The German invasion of the Netherlands commenced on May 10, 1940 and ended with the Dutch armed forces’ capitulation four days later.1 Rapid and decisive though this defeat may have been, the Dutch military did manage to extract a political silver lining from its encounter with the Wehrmacht’s overwhelming power: German airborne troops sent behind the lines to capture the royal family in The Hague were held off long enough to allow the escape of Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter Juliana and son-in-law Prince Bernhard, along with their children, on May 12, followed by the queen herself on the 13th. The monarch’s initial plan of having the British destroyer on which she had embarked take her to join Dutch forces in the country’s southwest was overtaken by the rapid advance of German forces; all the royals ended up conveyed to London, with Princess Juliana eventually being sent on to Canada as a hedge against the contingency of a German invasion of the British Isles. The members of the Dutch cabinet, backed by a coalition of most of the country’s major political parties, also departed for Britain at the urging of several outspoken ministers, who overrode the hesitations of a somewhat shell-shocked prime minister, Dirk Jan de Geer. In London, they joined two ministers already visiting the UK for the coordination of military efforts. Queen and cabinet together constituted a government-in-exile for the duration of their country’s occupation by the enemy. During the weeks that followed, the prime minister’s inclination to negotiate some sort of compromise with a Germany whose victories seemed irreversible were overridden by a defiant queen, backed by a majority of the cabinet; Wilhelmina accepted de Geer’s resignation in August. His place was taken by Pieter Gerbrandy, a maverick member of the Anti-Revolutionary Party – a conservative Calvinist party supportive of strong central government and historically more open than de Geer’s Christian Historical Union to working across sectarian lines with Catholic parties. Gerbrandy’s voice had been critical in the cabinet’s original decision to decamp to the United Kingdom.

To be patriotic can be defined as placing one’s country’s interests above one’s own.1 Yet behind this disarmingly simple formulation lies a welter of complications. For one thing, the matter of what constitutes a country’s interests and who can best determine that is an inherently contested issue. Moreover, even as self-sacrifice is esteemed as the highest expression of patriotism, the rhetoric of political leaders and publicists tends to hold forth the promise of what one might term a patriotic version of theodicy, whereby those who defend their nation’s collective security and dignity will duly find their material recompense – or at least will help secure it for their surviving families and compatriots in the event they make the ultimate sacrifice on the field of battle. The longer an allegedly patriotic agenda is manifestly at odds with the welfare of a large proportion of a country’s citizens, the harder it becomes to sustain the claim that it is in fact patriotic.

Up to this point, the major units of analysis in this book have, predominantly, been countries that were internationally recognized as independent prior to their invasion by Axis powers in the early stages of the Second World War. Yet, when one casts one’s eyes upon Japan’s wartime conquests, one quickly realizes that, apart from China and Thailand, all the lands that fell under the sway of the Rising Sun during the Second World War had previously been held by overseas colonial powers – notably, the French in Indochina, the British in Burma and Malaya, the Dutch in what was later to be called Indonesia,1 and the Americans in the Philippines. In other words, these countries were occupied in the first place, which allowed Japanese propagandists to present their seizure as blows struck against Western imperialism rather than as assaults on the peoples of these lands. Regardless of the sincerity or lack of it in Japanese claims to be acting as liberators rather than conquerors of their fellow Asians, the context of prior colonization seems, at first sight, to preclude useful comparison with any cases in Europe, where the Habsburg and Romanov empires had collapsed some two decades prior to the onset of the Second World War.

If one pans one’s camera back from the intricate details of this chapter’s cases, one common feature that comes into view – at least among China, Yugoslavia, and Greece – is that the relative weakness, brittleness, and/or instability of the pre-war states in each of these countries may have lent itself to the rise of strong resistance movements. Taking over these states was a greater challenge for the occupiers than seizing control of countries pre-equipped with relatively effective and socio-geographically pervasive political and civil-service institutions, such as the Netherlands or France. That is to say, the occupiers found themselves with less of a cooptable set of instruments at their disposal: the weaker the governing infrastructure of the defeated state, the more challenging the occupier’s task of assuming the reins of power.1 The relative isolation of broad swaths of countryside from the systematic reach of centralized power – most notably in China – was conducive to the emergence, survival, and growth over time of significant movements of armed opposition to the occupiers and their indigenous allies or collaborators. These very conditions also lent themselves to civil wars between those who resisted and those who opted to work under the aegis of the occupiers, as well as, in most of these cases, among rival currents of the resistance movements.

The cases in this section involve countries whose governments and/or senior administrators remained at least initially in place under Axis hegemony, establishing a potential institutional locus for the definition and dissemination – or alienation – of patriotic attitudes and values under the circumstances of occupation. Particularly during the early period after military defeat, these leaders were left with at least some limited measure of autonomy in their interactions with the occupiers as well as in their relationship with their own citizenry. What choices did they make under those circumstances, to what extent and in what ways did they seek to legitimize them in patriotic terms, and to what degree did their publics appear to accept or reject such justifications?

It is striking that all three full-on European civil wars of the 1940s took place in southern European countries, following in the wake of the region’s last such conflict – the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). There is a suggestive echo here of the 1820–21 revolutions, which had begun in Spain and spread to Italy and Greece.1 In that earlier sequence, the unrest had followed the upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupations of Spain and Italy. In the twentieth-century instance, the outbreaks either preceded continental-scale warfare (in Spain’s case) or began in the very midst of brutal foreign occupations. Even in the case of Spain, the country’s civil war very rapidly became intertwined with the broader, continental and global rivalries between Communism, fascism/Nazism, and liberal democracy.

The eleven cases of wartime occupation discussed in this book have been arranged under three umbrella themes: patriotism, civil war, and colonial legacy, respectively. These have been intended to serve as comparative frameworks rather than denoting hard-and-fast typological categories. They do not come close to exhausting the pool of potential organizing principles, nor are they mutually exclusive. Patriotism was, obviously, a hotly contested issue in all these societies, not just those that retained a semblance of unitary sovereignty or administrative continuity. Deep internal divisions and inter-factional violence were not restricted to those countries included in the civil-war section. Even the category of colonialism has ragged boundaries. For example, Ukrainians’ pre-war relationships with Poland and the Soviet Union were more complicated than can be captured by a reductionist characterization of them as either victims of imperialism or not. Indeed, one of the effects of this comparative exercise has been to highlight the plasticity – particularly under the high-pressure circumstances of occupation – of concepts such as “patriotism,” “civil war,” and “anti-colonial struggle.” That said, some broad patterns marking relations of occupiers with occupied can be discerned.

The myth of a patriotic closing of the ranks in shared resistance to foreign oppressors was central to the shaping of public memory of the war in much of formerly occupied parts of post-war Eurasia. The fact that significant cross-sections of societies – and not just handfuls of opportunistic “traitors” – may have accommodated, or even collaborated with, Axis occupiers to one degree or another was commonly swept under the carpet in the aftermath of the purge trials that followed liberation. It was only in later decades, if at all, that national historiographies began to contend systematically with the much more complicated historical realities and the uncomfortable moral and political ambiguities they presented.1

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