Did WW2 Heads of State Want to Preserve Their Empires As Much as Defend Their Homelands?

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender and the fall of the Third Reich. Likewise, World War II is the single most studied conflict in human history. But most Western accounts offer a one-dimensional interpretation: the war was a noble crusade against fascism, creating a convenient parable about good and evil. But this depiction ignores a far messier reality. But what went through the minds of the actual heads of state that led their nations through the war? Did they fight according to our understanding, or did they want to defend their nations’ global empires and ancient legacy?

A case can be argued that World War II was not a battle in which democracy triumphed over totalitarianism but rather a massive colonial war waged by rival empires. The war formally ended the era of British and Japanese colonialism but established in their places the highly militarized Soviet and American states, whose access to nuclear weapons threatened the possibility of annihilation.

As we grapple with the legacy of the war and its influence on geopolitics today, historian and today’s guest Paul Thomas Chamberlin urges us to reconsider the conflict from a new perspective in his book “Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Sky here with another episode of the History Unplug podcast.
0:07.1	With the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II upon us, discussion still persist
0:12.5	about its origins, but many narratives have largely collapsed into this story.
0:17.1	The war was fought by the Allies against xenophobic fascism, whether by Imperial Japan and the East, Nazi Germany and the West, and due to allied victory, it led to the post-World War II international order of the rise of democratic nation states, and this model was ascended throughout the Cold War until achieving final victory at its end 30 years ago.
0:34.3	But is that the perspective that the national leaders of World War II held themselves?
0:38.4	If we look at what animated their desires to go to war, defend their nations in the 1920s and
0:42.9	1930s, were they thinking of a nation state, or were they still beholdens their idea of either
0:47.8	defending their empires for the British and French in this case, or creating and expanding
0:52.1	a brand new empire, in the case of the Soviets,
0:56.1	or do they have an empire not in name but in practice, like the United States, with its possessions
1:00.3	of the Pacific? In this episode, we're getting into the minds of the leaders of World War II,
1:05.0	how many of them still had the desire to protect their empires, and how this can explain
1:09.3	decision-making in the war, such as Winston Churchill
1:12.2	being almost equally heartbroken at losing Britain's hold in India as he did with the bombing of London.
1:17.8	I'm speaking of Paul Thomas Chamberlain, author of the book Scorched Earth, A Global History of World War II.
1:22.6	Hope you enjoyed this discussion.
1:26.6	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.
1:35.1	We recently passed an 80th anniversary of Victory Day for World War II.
1:39.7	And there are always different anniversaries and commemorations of different events.
1:43.8	And I remember when I was in grade school, there was the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
1:48.6	That anniversary was a commemoration of everything that happened.
1:51.7	You heard speeches of survivors, firsthand accounts.
	...

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