![]() Axis POWs are herded into concentration camps, where many will stay for years on end as the Allies decide what to do with them. Soon sober again, their rage abated, and with shame coming to the fore the troops stopped of their own accord within just a couple of weeks.įor most civilians the first months of the post-war world are little different from the chaos and suffering that came before, except for the tens of millions of people on the move. There was even public disorder within the USSR itself as many categories of Gulag prisoners (some of the Red Army personnel who'd been captured by Germans but hadn't fought for them, white-collar criminals and petty thieves) were issued blanket-pardons and quickly re-offended. ![]() ![]() Even so, their behaviour was similar as an orgy of looting and mass-rapes ensued in Soviet-occupied Germany. For while Japanese soldiers were routinely brutalised, humiliated, and encouraged to take out their anger on others the Soviets had never and even in those final months did not do likewise. The result was at once similar and very different to the infamous indiscipline of Japanese soldiers in China - e.g. The likely cost to the civilian and POW populations was at best ignored, and if considered was deemed worth it. From the Vistula-Oder Operation onward, the NKVD's commissars were ordered to whip the men into the frenzy of bloodlust that command deemed necessary. But High Command still thought that there was only one way to get the grunts to keep fighting into Germany itself: vengeance. NKVD records show Red Army soldiers being both satisfied with the righteousness of their cause, and asking such wide and varied questions of their commissars as the state of food supplies from South America, the true effect of Allied strategic-bombing on German armaments production, and the shape of the post-war world to come. Throughout the war, the Soviets had demonstrated a characteristically Russian contempt for their soldiers' intelligence. The Nationalists' underwhelming and inglorious victory by mere association with the USA increasingly looks like the prelude to a second and bloodier phase of the Civil War as Jiang vows to unite the country and eradicate its true enemy - Communism, as embodied by the recently-unified Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong. In China, particularly, the country's sheer size and political fragmentation mean that the transition from Imperial to nominally-republican control is rarely a smooth one, with Japanese garrisons in many cases being ordered to hold their positions until the Americans can fly loyal Guomindang troops over to take over from them. ![]() Many other units simply transition from partisan activities to organized crime, with banditry rife as the Allies find themselves unable to police effectively the huge areas and populations that have come under their nominal control. Individual soldiers slip into the jungle on isolated islands and fight the Emperor's enemies well into The '70s. Whole Japanese platoons disbelieve the Emperor's surrender and continue fighting the Allies for months. Some isolated bands of Axis forces and numerous partisan and revolutionary groups continue to fight the Soviets, the Allies, the Axis and each other. The war has ended, but the fighting hasn't. Scene from Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946)
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