Causes and effects of world war II
...ty Congress on March 10, 1939, brushed aside Western forecasts of trouble over the Ukraine as designed "to provoke a conflict with Germany without any visible grounds.'' Declaring that the "non-aggressive" states were ''unquestionably stronger than the Fascist states,'' he argued that their failure to resist Hitler was motivated not by weakness but by desire to embroil the Nazis with the Soviets. He warned against "war-mongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them,'' and proclaimed the Soviet Union's intention to stay out of a "new imperialist war'' which was ''already in its second year." The Soviet "Political Dictionary" of 1940 described Stalin's report as raising "the question of the good neighborly relations between the Soviet Union and Germany. This declaration of Comrade Stalin," the article added, ''was properly understood in Germany." It is now known not only that this assertion was true but also that Stalin's declaration fell on already receptive Nazi ears. Until the end of 1938 Hitler hoped for a compact with Poland at Soviet expense, in which he would receive Danzig and the Corridor in exchange for supporting Polish gains in the Ukraine. When Poland did not respond, he was turning to the idea of a partition of Poland in concert with the Soviet Union. On March 15 Hitler sent German troops to occupy Bohemia and Moravia, set up Slovakia as an "independent'' state, but sacrificed his tiny Ukrainian ''Piedmont'' by giving it to Hungary. Thus he simultaneously made clear to the West that his ambitions exceeded the boundaries of German-speaking lands and to the Soviet Union that his much-bruited ''designs on the Ukraine" might at least temporarily be laid aside for purposes of diplomatic discussion. Nevertheless, the British and French pushed on with negotiations for a pact to halt further Nazi aggression. In the meantime discussions about a Nazi-Soviet trade pact were proceeding. On June 15 the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin passed on a message to the Nazis that the Soviet Union was trying to decide whether to conclude the pact with the British and French, drag out negotiations further, or undertake a rapprochement with Germany. He addied that ''this last possibility, with which ideological considerations would not have to become involved, was closest to Soviet desires." Thenceforth the Soviet Union was negotiating secretly with the Nazis and openly with the British and French at the same time. If it had chosen to take it, the West had ample warning of what was in store. Molotov continually raised the Soviet price for a pact, but the plainest danger signal was an article by Zhdanov in Pravda on June 29, in which he said he could not agree with his friends who thought Britain and France were sincere in the negotiations which were taking place. The British and French did not exhibit any hastiness, at any rate. When they sent a military mission to Moscow in August, it went by leisurely boat. However, Hitler was in a great hurry. An attack on Poland was scheduled for late August. By the end of July the Nazis realized that they must reach agreement with the Soviets very soon if these plans were to be safely implemented. It seems fairly clear that on the night of August 3 Hitler agreed to pay the Soviet price for a pact. Mussolini was left in the dark about his plans. The Italians learned only on August 11 that Hitler was bent on war, and the news threw them into a panic. On the night of August 19 the Nazi-Soviet trade treaty was signed. The next day Hitler telegraphed Stalin with a request that he see Ribbentrop on August 22 or 23. When he received Stalin's assent, Hitler pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted, "I have the world in my pocket!" On the night of August 23, 1939, the pact was concluded. It contained the provision which only totalitarians could insert, that it was to take effect as soon as it was signed. The public text of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was simply an agreement of nonaggression and neutrality, referring as a precedent to the German-Soviet neutrality pact of 1926. The real agreement was in a secret protocol which in effect partitioned not only Poland (along the line of the Vistula) but much of Eastern Europe. To the Soviets were allotted Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia; to the Nazis, everything to the West of these regions, including Lithuania. Each of the two signatories was to ask the other no questions about the disposition of its own ''sphere of interest." This nonaggression pact, coupled with the trade treaty and arrangements for large-scale exchange of raw materials and armaments, amounted to an alliance. When confronted with the public text of the pact, the Western emissaries could only creep home quietly. For the moment the Soviet obtained immunity from attack by Hitler, the opportunity for considerable expansion, and noninvolvement in the war which opened with Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1. Britain and France entered this war on September 3. On September 17 the Soviets announced they were entering eastern Poland. Actually the line of the secret protocol was now shifted by mutual consent. The Nazi-Soviet boundary in Poland became the Bug River instead of the Vistula River. In exchange the Soviets were allotted Lithuania. The Polish state disappeared. The Soviet Union handed Vilna to Lithuania and acquired an area whose western boundaries were roughly the same as the Russian frontier of 1795, plus eastern Galicia. For the moment World War II had no front, except for what was derisively called the Sitzkrieg or ''phoney war'' in the West, where neither the French nor the Germans attempted any serious offensive. In September and October the Soviet Union forced the three Baltic states to sign mutual assistance pacts, but for the moment left them independent. The foreign reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the annihilation of Poland was one of shock and rage. The Communist parties abroad, which had no official warning of the Soviet switch, reacted with confusion. On September 6 Thorez and other French Communists joined their regiments, calling for aid to Poland, only to desert at Moscow's behest a few days later. Harry Pollitt, the British Communist leader, wrote a pamphlet unfortunately titled "How to Win the War," and after two weeks both he and his pamphlet had to drop from public gaze. The German Communists in exile made strange noises suggesting that the Allies were worse than Hitler. The general line was that already stated by Stalin in March, that the war was an ''imperialist'' one for the redivision of the world. The Communists said much more about Allied than about Nazi ''culpability,'' and demanded ''peace.'' The Soviets brought pressure on Finland for a pact comparable to those signed by the Baltic states, but Finland refused and on November 29 was invaded by the Red Army. Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish Communist in Moscow's reserve for such emergencies, was brought out and made head of a puppet government which conceded all Soviet demands. The Soviets thereupon declared that they were not at war with Finland at all. Western sympathy for the Finns mounted as they successfully resisted the Reds. In 1939 the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations. Britain and France, observing the apparent weakness of the Red Army, debated sending troops to aid the Finns, and actually decided to do so a few days before a Soviet-Finnish peace was concluded in March 1940. The Nazis also took note of Soviet military weakness and filed it for future reference. The peace was an important factor in Daladier's replacement by Paul Reynaud as French premier, just in time to be faced with a new Nazi offensive in the West. On April 9 Hitler occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, where British forces landed and tried to resist. When they had been defeated and withdrawn from southern Norway (although troops remained in Narvik a month longer) , public opinion forced Chamberlain from office and on May 10 Winston Churchill became British prime minister, heading a coalition government including Labor. On the day that Winston Churchill became prime minister, Hitler attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. A break-through at Sedan was followed by a Nazi advance which reached the Channel on May 21, splitting Allied armies and compelling the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The Dutch had already been overrun, and the Belgian king surrendered on May 28. On June 10 Italy belatedly declared war on Britain and France. The French army was already shattered. On June 16 Reynaud yielded the premiership to Marshal Petain, who sued for peace at once. Churchill's Britain was left alone. The Soviets reacted sharply to the fall of France even before the signing of an armistice. Stalin ordered military occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and all three were ''admitted'' into the Soviet Union as constituent republics in July. In late June the Soviets also annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The annexation of Bukovina went beyond the line of the secret protocol of the pact with Hitler, which was to create some problems latter. All this was done by way of an ultimatum to Rumania. The Russians then used most of the annexed territory to create a new Moldavian SSR. The Nazis as well seemed to be closing up to their side of the protocol line. In August and September they began to occupy the rest of Rumania, partitioned its Transylvanian province and gave much of it to Hungary, and forced the Rumanians to cede the southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria. In July 1940 Hitler had secretly decided to prepare to attack the Soviet Union. In September a German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact was signed, and although it stipulated that it would not affect the relations of any of the three powers with the Soviets, a certain deterioration in Berlin-Moscow amity had become apparent. In November 1940 Molotov visited Berlin for further discussions of a vague and grandiose kind, but Hitler did not cancel his plans for attack. On December 18, 1940, he issued the directive for operation Barbarossa, the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union, to be launched in the middle of May 1941. Beginning in August the Nazis were launching large-scale air attacks on Britain. They were also consolidating their influence in the Balkans. The line of the secret protocol ended where Bessarabia touched the Black Sea, and south of that point neither Nazis nor Soviets could formally object to what their partners did. Hitler now extended the Tripartite Pact, often called the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, by obtaining the adhesion of Hungary, Rumania, and Slovakia in November. After some tension with Moscow over Bulgaria, the Bulgaria also signed the Axis pact. German troops went where the pact did. In late March 1941 Yugoslavia added its signature to the Axis pact, but the government was promptly overthrown by a pro-Western coup. Immediately Hitler attacked and overran Yugoslavia and Greece as well. In doing so Hitler incidentally extricated Mussolini from a gravely embarrassing position. After his declaration of war in June Mussolini had attacked Greece from Albania, but had been forced to retreat under a successful Greek counterattack. The brief Balkan campaign compelled Hitler to postpone "Operation Barbarossa" for a month, but its success left him in control of the whole continent up to the Soviet border, either directly or by way of his allies Mussolini and Franco, except for neutral Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. Even in Finland the government had accepted his aid in joint preparations for attacking the Soviet Union. Western sources warned the Soviets that a Nazi attack was imminent. It is till uncertain whether Stalin and his colleagues expected the attack. Evidently the Soviets were still thinking in terms of better relations with the Nazis, deliveries to whom were maintained with scrupulous fidelity throughout the period of the pact, as well as with Hitler's Japanese allies. In the spring Foreign Minister Matsuoka came to Europe, and in April a Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact was signed, acclaimed by Izvestiia as an ''historic reversal in the relations between Russia and Japan.'' Stalin conducted a remarkable public demonstration of affection for all Germans and Japanese who were in sight as he was bidding farewell to Matsuoka at the railway station. At that moment the Nazi attack was two months away. The Soviets, of course, did not know that. For that matter, neither did the Japanese. The night before the attack, Mototov summoned Count Schulenburg, Nazi ambassador in Moscow, told him that there were indications that the Germans were dissatisfied with the Soviets, and begged him to explain what had brought about the existing state of affairs. Schulenburg professed himself unable to say, and departed. A few hours later, however, he was back with all declaration of war on the Soviet Union. The Nazi invasion occurred, with Finnish, Rumanian, and other aid, all along the front from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, on June 22, 1941. Immediate Cause: German Invasion of Poland (1st September, 1939) The Polish September Campaign — also known as "Polish-German War of 1939", in Poland often as Wojna obronna 1939 roku ("Defensive War of 1939"), in Germany as "Polish Campaign" (Polenfeldzug) — was the conquest of Poland by the armies of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small contingent of Slovak forces during the Second World War. This is the immediate cause of the World War II. The campaign began on 1 September 1939, and ended on 6 October, 1939, with Germany and the Soviet Union occupying the entirety of Poland. None of the major participants—Germany, the Western Allies, the Soviet Union, or Poland itself—expected that this German invasion of Poland would lead to a war that would surpass the First World War in scale and cost. This military operation marked the start of the Second World War in Europe as the invasion led Poland's allies, the United Kingdom and France, to declare war on Germany on September 3. It was also the first campaign to witness the use of German Blitzkrieg tactics. Following the German-staged attack on September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland's western, southern and northern borders. Defending the long borders, the Polish armies were soon forced to withdraw east. After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of Bzura, the Germans gained undisputed initiative. Polish forces then began a withdrawal southeast, following a plan that called for a long defence in the Romanian bridgehead area where Polish forces were to await an expected Western Allies counterattack and relief. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Red Army invaded the eastern regions of Poland. The Soviets were acting in co-operation with Nazi Germany, carrying out their part of the secret appendix of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the division of Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence). In view of this unexpected Soviet aggression, the Polish government and its high command decided that the defence of the Romanian bridgehead was no longer feasible and ordered the evacuation of all troops to neutral Romania. By the beginning of October, Germany and the Soviet Union had completely overrun Poland. The Polish government (which never surrendered) together with many of its remaining land and air forces successfully evacuated to neighboring Romania and Hungary. Many of the evacuees subsequently joined the recreated Polish Army in allied France, French-mandated Syria and the United Kingdom. In the aftermath of the September Campaign, Poland, even under occupation, managed to create a powerful resistance movement and contributed significant military forces to the Allies for the duration of World War II. Germany captured the Soviet-occupied areas when it invaded the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), and the Soviet Union would later recapture these areas in 1944. Effects of the World War Loss of Life and Property: The war took some 50 million lives. More civilians died than combatants. They died horrible deaths from explosion, firestorm, vaporization, suffocation, exposure, starvation. The historian Ralph Raico has asked. "If capitalism is criticized for treating human beings like Commodities, what are we to say of an institution — the state — that treats human beings like garbage?" The historian C. Hartley Grattan wrote in 1949, "Of the material costs [of the war], the largest by all odds came from that most appalling innovation in ruthless destruction, air bombardment — especially area raids which were indiscriminate in that no specific target was aimed at. The assault on dwellings ranks as one of the great horrors of the way.... Terror and obliteration air raids were considered successful almost in proportion to the number of people who lost their homes." According to another historian, William Henry Chamberlin, "About twenty out of every one hundred residences in Germany were destroyed. Two and a quarter million homes were destroyed in Japan and 460,000 in Great Britain. Every fifth Greek was left homeless and 28,000 homes in Rotterdam were obliterated . Ironically, the French suffered more from bombing by their American and British 'liberators' than from the air attacks from their German invaders. The words of English historian Robert Mackenzie, in describing Europe at the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars, are even more apt in expressing the events of the Second World War: "The interests of peace withered in the storm; the energies of all nations, the fruits of all industries were poured forth in the effort to destroy. From the utmost North to the shores of the Mediterranean, from the confines of Asia to the Atlantic, men toiled to bum each other's cities, to waste each other's fields, to destroy each other's lives. In some lands there was heard the shout of victory, in some the wail of defeat. In all lands waste of war had produced bitter poverty; grief and fear were in every home." Source: James L. Stokesbury, author of A Short History of World War II. Country Dead Wounded The Allies Australia 23,365 39,803 Belgium 7,760 14,500 Canada 37,476 53,174 China 2,200,000 1,762,000 France 210,671 390,000 Poland 320,000 530,000 Soviet Union 7,500,000 5,000,000 United Kingdom 329,208 348,403 United States 405,399 671,278 The Axis Austria 380,000 350,117 Bulgaria 10,000 21,878 Finland 82,000 50,000 Germany 3,500,000 7,250,000 Hungary 140,000 89,313 Italy 77,494 120,000 Japan 1,219,000 295,247 Romania 300,000 When World War II ended in 1945, most of Europe lay in ruins. German cities like Dresden and Hamburg had practically been cremated from day-and-night Allied fire-bombings. Warsaw had been almost leveled to the ground by the Germans. The scorched-earth policies of both the Nazis and the Soviets had left much of European Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic States almost totally destroyed. The Nazi death camps had consumed not only the lives of six million Jews, but an equivalent number of Poles, Gypsies and other undesirables. Initiated by Germany as a way of terrorizing and demoralizing urban populations to speed German conquests, strategic warfare revolved around the use of air power to strike enemy cities. The effectiveness of the German campaigns were limited due to the relatively poor design of their bombers for this mission and small size of their air force. Near the middle of the war, the Allies began using large-scale strategic warfare against Germany. Using more effective bombers in greater quantities, they were able to create devastating impacts on German cities. By the end of the war, they were able to literally turn urban centers into fireballs, practically melting the city. The civilian losses were heavy, and in Germany were estimated around 300,000. Whether or not the campaign truly helped bring victory quicker remains unclear. Japan's civilian population was even more specifically attacked. Unlike Germany, who had an industrial base that allowed industry to be the primary target and the civilian population secondary, in Japan the nature of their industry made this impractical. Japan's civilian population was crowded into urban regions in cities that were built primarily of wood (unlike Germany's heavily stone-based architecture), which lent them to be attacked by incendiary bombs creating fires that overwhelmed entire cities. The United States employed newer and bigger bombers than against Germany as well. Ultimately though, the greatest strike came in the form of two nuclear attacks, each targeting a civilian population. Total Japanese casualties to the bombing was around 400,000. The campaign was however credited with precipitating the Japanese surrender. Japanese cities — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — lay incinerated from atomic blasts. Eight years of war and Japanese occupation in China had uprooted millions of Chinese who had taken refuge in the wild and hostile regions of western China; and tens of thousands had died trying to make their escape. Few forms of atrocity were excluded from the Eastern European theatre, including the killing of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians in the name of Lebensraum, of over a million Yugoslavs in disproportionate reprisal killings for Partisan activity, plus medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The population of Kiev dropped by 90% between the early 1930s and 1945, partly from starvation under Stalin, mostly under the Nazis. The Japanese Unit 731 experimented in Biological warfare in Manchuria In 1940 the Soviet Union murdered over 22000 citizens of Poland, mainly Polish officers, but also scientists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, priests and others. This genocide is known as the Katyn Massacre. Soviet occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1941 resulted in the death or deportation of least 1.8 million former Polish citizens. Though Article XXII of the draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare 1923 stated "aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants" was to be prohibited, these rules were not ratified by the Powers. Germany has been bombing civilian targets from the very first days of the war. In the first months of the war the British Government ordered the RAF to adhere strictly to the draft rules, but this restriction was progressively relaxed and abandoned altogether in 1942. By 1945 the strategic bombing of cities had been employed extensively by all sides. German bombing of Poland, Britain and the USSR initially caused shock but was soon exceeded by allied bombing. The deliberate firestorm bombing of Japanese and German cities, including Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden by Anglo-American forces and the American atomic bombing of 2 Japanese civilian populations, have been subject to criticism during the post-war era as possible war crimes; no action was taken against those responsible. From 1945 to 1949 German and Japanese officials, but no allied personnel, were prosecuted by Allied tribunals for war crimes. Accused of genocide and atrocities, many German officials were tried at the Nuremburg Trials and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial. During the Allied island advances in the Pacific, surrendering troops were almost routinely killed by Japanese, American and Australian troops. For identical behaviour against Americans during the Battle of the Bulge, German SS commanders were tried for war crimes after the war. The war crimes, more than the crimes against humanity, trials have been described as hypocritical "winners' justice", and many allied soldiers, including Winston Churchill, felt the same and many refused to testify. Finally, there was the moral cost exacted from America's befriending the Soviet Union. As a human charnel house, the Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany. Joseph Stalin was responsible for a minimum of 20 million deaths resulting from the terror famine in the Ukraine, the purges, and the Gulag. By becoming Stalin's ally, the United States gave Stalin a respectability he never could have earned, provided military assistance that may have saved his regime, and enabled his army to occupy half of Europe for 45 years. Stalin and his successors could boast that the Soviet Union was part of the noble crusade to defeat fascism. If you wish to experience the deep obscenity of that in stark perceptual form, simply study the famous photograph from the Yalta conference, where FDR, Churchill, and "Uncle Joe" (as Roosevelt referred to Stalin) sat side by side, satisfied smiles on their faces. But the costs to Americans cannot be stated merely in economic terms. Ten million Americans were conscripted; personal liberty was curtailed, dissent was limited. And how does one measure America's loss of political integrity entailed in President Roosevelt's systematic deception of the American people? As he travelled the country in the 1940 campaign promising Americans that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars," he was — at the same time — colluding with the British and provoking the Axis powers in search of a "back door to war." Formation of UNO World War II had appeared to pose an unprecedented threat to human civilization and gave impetus to the renewal of Wilson's vision of an international organization to keep the peace. Organizing efforts were begun even while the war was on. In June, 1945, 51 nations were represented at the founding conference in San Francisco. In October, 1945, the United Nations was officially established. Unlike the League of Nations, the UN had the full support and leadership of the United States, The Soviet Union and all the most significant nations of the world were members. The world community was thought to be entering a new era of international cooperation. The idea for the United Nations was elaborated in declarations signed at the wartime Allied conferences in Moscow and Tehran in 1943. United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested the name "United Nations" and the first official use of the term occurred on January 1, 1942 with the Declaration by the United Nations. During World War II, the Allies used the term "United Nations Fighting Forces" to refer to their alliance. From August to October 1944, representatives of France, the Republic of China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR met to elaborate the plans at the Dumbarton Oaks Estate in Washington, D.C. Those and later talks produced proposals outlining the purposes of the organization, its membership and organs, as well as arrangements to maintain international peace and security and international economic and social cooperation. These proposals were discussed and debated by governments and private citizens worldwide. On April 25, 1945, the United Nations Conference on International Organizations began in San Francisco. In addition to the Governments, a number of non-government organizations, including Lions Clubs International were invited to assist in the drafting of the charter. The 50 nations represented at the conference signed the Charter of the United Nations two months later on June 26. Poland, which was not represented at the conference, but for which a place among the original signatories had been reserved, added its name later, bringing the total of original signatories to 51. The UN came into existence on October 24, 1945, after the Charter had been ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council — Republic of China, France, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States — and by a majority of the other 46 signatories. The founders of the UN had high hopes that it would act to prevent conflicts between nations and make future wars impossible, by fostering an ideal of collective security. Those hopes have obviously not been fully realized. From about 1947 until 1991 the division of the world into hostile camps during the Cold War made agreement on peacekeeping matters extremely difficult. Following the end of the Cold War, there were renewed calls for the UN to become the agency for achieving world peace and co-operation, as several dozen active military conflicts continue to rage around the globe. The breakup of the Soviet Union has also left the United States in a unique position of global dominance, creating a variety of new problems for the UN (See the United States and the United Nations). Decolonisation Decolonization is the process by which a colony gains independence from a colonial power, a process opposite to colonization. Decolonization may involve peaceful negotiation and/or violent revolt by the native population. Decolonization in the strict sense is distinct from the break-up of traditional empires, and in modern academic discourse the period of decolonization generally refers to two major waves of independence from European colonial rule: From the late 18th century up through 19th century decolonization in the Americas occurred, beginning with American colonists' revolt against British rule in the present-day United States, and continuing through the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Latin America. In the 20th and 21st centuries "decolonization" usually refers to the achievement of independence by the various European colonies and protectorates in Asia and Africa following World War II. A particularly active period of decolonization occurred between 1945 to 1960, beginning with the independence of Pakistan and India from Great Britain in 1947. Decolonization in Asia 1931- Gandhi leads Salt March 1935: Government of India Act 1942: Quit India movements begins 1947: India and Pakistan are independent of Great Britain Decolonization in Africa 1948: First apartheid legislation in South Africa 1957: Ghana is first independent African nation 1960: Congo is granted independence from Belgium 1962: Algeria gains independence from France 1963: Organization for African Unity is formed Decolonization in the Middle East 1917: Balfour Declaration 1922: Britain receives League of Nations mandate for Palestine 1936-1939: Arab uprisings in Palestine 1948: Partition of Palestine and First Arab-Israeli War 1952: King Farouk is overthrown in Egypt 1956: Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal 1958: United Arab Republic is formed 1964: The Palestine Liberation Organization is formed. A list of the decolonised countries: Year Colonizer Event 1945 Japan Korea is independent after 40 years of Japanese rule, but then splits into communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. 1946 United States The Philippines are granted independence by the United States, which obtained them by replacing its historical colonizator Spain. United Kingdom The former emirate of Transjordan (present-day Jordan) becomes an independent Hashemite kingdom when Britain relinquishes UN trusteeship. 1947 United Kingdom India and Pakistan (including present-day Bangladesh) achieve independence in an attempt to separate the predominantly Hindu and Muslim parts of former British India. 1948 United Kingdom In the Far East, Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) become independent. In the Middle East, Israel becomes independent less than a year after the British government withdraws from the Palestine Mandate; the remainder of Palestine becomes part of the Arab states of Egypt and Transjordan. 1949 France Laos becomes independent. The Netherlands Independence of Indonesia is recognized. 1951 Italy Libya becomes an independent kingdom. 1952 United States Puerto Rico in the Antilles becomes an overseas Commonwealth, not independent. 1953 France France recognizes Cambodia's independence. 1954 France Vietnam's independence recognized, though the nation is partitioned. The Pondichery enclave is incorporated into India. United Kingdom The United Kingdom withdraws from the last part of Egypt it controls: the Suez Canal zone. 1956 United Kingdom Anglo-Egyptian Sudan becomes independent. France Tunisia and the sherifian kingdom of Morocco in the Maghreb achieve independence. 1957 United Kingdom Ghana becomes independent, initiating the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa. United Kingdom The Federation of Malaya becomes in...