Humanity's best and worst were displayed for all the world to see.note Clockwise from top: Allied troops land in France during Operation Overlord; Arbeit macht frei ("Work will free you") over the entrance to Auschwitz Death-Camp; the Soviet flag is raised over the Reichstag; the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima; a Nazi party parade.
World War II, or the Second World War (often abbreviated as WWII or WW2), was a global war that was under-way by 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's nations and nation-states — including all the great powers — which eventually formed two loose, opposing military alliances: the Allies or Allied powers (the UK, USA, and USSR among others) against the Axis powers (chiefly
Nazi Germany, as well as
Fascist Italy and
Imperial Japan). It was the most intensive and extensive war in history, with more than 100 million people serving in military units. In a state of "total war", the major participants eventually placed their entire financial, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, thereby erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by significant events involving (organized) massacres and genocides, including the Holocaust, large-scale aerial bombardment of civilian populations and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it resulted in some 50 to 70 million fatalities, making this war the deadliest and costliest conflict in human history.
In many works of speculative fiction featuring non-human intelligent species, the war and its minutiae are often used as 'proof' that
Humans Are The Real Monsters.
Tropes originating from the war:
- All Germans Are Nazis: Unfortunately, though the war is long past, the ugly shadow of Nazi Germany endures, and inevitably colors some perceptions of the German people.
- America Wins the War
- To this day, many in the Anglosphere and western Europe do not grasp the extent to which the war in Europe was mainly fought and mostly decided on the Eastern Front. It is true, however, that Allied victory would have been difficult without the USA's financial and industrial support *
America was the Queen of military production during the war; only the USSR gave her a run for her money in even a handful of categories
, and that the Americans led the charge on the Western Front. By the time of the Battle of the Bulge, they outnumbered the British and Canadians almost three to one - but upon German surrender, the Soviets had the Allies' forces on the mainland outnumbered by more than three-to-one
- The Pacific Theatre was a straighter example. Though the efforts of the Chinese, British and ANZACs should not be belittled (China alone inflicted more Axis military casualties than the total axis casualties on the Western Front put together), they were all very glad of American aid and it was the Americans that took a leading role in destroying the Imperial Navy and bringing the war to Japan. It should not be forgotten that America's support for Chinese Independence was the reason there was a Pacific Theatre in the first place.
- Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys: The Trope Maker in the world's consciousness. The actual truth behind the trope is more complex. It is true that the French generals were quite badly outwitted by the Germans in 1940, and it is also true that the French installed an appeaser as President of the Council of Ministers (Pétain) as soon as Paris was occupied and then signed an armistice with the Germans, which took the powerful French Navy and France's colonial empire out of the war. However, the French Army actually fought very hard and took a lot of casualties in 1940, they were just badly led by their generals and were not extensively equipped with modern means of communication. Their Alpine troops successfully held the Italians off until the armistice, the troops manning the perimeter at Dunkirk while the British Expeditionary Force withdrew so it could continue the war and protect its home nation were all French, and the Free French Forces led by General Charles De Gaulle kept fighting throughout the whole war. Battles such as Bir Hakeim, Monte Cassino or Ouistreham (on the D-Day) come to mind. The French Resistance's actions count as well.
- Les Collaborateurs: The Trope Namer was the Government of Vichy in France. See also The Quisling below.
- Final Solution: Trope Maker, Trope Namer, Trope Codifier. Nazis referred to die Endlösung der Judenfrage, "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question."
- Iwo Jima Pose: Trope Maker, Trope Namer, Trope Codifier. Associate Press photographer Joseph John Rosenthal took a photo depicting five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the US flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. It has since become one of the most iconic images in history, and the photo has come to symbolize US Marine operations in the Pacific Theater. It also formed the basis for the US Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.note Of course, if you ask a staff member they'll tell you that it may represent something else, and then not tell you what it is that it might be.
- Music to Invade Poland to
- Nazis with Gnarly Weapons
- No Swastikas: The entire rationale behind the taboos on the swastika and the Rising Sun, in fact.
- The Quisling: Trope Namer 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, Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Pierre Laval from France and Andrei Vlasov from the Soviet Union. Quisling, Laval and Vlasov were 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.
- Reds With Rockets: This war saw the brutal rise of USSR as the most powerful military in Europe in a couple of years following Operation Barbarossa.
- Many, many Reichstropen.
- La Résistance: The Trope Namer was active during this war in France, but every occupied country had a resistance movement to one degree or another. Some countries actually had more than one movement - e.g. a communist one plus a monarchist one (it wasn't unusual for them to end up fighting each other as well). China had so many turncoats-turned-resistance fighters-turned-bandits that the historical community generally wrings its hands and splits it up into local and regional warlords, nationalist guerrillas, communist guerrillas and Chinese Communist Party guerrillas, with some room for overlap.
- Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Nazi Germany developed technologies that were considerably ahead of their time, such as the first generations of jet airplanes and ballistic missiles. But no jetpacks.
- Those Wacky Nazis: The trope became popular because of the German occupation of Europe and the nazis' war crimes.
- Wartime Cartoon
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
— Anon note "If you seek its monument, look around you."
