caused 125,000 casualties. In May and June 1945
the bomber offensive spread to sixty other major
towns throughout Japan.
On 6 August 1945, for the first time, a new
weapon was used, the atom bomb that devastated
Hiroshima. The destruction and suffering were
appalling. Most of the city was destroyed, 66,000
people were killed in an instant and even more
succumbed to a new man-made illness, radiation
sickness. For decades the atom bomb claimed
victims from among the survivors. The casualties
from the spring raid on Tokyo by fleets of Super-
Flying Fortresses were greater, but what filled the
world with awe and horror was that a single plane
dropping just one bomb from out of the blue sky
could produce such suffering and destruction. A
second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three
days later, again causing great loss of life. In the
face of such a war the Japanese surrendered.
The Second World War was waged simultane-
ously in Asia, Europe and North Africa by huge
armed forces on all sides, backed by tanks and air-
craft in numbers hitherto unknown and, in its
closing stages, with a new weapon releasing the
devastating power of nuclear fission. The destruc-
tion and maiming on a global scale exceeded any-
thing known before. The war caused not only
many millions of dead and wounded, but also
inflicted on millions more forcible population
migrations and wholesale destruction of towns
and villages – a sum total of virtually unimagin-
able human misery.As the tide of the war turned, the German people
increasingly suffered the ravages of war. The losses
on the eastern front alone matched the bloodbath
of the First World War on all fronts. The great
majority of the German war dead died fighting in
Russia. The bomber commands of the Allies
inflicted devastation as city after city was laid to
waste during the last months of the war. Above all
else, the German people feared the Russians, bent
on revenge. Ethnic Germans and German colonis-
ers fled from the advancing Russian armies,
retreating into Germany. The Sudeten Germans,
who had lived in Czechoslovakia before 1938,
were driven out. Most of the Germans living in
Polish-occupied eastern German regions from
East Prussia to Silesia – assigned to the Poles for
administration in compensation for territorial
losses to the Soviet Union – were driven out or
fled in terror from the Poles and Russians.
‘Orderly and humane’ population transfers were
sanctioned by the Allied Potsdam Conference in
the summer of 1945. But the mass exodus of 15
million people immediately after the war was cer-
tainly not orderly and was frequently inhumane.
Pent-up hatreds against the Germans burst out
and were vented not only on the guilty supporters
of Hitler’s regime but also, indiscriminately, on
tens of thousands of innocent people, on children
and the sick. The exodus from Eastern and central
Europe began during the last months of the war
and continued after the war was over. Although
relatively few were deliberately murdered, in all as
many as 2 million Germans are estimated to have
died as a result of the privations they suffered.
Mere statistics cannot convey the tragedies
that befell almost every family in Europe. The274 THE SECOND WORLD WAR
9 August 1945. The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki
obscured the death and devastation below. ©
National Archives, Washington