nd villages were laid waste by aerial bombardment and marching armies. The transportation system, poor to begin with, was thoroughly disrupted. Most of the limited number of hospitals and health institutions in China were destroyed or lost.In India famine was recurrent, and the Indian economy was severely strained to support the burden the Allied military authorities placed upon it. The Philippines suffered from three years of Japanese occupation and exploitation and from the destruction wrought in the reconquest of the islands by the Americans in 1944-45. The harbor at Manila was wrecked by the retreating Japanese, and many portions of the city were demolished by bombardment.In Japan the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found the damage to urban centers comparable to that in Germany. In the aggregate, 40 percent of the built-up areas of 66 Japanese cities was destroyed, and approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the peculiar and lasting damage done by atomic explosion and radiation.World War II was the most terrible war in history. Military deaths are estimated at some fifteen million, and at least as many civilians were killed. If deaths linked indirectly to the war, from disease, hunger, and other causes, are included, the number of victims might reach as high as forty million. Most of Europe and significant parts of Asia were devastated. Yet the end of so terrible a war brought little opportunity for relaxation. The dawn of the atomic age and the dramatic end it brought to the war made people conscious that another major war might extinguish humanity. Everything depended on concluding a stable peace, but even as the fighting ended, conflicts among the victors made the prospects of a lasting peace doubtful.The quarter century following the conclusion of World War II saw the relative decline of European power. The United States and t...
