WWII

At the end of the Second World War a revolt took place among the armed forces of Britain in South East Asia that is little remembered. The soldiers realised that Britain was retaining them to fight new colonial wars, against peoples they had supposedly just "liberated". The soldiers sympathised with the peoples of South East Asia who sought genuine liberation. It led to a revolt that affected the army, the navy and the air force with strikes spreading among troops from South East Asia to India, the Middle East and North Africa.

In the early hours of August 24 seventy years ago Germany and Soviet Russia signed a "non-aggression pact", which divided the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", effectively slicing Poland into two halves. Ben Peck looks back at what happened and explains why such an incredible event could take place – and the price that was paid.

“An endless period of destruction and slaughter opens out before the peoples of the world. It can be ended, not by the victory of either imperialism, which would merely lay the basis for new wars and is not in the interests of the workers of any country, but by the victory of the workers over imperialism.” Ted Grant in the early period of the Second World War.

[Written in 2004] On the anniversary of the Normandy D-day landing. The leaders of the major powers were all present at the official celebrations, a far more pompous celebration than the 50th anniversary. This has more to do with present day politics than the events of 60 years ago.

In this second part of his article on the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings we look at the manoeuvres between British and US imperialism, their conflicting interests and their common struggle against Soviet Russia. So long as they needed Russia's help to defeat Germany and Japan - and to hold back the workers in Western Europe - they remained "allies". Once the war was over the real contradictions emerged and the period of the "Cold War" began.

An interesting critique of some of the European Trotskyists during the second world war who had failed to grasp the essence of Trotsky's military policy.