So total war involves the participation of entire populations, as we saw with World War War.

But if anything, populations participated, farm or both willingly and unwillingly across Eurasia and Africa during World War Two.

Lethal weapons played a huge role, of course, but so did human labor and the systems we created to capture and allocate Resource is not just guns and ships, but also food and medications and even books decide just one example.

Shortly before the American writer F.

Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he tried to find one of his books at several bookstores, but none carried them because he and his work were almost entirely for gotten until the U.

S Army started sending out.

Armed service is editions of novels to soldiers in the war.

Among the books distributed was Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which went from being almost out of print to being a great American novel, thanks to the U.

S.

Soldiers who read it and the army that distributed it.

In military history, we tend to focus on the generals and the weaponry, both of which are important.

But to really understand World War Two.

We also need to look at the experiences of soldiers and civilians.

Most Europeans did not welcome the war.

I mean, remember, World War had only ended a couple of decades earlier, and it had been a horrific trauma that many felt Hatton, in the end, done much to make the world better.

In Germany, however, many soldiers were riding a wave of nationalist enthusiasm that Hitler had aroused with his attacks on the verse I treaty and the takeover of the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

And they were also mostly enthusiastic about the invasion of Poland in 1939.

Which brings us to a big point in our study of history.

We like to cordon evil off to make evil the domain of a few demented individuals, ideally, individuals who seem quite different from us.

But whether it's the transatlantic slave trade or Nazism or the genocide will explore next week, we see again and again that evil is not the product of demented individuals.

It is the product of demented social orders.

Yes, it took a leader like Hitler to encourage others to dehumanize and destroy the lives of outsiders.

But why are we willing to listen to such voices?

And so another reason to look at the war, as experienced by so called regular people is that it paints in stark relief the reality that evil is not exceptional, but right back to the war.

Italian soldiers also enthused not just over their conquest of Ethiopia but of Mussolini's attacks that coordinated with Germany's.

Even in the depths of battlefield suffering, commitment and loyalty to Mussolini were very strong.

Terrible night from the 17th to the 18th.

One wrote home in that night, which I will remember all my life, which I would pass entirely on foot under the snow and rain that soaked my shoes and froze three toes.

The only thing that keeps me always on my feet and always ready faith in God and in the douche that is Mussolini.

Throughout the war, soldiers suffered and died in extraordinary numbers, but civilian losses were even worse.

In fact, they were much worse across Europe.

Houses, public buildings and factories were bombed, with entire towns and villages sometimes obliterated along with their inhabitants.

In Britain, close toe, 1/3 of all housing was entirely destroyed.

Germans dropped 30,000 bombs on the city of Swansea alone in a three day raid in 1941 theat allies, in turn, fire bombed German cities, including Dresden, which became the subject of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five.

Still, soldiers endured unendurable hardship, especially on the eastern front, and especially as Hitler stopped the production of warm winter clothing and other necessities, many soldiers froze to death.

But they somehow still remained motivated.

As is often the case in war, soldiers and the personnel who served them, even if not ideologically aligned with the government's they served, often reported ultimately fighting not for country or for ideology, but for their comrades, who they came to see as bands of brothers and sisters decide just one example.

Very.

Ivanovna Talackova, a Russian doctor in the prolonged and horrific battle of Stalingrad, noted that she was saved by the senior physician in her regiment as he found a horse, gave her his spare pair of slacks and wrapped the horse's mane around her hands.

Eventually they found more soldiers, and together they found safety, and that's how I got out of the encirclement, she said.

Thanks to the loyalty of the senior physician and the unity of the comrades in arms and what we often think of the lives of soldiers as being all about shooting or being shot When you read accounts written by regular soldiers, one thing that comes up again and again is the daily challenges, the miseries of being cold and tired and hungry.

Did the center of the world just opened?

There's some Campbell's soup in here, which I'm going to enjoy later.

We don't talk nearly enough in military history about food soldiers, what with the constant marching and digging need thio eat a lot.

Strategies for feeding soldiers varied throughout the war, but in the U.

S.

Army, one of the strategies used was the C ration, which came in a can and in three varieties meat and beans, meat and potato hash or meat and vegetable stew.

By most accounts, none of them were great, but also initially they came with very flimsy paper wrapping, which fell off immediately and so you didn't know which one you were gonna get.

But at least you always knew you were going to get meat.

Oh, I mean, suddenly, Campbell's tomato soup seems amazing, but of course, most of the combatants in Europe in World War Two.

We're not Americans.

They were fighting closer to home, and for many, the home front was also a battlefront.

So the line between civilian and military blurred as civilians might be informers or collaborators or resistors.

And the nature of governments was also changing on whatever still existed of the Home Front.

Government was expanding, as it often does during total war, to allocate goods and organized transportation.

European governments often decided how much food and clothing people could access through ration cards, and governments took control of transport, medical and other systems, a change that would have a deep and lasting effect in Europe.

The war changed Europeans ideas about what governments could and should do.

For instance, there was no National health service in the United Kingdom before World War Two.

Let's go to the thought bubble.

Governments actually sent out recipes for cooking, showing how air sensor alternative ingredients could be used as substitutes for scarce products like meat, fats and sugar.

For example, instead of coffee, consumers could drink hot beverages made from herbs or other plants like hickory, and governments were also involved in art making and propaganda to boost in militarize civilian morale and also to entertain.

Filmmakers were directed by governments to make patriotic films about war heroes successfully facing off with evil enemy forces.

A soldier in the Soviet film two warriors sings around the campfire about his wife, tending the cradle and of the ways in which the knowledge of her fidelity saves his life.

Despite the bullets whizzing by, soldiers and officers stationed in large cities and capitals like Paris often enjoyed peace time entertainment in cafes alongside privileged urban residents.

Meanwhile, many authors, composers, entertainers and scholars escaped to enrich the culture and science of the United States, Canada and other places of refuge, from the painter P et Mondrian to the novelist Thomas Mann in Paris, some of the most famous actors performed during the occupation toe audiences in which German officers have the best seats.

After the war, these performers countered charges of collaboration with the defense that they were doing a job.

Or as one French working class woman said Under the occupation, everyone worked for the Germans.

Thanks Thought bubble ideas about gender also played an important role in the war.

Nazi ideology never shut up about the German males, invincibility and racial superiority.

Women who knew their place were supposed to concentrate on breeding and raising the next generations of racial patriots to support their male masters.

In fact, there were bronze, silver and gold.

Mother's Cross is based on how many Children you had.

Bronze if you had four or five kids, silver if you had six or seven and gold if you had eight or more Nazis and Italian fascists removed women from the workforce, except for jobs is domestic servants and agricultural workers.

Many women adhered to the Nazi ideology of women's subservience by keeping themselves occupied in the household, even at the height of the war, when their labor was sorely needed in industrial production.

In contrast, Soviet women rushed to defend the nation, especially after the invasion by the Nazis.

The USSR did share the ideology that men were the armed protectors and women and Children, the inferior protected ones.

But it also talked a lot about equality, especially around jobs in heavy industry.

Women worked with big machinery, and in the early days of the war they were enlisted in battlefront nursing corps and then, as the German invasion expanded, tens of thousands of Soviet women rushed to join the front line troops.

As the Communist newspaper Pravda editorialized in 1941 a Soviet woman who loves her motherland passionately.

And if the enemy dares to attack our country, the enemy will be beaten, beaten without mercy.

Woman will stand up as a fighter, equal in her rights.

Next to man, say what you will about the Soviets, but, my God, they could do some propaganda.

So hundreds of thousands of Soviet women participated in combat, and hundreds of thousands more were army nurses and doctors order, lease and support staff to the military.

British women also contributed as the National Service Act of December 1941 conscripted women into military farming or munitions jobs from 1943 until the war's end.

80% of married women in the UK and 90% of single women served the war effort, including playing crucial roles in code breaking and the secret planning of military campaigns.

And even though they were forbidden to assume combat roles, many women still learn to use rifles and other weapons on their own time.

Others weren't tow fly airplanes as conditions worsened for Germany.

With the Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi officials tried to achieve the full employment of women that had put the USSR and Britain's productivity so far ahead of Germany's but propagandizing that women's role was in the home and subservient to the male protector had been all too successful.

Meanwhile, in Leningrad and in Bengal, millions of people were dying because of wartime famine.

Germans began the siege of Leningrad in September 1941 cutting off heating and food supplies, starving citizens, eight cats and birds and castor oil, and even the glue from their wallpaper.

But as one noted with black humor, not all people in the enormous city had such supplementary sources of food.

Deprived of nourishment.

Lenin Graeter's nonetheless Doug anti tank trenches and watched for fire set by German infiltrators as bodies piled up in a city that lacked would for coffins.

Still, radio and live performances continued, aiming to boost morale.

When the siege ended in January 1944 between 800,000 and 1.4 million people had died.

Among them was a child named Victor Putin, whose parents nearly died of starvation but survived the war.

Their third son, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952.

And then there was the civilian catastrophe that was the scorched earth infliction of famine on India in 1943 the very colony that contributed some 2.5 million soldiers to the British war cause.

In that year, Winston Churchill, the unquestionably racist if eloquent British prime minister, had thousands of tons of grain removed from India and sent to build up supplies at home using several justifications.

The British claim the Indians already had plenty of food, that the Japanese might take it all if they invaded and that the British needed the grain Maur than the already fat Indians.

Australia and the United States offered grain to India, but Churchill had those offers rebuffed, perhaps to weaken the Indian drive for independence.

This manufactured famine led to the deaths of an estimated three million Children and adults.

It is also another reminder that famines on that scale are almost never natural and are almost always inflicted by humans on each other.

Next time, we will consider the Holocaust and further mass murder in World War Two.

But I want to leave you today with the Bengal famine because it is a horrifying reminder of what happens when we imagine others as less than human.

There were, of course, also heroes throughout the war.

Agricultural scientists in Leningrad who starved to death while surrounded by edible seeds that they had sworn to protect for future harvests.

Indian men and women who gave what little they had to those in greater need.

Wartime resistors who helped escapees over borders or onto boats to safety.

That is also part of human nature, but none of us is immune from the evil that inevitably proceeds from the dehumanization of others.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time.

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