After VE and VJ day in Europe and the Pacific respectively, I’ve read that the fighting didn’t immediately stop like turning off a light switch but was more comparable to a bunch of candles sputtering out…to follow the analogy, do we know where the last candle was extinguished, the last shots fire in anger by or at the Germans and Japanese?
If you count the Japanese holdouts on some of the Pacific Islands, the date could be as late as 1972:
ETA: That’ll teach me to open the tab and then walk away for 20 minutes.
You know, I’d completely forgotten that Japanese holdouts actually caused fatalities, wow.
Are there any sources to show when the last shots were fired in anger in the European theater? The last alleged Werwolf action I can find that caused fatalities was an ammunition dump explosion at the end of July, 1945, were there any other Nazi holdouts after that?
Technically WW2 never ended because Russia and Japan couldn’t come to an agreement over the Kuril islands. Have any shots been fired over this after 1972?
In Germany, things settled down surprisingly rapidly at the end of “official” fighting. Very few and minor incidents after that.
But in neighboring countries, significant conflict continued for some time after. The biggest, longest lasting group were the Forest Brothers in the Baltic states. But similar groups existed in other Soviet controlled others, often not for very long.
The Forest Brothers, in some cases, had local ex-Waffen SS soldiers in them. There might have been the odd German soldier aligning with such groups here and there but certainly not many.
One little known aftereffect of WWII was in Belgium where a minor civil war erupted between pro-Allies French speakers and pro-Nazi German speakers. Don’t know when that would have been considered over.
Perhaps several thousand Japanese soldiers were allowed to join the Viet Minh and fought alongside them against the returning French. (The French also re-armed some Japanese POWs for a short bit when they were reasserting control.)
Another messy post-WWII area was Northern Burma. A Nationalist Chinese KMT army, which had earlier invaded Vietnam after the Japanese surrender, later ended up in Burma running an opium empire for decades. It continued to get US and Nationalist aid for it’s harassment efforts against the PRC. When this group stopped being anti-Japanese fighters and became anti-Communist fighters/drug lords is hard to pin down.
There was the Battle of Poljana between the Yugoslav Partisans and a retreating Axis column, that took place a few days after Nazi Germany’s official surrender. According to Wikipedia, it was “the last major battle of World War II in Europe* [citation needed]*”.
[cites this as an example along a few others. Notably, the [url=Battle of Odžak - Wikipedia]Battle of Odžak](]This answer on Reddit[/url) lasted from May 19–May 25. However, it was fought between Yugoslav Partisans and the forces of the Independent State of Croatia, rather than the Germans or the Italians. So far as I can tell, the Independent State of Croatia was a puppet state of the Axis powers — basically the Croatian version of Vichy France; whether or not that counts as a battle involving the Germans is a grey area.
Also, Wikipedia is similarly unsure about this one; it is cited as "the last World War II battle in Europe.[7][unreliable source?] "
Which means that in 1965, when Gilligan’s Island had the Japanese holdout as a wacky plotline, there were still holdouts out there for real.
All that time and he still couldn’t get promoted past PFC.
Wasn’t the Korean War in some sense an extension of World War II? And that’s never actually ended: It’s just in a very long cease-fire. So the answer would be the most recent time that North Korea has staged an “incident”.
It took Gomer Pyle 37 years to make Lance Corporal.
So does this count as a WW2 battle?
I bet his wife got some serious back pay though.
Yep, read the timeline of the Korean war and it’s very evident that its a direct consequence of the occupations by the USSR and US at the tail end of WW II. There was not really any peace, there was continuous fighting and resistance to the occupations both in the north and the south. I vote that until North and South Korea sign a peace treaty, WW II will not end.
And then another six years to make Corporal. NCOs: the backbone of the Marine Corps.
Well in that regard, Turkey was with the western allies in World War II, so if the Korea is a cold war proxy war, well the cold war is WW II continued … so Turkey shot down the Russian plane last year … They certainly consider there is no friendship to destroy there …
I’m not seeing the connection through Turkey. Yes, they were in WWII, but so was the US, and we wouldn’t automatically say that every war the US was in was a continuation of WWII. In Korea, though, there was continual fighting into the 1950s as a direct result of events in WWII.