книги / Международные отношения России теория и история

took the Crimea and advanced towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. Here again, acquiring new supplies of fuel to replenish Germany's dwindling stocks was the imperative. But Soviet generals had begun to learn how to co-ordinate tanks, infantry and air power and to avoid encirclement by tactical withdrawals. German losses mounted. The German forces were already dangerously short of reserves and supplies when they reached the city of Stalingrad on the river Volga, in August 1942.

Three months later, they had still not taken the city. Stalingrad became the object of a titanic struggle between the Germans and the Soviets, less because of its strategic importance than because of its name. When the Germans moved their best troops into the city, leaving the rear to be guarded by weaker Romanian and Italian forces, the Soviet generals saw their chance, broke through the rearguard and surrounded the besieging forces. Short of fuel and ammunition, the Germans under General Paulus were unable to break out. As one airfield after another was captured by the Red Army, supplies ran out and the German troops began to starve to death. On 31 January 1943, refusing the invitation to commit suicide that came with Hitler's gift of a field marshal's baton, Paulus surrendered. Some 235,000 German and allied troops were captured; more than 200,000 had been killed. It was the turning point of the war.

Last great counter-attack

From this moment on, the German armies were more or less continuously in retreat on the eastern front. The Red Army around Stalingrad was threatening to cut off the German forces in the Caucasus, so they were forced to withdraw, abandoning their attempt to secure the region's oil reserves. In early July 1943 came the last great German counterattack, at Kursk. This was the greatest land battle in history, involving more than four million troops, 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 12,000 combat aircraft. Warned of the attack in advance, the Red Army had prepared defences in depth, which the Germans only managed partially to penetrate. A tragi-comic incident happened when an advancing Soviet tank force fell into its own side's defensive ditches; nearly 200 tanks were wrecked, or destroyed by the incredulous Waffen-SS forces waiting for them on the other side. The local party commissar, Nikita Khrushchev,

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covered up this disaster by persuading Stalin that they had been destroyed in a huge battle that had eliminated more than 400 German tanks and won a heroic victory. The legend of "the greatest tank battle in history" was born.

In fact it was nothing of the kind. So enormous were the Russian reserves that the loss of the tanks made little difference in the end, as fresh troops and armour were moved in to rescue the situation. More than one million soldiers, 3,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, and nearly 4,000 combat aircraft entered the fray on the Soviet side and began a series of successful counter-offensives. The Germans were forced to retreat. The missing German tanks had not been destroyed; they had been pulled out by Hitler to deal with a rapidly deteriorating situation in Italy. After the war, German generals claimed bitterly they could have won at Kursk had Hitler not stopped the action. In reality, however, the Soviet superiority in men and resources was overwhelming.

And the tanks really were needed in Italy. Following their victory in north Africa, the allies had landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943 to be greeted in Palermo by Italian citizens waving white flags. A fortnight later, reflecting the evaporation of Italy's will to fight on, the Fascist Grand Coalition deposed Mussolini and began to sue for peace. On 3 September an armistice was signed, and allied forces landed on the Italian mainland. German troops had already invaded from the north, taking over the entire peninsula. Following the armistice, they seized 650,000 Italian soldiers and shipped them off to Germany as forced labourers to join millions of others drafted in from Poland and the Soviet Union to replace German workers sent to the front to replenish the Wehrmacht's rapidly diminishing manpower. In a daring commando raid on the Alpine hotel where Mussolini was being held prisoner, SS paratroopers liberated the former dictator, who was put in charge of a puppet regime based on the town of Salò. But as the allied armies made their way slowly northwards towards Rome, nothing could disguise the fact that Germany's principal ally had now been defeated.

German morale

These events had a devastating effect on German morale at home. In particular the catastrophe of Stalingrad began to convince many Germans that the war could not be won. Worse was to come. Meeting at

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Casablanca in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt decided on a sustained campaign of bombing German cities. A series of massive raids on the industrial area of the Ruhr followed, backed up by the destruction of key dams by the famous "bouncing bombs" on 16 May 1943. Arms production was severely affected. And in late July and early August 1943, the centre of Hamburg was almost completely destroyed in a firestorm created by intensive incendiary bombing that killed up to 40,000 people, injured a further 125,000, many of them seriously, and made 900,000 homeless. Refugees from the devastated city spread a sense of shock and foreboding all across Germany. In Hamburg itself, anger at the Nazis' failure to defend the city led to crowds tearing party badges off officials' coats amid cries of "murderer!" The chief of staff of the German airforce committed suicide. German air defences were still able to inflict serious losses on allied bombing expeditions, but they were not strong enough to prevent the devastation continuing.

By the end of 1943, German forces were retreating all along the line in the east and in Italy. The spectacle of German defeat and the brutal requisitioning of millions of forced labourers from occupied countries fuelled the rise of resistance movements right across Europe. The Reich had lost command of the skies and the seas. Ever more devastating bombing raids on a growing range of towns and cities were making people's lives unbearable. Ordinary Germans knew by the end of 1943 that the war was lost. Terror began to replace commitment as a means of keeping people fighting on. More than 20,000 German troops were executed by courts-martial during the war for varieties of defeatism. At home, people faced a similar escalation of terror from the Nazi party and the SS. Retreating into their private and family worlds, they began to focus increasingly on simply staying alive and waiting for the end.

Тема 8 Международные отношения после 1945 года

1.Ознакомьтесь с хронологической таблицей важных для международных отношений исторических событий после 1945 года. Какое значение они имели для России?

2.Охарактеризуйте основные тенденции каждого из периодов.

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3.Проведите ивент-анализ наиболее важных, по вашему мнению, событий.

4.Какие ключевые понятия связаны с данными событиями?

4. На основании метода когнитивного картирования сделайте вывод о целях и стратегиях наиболее значимых исторических личностей периода.

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20 марта 1997 г. Крупные тактические учения российских вооружённых сил в Тульской области

7 августа 1999 г. – 16 апВторая чеченская война реля 2009 г.

6. В опубликованной в газете «The Guardian» статье сравниваются точки зрения журналистов Джона Херси и Эрика Шлоссера на ядерные бомбардировки Хиросимы и Нагасаки. Составьте сопоставительную таблицу, отражающую позиции обоих журналистов

иавтора статьи Эндрю Энтони.

7.Составьте список российских источников по данной теме. Насколько оценка событий в них отличается от оценки англоязычных источников?

8.Как различия (сходства) трактовок трагедии Хиросимы и Нагасаки отражают национальные интересы стран?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/02/hiroshima- bombing-70-years-on-eric-schlosser

Hiroshima’s fate, 70 years ago this week, must not be forgotten

Andrew Anthony

Sunday 2 August 2015 08.00 BST

Two outstanding works of journalism bookmark that 70-year period: John Hersey’s 1946 article, which reminds us of the horror of the bombing; and Eric Schlosser’s terrifying account of a break-in at a US weapons plant in 2012 – a warning, he says, about our current complacency

In numbers of people killed, the second world war is uncontested in its claim to be the most murderous six years in human history. About 60 million perished in a global conflagration of total warfare. But amid this remorseless carnival of death and destruction, two very different events stand out for their grotesque novelty and their coldly efficient slaughter of civilians: the Holocaust, the world’s first industrialised genocide, and Hiroshima, the world’s first atomic bomb attack, which took place on 6 August 1945, 70 years ago this week.

Both cast long shadows over the 20th century and on into the present day. And both raise complex questions about the nature of

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humanity – that we have within us the capability to organise over several years the systematic extermination of a whole race of people, and also the obliteration of a large populated city in the blink of an eye.

Of the two, the Holocaust – unprovoked and unremitting – is unquestionably the greater crime. So monstrous was the methodical murder of 6 million Jews that it’s hard enough to imagine that it took place, let alone that it will ever be repeated. “Never again,” is the near universal consensus. But Hiroshima is another matter. Its mushroom cloud remains a vivid symbol of Promethean hubris, of technology’s grim and uncontrollable potential. And it was repeated, just three days later in Nagasaki.

What’s more, many thousands of infinitely more powerful nuclear weapons were subsequently developed and there have been occasions when they have come catastrophically close to being unleashed. Hiroshima is the lesson we must continually relearn if we are to avoid Armageddon. As the author John Hersey wrote: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

For those of my generation, when tens of thousands of nuclear warheads were primed for the commencement of the third world war, Hiroshima retains a salutary potency. In my case its relevance was made all the more lasting by the fact that my father visited Hiroshima not long after the bomb was dropped.

He was stationed in Japan, just outside Hiroshima, as an 18-year-old soldier shortly after the end of the war, an experience that he revisited with increasing frequency in old age. He spoke of the extraordinary devastation and the silhouettes of objects and even people that were burnt into the pavements in the molten heat of the atomic flash. It sounded like some scorched landscape from science fiction, one that must have been a daunting sight to absorb for a teenager very far from home.

That eerie dystopia has never been more intimately captured than in Hersey’s astounding 1946 report for the New Yorker that was later published as a slim, bestselling book entitled simply Hiroshima. Acclaimed in 1999 as the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th

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century, and often cited as the founding text of the New Journalism, it has just been republished by Penguin in a commemorative issue along with Eric Schlosser’s Gods of Metal, which meticulously documents a 2012 break-in at a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee.

Schlosser cites Hersey’s book as an inspiration. He has read it several times. “I think it’s one of the greatest works of non-fiction ever written,” he says. “It’s a beautiful piece of writing.”

Hersey had been a war correspondent for Life and survived no fewer than four aircraft crashes before following John F Kennedy through the Solomon Islands. In Japan, reporting on postwar reconstruction, he came across survivors of Hiroshima and set about writing his famous 31,000word article which, in an unprecedented feat, would fill a whole New Yorker issue.

It begins at 8.15am on 6 August 1945, the moment when the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb over Japan’s eighth-largest city and significant military stronghold, Hiroshima. Hersey then describes the impact on six individuals who survived the explosion.

Around 80,000 inhabitants, of whom about a quarter were soldiers, did not survive the initial blast and subsequent fires. A similar number were injured. Exactly how many went on to die over the next year as a result of exposure to radioactivity is not known, though estimates range upwards from 20,000.

In plain, unsentimental prose Hersey reports the desperate experiences the six survivors undergo as they encounter women and children horribly burned by the atomic flash, newly blind men whose eyes had melted in the heat of the explosion, and everywhere the oddly polite appeals of the ever-formal Japanese trapped under the rubble of a flattened city.

In among the tales of almost unbearable stoicism there are curious and memorable details – for example the pumpkins and potatoes that are dug up, ready cooked from the blast, like the produce of some enormous and hideously indiscriminate microwave oven.

In the main hospital there is only one active doctor, who works for three days on one hour’s sleep, dressing the wounds of the teeming

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