This year marks the 80th anniversary of the allied forces, led by the USA and the UK – with a large contribution from British Commonwealth forces and allied countries – defeating Nazi Germany.
On 8 May 1945 Germany surrendered. The war in Europe, that had begun in September 1939, was over. Historians estimate that between 75 and 85 million people perished in World War Two. This included approximately 57,000 Scots. Most were serving in the armed forces. Also among the dead were no less than 2,500 men, women, and children, killed by bombs dropped on Scottish towns, including Glasgow, Clydebank, Greenock, and Aberdeen. Of the wounded in Scotland, about 8,000 civilians were injured in air raids, mainly during May 1941.
Four months after hostilities ended in Europe, Germany’s ally, the Empire of Japan, surrendered. The United States had dropped the world’s first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events were the first, and so far, only use of nuclear weapons as an act of war. It’s estimated that between 100,000 and 250,000 Japanese civilians died when the bombs fell.
On 2 September 1945 the world war was officially declared over. The urgent task began of rebuilding devastated countries, brutalised societies and exhausted economies.
Keeping the balance of power in Europe
Britain didn’t go to war because Hitler was jailing and executing his political opponents or dehumanising Germany’s Jews and hounding them from jobs and homes (the Holocaust would come later). The majority in the UK knew very little then about the depth of Nazi depravity.
The country went to war because it had made a promise to Poland that if it were invaded, Britain (and France) would come to its aid. When Germany’s army crossed the border into Poland in September 1939, Poland’s allies kept their promises and declared war on Germany.
The military objective was to defeat Germany. The political objective was to maintain the balance of power in Europe, so that no single state could dominate the continent through its military, economic, or political might. A little more than 20 years before, Europe had been torn apart by the Great War, the First World War. Once again, Germany had grown to be the most powerful state in continental Europe. It was thought that the Treaty of Versailles, reached in 1919, would keep Europe from war.
From September 1939, Germany’s invasion of Poland, then France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, the Baltic states, Greece, Russia, and parts of North Africa – and its alliance with Japan in the Pacific – brought the full horror of war to much of the globe.
The end of World War Two saw a new world emerge
In 1945 the United Nations was born in San Francisco. It was an attempt to provide a forum for conflict resolution by peaceful means. Its authority has been much diminished over recent years, its weaknesses starkly revealed by its inability to stop the wars between Israel and Palestine, and Russia and Ukraine.
NATO founded by 12 nations
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was created in 1949. Twelve nations, including the USA, UK, France, and Canada came together in a military alliance. Its role was to deter perceived threats of nuclear war and the invasion of Western Europe by the Russia-controlled Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (also known as the Soviet Union). An attack on one NATO member state would be deemed an attack on all. NATO had then, and has now, no territorial ambitions. It is a purely defensive organisation. Today, 32 nations are full NATO members.
The Soviet response to the creation of NATO was the the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance of the eastern European states that lay within the Soviet sphere of influence. The era of “collective security” had begun, characterised by the superpowers of the USA and the USSR tiptoeing around each other in the nuclear stand-off known as the Cold War. The conflict was marked by peace in Europe, but numerous proxy wars underwritten by both the USA and the Soviets were fought in Africa, South and central America, and Asia.
Europe begins to unite, seeding the birth of the EU
In the 1960s, six European countries – France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands – founded what would later become the European Union. It has since grown to be the world’s biggest economic and political alliance of democratic states. It is one of the three largest economies of the planet, ranking alongside the US and China for industrial capacity, technological, and scientific leadership and the wealth of its countries and peoples.
Reagan’s America outspends communist Russia
In the 1980s the US under President Ronald Reagan spent trillions of dollars on upgrading its military capability, on land, sea, air, and in space. The Soviet Union simply couldn’t keep up. Its grip on the countries of Eastern Europe was weakened, challenged, then broken. One by one, the nations of the Warsaw Pact broke away. Many in Russia felt their country had been humiliated.
The USSR collapsed in 1991. The Berlin Wall fell. Communist East Germany joined the powerhouse economy that was West Germany. A new unified German state was born. Most of the western satellite states of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact chose a path of liberal democracy, mixed economies of capitalism and public enterprise and, for most, membership of NATO and the EU. As the tensions of the Cold War evaporated the world imagined a “peace dividend” where spending on armies and weapons would sharply fall and human beings would use the money to make a better world.
In Russia itself communism died and is unlikely ever to revive. The country had a brief flowering of liberalism. Foreign money poured in. Foreign governments spent millions trying to introduce western ideas of democracy, the rule of law and representative government. But corruption and gangsterism won the day. The ownership and control of state assets – oil, gas, coal, energy supply, telecommunications, transport, and property mysteriously ended up in the hands of a few. They came to be known as the Oligarchs. They got rich and Russia displayed all the signs of being a failed state.
Putin comes to power, determined to rebuild Russian pride
In 2000, a former Russia secret service agent , Vladimir Putin, was elected president. He was appalled at how once mighty Russia had become a fractured, unstable, and rapidly declining economic and military power.
Putin felt the West had exploited Russia and weakened its essence as a great nation. Foreign influence was curtailed. Many companies left. Media had to do what Putin wanted, or face forced sale of their assets or the imprisonment of owners.
The Oligarchs were obliged to toe the president’s line or risk the same fate as the media owners. The courts became puppets of Putin. Political opponents were jailed or fell from windows to their deaths.
Putin rules through fear. All the apparatus of the state – parliament, the armed forces, police, courts, and secret service – are subservient to him. Big business pays homage at his feet and does what it is told. There is no meaningful scrutiny of Putin’s policies or actions.
Within a decade Putin’s iron fist and brutal tactics made him the absolute ruler of Russia. He dreamed of an imperial Russia, one that dominated Eastern and Northern Europe and was feared in the world. The Russian Bear would roar again, led by a man exercising power as ruthlessly as the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and the mass-killer Joseph Stalin. And as brutally as the aristocratic regimes of the old Czars.
Putin pulled a new iron curtain across Europe, flexing his muscles with the partial annexation of the South Caucasus region of Georgia in 2008. In 2014 he invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, part of Ukraine. Russian forces attacked the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Russia (and the world) expected the war to be over in weeks, with Ukraine crushed and its people, territory, and assets transferred to Russia. But Ukraine has waged a great defence that has seen it admired by most of the free world. For Putin and Russia, the war has been a humiliation.
Riding to Putin’s rescue has come Donald Trump. Once, not long ago, the president of the United States held the honorary title of “Leader of the Free World”.
What that meant was the US upheld the values of liberal democracy; free and fair elections, secret voting, unquestioned support for the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peacefully protest and, most crucially of all, the right of peaceful states not to be attacked by the armed forces of another power.
America’s commitment to these ideals was intact until Donald Trump was re-elected president, made real by the robustness of its own internal democracy, its leadership of NATO and its support for Ukraine. The title now lies shredded and shamed by the actions of Trump.
In the 250 years since America won its independence from Britain, it has been seen as history’s most successful example of a society that brought the greatest happiness to the greatest number and did so while protecting the rights of the individual against the might of the state. Donald Trump has destroyed that status in less than half a year.
Trump admires Putin, sharing many of his attitudes
Donald Trump admires Putin. He sees virtue in Putin’s authoritarianism, his contempt for political opponents, his total control over judges, the police, the media, the economy, and the armed forces.
Like Putin, Trump has around him a band of very rich men who do his bidding. Like Putin, Trump has bullied much of the mainstream media into supporting the president’s agenda. Like Putin, Trump believes America has been weak on the global stage and belittled by what he sees as other countries taking American money and defence while giving little in return.
Like Putin, Trump has made no secret of his territorial ambitions. He covets Canada as the 51st state of the US. He eyes up Greenland and Panama for the industrial and commercial advantages they can bring America. He has threatened the use of armed force to get his way.
Like Putin, Trump controls all the arms of government. He is commander in chief of the armed forces. His supporters control the Supreme Court and the Senate. His cabinet runs all the departments of the federal government. Like Putin, Trump abhors the European Union, fearing its liberalism, its economic might and its tempering of the power of big business over the citizen.
Europe is coming together and uniting in unprecedented ways
Since the 8th of May 1945, most of Europe has lived in peace, growing more prosperous as the benefits of stability, democracy, and a more equal share of the economic cake have created more resilient economies and delivered higher standards of living for some 400 million Europeans. Central to that has been the EU.
America’s defence shield and its leadership of NATO played an enormous part in creating the conditions for Europe to prosper. With lightning speed Donald Trump has upended the world order that had survived for 80 years. As we wake into each new day of Trump’s second term as US leader, we fear what we might hear from America.
That these are dark times for the world is undeniable. But there is hope. Europe is coming together and uniting in unprecedented ways. Who knows if such unity will last. If it does it will face many testing moments. No citizen of any European country will be unaffected. Tough times are here.
This generation of European political leaders have found that history has reached a moment that demands that they lead. Almost every EU member state, and the UK, has committed to spend many extra billions on upgrading national defence capabilities.
The prospect of a European army – an idea hated by Trump supporters such as Nigel Farage – is now being seriously talked about. Many defence thinkers believe Trump cannot be trusted. If the reliability of America – NATO’s biggest member – is in question and Putin’s Russia continues showing expansionist intentions. Europe will have no option to look to its own defence.
Our job is to see clearly that the road of Trump and Putin is not the road for Scotland, the UK, or Europe.
Our job is to support people who will seek to protect our way of life, our values, and our freedoms. We cannot become vassals of dictators or of the mighty, the powerful, the super-rich, or the jackboot advocates of our time. Those who support them must be defeated at the ballot box and made irrelevant to our public life.
Let’s hear it for the good guys.
Let’s applaud the memory of men and women who won us the peace in 1945.
We must not let their memory down.
More in history.
