Who Won?

Who won World War II? The short-term answer, obviously, is the United States. Even among the victorious allies, America benefitted immeasurably more than the others. The Soviet Union had lost 22 million citizens and seen the western quarter of its country incinerated. Great Britain had barely held out and, newly bankrupt, was about to lose its entire global empire. France had given in to collaboration and was now to give in to the inevitable loss of its own empire in North Africa and Indochina.

Among the victors, only America had not paid a crippling price. The American mainland was untouched. American civilians had slept safely in their beds throughout the carnage. And the American economy accounted for fully half of the entire planet's wealth. Never before had any country, in either a quantitative or a qualitative sense, been so powerful.

Our enemies, on the other hand, were decimated as no societies had ever been. More than half of the largest cities in Germany and Japan were utterly destroyed by American bombs. Millions of civilians were killed, most of them in the last year of the war. These societies were brutalized in a way that it is useless to write about; if it's impossible to imagine, it's impossible for me to write about.

By demanding uncondional surrender, the United States lengthened the war. Many elements of the German and Japanese establishment would have negotiated a peace with the United States if this demand had not been made. After this demand was made, the German and Japanese moderates were made irrelevant. After the United States made it perfectly clear that it would use massive and indiscriminate terrorism to compel this surrender, that it would destroy entire metropolises, that it would incinerate 100,000 civilians, intentionally, in a single night, the moderates looked downright suicidal.

For what nation in its right mind would surrender to an army that was willing to destroy on the scale that America was? Many Germans and Japanese felt that surrendering to an enemy willing to employ that level of violence meant surrendering the very country; there was no guarantee of post-war American magnanimity and, quite frankly, there was no reason for the Germans or the Japanese to expect it.

However, once unconditional surrender was achieved, the Americans conducted themselves in a way that we should be proud of. The devastated nations were rebuilt, governed in a more democratic way than ever before, and brought back into the community of nations.

And the most staggering thing, which really borders on the unbelievable, is that despite the fact that there was hardly a single person in Japan and Germany that had not lost a loved one to American bombs, there was no insurgency. Not only was there no organized insurrection, there was not even an isolated incidenct of a widowed husband taking a shot at an American. None. Not 10, not 2. None. Zero Americans were killed in the occupations of Japan and Germany.

Sixty years later, Japan and Germany are the second and third richest countries on Earth. Their physical security is guaranteed in perpetuity by the only country that is richer than them, the United States. Germany and Japan were made to give up their empires, which they never could have maintained anyway. They were subjected to a level of violence that had never been employed before armies before, never mind civilians. But in the end, they are the second and third richest countries on Earth and they pay absolutely nothing for their own defense. So, who won?