How different groups experienced the same war

There is no single experience of war. There are as many experiences as there are participants, and the differences between them are not incidental details but fundamentally different realities. A general sitting in a command post sixty miles behind the front lines, moving divisions across a map, inhabits a different war than the infantryman crouching in a foxhole, who inhabits a different war than the civilian huddled in a basement as bombs fall, who inhabits a different war than the refugee fleeing with nothing, who inhabits a different war than the prisoner of war starving in a camp, who inhabits a different war than the resistance fighter sabotage, who inhabits a different war than the collaborator making compromises, who inhabits a different war than the child too young to understand any of it.

World War II, because of its scale and its documentation, offers the clearest case study in how a single historical event can mean radically different things to different people. Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 70 to 85 million people died. The war touched every inhabited continent. It reshaped the global order. And it was experienced -- was lived -- in ways so different that the question of whether participants were even in the same war becomes meaningful.

The Eastern Front and the Western Front

The most fundamental division in the experience of World War II is between the Eastern Front and the Western Front. In the West, particularly in the United States and Britain, the war is remembered as a crusade against fascism, a necessary and ultimately triumphant struggle marked by D-Day, the Battle of Britain, and the liberation of the concentration camps. This narrative is not false, but it is partial.

The war in the East was a different conflict in both scale and character. The Soviet Union suffered approximately 27 million deaths during the war -- military and civilian combined. This figure is so large that it is almost incomprehensible. By comparison, the United States suffered approximately 418,500 military and civilian deaths. Britain suffered approximately 450,000. The Soviet death toll alone was more than sixty times the American toll, and it represented roughly 14 percent of the pre-war Soviet population.

The Eastern Front was also fought with a brutality that exceeded anything on the Western Front. The German war against the Soviet Union was conceived from the beginning as a war of annihilation -- a Vernichtungskrieg -- aimed not merely at defeating the Soviet military but at destroying the Soviet population. The Hunger Plan, developed by German economic planners in 1941, explicitly envisioned the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens to feed German troops and civilians. The implementation of this plan, combined with the brutality of combat, produced suffering on a scale that has no parallel on the Western Front.

The historian Richard Overy, in Russia's War (1997), argued that the Soviet experience of the war was fundamentally shaped by the regime's own brutality. Joseph Stalin's pre-war purges had decimated the officer corps, contributing to the catastrophic Soviet defeats of 1941. The Soviet military leadership was willing to accept casualties that no Western democracy could have sustained or tolerated. Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans and then liberated were often sent to the Gulag, suspected of having surrendered too easily. The Soviet war effort was heroic, but the heroism was extracted from a population that had no choice.

The American historian David Glantz, who has done more than any Western scholar to reconstruct the military history of the Eastern Front from Soviet sources, has argued that the Western understanding of World War II is fundamentally distorted by the relative neglect of the Eastern Front. The decisive battles of the war -- Stalingrad, Kursk, Operation Bagration -- were fought in the East. The majority of German military casualties -- roughly 75 to 80 percent -- were inflicted by the Soviet Union. D-Day was important, but it was not the turning point of the war. The turning point was Stalingrad, a year and a half before the Normandy landings.

Colonized Soldiers Fighting for Empires

World War II was fought by empires, and the soldiers of those empires came from every continent. The British Indian Army -- the largest volunteer army in history -- provided approximately 2.5 million soldiers. African colonies contributed hundreds of thousands of troops to the British and French war efforts. The French Army in 1940 included large numbers of soldiers from West Africa, North Africa, and Indochina. These soldiers fought and died for empires that did not treat them as equals.

The experience of colonized soldiers was marked by a particular irony. They were asked to fight for freedom and democracy against fascism, while living under colonial regimes that denied them freedom and democracy. The historian David Killingray, in Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (2010), documented the experiences of African soldiers who served in Burma, Ethiopia, the Middle East, and Europe. Many of these soldiers returned home with new political expectations, having seen other societies and having been treated -- at least in some contexts -- with a degree of respect that colonial rule ordinarily denied them. Their experience of the war contributed directly to the post-war independence movements that dismantled the European colonial empires.

The treatment of colonial troops also reflected the racial hierarchies of the empires they served. African troops in the French Army were officially praised for their bravery but were often assigned to the most dangerous missions and were denied the promotions and decorations given to white soldiers. After the fall of France in 1940, African prisoners of war were often treated worse than their white counterparts by the Germans. The British Indian Army maintained racial distinctions in its officer corps, with British officers commanding Indian troops, a practice that was not fully reformed until the war's later stages.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust is the most extreme example of how the experience of World War II varied by identity. For the Jews of Europe, the war was not primarily a military conflict. It was a campaign of systematic extermination that killed approximately six million people -- roughly two-thirds of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe.

The historian Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), situated the Holocaust within a larger pattern of mass killing in the territories between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states -- where approximately 14 million non-combatants were killed between 1933 and 1945 through starvation, shooting, and gassing. Snyder argued that the Holocaust could not be understood in isolation from this larger context of mass violence, though this position has been criticized by some scholars who worry that it risks diluting the specifically anti-Jewish character of the genocide.

The experience of the Holocaust also varied dramatically depending on where Jews lived. In Western Europe, some Jews were able to go into hiding or escape. In Eastern Europe, where the majority of European Jews lived and where the Nazi occupation was most brutal, survival was far more difficult. In Poland, which had the largest Jewish population in Europe before the war, approximately 90 percent of Jews were killed. The experiences of those who survived -- in hiding, in the camps, as partisans -- were so different from one another that generalization is hazardous.

The historian Saul Friedlander, in The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2007), argued for an "integrated history" that combined the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. This approach was controversial. Some scholars argued that the attempt to integrate the perspectives of perpetrators and victims risked creating a false equivalence between them. Others argued that it was necessary for understanding how the genocide was carried out and how it was allowed to happen.

Japanese-American Internment

In the United States, the war experience of Japanese Americans was fundamentally different from that of other Americans. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal and internment of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of them American citizens, from the West Coast. They were given days to dispose of their homes, businesses, and possessions and were transported to remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

The historian Roger Daniels, in Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (1993), documented the economic devastation caused by internment. Japanese Americans lost an estimated $400 million in property -- homes, farms, businesses -- that they were forced to sell at a fraction of its value or abandon entirely. The psychological impact was also severe: the experience of being declared a threat to national security solely on the basis of ancestry, by one's own government, left lasting scars.

The experience of Japanese Americans during the war highlights the gap between the official narrative of the war as a struggle for freedom and democracy and the actual treatment of American citizens whose civil liberties were suspended on the basis of race. Notably, no similar mass internment was imposed on Americans of German or Italian descent, despite the United States being at war with Germany and Italy as well. The racial logic of internment was clear, even if it was not acknowledged at the time.

The Soviet Civilian Experience

For Soviet civilians, the war was an experience of catastrophic loss. Entire cities were destroyed. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) endured a siege of nearly 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, in which approximately one million civilians died, mostly from starvation. The siege produced scenes of suffering -- and of endurance -- that are among the most harrowing in the history of warfare. Anna Reid, in Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (2011), drew on diaries and survivor accounts to reconstruct the daily experience of the siege: the rationing, the desperate searches for food, the collapse of public services, the gradual descent into starvation and death.

The experience of Soviet civilians under German occupation was equally devastating. Millions were deported to Germany as forced laborers. Entire villages were burned and their inhabitants killed in anti-partisan operations. The German occupation was explicitly racist, treating Slavic peoples as subhuman. The historian Wendy Lower, in Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013), documented the participation of German women -- nurses, secretaries, teachers, wives -- in the occupation and its atrocities, challenging the assumption that violence in the East was exclusively the work of male soldiers and SS men.

Women's Experiences

The experience of war also varied profoundly by gender. In the combatant nations, millions of women entered the industrial workforce to replace men who had been drafted, transforming gender roles in ways that would have long-term consequences. In the United States, the image of "Rosie the Riveter" became a symbol of women's capacity for industrial labor. In Britain, women were conscripted into the workforce and into auxiliary military services. In the Soviet Union, women served in combat roles -- as snipers, fighter pilots, and tank drivers -- to a degree unmatched by any other combatant nation.

But women's wartime experiences also included suffering specific to their gender. Mass rape accompanied military operations on all sides, but was particularly systematic on the Eastern Front. The Red Army's advance into Germany in 1945 was accompanied by the widespread rape of German women, a subject that was largely taboo in both East and West Germany for decades and was only fully documented after the end of the Cold War. The historian Antony Beevor, in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), estimated that approximately two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers during the final months of the war, a figure that has been disputed by some scholars but that indicates the scale of the violence.

The historian Margarete Buber-Neumann, herself a survivor of both the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbruck, documented the specific vulnerabilities of women in wartime detention. Women in concentration camps were subjected to forced prostitution, medical experiments, and systematic abuse that went beyond what male prisoners experienced, though male prisoners also suffered enormously.

Who Got to Write the History

The post-war narratives of World War II were shaped by who survived, who had the resources to write and publish, and whose accounts served the political interests of the post-war order. In the United States, the dominant narrative emphasized American heroism and sacrifice: D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima. The Soviet contribution was minimized during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was the enemy. The contribution of colonized peoples was barely acknowledged by the imperial powers they had served. The Holocaust was not central to the early post-war narratives; it became so only gradually, as survivors began to write and speak about their experiences and as the full scale of the genocide became known.

The historian Tony Judt, in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), argued that the immediate post-war period in Europe was characterized by a collective desire to move on, to rebuild, and to suppress the memory of collaboration, betrayal, and atrocity. In France, the myth of universal resistance -- the idea that all French people had opposed the German occupation -- dominated public memory for decades, despite the fact that the Vichy regime had actively collaborated with the Nazis and that many French citizens had participated in the deportation of Jews. In Germany, the immediate post-war period was marked by silence about the Holocaust and about the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Nazi regime. It was not until the 1960s that German society began to confront its past in a serious way.

The Cold War shaped the historiography of the war in profound ways. In the West, the Soviet Union's role in defeating Nazi Germany was downplayed or reframed as part of the expansion of totalitarianism. In the Soviet bloc, the Western Allies' contribution was minimized, and the war was presented as a triumph of the Soviet people under the leadership of the Communist Party. The opening of archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed historians to produce more comprehensive accounts, but the political and cultural frameworks through which the war is remembered continue to vary dramatically from country to country.

The historian Mary Louise Roberts, in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013), challenged the sanitized American narrative of the liberation of France by documenting the sexual violence and exploitation that accompanied the American military presence. Her work, like that of many other scholars who have examined the darker aspects of the Allied war effort, was controversial, but it illustrated the ongoing process by which the history of the war is being revised and expanded to include the experiences of those who were previously excluded from the narrative.

The Same War, Different Wars

The experience of World War II was so varied that the question of whether it was "the same war" for all participants is not merely rhetorical. For an American factory worker in Detroit, the war meant overtime shifts, rationing, and anxiety about family members overseas. For a Soviet soldier at Stalingrad, it meant hand-to-hand combat in the ruins of a city, starvation, and the expectation that retreat would be punished by his own side. For a Jewish child in hiding in the Netherlands, it meant silence, fear, and the disappearance of everyone she knew. For a Japanese civilian in Tokyo, it meant firebombing that killed 100,000 people in a single night. For an Indian soldier fighting in Burma, it meant combat in jungle terrain far from home for an empire that regarded him as inferior.

These were all part of the same historical event. They were all caused by the same political and military dynamics. But they were lived as different wars, and the histories that have been written about them reflect the perspectives, priorities, and biases of those who wrote them. The task of the historian is not to choose among these perspectives but to hold them together, recognizing that the totality of the war includes all of them and that no single narrative can do justice to the range of human experience that the war encompassed.

Sources

• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945. London: Viking, 2002.
• Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
• Friedlander, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
• Glantz, David M., and Jonathan House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
• Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2005.
• Killingray, David. Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010.
• Overy, Richard. Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow. London: Viking, 1997.
• Reid, Anna. Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
• Roberts, Mary Louise. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.