The selection of July 4 as the date for the Philippines’ official transition to independence in 1946 speaks volumes about the ambiguity of that event. The deliberate synchronization of independence days, agreed upon more than a decade ahead of time, was a reflection of the officially amicable basis for the Americans’ surrender of their sovereignty over the islands. (Indeed, as noted in Chapter 7, the previous decade’s push to set a firm timetable for the separation had been initiated by Washington.) The successful culmination of this process could serve to retroactively validate the United States’ portrayal of its role in the Philippines as sincerely benevolent, in keeping with the myth of American exceptionalism and in supposed contrast to the more exploitative and repressive conduct of other colonial powers. And just as the Philippines struck out on its own, the auspicious calendrical convergence between the two countries’ major secular holidays could serve as a reminder that their political separation did not constitute a parting of ways. Whenever Filipinos would celebrate their own independence day, they would effectively be reaffirming their ongoing historic connection to a United States to which they “owed” their own constitutional principles, political culture, and ideological values.

As Robert Gildea has noted, and as was mentioned in Part I, wartime occupation often had the effect of drastically curtailing the scope of social networks and political frameworks, as people struggled to survive within the narrow sphere of their own immediate communities and families.1 Yet the experience of occupation also had a transnational dimension. Occupations redrew, redefined, or did away with political and national boundaries across much of Eurasia and beyond. Occupying powers fashioned ideological rationales for their imperial expansion, some of which were designed to engage the support of various sectors within the occupied populations. In some cases, pre-war networks of transnational affinity and exchange were activated or exploited under the transformed circumstances of occupation. By the same token, resistance to occupation was often informed by ideals as well as organizational and experiential connections that transcended political and ethno-national boundaries. Moreover, in many countries, those who did not fully “belong” to the nation – notably, members of marginalized minorities as well as foreign nationals, who were particularly vulnerable to repression and violence on the part of occupation authorities and collaborationist regimes – were disproportionately represented among the ranks of resistance movements. Examples include the many Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, and other “others” who joined the ranks of the French resistance, the Macedonian Slavs who contributed significantly to the rank-and-file of Communist forces in Greece (particularly in the 1946–49 phase of that country’s civil war), and the Italian soldiers who joined the ranks of the (already multi-ethnic) Yugoslav partisans as well as the Greek resistance rather than fall captive to the Germans after September 1943.2

The term “total war” evokes images of violent clashes between militaries and of mass mobilization, as well as indiscriminate targeting, of civilian populations over the course of a protracted armed conflict.1 The Second World War featured these characteristics on an unimaginable scale. But for much of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of wartime experience was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers.2 This was a function of the relatively quick and massive victories won early on by the principal aggressor states, starting with Japan’s 1937 onslaught on China, and continuing with Germany’s partition of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Nazis’ decisive victories in Northern and Western Europe the following year, the German advance into Southeastern Europe (as well as parts of North Africa) and its deep inroads into Soviet territory in 1941, and Japan’s sweep into Southeast Asia in 1941–42. The rest of the war was dominated by the long-drawn-out efforts of the principal Allied powers (Britain, the USSR, and the United States) to reverse these initial outcomes. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of people found themselves under one form or another of Axis control or domination.

“If these barbarians had been able to replace the old colonial authority, why had that authority been necessary at all?”1 With these words, Sutan Sjahrir conveyed how he perceived the impact on his compatriots of the rapid fall of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese, whose own approach to governance they saw, he claimed, as crude and ignorant. At the same time, the opportunity the Japanese afforded indigenous elites to move higher up the administrative ladder than before served to bolster their confidence in their ability to run their country themselves.

Debates over whether or not violent conflicts in occupied societies should be considered civil wars tend to be politically loaded and are very hard to settle based on any objective standard. So is the related problem of assessing historical continuities and ruptures in countries that fell under enemy control in wartime. There certainly are some striking ways in which the struggles of the war years appear to be variations upon and exacerbations of long-standing divisions in these societies. France constitutes one of the best-known examples of this phenomenon, insofar as the Vichy regime and its supporters drew upon various strands of a home-grown illiberal tradition that could be traced not only to the country’s polarized politics of the 1930s, but to the anti-Dreyfusard movement of the 1890s and perhaps even as far back as the counter-revolutionary reaction of the early nineteenth-century Bourbon Restoration.1 For their part, some of the main currents of the French resistance could be linked directly to the Popular Front of the 1930s, and could also be seen as incarnating certain elements of the French republican/revolutionary tradition writ large.

Among the countries constituting case studies in this section, the Philippines had arguably been shaped most profoundly by its colonial experience. This was in part a function of the extended duration of that experience, which had begun with Spain’s incursion into, and consolidation of power over most of, the archipelago in the course of the second half of the sixteenth century. (Most of Muslim-minority Mindanao remained beyond Spain’s effective control well into the late nineteenth century.) Unlike the Dutch East Indies, across much of which Islam had become a dominant religion by the time of European colonization, most of the islands north of Mindanao had not yet been converted to a “religion of the book” at the time of Spanish colonization. This gave Catholic missionaries an opportunity to spread their faith across the population. Successful Christianization created forms of cultural hybridity and connection that linked much of Philippine society to “the West” in ways that were no less durable for being contradiction-ridden and paradoxical. The fact that, prior to Spanish colonization, most of the island chain’s societies had been organized around relatively small, clan-based structures, rather than more demographically and territorially extensive states (with the exception of some budding Muslim sultanates), meant that there was little in the way of a “usable past” for latter-day anti-colonial activists to latch on to as a point of reference for the construction of a national identity unconnected to the legacy of Western rule. The country’s very name – chosen to honor the crown prince of the 1540s who became King Philip II of Spain in 1556 – was a relic of its conquest by Europeans. And while nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists promoted the adoption of a standardized form of Tagalog – one of the languages spoken on the island of Luzon – as a national language for the entire archipelago, this could and did raise hackles among speakers of some of the from-120-to-186 (depending on definition) other languages (nearly all of them also in the Malayo-Polynesian language family) used across the archipelago. First Spanish and later English were hard to displace as the Philippines’ ethnically “neutral,” culturally prestigious, lingue franche.1

This section focuses on a set of occupied countries whose internal conflicts during and/or immediately after occupation rose to a level of violence that can be described as civil war. Although each of these clashes featured particular characteristics arising from local conditions, participants were usually acutely aware of their connection to the continental and global theaters of warfare as well as to analogous internal conflicts in other occupied countries. One can therefore speak of a sort of archipelago of loosely analogous, temporally overlapping (though not necessarily synchronous), and at least indirectly interconnected civil wars fought across a wide array of lands amidst the overarching global conflict. Indeed, this archipelago extended well beyond Europe, as will be seen in the discussion of the Chinese case.

On February 22, 1943, in the course of the Battle of the Neretva, the Fourth Brigade of the Communist-led Yugoslav partisans took the town of Jablanica from an Italian battalion, capturing the commander in the process. On learning that their prisoner was a proud veteran of the pro-Franco Italian contingent in the Spanish Civil War, his counterparts among the partisans demanded his immediate execution. The Italian officer returned the salutation in a manner of speaking, requesting that his shooting be carried out by one of those former volunteers for the Spanish Republic. The request was denied, and he was shot by military couriers instead.1

On August 12, 1941, Philippe Pétain took to the airwaves to speak to his compatriots of an “evil wind” he sensed rising across the land. Among the factors he blamed for what he described as a growing public mood of disquiet and a questioning of his government’s authority were the forces of the “ancien régime” (i.e. the Third Republic) – the Freemasons chief among them! But, after first claiming that the partisans of the defunct system and of the corporate “trusts” were somehow interposing themselves between “the people” and him – between whom, otherwise, a mutual understanding existed – he went on to imply that it was precisely the French people who were at fault. Insisting that authority no longer flowed from the bottom up but rather from his own person, he described the solution to the problem as lying in a more energetic and forceful use of that authority to implement the principles of the National Revolution. The marshal cited his past record of restoring order out of chaos during the military mutinies of 1917 as well as the rout of 1940, concluding that “today, it is from yourselves that I wish to save you.” The alternative, he warned, was a civil war on the Spanish model.1

Amidst this variety of fluid, evolving, and conflicting responses to occupation, most of which were justified by appeals to patriotism, it is tempting to conclude that patriotism per se actually had no impact on political choices – at least not under extreme conditions such as wartime occupation by totalitarian powers. And certainly, be it at the best of times or the worst of times, the indivisible national solidarity towards which patriotism strives can never be more than a mirage that glimmers on the horizon of popular anticipation. Yet it is just that pursuit of unattainable visions – be they of national unity, of social equality, or of “freedom and justice for all” – that fashions so much of political debate and public opinion. And on closer examination, what the comparative analysis of this part’s four cases reveals is how evolving military, economic, and geopolitical conditions helped define the ever-shifting parameters of the patriotically plausible. What was patriotically plausible depended heavily on exogenous circumstances, as the powerful tides of global war repeatedly reshaped the landscape of expectations. But it also, in turn, helped determine the relative viability at any given time of competing political agendas and ambitions within the occupied lands.

The three cases in this section fall along a spectrum of varied relationships with the pre-war metropoles that governed them. Ukraine as of June 1941 was a fully integrated constituent republic of a territorially contiguous Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was Nazi Germany that sought to colonize it. Yet Ukraine’s recent history complicated the picture significantly, as will be discussed below. And the initial German invasion was misread by certain Ukrainian nationalists as an opportunity for national liberation. The Philippines and the Dutch East Indies were both subject to governance by distant, overseas imperial metropoles, and their indigenous populations did not, by and large, have US or Dutch citizenship, respectively. However, in the case of the Philippines, an elected government functioned semi-autonomously in the capital Manila, and in the mid-1930s a firm deadline of 1946 had been agreed upon for the termination of American rule and the granting of formal political independence to the Philippines. The Dutch government had no such plans to relinquish control over the East Indies.

German army traditionally stressed the personal factor and therefore the importance of the second command task, selecting the right men. Operated the ‘seniority tempered by merit’ principle for appointing and promoting officers, based on a carefully structured though flawed confidential reporting system. Continuous but not always successful efforts during the war to select good and weed out unsuitable commanders and general staff officers. Limits on ability to post officers freely, especially because of the constraints on and conservatism of the Military Cabinet running the system. Suggestions that function automatically overrode rank at best oversimplified. Always the possibility of friction in such cases, illustrating the effect of personal factors such as reputation, honour, ambition, pay and strain. Personal relationships, sometimes developing into networks and cliques, interacted with objective professional considerations and influenced the conduct of operations as well as the subsequent historiography. Two case studies illustrate these factors.

The German army viewed war as the realm of constant uncertainty. Reducing this was the third command task, principally through intelligence on the enemy and information on German troops (Chapter 6). By 1917, loss of the initiative and the need to deploy scarce resources efficiently had boosted German military intelligence’s importance. Its dense network of sources. Poor integration and frequent squabbles between intelligence producers, but also effective informal co-operation, including extensive use of civilians. The tiny Intelligence Department in OHL (Supreme Army Command) produced all-source assessments used extensively by decision-makers, but performance on total war political and economic requirements was inadequate despite recruitment of high-level agents.

Case study of German intelligence’s mixed performance in spring 1917. Good intelligence played a central role in the German victory over the French assault by enabling timely concentration of forces; but uncertainty about British plans was a major factor in delaying defensive preparations, leading to the initial defeat at Arras.