Understanding Who Saved Humanity: A Restorationist History

This study was written by Neville Roy Singham, chair of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s advisory board. The author acknowledges with gratitude the crucial support of the Tricontinental team, spanning multifaceted research, comprehensive statistical analysis, technical infrastructure, and the production of this publication. An earlier version of this study was published in Guancha (观察者网), whose editors provided valuable advice for further research and analysis. The author takes full responsibility for any errors or omissions in this work.

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW), the Western powers spin their familiar tale: US industrial might and British resolve saved the world from fascism. This is a lie. The truth burns in the numbers: while the Western powers calculated their economic advantage, the Soviet and Chinese peoples paid in blood. Fascism was defeated not by Anglo-American capital but by socialist leadership and mass heroism – a brilliant strategy from Moscow and Yan’an, unbreakable resilience from workers and peasants who refused to surrender, and a sacrifice that saved humanity from slavery.

The real war began not in 1939, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, but in 1931, when Japan invaded Northeast China (东北).1 For ten years, China fought mainly alone except for Soviet aid, which included planes and pilots. Britain, France, and the United States sent only minimal aid to China from 1937 to 1941. Washington and London would rather count profits.

Throughout the same decade, the Soviet Union raced against time, force-marching industrialisation while knowing invasion was imminent. Josef Stalin’s February 1931 speech to industrial managers predicted with terrible precision: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.2 Ten years later – June 1941 – the Wehrmacht invaded. The USSR had exactly one decade to prepare for a war everyone knew was coming. The preparation was not enough to prevent the initial catastrophe, but it was exactly enough to enable recovery.

The Atlantic powers’ initial strategy until just before their entry into the war was simple and cynical: let fascism and communism destroy each other.

1. The West’s Deliberate Delay: A Strategy of Treachery

The timeline of Western betrayal speaks for itself. From 1931 to 1941, as Japan carved up China, Western banks maintained their offices in Tokyo, Western oil fuelled Japanese warships, and Western scrap metal became Japanese bullets.3 When full-scale invasion erupted in 1937 – the Rape of Nanjing, the terror bombing of Chinese cities – the Allied imperialists’ response was to sell more oil to Japan. The US provided 80% of Japan’s petroleum until 1941.4

This was not isolation but calculated provision – fascism executing what the failed White Encirclement could not accomplish. By 1941, 250 US corporations operated in Nazi Germany.5 Thomas Watson of IBM automated the Holocaust while maintaining personal friendships with both US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.6 General Motors’ German subsidiary Opel produced Wehrmacht trucks until 1944, with GM later claiming a $22.7 million tax write-off for its ‘abandoned’ Nazi operations.7 The US continued strategically to be economically, politically, and militarily committed to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Western historiography attributes this late US entry to ‘isolationism’. This ahistorical view ignores documented precedent: during the White Encirclement of 1919, the US deployed 11,500 troops to Russia – 4,500 to Arkhangelsk and 7,000 to Vladivostok – alongside British, French, and Japanese forces, fighting the Red Army directly with over 500 US casualties.8 US President Woodrow Wilson also provided more than $50 million in military support to White armies. When direct military intervention failed to nip socialism in the bud, the strategy shifted. US policymakers consistently favoured right-wing autocrats who promised stability and anti-Bolshevism over democratic movements. This policy produced open support for European fascism. In 1933, President Roosevelt stated that he was ‘deeply impressed by what [Benito Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy’.9

The first British strategy, even when it entered the war, was to let Hitler and Stalin exhaust each other. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France, while declaring war on Germany, did nothing – the ‘Phoney War’ lasted eight months while they hoped Hitler would turn east. Winston Churchill’s anti-communist hatred defined his career. In 1919, he sought to ‘strangle Bolshevism in its cradle’.10 By 1945, with Hitler barely dead, he planned Operation Unthinkable – using Wehrmacht forces to attack the Soviet Union.11

Churchill’s genocidal impulses targeted communists and colonised peoples equally. His racial violence was extensive: celebrating killing ‘savages’ at Omdurman (1898), supporting concentration camps that killed forty-eight thousand Africans and Boers, and advocating poison gas for Iraqi ‘uncivilised tribes’ (1920). By 1942, as Bengal starved, he told Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’. When Amery begged for famine relief, Churchill replied that Indians ‘breed like rabbits’.12 Three million Indians died while Britain exported Bengal’s rice. After Churchill’s India tirade, Leo Amery wrote in his diary: ‘I couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s’.13 Today, Britain venerates this man, who differed from Hitler only in his victory.

The US entered the war only when it was directly attacked at Pearl Harbor (Hawaiʻi) – a decade into Japan’s war against China. The Second Front, promised for 1942, was not delivered until June 1944 – 730 days late, after the battles at Stalingrad (1942–1943) and Kursk (1943) had already broken the Wehrmacht’s spine.14 By D-Day, the Red Army had already destroyed the myth of German invincibility and Nazi defeat was already determined. The US and Britain had to invade continental Europe in 1944, by which time the Soviet Union had already guaranteed the defeat of Germany, to ensure that the socialist USSR did not liberate the entire continent, threatening capitalism in Western as well as Eastern Europe.

US priorities were clear: better a fascist Europe than a socialist one. Better Japanese domination of Asia than Chinese liberation and the expansion of socialism. The metropolitan powers’ hatred of communism and love of their colonies outweighed their anti-fascist principles.

2. When Inter-Imperialist Rivalries Mattered

The Western strategy towards Nazi Germany followed a logic established in 1917. When British intervention failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks, geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder – appointed high commissioner to organise support for the White Army – recommended that German rearmament, though dangerous to British interests, was essential as a bulwark against Bolshevik control of Eastern Europe. The Treaty of Versailles (1919), as economist Thorstein Veblen observed, was fundamentally ‘a compact for the reduction of Soviet Russia’ – a goal that, while ‘not written into the text of the Treaty’, was nonetheless ‘the parchment upon which the text was written’.15 This remained Western strategy through 1945: contain and destroy the USSR, even if it meant enabling fascism.

At Munich in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formalised this strategy with Hitler: Germany would receive a ‘free hand’ in Eastern Europe to attack the USSR in exchange for respecting British imperial interests. Yet inter-imperialist rivalry imposed limits. Britain wanted Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union but feared that unchecked German expansion would threaten the British Empire itself – the contradiction explains both the collusion and Britain’s eventual war declaration.

When Britain sent negotiators to Moscow by slow merchant ship, Admiral Reginald Drax arrived without written authority – the message was unmistakable: no real alliance with communists.16 Foreign Secretary Halifax praised Hitler in a 1937 meeting as a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’, while a 1939 government-endorsed pamphlet by Lord Lloyd of Dolobran identified Hitler’s ‘final apostasy’ not as invading Poland but as signing the German-Soviet pact—‘the betrayal of Europe’.17 Facing isolation, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 – not from choice but from necessity created by Western collusion with Hitler.

In the following twenty-two months (September 1939–mid-June 1941), the Soviet Union more than tripled its army from 1.6 to 5.3 million, doubled its tank production from 2,794 units in 1940 to 6,590 in 1941 (including 1,225 T-34s), and moved entire industries eastward. US attachés reported massive industrial transfers to the Urals by late 1940, before the invasion. The USSR pushed its borders 200–300 kilometres west, trading space for time. Stalin knew war was coming.18

In May 1940, Churchill became prime minister as France and Britain’s army fled Dunkirk. Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax proposed negotiating peace through Mussolini – Germany could have Europe if Britain kept its empire.19 Churchill opposed this plan, not from principle but out of arithmetic. If Germany were allowed to conquer Europe, its strength would mean it could later overturn any peace agreement and defeat Britain. To take only one example, the Caucasus produced 25.4 million tonnes of oil annually – 80% of Soviet output. Germany had 3.1 months of oil reserves.20 If Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler seized Soviet resources, Britain faced certain defeat.

By continuing the war, Churchill forced Germany to maintain forty-nine divisions in Western Europe and Norway – 24% of total Wehrmacht strength that could not be deployed against the USSR.21 While significant, this did not prevent the assembly of history’s largest invasion force.

Germany launched Operation Barbarossa with 153 German divisions totalling over 3 million troops. The Imperial War Museum, Britain’s unrepentant national museum, calculates that 80% of the German Army was committed to this invasion.22 Additionally, 36 Axis-allied divisions joined the assault – 16 Finnish, 15 Romanian, 3 Italian, and 2 Slovak – bringing the total to 189 divisions. This force of nearly 4 million troops represented the overwhelming concentration of Axis military power. The Eastern Front was not another theatre of war but the primary site of fascist aggression, where the Wehrmacht deployed its best units, most experienced commanders, and maximum strength.

This was the largest military invasion in human history. Yet the Soviet Union defeated this unprecedented assault through its own strategic depth, mass mobilisation, and industrial relocation.

Facing extremely powerful adversaries, Stalin and Mao Zedong took into account how to exploit inter-imperialist rivalries that became so intense by the 1940s. These inter-imperialist contradictions – contingent moments when empire’s internal conflicts accidentally serve revolutionary forces – are usually brief and unreliable. They emerge unpredictably from capitalism’s internal contradictions, must be recognised and leveraged when they appear, but never mistaken for a strategic alliance.

3. Economic Power in 1941: The Myth of Western Might

In 1941, world GDP totalled approximately $4.5–$5 trillion (in 1990 international dollars). Those with the greatest capacity to fight fascism deliberately chose not to do so.

As documented by economic historian Mark Harrison in his book The Economics of World War II (1998), the Anglo-American imperial core commanded approximately 30.2% of world GDP. The US alone controlled $1,094 billion – roughly 22–24% of global output – while maintaining comfortable neutrality a decade into the WAFW. The British Empire added $344 billion (7–8% of world GDP), extracted from 427 million colonial subjects. In total, this camp (the US and its territories and the British Empire as defined by the British in 1941) controlled 28.6% of the world’s population. The US remained neutral until it was attacked. Britain declared war but prioritised empire.

Sources: Population data mainly from Maddison (2010); GDP data mainly from Harrison (1998), p. 10, table 1.3; USSR population for 1941 from Statista (2025); China and world-total GDP are corroborated estimates by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. See Section 2 for full methodology.

The US dedicated just 11% of its GNP to military spending before Pearl Harbor. The US military in December 1941 fielded only 1.62 million troops from a population of 133.9 million – just 1.2% of its population was under arms. By contrast, Germany had 7.3 million troops from a population of 70.2 million (10.4%), and the Soviet Union had 7.1 million from a population of 195.4 million (3.6%) by year’s end. Britain, despite declaring war in 1939, had reached 53% of national expenditure on military efforts, but much of this went to protecting empire, not fighting fascism directly. In North Africa, British forces fought to maintain colonial control, not liberate populations. Churchill’s quote: ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister to liquidate the British Empire’. 23

Sources: Troops data from Harrison (1998), p. 14, table 1.5; population from Maddison (2010) and Statista (2025). See Section 2 for full methodology.

The fascist-imperialist Axis had weaponised its economies. Germany devoted 52% of GNP to military spending in 1941, reaching 70% by 1943, and fielded 3 million troops for the Barbarossa invasion (1941). Other Axis powers fielded an additional 500,000 to 700,000 troops (Romania, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia), thus allowing Hitler to claim that this was a pan-European operation. It was and remains the largest military invasion in human history. Japan maintained 1.7 million soldiers in China with a military burden of 27% of GDP after a decade of continuous warfare.

The Axis, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan, also included pact signatories Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Croatia, with Finland as a co-belligerent. The Axis powers and the territories they controlled commanded approximately 20.1% of world GDP. This figure was composed of contributions from Germany proper ($412 billion), the annexed territory of Austria ($29 billion), Japan ($196 billion), Italy ($144 billion), the heavily industrialised occupied territory of France ($130 billion), and the other members (approximately $47 billion). In addition to this, ‘neutral’ collaborators, including Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, contributed a separate 2.6% of world GDP to the Axis economic sphere.

The socialist camp – the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist base areas that would tie down 60% of Japanese forces – represented approximately 8% of world GDP with $359 billion. By mid-1941, with German armies deep in Soviet territory, even this was shrinking. Yet the Soviets had mobilised 28% of GNP for military expenditure. The Red Army expanded the army’s peacetime strength from 1.5 million on 1 January 1938 to over 5 million in June 1941.24

China’s tragedy was written in numbers. Controlling 23% of the world’s population (490–525 million people), China generated only around 5% of world GDP after its century of humiliation and a decade of Japanese devastation. Official data from the Kuomintang (KMT) government is scarce. In 1937, the year of full escalation of Japanese aggression, the estimate for KMT troops was 1.7 million; by 1941, the US military estimated 3.8 million troops. A scholarly monograph on Chinese military history estimated that there were 6 million KMT troops in the summer of 1941.25 The people’s army, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), grew from 56,000 in 1937 to around 440,000 in 1941 and 1.3 million in 1945.26 With little domestic arms production, military capacity depended on foreign supplies, especially from the Soviet Union. China had people but few weapons, courage but little industry, resistance but scant resources.

The pattern of foreign aid exposed priorities. Between October 1937 and June 1941, while the US watched, the Soviet Union provided China with over $250 million in credits, 1,235 aircraft, thousands of artillery pieces, tens of thousands of machine guns, as well as ammunition and supplies.27 The Soviets sent more than 2,000 pilots – 200 of whom died defending Chinese cities – and military advisers.28 While the USSR was fighting for survival, it still managed to send aid that represented 0.07% of Soviet GDP annually. Soviet pilots flew combat missions over Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chongqing. Before Pearl Harbor, the US provided almost nothing despite commanding 22–24% of world GDP.

Even after entering the war, China received just $632 million in Lend-Lease aid (1941–1945) while Britain, along with its two white settler states (Australia and New Zealand), received $25.8 billion of the $30.3 billion assigned by the US to the ‘British Empire’.

Sources: Lend-Lease aid numbers from US Department of State (1945), p. 14, table 2, and pp. 42–43, table 25; population data from Maddison (2010); China death data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; India death data from Sen (1977), p. 36. See Section 2 for full methodology.*‘British India’ here refers to India and today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Lend-Lease aid and population numbers for British India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) are included here.*‘White settler states’ refers to Australia and New Zealand.

Chart 1: Per capita aid: whites received $442.3 per person; non-whites (China, British India, and Ceylon) received $4.4 – a 101:1 ratio

Chart 2: Per death valuation: white deaths ‘valued’ at $52,913; non-white (China, British India) deaths at $155 – a 341:1 ratio

The British Empire in 1945 (as defined by the US in the Lend-Lease Programme) consisted of 58.3 million whites and 443.1 million non-white subjects. The mathematics was simple: the US directed 85.1% of the British Empire’s Lend-Lease aid to whites, who comprised only 11.6% of the Empire’s population.

From 1945 to 1948, the US provided at least $1.4 billion to Chiang Kai-shek’s government, with over half being military aid – double the $700 million in military aid given during the WAFW – excluding substantial surplus property sales.29 Additional aid continued through 1949 when the Nationalists lost the civil war. The formula: minimal help against Japan, maximum support against communism.

Poignant observations were made by two articles in Historical Review published by the China Academy of Social Sciences in August 2025:

First: Overall, in the early stages of the full-scale War of Resistance, the Soviet Union’s vital assistance to a China engaged in an arduous struggle was like ‘offering fuel in snowy weather’.

Second: After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the US actively aided and supported the Kuomintang reactionaries in launching a civil war and signed the seemingly reciprocal but actually unequal ‘Sino-American Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation’ with the Nationalist government, aiming to maintain influence over China through economic control and military intervention.

The economic arithmetic was clear: the Anglo-Americans had the money but would not fight. The fascists had militarised everything. The socialists had little but gave all.

Source: Harrison (1998), p. 21, table 1.8. See appendix for a verbatim transcript of the source data.

4. China’s Fourteen-Year Resistance: The Forgotten Foundation of Victory

China’s fourteen-year resistance against Japanese imperialism tied down the bulk of Japanese land forces throughout the war. Chinese forces prevented over half a million Japanese soldiers from attacking the Soviet Far East or sweeping through the Pacific.30 As the war progressed, increasing numbers of KMT soldiers defected to the Communist forces, strengthening the guerrilla resistance. Every Chinese soldier who held a position with obsolete weapons and an empty stomach prevented a Japanese soldier from fighting elsewhere. China’s military weakness made its resistance more heroic, not less.

The Red Army soldiers who fled Ruijin, site of the first Chinese Soviet Republic, crossed frozen mountains in straw sandals in 1935 while KMT bombers with US engines hunted them from above.31 Blood froze in their footprints. Toes turned black and fell off. Those who survived became the core of guerrilla forces that by 1940 tied down 60% of Japanese troops.

The following numbers shatter every myth about who won this war:

Sources: USSR data from Andreev et al. (1993); China data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; India data from Sen (1977), p. 36. See appendix for full methodology.

The deployment patterns expose the truth: socialist forces were desperately engaged in existential struggle while capitalist forces carefully husbanded their strength for post-war advantage.

5. The Blood Price: Who Really Defeated Fascism

The global struggle against fascism killed 85 million human beings.

That is 3.8% of humanity: dead.

Sources: USSR death data from Andreev et al. (1993); China death data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405; French Indochina population from Budge (2014) and death data from The National WWII Museum New Orleans (n.d.); other population data from Maddison (2010). See appendix for full methodology.

Who paid this price reveals who saved the world. The arithmetic will destroy every lie that the late arrivals have said about this war, not as statistics but as accusations. Every number is a crime – every percentage a verdict.

59.8% socialists dead, 13.1% colonised peoples dead – only 1% Anglo-Americans dead.

This was not their war. It was their profit.

Sources: USSR data from Andreev et al. (1993); China data from Bian (2012), pp. 401–405 and p. 442. See appendix for full methodology.

But even these deaths tell only half the horror. The wounded – those who survived maimed, traumatised, broken – vanished from Western history. We restore them here: thirteen to eighteen million Soviets wounded – ignored. Each lived with pain that Washington and London never felt. Every Western soldier wounded became a casualty worthy of pensions, medals, remembrance. The eleven to twenty-six million wounded Chinese vanished from history as if they never existed, never suffered, never mattered.

The arithmetic convicts: socialist forces suffered 59.8% of all WAFW deaths with less than 15% of world GDP. In Korea, 99% of deaths were Korean or Chinese. In Vietnam, 99% of the deaths were Southeast Asian. The pattern screams across three wars, across five decades, and across continents – those with nothing saved humanity while those with everything preserved their strength for the post-war plunder.

6. The Soviet Union Destroyed Fascism in Europe

The Red Army eliminated or decisively defeated the Wehrmacht’s strength in battles that decided humanity’s fate: Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. The price: 27 million Soviet deaths.32 That’s 13.8% of the Soviet population based on a population of 196.0 million in 1940. That is 1.2% of the entire world’s population wiped out because they stood between fascism and the rest of us.

These were not abstract statistics. Whole villages where no men between the ages of eighteen and fifty survived. The Soviet Union inflicted 9 million of Germany’s 11.1 million military casualties. This victory was partly possible because China’s resistance prevented Japan from attacking the Soviet Far East during 1941–1942 when Moscow hung by a thread. As President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in 2025, China’s resistance was ‘one of the crucial factors that prevented Japan from stabbing the Soviet Union in the back during the darkest months’.

Among Soviet deaths were 1.3 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust’s eastern killing fields, 3.3 million prisoners of war deliberately starved in German camps, and millions of civilians killed in accordance with Generalplan Ost (Master Plan for the East) and other Nazi racial policies targeting ‘subhuman’ Slavs.33

7. China’s Demographic Catastrophe

At least 23.6 million deaths were documented from 1937 to 1945 alone – 20.6 million direct deaths from combat and massacres, plus 3 million from the 1942 Henan famine caused by the Japanese disruption. Before that, from 1931 to mid-1937, the Japanese invasion also resulted in an estimated 450,000 deaths. The total documented deaths from 1931 to 1945: 24.05 million. With wounded included, total casualties reached 35 million. However, even this staggering figure understates the catastrophe. When including the 15 million who were never born because of the war’s destruction, China’s total population loss exceeded 50 million. The West acknowledges perhaps 15–20 million dead, ignores the wounded entirely, and erases the demographic hole that took generations to fill.34

The forced-labour system added another dimension to this genocide: from 1935 to 1945, 20% of the 11.5 million forced labourers in Northeast China died (2.3 million deaths). Among the 38,935 forced labourers shipped to Japan, 17.5% were killed in the emperor’s homeland, according to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historian Bian Xiuyue.35 This research documents the genocide in precise terms, not with vague estimates.

The Western insistence on counting only deaths performs a double erasure. When 35 million Chinese were killed or wounded, focusing only on the West’s understated count of 20 million or fewer deaths erases at least 11 million wounded people whose lives were destroyed by Japanese aggression.

China’s 2015 government survey, involving 600,000 participants, documented systematic extermination through multiple methods. The Nanjing Massacre: 300,000 killed in six weeks and an estimated 20,000–80,000 rapes.36 Japan’s ‘Three Alls’ campaign – ‘Kill all, burn all, loot all’ – turned entire provinces into graveyards. Even regular POW camps revealed a national chauvinism extermination policy: Japan killed 99.9% of Chinese prisoners but only 27.1% of Western POWs.37

8. The Colonial Holocaust: Eleven Million Erased

While the imperial powers preserved their strength, their colonies bled. A total of 11.2 million colonial subjects died – more than ten times the total Anglo-American war death toll.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million Indians through British policy. While Bengalis starved, Britain exported rice from Bengal and denied relief ships.38 Churchill told his private secretary that ‘the Hindus were a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’. He wished that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, head of the British Bomber Command, could ‘send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them’.39

The Dutch East Indies lost 3.4 million people – 4.7% of the population. Both colonial powers killed them – the Dutch through centuries of extraction that left them defenceless, the Japanese through forced labour, starvation, and systematic violence.

In Java alone, 1.8 million excess deaths occurred between 1944 and 1945. The rōmusha forced-labour system sent 300,000 Indonesians overseas; only 77,000 returned.40 On the Sumatra Railway alone, 17,000 of 22,000 Javanese labourers died – a mortality rate of 77%.

French Indochina: 1.5 million deaths – 6.5% of the population. The 1944–1945 famine killed 1–2 million Vietnamese through the combined extraction of Japanese requisitions and continued French colonial administration.

Burma: 270,000 to perhaps as high as 1 million dead under Japanese occupation while Britain fled, destroying oil fields but abandoning the Indian labourers and Burmese civilians who had no means of escape. The Thailand-Burma Railway (402 kilometres) killed 215 people per kilometre of track laid: 31 Western POW deaths per kilometre, 184 Asian labourer deaths per kilometre – a six-fold racial calculus.41 The shorter Kra Isthmus Railway (90 kilometres) had an even higher mortality rate of 537 deaths per kilometre (Huff, 2020), constructed entirely by Asian workers whose deaths went largely undocumented by Japanese authorities. Of an estimated 260,000–270,000 total workers on both railways, approximately 90,000–140,000 Asian labourers perished, including significant numbers among the more than 100,000 Malays and Tamils conscripted from British territories.

Malaya and Singapore: up to 150,000. Philippines: 765,000.42 Portuguese Timor: 14% to 19% of its population – the highest death rate of any territory in South Asia.43

The colonial arithmetic: killed by fascist occupation while colonial masters hoarded resources. Indians starved; Britain had grain. Indonesians died; Dutch extraction had built nothing to save them. Vietnamese perished; France maintained its extraction apparatus even under Japanese rule.

Eleven million colonial deaths. Museums memorialise the 12,000 US and Filipino soldiers who died in the Bataan Death March.44 The rōmusha who built the Burma Railway – 90,000–100,000 dead – have no museum nor movie like Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

9. Africa: Two Million Erased

Africa became the Allies’ emergency reserve when France fell, and the Western colonies in Asia were lost to Japan. Britain, France, and Belgium extracted maximum resources from African colonies while fighting a war supposedly for freedom. Between 1.6 and 2 million Africans died – from fascist invasion, forced labour, combat service, and systematic starvation. Colonial authorities, who tracked copper production down to the metric tonne, never counted African deaths.

Ethiopia: The First Battlefield

The WAFW began in Africa in 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. A 1945 Ethiopian government memorandum documented 760,300 deaths: 275,000 battle deaths, 300,000 from hunger among refugees, 75,000 patriots killed during occupation, 35,000 in concentration camps, 30,000 in the February 1937 Addis Ababa massacre, 24,000 executions, 17,800 civilians killed by air strikes. Despite signing the Geneva Protocol, Italy used 300–500 tonnes of mustard gas and dropped 4,336 aerial bombs filled with sulphur mustard and 540 bombs containing diphenylchlorarsine on Ethiopia. Soviet analysts calculated that these chemical weapons caused 30% of Ethiopian combat deaths. At Ametsegna Washa cave in 1939, Italian forces gassed and machine-gunned over 5,500 Ethiopians.

Ethiopian women fought as armed combatants (arbegna) against Italian occupation – the Ethiopian government’s official Book of Honour, 1935–1941 documented their sacrifice, recording one-third of its names as women patriots who took up arms against fascism, though Western histories erase them entirely.45 These women learned to use rifles and grenades, endured aerial bombardment and mustard gas attacks, and in some cases took command of troops. By March 1948, the UN War Crimes Commission identified 1,200 Italian war criminals from the Ethiopian campaign. Prosecutions: zero.46 Badoglio, who was implicated in the Italian genocide in Libya (1929–1934), went back to Italy to become Mussolini’s last prime minister.47 The Italian field marshal who authorised the systematic use of chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands of Ethiopians became the Anglo-Americans’ ‘valuable asset’ against communism.

When the Bonomi government appeared ready to arrest Badoglio, Prime Minister Churchill sent a ‘Personal and Top Secret’ telegram on 8 December 1944 to Sir Noel Charles, the British ambassador in Rome, stating: ‘You are responsible for the Marshal’s safety and sanctuary in the British Embassy or in some equally safe place to which he can be removed’.

Combat Service

Nearly one million Africans served. France deployed 100,000 African soldiers against Germany in 1940 – 17,500 killed. Morocco sent 90,000 troops to France. In Burma, 90,000 African soldiers constituted 9% of imperial forces. The 82nd West African Division suffered 2,085 casualties – the highest in the XV Corps.

Military apartheid structured everything. African privates received one-third of white soldiers’ pay, and corporal punishment remained legal for Africans until 1946. Officers were so rare among the 500,000 African soldiers that each was known by name. The racial discrimination extended beyond institutional policy into brutal violence: in 1940, the Nazis massacred 3,000 Black French soldiers and Hitler kept African POWs in captivity while releasing white prisoners.

Extraction Mathematics

Africa supplied 98% of Allied industrial diamonds, 90% of cobalt, 50% of gold production, and 39% of chromite. The British conscripted 100,000 men for Nigerian tin mines between 1942 and 1944. Death rate from disease on the Tente Dam: 10%.48 Production increase: 6%. In Belgian-occupied Congo, mandatory labour reached 120 days annually. French West Africa: 38,153 men in forced-labour armies. Entire villages fled – 6,000 from Forécariah to Sierra Leone.

The Shinkolobwe mine provided uranium for the atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ore: 75% uranium oxide versus 0.2% considered marketable in North America. Congolese miners handled radioactive ore bare-handed. Their names: never recorded. Their deaths: never counted.49

Forced crop substitution created famine. Mozambique: 800,000 in forced cotton cultivation. Cape Verde: 24,643 dead from wartime famine. Nigeria: Groundnut exports rose, while millet production was abandoned. Starvation followed export ledgers.

The Betrayal

1 December 1944, Thiaroye, Senegal: French officers massacred West African veterans demanding back pay. Official count: 35 dead. Military archives: 70 dead. Current historical research: 300–400 dead. The archives contain falsified documents and remain classified eighty years later, deemed ‘sensitive’.

Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945: French forces began killing Algerians in Sétif and Guelma. Algeria counts 45,000 dead.50 France admits to 1,500.

The 1945 Nigerian general strike.

Madagascar, 1947: 40,000 killed, crushing independence.

French West African railway strike, 1947–1948: 160 days, 20,000 workers on strike.

Gold Coast (now Ghana), 1948: British Superintendent Imray personally shot three veteran protest leaders.

General strikes erupted from Durban to Tunis, from Dakar to Dar es Salaam. Mombasa, 1947: 15,000 workers paralysed the city.

Witwatersrand, 1946: African miners struck despite 1,248 wounded by police.

The pattern was set: veterans demanding wages were massacred, workers demanding rights were shot, independence movements would be crushed. France would kill 1.5 million in Algeria. Britain would cage 1.5 million Kenyans. Portugal would burn Mozambique. The veterans who survived fascism now understood the enemy. Within a decade, liberation wars would erupt from Algeria to Kenya, from Angola to Mozambique – led and influenced by socialist movements and leaders who learned that the West’s six-hundred-year formula never changed: maximum extraction, maximum death, minimum acknowledgement, no accountability.

The 1935–1945 accounting the colonial powers never made: between 1.6 and 2 million Africans dead. Ethiopia alone: 760,000. Military deaths: 75,000. Forced labour and famine: hundreds of thousands. Colonial authorities documented copper down to the metric tonne: 262,394 tonnes. African deaths: ‘unrecorded’.

10. How Socialism Defeated Fascism Through Superior Strategy

Three battles proved Japan could be beaten. At Pingxingguan (平型关) in 1937, Communist forces killed over 1,000 Japanese and captured 82 vehicles – Japan’s first defeat.51 At Taierzhuang (台儿庄) in 1938, the Japanese were routed. There are varying historical estimates. One 1996 study estimates that there were 20,000 casualties among 55,000 Japanese soldiers.52 At Wanjialing (万家岭) on 10 October 1938, an entire Japanese division – 31,000 troops – was reduced to 1,000 survivors. It was Japan’s darkest day.

The CPC’s Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 – a series of coordinated strikes across northern China – shattered Japanese infrastructure. The CPC’s forces tied down 60% of Japanese forces and 95% of puppet forces – not some vague ‘bulk’ but a precise, bleeding majority.53 ‘Sparrow warfare’ (麻雀战) made Japanese patrols bleed for every mile. Tunnel warfare in Ranzhuang (冉庄) in 1939: sixteen kilometres long, connecting five villages, guerrillas appearing and vanishing like ghosts.54

The defeat of fascism was not just about sacrifice; it was a brilliant strategy that turned initial weakness into strength. Socialist leadership did not just mobilise the masses; it outthought and outfought its enemies, despite every material advantage.

Soviet innovation transformed defeat into total victory. The USSR faced an impossible equation: while constructing humanity’s first socialist society from the ruins of tsarism’s feudal system – transforming social relations of production and reproduction at an unprecedented scale – it had exactly one decade to build a military-industrial capacity for the inevitable war.

When German armies smashed through Soviet defences in June 1941, Western observers gave the USSR weeks to survive. Within six months, the USSR imposed the first major strategic defeat on Nazi Germany with the Moscow counteroffensive; within eighteen months the Red Army was decimating entire German army groups. The secret lay in combining revolutionary military doctrine with unprecedented social mobilisation. Deep battle theory envisioned rupturing enemy lines at multiple points, then exploiting with reserves to annihilate entire fronts. When the crisis arose, 1,523 factories were loaded onto 1.5 million railcars and evacuated beyond the Urals in five months under Luftwaffe bombardment.55 Seventeen million Soviet citizens evacuated with their factories.56 The Kirov Works was evacuated from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk, where 5,800 machines were installed and operational in less than three weeks – in roofless halls, with workers living in tents at –40°C.57

Soviet tank production rose from 6,590 in 1941 to 24,719 in 1942 – nearly quadrupling despite catastrophic losses.58 The Soviets produced over 100,000 tanks and self-propelled guns total, versus Germany’s 43,000 (1941–1945).59 The T-34 so devastated Wehrmacht forces that German engineers desperately tried to copy it and failed. Even RAND Corporation admitted that it was the ‘epitome of creative design’.60

Stalin created the State Defence Committee (GKO) on 30 June 1941, which coordinated this unprecedented evacuation. Workers laboured around the clock and built new factories around the equipment as trains arrived. By March 1942, these evacuated plants were producing at pre-war levels. The Germans had captured areas containing 40% of the population, 60% of coal, steel, and aluminium production, yet Soviet military output surpassed German production by 1942.61 Only a socialist-led society could achieve this miracle of relocation while under invasion.

This was scientific superiority.

Stalingrad demonstrated a superior battle strategy over German tactical excellence. General Georgy Zhukov let the Germans pour their best units into urban combat where tank superiority meant nothing. Every building became a fortress; every room became a battlefield. While German forces exhausted themselves in the city, Soviet reserves massed on the flanks. Operation Uranus in 1942 struck with mathematical precision, targeting the Romanian armies Germany had positioned on its flanks – weaker Axis-allied forces holding critical positions. Multiple simultaneous attacks shattered these Romanian armies and encircled the entire Sixth Army.

By the war’s end, Soviet offensives routinely destroyed entire German army groups across thousand-mile fronts. The same army that collapsed in 1941 was by 1944 conducting operations of complexity and scale that no capitalist military could match.

This was not heroism alone, but the fusion of Marxist science with mass creativity. Where capitalist armies preserved professional forces, the Soviet system mobilised everyone. By 1942, women in the Red Army numbered 800,000. By 1945, there were 246,000 women in uniform on the front line – snipers, pilots, tank crews, not just nurses.62 Partisan warfare tied down 500,000 German troops with locally organised forces; approximately 205,600 partisans were organised behind German lines by 1 July 1944.63 Despite losing most of its prewar industrial base, the USSR outproduced Germany in every category that mattered: 112,100 combat aircraft to Germany’s 89,500.64 Of Germany’s 3–3.5 million military deaths, 2.6–3.1 million died fighting the Red Army; of their 11.1 million total casualties, 9 million came on the Eastern Front.65 From 1941 to 1942, Germany had to deploy 72–80% of its entire military strength along this 3,000-kilometre front – and lost them there. While the Allied imperialists faced 54 German divisions on D-Day, the Red Army was simultaneously dismantling and destroying 156½ divisions in the East.66

Meanwhile, Chinese innovation overcame the Japanese superiority in arms. The CPC transformed China’s weakness into strength. Its Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army tied down 60% of Japanese forces through guerrilla warfare. Its ‘comprehensive resistance’ turned every farmer into a supplier, every worker into a saboteur, every student into an organiser.

The KMT’s conventional forces engaged the remaining 40% but faced severe challenges in battle despite some notable defensive victories.

In On Protracted War (1938), Mao provided a scientific analysis: Japan was strong but small, isolated, and barbaric; China was weak but vast, progressive, and with time on its side. Mao predicted three phases – strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, strategic counteroffensive – exactly how the war unfolded. The prophecy proved exact.

The rear battlefield became Japan’s bleeding wound. Communist forces established bases throughout the occupied territories, implementing land reform to mobilise peasants and democratic governance to unite all patriotic classes against the invader. By the stalemate phase, guerrilla warfare tied down 60% of Japanese troops and 95% of puppet forces. Tunnel warfare, mobile warfare, and landmine warfare – each tactic exploited Japanese vulnerabilities. The occupiers controlled the cities and railways; the resistance controlled everything else.

The Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 proved the occupied zones were graveyards, not colonies. Coordinated strikes across northern China destroyed Japanese infrastructure and shattered the myth of pacification. Every blown railway, every ambushed convoy demonstrated a simple truth: superior weapons meant nothing when every village was hostile, every peasant an intelligence network, every night an opportunity for attack. The Japanese found themselves drowning in an ocean of people’s war.

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