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Reminiscences of World War II - when darkness fell

by Aryadasa Ratnasinghe

The World War II began on Friday, September 1, 1939, when a German bomber dropped a projectile on Puck, the fishing village and air base in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula. The architect of the War was Adolf Hitler, who was able to mesmerise a nation and terrorize the world.

When the human slaughter ended in 1945, "over 50 million people, two-thirds of them civilians, had been either shot, drowned, bombed, frozen, starved or gassed"! The greatest catastrophe was the mass massacre of Jews who were killed inside concentration camps or gas chambers. The slogan behind the War was "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" (One people, One nation, One leader).

After 1929, democracy in most countries suffered many setbacks, and soon the major dictatorships of Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia, began a militant aggressiveness against their neighbouring countries, evidently determined to tear up treaties, flout the League of Nations and make conquests. The main aim was territorial aggrandizement.

The great powers, (France, Great Britain and the United States) were unconcerned of the political developments of the dictatorship countries, but were concerned mainly with their domestic affairs. It was not their intension to go on the warpath. In the meantime, the dictators committed one aggression after another, evidently believing that the democratic countries were too divided and too pacifist to oppose them.

The War was between the United Nations, headed by Great Britain, the USA, the USSR, France and China, on the one side, and the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini and Japan under Emperor Hirohito, with their satellites, on the other side. In 1931, Japan, in violation of treaties, conquered the rich Chinese province of Manchuria. The league of Nations condemned it, but took no other action, until the attack continued and got merged with the War.

Nazi Germany followed Japan's example and bean aggressions in Europe. In 1933, Hitler, new to power, broke up an international disarmament conference in Geneva, and had Germany secede from the League of Nations.

Next year, he tried to annex Austria by inciting a revolt of Nazis in Austria. Dollfuss, the Prime Minister, was murdered, but the Austrian majority rallied, and Mussolini, fearing extension of German boundaries, joined France in the event of a threatened war. In 1935, Fascist Italy was on the warpath, and Mussolini attacked the independent kingdom of Ethiopia (Abyssinia).

This brought him into friendly relations with Hitler, and in 1936, the two made a close alliance known as the Axis. Immediately, Germany concluded a pact with Japan, and Italy joined it in 1937. Thus the three dictatorships stood ready to back one another in their aggressive campaigns. Next Hilter bullied Lithuania into ceding its Baltic port of Memel to Germany and Mussolini seized Albania for Italy. Encouraged by these successes, the Axis partners looked elsewhere. Hitler directed propaganda against Polanad, and Mussolini against France.

Reassured of his success over the pact with Russia, Hitler on September 1, 1939, launched an armed attack on Poland. Britain and France, true to their pledges, declared war on Germany, on the following day. With everything ready for war, the Germany's attack on Poland was "Blitzkrieg' (Lightning War), a quick slashing onset by overwhelming numbers with armed tanks and bombers. The Poles resisted bravely and stubbornly, but they lacked the means of coping with this new kind or war. Warsaw, their battered capital city, was forced to surrender.

At the appointed hour of 4.45 a.m. (Poland time), Hitler struck all along the 1,750 miles long Polish frontier. The catastrophic war of revenge, that he alone wanted, was now at his command. Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch, sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzing, the 8th and the 10th Armies stricking over the Vistula plain towards Warsaw, the 14th Army driving across Silesia towards Carcow, i.e., 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armoured divisions.

Overhead, another new German weapon seized control of the skies. They were Junkers-87 Stuka dive bombers, which plunged down to blast road junctions and railway lines. These bombers also had a device that emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who led the Polish exile army, through the battles of North Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel - 111s overhead, which flew like cranes towards Warsaw. The Poles were amazed at the speed of the German successes, and even the Germans were surprised.

On Sept. 3, Hitler left Berlin to survey his armies' progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General Heinz Guderian, the tank commander, who had already swept across the 50 miles wide Polish Corridor (the once German area linking Poland to the Baltic Sea) took Hitler on a tour of the newly conquered territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of German casualties. Only 150 had been killed and 700 wounded among the four divisions.

At the height of the War, some of the best and brightest men and women left Germany, and among them were Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Roche, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and some of the less fortunate fell into the hands of Goring's Police, and ended up in a little village outside Munich, where the Nazis had built their first concentration camp. It was Dachau. The Jews were treated with indiscribable cruelty.

In the course of 1942, reports began to penetrate to the outside world of the horrors of the death camps at Majdanek, Belsec, Treblinka, Oswiecim, and elsewhere. The largest of them was Bergen Belson, with a capacity for 5,000 prisoners at a time. At Terezin, a medieval fortress town in Central Bohemia, a vast Ghetto (mainly for the aged) was established, holding at its peak as many as 65,000 individuals.

The Air battle over Britain, which lasted from July 10 to Oct. 31, 1940, was one of the decisive battles in history, which Hitler launched to crush the British power. At the outset the Germans were in a strong position. They controlled all the French and Dutch airfields, and the entire seaboard from North Cape to Hendaye. The front-line strength of the Luftwaffe (Air Force), was over 3,000 aircraft, and German industry was capable of producing over 1,000 operational types a month. Preparatory to the invasion, the Germans launched a tremendous air attack on Britain, but failed to defeat the Royal Air Force, and although they had assembled a great army, they had to abandon their plans to invade England.

As the Luftwaffe launched their mass day-light raids on England, there were other problems too. Night raids were first directed against London, and then the provincial cities such as Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow and Hull. Since the Battle of Britain, American opinion had inclined ever more strongly, in spite of isolationist opposition, towards Roosevelt's policy of making the US ' the arsenal of democracy', which was put into operation in March, 1941.

On Dec. 7, 1941, while japanese peace envoys were still in Washington, US, Japanese airplanes came suddenly and unexpectedly out of the sky and showered bombs on the US fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hawai (a deep-water naval Base on the island of Oahu in the US Pacific Ocean, adjacent to Honolulu, established in 1908. The bombing of the Japanese, brought the US into World War II. Many people were killed and wounded and much damage was done. The next day, US declared war on Japan, and Germany and Italy immediately declared war on the US.

In March 1945, the Anglo-American, and Canadian armies forged across the Rhine, and in early May, met the Russian troops around Berlin. Hitler, trapped in his bunker, committed suicide on May 7, 1945, and the Germans surrendered unconditionally. A few days earlier, Benito Mussolini, while fleeing towards Switzerland, was intercepted and killed. Bitter and deadly fighting continued to ravage the Pacific, as Japanese armies were still on the warpath.

To prevent their progress and to bring the War to a halt, the US, on August 6 and 9, 1945, dropped two atomic bombs, on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Hiroshima is a port on the South coast of Honshu. It was completely devastated by the first atomic bomb to be used in war-time. The bomb dropped by parachute from an American Super-fortress plane, flying at 30,000 ft., exploded 1,000 ft. above the city.

Nagasaki is a seaport on Kyushu Island, Japan, and morefully an industrial centre, well-known for ship building. Each of these bombs had destructive power to 20,000 tons of Trinitrotuluene (TNT), a very high explosive, which heated the surrounding air to 100 deg. Celsius (boiling point).

Sri Lanka too had the effects of the War. Food was rationed and issued on coupons, along with flour and sugar. The distribution of rice was 1/2 measure for an infant, 3/4 for a child, 1 measure for an adult and 1 1/4 measure for a working adult per week. The sugar ration throughout was 1/2 1b per head per week. The prices of rice and flour were kept at a controlled low level by government subsidisation. Most of other essential foods like pulses, dried-fish, currystuffs, milk foods etc. were price marked. An interesting development in Sri Lanka, during the war (1939-1945), was the large role which consumers' co-operative stores were called upon to play in the distribution of controlled foodstuffs.

At the Nuremberg Trials, 24 men who faced the International Military Tribunal, were Krupp, Ley, Borman, Fritsche, Schacht, Papen, Hess, Frank, Funk, Raeder, Shirach, Speer, Neurath, Doenitz, Goering, Ribbentrop, Karltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frick, Sauckel, Seyess-Inquart, Streicher, Keitel and Jodl. Some of them committed suicide during Trial, some were sentenced to death, some were imprisoned and others were acquitted. The German Protective Squadron (Schutz-Staffel) and Gestapo (an abbreviated form of Geheime Staatspolizei, the Nazi Political Secret Police) were declared criminal organisations.

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