"Japanese soldiers are shown marching through Nanking's residential section. These soldiers are still fully armed but under perfect control at all times. Photographer: Lt. Richard Loeb. 3 September, 1945."
Yeoman's Fourth Law of History. War changes everything
This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars. I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything. No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation. People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.
We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated. Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.
On Monday, September 3, 1945, people woke up to a new world, whether they realized it or not.
The prior day Japan, the last Axis hold out, surrendered.
May people had the day off, as it was Labor Day.
With this entry, we end our daily tracking of events 80 days in the past. When we started tracking events 80 years ago, it was because we were coming up on the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Events of the 1940s otherwise are not really the focus of this blog, and 80 years is an odd period to look back to retrospectively, although no odder, I suppose, than 125 years, 115, and 120 years, which this blog otherwise does, although in the context of this blog's focus, that actually is less odd. The tacking of those other dates fills in gaps left in the focus of this blog when we started posting on the Punitive Expedition from a 100 year focus. Just as here we failed to fill in the dates from 1939 to 1941, which were very much part of the Second World War story, we failed to fill in the dates from 1900 to 1916, which were very much part of the overall story of the event we were focusing on.
We still occasionally post events 100 years past, and 50 years past, although not all that frequently. And we will likely catch some 80 years past when they are very significant. Should this author make to 2030, chances are good that we'll start again with the events of the Korean War, or perhaps just three years from now with the Berlin Blockade.
For now, we're finished with the 80 years retrospectives.
We would note that things were still going on in the Second World War on this date. The war in the Pacific sputtered to a conclusion and in a manner distinctively different from the war in Europe. In Europe, as we have seen, there were some German formations that fought on after the German surrender, but usually because they feared being taken captive by Communist forces. Japanese forces however were often still quite well organized in the field and had not, in many locations, been defeated. Their surrenders were bizarrely formally orchestrated, usually featuring meetings and formal surrender instruments. Of course, Japan had not been occupied at the time of Japan's surrender, which was not true of Germany.
Indeed, on this day, General Tomoyuki Yamashita formally surrendered the remaining Japanese troops in the Philippines to General Jonathan M. Wainwright. Things like this would go on for days.
Also going on for days would be the British reoccupation of its lost colonial domain in the East. Other nations, notably the French and the Dutch, would try the same, but they'd have to fight their way back in, and ultimately, they lost the fight.
All that is part of the story of the post war world. Colonialism was done for. The British would have the wisdom soon to see that, whereas the French resisted it.
Also part of the post war world would be the rise of Communism.
Communism had been part of the global story going back into the late 19th Century, but the Second World War boosted its fortunes, in part because it aligned itself with anti colonial movements.
The struggle between Communism and Democracy, even imperfect democracy, had already begun before the end of the war. In some places the struggle between Communist and Anticommunist forces was long established. The Chinese Civil War had commenced before World War Two, and it had recommenced before the Japanese surrender. In other places, however, the end of the war brought out movements that had not been significant before. In Vietnam, for example, the Viet Minh has declared independence prior to the Japanese surrender and were moving towards contesting the French for control of the country, something that would be interrupted by the British at first, using surrendered Japanese troops. That a Cold War was on wasn't widely recognized to be occurring as of yet, but that it was is clear in retrospect.
The rise of the United States as a global power, something that many Americans had not wanted to occur before World War Two, had been completed by the Second World War's end. Economically, the United States was effectively the last man standing. 1945 would usher in a post war economic world such as had not existed in modern times. The US became the globally dominant economic power because its factories had not been destroyed, and would enjoy that status well into the 1970s. At the same time, the US became a major military power for the first time in its history, a status which it retains.
The period from 1945 to, roughly 1973/1991, would be sort of an American golden era, albeit one with many significant problems. The legacy of that period haunts the United States today. From 1945 until the early 1970s nobody could contest the US economically and that meant, at home, there were always decent jobs for Americans, no matter how well educated they were, or were not. A college education guaranteed a white collar occupation. That began to come apart in the 1970s and by the late 1980s that was no longer true, although Americans have never accepted the change.
Indeed, that's a major problem today. The US is controlled by those who came of age in this era, and many elderly voters cannot look back past it. When people pine for a return of a prior era, that's the era they hope to restore. But it was never destined to be permanent. World War Two was so massive it destroyed the global economy, but the economy would inevitably recover, and the Cold War against the Soviet Union could never have been won by the USSR. The economy that had come into place in the 1990s was a more natural one, and interestingly restored the global economy to the state of globalization that it had obtained prior to the First World War.
The social changes brought about by the war were likewise massive, and that's been forgotten.
Ironically, one of the most cited social claims about the war is incorrect, that being that it brought women into the workplace. It didn't. That had been going on for a long time, but as often noted here, it was domestic machinery that caused that change. Having said that, the immediate post war economic boom caused a massive introduction of that machinery into homes. People who had never owned a washing machine, for example, now suddenly did. And with the washer and dryer coming in, trips to the laundromat, or hours spent at home working on laundry, both being "women's work", went out. They now had time to go to work. . . or school.
This, as many of the trends we noted, was something that was already occurring. The war accelerated it. Even before World War Two more women graduated from high school than men. College education remained predominantly male, but even at that the number of female college students grew from 9,100 (21% of the total) in 1870 to 481,000 (44% of the total) by 1930, with female university attendance receiving a big boost during the 1920s. The war, however, boosted this. Already by the 1920s the reduction in female labor needs at home had meant that a sizable number of well off and middle class young women could attend college. The Great Depression dampened that, but the end of the Second World War dramatically altered the situation after 1945.
Young men also began to crowd college campuses like never before.
Prior to the Second World War a small minority of men attended, let alone completed, college. In 1940 5.5% of American men had completed a bachelor's degree or higher, which was a higher percentage than women at 3.8%. Moreover, with certain distinct exceptions, American men who attended college were part of a WASP upper class. Indeed, the extent to which Ivy League schools were protestant institutions has been largely forgotten. Princeton, for instance ended its Sunday chapel requirement for upperclassmen in 1935, for sophomores in 1960, and for freshmen in 1964. Harvard, we should not, ended its chapel requirement in 1886 and Yale in 1926, but the point is that most of those who attended private universities were of a WASP heritage. This was less true, of course, of state universities, which often had a agricultural, teaching or mining focus.
World War Two, however, changed all of this through the GI Bill, with newly discharged men heading to university. Included in student body were Catholics, a sizable American minority, who had largely not attended university before.
The implications of this were enormous. Women leaving homes to live on their own before marriage had really started in an appreciable degree the 1920s, although it occurred and was possible before that. My mother's mother, had a university degree prior to that time. Large numbers of young men doing so was really new, with perhaps the only real analogy being the camps of young itinerant workers in the Great Depression.
Of course, the Great Depression had practically acclimated young men to living away from home while young, and then the Second World War certainly acclimated large numbers of them. The new environment was large numbers of young men and young women living away from home, and from very varied backgrounds. Co-ed students from prior to the Second World War would have found a much narrower demographic than they did after the war.
This at least arguably accelerated the blending of distinct cultures within the overall American culture, although that's always been a feature of the United States. Having said that, the "melting pot" of American culture melted more slowly prior to World War Two. With the war having a levelling effect on ethnic differences, they shifted notably.
Prior to World War Two, and for some time thereafter, Catholics, Jews, Blacks and Hispanics were really "others". It's certainly the case that distinctions and prejudice remains today, but the Second World War started the process of addressing them. Catholics fairly rapidly moved from a disdained religious minority, albeit a large minority, to part of the general American religious background, that process complete with the election of John F. Kennedy. At the same time, however, the uniqueness and identify of many of these groups, which had heretofore been quite strong, began to dissipate.
Sudden success and sudden cultural change often has within them the seeds of their own decay and downfall. This seems to have been much the case with the second half of the Twentieth Century as "the American Century". Americans came to very rapidly believe that their postwar economic good fortune was due to some native genius, rather than the good luck of having been outside the range of Axis aircraft. Rapid cultural changes that saw young Americans step right out of high school and into good paying jobs, or off to college for even better paying jobs, all while being outside of their parents homes, began to seem like a decree of nature. Liberalization of culture yielded to libertinism of culture and an attack on traditional value. Everything seemed headed, in the end, in one direction.
It didn't.
The destroyed nations rebuilt, and at the same time, under American influence, democracy spread. This was a huge global success, but it also meant that the US inevitably came to a point at which it could not dominate the world's economies. Advances in technology an globalization ultimately wiped out he heavy labor segment of the American economy while at at the same time the same developments that freed up women from domestic labor enslaved them to the office place. The post war arrogance that bloomed in the late 60s ultimately badly damaged the existential nature of the family in ways that are still being sorted out.
The post war world started to come to an end in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. But like a lot of things, it took and is taking a long time to play out. We're likely in its final closing pages now, as the Boomer generation makes a desperate effort to restore a lost world, but only selectively. Very few really want to return to the point before these developments commenced. The ultimate question remains however if World War Two, which the country had no choice but to fight, resulted in such existential damage to the country, and the world, that much of what came before the war was not only better than what came after it, but that whether the damage of the war was so severe that it cannot be recovered.
On this day, in addition to what has already been noted, British Marines landed at Pennang. Hirohito opened the 88th Imperial Diet.
The Red Army opened Officer's Clubs.
While we won't catalog events hence force on a day to day basis, we will look in more depth at the changes World War Two brought about, for good, and ill.
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Labels: 1940s, 1945, Allies, Australia, Blog Mirror, Japan, North Vietnam, United Kingdom, Vietnam, VJ Day, World War Two
