The Second World War Antony Beevor Pdf Download
Agathe Thies
Seventy five years ago, the European continent and large areas of Asia and Africa were on fire in the second world war, with inhuman suffering of the worst kind caused by an irreconcilable struggle for global power. Antony Beevor provides a valuable reminder to what depths imperialism and capitalism can sink, even in Europe.
After the brutal partition of Poland, which signaled the start of the second world war, the German Wehrmacht turned west. Beevor shows how its later famous blitzkrieg (lightning war) against Belgium, the Netherlands and France did not follow any plan, but was improvised. The subsequent occupation of Denmark and Norway was motivated by the need to ensure the availability of iron ore in northern Sweden and the need for more ports for the Atlantic war.
The large number of civilian deaths in the second world war was a result of capitalist leaders relying on artillery and aerial bombardment in order to reduce their own casualties. British Marshal Arthur Harris developed a method where firebombs preceded explosive bombs. He boasted that 63 German cities were destroyed. This is even more the case in recent US wars, with extensive aerial bombings of Vietnam and Cambodia, later in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa.
The contradictions that led to the second world war still exist within capitalism today. There is an intense competitive struggle between nation states for economic gain and strategic power. Even within the EU this struggle between the interests of the national capitalist classes is on-going, in particular with the dominant power, Germany, striving to impose its policies on the weaker, peripheral countries. While world war is ruled out by the existence of nuclear weapons, smaller regional wars continue endlessly.
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