But that just shows how little anybody really understood what was happening to the world. Nobody outside of China remembered Nanking a couple years later when the German Reich began its stunning expansion through Europe. The Wehrmacht stampeded whole armies before it with its terrifyingly brutal new style of tank attack (the European press called it “blitzkrieg,” and the name stuck), and rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories — wholesale deportations and systematic massacres, like a vast mechanized replay of the Mongol invasions. A story solemnly made the rounds of the world’s newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, “Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!”
It was in September 1939, in the wake of the German invasion of Poland, that the phrase “the Second World War” began turning up in newspapers and government speeches. The name was a kind of despairing admission that nobody knew how long the war would go on or how far the fighting would spread. Over the next two years the news arrived almost daily that battles had broken out in places that only weeks before had seemed like safe havens. By the time of Pearl Harbor the war had erupted in Norway and Mongolia, on Crete and in the Dutch East Indies; the Italian Army had marched on Egypt, and the German army was pushing into the outskirts of Moscow; there had been savage fighting in Finland north of the Arctic Circle and sea battles off the coast of Argentina. The United States was one of the last secluded places left on earth.