The idea that certain natural disasters could totally overwhelm Humanity and the Earth (catastrophism) was not yet back in popular and scientific fashion in 1954 and hadn't been in fashion for a hundred and thirty years.
Proof can be found in virtually all accounts of WWII.
The leaders of the six biggest imperial powers in the war (Churchill, Hitler,FDR,Stalin,Mussolini,Tojo) were indeed larger than life figures, stagey and theatrical in manner in their every public appearance.
The type of actors who would even eat the (supposedly bland) (supposedly inert) scenery to steal a scene.
So writers played WWII as a human drama exclusively and wrote natural forces out of their accounts of the war's progress.
But one could argue (as some historians belatedly do today, seventy five years too late) that there was plenty visible evidence at the time that natural forces - the climate above all - moved this particular global human drama all over the map.
And the humans (even these six extremely strong willed men) meekly went alone.
In perhaps the first important example, before the actual firing war, in the 1930s, the state of the crucial annual German harvest (regardless whether inputs of labour,machinery and fertilizer were increased or decreased) still mostly hung on the state of the weather.
And Hitler was always more likely to take desperate and violent action after a bad harvest, fearful that a hungry German population would turf him like they did the Kaiser.
Yes, even Hitler meekly danced the rythmn of the rain and the sun and the wind.
It turns out the scenery ended up eating the actors, not the other way around....
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