Who Were the Good Guys and Bad Guys in the Second World War?
Some people are probably surprised that this question even gets asked. And when they see it asked, they might suspect an ulterior motive. Yet, it has come up as a conversation on social media.
The reason is that a certain person was given a very significant platform to state that Winston Churchill, and not Hitler, was the real villain of the Second World War. That, of course, is nonsense.
Russell Moore, a Christian theologian, shared this on X:
But is it really that simple?
Before you get outraged, let me put my cards on the table. I believe the Allies did the right thing in defeating the Axis. I believe that German and Japan were guilty of horrendous war crimes and they needed to be stopped. I am a current member of the Canadian Armed Forces and I am proud of Canada’s role in defeating the Axis.
However, it is not as simple as Moore makes it out to be. Notice the flags that he included in his post: American and British. Putting aside for a moment the Dominons (including but not limited to Canada) that fought along side these two nations, the Soviet Union was another part of the Big Three.
The Soviet Union initially had a non-aggression pact with Germany and participated in the invasion of Poland. It was the German invasion of the Soviet Union that made them allies with Britain and them the United States.
There is no question that the Soviet Union was crucial for the defeat of Germany. If Germany and the Soviet Union had made a separate peace, things would have been very difficult for the rest of the Allies. There are reasons for us to be thankful for the sacrifice of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War.
At the same time, Stalin was not a nice guy. In fact, he is responsible for more deaths than Hitler, many of them his own people. There were war crimes committed by the Soviets, ones that were not prosecuted because they were on the winning side.
To add to the confusion, where do we put Italy? They were a part of the Axis. But they seem to have never fully committed to Mussolini’s vision and they eventually overthrew Mussolini and stepped out of the war, despite the danger of being occupied by the Germans.
And there were the French. Yes, there were the Free French who continued to fight on the side of the Allies. But what about Vichy France? They seemed willing enough to cooperate with Germany.
What makes things even more confusing is the fact that, even if the Allies were overall the good guys, that does not mean that everything that the Allied forces did was always the moral thing. There are many cases we could look at, the most obvious and contentious one being the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations.
In general, the Allies were on the side of good but there is a fair bit of nuance. They were not perfect and there were plenty of questionable actions. It is clear cut that German and Japan did terrible things and they needed to be defeated.
Sadly, war is often not as clear cut as the good guys vs the bad guys. The Second World War is often seen as the last moral war. However, we might look at succeeding conflicts, even the Second World War was not always black and white.
A book that I have found helpful is Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II (Amazon affiliate link)
If you want to learn more about the Second World War, please subscribe to my Second World War Podcast on Apple or Spotify.
