The Allies didn't have to win WWII.
It just turned out that way.
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“History repeats itself. So you might wanna pay attention.”
Quavo
You might of heard this saying in one form or the other but the gist is the same.
History is cyclic so you better learn from it or be doomed to repeat its mistakes.
A big power bullying a little one (Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Germany & Soviet Union's 1939 invasion of Poland).
A complex religious and political dispute (Israel and Palestine in 2023 & 1947 Partition of India).
Two rival global powers, (China & the U.S. and the U.S. & the U.S.S.R.) asserting themselves on the global stage.
And it remains cyclic as humans are swayed by the same feelings of happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust since our first steps as a species. The forms may change, but the essence remains the same.
The flipside is that history is also a reservoir of lessons to pull from.
And there’s no greater lesson in recent history than World War II; a war that encompassed 7 continents, 30 countries and left more than 70 million dead.
I remember hearing about WWII as a kid; the story went something like this:
Many years ago, a bad guy called Hitler came to power in Germany. He began invading countries and throwing a lot of people, specifically the Jewish people, into camps where many died. Britain & France, the Allies aka the Good Guys, fought back. Japan joined Germany and so did the Soviet Union, forming the Axis Powers aka the Bad Guys. France fell and Britain was on its heels. Then Pearl Harbor happened and the United States joined the war on the side of the Allies. The Germans then betrayed the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union flipped sides, joined the Allies and together the Allies invaded Europe on D-Day. Fighting the Japanese on Pacific islands was really tough so the United States dropped a few atomic bombs and the bad Japanese emperor surrendered. Eventually Berlin fell, Hitler died and we, the good guys, won.
Yay!
Hearing about this felt good as a kid. War was a real-life Disney movie complete with heroes & villains, and a happy-ever-after ending. It was a feel-good story where you could go to bed with a warm sensation in your tummy.
And as I got older, I began to see the nuance in the narrative; the story fractured.
I discovered that the word “bad guy” did no justice to the cold logic and extent to which the Holocaust was carried out; a systemized effort to eradicate an entire population of peoples, primarily the Jewish people.
Within German-controlled territory, the Jewish people were first identified and then marked with the Star of David. Slowly, their civil rights were curtailed with the shuttering of buisnesses, restricted movements with curfews then the forced internment into the ghettos.
Rabbis were lied to in order to convince their congregations to willingly board trains that were destined to more than 1000 concentration camps, places specialized in the slow, torturous slaughter of humans.
Upon arrival, those deemed "useful" were separated from the "useless".
Victor Frankl recounts his initial arrival to the camps:
"He [the SS Officer] had assumed an attitude of careless ease, supporting his right elbow with his left hand. His right hand was lifted and with the forefinger of that hand he pointed very leisurely to the right or to the left...The significance of the finger game was explained to us in the evening. It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90 percent it meant death.Those who were sent to the left were marched from the station straight to the crematorium. This building...had the word "bath" written over its doors in multiple European languages. On entering each prisoner was handed a piece of soap.. mercifully I do not need to describe the events which followed. Many accounts have been written of this horror..."
Man’s Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl
And what remained for those who survived the initial culling?
Hunger gnawing at your stomach until you could see your ribs.
Experimental surgeries done without anesthesia to satiate the whimsical curiosities of German scientists.
Breaking big rocks into little rocks.
When the Allies freed Europe, they discovered the remnants of past lives. Barrels of wedding rings. Crates of gold teeth fillers. Images of families forever separated.
The Holocaust would ultimately claim 6 million Jewish lives, reducing the global Jewish population by 35 percent.
And, I realized that the Axis Powers did not have a monopoly on World War II atrocities.
The United States massacred hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with its atomic bombs, and interned more than 100,000 US citizens of Japanese ancestry based on false notions of racial allegiance.
The British, frustrated with the German war machine, carried out a massive firebombing campaign of Hamburg and Dresden with ordinace specifically designed to start and spread fires, killing tens of thousands of German men, women and children.
Upon the counter surge into German held territory, the Soviet Union’s Red Army raped 2 million German women out of fury for the hundreds of thousands Soviet lives lost at Stalingrad with close to 200,000 children estimated to have been born of mixed German/Russian ancestry.
From 1943-44, due to a combination of British policy failures, war disruptions, and natural disasters, an estimated 2.1 million people starved to death in Bengal (present day India & Bangladesh).
I wrestle with what it means to be an American given the innocent lives lost and the lengths to which the Allies went to in winning the war.
And, at a time where Nazi Germany was systematically eradicating people by the millions and Imperialist Japan was taking tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of women as comfort women & hell-bent on establishing a global ethno-state; these governments whose express purpose was to establish a racial hierarchy & exterminate others, it’s quite hard to argue that’s also a world we want to live in.
Ultimately, the Allies fought to uphold a more humane world.
There is a unique difference between a government who holds up the principles of decency, liberty and hard work & betrays these principles at times, versus one who expressely violates sovereign territory, & partakes in the subjugation and torture of others.1
Major atrocities were committed by the Axis and Allies powers and the world is a better place that the Allies won.
Both can be and are true.
But the entire time, while I was learning of WWII, I felt a certain distance from these experiences. Important to know but… what does it have to do with me?
Each time WWII-related media came on, it became easy to distance myself & Disneyify the experience; this is the side of good vs the side of evil. Additionally, time had weakened the collective memory of people; those alive today from WWII were mostly infants back then. Most new media today works with a finite body of stories and interviews from decades prior. And though India was mobilized as a colony of Britain, no one in my family, to my knowledge, entered into the war.
Reading about this kind of history, felt removed. Foreign even.
That shifted in late December 2023.
I watched the recently released Netflix WWII documentary over the holidays with my family. The creators used interviews with WWII veterans of both sides and new technology to recolorize WWII film.
But what stood out to me was how humanizing the docuseries was, both in its coverage and multi-dimensional approach.
It’d be one thing for the WWII show creators to say, “Here a Nazi. Here’s someone who massacred a whole town and was a solidier of a racist order."
Many documentaries have done so and rightly so.
However, it’s easy to condemn, easy to distance yourself. We can look at that and say, “That’s not me. I’m not like that. They are the bad guys and we are the good guys.”
It’s much harder to show, “Here’s a Nazi. Here's someone who massacred a whole town and was a solidier of a racist order. And here’s his home life, his hometown, his family, his children, his upbringing, his homelife, his way of life, his way of thinking of the world.”
Suddenly that evil man becomes multidimensional. He’s not just a Nazi; but a father, son, a living member of society.
Someone who enjoys playing on the beach as much as I do.
This is not to say than humanizing Nazis absolves them of responsibility for their actions or takes away from the plight of the people they hurt. No, rather the opposite. When you do so, what you are truly showing is the contrast of the experience of the communities persecuted.
When someone, anyone, becomes more humanized in our eyes, we inherently relate to them more and more.
And then a couple things hit you at once.
A) How can someone so human do something so atrocious?
When you see that someone is so human, so relatable, you cannot help but see yourself in them. That is after all the premise of being relatable (I see some of myself in you).
But seeing a Nazi as a full human being creates a sort of inner friction. After all, they are a Nazi; a member of one of the worst, most despicable orders of human history.
"I could never do such things!” you reassure yourself.
But you see, it never actually occurs to anyone when they are in the middle of something, that what they are doing is fundamentally wrong.
Everyone wants to be justified in their actions, to believe that they are on the side of peace, justice, whatever it is.
As one Nazi solidier puts it in the documentary when he was part of the first air invasion crew into Poland to kickstart WWII, he says, “We thought we were the good guys.”
Anyone is capable of commiting atrocities because the ability to demonize, dehumanize and create in&out groups is a universal human quality. Suddenly the world looks a lot different. Even people who are pledging they are on the side of justice & peace can be doing atrocious things, intentionally or otherwise.
As a friend put it, “Everyone has a inner Nazi.”
B) It makes the horror of the Holocaust stand out even more vividly.
Because if the Nazis and those who supported them were real people, then they were part of the community.
And for those persecuted,how must it have felt to have your own neighbors turn against you? Your friends? Your colleagues at work? Your own manager? The cops on the street? The doctor at the local hosptial?
There’s no one showing up to help you when someone robs you.
No doctor to heal your wounds.
No sympathy from the passerby.
You’re all alone. Left at the mercy of other people’s fury.
C) People were incredibly brave.
I cannot begin to imagine the kind of steel it takes to storm a beach facing immediate gunfire, knowing a good portion of you and your friends will die.
Or to survive the inhumane treatment of the camps and retain a sense of hope.
Or to wait till the crack of dawn, knowing that you and your buddies are outgunned, that the approaching enemy is too powerful to stop given your armaments & numbers and to stay & fight.
You fight because although you know you will fall today and the tide of enemies will sweep past your position, you chip away at a larger machine that threatens your homeland and the people you love.
That’s real courage right there.
D) The Allies victory was never guaranteed.
The Allies were never destined to win, they just did.
But what if they didn’t?
What if the Japanese never did bomb Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war and what if Nazi Germany never launched Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union never would’ve invaded Germany and Hitler’s immense war machine would’ve turned wholly on towards Britain.
And, given the United States reluctance to enter the war and the immense military might of the combined Axis powers, Britain would likely have fallen.
And among the terms of surrender, just as Germany gave up its colonies after losing WWI, Britain would also have to give up it’s colonies.
And who was a colony of Britain’s at the time?
India!
And how would I, a dark-brown eyed, dark skinned, black curly-haired Indian man faired under a pure Aryan hierarchy that held blue-eyed, light skinned, blonde haired peoples as the highest forms of humans?
My grandparents in Kerala, India never would have bought a plot of land and built their home. My father wouldn’t have grown up racing thru coconut farms, climbing mango trees to steal their juicy treats and swiping extra food from the pantry after hours of playing in the dusk rays.
My parents never would have gotten a college education, much less left India to settle in the United States and begun a life anew here.
My dad never would have complained of the 5 days/week, 2 hour one-way commute to South Bay across the San Mateo bridge and my mom never would have taken me to see the public demonstrations at UC Berkeley’s labs during their annual Cal Days. I never would have stressed over getting in colleges, fretted over the cute girls in my high school and sweated as I ran up and down the hills of the East Bay area.
I would be stuck in some desolate hole, starved, breaking up big rocks into little rocks. Forced into sub-human experiments at the whims of curious scientists and to live or die at the pleasure or displeasure of others.
What of reading, writing and the beauty of human curiosity?
Of feeling the sun on my face and stopping for a treat simply because I found it delectable from a passing glance into a storefront window?
To be able to love someone & be loved by someone because of what is in our heads over some twisted notion of the hierarchy of our race?
These rights were stolen from millions.
Suddenly, WWII becomes the upstream struggle against a fundamental ideology, that left unconstrained, would have consumed the world and my family as well. The only reason why I didn’t experience that reality is that brave people fought back, human ingenuity and good fortune led to a good outcome.
So to those who died, to those who sacrificed, thank you. In an ideal world, your sacrifice wouldn't have been necessary but the circumstances demanded it anyway.
And you paid the price.
You died, on and off the battlefield, so I could be free to write these words today; my silly life of tweets, Salt&Straw and laughter was never guaranteed.
I don’t know what form the challenges of the past will take in this next revolution of history.
But I do know that the courage to question ourselves, the ability to be curious and to be brave remains important.
These too repeat themselves.
Until next time,
- Kiran
A notable exception here is the U.S.S.R.
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