THE WORLD ATLAS

Chapter · Second World War

Victory, Ruin and the Atom

The world in 1945

1945 is the year the Second World War ends, the deadliest conflict in history, which killed an estimated 60 to 85 million people, including six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Germany surrendered in May after Hitler's suicide in the ruins of Berlin, and Japan surrendered in August after American atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria.

Two superpowers emerge: the United States, the richest country on Earth and sole owner of the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union, whose Red Army now occupies Eastern Europe. At Yalta and Potsdam the victors divided Germany and Austria into occupation zones, and in San Francisco fifty nations founded the United Nations. Britain and France are victorious but bankrupt, and their empires are starting to crack: Indonesia and Vietnam declare independence, India is heading toward freedom, and China slides back into civil war. Much of Europe and East Asia lies in rubble, with millions of refugees on the move.

Open the map in 1945

The great powers

Region by region

Southern Africa

South Africa's Prime Minister Jan Smuts helps draft the United Nations Charter, while his country keeps the mandate of South West Africa and its system of racial segregation. Uranium from the Belgian Congo's Shinkolobwe mine supplied the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. Britain rules the Rhodesias, Tanganyika, Nyasaland and Kenya, Portugal still holds Angola and Mozambique, and Madagascar is under Free French rule after Britain seized it from Vichy France in 1942.

Northern Africa

Haile Selassie was restored to Ethiopia's throne in 1941 after British and Ethiopian forces drove out the Italians. Italy's former colonies of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia are under British (and, in Libya's Fezzan, French) military administration. Egypt, under King Farouk, hosts the founding of the Arab League in March 1945. In French Algeria, protests on VE Day at Setif lead to a massacre of thousands of Algerians, and France also rules Morocco, Tunisia and West and Equatorial Africa.

Europe

Nazi Germany surrendered on 7-8 May 1945; Germany and Austria are divided into American, British, French and Soviet zones, with Berlin and Vienna also split, and Germany's lands east of the Oder-Neisse line handed to Poland, except northern East Prussia, which the Soviet Union annexed and, in northern East Prussia, the Soviet Union. The Red Army occupies Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, where Communist-dominated governments are being installed, while Tito's partisans rule Yugoslavia. Britain elects Clement Attlee's Labour government in July, replacing Winston Churchill, and France is led by Charles de Gaulle's Provisional Government. Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, neutral in the war, remain dictatorships.

Middle East & South Asia

India is still ruled by Britain under Viceroy Lord Wavell, but independence is clearly coming, and the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demands a separate Pakistan. Iran, under the young Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, remains occupied by British and Soviet troops, and a Soviet-backed separatist movement emerges in Azerbaijan. Syria and Lebanon are winning independence from France, Britain holds the Palestine mandate amid rising Jewish-Arab conflict, and Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia met President Roosevelt in February, beginning the US-Saudi oil partnership. Turkey, under Ismet Inonu, joined the Allies only in February 1945.

Northern & Central Asia

Soviet Central Asia and Siberia were transformed by the war, receiving evacuated factories and entire peoples deported by Stalin, such as Volga Germans, Chechens and Crimean Tatars, many of them sent to Kazakhstan. The USSR annexed Tuva in 1944. Mongolia, under Choibalsan, votes for independence in an October 1945 plebiscite that China soon recognises, and in Xinjiang a Soviet-backed East Turkestan Republic controls the Ili region.

East Asia

Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 and formally on 2 September; Emperor Hirohito remains, but the country is occupied by the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur. Korea, freed from Japanese rule, is divided at the 38th parallel into a Soviet-occupied north and an American-occupied south, and Taiwan is handed back to China. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists hold peace talks in Chongqing, but both race to seize Japanese-held territory, and civil war is about to resume. Tibet is governed by a regent for the young 14th Dalai Lama.

Southeast Asia

Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia has shattered European prestige. Sukarno proclaims Indonesia's independence on 17 August and Ho Chi Minh proclaims the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September, while the last Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, abdicates; British and Indian troops arrive to restore Dutch and French rule and fight Indonesian nationalists at Surabaya. The Philippines, liberated in the bloody Battle of Manila, is led by President Sergio Osmena toward independence in 1946. Britain retakes Burma and Malaya, and Thailand, under King Ananda Mahidol, escapes punishment for its alliance with Japan.

Northern North America

Canada, under Prime Minister Mackenzie King, ends the war as a major military and industrial power; in September a Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defects in Ottawa, exposing Soviet spy rings in an early warning of the Cold War. Newfoundland is still run by a British commission and will join Canada in 1949. Alaska, linked by the new Alaska Highway, is a US territory, and Greenland hosts US bases while Denmark was under German occupation.

Southern North America

Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, and President Harry S. Truman led the United States to victory, ordering the atomic bombings after the first test in New Mexico in July. The US emerges with half the world's industrial output. Mexico, under Manuel Avila Camacho, sent an air squadron to fight in the Philippines, Guatemala's democratic 'revolution' of 1944 brings Juan Jose Arevalo to the presidency, and Trujillo still rules the Dominican Republic.

Northern South America

Brazil, the only Latin American country to send combat troops to Europe, sees the army depose Getulio Vargas in October 1945, and General Eurico Gaspar Dutra is elected president in December. In Venezuela, an October coup brings Romulo Betancourt's Democratic Action party to power. Peru elects Jose Luis Bustamante y Rivero, and Colombia is led by Alberto Lleras Camargo from August 1945.

Southern Cone

Argentina, under a military government with General Edelmiro Farrell as president, declared war on the Axis only in March 1945; Colonel Juan Peron, the powerful labour minister, was arrested in October but freed after a mass workers' rally on 17 October, launching Peronism. Chile, under Juan Antonio Rios, celebrates poet Gabriela Mistral, Latin America's first Nobel Prize winner in literature. Uruguay is led by Juan Jose de Amezaga and Paraguay by the dictator Higinio Morinigo.

Australasia & Oceania

Australia's wartime Prime Minister John Curtin died in July 1945 and was succeeded by Ben Chifley; Australian troops ended the war fighting in New Guinea and Borneo. New Zealand is led by Peter Fraser. The Pacific islands, from the Solomons to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, have been bloody battlefields, and Japan's former Micronesian mandate is now held by the United States.

Events

  1. Germany invades Poland; the Second World War begins
  2. Germany invades the Soviet Union; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor
  3. Yalta Conference (February); Roosevelt dies (April)
  4. Hitler's suicide and Germany's surrender (May)
  5. United Nations Charter signed in San Francisco (June)
  6. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan surrenders (August)
  7. Indonesia and Vietnam declare independence; Korea divided

Moments of this period

Wars of this period

More chapters

Sources