 The Second World War and its consequences. 75 years ago, in June 1944, a young soldier surrendered to American paratroopers in the Allied invasion of Normandy. At first, his captors thought that he was Japanese, but he was in fact Korean. His name was Young Kyung In 1938, at the age of 18, Young had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese into the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. A year later, he was captured by the Red Army at the Battle of Kalkingal and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet military authorities at a moment of crisis in 1942 drafted him along with thousands of other prisoners into their forces. Then early in 1943, he was taken prisoner by the German Army at the Battle of Karkov in Ukraine. In 1944, now in German uniform, he was sent to France to serve with an Osobatayan, supposedly boosting the strength of the Atlantic War at the base of the Kotlin-Tam Peninsula in land from Utah Beach. After time in a prison camp in Britain, he went to the United States, where he said nothing of his past. He settled there afterwards and finally died in Illinois in 1992. In a war which killed more than 60 million people and had stretched around the globe, this reluctant veteran of the Japanese, Soviet and German armies had been comparatively fortunate. Yet Young remains perhaps the most striking illustration of the helplessness of most ordinary mortals in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming historical forces. Today, it is very hard to appreciate the huge historical forces which killed those 60 to 70 million people. The Poles lost nearly 6 million people, almost a fifth of their population. The Chinese lost more than 20 million. Estimates of total Soviet losses now range from 24 to 26 million dead. Stalin knew in 1945 that they exceeded 20 million, but he tried to conceal this. As David Reynolds, the Professor of International Relations at Cambridge University, pointed out, he settled for 7.5 million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic but not criminally homicidal. Experiences and memories of the Second World War are so different that it's not surprising that each country has their own historical version of events. For Americans, the war didn't start until December 1941 when Hitler declared war on the United States. Russians believed that it began only in June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Most Europeans, on the other hand, consider that it commenced in Poland in September 1939. But for the Chinese, it started in 1937 with the Sino-Japanese War, or even in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria. And many in Spain are still convinced that it began in 1936 with General Franco's nationalist rising to overthrow the Spanish Republic. Historians often extend the conflict even further, arguing over what is called the Long War of the 20th century. Some say it lasted from 1914 to 1945, including of course the Spanish Civil War. Others extend the period until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. The statistics of suffering and the sheer size of the numbers are dangerously numbing, as the Soviet Joe Schreiter, Vasily Grossman, instinctively understood. In his view, the duty of survivors was to try to recognize the millions of ghosts from the mass graves as individuals, not as nameless people in caricatured categories, because that sort of dehumanization was precisely what the perpetrators had sought to achieve. But focusing entirely on the dead makes us overlook the way the Second World War also totally changed or marked the lives of survivors. And it's vital that we understand the effect on the individual as well as on the statistical mass. A few years ago, I heard from a German friend that her sister's father-in-law had just died. His most intense childhood memory came from January 1945 in East Prussia, when he was only five or six years old. To escape the indiscriminate vengeance of the Red Army, his mother took him and his little sister on foot across the frozen lagoon of the Fisher's House. The ice began breaking up all around, with many people falling through to freeze and drown. Almost 75 years later, his last words before he died were, I can hear the cracking of the ice. In the mad scheme of such a war, human life was intensely fragile. Survival was totally unpredictable. In the Archive National in Paris, I came across a short paragraph in a June 1945 report by the French security police, the D'Estée. This recorded that a German farmer's wife had been found in Paris having somehow smuggled herself onto a train returning French deputies from camps in Germany. It transpired that she had had an illicit affair with a French prisoner of war assigned to that farm in Germany, while her husband was on the Eastern Front. She'd fallen so much in love with this enemy of her country that she'd followed him to Paris, where he was picked up by the police. That was all the detail provided. These few lines raised so many questions. Would her difficult journey have been in vain, even if she'd not been picked up by the police? Had her lover given her the wrong address because he was already married? And had he returned home, as quite a few did, to find that his wife had had a baby in his absence by a German soldier? A recent book in France estimated that around 100,000 babies known as Enfant de Guerre or, more viciously, Bataire de Bosch had been fathered by German soldiers during the occupation. Some put the figure even higher, but I'm very dubious about that. In any case, the bare bones of her story could almost have been a novel by Marguerite de Haas. It is, of course, a tiny tragedy in comparison to the horrors of the Eastern Front. But it remains a poignant reminder that the consequences of decisions by leaders such as Stalin and Hitler ripped apart the traditional fabric of existence. Many aspects are not as they appear on the surface as I've learned over the years. I remember as a young army officer in Germany during the Cold War, based next door to Kibelsen concentration camp, being horrified by a memorial to the French Jews who had died there. It stated, I found the idea of French Jews dying for glory in the Fatherland in these circumstances quite grotesque. Many years later, I mentioned this to the French historian Henri Rousseau. He replied, I entirely understand your reaction, but you're completely wrong. It was the French Jews themselves who insisted after the war that memorials to their dead should have exactly the same wording as those of all the French. And this was because they would never forget Vichy for having tried to take away their French citizenship. Perhaps the hardest for all of us to comprehend fully is the true experience of soldiers, the conditions under which men fought were so desperate that today we can hardly imagine how they endured them. Even many who were there looked back in amazement. One Red Army officer, Vladimir Ivanovich Tulianov said, nowadays I can't believe that we were able to live in the trenches in the open, in the snow, never taking off our boots or clothes with no water or source of heat. How on earth did we survive all that? Between 1941 and 1945, some Red Army soldiers, those who survived the battles along the way, fought and marched for more than 12,000 kilometers. Red Army soldiers, afraid both of their Nazi enemy and of execution by their own side, were put under a terrible psychological pressure. They and Soviet civilians were crushed pitilessly between the two totalitarian regimes. Red Army snipers at Stalingrad, for example, were ordered to shoot starving Russian children who'd been tempted with crusts of bread by German infantrymen to fill their water bottles in the Volga. The proud brutality of Soviet commanders is simply unimaginable in Western democratic societies. When he came to ruthlessness, General Zhukov even exceeded his master Stalin. On the 4th of October 1941, Zhukov, then commander of the Leningrad Front, issued the following order to make clear to all troops that all families of those who surrendered the enemy would be shot, and they themselves would be shot upon return from prison. Ironically, it did not occur to Zhukov when he issued this order, that under it Stalin himself was in theory liable to execution, since his own son, Yakov Zhukashvili, had recently surrendered. I didn't think Stalin was unduly worried. He simply admired Zhukov for his pitiless determination. President Putin is always the first to claim that the Soviet Union won the Second World War in Europe. According to German sources, the Red Army inflicted just over four million fatal casualties and the total on the Wehrmacht during the war. About three quarters of the total Wehrmacht death toll. So the Soviet sacrifice and contribution to the destruction of Nazism was indeed the greatest. But at the same time, Putin refused to acknowledge the American and British contribution to Soviet survival and to victory on the Eastern Front. The great myth encouraged under Stalin was that the British and the Americans deliberately held back from launching the Second Front with a cross-channel invasion in order to weaken that communist ally. Putin still deliberately ignores the fact that even Stalin privately acknowledged that if the United States had not helped, we would not have won the war. Along with the vast supplies of weaponry, vehicles, fuel and steel, came food supplies, which saved the Soviet Union from famine, especially in the winter of 1942 to 1943. Red Army soldiers in their trenches and dugouts used to joke on opening an American tin of spam. Let's open the Second Front. Even today, Russian historians are not yet prepared to acknowledge, but the hugely controversial Allied strategic bombing campaign against German cities helped the Soviet Union enormously. Whatever one might think on moral grounds about our Chief Marshal Harris, known as Bomber Harris, and his brutal and relentless bombing operations, they did force the Luftwaffe to withdraw the bulk of its fighter squadrons and anti-aircraft guns to defend the Reich. And this gave the Soviet Union air superiority on the Eastern Front. The 88mm anti-aircraft guns were also the German's most effective anti-tank gun, which made a great difference in the ground war, too. The other important side effect of the Germans losing air superiority on the Eastern Front meant that they could not carry out air reconnaissance over the Red Army's rear areas. And this enabled the Soviets to carry out major deception operations, which they called Maskerovka, to conceal their major offensives, such as Operation Bagration, a surprise attack which secured Belarus and eastern Poland and destroyed the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944. Finally, there is one irony which Russian historians still refuse to acknowledge. If the United States had not provided almost a half a million military vehicles to the Red Army through Len Lies, then the US Army would have reached Berlin well before the Red Army. Much has been written about the fighting qualities of the different armies in the Second World War, especially the differences between the armies of democracies and the armies of dictatorships. Much less has been said, on the other hand, about their similarities. If one studies the performance of the average as opposed to elite troops. The evidence indicates that any small proportion of frontline troops truly engaged in combat. An initial study in the British Army was carried out in Italy by Major Lionel Wigrum in 1943. Wigrum estimated that in most platoons of about 30 men, only a few really did the fighting. Another small group of men were likely to run away at the first opportunity. Those in the main group in between would follow the fighters if things went well, or the potential deserters if they went badly. General Montgomery was so horrified by the report that he had it suppressed. The Germans, meanwhile, divided their soldiers' combat performance into four categories. So it's basically the same as Wigrum's breakdown, except that the Germans split the main group in the middle in two. The American combat historian Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall went into the subject in much greater detail soon after the war. There could be little doubt about the overall conclusion of his work, but only a minority of soldiers in a conscript army actually shoot at the enemy. The Red Army was no different as we found in the Soviet Russian archives. Soviet officers argued during the war that a weapons inspection should be carried out immediately after an engagement with the enemy. All those found to have clean rifle barrels should be executed immediately as deserters, they said. Previously unpublished letters and diaries of the time give us an idea of personal experiences, but they also reveal the attitudes and mentalities holding sway. German officers and soldiers, for example, felt that the Wehrmacht was invincible at the start of the war. It never seemed to occur to them then that the war which they were bringing so pitilessly to other countries might one day turn back against them and destroy their own homes and families. Their triumphalism in the conquest of France in 1940 was buoyed up by relief that this war on the Western Front was completely unlike the battles of attrition in Flanders a generation earlier. We live like gods in France, the German soldier wrote home. If we need meat, we slaughter a cow and take only the best cuts. The rest is discarded. With our rifles and our hands, we then break into houses and our hunger is sated. Terrible, isn't it? But one gets used to anything. Thank God that these conditions didn't prevail at home. The idea that the Fuhrer had spared Germany such horrors, a typical confusion of course and effect became a constant refrain in soldiers' letters. Preparations for the massive assault on the Soviet Union prompted similar hopes of a rapid victory. Forests of birch and fir trees along the Nazi Soviet frontier concealed vehicle parks, tinted headquarters and signal arrangement as well as fighting units. Officers briefed their men, reassuring them that it would only take three to four weeks to crush the Red Army. Early tomorrow morning, Registrar and Imagine Division were off thanks be to God against our mortal enemy Bolshevism. For me a real stone has fallen from my heart. Finally, this uncertainty is over and one knows where one is. I am very optimistic and I believe that if we can take all the land and raw materials up to the Urals, then Europe will be able to feed itself and it will not matter how long the war at sea lasts. This war of annihilation, as Hitler called it, was pitiless. The Russian is a tough opponent, wrote a German soldier. We take hardly any prisoners and shoot them all instead. When marching forwards, some German soldiers fired for fun at crowds of red soldiers hurried back as prisoners to make shift camps where they were left to starve and freeze in the open. Thousands of Soviet citizens died in the bombing of the cities of Belarus. Survivors fared a little better in their attempts to escape eastwards. After Minsk began to burn, a Soviet journalist noticed, blind men from the Home for Invalides walked along the highway in a long file tied to one another with towels. Beyond the repression and the starvation of ordinary Soviet citizens lay the far darker forces of Himmler's murderous SS squads, the Einsatzkommandos. Only a few Jews managed to survive the killing pits, in some cases by digging themselves out from under the bodies on top of them. They were utterly traumatized. On the northeastern edge of the Ukraine, Vasily Grossman encountered one of them. A girl, a Jewish beauty, who's managed to escape from the Germans, he wrote in his netbook, has bright absolutely insane eyes. But the Germans were not invincible. In the autumn of 1942 they reached their cumulative point, which means that they had overextended themselves, they'd run out of momentum and were suddenly vulnerable. After the after the Soviet victory of Stalingrad that winter, the Wehrmacht's retreat began. Nervous breakdown became a much more recognizable subject in Lettuce's home to Germany. Psychologically, wrote a gunner in a heavy artillery battery, I am finding it increasingly hard to manage when you've just had a good chat with a comrade and half an hour later you see him as little more than scraps of flesh as if he had never existed. This war is a crushing war of nerves. Soviet revenge for Nazi crimes in the East caused great fear when finally in April 1945 the German front line began to break east of Berlin. Traumatized survivors ran back shouting Daivan kommt. Local farmers and their families also started to flee. Refugees hurried by like creatures of the underworld, wrote a young soldier. Women, children and old men surprised in their sleep, some only half dressed. In their faces is despair and deadly fear. Crying children holding their mother's hands look out at the world's destruction with shock to eyes. Some fathers, as they left to join their Wolfstrom unit to defend Berlin, thought only of the fate awaiting their families. It's all over my child, one told his daughter, handing her a pistol. Promise me that when the Russians come you will shoot yourself. He then kissed her and left. Others killed their wives and children and then committed suicide themselves. In the Far East before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Malaya, the racial arrogance of colonial society, British, Dutch and French, had produced a dangerous self-deception. The British convinced themselves that all Japanese soldiers were very short-sighted and inherently inferior to Western troops. In fact they were immeasurably tougher. Far more mobile and astonishingly self-sufficient. They did not need bridging equipment, their soldiers cut sick bamboos, then threw themselves in pairs into the river and bent forward with the bamboos running from shoulder to shoulder in parallel to form a bridge for their comrades to run over. Japanese soldiers had been brought up in a militaristic society. The whole village or neighborhood would usually turn out to bid farewell to a conscript departing to join the army. Soldiers dreaded, disgracing their family and community. Their basic training was designed to destroy individuality. Recruits were constantly insulted, slapped and beaten by their sergeants and corporals to toughen them up. In what might be called the knock-on theory of oppression, this treatment was also intended to provoke them to take their anger out in turn on the soldiers and civilians of a defeated enemy. During the rape of Nanking in December 1937, Japanese officers made Chinese prisoners, kneel in rows and then practiced beheading them one by one with their samurai swords. Their soldiers were also ordered to carry out burnet practice on thousands of Chinese prisoners bound up or tied to trees. Any soldiers who refused were beaten severely by their sergeants and corporals. John Raaba, the German businessman from Siemens, who courageously organized the safety zone in Nanking, wrote in his diary, I am totally puzzled by the conduct of the Japanese. On the one hand they want to be recognized and treated as a great power on a level with European powers. On the other they are currently displaying a crudity, brutality and bestiality that bears no comparison except with the hordes of Genghis Khan. Japanese navy pilots would sit down to play bridge together in what they considered a respectful imitation of British officers of the Royal Navy, but they would behead any shop-down American pilot pulled from the sea. Japan in the 1930s and 1940s have become a dangerous combination of ancient culture and parvenu power. The Imperial Japanese army's process of dehumanizing its troops was stepped up as soon as they arrived in China from the home islands. A corporal Nakamura, who had himself been conscripted as a soldier against his will, described in his diary how they made some new recruits watch as they tortured five Chinese civilians to death. The newcomers were horrified, but Nakamura wrote all new recruits are like this but soon they will be doing the same things themselves. I think that in the course of all my research is the discovery that shocked me the most was the way that the Japanese military authorities did not merely condone but actively encouraged cannibalism especially towards the end of the war. These were not isolated cases. A similar pattern was found across the Japanese army in China and Pacific garrisons who had been cut off from supplies by the US Navy. It became clear from all of the reports collected later by American authorities in the Australian war crimes section that cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy. Both locals and a number of Allied prisoners of war were kept alive as human cattle and then butchered for their meat one by one. On the 9th of May 1945 when news of Germany's surrender reached the rifle companies of the American First Marine Division during the battle for the Japanese island of Okinawa their reaction was so what they were exhausted and filthy and everything around them stank. As far as they were concerned the war in Europe was indeed another war on another planet. After the savage fighting on Okinawa there remained even more dreadful prospect of invading the Japanese home islands where soldiers and civilians alike were preparing to fight on to the death. None of the marines knew then of the atomic bombs being prepared in such secrecy. It was not just the nuclear age and the cold war which began in 1945. The consequences of the Second World War reshaped the international order. They also brought world history together for the first time. This was partly because of the global reach of the conflict but also because it sealed the fate of colonialism the British, French and Dutch empires. In the far east the defeat of the Japanese and the advance of the Red Army across northern China and Mongolia enabled Mao Zedong's Communist Party to win the civil war and centralize the country in a totalitarian dictatorship. Although impossible to imagine at the time this would enable China seven decades later to become an economic and then military superpower. The origins of the Cold War lie in the Yalta Conference of September 1945. For Stalin Poland was the key to Soviet security after the war and he was determined that it should be entirely under his thumb. He had suffered a traumatic shock and humiliation on the 22nd of June 1941 when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union without warning. His paranoid fear of surprise attack afterwards made him even more determined to create a quorum sanitaire of communist satellite states centered on Poland and East Germany to make sure that this could never happen again. On the other hand the Yalta Conference also gave birth to the United Nations which was inspired by President Roosevelt's belief in the possibility of a more peaceful world. In 1945 a war ravaged Europe was left bankrupt and enfeebled. In fact Western Europe might also have gone communist if it had not been for the Marshall Planade from the United States which in 1948 kick-started economic recovery. The horrors of the conflict and its consequences spurred the start of a movement towards European Union. Yet European integration is a story based on the confusion of cause and effect and also the law of unintended consequences. It's long been an article of faith that the move towards unification has saved the continent from another war but this idea is historically false. The real truth of course is that democracies do not fight each other. Peace is a question of governments not unification. It is precisely the undermining of democracy which creates the conditions for conflict and history has shown time and time again that attempts to suppress nationalism make it far more virulent. Now in the midst of alarming global instability social political and economic it is understandable that people look again at the Second World Wars a warning one that can alert us to danger signals. They might argue that we've learned little from history's greatest human tragedy and are blindly headed towards another global conflict but history never repeats itself and nothing in human affairs is inevitable yet we still need to understand the past to make better sense of what's happening around us now and we must avoid the temptation to generalize or to draw bogus parallels. The Second World War was a complex business and our understanding of it must be equally nuanced. We tend for example to reduce the war to a battle between major powers. Some misleadingly portray it as a fight between democracy and dictatorship even though the Soviet Union was certainly very far from a democracy. In fact the war was a conglomeration of conflicts. Some were great power rivalries yet all to a certain degree were influenced by the international civil war between the polarized extremes of communism and fascism. What we are seeing today in Europe especially is very different. The extreme left and the extreme right strongly assisted by Putin are now linking up to undermine traditional parliamentary democracy. The sheer brutality of the Second World War is underlined by the fact that for the first time in history far more civilians were killed than competence and this can only be explained in terms of ideologically fueled dehumanization. Nationalism stirred to a fever pitch and extolling racism as a virtue on one side but also Leninist class warfare aiming to exterminate all opposition on the other. Not surprisingly the Soviet Union fought tooth and nail in the United Nations committees after the war to prevent class warfare from being included in the international definition of genocide. The great Soviet physicist and dissident Andrey Sakharov observed that Stalin may have killed more people but Hitler had to be defeated first and he was of course right. If the Nazis had succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union their so-called hunger plan to reduce the population through deliberate famine by 35 million would have dwarfed even the horrors of the Holocaust. Perhaps the Second World War's most important lesson is a moral one. Even in the midst of the most horrifying conditions there were those who never let go of their fundamental belief in humanity. Their example is something we must try to uphold as we face the profoundly disturbing challenges and potential conflicts of the world today. It is striking that the Second World War as a subject still attracts so many novels poems and movies but then new other period in history offers so rich a source for the study of moral choice, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of some commanders, betrayal, perversity, unbelievable sadism but also self-sacrifice and unpredictable compassion. In short one of the most important lessons of the Second World War is that it defies generalization and simple categories. Thank you very much.