Notwithstanding his democratic ideology, Chiang now has more power than any world leader except Stalin, and he has more titles than Stalin. Besides being President of China, Commander of the Army and chief of the Kuomintang, he is the head of at least forty-three other organizations . . . the Generalissimo is China. His word is law and he has his word on many things that other national leaders would delegate to subordinates.
It would not do him any good. Exactly four years later, the Generalissimo would be reduced to wielding his authority over a small island off the Fujian coast, formerly known as Formosa, and now as Taiwan.
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AND SO YEAR ZERO FINALLY came to an end, on a mixed note of gratitude and anxiety. Grateful that a kind of peace had been achieved, in most places, people had fewer illusions about a glorious future and growing fears about an increasingly divided world. Millions were still too cold and hungry to celebrate the coming new year with any semblance of joy. Besides, the news was often grim: food revolts were expected in occupied Germany; acts of terrorism were creating chaos in Palestine; Koreans were furiously protesting against their semicolonial status; fighting continued in Indonesia, with British soldiers and Dutch marines, “fully supplied with American equipment,” trying to crush the native rebellion.38
But the sense one gets from newspapers around the world on the last day of 1945 is that most people were too anxious to get on with their own lives to care much about the global news anymore. During a worldwide war, everywhere matters. In times of peace, people look to home.
So the British talked about the weather and sports. According to the Manchester Guardian, “The war-time ban on weather reporting has left us a little out of practice in assessing the sort of fog we had last night in the North-west.” But it was good to know that “the Derbyshire and Lancashire Gliding Club hopes to be the first gliding and sailplane club in the country to resume activities which were suspended when war broke out.”
The French talked about food. American GIs, who just one year ago had been fighting in the bloody snow of the Ardennes, were now being treated to a skiing holiday in the French Alps. “The cuisine,” reported Le Monde from Chamonix, “was prepared by French chefs to everyone’s delight. One is surprised to see to what extent this aspect of French civilization is appreciated.” The paper was also happy to announce that the “fourth litre of wine in December” could be obtained with J3, M, C, and V rations.
The Frankische Presse of Bayreuth struck a more somber note with reminiscences of the terrible hardships suffered by the German population, “huddled in cellars and bunkers, a shattered, exhausted mass of people with feverish eyes and shivering hearts, with only one hope, not even of victory, but of an end to the war.” There was other news: two German men had come forward as volunteers to execute the war criminals at Nuremberg. Erich Richter, from the town of Marburg, said he would be happy to chop their heads off for nothing. Josef Schmidt, from a DP camp in Leipzig, was prepared to hang or behead the convicts, but would exact “a price for each head.” The solace of culture was not neglected. For the first time in years, the Bayreuth Symphony Orchestra would perform music by Claude Debussy, “the French composer who . . . worked systematically to free French music from the influence of German Romanticism and neo-Romanticism.” And this in Bayreuth, the Mecca of Wagnerism!
In Tokyo, the main editorial of the Japan Times proclaimed: “Ring out the old! Ring in the new! Japan will ring out the old year which has just ended with no regrets. For it was a year of pain and suffering, disillusionment and confusion and humiliation and punishment. Such a year of bitter memories can be relegated to the limbo with hearty relief.” The paper also revealed that “Japanese plans for using flour made of ground silkworms, locusts, mulberry leaves and a dozen other food substitutes to avert a food crisis when American forces invaded . . . [are] still being developed.” And a reporter named Nishizawa Eiichi explained that although most heroes in Kabuki plays were regrettably feudal, there were some rare exceptions. The seventeenth-century village headman Sakura Sogoro, for example, crucified for impudently asking the shogun to reduce the tax burden on poor peasants, “was a martyr in the democratic cause.”
The tone of the New York Times was a bit more upbeat: “New York’s Bacchanalian barometers flew storm warnings yesterday, indicating the city was headed tonight for its most exuberant New Year’s Eve since 1940.” But more than the articles, it is the advertisements in the Times that showed the almost unimaginable gulf between the new and the old worlds: “It’s different—the creamy smooth peanut butter that melts in your mouth—spread it thicker, Mom, it’s Peter Pan!”
If there is anything to be gleaned from these glimpses of the global mood on New Year’s Eve, it is that a certain sense of normality was beginning to seep back into the daily lives of people who were lucky enough to be able to lift their heads from the direst misery of the immediate postwar period. This was not a luxury available to those who were still displaced in Germany, in Japanese POW camps, or in whatever sordid limbo they found themselves.
Set to the task of rebuilding their shattered countries, they had no more time for feasting, or even much mourning. There was work to be done. This made for a more sober perception of reality, grayer, more orderly, less exciting than the upheavals of war and liberation. In some places, of course, new wars, against colonial masters, or domestic enemies in civil conflicts, would continue, and new dictatorships were imposed. But for millions of others, there had been enough excitement to last a lifetime, years of drama that some preferred to forget, and others, who had perhaps been more fortunate, would look back on with a tinge of nostalgia—things would never be as interesting again.
Year Zero itself has been rather eclipsed in the world’s collective memory by the years of destruction that preceded it, and new dramas that still lay in store, in Korea, Vietnam, India-Pakistan, Israel, Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on. But for those who came of age after Year Zero, when so much was created amidst the ruins of war, it was perhaps the most important year of all. Those of us who grew up in western Europe, or indeed in Japan, could easily take for granted what our parents had built: the welfare states, economies that just seemed to grow, international law, a “free world” protected by the seemingly unassailable American hegemon.
It wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing ever does. But that is no reason not to pay tribute to the men and women who were alive in 1945, to their hardships, and to their hopes and aspirations, even though many of these would turn to ash, as everything eventually does.