Top Photo: Souvenir hand flag for the 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Edo-Tokyo Museum - Sumida, Tokyo, Japan. Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hosting the Summer Olympic Games requires years of planning and vast sums of money. Stadiums are built, funds raised, posters painted, tickets purchased, and hotels and planes booked. But what happens when all that preparation is done in vain?

That's the intriguing story behind the wartime Olympics of 1940 and 1944. First Tokyo, then Helsinki, Finland, won the right to hold the 1940 competition, and London was set to host the 1944 Summer Games. However, none of these cities got their moment in the sun: both events would ultimately be canceled due to the life-and-death events beyond the sports arena.

The International Olympic Committee's (IOC) plans for the 1940 Summer Games took many unexpected turns as the world drifted toward global war. During the 1930s, Japan competed with Fascist Italy for the right to host an Olympiad. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini eventually gave up his ambitions to hold the Games in Rome, and in 1936 the IOC awarded Tokyo the 1940 Games. It was a proud moment for the Japanese people, who considered their selection an acknowledgment by the West of the equality of Asian athletes.

The choice of Tokyo for the Games posed problems from the start. The 1936 Summer Games in Nazi Germany had shown the kind of spectacle a totalitarian regime could produce when it hosted the world’s most popular sports competition. Opened by Adolf Hitler, glamorized by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, and shrewdly exploited by Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the Berlin Games minted PR gold for the Nazis, creating a platform for promoting their racist ideology. Many feared that Tokyo’s 1940 Games and its commemoration of the 2,600th year of the Empire would become a similar publicity coup for Japan’s military leaders, who presided over Japan’s war of conquest in China in the late 1930s.

Poster of the 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo by Wada Sanzō, published in the official report of the Games Organizing Committee in 1940. Via Wikimedia Commons

Japan first attacked a weakened China in 1931, but these actions escalated into full-fledged war in 1937 when Japanese forces invaded and took the capital city of Nanking (known today as Nanjing) with a savagery that resulted in approximately 300,000 civilian deaths. This terrifying episode would become known the world over as “The Rape of Nanking.”

By 1938, the “China incident,” as Japan’s Olympic delegation called the brutal occupation, had become a cause célèbre in the international community. The United States, the UK, and Scandinavian countries threatened to boycott the Tokyo Games over the Sino–Japanese War. Moreover, nationalistic segments within Japanese society resisted the Games as a Western intrusion. In July 1938, the Japanese government abruptly canceled the competition, citing the need to conserve resources in wartime. The government’s decision to withdraw its bid for the 1940 Games stunned its Japanese supporters.

The IOC reassigned the 1940 Games to Helsinki (deciding against a bid by Detroit). But the expanding war in Europe finally halted planning entirely after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, and the neutral Finns, after spending $10 million preparing to host the Games, were forced to cancel the sports extravaganza after the Soviet Union invaded their country in late 1939.

Proposals for the Helsinki Olympic Games 1940 poster competition, Helsinki 1938. In the photo left. "White City Games" (Olof Eriksson), right. "Finland's position on Earth immediately known" (Aarno Knuus). Finnish Heritage Agency

In June 1939, the IOC arrived in London to consider it as the site for the 1944 Summer Games. London was keen on assuming the role, having hosted the Games in 1908. Despite talk of war, the city spared little expense to impress the “right people,” dazzling the 40-member IOC with artistic performances, Savoy dinners, and brushes with royalty at St. James Palace. The charm offensive worked, and the IOC awarded the 1944 Summer Games to the British capital. London beat out rivals such as Belgrade, Lausanne, and an increasingly brash Detroit, the growing center for midcentury technology and home of Ford and Chrysler’s impressive assembly lines.

London’s victory was short-lived, however. Three months after the IOC’s decision, Hitler invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939. All over the world, the opening of hostilities altered every plan and calculation, including the Olympics.

With conflict raging across the globe, the IOC canceled the London Olympics and suspended the Games for the duration of the war. The organization would hold a tiny ceremony in neutral Switzerland in the summer of 1944, reminding the world that the spirit of peaceful international athletic competition still endured, but a warring world took little notice. 

After the war, London finally hosted the 1948 Olympic Games. Still battered and bruised from the bombing raids of the London Blitz, the city staged an austere version. Helsinki went on to host the Games in 1952, and Tokyo would host in 1964. Gradually the memories of the “Lost Olympics” would fade, swept aside by the epic battles and immense toll of the era. Nevertheless, they remain a fascinating side story of World War II, and a haunting casualty of the human capacity for violence.