Savages.

This is coolbert:

War and conflict always having to be understood as consisting of three distinct stages:

1. What led up to the war. 2. The actual mortal combat. The fighting of the war itself. 3. What occurred in the aftermath of the war.

Here from a most recent edition of the BBC "History" magazine an extract from an article, the death and destruction as associated with the Second World War continuing even after German surrender:

"THE WAR WITHOUT AN END", "Postwar savagery"

"The political and ethnic tensions and urge for revenge that smoldered during the Second World War erupted after German surrender."

1. "GERMANY."

"Fatal revenge"

A. "At the end of the war, 6-8 million foreign forced labourers were set free within Germany. Over the following months they ran amok, looting shops and taking revenge on civilians."

Forced laborers of all nationalities and as you well might imagine treated in an inhumane manner during their time of captivity.

B. "Some 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled form other parts of Europe and forced to travel to Germany."

Some authorities claim that number of ethnic Germans expelled from all over Eastern Europe at least 15 million, with as many as 2 million perishing from all causes during the journey to Germany proper.

2. "FRANCE AND ITALY."

"Resistance is volatile"

"After the liberation of both countries, 10,000 collaborators in France and 20,000 Fascists in Italy were summarily executed. Resistance movements refused to give up their weapons . . . Law and order was restored only by employing draconian measures such as mass arrests."

3. "THE BALTIC STATES"

"The price of liberation."

"By the end of the war the red Army 'liberated' Lithuanian, Latvia and Estonia and subsumed those countries into the Soviet Union. The populations regard this action as a new occupation, and hundreds of thousands took to the forests from where they waged a guerrilla war against Soviet troops."

Of the pre-war [1939 population of Lithuania [about 2 million] understand that nearly 800,000 either perishing as casualties of the war or having been whisked off to the GULAG never to return.

4. "UKRAINE AND POLAND."

"Brutality at the border."

"Between 1944 and 1947 Poles and Ukrainians waged a savage war across their borderlands in which more than 100,000 civilians were slaughtered . . . Eventually the Polish government [communist] resorted to the mass deportation of all Ukrainian speakers from their south-eastern borderlands"

5. "YUGOSLAVIA."

"Mass executions."

"For over a week after the official ceasefire was signed in May 1945, soldiers of the German army continued fighting in Yugoslavia. The were captured in mid-May and slaughtered en masse by Yugoslav Partisans [communists] over the following weeks."


6. "GREECE."

"Descent into civil war."

"Through 1944 into 1945 a breakdown in relations between the British Army and communist partisans in several months of violence.  . . . By 1946 Greece had descended into civil war. It has been estimated that over the next three years around 700,000 people were displaced and up to 150,000 killed."

"Postwar savagery" in these instances confined strictly to Europe. As to the Asiatic theater I might well assume a massive degree of trauma also occurring on a similar scale, perhaps even greater?

coolbert.