Depending on who you ask, the death toll of World War 2 ranged from 50 million to over 80 million people, with a majority of those being innocent civilians. This is a war filled with questions of morality, conspiracy, controversy, the gruesome deaths of millions of people, the introduction of innovative weapons, and an American victory. Even though this was a “good war” for us, in the sense that we won, but it was generally a really bad war that could have been avoided. For example, after World War One, The Treaty of Versailles blamed WW1 on Germany, and it said that Germany owed an estimated 33 billion dollars in damages. This put them into an economic depression which led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. During the Treaty of Versailles, America, and the U.K., wanted a more lenient punishment, while on the other hand, France wanted a more harsh punishment. This was because unlike the U.S. and the U.K. , France didn’t have a body of water separating the countries, and Germany and France both shared borders making it easy to attack one another. Another reason why France got their way was because Woodrow Wilson was sick, and he was not able to defend the idea that a treaty requiring economic and social destruction could only eventually lead to more problems.
The U.S. didn’t get involved in World War 2 until December 7, 1941 when Japan launched a military strike on Pearl Harbor. There is a lot of conspiracy theories that are involved with this event, because multiple people believed that the U.S. knew what Japan was going to do. They thought this because there was a carrier group on a routine trip during the attack, and some people believed that this was simply coincidental. If the carriers happened to be at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack, then we would not have been able to recover from it because of how important the ships of the carrier group were to our defense. Not to mention, if we knew of Japan’s intentions beforehand, it was smarter not to have every single ship evacuated, because then Japan would know about our knowledge of their plans. Also, F.D.R knew that the U.S. would have to enter the war at some point, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.
As previously mentioned, when Germany’s economy crashed, Hitler rose. He is responsible for exterminating an estimated 6-9 million people. These people included Jews, people with disabilities, and people who were deemed not socially acceptable. Although he was an extremely bad person, he was an outstanding public speaker, and when he saw Germany go into a depression, he saw an opportunity to gain control of the country. He knew what the people wanted and how to broaden his appeal to the great mass of voting Germans. Although he did fulfill his promises of bringing back Germany’s economy, he put all the blame for the country’s problems on the Jewish people, and he made Germans out to be the “superior race” in his book called “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). He wrote this while serving 10 months in prison for his attempt to overthrow the government. There are many conspiracies about him which included the ideas that maybe Hitler was secretly Jewish, and that maybe he would have never risen to power if he got accepted into art school. After a long 12 years as chancellor of Germany (1933-1945) Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, which also marked the end of his dictatorship.
On another note, one of the most controversial parts of the war was the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. This took place a few months before Germany had surrendered (May 7, 1945). The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which caused a death toll of somewhere between 90,000 and 146,000. After this, the U.S. told Japan that we had many more bombs, and we would keep using them until they surrendered. They did not surrender, so we dropped another bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, where an estimated total of 39,000 to 80,000 people died. This raised many questions about morality, and, if this was really necessary, but when you think about it, a nuclear bomb is a weapon, and we were in the middle of a war, and it was not rare for a country to bomb a city. For example, in the U.K. and Germany, there were bombing raids where hundreds of thousands of people died. People just tended to focus on the nuclear attacks, because this was the start of something new. The bombings showed just how powerful nuclear bombs were and also led to the surrender of Japan.
Overall, this war was a bad war even though America ended up winning, but even if you win you still lose. Despite the fact that we did win, this war could have been completely avoided, which would have resulted in millions of lives being saved. There was an evaporation of the line between the civilian and the military. Cities were now targets, just because they were filled with the "enemy". A new concept of a real weapon of mass destruction was introduced. People have tried biowarfare and chemical weapons before, but, nuclear weapons completely changed things. Also, another reason why we won was because of the large geographical scale. This war took place over a large area of the world Europe, the Pacific, Africa, and Asia. Only the Americas and Australia were spared from massive conflict. This war was a very interesting fight, and the only thing that we can do now is learn from it, so we can prevent history from repeating itself.