World War II In Just 10 Minutes (Part 2)

When I left off before, I think I was talking about Germany. They conquered a lot of land and were getting even more, but this didn’t go on forever as nothing does.

Germany made the worst decision ever by attacking Russia (it was called the Soviet Union at that time). No one could possibly conquer mighty Russia, and from this moment was the fall of Germany. Germany flew close into Russia territory and began to attack. Winter was coming and the freezing temperatures of Russia were too much for the Germans to handle. Russians were used to it of course.

At that time Japan was at war with China. The war was brutal as they attacked the small villages of China and Manchuria. The farther the land was from the capital of China the harder it was to control, so Japan was winning by attacking small villages one by one and succeeded.

War is super expensive and for Japan they needed more resources like iron for weapons and other stuff. Japan is a small country on many islands with volcanoes and other stuff. They don’t have many resources so they get their iron from the United State. Japan kept attacking China and the United States was on China’s side. And this lead to the United States cutting off the deal and stopped sending iron to Japan. A type of attitude like that is also known as an embargo.

Because of the embargo that the United States put on, Japan had no choice but to find resources. Japan came to conquer the South East Asia territories such as Indonesia, Philippines, Borneo (Kalimantan), Australia and other tropical countries. Conquering Asia was two birds with one stone because some of the territories belonged to Britain and France.

[caption id="attachment_217962" align="aligncenter" width="404" caption="Kamikaze Attack (Doc: images.mackanzoor.com)"][/caption] On December 7, 1941 was the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was taught in middle school that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they wanted to find a challenging opponent. If this was true, then that would be a seriously bad decision to make. Yet this is not the 100% reason why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

What really happened was that Japan wanted to conquer most of South East Asia. Some of that territory belonged to Great Britain. Others belonged to France and Netherlands and the United States. If Japan took the land that belonged to the United States, that would start a war between them. But because of the lack of resources Japan had, it was their only option to survive. Pearl Harbor is full of the United States Navy and fleet. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to destroy their fleet so they couldn’t do anything when Japan took the South East Indies that belonged to the US.

This was also a bad idea because this brought the US into the war. The US helped British troops move to defeat Italian troops in Africa and moved forward to corner Germany. From the North-East side came the Russians and from the South-west came the Allies which contained United kingdom, the US and France troops. Canada also took part be siding the allies.

So now it was,

The Allies:

-United States

-Great Britain

-France

-Russia

The Axis:

-Germany

-Italy

-Japan

Italy lost to the allies and switched sides to form with the allies which is kind of funny because they started off be siding the Germans and when Russia and the US are your enemies there’s no way you can win. This also made Germany became even more cornered. Adolf Hitler couldn’t do much and he committed suicide.

Russia helped out the South East Asia countries like Indonesia because the only opponent left was Japan. Russia helped out Indonesia by sending tanks in. And the United States backed the Japan off of American territory and the war finally ended with two atomic bombs which were completely unnecessary.

The two atomic bombs were named little boy and fat man, had more negative effects than the positive effects which were winning the war. An atomic bomb can destroy everything in its path, depleting houses and buildings everywhere. The number of people who died from when the bomb hit the ground was estimated to be 70,000 people from the Hiroshima bomb (fat man) and 40,000 people from the Nagasaki bomb(little boy). And 90,000 died months after that from the disease of ionizing radiation. Japan was left with a big scar on its face.

[caption id="attachment_217963" align="aligncenter" width="404" caption="Nagasaki Bomb (Doc: en.wikipedia.org)"]

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This could have been avoided. The United States could have won without bombing the two cities. And the people who died didn’t need to die. Most of the people were citizens that didn’t have a say in anything. They were not wrong and didn’t deserve it.

Tragedies can happen in war but because of that bomb the Japan surrendered and Indonesia raised its hand. We took advantage of the bomb and kicked the Japanese out of Nusantara (because it wasn’t Indonesia yet). Nusantara declared independence from Japan and got named Indonesia. The word Indonesia comes from the Latin and Greek word ‘Indus’ and the Greek word ‘nesos’ meaning island (I actually just learned this). Indus valley is a civilization in Asia which, I’ll talk about later.

So now I want to make a conclusion. Wars don’t need to happen, but they do happen and we need to accept that. Also, wars have a negative and positive side effect. Japan and Germany surely got the negative side from this war. But we benefited from the war like, Independence. Now who doesn’t want Independence? War may have huge down sides but it can make positive sides that can change the world

History is important to study for future generations to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again. It is also important to study the full story of history rather than just a chapter. And one last thing I want to talk about is point of view. It is hard to see a far mountain from on top of a tree point of view. Sometimes we need to see the birds’ point of view.

Thanks for reading.