ABSTRACT
When the Second World War came to an end in 1945, large tracts of Europe and the Far East were in ruins. The territorial ambitions of pre-war Germany, Italy and Japan had been crushed. Their wartime allies, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, were mauled and defeated. The captive nations, most cruelly Poland and Yugoslavia, had suffered terrible repression. In every country under German rule, the Jews had been singled out for physical annihilation. Under Japanese rule, captive peoples had been denied their rights and dignity, murdered in large numbers, and, as the war ended, had taken up the struggle for independence from European colonial rule. The British and French Empires in Asia and Africa had been shaken. China, the world’s most populous country, having been ravaged by almost ten years of savage conflict, was on the brink of revolution. India, the world’s second most populous country, while insisting on independence from Britain, was soon to break up into two nations, one mainly Muslim, the other predominantly Hindu. Dutch rule in the Far East was under attack. United States rule in the Philippines was coming to an end.
