Europe in an Age of Total War: World War II,1939–45 585the Polish campaign), and the first rationing began in
January 1940. Britons would live with rationing for the
next fourteen years—a period long past the end of the
war being required to rebuild the economy. Many fami-
lies dug up their lawn or flowers to plant vegetables,
and towns in Britain (as in many other countries)
matched that effort by ploughing public parks or ath-
letic playing fields; the moat around the Tower of Lon-
don, for example, was converted to such a garden.
Families in the south of England also learned to live
without their children; 1.5 million children were moved
outside German bombing range, many to refuge in
Canada and the United States. The government cur-
tailed free-market capitalism in favor of a regulated
economy. Strikes were outlawed, the workweek in-
creased to fifty-four hours, and the Ministry of Labor
received the power to reassign workers to different
jobs. The war effort also demanded much higher taxes.
With one-third of all men between the ages of sixteen
and sixty-four serving in uniform, women again entered
the workforce at much higher levels, not only in fac-
tory jobs but also in a wide range of replacement posi-
tions (such as the police force, which lost much
personnel to the military).
Domestic conditions were worse in the theaters of
war. Russia suffered enormously from total war. Civilian
populations overrun by the German army endured se-
vere privation and frequent atrocities; these people had
scarcely recovered from the suffering of forced collec-
tivization and a subsequent famine in the 1930s. For
those caught directly in the fighting, the meaning of
total war was abundantly clear: The three million peo-
ple of Leningrad endured a German siege lasting 890
days, and 600,000 of them died of starvation.
Civilian resistance in Britain and the Soviet Union
contrasted with the collaboration of defeated countries
such as Vichy France. The Nazi puppet government of
Pétain and Laval sent more than one million Frenchmen
to forced labor in Germany and arranged the Nazi req-
uisition of three million tons of wheat and one million
tons of meat. Conditions in France deteriorated so far
that even wine was rationed. An underground resis-
tance movement, composed of many separate groups
(chiefly Communist, but with a large Catholic element)
was collectively known as the Maquisor the French
Forces of the Interior (FFI). Approximately 2 percent of
the population took the risks of espionage, sabotage, or
simple defiance, but the Maquismade a significant con-
tribution to later stages of the war. Similar resistance
movements existed in all occupied countries, with espe-
cially active movements in the mountain regions of
Greece and Yugoslavia.
Hitler initially strove to cushion most of the Ger-
man civilian population from the impact of the war be-
cause he feared the collapse of the home front, which
had been a significant factor in the German defeat in- Thus military deferments remained common un-
til 1942. Rationing was introduced in August 1939, but
the level was kept unusually high (a weekly supply of
one pound of meat, five pounds of bread, twelve ounces
of cooking fat, twelve ounces of sugar, and one pound
of ersatz coffee per person), largely through food
supplies plundered abroad. Behind such comforts,
however, hid a nightmarish expression of Nazi total
war at home: a euthanasia program to eliminate “useless
mouths,” launched at the start of the war. Between
100,000 and 200,000 of the elderly, the severely ill, the
handicapped, the mentally ill, and even severely injured
World War I veterans were put to death by the govern-
ment with the willing cooperation of doctors, nurses,
and hospital administrators. Only when Clemens von
Galen, the bishop of Münster, courageously protested
in 1941 did the government suspend the program
(planning to resume it after victory), fearing a propa-
ganda catastrophe if army units learned of the program
of euthanasia for crippled veterans.
The Global War
The European war had been preceded by an Asian war,
which began when Japan invaded China in 1937 (see
map 29.3). The Japanese had been building an Asian
empire for half a century. While acquiring Formosa
(won in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895), Korea (won in
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05), and Manchuria
(occupied in 1931), Japanese nationalists developed the
dream of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—a
slogan to cover Japanese conquest and dominance of
East Asia. A second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937,
and by the end of that year the Japanese Empire
stretched across China as far south as Shanghai. In the
course of this conquest, the Japanese army committed
some of the most ruthless atrocities of the age of total
war. The “rape of Nanking,” which followed the con-
quest of that city, included the massacre of approxi-
mately 300,000 Chinese civilians, often in extremely
cruel ways such as using live people for bayonet prac-
tice. (The name of this brutality was not misplaced:
The Japanese army made rape an organized aspect of
warfare, victimizing perhaps eighty thousand women in
Nanking.) After the fall of France in June 1940, the
Japanese army landed forces in French Indochina and