History UsefulNotes / WorldWarII

* WorldWarII/TheNeutralNations

-->-- '''Joseph Goebbels''', [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech Sportpalast speech,]] 18 February 1943

[[caption-width-right:320:Humanity's best and worst were displayed for all the world to see, all colourised.[[note]]Clockwise from top-right: A Nazi parade, US troops in a LCVP landing craft on the 'D-day' (initiation of mass-combat) of ''Operation Overlord'', the flag of the Soviet Union is raised over the German ''Reichstag'' (this is the second, staged, photo), the 'mushroom cloud' immediately following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, US Navy Air Force Douglas SBD Dauntless bombers flying over a Pacific atoll, and Imperial Japanese sailors at attention[[/note]]]]

'''The''' true [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI War to End All Wars]], at least for now. Whether it remains the War to End All Wars depends on if Earth has another war [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Red_giant_stage in the next five to eight billion years]]... or not.

The war was also marked by the large-scale aerial bombardment of civilian populations and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, and resulted in some 70 to 85 million dead, depending on which starting date one uses, which conflicts one includes, and which deaths on attributes to the war[[note]]The figure of 85 million is reached by historians who date the war's beginning to Japan's 1937 invasion of China, include contemporaneous conflicts like the undeclared 1939 Japanese-Soviet border war, and include deaths caused by humanitarian disasters like the refugee crises and forced deportations that characterized Eastern, Central, and Balkan Europe for the first year or two after the war[[/note]]. Some higher estimates go to a nice round 100 million by counting the unborn... or just by simple, and usually not deliberate, miscounting[[note]]One infamous error made by someone compiling figures for military dead, missing, and wounded in the Soviet-German War/Ostfront was made by someone missing a zero, thereby claiming that a Soviet force lost more troops in a single operation/campaign ''than there were in the entire Red Army''. Someone else also arrived at an infamous estimate of 40+ million Soviet dead (versus a usual estimate of no more than 28 million) during the war by effectively miscounting 'wounded' soldiers as 'dead' soldiers (no more than 20-30% of 'wounded' soldiers died at any point; this guy assumed that it was considerably more than that) and failing to account for the Poles ethnically cleansed (forcibly evicted) from the western USSR in the immediate post-war period. Although the USSR was supposedly his specialty, he also put the Chinese deaths at 30-40 million (versus a usual estimate of no more than c.10-20 million) by choosing the highest possible estimate of war-dead and attributing the c.10 million dead of the later Chinese Civil War and post-war CCP purges (1946-50) to the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). This is how he managed to arrive at a figure of 100 million dead.[[/note]]. By even the most conservative estimates, this war was the deadliest and costliest conflict in human history, by such a huge margin that even eighty years later it's still often referred to simply as "the War", despite it being far from being the only conflict in history or the most recent.

'''The''' true [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI War to End All Wars]], at least for now. Whether it remains the War to End All Wars depends on if Earth has another war [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Red_giant_stage in the next five to eight billion years.]]

'''The''' true [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI War to End All Wars]], at least for now (whether or not it is really the War to End All Wars depends on if there are no more wars until the Earth ceases to exist).

* TheQuisling: TropeNamer [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling Vidkun Quisling]], who betrayed his country to the Nazis and got stood up in front of a firing squad after the war. Other Quislings of World War II include President Wang Jingwei of China, Dirk Jan de Geer of the Netherlands, Marshal Philippe Pétain and Prime Minister Pierre Laval of France and General Andrei Vlasov of The Soviet Union. De Geer advocated negotiating a peace treaty between the Netherlands and Nazi Germany, which hurt Dutch morale by stating that the war couldn't be won; Queen Wilhelmina labeled him a deserter and traitor to the Dutch cause for publishing documents advocating cooperation with the Germans. After the war ended, De Geer was convicted of treason at trial and stripped of his honorary titles, spending one year in jail followed by a three-year probationary period. Quisling, Laval and Vlasov were (tortured and) executed, Pétain's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment due to his advanced age and (by that time) severe dementia, and Jingwei died of natural causes before the war was over.