Francis P. Sempa
The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in human history. When it was over, some sixty million people were dead. It featured the mass bombing of cities and civilians, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, starvation, genocide, and the use of atomic weapons. The peace that ended the war was imperfect. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, which helped start the European phase of the war, was one of the victors, and its totalitarian realm expanded. China’s civil war continued, resulting in Mao Zedong’s communist conquest of the mainland. World War II gave birth to the nuclear age and the Cold War, with all of its “smaller” wars and crises. Winston Churchill, who led Great Britain to victory in the war, wrote afterward that “there never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” He called World War II the “unnecessary war.”
No comments:
Post a Comment