Chapter 9.4 Out of the Ashes
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Describe the final stages of the war in Europe
- Identify the components of the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam
- Analyze the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan
- Discuss the efforts to transform Japan after its surrender
Just as it did after World War I, immense hope prevailed after World War II that genuine and lasting peace might arise. The future of the globe itself seemed to hang in the balance if humans could not avoid using violence to solve their problems. However, the use of nuclear weapons to end the fighting in the Pacific meant the postwar world had to grapple with new ethical and technological concerns. The rebuilding of war-torn and defeated countries added a new dimension to what victory looked like.
Victory in Europe and Plans for Peace
For more than five years after they met in Newfoundland and produced the Atlantic Charter’s plan for the end of the conflict, Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged more than 1,700 letters and messages and held many high-level meetings to closely coordinate their efforts at every level. At a specialized conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, representatives of forty-four Allied countries together hammered out the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund, both intended to secure economic security and stability after the war.
As Allied troops marched toward the German border, however, their coalition began to fray. On a visit to Stalin late in 1944, Churchill signed the Percentages Agreement in which the two decided to divide eastern Europe into spheres of influence, with Britain getting a 90 percent share of Greece, the USSR getting 90 percent of Romania, and both holding 50 percent of the political power in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Churchill thought Stalin should burn the document afterward because “it might be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner.”
Finally, several months after the Soviet victory at Kursk, General Eisenhower prepared to open a second front in the European theater of the war. By May 1944, the German military was facing a dilemma. The Soviet Red Army was relentlessly rolling back German positions in the east, and it seemed obvious that the British and U.S. troops were preparing for an invasion of the continent. Given the brutality of the battles on the eastern front, the Germans chose to retain 228 divisions to counter the Soviets and assigned the defense of Europe to fifty-eight divisions, only fifteen of which were in the vicinity of Normandy, France.
Normandy, however, was the secret site of the coming invasion. After months of assembling and training troops, the Allies began their invasion of France at 2 a.m. on June 6, 1944—D-Day. Having assumed responsibility for nearly every detail but not convinced he had done eno