Part 29 (1/2)

(19311962)

IN A NUTSh.e.l.l.

The collapse of the U.S. economy in late 1929 greatly exacerbated the rest of the planet's financial woes. By 1932, the world's economic output had dropped 40 percent, and it would take five more years for the global economy to reach 1929 levels again.

Human nature being what it is, people looked around for someone to blame. In the Soviet Union, it was the capitalists of the West. In the United States, it was the Republicans. In China, it was the Communists. In Germany-most ominously-it was the Jews. The blame game combined with the postWorld War I decline of monarchies to open the door for waves of nationalism. Countries increasingly hungered for their own ident.i.ty, a hunger often whetted by individuals' hunger for power: former schoolteacher Benito Mussolini in Italy; military officer Francisco Franco in Spain; military officer Hideki Tojo in j.a.pan; failed painter Adolf Hitler in Germany; and seminary student turned bank robber Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

So, you combine a crippled world economy, a hunger for national ident.i.ty, and a collection of monsters masquerading as men, and what you ultimately get is a very big war.

The group that would become known as the Axis Powers-Germany, Italy, and j.a.pan-warmed up for war with fighting in Manchuria, China, Ethiopia, and Spain. In 1939, after rolling over Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germany finally ignited the firestorm by invading Poland.

Allied against the Axis were, well, the Allies. Led by Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the allied forces turned the tide of war by the end of 1943. Before the war's end in 1945, however, the world would endure two of history's worst nightmares: the use of nuclear weapons, and the Holocaust.

After the war, most of Eastern Europe fell under an ”iron curtain” of Soviet control. In Asia, meanwhile, Communists under Mao Zedong finally won their twenty-five-year struggle with the Nationalist government and took control of the world's most populous nation in 1949.

Western powers dug in to confront the spread of communism. In 1948, the USSR blockaded land routes into the city of Berlin and eventually built a wall cutting the city in half. One side was controlled by the Communist government of East Germany and the other by West Germany.

A much more violent confrontation occurred on the Korean Peninsula. Korea had been part.i.tioned after the war into two countries, with a Soviet-backed Communist state in the North and a U.S.-backed capitalist state in the South. After three years of intense fighting, the two sides agreed in 1953 to an armistice, redrawing the border almost exactly where it had been when the fighting started.

By the end of the 1950s, the world had divided itself politically into three basic groups: Communist, capitalist, and non-aligned nations, labeled the third world. But not every conflict revolved around Communist versus anticommunist.

India, the world's second most populous nation, finally won its independence from the British Empire in 1947 after decades of often violent civil unrest. In the Middle East, the creation of the Jewish state of Israel triggered a war with neighboring Islamic countries and kicked off what proved to be a more-or-less continual conflict in the region.

To be fair to the species, mankind did make some pretty impressive scientific and medical strides during the period. There was the invention of the transistor and the first electronic computer, the discovery of vaccines for the dreaded childhood disease of polio, the refining of the use of antibiotics to fight infections, the development of synthetic fibers such as nylon, the launching of the first manmade earth-orbiting satellites-and the blossoming of television.

But there was a mushroom-shaped shadow constantly hanging over the planet. By 1949, thanks in large part to successfully spying on U.S. programs, the Soviet Union had its own nuclear weapons. Great Britain had them by 1952, France by 1960, and China by 1964.

The mushroom shadow was perhaps at its darkest in the fall of 1962, when U.S. spy planes discovered that Soviet missiles were being deployed in the Communist island nation of Cuba. For the better part of two weeks, the world held its breath, poised on what seemed to be the brink of nuclear war. Fortunately, both sides kept their cool. The Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba, the U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Life went somewhat nervously on.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

Sept. 23, 1932 The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is founded.

Jan. 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler begins 12-year span as dictator of Germany.

Mar. 4, 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt begins 12-year span as U.S. president.

Oct. 16, 1934 Chinese Communist forces begin what will be a year-long, 6,000-mile retreat from Nationalist forces.

Sept. 15, 1935 Germany adopts the Nuremberg Laws, which strip German Jews of most of their legal and human rights.

Nov. 11, 1935 The first official trans-Pacific airmail flight leaves San Francisco. It arrives in Manila a week later.

Sept. 1, 1939 World War II begins as Germany attacks Poland.

June 4, 1940 The last of 340,000 French and British troops are evacuated from the French beaches of Dunkirk.

Apr. 1, 1940 The world's first electron microscope is demonstrated at the RCA laboratories in Camden, New Jersey.

June 22, 1941 German troops invade the Soviet Union, ending the two nations' alliance of convenience.

June 6, 1944 D-Day: More than 170,000 Allied troops land on beaches in France's Normandy province.

Apr. 12, 1945 President Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Apr. 30, 1945 Adolf Hitler commits suicide as Soviet troops converge on Berlin.

May 8, 1945 World War II ends in Europe.

Aug. 10, 1945 j.a.panese leaders sue for peace. U.S. president Harry Truman declares victory on August 14.

Jan. 10, 1946 The United Nations opens its first General a.s.sembly session, in London.

Aug. 29, 1949 The Soviet Union successfully detonates an atomic bomb at a test site in Kazakhstan.