Eighty years on, the Allied victory is still hailed as a triumph over tyranny — but behind the celebration lies a legacy of deceit, injustice, and moral compromise. The victors fashioned a postwar world less defined by liberation than by selective memory and calculated impunity
When President Harry Truman read the plea from Manhattan Project scientists urging a reconsideration of the atomic bomb’s use on Japan, his response likely showed no moral hesitation or remorse. Instead, his actions reinforced a postwar global order based not on liberty, but on selective memory and perverse exoneration.
Eighty years after Victory in Europe Day, the dominant Western narrative continues to present the war’s outcome as a triumph of virtue, ignoring the uncomfortable ethical compromises and strategic duplicities that underpinned it. The mythology of liberation has become sacrosanct, while the darker aspects — such as rendition, racial internment, scientific justification of war crimes, and indifference to colonial sacrifice — remain marginalised or erased. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — while dressed in the procedural lexicon of wartime necessity — was, in fact, the Western world’s inaugural postbellum moral abdication. The bombings were less a denouement of global conflict and more a vulgar display of technological supremacy calculated to dissuade Soviet assertiveness. The horror, therefore, was not simply that a nuclear Rubicon had been crossed, but that it was done with an exculpatory grin, and later justified with the antiseptic language of ‘strategic imperatives’. It is no longer speculative fiction but a matter of record, buried in declassified memoranda, that alternatives existed — namely, Japan’s increasing willingness to consider surrender if the Emperor were retained. Truman’s decision was not an exigency of war, but a deliberate theatricality of dominance. The supposed Allied moral high ground crumbled further when Operation Paperclip was set into motion.
Over 1,600 Nazi scientists, including unrepentant perpetrators of ghastly human experimentation, were clandestinely ferried into the United States under the auspices of national security and scientific utility. Wernher von Braun, a man whose rockets were lubricated by the blood of enslaved labourers at Mittelwerk, became a lauded patriarch of American aerospace triumph. The apologia was monstrously bureaucratic — his past affiliations were ‘scrubbed’ to sanitise his assimilation into American exceptionalism. In a 1947 CIA memo, the chilling intent is laid bare: “It is not desirable that the public or press become aware…” — a line that resounds like a macabre hymn to state-sanctioned impunity. This institutional duplicity was not uniquely American.
The British intelligence establishment had its own euphemistically elegant form of deceit. Through the “Double Cross System,” MI5 successfully manipulated German intelligence via double agents, such as the legendary Juan Pujol García, to misdirect Axis expectations about D-Day. Though tactically ingenious, this also reveals an alarming precedent: deception, once wielded in wartime, quickly transmogrifies into peacetime governance. The ability to deceive a foreign enemy soon turned inward — domestic populations were no longer sacrosanct from psychological warfare, propaganda, and informational obfuscation. Simultaneously, the West turned a wilfully blind eye to Soviet atrocities for the sake of fragile alliances. The Katyn Forest massacre, wherein Stalin’s NKVD executed over 22,000 Polish officers, was known to the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations.
Declassified communications confirm that both leaders opted for calculated silence, fearing the rupture of wartime unity. One CIA memo chillingly advised that “public disclosure not advised due to diplomatic concerns.” In those words lies the DNA of postwar moral relativism: truth subjugated to expediency.
Even within the triumphant United States, the internment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans — a move unreplicated in scale or racial homogeneity for any other ethnic group — was executed under the pretence of national security, yet dripped with racial animus. The true indictment emerges not just from the camps themselves, but from what came after. Thousands of Japanese American men volunteered to fight for a nation that caged their families. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, largely composed of these internees’ sons, became the most decorated unit of its size in US military history. Their leader, Senator Daniel Inouye, once said, “We fought not just the enemy, but the prejudice of our own country. Still, we fought.”
That their legacy was received with patronising nods rather than substantive restitution only amplifies the grotesquerie of their sacrifice. Meanwhile, British colonial troops — 2.5 million strong from India, Africa, and the Caribbean—were deployed across the world’s war fronts, shedding blood for a Crown that had no intention of emancipating them.
In Burma, Indian troops bore the brunt of the jungle war, their bodies discarded in the colonial ledger as expendable assets. Their gallantry was neither commemorated with equitable pensions nor with places in British collective memory. A veteran of the Burma Campaign once lamented: “We fought for the British, yet after the war, they forgot us. My medals mean little without respect.” Postwar Britain, engrossed in rebuilding its own wounded self-image, had no space for the sepia-toned loyalty of its colonial wards. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union — while lionised for its monumental military sacrifice — was also the architect of unspeakable internal savageries. The Holodomor, the Great Purge, and mass deportations — these were not aberrations but policies. The Red Army’s entry into Berlin was marked not only by military triumph but by a tidal wave of civilian rapes and looting, acts that were obfuscated or trivialised in postwar historiography.
Allied complicity in whitewashing these crimes was another ethical forfeiture. The mythos of the ‘liberator’ prevailed, even as countless women were left psychologically eviscerated by the supposed liberators themselves. There were no clean hands in this war — not among the Allies, not among the Axis, and certainly not among the institutions that shaped the postwar order. The psychological experiments of Unit 731 in Japan, which included live vivisections and plague dissemination, should have led to Nuremberg-style prosecutions in the Pacific. Instead, many of its physicians were rewarded with amnesty by the United States in exchange for their data on biological warfare. “Data on human experimentation is valuable…” read a US Army report in 1947.
It is difficult to concoct a phrase more morally desiccated. Nor was the West’s complicity confined to acts of commission; its sins of omission reverberate just as loudly. The Jewish partisans in Eastern Europe, those who rose from the ashes of ghettos to sabotage Nazi convoys and derail genocide, were rarely included in the triumphalist Allied narrative. Their resistance did not conform to the clean binaries of statehood or military discipline — it was desperate, feral, and incandescently courageous. Faye Schulman, one such partisan, wrote: “I vowed never to be taken alive again. The forest became my freedom, my gun my answer.”
The war also eviscerated any illusions of gender equality. Thousands of women risked and gave — their lives in resistance movements, logistics, and espionage. Noor Inayat Khan, a British Muslim spy of Indian heritage, refused to betray her comrades under Gestapo torture and was eventually executed at Dachau. Her last known words were: “I have nothing more to say.” Yet after the war, women were largely herded back into domestic anonymity, their wartime roles ossified as aberrations rather than recognised contributions to victory. The truth is that, while the West defeated fascism with the indispensable support of the Global South and poorer nations, it merely adopted fascist mechanisms, cloaked them in democratic rhetoric, and integrated them into the Cold War order. What followed was not peace, but a cover-up, where impunity was dressed as security and complicity as strategy. The moral divide between Axis villainy and Allied virtue crumbles, revealing a postwar world shaped not by justice, but by duplicity, omission, and a profound fear of moral reckoning.
(The writer is a columnist and political analyst based in Colombo. Views are personal)
