A final word about the Ukraine War - and then I'll shut up and switch (for a while) to something else in future posts. It 's hard to see how this bitter conflict will end given the present stalemate on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both sides to compromise on their most cherished aims - albeit Moscow, the aggressor, is still demanding Ukrainian territory which it looks increasingly unlikely to conquer (if it could ever have done). If we look at the two world wars of the 20th century - by early June this year the Ukraine War will have lasted as long as the First World War - it's clear that in both cases decisive military defeat ended any hope that the Central Powers and Nazi Germany, respectively, could keep on fighting. Certain groups in post-war German society continued to argue that their country had not surrendered as such in 1918 since their army had withdrawn back to barracks in good order - the 'stab-in-the-back' myth that Hitler would go on to exploit - but all the evidence now shows that German morale and reserves had utterly collapsed by that November, being preceded by mass German surrenders on the Western Front on an unprecedented scale (we're talking hundreds of thousands of men at a time, led by their NCOs, calmly leaving their trenches and giving themselves up to the enemy). The armistice that followed - dictated to the German delegation under threat of further Allied attack - was simply a brutal acknowledgement that Germany had lost the war. As for WW2's end, there's no dispute that in 1945 both Germany and, a few months later, Japan formally surrendered to the Allies when their respective countries were comprehensively destroyed, overrun and occupied. It's hard to see this decisive WW2 outcome happening in the Ukrainian conflict, while WW1's finale - one side decisively forcing the other to stop fighting - defies the present attritional state of the battlefield. Ukraine, at the most (if it could), would be happy to drive the invading Russians off its sovereign territory - certainly, if necessary, by inflicting unacceptable damage to Russian infrastructure and resources - but it has no interest in invading and occupying Russia (except, as it has shown, as a way of using captured Russian territory as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations). For their part, the Russians seem unlikely, on all the evidence of the war so far, to overrun let alone occupy Ukraine as their casualties mount alarmingly (serious estimates run at 1.2 million and counting) and their economy shows signs of severe strain. In such a situation, it would be foolhardy of the Russians (and, I suspect, they know it) to try to spread the conflict to other countries ( e.g. NATO ones) as this would likely encourage a much more proactive coalition behind Ukraine that could tip the balance against Moscow, and so make possible something closer to a WW2 result (not occupation of Russia, of course, but existential for the Putin regime all the same). Of course, WW2's end was decisive in a way that WW1's wasn't for two very good reasons. Firstly, 1945 marked the first and only time in history that atomic weapons have been employed in anger. So, for that reason alone, this first major war in the heart of Europe since WW2 is hard to predict: would Putin, for example, countenance tactical nuclear weapons at any point? He's talked about them and, if he felt cornered, it's not impossible he would resort to them. But, realistically, that's a line which probably nobody wants to breach, for fear of what lies beyond. Mind you, they said that about bombing civilians from the air and poison gas - but, despite pre-war international agreements prohibiting both, both were rapidly adopted by all sides in WW1. And the second reason? In a word, Trump. In 1945 the extraordinary might and resources of the USA led the fight against the Axis powers, critically supported on the eastern front and northern China by the massed divisions of the Red Army. Today, who knows really what Trump's America is up to in this war. But all its actions (and most of its rhetoric) has suggested that it wants to please Moscow rather than arrive at a just and equitable settlement. This makes the Ukraine War unique in recent history - and all the more difficult to resolve. Surrendered German troops march in orderly fashion into Allied captivity, autumn 1918. The lack of armed escorts suggests these men have willingly given themselves up to end a war they no longer want to fight. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. What's memorialised here is what we have become used to calling 'The Holocaust', by which is meant the deliberate extermination of some six million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. But this very particular term (with its emphatic 'The' prefix and capital H) has only really been around since the 1970s and '80s, which was when it first entered public discourse, having been until then largely the preserve of academic studies, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The truth is, of course, there have been many holocausts in history even in the strict sense of genocidal attacks purposefully perpetrated against whole peoples. In the modern era, the most notable previous to WW2's was the Armenian genocide carried out from 1915 onwards by the Turks during the First World War. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the strain of the conflict, the Christian Armenian minority in Anatolia came to be seen as a threat by nationalist Turkish elites, which began a campaign to deport and exterminate them and destroy their culture (the latter action, by the way, is a key component of the legal definition of genocide as established by the 1948 Convention). It's estimated that up to a million Armenians, some say as many as 1.5 million, died during this episode, which has always been denied by Turkey but is largely recognised as genocide by most serious historians and, officially so, by some 34 countries worldwide. In the more recent past, there has been the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which the majority population of Hutus launched a campaign of murderous violence against the Tutsi minority (killing more than 650,000 in just over four months and raping tens of thousands of women). This African holocaust recalls another, in the early years of the 20th century, committed by the German military in south-west Africa (modern-day Namibia) against the Herero people, of whom up to 65,000 were systematically murdered or starved. Today, in an extraordinary completion of the circle, we are confronted with another wholesale massacre of a people in the shape of the Gaza tragedy, perpetrated by the very nation no less that was first populated by many Jewish survivors of The Holocaust after the state's founding in 1948. Despite angry Israeli denials, the killing by shooting and bombing of tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians (a third of them children) and the deliberate destruction of their cities and their way of life has now been condemned by all reputable historians of The Holocaust as an act of genocide. When does genocide amount to the 'lesser' crime of ethnic cleansing? Which was it in Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s? What do we call what's happening to the Muslim Uyghurs in north-west China today? If Putin had overrun Ukraine after his invasion of 2022, can anyone really doubt that the Russians would have made every effort to erase the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture? These are not questions we can resolve here. Suffice it to say, as the world becomes ever more unstable, with might asserting right, the potential for holocausts and genocides will rise. In that context, the enormity of The Holocaust, the sheer scale of its crime, will rightly continue to be held up as a warning from history to the future. Turkish soldiers with bayonets fixed escort Armenian men from the town of Kharpert (or Harput) to their execution. The photo is undated, but mass arrests and deportations of Armenians in the area began from the spring of 1915, with widespread massacres committed thereafter. ( Armenian National Institute ) If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

On January 11, 2026, it was reported that the full-scale war in Ukraine had now lasted 1,418 days - matching the duration of the German-Soviet war on the eastern front that began with Hitler's invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. It's worth adding that in less than 150 days time, therefore, the Ukrainian conflict will have lasted as long as the First World War (1,569 days). None of this will be any comfort to the long-suffering victims of this seemingly intractable struggle: why should they care about such a comparison, they just want the misery and destruction to stop? There is, however, an interesting point to be made in this respect, which is that the dates of wars tend to owe rather more to a neat convenience than real historical accuracy. For if we put big wars in their proper historical context, it seems clear that they have always been very difficult to end once begun (much harder than stopping them starting), and the difficulty grows the longer the fighting goes on. This has certainly been true in the modern era as the technology of warfare has become ever more destructive. In the case of the two world wars of the 20th century, both lasted well over 4 years (WW2 went on for over 6 years) and saw fighting in all parts of the globe. It's not very surprising, then, that both took a long time to stop, for the violence continued to unravel long after the armies had laid down their arms and the major battle fronts had gone silent. That's because long international wars are often complicated by other factors, such as simmering local grievances and bitter civil wars within combatant states, which simultaneously feed off and drive the wider conflict. Thus the German Freikorps (right-wing nationalist paramilitaries) went on fighting against their Communist opponents inside Germany after the country's defeat in 1918, even attempting a coup in 1920 against the government in Berlin (the Kapp putsch ); they then took that fight to Latvia and Estonia to help the ethnic German population there resist the advances of the Soviet Red Army. Equally, in the Middle East the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in WW1 led to a brutal conflict between the Greeks and the Turks in the years 1919-1922 that featured vicious bouts of ethnic cleansing. The violence after WW2 was even more widespread, ranging from Communist and nationalist insurgencies in the Far East (essentially, anti-colonial struggles given new impetus by Japanese occupation during the war), to Ukrainian partisan warfare against the Soviets (which lasted into the 1950s), to extreme attacks on millions of displaced Chinese and European refugees, notably expelled minorities such as the despised German populations ( Volksdeutsche ) of post-war eastern Europe. As I say, none of this gives much comfort to those wanting an end to the Ukrainian war where, because so much blood has now been spent on both sides, attitudes inevitably have hardened. Defeat now could be existential for both regimes involved - certainly, the destruction of Ukraine's national and cultural identity if the Russians win, probably the fall of Putin and dramatic social unrest should Russia lose (having now tanked its economy and lost well over 1.5m soldiers for very little real gain [ read my blog of October 17, 2025 ]). But wars, even long ones (maybe long ones in particular ) can also end suddenly and unexpectedly. Who among the Allies in the spring of 1918, as the Germans mounted yet another massive offensive across the Western Front, could have predicted that by November the German forces would have totally collapsed. Likewise, no one at the end of 1944 would have believed that the war in Europe would end decisively just 4 months later, while in the Far East the Allied top brass gloomily expected the war against Japan to drag on into 1947. The bigger picture here, often hidden from the actors on the ground dealing with their daily challenges, is that national war machines, once they become overburdened and vulnerable, can very quickly collapse. Let's hope such an abrupt peace breaks out in Ukraine this year. Even if the fighting officially stops, though, even if some kind of compromise agreement is patched together, I'm afraid there's no guarantee that the violence will end there too. Greek infantry advance during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 Join The Conversation, Have Your Say If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Eighty-three years ago - to be precise, between November 8 and November 16, 1942 - the first joint Anglo-American amphibious beach landings of the Second World War were launched. This also marked the first major blooding of the Americans in combat against the Axis powers - not in Europe but in the Vichy French-occupied North African territories of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The landings were codenamed Operation Torch and, though a vast flotilla of ships and landing craft (300 warships and almost 400 transports) was required to get over 100,000 men ashore, the ensuing bitterly fought 6-month campaign is much less well known than D-Day and the 1944 battle for Normandy or even the painfully slow conquest of Sicily and Italy that followed Torch in the summer of 1943. Essentially, the campaign was a compromise hammered out against a backdrop of Soviet pressure on the Western allies to start a second front in Europe. The British felt (rightly) that landings in mainland Europe (favoured by the US top brass) were simply not feasible as early as 1942: at its most basic, the Allies just didn't have enough shipping for the job. The decision to go for Torch was made almost unilaterally by Roosevelt, as a sop to Stalin and to concede to Churchill's strategic preoccupation with the Mediterranean and attacking Hitler's 'soft underbelly' from the south. One of the unknowns at the start of the campaign was whether the Vichy French would resist. In July 1940, following the fall of France and fearing the Germans would commandeer the French fleet, the British had sunk and damaged several French battleships in port, killing over 1300 French sailors. As a result, Roosevelt insisted that no British troops take part in the initial Torch landings. But in the event Vichy's forces did put up stiff resistance, much to the amazement of many American soldiers who assumed the French would be friendly. The US troops (who made up three-quarters of the total invasion force) had significant shortcomings: most had been in the army for less than three years, a good number for less than three months. Early on, a string of calamities showed poor American leadership and inept tactics, ensuring heavy casualties. However, the Americans learned quickly from their mistakes (a pattern repeated in other theatres they fought in, notably in the Pacific), and by May 1943, with Morocco and Algeria conquered, the Allied campaign ended in Tunisia, where the British and American armies of Torch met up with Montgomery's 8th Army, fresh from its successful sweep across Libya pursuing Rommel's Afrika Corps. The final surrender at Tunis of 200,000 German and Italian troops can be compared (and was by Goebbels) to the German capitulation at Stalingrad the previous February - though, to be accurate, twice as many German divisions were destroyed at Stalingrad. Arguably, though, Torch and Tunis marked the beginning of the Allied turnaround in the war in the West: Hitler had now lost the strategic initiative and Mussolini's Italian empire lay in ruins, along with the delusions of many Italians (Italy would surrender to the Allies in September 1943). Equally significant, the United States had proved itself and confirmed that going forward it would be the dominant partner in the Anglo-American alliance - not least for its astonishing capacity to produce the resources necessary to win a protracted war. The names of those Anglo-American commanders - Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Montgomery and Alexander - who had been at the helm during the North African campaign launched by Torch would remain in post till the end of the war in Europe to become household names. Last but not least, maybe Torch saved the Western allies from a disastrously premature D-Day in northern Europe, deferring that greater gamble until the odds had improved. American troops make landfall in Algeria in Operation Torch ( http://inspiredpencil.com ) . This looks like a stroll in the park, but some beach landings met fierce resistance: at Oran on 8 November two troop transports were struck by French shore fire, killing half of the men and wounding almost all the rest. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

One of the key narratives of the current Ukraine war is the staggering scale of Russian losses on the battlefield, not just of their troops but their military hardware as well. Losses, moreover, for very little gain, territorially or otherwise. How and why this has occurred is an interesting question but it's not my primary focus here. Rather I want to say a word about these losses in the context of other Russian wars in the modern era. It's been calculated (in a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies) that in contested areas like Kharkiv, Russian forces have advanced on average no more than 50 metres a day. This is a slower rate of advance than on the Somme in 1916, when French and British troops pushed forward (at huge cost) an average of 80 metres a day, and far less than the 1914 Russian offensive in Galicia (over 1500 metres a day) or the Soviet attempt (which ultimately failed) to relieve Leningrad in January 1943 (1000 metres a day). Where the Russians have made gains in Ukraine, mostly in the previously part-occupied eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, for a long time now their advances have typically covered a few kilometres at best, some of which have been reversed by Ukrainian counter-attacks - reinforcing the impression of a stalemate along the front lines reminiscent of the Western Front in WW1. As for troop losses, a majority of specialist third-party sources now agree that, after over three and a half years of war, Moscow's casualties in Ukraine (killed, wounded and missing) number well over one million. Moreover, the number killed is reckoned to be roughly five times greater than the total combat deaths in all Russian and Soviet wars combined since the end of WW2. Or to put it another way, Russian battlefield deaths in Ukraine are 15 times larger than in the Soviet Union's decade-long war in Afghanistan and ten times greater than during Russia's 13-year conflict in Chechnya. This raises, not for the first time, the whole debate over the Russian way of warfare, for in both world wars even Moscow's victories came at an appalling cost for its soldiers as seemingly inexhaustible waves of infantry were hurled at the enemy in attritional 'meat-grinder' offensives. Thus in 1916 the successful three and a half month Brusilov offensive cost the Russians 1.4 million casualties as against 750,000 of their Austro-Hungarian opponents. Likewise, the 120,000 Russian losses suffered (to date) in Moscow's campaign to take the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk bears comparison with the 126,000 Red Army losses in its East Prussian offensive of January to April 1945 (or indeed the astonishing 80,000 Soviet casualties in just over two weeks at the battle of Berlin in April 1945). Of course, in the two world wars the major armies were far bigger and more extended than those in Ukraine today, with formidable fire power at their disposal - just one qualification of many when it comes to comparing battlefield losses, always a notoriously tricky exercise. It's also important to say that the Red Army of WW2 did over time learn to use its manpower less wastefully and became expert in combined arms manoeuvres, in particular using deception and massed artillery to great effect to overwhelm the Germans. Nevertheless the proportions are what's significant here. The fact is that Soviet military losses in the whole of WW2 (8 million is often quoted, some experts say over 10 million) far outnumbered their enemy's, on average by three to one, leaving the winner of the Great Patriotic War so destroyed in every way by 1945 that it looked more like a country which had been utterly defeated. Post-war Soviet propaganda kept these losses a secret, playing up the heroic aspects of the epic struggle and trumpeting Stalin's leading role. But nothing could hide the huge gaps in Soviet society left by the millions who never returned from the Second World War. Putin too - if he's around whenever the war ends - will have to confront the massive scale of Russian losses in Ukraine. That reckoning will be all the grimmer if, as seems increasingly likely, he will be unable to spin a victory narrative out of Russia's dismal performance in its 'special military operation'. Russian infantry during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Note that none of them are wearing helmets. These were not standard issue even in the Red Army until the Second World War.     If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

As the United Nations assembles in New York this week, eight decades after its founding in 1945, all the signs are that the organisation is running out of steam, beset as it is by interlocking crises of funding and ineffectiveness, and paralysed by great power rivalries that are currently enabling ruinous wars in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in sub-Saharan Africa. The key factor in this UN malaise is the withdrawal of the United States, which has decimated USAID, a cornerstone of the international humanitarian system. and pulled hundreds of millions of dollars out of the UN's peacekeeping missions and refugee programmes. In a matter of months, Trump has taken America out of UNESCO (the UN's cultural agency), the UN's Human Rights Council, and the World Health Organisation, while abandoning the UN-brokered Paris climate accords of 2015. Some US Republicans are even calling for their country to stop participating in the UN altogether. What a far cry this is from those heady days in 1945 when Roosevelt's America - victorious after the worst war in history and claiming (somewhat belatedly) to have defeated the Axis tyranny in the name of democratic freedoms - pushed for a global organisation which, through collective agreement, would stop all future conflicts from starting. In October of that year, 50 countries signed up to the UN, including the Soviet Union which, before the Cold War got serious, seemed happy to partner the United States in policing the world - not, as Roosevelt hoped, to defend the sovereign rights of countries against external aggression but to protect the USSR's own chosen spheres of interest. In hindsight, we can see in that mismatch of high-flown principles and realpolitik that the UN was probably flawed from the start. The fact was that, even as the world body was being created, the Red Army, in occupation across eastern Europe, was consolidating a repressive Soviet power well beyond the USSR's own borders. Stalin, moreover, insisted that the 5 permanent members of the Security Council have an individual power of veto - a mechanism that over the decades has probably done more to undermine the UN's effectiveness than any other factor. Not that the Americans were unmindful that the veto could also protect their interests when it suited them - which meant that a battle over the issue was not worth the candle. It's worth noting that, for all its high-flown rhetoric, the UN Charter of 1945 had little specific to say about human rights, a shortcoming that was corrected in 1948 when a Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up. But even this document contained no reference to racial discrimination, which became a sore point for US delegates when African-American campaigners called on the UN to do more about racial injustice in the United States. No less than Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's widow and doyen of multiple progressive causes, weighed in to help American negotiators make sure that the subject of racial discrimination was kept out of the 1948 Declaration - so as not to offend powerful southern politicians in Congress (many of them Roosevelt Democrats). It's surprising to learn too that, despite its leading role in the Nuremberg trials, the US failed to sign up to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, only doing so in 1985 when President Reagan, after press criticism of his state visit to West Germany for failing to give sufficient recognition to victims of the Holocaust, hastily pushed it through Congress. All that said, and for all the UN's imperfections from the outset, the great difference in 1945 was that the prevailing political will, led by US dollars and drive, was greatly in favour of such a global forum, so that emergent post-war nations were only too eager to join, not least as a way of legitimising their status in the new world order. In contrast, Trump's America has turned its back on multilateralism: it's not interested in finding global solutions to global problems - indeed, arguably it doesn't want the UN to work at all. The first ever session of the UN Security Council was held on 17 January, 1946, not on American soil but in London - at of all places Church House, Westminster, headquarters of the Church of England. This was because the committee creating the UN was based in wartime London and, symbolically, Church House seemed appropriate for an organisation dedicated to world peace.

August 1944, 81 years ago, saw a terrible tragedy played out on the banks of the Vistula during what we know today as the Warsaw Uprising. In all, the attempt by some 40,000 underground resistance fighters - members of the Polish Home Army or AK - to seize the city from the occupying Germans lasted 63 days, ending in a bitter and brutal failure that led to death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Upwards of 200,000 civilians were killed or injured (many of them mutilated in systematic German atrocities), while another 700,000 or so became slave labour, ended up in concentration camps, or were left to fend for themselves as refugees: on Hitler's orders, the city was literally razed to the ground, street by street, building by building. At the time, and for many years afterwards (indeed, it still pops up today), the story was that the Soviets could have saved the uprising but Stalin chose not to, halting his divisions on the Vistula to allow time for the AK to be destroyed before the Red Army moved in to take the Polish capital for itself. The story is a plausible one on several levels. Firstly, Stalin had no wish to see the insurgents triumph. Soviet plans for post-war Poland, already well-advanced, envisaged a puppet government subservient to Moscow at the expense of the Polish government-in-exile in London, which commanded the loyalty of the AK. The Soviet leader even refused to help with an Allied airlift of food and weapons to AK-held areas of Warsaw, much to Churchill's disgust - only doing so belatedly when all was lost. It's also clear that the AK fighters themselves expected the Red Army to help them, timing the insurrection to coincide with the arrival at the Vistula of Marshal Rokossovsky's 1st Belorussian Front (the Marshall was himself a Pole whose sister was then still living in Warsaw). When no Soviet support came, the sense of betrayal among the Poles was understandably acute. But this is where the received narrative starts to unravel. For the AK had not told the Soviets when the uprising would start (Rokossovsky only learned about it the day after it began - and was horrified) and there were no plans to co-ordinate with the Red Army, no doubt because the Poles wanted an exclusively Polish takeover of their capital before the Soviet communists arrived (Poles had already experienced Stalinist repression, after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939). Angry at this independent action by the Poles, Stalin condemned the uprising as 'adventurism' and would have nothing to do with it. But there were overriding military reasons why the Red Army halted at the Vistula. The fact was that, by August 1944, Rokossovsky's armies had been on the move without a pause for at least six weeks: his men were exhausted and their supply lines now lagged hundreds of kilometres behind them. The mighty Vistula in itself posed a huge logistical challenge, with the Germans in well-prepared defensive positions on the opposite bank. Indeed, strong panzer counter-attacks had soon inflicted severe damage on two major Soviet tank corps. Under these circumstances, and facing other pressures elsewhere along a very extended front, Rokossovsky had little option but to pause his advance so as not to jeopardise the greater goal of pushing Hitler's forces back into the Reich itself. The Polish uprising presented an added challenge in this already difficult situation, but it played no part in Rokossovky's decision-making. In the event, soon after the AK's surrender on 2 October, German defensive fire was still so fierce that the Soviet commander cancelled the offensive on Warsaw altogether and pulled back his armies. It wasn't until well into January 1945 that Red Army troops finally captured the Polish capital. B y then a pre-war city population of 1.3 million had fallen to a mere 153,000. And in a grotesque twist worthy of Kafka (but quite logical in Stalin's mind), in the aftermath many surviving AK fighters, heroes of the anti-Nazi struggle, found themselves arrested by the NKVD as 'enemies of the people' and imprisoned (some were even executed) alongside their former German occupiers. AK fighters man a barricade during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 ( rarehistoricalphotos.com ) If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understandimg History Podcast

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Victory Over Japan (VJ) Day on 15 August, the exact manner of, and motivation for, Japan's surrender in 1945 still remains a matter of some debate. The long-held dominant narrative has been that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally pushed Tokyo over the line, forcing Emperor Hirohito (the only person in Japan whose decision ultimately counted) to insist that his reluctant military bow to necessity. This has certainly been the explanation favoured by the Americans, who were anxious to end the war quickly without having to invade, at likely huge cost, the Japanese home islands. It's also a plausible explanation. After all, the two atomic bombs together killed at least 150,000 Japanese civilians more or less outright - though we now know that the Nagasaki bomb could have killed many more had the American bomb aimer on the day, whether deliberately or not (there's some suggestion it was the former), not dropped 'Fat Man' on an outlying suburb rather than the city centre. In recent years, however, some historians have speculated whether another factor was equally or more decisive in the Japanese capitulation, namely the Soviet advance into Japanese-held Manchuria, which began in the early hours of August 9, shortly before Fat Man detonated over Nagasaki. It's often forgotten that even at this late date Japan still had a very large army in China which was essentially undefeated. Its elite units formed the Kwantung Army, the force that had occupied Manchuria since 1932. This army had been soundly defeated in battle by the Soviets in 1939 (during border hostilities) and it suffered a much worse humiliation in the days following August 9, 1945 - as Stalin made good on his promise to help the Allies defeat Japan once Hitler's regime had been destroyed. By the time the Soviet campaign ended on August 20, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and northern Korea, as well as Japan's Kuril and Sakhalin islands, had fallen to the Red Army. These rapid military defeats dramatically reduced any possibility that Japan might fight on, while the prospect of a Communist partition of the home islands (Stalin had his eye on Hokkaido too) horrified Tokyo's right-wing leaders. Thus the imperial decision to surrender to the United States on August 15 simply acknowledged that Japan was out of options - in particular, as Tokyo saw it, the negotiated surrender it sought was was no longer on the table - and should accept, as quickly as possible, the least of all evils: unconditional American occupation. 'Surrender' of course did not figure in the vocabulary of the Japanese military, and in the formal radio broadcast to his people Hirohito spoke only of the 'termination of the war' - suggesting he was ending the conflict for the nation's own good, not because they had been defeated. More eloquent, however, at the final meeting of his war cabinet the day before, were the emperor's tears and the loud sobbing from those seated around the table. In the hours and days that followed Hirohito's broadcast, several units of soldiers mutinied in protest and nine leading Japanese generals and admirals (including the Minister of War) committed ritual suicide. Indeed, the unrest in the country meant the formal signing of Japan's surrender (on board USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay) was postponed until September 2 to allow time for sufficient American forces to be deployed on Japanese soil to meet any resistance that might be expected. In the event, the crisis passed relatively peacefully. As with VE Day, the real complexities that lay behind VJ Day in 1945 are only now becoming part of a new narrative. The Japanese delegation arrive aboard USS Missouri to sign the surrender document (US National Archives, C-2719)

As we bask in (or seek the shade from) Europe's recurrent heatwaves this summer, I am reminded of an earlier summer - to be more precise, July 1914, now known by historians as the 'July crisis' because it was during this month that fateful decisions were made in the chancelleries of Europe that led to the outbreak of the First World War. Apparently that July was marked by picnic-perfect weather across Europe, adding to the massive irony that would emerge only in hindsight of a slaughterous conflict that was certainly not the picnic that some thought it might be when it started. Indeed, 'the summer of 1914' has become a metaphor for the naivety of a generation which was about to 'sleepwalk' into catastrophe. In the 111 years since, historians have agonised over how and why this disastrous war came about. The post-war Versailles settlement of 1919, which imposed a new world order amid the ruins of the old, expressly blamed Germany for starting it all, and accordingly exacted from it massive penalties - leaving Germans outraged and providing the rising Nazi Party with ample ammunition for its rhetoric of 'victimisation'. That 'war guilt' clause has been at the heart of debate about the origins of WW1, with to this day scholars (many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, German) lining up either to condemn it as a false reading of history or (often using the very same evidence) blaming Germany for an excess of belligerence and militarism in 1914 and before. Interestingly, in the immediate aftermath of Versailles, the German foreign ministry took pains to publish archived documents which gave the impression that German diplomacy up to 1914 had been eminently, well, diplomatic - that is, moderate and reasonable. This had some effect for in the 1930s historians, no doubt not wishing to exacerbate a subject so painful to the Germans, apportioned blame more evenly among the capitals of Europe. But then in 1961 the German historian Fritz Fischer lobbed a bomb into this space by asserting, essentially, that Germany had been the prime mover for taking the continent to war in 1914. Fischer had accessed new archives as well as re-interpreting old ones. His explosive thesis reinvigorated the whole blame game all over again, with at least one German historian denouncing Fischer as a 'traitor'. The issue today - with the demise of many older-generation German scholars in particular - is much less heated, not least because WW2 has occurred since and few disagree that that conflict was caused by the German Nazi regime. The consensus now on 1914 would seem to be closer to what it was in the 1930s, with a more even-handed approach that lays some blame on all the major protagonists - even if some narratives agree that Germany and Austria-Hungary bear a heavier responsibility than others. Broadly, historians now focus on the how rather than the why in seeking to explain what happened in that hot July of 1914 that led to a world war. Are we in a similar scenario in the summer of 2025, with Russian aggressors in Ukraine, dangerous tensions in the Middle East, and Chinese sabre-rattling in the Pacific suggesting we're on the brink of WW3? Who can say? History never repeats itself, though it can perhaps rhyme or echo the past. But if the next world war does break out this August, the 'summer of 2025' may well become the new ironic buzz-phrase - though marking this time not our naivety (we're only too aware of the dangers today) but rather our reckless stupidity. Crowds outside the Royal Palace in Berlin cheer the news that Austria-Hungary is at war with Serbia. Within days, Russia mobilised in support of Serbia - prompting Germany, as it had promised, to side with Vienna. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Today bombing has a very different form from even the quite recent past. In the Russia-Ukraine war, and now in the very recent conflict between Israel and Iran, we are seeing fleets of pilotless drones and precision-guided missiles, typically launched a long way from their targets. This kind of bombing, while often hugely destructive (and no less traumatic, of course, for those actually affected), does not generally incur high civilian casualties, certainly not on the scale that large urban populations in Europe and Asia suffered during WW2. In that more global conflict, strategic bombing (to give it its precise military meaning) was almost entirely carried out by crewed aircraft, typically heavy bombers in massed formations, which flew to their targets (the British Lancaster had a range of well over 1000 miles, the American B-17 Flying Fortress 2000 miles) and dropped colossal explosive tonnages over a wide area, missions aptly named as carpet-bombing - not least because for most of WW2 precision had a very low threshold, with British and American payloads typically missing their targets by as much as five miles (a failing that the air force authorities kept a closely guarded secret at the time and for long after). Targeting had improved greatly by the end of the war, but the widespread use of incendiary bombs on cities caused intense fire-storms that resulted in massive loss of civilian life, with many victims incinerated beyond recognition. By modern standards, the statistics are on a breathtaking scale, with some cities enduring extraordinary civilian losses from single raids. To mention only the worst, Hamburg lost some 37,000 killed over a few days in July-August 1943, Dresden 25,000 over two days in February 1945, and Tokyo up to 100,000 on 9/10 March 1945 - the latter a tally worse even than the respective losses from the subsequent atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would be naive to think that either the RAF or the USAF were unaware of their impact on civilians. As time went on, the tendency of the air war, even despite conspicuous failures, was invariably to escalate , so that initial attempts to stick to military targets quickly became much more indiscriminate 'area-bombing', where the implicit aim was not just to hit industrial centres but to kill as many people in the vicinity as possible, thus disrupting the enemy's economic might and undermining civilian morale. WW2 air forces continued to believe that bombing raids did damage the enemy's economy and morale, but all the evidence suggests that they did not, whether it was the Blitz in Britain or raids over Germany and Japan (only perhaps in Italy did the bombing of its cities hasten its early surrender in September 1943 - and, arguably, in 1944 Allied bombing, by then much more precise and enjoying air supremacy, began to have a significant impact on the Nazi war machine). Ironically, bomber crews, on all sides, came off particularly badly during the war in Europe, certainly in proportional to other services, for enemy flak and anti-aircraft fire took a heavy toll on both men and planes: RAF Bomber Command lost a staggering 41% of its personnel killed in action (almost 10,000 were Canadians), while the US Eighth Air Force suffered 26,000 killed. Overall, only one in three airmen survived the air war in Europe. In the pilotless, precision-guided drone-missile conflicts of 2025, we are unlikely to see such unparalleled casualties among either civilians or air crew. A small positive perhaps in an unrelentingly gloomy world outlook. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

Given the prominence today of China as a global power, it's a surprise to learn that the country was not admitted to the UN and the Security Council until as late as 1971 - 22 years after the birth in October 1949 of the People's Republic of China (PRC) led by Mao Zedong's Communist Party, victor in a brutal and protracted civil war. Until 1971, the China seat at the UN was held by Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists (the Kuomintang or KMT) in the name of the Republic of China (ROC), which had borne the brunt of the fighting against the invading Japanese between 1937 and 1945. If American support for Chiang was, in practice, often limited and relations between the two sides frequently fractious, nonetheless Nationalist China was officially the wartime ally of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union. And so when the war ended, though Mao's communists now had a million men under arms and shared a fragile coalition with the KMT, it was Chiang who took the formal Japanese surrender in September 1945. Four years later, however, the Nationalists had been forcibly ejected from the mainland and taken refuge on the island of Formosa (later Taiwan), where Chiang's ROC would now be based for years to come. For the Americans, the 'loss' of China to the Communists in 1949 came as a huge shock - prompting a bitter internal debate over who was to blame - but with the Cold War hardening (in August that year the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb), US loyalties lay resolutely with the Nationalists on Taiwan. Indeed, the ROC was a founding member of the UN and, in recognition of its longstanding battle against Axis aggression, the first country to sign the charter. In protest at the PRC's exclusion from the UN, the Soviet Union boycotted its proceedings for most of 1950 - during which time the Korean War broke out, involving some 300,000 Communist Chinese troops fighting the US-led coalition. Thus for decades there were two Chinas - the de facto Communist regime of the mainland and the 'official' government in Taiwan. In fact, until the 1990s (long after Chiang's death in 1975) it remained ROC policy to retake the mainland - an agenda forgotten today amid Xi Jinping's sabre-rattling threats to seize Taiwan. Those who regard the current confrontation between America and China as the way it's always been - well, it hasn't. Remember Nixon's astonishing rapprochement with Deng Xiaoping's China in 1972? On that occasion, China was at loggerheads with the Soviet Union, as it so often was during the Cold War years. That was then. Now Putin and Xi are apparently best buddies. Geopolitical circumstances can make a big difference. And geopolitics can change. Lt-General Joseph Stilwell, US chief of staff to General Chiang Kai Shek, presents his boss with the Legion of Merit in 1943. The two men did not get on. If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast

On May 9, in Moscow's Red Square, military parades marked VE Day for the Russians. But how come when the Germans actually surrendered on May 8, 1945 - the date the US and western Europe recognises as the big day? But then there's also May 4, when German forces surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery in a carpeted tent on Luneburg Heath near Hamburg. It's complicated, as were most things when WW2 drew to its very messy close. A key figure in this story is Grand Admiral Karl Donitz , whom Hitler had designated his successor - after dismissing Himmler, the deputy Fuhrer, for attempting to negotiate separately with the West. After Hitler's suicide on April 30, Donitz set up a rump German government in Flensburg, near the Danish border. The admiral later told his American captors that, after taking power, he immediately set about arranging the surrender of German forces, but in fact he prolonged the war as long as he could. Knowing that the Allies planned to partition Germany between them, Donitz's chief concern was to avoid abandoning tens of thousands of German soldiers and their equipment in the designated Soviet zone. To buy time for these troops to move to the Allied lines in the west, he planned to negotiate separate and protracted surrenders with the British and Americans. The Luneburg ceremony of May 4 only covered German forces in the north-west (including occupied Holland and Denmark) and was signed on the German side by an admiral and a staff colonel. Allied commanders then insisted that a separate unconditional capitulation of all German forces on all fronts must be signed by the top commanders of the German high command. Donitz wanted to make a separate deal for German forces on the Western front only, but when Eisenhower threatened to resume bombing and close the borders to those Germans fleeing from the east, the admiral authorised Colonel General Alfred Jodl , German Chief of Staff, to sign the broader surrender. This duly took place at 2.41 on the morning of May 7 at a schoolhouse in the French city of Reims, which was then serving as the Supreme HQ of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF): all German soldiers everywhere were to lay down their arms by 23.01 the next day, May 8. But then came a glitch. The Soviets, who had been represented at Reims by a relatively junior general, started quibbling about technicalities in the agreement. It soon became clear that Stalin wanted a much grander, more symbolic ceremony of surrender, in Berlin itself and in the presence of his victorious generals, chief among them Field Marshal Zhukov . It had also occurred to the British that the top German military leadership, by not signing the surrender in person, might try to shift the blame for the war's defeat - as they'd done at the end of WW1. In the event, in the late afternoon of May 8, all the signatories to the third formal capitulation of German forces (among them this time the Wehrmacht's C-in-C, Field Marshal Keitel , and the top-ranking navy and air force commanders) arrived at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, from where the Soviets ferried them across the ruined city to the virtually unscathed district of Karlshorst. Here, after some hours delay because a Russian translation of the surrender agreement had to be prepared (and an improvised flag found to represent the French), the officers' mess hall of a former German army engineering college became the site of the final signing. The document was unchanged from Reims and, though not finally signed till well after midnight (that is, on May 9), still stipulated that the full German surrender took place at one minute past eleven on the night of May 8. This precise timing couldn't be changed because after Reims it had already been communicated to the armies on the ground. So the delegates at Karlhorst simply fudged the time and date. However, in 1944 Moscow was two time zones ahead of Berlin. In the Soviet capital it was already May 9 when the 11.01 pm deadline of May 8 kicked in. Thus a very human narrative of pride, defiance, subterfuge, resolution, and simply making do amid chaotic circumstances, finally got a deal to end the war over the line. Arguably, a separate Victory Day in Russia has merely underlined Moscow's conviction that the Russian contribution to the defeat of Hitler was a special one. Few would deny that - at least 27m Soviet soldiers and citizens died in WW2 - but that narrative has been perverted by Putin to promote his claim that fascism is again on the rise in Europe and only Russia is challenging it. History, as ever, lies in the eye of the beholder. Field Marshal Keitel and the German delegation sign the unconditional surrender If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again. www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk An Understanding History Podcast