What Young People Would Say Today About the Actions of the Allies in World War Two

A line to remember from the comedy series, Seinfeld, “War, what is it good for?” has been on my mind lately. The images from Ukraine and Gaza that appear on the small screens most of us carry these days, and those in the media, are disturbing. They show destruction, the tearing down of civilization, and death. Is there any justification for what we are witnessing daily? Can the death of a bystander in a war be acceptable under any circumstances?

Wars Past and Present are Brutal

When Japan first launched its war on China in 1931 with the conquest of Manchuria, and then in 1937 on the rest of China; when Italy began its war of conquest in 1935 in Ethiopia; and when Nazi Germany began the European war with an assault on Poland in 1939, the average person away from the frontlines of these conflicts didn’t see the collateral damage. The average person saw newsreels of marching troops, airplanes taking off, the aftermath of bombings, and refugees fleeing with their possessions in tow. There were fewer images of death in the newsreels back then.

Imagine if the technology we have at present would have been available then. What would young people have said and done? What would they have said and done in witnessing on their mobile phones the assault on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled by Nazi Germany? And what would they have said and done witnessing the Allied war response to Germany and Japan’s aggressions and crimes against humanity?

The list of past atrocities committed in and out of war is miles long.

• Japan’s rape of Nanking,
• Germany’s Final Solution,
• The Bataan Death March,
• The Amritsar massacre by the British in India,
• The Ottoman Armenian genocide,
• The Soviet Ukraine Holodomor,
• The Rwandan genocide,
• Italy’s civilian repression and mass executions in Ethiopia,
• The London Blitz,
• The nightmare of the Dresden bombing,
• The firebombing of Tokyo,
• The dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Modern Technology Has Given Us a Front Row Seat

With cell phones in hand, how many of these past horrific events would have blanketed the Internet making us voyeurs to carnage and destruction? The difference between now and the past is that we live in an age of ubiquitous always-on communication. We also live at a time when most wars are brushfires and not global conflicts like the one that ended 78 years ago.

But when you delve into the recent past we have civil wars in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. Go back further and we have had wars between Israel and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. Then there is America’s fateful war in Vietnam and Cambodia. In all of these, there are the same images of inflicted pain, destruction and death.

Even the “righteous act” of freeing Europe from Nazi Germany produced collateral damage to the very people the Allies were attempting to liberate. The D-Day assault on Normandy, including the Allied bombings preceding and after June 6, 1944, killed 20,000 with 5,000 more collateral French civilian deaths on the day of the invasion. The bombing of German and Japanese cities throughout that war, not including the two atom bombs, caused 600,000 civilian deaths in the former, and 200,000 in the latter.

The two contemporary wars making the headlines of Western media have produced thousands of collateral civilian casualties. Since February 2022, when Russia launched its war on Ukraine, more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Palestinian deaths have exceeded 20,000 civilians and militia, and Israel has seen 1,200 civilians and several hundred taken hostage. We have bore witness on television, online and in the news media daily to the suffering in both of these conflicts.

Wars Are a Product of History 

The challenges are numerous for young people in trying to understand the whys and wherefores of the wars they are witnessing. These conflicts are an assault on their senses. The issues behind them are subborned by the emotions they bring out. It is easier to side with the one being attacked than the one attacking. It is easier to accept “facts” on the Internet that have no historical foundation.

What’s Behind the Ukraine Conflict?

Let’s look at the history behind the Ukraine conflict. Was there ever a Ukrainian nation before the dissolution of the Soviet Union? No.

Ukraine was given a geographic status by the Soviet Union when the latter formed after World War One. Ukrainians, however, spoke a different language than their Russian neighbours and practiced different religious and cultural traditions.

Ukraine became a nation when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Its boundaries conformed to the geography established by the former Soviet Union. Ukraine entered into economic associations with the former Soviet republics that were now loosely joined in a commonwealth of nations.

Ukrainians, however, increasingly have seen themselves as part of Europe. They applied to become a member of the European Union and to join NATO, the defensive alliance formed after World War Two to counter the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern Europe. Russia has protested these moves.

Ukraine being both politically and culturally different from Russia, was now perceived by the latter to have betrayed its Russian historic associations. The Russian leadership has responded by sending its army into Ukraine with a plan to end the European quest and incorporate a sizable chunk of the country into Russia.

What’s Behind the Israel-Hamas Conflict?

With Israel and Hamas, the seeds of the conflict go back to the 19th century when a small community of Jews in what was then a province within the Ottoman Empire began to see other Jews arrive from Russia and Europe fleeing pogroms and persecution. The carving up of the Ottoman Empire by France and Britain after World War One also included a British promise to a nationalist Jewish movement called Zionism with its goal of establishing a homeland in Palestine. The British also promised the Arabs a degree of national autonomy in the same region. The Holocaust of World War Two brought surviving European Jews to British Palestine.

In 1947, the British decided to leave and the United Nations recognized a British plan to partition the territory. This is where Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are today. The Jews of Palestine declared their partitioned area to be the state of Israel. The neighbouring Arab states, also carved from the Ottoman Empire with no prior existence as nations themselves, refused to recognize Israel’s declaration of independence and promptly invaded. They lost the war with the boundaries of the Jewish state expanding with displacement of the local native population. The Arab states expelled their Jewish communities who found refuge in the new state of Israel.

The two remaining geographic segments of Palestine remained in Arab nation hands. The one in Gaza was incorporated into Egypt. The one in the West Bank became part of Jordan. Neither Arab state recognized Palestine and the territories they absorbed as a nation. The people of Gaza and the West Bank weren’t made citizens of these states. Palestinians became refugees. Subsequent wars between Israel and Arab neighbouring states have left the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza under the military control of Israel. Today, they are two jurisdictions with a degree of local autonomy. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank.

In both wars, who is in the right, and who is in the wrong?

For young people not familiar with the history and assailed by thousands of disturbing images, it is hard to determine who has been wronged. These images bring out passionate emotions. Where they appear on the Internet and in social media they come attached to expressed opinions, the spin of disinformation, and the doctoring of facts. It’s easy to do, to ascribe an image to a current event that comes from elsewhere and a different conflict. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists, and ideologues who have a different agenda in mind, one focused on hatred and bigotry.

War is ugly. Hate feeds wars and wars feed hate. Will we ever get rid of war? Will we ever end hate and bigotry? When ignorance is overcome by knowledge, and when our shared planet becomes a collective project worth nurturing and saving, maybe we will find our better nature.

In World War Two, and in other wars, humans have done unspeakable acts to other humans and to the planet. What happened then has happened again and again. The youth of the world in whatever nation they reside, whatever their creed, skin colour, or sex, need to learn from those who preceded them and have never learned how to stop the kind of wars fought in the past and present.

There is, however, one righteous war still ahead. It is the one to save the planet. This is the existential battle, to mitigate climate change, to help those hurt by it to adapt, and to ensure that those escaping its consequences are welcomed wherever they go and whenever they arrive.