They say the victors make the rules and the end justifies the means yet when the cloud of war hang over Europe on the evening of 1 September 1939 after Germans invasion of Poland, some people were naive enough to think that the war would be quick and done with in a matter of time. In the end, the war dragged for 6 years leaving over 60 million casualties in Europe alone. Mankind was exposed to horrors never seen since creation of man, the concentration camps, Holocaust, terror bombing, large scale civilian killings etc. What stood up against it all was the weapons of destruction man invented to kill fellow man.
Many technological advancements were made during the period preceding the war which i feel could have helped man kind even further from the dark age. So would world war 2 have been averted? I feel it could have. When world war 1 ended, the world was angry at Germany for being the root cause of the war. In this regards, they imposed severe unrealistic rules that crippled Germany socially and economically. Being a nation, Adolf Hitler came along and offered to provide a national rebirth and he did. His ambitious and canning nature caught everyone napping and before anyone knew what was happening Europe was sowing the seeds that would germinate into war. Having witnessed the horrors of the previous war, everyone wanted to avert war but the more they wanted the war averted the more they napped into the job. That's why no one questioned Hitler when he marched into the Rhineland. Word has it that had the French army stood firm, that is the day Hitler would have lost his prestigious army and his newly created Reich.
The leaders wanted to appease him so much that they could sell a whole nation to make him happy. But this gave him even more courage. When he took over Austria, part of Czechoslovakia and finally the whole country, the world looked away and whistled. After all he was taking up only a few land which was not big deal so long as he was happy. No one did a thing. The war could have been averted if the League of Nations had been an instrumental body and vocal in major German moves that only saw to undermine the body. The League then was weak, had no committed forces and was only good at shouting. True, major powers were recuperating from the losses of the previous wars but they should have seen the venom arising from Germany. Someone ought to have done something but no one did.
The stroke at the back of the camel came after the commencement of the war. It took a whooping 6-9 months before the Allied powers deployed to Europe and when they did, it was a disaster. In the meanwhile, Poland was getting ripped apart by a combined power of Russian and German forces. By then it was too late for diplomacy and the only way to end the mess that would have been averted was war to the last man. When the war came to and end in Europe, most cities were smouldering heaps of ashes with so many buried underneath the rumbles in the six year period that man proofed that he is the single most threat to his own survival. This war could have been averted had all major powers stood up against tyranny. But the lessons are huge, some well learnt,some not yet. The world has never known peace from the year 1945. This was the launching pad for major conflicts that continue to shape the globe as we know it. Nearer home, when civil war broke out in Rwanda in the 1990s, the world again watched as man butchered man in a such a grand scale that in 100 days, close to 1 million people were dead. Seems lessons are yet to be learnt.
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