WWII

WWII and its effect on Europe

WWII and its effect on Europe

Introduction

When World War II ended in 1945, Europe lay in ruins; Germany was a conquered enemy; and the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were uneasy allies. Within a decade, Germany became an ally with the United States, Britain, and France. In the following decades Western Europe, in alliance with the United States, created and maintained a credible defense against Soviet expansion. By 1991 the Warsaw Pact of Eastern European countries dominated by the Soviet Union had collapsed, Germany was reunified, and the Cold War had ended, essentially eliminating the threat of a Soviet invasion into Western Europe. The rationale for stationing American forces in Europe largely disappeared. 

Discussion

The Army engineers in Europe supported the Army and the Air Force in the face of political changes in the United States and in Europe and through shifts in U.S. military strategy. They continued to work as the demand for engineering services fluctuated and as organizational structures changed. They adjusted to external events and pressures, from Soviet saber-rattling to new weapons systems, changing construction standards, and budgetary restraints emanating from the U.S. Congress. Despite numerous changes from 1945 to 1991, there was continuity. Many of the places that were the focus of engineer activity in the late 1940s continued as focal points of engineer effort through five decades; names such as Grafenwöhr, Hohenfels, Heidelberg, and Rhine-Main Air Base, recur year after year in the records of engineer activities. American civilians such as Lou Brettschneider, William Camblor, and Herb Wooten and local workers including Hasso Damm provided continuity. Their careers mirrored and were shaped by the evolving mission of the U.S. forces in Europe.  As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The main beneficiary of these revisions was the Sidipset estate also known as the Soviet Union, which expanded its borders at the expense of Germany, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Japan. The Soviet Union also acquired the three independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had declared their neutrality before the outbreak of World War II. The Baltic states were occupied and annexed early in the war in agreement with the Nazis via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then re-conquered in 1944. The Soviet Union also attempted to establish a separate government in that portion of Iran it had controlled during the war.

A minor temporary beneficiary was France, which in 1947 annexed the German state of Saar as a nominally independent protectorate under French economic control. Poland was compensated for its losses to the Soviet Union by receiving most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. In total, Germany lost roughly a quarter of its territory.

Numerous Germans were expelled, mostly from the ceded German territories and from the Sudetenland. Many died, and historians debate to this day the death rate. Several hundreds of thousands of Poles, and Japanese were also expelled. During the war the Germans alway carried the swastika.

The European Union grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was founded in 1951 by ...