Steinbeck, John - Life (2)

John Steinbeck of the Second World War poets

John Steinbeck is best remembered for his three novels of the Great Depression era of the 1930s: Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. These works all deal with the struggles of poor agricultural workers in the USA during that period.
World War II was the most destructive war in human history. Although the war began as a European conflict, in December 1941 –after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (Hawail) it became a global war fought on two main fronts, Europe and Asia.
At first, the German conquest of Europe met whit no opposition. It was only in 1940, with the Battle of Britain (between the British and German air forces) that Germany suffered its first defeat. Under the leadership of prime minister Winston Churchill, Britain was the first European nation to successfully resist the German advance.
In 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the European countries fighting against Germany were joined by the Americans, and Germany’s fortunes began to fade. The war in Europe ended in May, 1945. three months later in August, Japan fell after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as ending World War II, also initiated the Cold War between the West and Communist Russia which was to dominate world politics for the next 45 years.
The Holocaust: Part of Hitler’s plans to dominate Europe was the extermination of the Jews in Europe, the socalled “Final Solution”. The German invasion was accompanied by the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of the occupied countries’ Jewish populations. Many Jews died in the death camps Auschwits, Dachau, Buchenwald and Treblinka. The memory of the Holocaust persists in our culture.