Total War accounted for more than 60 million dead or over 2.5% of the world's population although some estimate the figure at 85 million plus to include war related famine and disease. Possibly 55 million of this total were civilians with huge casualty rates arising from the Holocaust and civilian bombing.
Strange though it may seem, Hitler's belief that Germany was defeated by international Capitalism and Communism in 1918 would be true of the end of World War II in 1945 as the capitalist US and Allied tanks and troops poured over Germany's Western borders while Communist Russian tanks and troops entered Berlin.
The ripples from World War 1 continued to spread across the world as the Kaiser's Germany had played a key role in the birth of the Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia was active in promoting Communism around the world.
In China, following the forced abdication of the “Last Emperor in 1912 , there was an ongoing struggle for power and between the Kuomintang (KMT)and Sun Yat Sen promoting 'Constitutional Parliamentary Democracy, groups promoting “Constitutional Monarchy” and powerful warlords. The Marxist-Leninist approach of “democratic centralism” was adopted by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921 while in 1923 the nationalist KMT and its government was receiving funding from the USSR on condition it organized in a Leninist party structure and the CPC was ordered to join the KMT.
Personally I have always been a keen advocate for the concept of “This happened in history and as a result this occurred!” Purist historians have argued with me on this matter and as a result my academic achievements in history as a subject have not matched the heights of my “imaginings”.
You have to ask yourself though! If Britain had taken a more belligerent tone pre-1914, would Germany have been so keen on war? If the French Division facing the re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 had militarily responded to a clear breach of the terms of the Versailles Treaty; how would future expansionist actions by Hitler been affected? Then I'm not actually an historian but someone interested in history and what it means to me.
We were in China. , In Europe, what I call the close of The World War Part 2 takes place. In 1945, Germany has again been defeated by the Allies with US, British and other forces racing across Germany's western border as the Russians poured in from the East.
In China, the attempt to unify the Nationalists and the CPC failed and civil war broke out in 1927 and continued intermittently until 1937 when they formed a joint opposition to invasion by Japan. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and there were a series of “incidents” as they were described at the time as neither side issued a formal declaration of war.
During the years of civil war from 1927, it is thought that there were probably about 2 million war related deaths. In the period from 1937 to 1945 Chinese deaths alone are estimated at 20 million. This was a time of numerous atrocities carried out on the civilian population including the Nanjing or Nanking Massacre in 1937, when the Japanese captured the city, and which involved the torture and murder of as many as 300,000 Chinese (mainly civilian) and tens of thousands of Chinese women raped.
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