A World at War's End: The Broken World of 1945

A World at War's End: The Broken World of 1945

The Sound of Silence

Imagine standing in the middle of a street where, just a few months ago, thousands of people walked to work, children ran to school, and families gathered for dinner. Now the street is empty. The buildings on both sides are nothing but piles of broken bricks and twisted metal. No one is cooking dinner because there is no food. No children are running because there are no schools left standing. The only sounds are the wind whistling through empty doorways and the occasional rumble of a building collapsing under its own weight.

This was what much of Europe looked like in the spring of 1945.

The most destructive war in human history had finally come to an end. The guns that had thundered for six long years had fallen silent. The soldiers who had marched across continents, crossed rivers, and climbed mountains were finally going home. Victory celebrations erupted in cities from London to Moscow to Washington. People danced in the streets, tears streaming down their faces, relieved that the nightmare was over.

But as the fireworks faded and the cheering stopped, people looked around at what remained and asked a difficult question: What comes next?

The answer would shape the entire second half of the twentieth century and affect the lives of millions of people for generations to come.

In this chapter, you will discover what happened when the fighting stopped. You will learn about the leaders who gathered in grand conference rooms to decide the fate of nations. You will meet ordinary people—children, mothers, soldiers, and refugees—who had to rebuild their lives from almost nothing. And you will begin to understand how the wounds of World War II created the conditions for a new kind of conflict: the Cold War.

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The Broken World

A War Like No Other

Before we can understand what happened in 1945, we need to understand just how devastating World War II truly was.

Think about the biggest problem you've ever faced. Maybe it was a difficult test at school, or a fight with a friend, or a time when your family had to move to a new home. These problems felt huge at the time, didn't they? But the problems of World War II were in a category completely by themselves.

World War II was fought across six of the world's seven continents. Almost every country on Earth was involved either as a combatant or as a supplier to those fighting. The war lasted for 2,174 days—that's almost six years! And by the time it was over, an estimated 70 to 85 million people had died. To put that number in perspective, that's roughly equal to everyone in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland combined—all gone in just six years.

The destruction wasn't just measured in lives lost. Entire cities were reduced to rubble. Look at a map of Europe, and imagine drawing a circle around every city that was damaged or destroyed. The circles would cover almost the entire continent.

In Germany, the city of Dresden—famous for its beautiful architecture and art—was bombed so heavily that it looked like the surface of the moon. The great opera house where composer Richard Wagner premiered his works, the churches with their intricate spires, the elegant squares where people once strolled—all of it was gone. More than 25,000 people died in a single night of bombing.

In England, the German air force had bombed London for months. The famous Houses of Parliament were damaged. Ancient churches built centuries ago were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods disappeared in flames.

In the Soviet Union—which is now Russia and many other countries—hundreds of cities and thousands of villages were destroyed. The city of Stalingrad, site of one of the war's bloodiest battles, was so completely wrecked that soldiers sometimes had to fight through buildings that were nothing but shells of brick and concrete.

And these were just the cities in Europe. In Asia, the situation was even worse. The Japanese military had conquered huge territories across China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. They had committed terrible atrocities, including the infamous Nanking Massacre in China, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Cities across Asia were bombed, burned, and occupied.

The Human Cost

Numbers can be hard to understand when they get this big. So let's think about it differently.

If you were to write the name of every person who died in World War II on a single sheet of paper, using just your name-sized handwriting, the papers would stretch from one end of the Earth to the other. You would need more than 700 million sheets of paper. That's more paper than all the trees in all the forests of the world could produce.

More than half of those who died were civilians—ordinary men, women, and children who weren't soldiers but found themselves in the middle of war zones. They died from bombs dropped on their cities, from diseases that spread in the chaos, from starvation as food supplies were destroyed, and from the deliberate cruelty of governments that wanted to wipe out entire groups of people.

The Nazi German government had launched a systematic program to exterminate Jewish people, as well as Roma, disabled people, and political opponents. This genocide—called the Holocaust—killed six million Jewish men, women, and children. Entire families were wiped out. Communities that had existed for centuries disappeared. Synagogues burned. Schools closed. Whole towns became ghost towns as the Nazis hunted down anyone they considered "undesirable."

But even this horror was not the end of the suffering. Millions of people found themselves homeless, their houses destroyed or confiscated. Millions more were trapped in concentration camps, starved and abused, waiting for liberation that sometimes came too late.

And then there were the soldiers—tens of millions of young men who had left their homes to fight, many of whom would never return. In the Soviet Union alone, more than eight million soldiers died in combat. The United States lost about 400,000 soldiers. Britain lost about 380,000. The numbers from Germany and Japan were even higher.

Every one of those numbers represents a person. A son who would never see his parents again. A father who would never watch his children grow up. A best friend who would never share another adventure. When we talk about the millions who died, we are talking about millions of families whose lives were changed forever.

Displaced: A World on the Move

Perhaps the most visible legacy of World War II was the millions of people who found themselves far from home with no way to return.

The war had caused what historians call the largest forced migration in human history. During the six years of conflict, borders changed constantly. Countries were invaded, occupied, and liberated. People fled from one direction, then from another. Some were forced to move by governments. Some ran away to escape bombing. Some were taken as prisoners.

By 1945, there were an estimated 20 million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe alone. A displaced person is someone who has been forced to leave their home and cannot return because of war, persecution, or natural disaster.

These people had lost everything. Their homes were destroyed. Their possessions were stolen or left behind. Their savings were worthless because their country's currency had collapsed. Many didn't even have the clothes they were wearing.

Some had been refugees for years. They had fled from Poland when Germany invaded, then fled again when the Soviet Union took over part of Poland, then fled once more as the front lines moved back and forth. They had lived in barns, attics, basements, and caves. They had eaten whatever they could find—roots, grass, scraps from garbage heaps. They had watched their children starve.

Others were newly homeless. They had survived bombing raids or battle by hiding in cellars while the