The word world war 2

World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world’s countries, including all of the great powers, fought as part of two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. Many participants threw their economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind this total war, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and the delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war.

World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in history; it resulted in an estimated 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massacres, and disease. In the wake of the Axis defeat, Germany and Japan were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders.

The causes of World War II are debated, but contributing factors included the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, the rise of fascism in Europe, and European tensions in the aftermath of World War I. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. The United Kingdom and France subsequently declared war on Germany on 3 September. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their «spheres of influence» across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, in a military alliance with Italy, Japan and other countries called the Axis. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, and the fall of France in mid-1940, the war continued primarily between the European Axis powers and the British Empire, with war in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz of the United Kingdom, and the Battle of the Atlantic. On 22 June 1941, Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history.

Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with the Republic of China by 1937. In December 1941, Japan attacked American and British territories with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, including an attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor which resulted in the United States and United Kingdom declaring war against Japan. The European Axis powers declared war on the United States in solidarity. Japan soon captured much of the western Pacific, but its advances were halted in 1942 after losing the critical Battle of Midway; later, Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. Key setbacks in 1943—including a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Allied offensives in the Pacific—cost the Axis powers their initiative and forced them into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and pushed Germany and its allies back. During 1944 and 1945, Japan suffered reversals in mainland Asia, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key western Pacific islands.

The war in Europe concluded with the liberation of German-occupied territories and the invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the Fall of Berlin to Soviet troops, Hitler’s suicide, and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Following the refusal of Japan to surrender on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration (issued 26 July 1945), the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August. Faced with an imminent invasion of the Japanese archipelago, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, and the Soviet Union’s declared entry into the war against Japan on the eve of invading Manchuria, Japan announced on 10 August its intention to surrender, signing a surrender document on 2 September 1945.

World War II changed the political alignment and social structure of the globe and set the foundation for the international order of the world’s nations during the Cold War and into present day. The United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts,^[1] with the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—becoming the permanent members of its Security Council. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century-long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery and expansion. Political and economic integration, especially in Europe, began as an effort to forestall future hostilities, end pre-war enmities, and forge a sense of common identity.

Start and end dates

It is generally considered that, in Europe, World War II started on 1 September 1939,^[2][3] beginning with the German invasion of Poland and the United Kingdom and France’s declaration of war on Germany two days later on 3 September 1939. Dates for the beginning of the Pacific War include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937,^[4][5] or the earlier Japanese invasion of Manchuria, on 19 September 1931.^[6][7] Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously, and the two wars became World War II in 1941.^[8] Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935.^[9] The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939.^[10] Others view the Spanish Civil War as the start or prelude to World War II.^[11][12]

The exact date of the war’s end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945 (V-J Day), rather than with the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945, which officially ended the war in Asia. A peace treaty between Japan and the Allies was signed in 1951.^[13] A 1990 treaty regarding Germany’s future allowed the reunification of East and West Germany to take place and resolved most post–World War II issues.^[14] No formal peace treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union was ever signed,^[15] although the state of war between the two countries was terminated by the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, which also restored full diplomatic relations between them.^[16]

Background

Aftermath of World War I

World War I had radically altered the political European map with the defeat of the Central Powers—including Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—and the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies of World War I, such as France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Greece, gained territory, and new nation-states were created out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman and Russian Empires.

To prevent a future world war, the League of Nations was created during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The organisation’s primary goals were to prevent armed conflict through collective security, military and naval disarmament, and settling international disputes through peaceful negotiations and arbitration.^[17]

Despite strong pacifist sentiment after World War I,^[18] irredentist and revanchist nationalism emerged in several European states in the same period. These sentiments were especially marked in Germany because of the significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, Germany lost around 13 percent of its home territory and all its overseas possessions, while German annexation of other states was prohibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country’s armed forces.^[19]

Germany

The German Empire was dissolved in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and a democratic government, later known as the Weimar Republic, was created. The interwar period saw strife between supporters of the new republic and hardline opponents on both the right and left. Italy, as an Entente ally, had made some post-war territorial gains; however, Italian nationalists were angered that the promises made by the United Kingdom and France to secure Italian entrance into the war were not fulfilled in the peace settlement. From 1922 to 1925, the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy with a nationalist, totalitarian, and class collaborationist agenda that abolished representative democracy, repressed socialist, left-wing and liberal forces, and pursued an aggressive expansionist foreign policy aimed at making Italy a world power, and promising the creation of a «New Roman Empire».^[20]

Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923, eventually became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 when Paul Von Hindenburg and the Reichstag appointed him. Following Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Fuhrer of Germany and abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearmament campaign.^[21] Meanwhile, France, to secure its alliance, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia, which Italy desired as a colonial possession. The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany, and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, accelerated his rearmament programme, and introduced conscription.^[22]

European treaties

The United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the Stresa Front in April 1935 in order to contain Germany, a key step towards military globalisation; however, that June, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The Soviet Union, concerned by Germany’s goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe, drafted a treaty of mutual assistance with France. Before taking effect, though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless.^[23] The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August of the same year.^[24]

Hitler defied the Versailles and Locarno Treaties by remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, encountering little opposition due to the policy of appeasement.^[25] In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Rome–Berlin Axis. A month later, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy joined the following year.^[26]

Asia

The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party allies^[27] and new regional warlords. In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan, which had long sought influence in China^[28] as the first step of what its government saw as the country’s right to rule Asia, staged the Mukden Incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo.^[29]

China appealed to the League of Nations to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations after being condemned for its incursion into Manchuria. The two nations then fought several battles, in Shanghai, Rehe and Hebei, until the Tanggu Truce was signed in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and Chahar and Suiyuan.^[30] After the 1936 Xi’an Incident, the Kuomintang and communist forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose Japan.^[31]

Pre-war events

Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935)

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was a brief colonial war that began in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war began with the invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia) by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy (Regno d’Italia), which was launched from Italian Somaliland and Eritrea.^[32] The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI); in addition it exposed the weakness of the League of Nations as a force to preserve peace. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations, but the League did little when the former clearly violated Article X of the League’s Covenant.^[33] The United Kingdom and France supported imposing sanctions on Italy for the invasion, but the sanctions were not fully enforced and failed to end the Italian invasion.^[34] Italy subsequently dropped its objections to Germany’s goal of absorbing Austria.^[35]

Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

When civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini lent military support to the Nationalist rebels, led by General Francisco Franco. Italy supported the Nationalists to a greater extent than the Nazis did: altogether Mussolini sent to Spain more than 70,000 ground troops and 6,000 aviation personnel, as well as about 720 aircraft.^[36] The Soviet Union supported the existing government of the Spanish Republic. More than 30,000 foreign volunteers, known as the International Brigades, also fought against the Nationalists. Both Germany and the Soviet Union used this proxy war as an opportunity to test in combat their most advanced weapons and tactics. The Nationalists won the civil war in April 1939; Franco, now dictator, remained officially neutral during World War II but generally favoured the Axis.^[37] His greatest collaboration with Germany was the sending of volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front.^[38]

Japanese invasion of China (1937)

In July 1937, Japan captured the former Chinese imperial capital of Peking after instigating the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which culminated in the Japanese campaign to invade all of China.^[39] The Soviets quickly signed a non-aggression pact with China to lend materiel support, effectively ending China’s prior co-operation with Germany. From September to November, the Japanese attacked Taiyuan, engaged the Kuomintang Army around Xinkou,^{[40][unreliable source?]} and fought Communist forces in Pingxingguan.^[41][42] Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai, but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. The Japanese continued to push the Chinese forces back, capturing the capital Nanking in December 1937. After the fall of Nanking, tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by the Japanese.^[43][44]

In March 1938, Nationalist Chinese forces won their first major victory at Taierzhuang, but then the city of Xuzhou was taken by the Japanese in May.^{[45][unreliable source?]} In June 1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding the Yellow River; this manoeuvre bought time for the Chinese to prepare their defences at Wuhan, but the city was taken by October.^[46] Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that Japan had hoped to achieve; instead, the Chinese government relocated inland to Chongqing and continued the war.^[47][48]

Soviet–Japanese border conflicts

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Japanese forces in Manchukuo had sporadic border clashes with the Soviet Union and Mongolia. The Japanese doctrine of Hokushin-ron, which emphasised Japan’s expansion northward, was favoured by the Imperial Army during this time. With the Japanese defeat at Khalkin Gol in 1939, the ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War^[49] and ally Nazi Germany pursuing neutrality with the Soviets, this policy would prove difficult to maintain. Japan and the Soviet Union eventually signed a Neutrality Pact in April 1941, and Japan adopted the doctrine of Nanshin-ron, promoted by the Navy, which took its focus southward, eventually leading to its war with the United States and the Western Allies.^[50][51]

European occupations and agreements

In Europe, Germany and Italy were becoming more aggressive. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, again provoking little response from other European powers.^[52] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. Soon the United Kingdom and France followed the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and conceded this territory to Germany in the Munich Agreement, which was made against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands.^[53] Soon afterwards, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary, and Poland annexed the Zaolzie region of Czechoslovakia.^[54]

Although all of Germany’s stated demands had been satisfied by the agreement, privately Hitler was furious that British interference had prevented him from seizing all of Czechoslovakia in one operation. In subsequent speeches Hitler attacked British and Jewish «war-mongers» and in January 1939 secretly ordered a major build-up of the German navy to challenge British naval supremacy. In March 1939, Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state, the Slovak Republic.^[55] Hitler also delivered an ultimatum to Lithuania on 20 March 1939, forcing the concession of the Klaipėda Region, formerly the German Memelland.^[56]

Greatly alarmed and with Hitler making further demands on the Free City of Danzig, the United Kingdom and France guaranteed their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to the Kingdoms of Romania and Greece.^[57] Shortly after the Franco-British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalised their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.^[58] Hitler accused the United Kingdom and Poland of trying to «encircle» Germany and renounced the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact.^[59]

The situation reached a general crisis in late August as German troops continued to mobilise against the Polish border. On 23 August, when tripartite negotiations about a military alliance between France, the United Kingdom and Soviet Union stalled,^[60] the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.^[61] This pact had a secret protocol that defined German and Soviet «spheres of influence» (western Poland and Lithuania for Germany; eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia for the Soviet Union), and raised the question of continuing Polish independence.^[62] The pact neutralised the possibility of Soviet opposition to a campaign against Poland and assured that Germany would not have to face the prospect of a two-front war, as it had in World War I. Immediately after that, Hitler ordered the attack to proceed on 26 August, but upon hearing that the United Kingdom had concluded a formal mutual assistance pact with Poland and that Italy would maintain neutrality, he decided to delay it.^[63]

In response to British requests for direct negotiations to avoid war, Germany made demands on Poland, which only served as a pretext to worsen relations.^[64] On 29 August, Hitler demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary immediately travel to Berlin to negotiate the handover of Danzig, and to allow a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor in which the German minority would vote on secession.^[64] The Poles refused to comply with the German demands, and on the night of 30–31 August in a confrontational meeting with the British ambassador Nevile Henderson, Ribbentrop declared that Germany considered its claims rejected.^[65]

Course of the war

War breaks out in Europe (1939–1940)

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland after having staged several false flag border incidents as a pretext to initiate the invasion.^[66] The first German attack of the war came against the Polish defenses at Westerplatte.^[67] The United Kingdom responded with an ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations, and on 3 September, after the ultimatum was ignored, Britain and France declared war on Germany,^[68] followed by Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. During the Phoney War period, the alliance provided no direct military support to Poland, outside of a cautious French probe into the Saarland.^[69] The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country’s economy and the war effort.^[70] Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which would later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic.^[71]

On 8 September, German troops reached the suburbs of Warsaw. The Polish counter-offensive to the west halted the German advance for several days, but it was outflanked and encircled by the Wehrmacht. Remnants of the Polish army broke through to besieged Warsaw. On 17 September 1939, two days after signing a cease-fire with Japan, the Soviet Union invaded Poland^[72] under the pretext that the Polish state had ostensibly ceased to exist.^[73] On 27 September, the Warsaw garrison surrendered to the Germans, and the last large operational unit of the Polish Army surrendered on 6 October. Despite the military defeat, Poland never surrendered; instead, it formed the Polish government-in-exile and a clandestine state apparatus remained in occupied Poland.^[74] A significant part of Polish military personnel evacuated to Romania and Latvia; many of them later fought against the Axis in other theatres of the war.^[75]

Germany annexed the western and occupied the central part of Poland, and the Soviet Union annexed its eastern part; small shares of Polish territory were transferred to Lithuania and Slovakia. On 6 October, Hitler made a public peace overture to the United Kingdom and France but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. The proposal was rejected,^[65] and Hitler ordered an immediate offensive against France,^[76] which was postponed until the spring of 1940 due to bad weather.^[77][78][79]

After the outbreak of war in Poland, Stalin threatened Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with military invasion, forcing the three Baltic countries to sign pacts that stipulated the creation of Soviet military bases in these countries. In October 1939, significant Soviet military contingents were moved there.^[80][81][82] Finland refused to sign a similar pact and rejected ceding part of its territory to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939,^[83] and the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations.^[84] Despite overwhelming numerical superiority, Soviet military success during the Winter War was modest,^[85] and the Finno-Soviet war ended in March 1940 with some Finnish concessions of territory.^[86]

In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the entire territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,^[81] and the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. In August 1940, Hitler imposed the Second Vienna Award on Romania which led to the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary.^[87] In September 1940, Bulgaria demanded Southern Dobruja from Romania with German and Italian support, leading to the Treaty of Craiova.^[88] The loss of one-third of Romania’s 1939 territory caused a coup against King Carol II, turning Romania into a fascist dictatorship under Marshal Ion Antonescu with a course set firmly towards the Axis in the hopes of a German guarantee.^[89] Meanwhile, Nazi-Soviet political rapprochement and economic co-operation^[90][91] gradually stalled,^[92][93] and both states began preparations for war.^[94]

Western Europe (1940–1941)

In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to protect shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were attempting to cut off.^[95] Denmark capitulated after six hours, and Norway was conquered within two months^[96] despite Allied support. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was replaced by Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940.^[97]

On the same day, Germany launched an offensive against France. To circumvent the strong Maginot Line fortifications on the Franco-German border, Germany directed its attack at the neutral nations of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.^[98] The Germans carried out a flanking manoeuvre through the Ardennes region,^[99] which was mistakenly perceived by Allies as an impenetrable natural barrier against armoured vehicles.^[100][101] By successfully implementing new Blitzkrieg tactics, the Wehrmacht rapidly advanced to the Channel and cut off the Allied forces in Belgium, trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in a cauldron on the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. The United Kingdom was able to evacuate a significant number of Allied troops from the continent by early June, although abandoning almost all their equipment.^[102]

On 10 June, Italy invaded France, declaring war on both France and the United Kingdom.^[103] The Germans turned south against the weakened French army, and Paris fell to them on 14 June. Eight days later France signed an armistice with Germany; it was divided into German and Italian occupation zones,^[104] and an unoccupied rump state under the Vichy Regime, which, though officially neutral, was generally aligned with Germany. France kept its fleet, which the United Kingdom attacked on 3 July in an attempt to prevent its seizure by Germany.^[105]

The air Battle of Britain^[106] began in early July with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping and harbours.^[107] The United Kingdom rejected Hitler’s peace offer,^[108] and the German air superiority campaign started in August but failed to defeat RAF Fighter Command, forcing the indefinite postponement of the proposed German invasion of Britain. The German strategic bombing offensive intensified with night attacks on London and other cities in the Blitz, but failed to significantly disrupt the British war effort^[107] and largely ended in May 1941.^[109]

Using newly captured French ports, the German Navy enjoyed success against an over-extended Royal Navy, using U-boats against British shipping in the Atlantic.^[110] The British Home Fleet scored a significant victory on 27 May 1941 by sinking the German battleship Bismarck.^[111]

In November 1939, the United States was taking measures to assist China and the Western Allies and amended the Neutrality Act to allow «cash and carry» purchases by the Allies.^[112] In 1940, following the German capture of Paris, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased. In September the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases.^[113] Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention in the conflict well into 1941.^[114] In December 1940 Roosevelt accused Hitler of planning world conquest and ruled out any negotiations as useless, calling for the United States to become an «arsenal of democracy» and promoting Lend-Lease programmes of aid to support the British war effort.^[108] The United States started strategic planning to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Germany.^[115]

At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact formally united Japan, Italy, and Germany as the Axis powers. The Tripartite Pact stipulated that any country, with the exception of the Soviet Union, which attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three.^[116] The Axis expanded in November 1940 when Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania joined.^[117] Romania and Hungary later made major contributions to the Axis war against the Soviet Union, in Romania’s case partially to recapture territory ceded to the Soviet Union.^[118]

Mediterranean (1940–1941)

In early June 1940, the Italian Regia Aeronautica attacked and besieged Malta, a British possession. From late summer to early autumn, Italy conquered British Somaliland and made an incursion into British-held Egypt. In October, Italy attacked Greece, but the attack was repulsed with heavy Italian casualties; the campaign ended within months with minor territorial changes.^[119] Germany started preparation for an invasion of the Balkans to assist Italy, to prevent the British from gaining a foothold there, which would be a potential threat for Romanian oil fields, and to strike against the British dominance of the Mediterranean.^[120]

In December 1940, British Empire forces began counter-offensives against Italian forces in Egypt and Italian East Africa.^[121] The offensives were highly successful; by early February 1941, Italy had lost control of eastern Libya, and large numbers of Italian troops had been taken prisoner. The Italian Navy also suffered significant defeats, with the Royal Navy putting three Italian battleships out of commission by means of a carrier attack at Taranto, and neutralising several more warships at the Battle of Cape Matapan.^[122]

Italian defeats prompted Germany to deploy an expeditionary force to North Africa and at the end of March 1941, Rommel’s Afrika Korps launched an offensive which drove back the Commonwealth forces.^[123] In under a month, Axis forces advanced to western Egypt and besieged the port of Tobruk.^[124]

By late March 1941, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact; however, the Yugoslav government was overthrown two days later by pro-British nationalists. Germany responded with simultaneous invasions of both Yugoslavia and Greece, commencing on 6 April 1941; both nations were forced to surrender within the month.^[125] The airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete at the end of May completed the German conquest of the Balkans.^[126] Although the Axis victory was swift, bitter and large-scale partisan warfare subsequently broke out against the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, which continued until the end of the war.^[127]

In the Middle East in May, Commonwealth forces quashed an uprising in Iraq which had been supported by German aircraft from bases within Vichy-controlled Syria.^[128] Between June and July, British-led forces invaded and occupied the French possessions of Syria and Lebanon, with assistance of the Free French.^[129]

Axis attack on the Soviet Union (1941)

With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations for war. With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia, the two powers signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941.^[130] By contrast, the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, massing forces on the Soviet border.^[131]

Hitler believed that the United Kingdom’s refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later.^[132] On 31 July 1940 Hitler decided that the Soviet Union should be eliminated and aimed for the conquest of Ukraine, the Baltic states and Byelorussia.^[133] However, other senior German officials like Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to create a Euro-Asian bloc against the British Empire by inviting the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact.^[134] In November 1940, negotiations took place to determine if the Soviet Union would join the pact. The Soviets showed some interest but asked for concessions from Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan that Germany considered unacceptable. On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued the directive to prepare for an invasion of the Soviet Union.^[135]

On 22 June 1941, Germany, supported by Italy and Romania, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, with Germany accusing the Soviets of plotting against them. They were joined shortly by Finland and Hungary.^[136] The primary targets of this surprise offensive^[137] were the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with the ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line, from the Caspian to the White Seas. Hitler’s objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate Communism, generate Lebensraum («living space»)^[138] by dispossessing the native population^[139] and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany’s remaining rivals.^[140]

Although the Red Army was preparing for strategic counter-offensives before the war,^[141] Operation Barbarossa forced the Soviet supreme command to adopt a strategic defence. During the summer, the Axis made significant gains into Soviet territory, inflicting immense losses in both personnel and materiel. By mid-August, however, the German Army High Command decided to suspend the offensive of a considerably depleted Army Group Centre, and to divert the 2nd Panzer Group to reinforce troops advancing towards central Ukraine and Leningrad.^[142] The Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four Soviet armies, and made possible further advance into Crimea and industrially developed Eastern Ukraine (the First Battle of Kharkov).^[143]

The diversion of three quarters of the Axis troops and the majority of their air forces from France and the central Mediterranean to the Eastern Front^[144] prompted the United Kingdom to reconsider its grand strategy.^[145] In July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance against Germany^[146] and in August, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly issued the Atlantic Charter, which outlined British and American goals for the post-war world.^[147] In late August the British and Soviets invaded neutral Iran to secure the Persian Corridor, Iran’s oil fields, and preempt any Axis advances through Iran toward the Baku oil fields or India.^[148]

By October, Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad^[149] and Sevastopol continuing.^[150] A major offensive against Moscow was renewed; after two months of fierce battles in increasingly harsh weather, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, where the exhausted troops^[151] were forced to suspend their offensive.^[152] Large territorial gains were made by Axis forces, but their campaign had failed to achieve its main objectives: two key cities remained in Soviet hands, the Soviet capability to resist was not broken, and the Soviet Union retained a considerable part of its military potential. The blitzkrieg phase of the war in Europe had ended.^[153]

By early December, freshly mobilised reserves^[154] allowed the Soviets to achieve numerical parity with Axis troops.^[155] This, as well as intelligence data which established that a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East would be sufficient to deter any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army,^[156] allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on 5 December all along the front and pushed German troops 100–250 kilometres (62–155 mi) west.^[157]

War breaks out in the Pacific (1941)

Following the Japanese false flag Mukden Incident in 1931, the Japanese shelling of the American gunboat USS Panay in 1937, and the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre, Japanese-American relations deteriorated. In 1939, the United States notified Japan that it would not be extending its trade treaty and American public opinion opposing Japanese expansionism led to a series of economic sanctions, the Export Control Acts, which banned U.S. exports of chemicals, minerals and military parts to Japan and increased economic pressure on the Japanese regime.^{[108][158][159]} During 1939 Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by late September.^[160] Despite several offensives by both sides, the war between China and Japan was stalemated by 1940. To increase pressure on China by blocking supply routes, and to better position Japanese forces in the event of a war with the Western powers, Japan invaded and occupied northern Indochina in September 1940.^[161]

Chinese nationalist forces launched a large-scale counter-offensive in early 1940. In August, Chinese communists launched an offensive in Central China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures in occupied areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists.^[162] The continued antipathy between Chinese communist and nationalist forces culminated in armed clashes in January 1941, effectively ending their co-operation.^[163] In March, the Japanese 11th army attacked the headquarters of the Chinese 19th army but was repulsed during Battle of Shanggao.^{[164][unreliable source?]} In September, Japan attempted to take the city of Changsha again and clashed with Chinese nationalist forces.^{[165][unreliable source?]}

German successes in Europe encouraged Japan to increase pressure on European governments in Southeast Asia. The Dutch government agreed to provide Japan with some oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies, but negotiations for additional access to their resources ended in failure in June 1941.^[166] In July 1941 Japan sent troops to southern Indochina, thus threatening British and Dutch possessions in the Far East. The United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western governments reacted to this move with a freeze on Japanese assets and a total oil embargo.^[167][168] At the same time, Japan was planning an invasion of the Soviet Far East, intending to capitalise off the German invasion in the west, but abandoned the operation after the sanctions.^[169]

Since early 1941 the United States and Japan had been engaged in negotiations in an attempt to improve their strained relations and end the war in China. During these negotiations, Japan advanced a number of proposals which were dismissed by the Americans as inadequate.^[170] At the same time the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands engaged in secret discussions for the joint defence of their territories, in the event of a Japanese attack against any of them.^[171] Roosevelt reinforced the Philippines (an American protectorate scheduled for independence in 1946) and warned Japan that the United States would react to Japanese attacks against any «neighboring countries».^[171]

Frustrated at the lack of progress and feeling the pinch of the American–British–Dutch sanctions, Japan prepared for war. Emperor Hirohito, after initial hesitation about Japan’s chances of victory,^[172] began to favour Japan’s entry into the war.^[173] As a result, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned.^[174][175] Hirohito refused the recommendation to appoint Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni in his place, choosing War Minister Hideki Tojo instead.^[176] On 3 November, Nagano explained in detail the plan of the attack on Pearl Harbor to the Emperor.^[177] On 5 November, Hirohito approved in imperial conference the operations plan for the war.^[178] On 20 November, the new government presented an interim proposal as its final offer. It called for the end of American aid to China and for lifting the embargo on the supply of oil and other resources to Japan. In exchange, Japan promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw its forces from southern Indochina.^[170] The American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers.^[179] That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China, or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force;^[180][181] the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.^[182]

Japan planned to seize European colonies in Asia to create a large defensive perimeter stretching into the Central Pacific. The Japanese would then be free to exploit the resources of Southeast Asia while exhausting the over-stretched Allies by fighting a defensive war.^[183][184] To prevent American intervention while securing the perimeter, it was further planned to neutralise the United States Pacific Fleet and the American military presence in the Philippines from the outset.^[185] On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Asian time zones), Japan attacked British and American holdings with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific.^[186] These included an attack on the American fleets at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, as well as invasions of Guam, Wake Island, Malaya,^[186] Thailand, and Hong Kong.^[187]

The Japanese invasion of Thailand led to Thailand’s decision to ally itself with Japan and the other Japanese attacks led the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia, and several other states to formally declare war on Japan, whereas the Soviet Union, being heavily involved in large-scale hostilities with European Axis countries, maintained its neutrality agreement with Japan.^[188] Germany, followed by the other Axis states, declared war on the United States^[189] in solidarity with Japan, citing as justification the American attacks on German war vessels that had been ordered by Roosevelt.^[136][190]

Axis advance stalls (1942–1943)

On 1 January 1942, the Allied Big Four^[191]—the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and 22 smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations, thereby affirming the Atlantic Charter,^[192] and agreeing not to sign a separate peace with the Axis powers.^[193]

During 1942, Allied officials debated on the appropriate grand strategy to pursue. All agreed that defeating Germany was the primary objective. The Americans favoured a straightforward, large-scale attack on Germany through France. The Soviets were also demanding a second front. The British, on the other hand, argued that military operations should target peripheral areas to wear out German strength, leading to increasing demoralisation, and bolster resistance forces. Germany itself would be subject to a heavy bombing campaign. An offensive against Germany would then be launched primarily by Allied armour without using large-scale armies.^[194] Eventually, the British persuaded the Americans that a landing in France was infeasible in 1942 and they should instead focus on driving the Axis out of North Africa.^[195]

At the Casablanca Conference in early 1943, the Allies reiterated the statements issued in the 1942 Declaration and demanded the unconditional surrender of their enemies. The British and Americans agreed to continue to press the initiative in the Mediterranean by invading Sicily to fully secure the Mediterranean supply routes.^[196] Although the British argued for further operations in the Balkans to bring Turkey into the war, in May 1943, the Americans extracted a British commitment to limit Allied operations in the Mediterranean to an invasion of the Italian mainland and to invade France in 1944.^[197]

Pacific (1942–1943)

By the end of April 1942, Japan and its ally Thailand had almost fully conquered Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Rabaul, inflicting severe losses on Allied troops and taking a large number of prisoners.^[198] Despite stubborn resistance by Filipino and U.S. forces, the Philippine Commonwealth was eventually captured in May 1942, forcing its government into exile.^[199] On 16 April, in Burma, 7,000 British soldiers were encircled by the Japanese 33rd Division during the Battle of Yenangyaung and rescued by the Chinese 38th Division.^[200] Japanese forces also achieved naval victories in the South China Sea, Java Sea, and Indian Ocean,^[201] and bombed the Allied naval base at Darwin, Australia. In January 1942, the only Allied success against Japan was a Chinese victory at Changsha.^[202] These easy victories over the unprepared US and European opponents left Japan overconfident, as well as overextended.^[203]

In early May 1942, Japan initiated operations to capture Port Moresby by amphibious assault and thus sever communications and supply lines between the United States and Australia. The planned invasion was thwarted when an Allied task force, centred on two American fleet carriers, fought Japanese naval forces to a draw in the Battle of the Coral Sea.^[204] Japan’s next plan, motivated by the earlier Doolittle Raid, was to seize Midway Atoll and lure American carriers into battle to be eliminated; as a diversion, Japan would also send forces to occupy the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.^[205] In mid-May, Japan started the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in China, with the goal of inflicting retribution on the Chinese who aided the surviving American airmen in the Doolittle Raid by destroying Chinese air bases and fighting against the Chinese 23rd and 32nd Army Groups.^[206][207] In early June, Japan put its operations into action, but the Americans, having broken Japanese naval codes in late May, were fully aware of the plans and order of battle, and used this knowledge to achieve a decisive victory at Midway over the Imperial Japanese Navy.^[208]

With its capacity for aggressive action greatly diminished as a result of the Midway battle, Japan chose to focus on a belated attempt to capture Port Moresby by an overland campaign in the Territory of Papua.^[209] The Americans planned a counter-attack against Japanese positions in the southern Solomon Islands, primarily Guadalcanal, as a first step towards capturing Rabaul, the main Japanese base in Southeast Asia.^[210]

Both plans started in July, but by mid-September, the Battle for Guadalcanal took priority for the Japanese, and troops in New Guinea were ordered to withdraw from the Port Moresby area to the northern part of the island, where they faced Australian and United States troops in the Battle of Buna–Gona.^[211] Guadalcanal soon became a focal point for both sides with heavy commitments of troops and ships in the battle for Guadalcanal. By the start of 1943, the Japanese were defeated on the island and withdrew their troops.^[212] In Burma, Commonwealth forces mounted two operations. The first, an offensive into the Arakan region in late 1942, went disastrously, forcing a retreat back to India by May 1943.^[213] The second was the insertion of irregular forces behind Japanese front-lines in February which, by the end of April, had achieved mixed results.^[214]

Eastern Front (1942–1943)

Despite considerable losses, in early 1942 Germany and its allies stopped a major Soviet offensive in central and southern Russia, keeping most territorial gains they had achieved during the previous year.^[215] In May, the Germans defeated Soviet offensives in the Kerch Peninsula and at Kharkov,^[216] and then launched their main summer offensive against southern Russia in June 1942, to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe, while maintaining positions on the northern and central areas of the front. The Germans split Army Group South into two groups: Army Group A advanced to the lower Don River and struck south-east to the Caucasus, while Army Group B headed towards the Volga River. The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad on the Volga.^[217]

By mid-November, the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting. The Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad,^[218] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.^[219] By early February 1943, the German Army had taken tremendous losses; German troops at Stalingrad had been defeated,^[220] and the front-line had been pushed back beyond its position before the summer offensive. In mid-February, after the Soviet push had tapered off, the Germans launched another attack on Kharkov, creating a salient in their front line around the Soviet city of Kursk.^[221]

Western Europe/Atlantic and Mediterranean (1942–1943)

Exploiting poor American naval command decisions, the German navy ravaged Allied shipping off the American Atlantic coast.^[222] By November 1941, Commonwealth forces had launched a counter-offensive, Operation Crusader, in North Africa, and reclaimed all the gains the Germans and Italians had made.^[223] In North Africa, the Germans launched an offensive in January, pushing the British back to positions at the Gazala line by early February,^[224] followed by a temporary lull in combat which Germany used to prepare for their upcoming offensives.^[225] Concerns the Japanese might use bases in Vichy-held Madagascar caused the British to invade the island in early May 1942.^[226] An Axis offensive in Libya forced an Allied retreat deep inside Egypt until Axis forces were stopped at El Alamein.^[227] On the Continent, raids of Allied commandos on strategic targets, culminating in the disastrous Dieppe Raid,^[228] demonstrated the Western Allies’ inability to launch an invasion of continental Europe without much better preparation, equipment, and operational security.^{[229][page needed]}

In August 1942, the Allies succeeded in repelling a second attack against El Alamein^[230] and, at a high cost, managed to deliver desperately needed supplies to the besieged Malta.^[231] A few months later, the Allies commenced an attack of their own in Egypt, dislodging the Axis forces and beginning a drive west across Libya.^[232] This attack was followed up shortly after by Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, which resulted in the region joining the Allies.^[233] Hitler responded to the French colony’s defection by ordering the occupation of Vichy France;^[233] although Vichy forces did not resist this violation of the armistice, they managed to scuttle their fleet to prevent its capture by German forces.^[233][234] The Axis forces in Africa withdrew into Tunisia, which was conquered by the Allies in May 1943.^[233][235]

In June 1943, the British and Americans began a strategic bombing campaign against Germany with a goal to disrupt the war economy, reduce morale, and «de-house» the civilian population.^[236] The firebombing of Hamburg was among the first attacks in this campaign, inflicting significant casualties and considerable losses on infrastructure of this important industrial centre.^[237]

Allies gain momentum (1943–1944)

After the Guadalcanal campaign, the Allies initiated several operations against Japan in the Pacific. In May 1943, Canadian and U.S. forces were sent to eliminate Japanese forces from the Aleutians.^[238] Soon after, the United States, with support from Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islander forces, began major ground, sea and air operations to isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands, and breach the Japanese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.^[239] By the end of March 1944, the Allies had completed both of these objectives and had also neutralised the major Japanese base at Truk in the Caroline Islands. In April, the Allies launched an operation to retake Western New Guinea.^[240]

In the Soviet Union, both the Germans and the Soviets spent the spring and early summer of 1943 preparing for large offensives in central Russia. On 5 July 1943, Germany attacked Soviet forces around the Kursk Bulge. Within a week, German forces had exhausted themselves against the Soviets’ deeply echeloned and well-constructed defences,^[241] and for the first time in the war, Hitler cancelled an operation before it had achieved tactical or operational success.^[242] This decision was partially affected by the Western Allies’ invasion of Sicily launched on 9 July, which, combined with previous Italian failures, resulted in the ousting and arrest of Mussolini later that month.^[243]

On 12 July 1943, the Soviets launched their own counter-offensives, thereby dispelling any chance of German victory or even stalemate in the east. The Soviet victory at Kursk marked the end of German superiority,^[244] giving the Soviet Union the initiative on the Eastern Front.^[245][246] The Germans tried to stabilise their eastern front along the hastily fortified Panther–Wotan line, but the Soviets broke through it at Smolensk and by the Lower Dnieper Offensive.^[247]

On 3 September 1943, the Western Allies invaded the Italian mainland, following Italy’s armistice with the Allies and the ensuing German occupation of Italy.^[248] Germany, with the help of fascists, responded to the armistice by disarming Italian forces that were in many places without superior orders, seizing military control of Italian areas,^[249] and creating a series of defensive lines.^[250] German special forces then rescued Mussolini, who then soon established a new client state in German-occupied Italy named the Italian Social Republic,^[251] causing an Italian civil war. The Western Allies fought through several lines until reaching the main German defensive line in mid-November.^[252]

German operations in the Atlantic also suffered. By May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became increasingly effective, the resulting sizeable German submarine losses forced a temporary halt of the German Atlantic naval campaign.^[253] In November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and then with Joseph Stalin in Tehran.^[254] The former conference determined the post-war return of Japanese territory^[255] and the military planning for the Burma campaign,^[256] while the latter included agreement that the Western Allies would invade Europe in 1944 and that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat.^[257]

From November 1943, during the seven-week Battle of Changde, the Chinese forced Japan to fight a costly war of attrition, while awaiting Allied relief.^{[258][259][260][unreliable source?]} In January 1944, the Allies launched a series of attacks in Italy against the line at Monte Cassino and tried to outflank it with landings at Anzio.^[261]

On 27 January 1944, Soviet troops launched a major offensive that expelled German forces from the Leningrad region, thereby ending the most lethal siege in history.^[262] The following Soviet offensive was halted on the pre-war Estonian border by the German Army Group North aided by Estonians hoping to re-establish national independence. This delay slowed subsequent Soviet operations in the Baltic Sea region.^[263] By late May 1944, the Soviets had liberated Crimea, largely expelled Axis forces from Ukraine, and made incursions into Romania, which were repulsed by the Axis troops.^[264] The Allied offensives in Italy had succeeded and, at the expense of allowing several German divisions to retreat, on 4 June Rome was captured.^[265]

The Allies had mixed success in mainland Asia. In March 1944, the Japanese launched the first of two invasions, an operation against Allied positions in Assam, India,^[266] and soon besieged Commonwealth positions at Imphal and Kohima.^[267] In May 1944, British and Indian forces mounted a counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma by July,^[267] and Chinese forces that had invaded northern Burma in late 1943 besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina.^[268] The second Japanese invasion of China aimed to destroy China’s main fighting forces, secure railways between Japanese-held territory and capture Allied airfields.^[269] By June, the Japanese had conquered the province of Henan and begun a new attack on Changsha.^[270]

Allies close in (1944)

On 6 June 1944 (known as D-Day), after three years of Soviet pressure,^[271] the Western Allies invaded northern France. After reassigning several Allied divisions from Italy, they also attacked southern France.^[272] These landings were successful and led to the defeat of the German Army units in France. Paris was liberated on 25 August by the local resistance assisted by the Free French Forces, both led by General Charles de Gaulle,^[273] and the Western Allies continued to push back German forces in western Europe during the latter part of the year. An attempt to advance into northern Germany spearheaded by a major airborne operation in the Netherlands failed.^[274] After that, the Western Allies slowly pushed into Germany, but failed to cross the Rur river in a large offensive. In Italy, Allied advance also slowed due to the last major German defensive line.^[275]

On 22 June, the Soviets launched a strategic offensive in Belarus («Operation Bagration») that almost completely destroyed the German Army Group Centre.^[276] Soon after that, another Soviet strategic offensive forced German troops from Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. The Soviets formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation to control territory in Poland and combat the Polish Armia Krajowa; the Soviet Red Army remained in the Praga district on the other side of the Vistula and watched passively as the Germans quelled the Warsaw Uprising initiated by the Armia Krajowa.^[277] The national uprising in Slovakia was also quelled by the Germans.^[278] The Soviet Red Army’s strategic offensive in eastern Romania cut off and destroyed the considerable German troops there and triggered a successful coup d’état in Romania and in Bulgaria, followed by those countries’ shift to the Allied side.^[279]

In September 1944, Soviet troops advanced into Yugoslavia and forced the rapid withdrawal of German Army Groups E and F in Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia to rescue them from being cut off.^[280] By this point, the communist-led Partisans under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who had led an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the occupation since 1941, controlled much of the territory of Yugoslavia and engaged in delaying efforts against German forces further south. In northern Serbia, the Soviet Red Army, with limited support from Bulgarian forces, assisted the Partisans in a joint liberation of the capital city of Belgrade on 20 October. A few days later, the Soviets launched a massive assault against German-occupied Hungary that lasted until the fall of Budapest in February 1945.^[281] Unlike impressive Soviet victories in the Balkans, bitter Finnish resistance to the Soviet offensive in the Karelian Isthmus denied the Soviets occupation of Finland and led to a Soviet-Finnish armistice on relatively mild conditions,^[282] although Finland was forced to fight their former ally Germany.^[283]

By the start of July 1944, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the Chindwin River^[284] while the Chinese captured Myitkyina. In September 1944, Chinese forces captured Mount Song and reopened the Burma Road.^[285] In China, the Japanese had more successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August.^[286] Soon after, they invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the end of November^[287] and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by mid-December.^[288]

In the Pacific, U.S. forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944, they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands and decisively defeated Japanese forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. These defeats led to the resignation of the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, and provided the United States with air bases to launch intensive heavy bomber attacks on the Japanese home islands. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval forces scored another large victory in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history.^[289]

Axis collapse and Allied victory (1944–1945)

On 16 December 1944, Germany made a last attempt on the Western Front by using most of its remaining reserves to launch a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes and along the French-German border to split the Western Allies, encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and capture their primary supply port at Antwerp to prompt a political settlement.^[290] By 16 January 1945, the offensive had been repulsed with no strategic objectives fulfilled.^[290] In Italy, the Western Allies remained stalemated at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the Red Army attacked in Poland, pushing from the Vistula to the Oder river in Germany, and overran East Prussia.^[291] On 4 February Soviet, British, and U.S. leaders met for the Yalta Conference. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.^[292]

In February, the Soviets entered Silesia and Pomerania, while the Western Allies entered western Germany and closed to the Rhine river. By March, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine north and south of the Ruhr, encircling the German Army Group B.^[293] In early March, in an attempt to protect its last oil reserves in Hungary and to retake Budapest, Germany launched its last major offensive against Soviet troops near Lake Balaton. In two weeks, the offensive had been repulsed, the Soviets advanced to Vienna, and captured the city. In early April, Soviet troops captured Königsberg, while the Western Allies finally pushed forward in Italy and swept across western Germany capturing Hamburg and Nuremberg. American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe river on 25 April, leaving several unoccupied pockets in southern Germany and around Berlin.

Soviet troops stormed and captured Berlin in late April.^[294] In Italy, German forces surrendered on 29 April. On 30 April, the Reichstag was captured, signalling the military defeat of Nazi Germany,^[295] and the Berlin garrison surrendered on 2 May.

Major changes in leadership occurred on both sides during this period. On 12 April, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on 28 April.^[296] On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in his headquarters, and he was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and Joseph Goebbels. Total and unconditional surrender in Europe was signed on 7 and 8 May, to be effective by the end of 8 May.^[297] German Army Group Centre resisted in Prague until 11 May.^[298]

In the Pacific theatre, American forces accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of April 1945. They landed on Luzon in January 1945 and recaptured Manila in March. Fighting continued on Luzon, Mindanao, and other islands of the Philippines until the end of the war.^[299] Meanwhile, the United States Army Air Forces launched a massive firebombing campaign of strategic cities in Japan in an effort to destroy Japanese war industry and civilian morale. A devastating bombing raid on Tokyo of 9–10 March was the deadliest conventional bombing raid in history.^[300]

In May 1945, Australian troops landed in Borneo, overrunning the oilfields there. British, American, and Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma in March, and the British pushed on to reach Rangoon by 3 May.^[301] Chinese forces started a counterattack in the Battle of West Hunan that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945. American naval and amphibious forces also moved towards Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by the end of June.^[302] At the same time, a naval blockade by submarines was strangling Japan’s economy and drastically reducing its ability to supply overseas forces.^[303][304]

On 11 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany,^[305] and the American, British and Chinese governments reiterated the demand for unconditional surrender of Japan, specifically stating that «the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction».^[306] During this conference, the United Kingdom held its general election, and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister.^[307]

The call for unconditional surrender was rejected by the Japanese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms.^[308] In early August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, invaded Japanese-held Manchuria and quickly defeated the Kwantung Army, which was the largest Japanese fighting force.^[309] These two events persuaded previously adamant Imperial Army leaders to accept surrender terms.^[310] The Red Army also captured the southern part of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. On the night of 9–10 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his decision to accept the terms demanded by the Allies in the Potsdam Declaration.^[311] On 15 August, the Emperor communicated this decision to the Japanese people through a speech broadcast on the radio (Gyokuon-hōsō, literally «broadcast in the Emperor’s voice»).^[312] On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed at Tokyo Bay on the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, ending the war.^[313]

Aftermath

The Allies established occupation administrations in Austria and Germany, both initially divided between western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, respectively. However, their paths soon diverged. In Germany, the western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union officially ended in 1949, with the respective zones becoming separate countries, West Germany and East Germany. However, in Austria occupation continued until 1955, when a joint settlement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union permitted the reunification of Austria as a neutral democratic state, officially non-aligned with any political bloc (although in practice having better relations with the Western Allies). A denazification program in Germany led to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials and the removal of ex-Nazis from power, although this policy moved towards amnesty and re-integration of ex-Nazis into West German society.^[314]

Germany lost a quarter of its pre-war (1937) territory. Among the eastern territories, Silesia, Neumark and most of Pomerania were taken over by Poland,^[315] and East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, followed by the expulsion to Germany of the nine million Germans from these provinces,^[316][317] as well as three million Germans from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. By the 1950s, one-fifth of West Germans were refugees from the east. The Soviet Union also took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon line,^[318] from which 2 million Poles were expelled;^[317][319] north-east Romania,^[320][321] parts of eastern Finland,^[322] and the three Baltic states were incorporated into the Soviet Union.^[323][324]

In an effort to maintain world peace,^[325] the Allies formed the United Nations, which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945,^[326] and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a common standard for all member nations.^[327] The great powers that were the victors of the war—France, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States—became the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council.^[328] The five permanent members remain so to the present, although there have been two seat changes, between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China in 1971, and between the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over.^[329]

Germany had been de facto divided, and two independent states, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany),^[330] were created within the borders of Allied and Soviet occupation zones. The rest of Europe was also divided into Western and Soviet spheres of influence.^[331] Most eastern and central European countries fell into the Soviet sphere, which led to establishment of Communist-led regimes, with full or partial support of the Soviet occupation authorities. As a result, East Germany,^[332] Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Albania^[333] became Soviet satellite states. Communist Yugoslavia conducted a fully independent policy, causing tension with the Soviet Union.^[334]

Post-war division of the world was formalised by two international military alliances, the United States-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.^[335] The long period of political tensions and military competition between them, the Cold War, would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race and number of proxy wars throughout the world.^[336]

In Asia, the United States led the occupation of Japan and administered Japan’s former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.^[337] Korea, formerly under Japanese rule, was divided and occupied by the Soviet Union in the North and the United States in the South between 1945 and 1948. Separate republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel in 1948, each claiming to be the legitimate government for all of Korea, which led ultimately to the Korean War.^[338]

In China, nationalist and communist forces resumed the civil war in June 1946. Communist forces were victorious and established the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949.^[339] In the Middle East, the Arab rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the creation of Israel marked the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict. While European powers attempted to retain some or all of their colonial empires, their losses of prestige and resources during the war rendered this unsuccessful, leading to decolonisation.^[340][341]

The global economy suffered heavily from the war, although participating nations were affected differently. The United States emerged much richer than any other nation, leading to a baby boom, and by 1950 its gross domestic product per person was much higher than that of any of the other powers, and it dominated the world economy.^[342] The Allied occupational authorities pursued a policy of industrial disarmament in Western Germany from 1945 to 1948.^[343] Due to international trade interdependencies, this policy led to an economic stagnation in Europe and delayed European recovery from the war for several years.^[344][345]

At the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, the Allied nations drew up an economic framework for the post-war world. The agreement created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The Bretton Woods system lasted until 1973.^[346] Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany, and was sped up by the liberalisation of European economic policy that the Marshall Plan (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused.^[347][348] The post-1948 West German recovery has been called the German economic miracle.^[349] Italy also experienced an economic boom^[350] and the French economy rebounded.^[351] By contrast, the United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin,^[352] and although receiving a quarter of the total Marshall Plan assistance, more than any other European country,^[353] it continued in relative economic decline for decades.^[354]
The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era.^[355] Japan recovered much later.^[356] China returned to its pre-war industrial production by 1952.^[357]

Impact

Casualties and war crimes

Estimates for the total number of casualties in the war vary, because many deaths went unrecorded.^[358] Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians.^{[359][360][361]}
Many of the civilians died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass bombings, disease, and starvation.

The Soviet Union alone lost around 27 million people during the war,^[362] including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths.^[363] A quarter of the total people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed.^[364] Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.^[365]

An estimated 11^[366] to 17 million^[367] civilians died as a direct or as an indirect result of Hitler’s racist policies, including mass killing of around 6 million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, at least 1.9 million ethnic Poles^[368][369] and millions of other Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and other ethnic and minority groups.^[370][367] Between 1941 and 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs, along with gypsies and Jews, were persecuted and murdered by the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia.^[371] Concurrently, Muslims and Croats were persecuted and killed by Serb nationalist Chetniks,^[372] with an estimated 50,000-68,000 victims (of which 41,000 were civilians).^[373] Also, more than 100,000 Poles were massacred by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volhynia massacres, between 1943 and 1945.^[374] At the same time, about 10,000–15,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish Home Army and other Polish units, in reprisal attacks.^[375]

In Asia and the Pacific, the number of people killed by Japanese troops remains contested. According to R.J. Rummel, the Japanese killed between 3 million and more than 10 million people, with the most probable case of almost 6,000,000 people.^[376] According to the British historian M. R. D. Foot, civilian deaths are between 10 million and 20 million, whereas Chinese military casualties (killed and wounded) are estimated to be over five million.^[377] Other estimates say that up to 30 million people, most of them civilians, were killed.^[378][379] The most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.^[380] Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sankō Sakusen. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung.^[381]

Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731)^[382][383] and in early conflicts against the Soviets.^[384] Both the Germans and the Japanese tested such weapons against civilians,^[385] and sometimes on prisoners of war.^[386]

The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers,^[387] and the imprisonment or execution of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD, along with mass civilian deportations to Siberia, in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army.^[388]

The mass bombing of cities in Europe and Asia has often been called a war crime, although no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II.^[389] The USAAF bombed a total of 67 Japanese cities, killing 393,000 civilians, including from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroying 65% of built-up areas.^[390]

Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour

Nazi Germany, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, was responsible for the Holocaust (which killed approximately 6 million Jews) as well as for killing 2.7 million ethnic Poles^[391] and 4 million others who were deemed «unworthy of life» (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) as part of a program of deliberate extermination, in effect becoming a «genocidal state».^[392] Soviet POWs were kept in especially unbearable conditions, and 3.6 million Soviet POWs out of 5.7 million died in Nazi camps during the war.^[393][394] In addition to concentration camps, death camps were created in Nazi Germany to exterminate people on an industrial scale. Nazi Germany extensively used forced labourers; about 12 million Europeans from German-occupied countries were abducted and used as a slave work force in German industry, agriculture and war economy.^[395]

The Soviet Gulag became a de facto system of deadly camps during 1942–43, when wartime privation and hunger caused numerous deaths of inmates,^[396] including foreign citizens of Poland and other countries occupied in 1939–40 by the Soviet Union, as well as Axis POWs.^[397] By the end of the war, most Soviet POWs liberated from Nazi camps and many repatriated civilians were detained in special filtration camps where they were subjected to NKVD evaluation, and 226,127 were sent to the Gulag as real or perceived Nazi collaborators.^[398]

Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also had high death rates. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners was 27 per cent (for American POWs, 37 per cent),^[399] seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians.^[400] While 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only 56.^[401]

At least five million Chinese civilians from northern China and Manchukuo were enslaved between 1935 and 1941 by the East Asia Development Board, or Kōain, for work in mines and war industries. After 1942, the number reached 10 million.^[402] In Java, between 4 and 10 million rōmusha (Japanese: «manual labourers»), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in Southeast Asia, and only 52,000 were repatriated to Java.^[403]

Occupation

In Europe, occupation came under two forms. In Western, Northern, and Central Europe (France, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and the annexed portions of Czechoslovakia) Germany established economic policies through which it collected roughly 69.5 billion reichsmarks (27.8 billion US dollars) by the end of the war; this figure does not include the sizeable plunder of industrial products, military equipment, raw materials and other goods.^[404] Thus, the income from occupied nations was over 40 percent of the income Germany collected from taxation, a figure which increased to nearly 40 percent of total German income as the war went on.^[405]

In the East, the intended gains of Lebensraum were never attained as fluctuating front-lines and Soviet scorched earth policies denied resources to the German invaders.^[406] Unlike in the West, the Nazi racial policy encouraged extreme brutality against what it considered to be the «inferior people» of Slavic descent; most German advances were thus followed by mass executions.^[407] Although resistance groups formed in most occupied territories, they did not significantly hamper German operations in either the East^[408] or the West^[409] until late 1943.

In Asia, Japan termed nations under its occupation as being part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, essentially a Japanese hegemony which it claimed was for purposes of liberating colonised peoples.^[410] Although Japanese forces were sometimes welcomed as liberators from European domination, Japanese war crimes frequently turned local public opinion against them.^[411] During Japan’s initial conquest, it captured 4,000,000 barrels (640,000 m³) of oil (~550,000 tonnes) left behind by retreating Allied forces; and by 1943, was able to get production in the Dutch East Indies up to 50 million barrels (7,900,000 m³) of oil (~6.8 million tonnes), 76 per cent of its 1940 output rate.^[411]

Home fronts and production

In Europe, before the outbreak of the war, the Allies had significant advantages in both population and economics. In 1938, the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, Poland and the British Dominions) had a 30 percent larger population and a 30 percent higher gross domestic product than the European Axis powers (Germany and Italy); if colonies are included, the Allies had more than a 5:1 advantage in population and a nearly 2:1 advantage in GDP.^[412] In Asia at the same time, China had roughly six times the population of Japan but only an 89 percent higher GDP; this is reduced to three times the population and only a 38 percent higher GDP if Japanese colonies are included.^[412]

The United States produced about two-thirds of all the munitions used by the Allies in World War II, including warships, transports, warplanes, artillery, tanks, trucks, and ammunition.^[413]
Though the Allies’ economic and population advantages were largely mitigated during the initial rapid blitzkrieg attacks of Germany and Japan, they became the decisive factor by 1942, after the United States and Soviet Union joined the Allies, as the war largely settled into one of attrition.^[414] While the Allies’ ability to out-produce the Axis is often attributed^{[by whom?]} to the Allies having more access to natural resources, other factors, such as Germany and Japan’s reluctance to employ women in the labour force,^[415] Allied strategic bombing,^[416] and Germany’s late shift to a war economy^[417] contributed significantly. Additionally, neither Germany nor Japan planned to fight a protracted war, and had not equipped themselves to do so.^[418] To improve their production, Germany and Japan used millions of slave labourers;^[419] Germany used about 12 million people, mostly from Eastern Europe,^[395] while Japan used more than 18 million people in Far East Asia.^[402][403]

Advances in technology and its application

Aircraft were used for reconnaissance, as fighters, bombers, and ground-support, and each role developed considerably. Innovations included airlift (the capability to quickly move limited high-priority supplies, equipment, and personnel);^[420] and strategic bombing (the bombing of enemy industrial and population centres to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war).^[421] Anti-aircraft weaponry also advanced, including defences such as radar and surface-to-air artillery. The use of the jet aircraft was pioneered and, though late introduction meant it had little impact, it led to jets becoming standard in air forces worldwide.^[422]

Advances were made in nearly every aspect of naval warfare, most notably with aircraft carriers and submarines. Although aeronautical warfare had relatively little success at the start of the war, actions at Taranto, Pearl Harbor, and the Coral Sea established the carrier as the dominant capital ship (in place of the battleship).^{[423][424][425]} In the Atlantic, escort carriers became a vital part of Allied convoys, increasing the effective protection radius and helping to close the Mid-Atlantic gap.^[426] Carriers were also more economical than battleships because of the relatively low cost of aircraft^[427] and their not requiring to be as heavily armoured.^[428] Submarines, which had proved to be an effective weapon during the First World War,^[429] were expected by all combatants to be important in the second. The British focused development on anti-submarine weaponry and tactics, such as sonar and convoys, while Germany focused on improving its offensive capability, with designs such as the Type VII submarine and wolfpack tactics.^{[430][better source needed]} Gradually, improving Allied technologies such as the Leigh light, hedgehog, squid, and homing torpedoes proved effective against German submarines.^[431]

Land warfare changed from the static front-lines of trench warfare of World War I, which had relied on improved artillery that outmatched the speed of both infantry and cavalry, to increased mobility and combined arms. The tank, which had been used predominantly for infantry support in the First World War, had evolved into the primary weapon.^[432] In the late 1930s, tank design was considerably more advanced than it had been during World War I,^[433] and advances continued throughout the war with increases in speed, armour and firepower.^[434][435] At the start of the war, most commanders thought enemy tanks should be met by tanks with superior specifications.^[436] This idea was challenged by the poor performance of the relatively light early tank guns against armour, and German doctrine of avoiding tank-versus-tank combat. This, along with Germany’s use of combined arms, were among the key elements of their highly successful blitzkrieg tactics across Poland and France.^[432] Many means of destroying tanks, including indirect artillery, anti-tank guns (both towed and self-propelled), mines, short-ranged infantry antitank weapons, and other tanks were used.^[436] Even with large-scale mechanisation, infantry remained the backbone of all forces,^[437] and throughout the war, most infantry were equipped similarly to World War I.^[438] The portable machine gun spread, a notable example being the German MG 34, and various submachine guns which were suited to close combat in urban and jungle settings.^[438] The assault rifle, a late war development incorporating many features of the rifle and submachine gun, became the standard post-war infantry weapon for most armed forces.^[439]

Most major belligerents attempted to solve the problems of complexity and security involved in using large codebooks for cryptography by designing ciphering machines, the most well known being the German Enigma machine.^[440] Development of SIGINT (signals intelligence) and cryptanalysis enabled the countering process of decryption. Notable examples were the Allied decryption of Japanese naval codes^[441] and British Ultra, a pioneering method for decoding Enigma benefiting from information given to the United Kingdom by the Polish Cipher Bureau, which had been decoding early versions of Enigma before the war.^[442] Another aspect of military intelligence was the use of deception, which the Allies used to great effect, such as in operations Mincemeat and Bodyguard.^[441][443]

Other technological and engineering feats achieved during, or as a result of, the war include the world’s first programmable computers (Z3, Colossus, and ENIAC), guided missiles and modern rockets, the Manhattan Project’s development of nuclear weapons, operations research, the development of artificial harbours and oil pipelines under the English Channel.^[444] Penicillin was first developed, mass-produced and used during the war.^[445]

See also

• Lists of World War II topics
• Opposition to World War II
• Outline of World War II
• Lists of World War II military equipment

Notes

Citations

References

External links

• West Point Maps of the European War
• West Point Maps of the Asian-Pacific War
• Atlas of the World Battle Fronts (July 1943 to August 1945)
• Records of World War II propaganda posters are held by Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books Archived 2 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine
• Maps of World War II in Europe at Omniatlas

Leading up to World War II

The devastation of the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) had greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In particular, political and economic instability in Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty, fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated as NSDAP in German and the Nazi Party in English..

Did you know? As early as 1923, in his memoir and propaganda tract «Mein Kampf» (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler had predicted a general European war that would result in «the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.»

After becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler swiftly consolidated power, anointing himself Führer (supreme leader) in 1934. Obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” Hitler believed that war was the only way to gain the necessary “Lebensraum,” or living space, for the German race to expand. In the mid-1930s, he secretly began the rearmament of Germany, a violation of the Versailles Treaty. After signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union, Hitler sent troops to occupy Austria in 1938 and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s open aggression went unchecked, as the United States and Soviet Union were concentrated on internal politics at the time, and neither France nor Britain (the two other nations most devastated by the Great War) were eager for confrontation.

Outbreak of World War II (1939)

In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II.

On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-Finnish War. During the six months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of action on the part of Germany and the Allies in the west led to talk in the news media of a “phony war.” At sea, however, the British and German navies faced off in heated battle, and lethal German U-boat submarines struck at merchant shipping bound for Britain, sinking more than 100 vessels in the first four months of World War II.

World War II in the West (1940-41)

On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest. On May 10, German forces swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war. Three days later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Meuse River and struck French forces at Sedan, located at the northern end of the Maginot Line, an elaborate chain of fortifications constructed after World War I and considered an impenetrable defensive barrier. In fact, the Germans broke through the line with their tanks and planes and continued to the rear, rendering it useless. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated by sea from Dunkirk in late May, while in the south French forces mounted a doomed resistance. With France on the verge of collapse, Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini formed an alliance with Hitler, the Pact of Steel, and Italy declared war against France and Britain on June 10.

On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights later. France was subsequently divided into two zones, one under German military occupation and the other under Petain’s government, installed at Vichy France. Hitler now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive advantage of being separated from the Continent by the English Channel.

To pave the way for an amphibious invasion (dubbed Operation Sea Lion), German planes bombed Britain extensively beginning in September 1940 until May 1941, known as the Blitz, including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage. The Royal Air Force (RAF) eventually defeated the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler postponed his plans to invade. With Britain’s defensive resources pushed to the limit, Prime Minister Winston Churchill began receiving crucial aid from the U.S. under the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in early 1941.

Hitler vs. Stalin: Operation Barbarossa (1941-42)

By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April. Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans was a precursor for his real objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast territory would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed. The other half of Hitler’s strategy was the extermination of the Jews from throughout German-occupied Europe. Plans for the “Final Solution” were introduced around the time of the Soviet offensive, and over the next three years more than 4 million Jews would perish in the death camps established in occupied Poland.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Though Soviet tanks and aircraft greatly outnumbered the Germans’, Russian aviation technology was largely obsolete, and the impact of the surprise invasion helped Germans get within 200 miles of Moscow by mid-July. Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the next German advance until October, when it was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather.

World War II in the Pacific (1941-43)

With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late 1941 included an expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East. On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, taking the Americans completely by surprise and claiming the lives of more than 2,300 troops. The attack on Pearl Harbor served to unify American public opinion in favor of entering World War II, and on December 8 Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared war on the United States.

After a long string of Japanese victories, the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway in June 1942, which proved to be a turning point in the war. On Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success against Japanese forces in a series of battles from August 1942 to February 1943, helping turn the tide further in the Pacific. In mid-1943, Allied naval forces began an aggressive counterattack against Japan, involving a series of amphibious assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. This “island-hopping” strategy proved successful, and Allied forces moved closer to their ultimate goal of invading the mainland Japan.

Toward Allied Victory in World War II (1943-45)

In North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and Germans by 1943. An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s government fell in July 1943, though Allied fighting against the Germans in Italy would continue until 1945.

On the Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest combat of World War II. The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, spelled the end for German troops there, and the last of them surrendered on January 31, 1943.

On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allies began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his army into Western Europe, ensuring Germany’s defeat in the east. Soviet troops soon advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler gathered his forces to drive the Americans and British back from Germany in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945), the last major German offensive of the war.

An intensive aerial bombardment in February 1945 preceded the Allied land invasion of Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8, Soviet forces had occupied much of the country. Hitler was already dead, having died by suicide on April 30 in his Berlin bunker.

World War II Ends (1945)

At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman (who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany. Post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and France. On the divisive matter of Eastern Europe’s future, Churchill and Truman acquiesced to Stalin, as they needed Soviet cooperation in the war against Japan.

Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of Japan led Truman to authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon. Developed during a top secret operation code-named The Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb was unleashed on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August. On August 15, the Japanese government issued a statement declaring they would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and on September 2, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

African American Servicemen Fight Two Wars

A tank and crew from the 761st Tank Battalion in front of the Prince Albert Memorial in Coburg, Germany, 1945.

World War II exposed a glaring paradox within the United States Armed Forces. Although more than 1 million African Americans served in the war to defeat Nazism and fascism, they did so in segregated units. The same discriminatory Jim Crow policies that were rampant in American society were reinforced by the U.S. military. Black servicemen rarely saw combat and were largely relegated to labor and supply units that were commanded by white officers.

There were several African American units that proved essential in helping to win World War II, with the Tuskegee Airmen being among the most celebrated. But the Red Ball Express, the truck convoy of mostly Black drivers were responsible for delivering essential goods to General George S. Patton’s troops on the front lines in France. The all-Black 761st Tank Battalion fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and the 92 Infantry Division, fought in fierce ground battles in Italy. Yet, despite their role in defeating fascism, the fight for equality continued for African American soldiers after the World War II ended. They remained in segregated units and lower-ranking positions, well into the Korean War, a few years after President Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the U.S. military in 1948.

World War II Casualties and Legacy

World War II proved to be the deadliest international conflict in history, taking the lives of 60 to 80 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Civilians made up an estimated 50-55 million deaths from the war, while military comprised 21 to 25 million of those lost during the war. Millions more were injured, and still more lost their homes and property. 

The legacy of the war would include the spread of communism from the Soviet Union into eastern Europe as well as its eventual triumph in China, and the global shift in power from Europe to two rival superpowers–the United States and the Soviet Union–that would soon face off against each other in the Cold War.

Photo Galleries

World War II, also WWII, or the Second World War, was a global military conflict that took place between 1939 and 1945. It was the largest and deadliest war in history. The date commonly given for the start of the war is September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Within two days the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany, although the only European battles remained in Poland. Pursuant to a then-secret provision of its non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union joined with Germany on September 17, 1939, to conquer Poland and to divide Eastern Europe.

The Allies were initially made up of Poland, the British Empire, France, and others. In May, 1940, Germany invaded western Europe. Six weeks later, France surrendered to Germany. Three months after that, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a mutual defense agreement, the Tripartite Pact, and were known as the Axis Powers. Then, nine months later, in June 1941, Germany betrayed and invaded the Soviet Union, forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp (although they continued their non-aggression treaty with Japan). In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States bringing it into the war on the Allied side. China also joined the Allies, as eventually did most of the rest of the world. From the beginning of 1942 through August 1945, battles raged across all of Europe, in the North Atlantic Ocean, across North Africa, throughout Southeast Asia, and China, across the Pacific Ocean and in the air over Germany and Japan.

After World War II, Europe was split into western and Soviet spheres of influence. Western Europe later aligned as NATO and Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact. There was a shift in power from Western Europe and the British Empire to the two post-war superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. These two rivals would later face off in the Cold War. In Asia, Japan’s defeat led to its democratization. China’s civil war continued into the 1950s, resulting eventually in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. European colonies began their road to independence. Disgusted at the human cost of war, as people had been after World War I, a commitment to diplomacy to resolve differences was written into the charter of the new international body that replaced the failed League of Nations, the United Nations, which this time attracted U.S. support. The real effectiveness of this body has been subsequently compromised because member states act when it suits them, and sometimes by-pass it altogether. The victory, though, of the Allies over the Axis powers is usually regarded as having safeguarded democracy and freedom. The Holocaust represented one of the the most evil incidents in human history. Even still, the Allies cannot be said to have conducted the war according to the highest standards of combat, using mass bombings that provoked one leading British Bishop, George Bell (1883-1958) to withdraw his support for the just cause of the war.

Causes

Commonly held general causes for WWII are the rise of nationalism, militarism, and unresolved territorial issues. In Germany, resentment of the harsh Treaty of Versailles—specifically article 231 (the «Guilt Clause»), the belief in the Dolchstosslegende (that treachery had cost them WWI), and the onset of the Great Depression—fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler’s militarist National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party). Meanwhile, the treaty’s provisions were laxly enforced due to fear of another war. Closely related is the failure of the British and French policy of appeasement, which sought to avoid war but actually gave Hitler time to re-arm. The League of Nations proved to be ineffective.

Japan, ruled by a militarist clique devoted to becoming a world power invaded China to bolster its meager stock of natural resources. This angered the United States, which reacted by making loans to China, providing covert military assistance, and instituting increasingly broad embargoes of raw materials against Japan. These embargoes would have eventually wrecked Japan’s economy; Japan was faced with the choice of withdrawing from China or going to war in order to conquer the oil resources of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). It chose to proceed with plans for the Greater East Asia War in the Pacific.

War breaks out in Europe: 1939

Pre-war alliances

In March 1939, when German armies entered Prague then occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, the Munich Agreement—which required Germany to peacefully resolve its claim to the Czech territory—collapsed. On May 19, Poland and France pledged to provide each other with military assistance in the event either was attacked. The British had already offered support to the Poles in March; then, on August 23, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The pact included a secret protocol which would divide eastern Europe into German and Soviet areas of interest. Each country agreed to allow the other a free hand in its area of influence, including military occupation. Hitler was now ready to go to war in order to conquer Poland. The signing of a new alliance between Britain and Poland on August 25, deterred him for only a few days.

Invasion of Poland

On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The French mobilized slowly, then mounted a token offensive in the Saar, which they soon abandoned, while the British could not take any direct action in support of the Poles in the time available. Meanwhile, on September 9, the Germans reached Warsaw, having slashed through the Polish defenses.

On September 17, Soviet troops occupied the eastern Poland, taking control of territory that Germany had agreed was in the Soviet sphere of influence. A day later the Polish president and commander-in-chief both fled to Romania. The last Polish units surrendered on October 6. Some Polish troops evacuated to neighboring countries. In the aftermath of the September Campaign, occupied Poland managed to create a powerful resistance movement and Poles made a significant contribution to the Allies’ cause for the duration of World War II.

After Poland fell, Germany paused to regroup during the winter of 1939-1940 until April 1940, while the British and French stayed on the defensive. The period was referred to by journalists as «the Phony War,» or the «Sitzkrieg,» because so little ground combat took place.

Battle of the Atlantic

Meanwhile in the North Atlantic, German U-boats operated against Allied shipping. The submarines made up in skill, luck, and daring what they lacked in numbers. One U-boat sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, while another managed to sink the battleship HMS Royal Oak in its home anchorage of Scapa Flow. Altogether, U-boats sank more than 110 vessels in the first four months of the war.

In the South Atlantic, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee raided Allied shipping, then was scuttled after the battle of the River Plate. About a year and a half later, another German raider, the battleship Bismarck, suffered a similar fate in the North Atlantic. Unlike the U-boat threat, which had a serious impact later in the war, German surface raiders had little impact because their numbers were so small.

War spreads: 1940

Soviet-Finnish War

The Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30, 1939, starting the Winter War. Finland surrendered to the Soviet Union in March 1940 and signed the Moscow Peace Treaty (1940) in which the Finns made territorial concessions. Later that year, in June the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania.

Invasion of Denmark and Norway

Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, in part to counter the threat of an impending Allied invasion of Norway. Denmark did not resist, but Norway fought back, assisted by British, French, and Polish (exile) forces landing in support of the Norwegians at Namsos, Åndalsnes, and Narvik. By late June, the Allies were defeated, German forces were in control of most of Norway, and what remained of the Norwegian Army had surrendered.

Invasion of France and the Low Countries

On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, ending the «Phony War.» The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French Army advanced into northern Belgium, planning to fight a mobile war in the north while maintaining a static continuous front along the Maginot Line, built after World War I, further south.

In the first phase of the invasion, Fall Gelb (CACA), the Wehrmacht’s Panzergruppe von Kleist raced through the Ardennes, broke the French line at Sedan, then slashed across northern France to the English Channel, splitting the Allies in two. Meanwhile Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands fell quickly against the attack of German Army Group B. The BEF, encircled in the north, was evacuated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. On June 10, Italy joined the war, attacking France in the south. German forces then continued the conquest of France with Fall Rot (Case Red), advancing behind the Maginot Line and near the coast. France signed an armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940, leading to the establishment of the Vichy France puppet government in the unoccupied part of France.

Battle of Britain

Following the defeat of France, Britain chose to fight on, so Germany began preparations in summer of 1940 to invade Britain (Operation Sea Lion), while Britain made anti-invasion preparations. Germany’s initial goal was to gain air control over Britain by defeating the Royal Air Force (RAF). The war between the two air forces became known as the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe initially targeted RAF Fighter Command. The results were not as expected, so the Luftwaffe later turned to terror bombing London. The Germans failed to defeat the Royal Air Force, thus Operation Sea Lion was postponed and eventually canceled.

North African Campaign

Italy declared war in June 1940, which challenged British supremacy of the Mediterranean, hinged on Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria. Italian troops invaded and captured British Somaliland in August. In September, the North African Campaign began when Italian forces in Libya attacked British forces in Egypt. The aim was to make Egypt an Italian possession, especially the vital Suez Canal east of Egypt. British, Indian, and Australian forces counter-attacked in Operation Compass, but this offensive stopped in 1941 when much of the Commonwealth forces were transferred to Greece to defend it from German attack. However, German forces (known later as the Afrika Korps) under General Erwin Rommel landed in Libya and renewed the assault on Egypt.

Invasion of Greece

Italy invaded Greece on October 28, 1940, from bases in Albania after the Greek Premier John Metaxas rejected an ultimatum to hand over Greek territory. Despite the enormous superiority of the Italian forces, the Greek army forced the Italians into a massive retreat deep into Albania. By mid-December, the Greeks occupied one-fourth of Albania. The Greek army had inflicted upon the Axis Powers their first defeat in the war, and Nazi Germany would soon be forced to intervene.

War becomes global: 1941

European theater

Lend-Lease

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act on March 11. This program was the first large step away from American isolationism, providing for substantial assistance to the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other countries.

Invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia’s government succumbed to the pressure of the Axis and signed the Tripartite Treaty on March 25, but the government was overthrown in a coup which replaced it with a pro-Allied government. This prompted the Germans to invade Yugoslavia on April 6. In the early morning, Germans bombarded Belgrade with an estimated 450 aircraft. Yugoslavia was occupied in a matter of days, and the army surrendered on April 17, but the partisan resistance lasted throughout the war. The rapid downfall of Yugoslavia, however, allowed German forces to enter Greek territory through the Yugoslav frontier. The 58,000 British and Commonwealth troops who had been sent to help the Greeks were driven back and soon forced to evacuate. On April 27, German forces entered Athens which was followed by the end of organized Greek resistance. The occupation of Greece proved costly, as guerilla warfare continually plagued the Axis occupiers.

Invasion of Soviet Union

Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history, began June 22, 1941. An Axis force of over four million soldiers advanced rapidly deep into the Soviet Union, destroying almost the entire western Soviet army in huge battles of encirclement. The Soviets dismantled as much industry as possible ahead of the advancing forces, moving it to the Ural Mountains for reassembly. By late November, the Axis had reached a line at the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Rostov, at the cost of about 23 percent casualties. Their advance then ground to a halt. The German General Staff had underestimated the size of the Soviet army and its ability to draft new troops. They were now dismayed by the presence of new forces, including fresh Siberian troops under General Zhukov, and by the onset of a particularly cold winter. German forward units had advanced within distant sight of the golden onion domes of Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral, but then on December 5, the Soviets counter-attacked and pushed the Axis back some 150-250 kilometers (100-150 mi), which became the first major German defeat of World War II.

The Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union began on June 25, with Soviet air attacks shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.

Allied conferences

The Atlantic Charter was a joint declaration by Churchill and Roosevelt, August 14, 1941.

In late December 1941, Churchill met Roosevelt again at the Arcadia Conference. They agreed that defeating Germany had priority over defeating Japan. The Americans proposed a 1942 cross-channel invasion of France which the British strongly opposed, suggesting instead a small invasion in Norway or landings in French North Africa.

Mediterranean

Rommel’s forces advanced rapidly eastward, laying siege to the vital seaport of Tobruk. Two Allied attempts to relieve Tobruk were defeated, but a larger offensive at the end of the year drove Rommel back after heavy fighting.

On May 20, the Battle of Crete began when elite German parachute and glider-borne mountain troops launched a massive airborne invasion of the Greek island. Crete was defended by Greek and Commonwealth troops. The Germans attacked the island’s three airfields simultaneously. Their invasion on two airfields failed, but they successfully captured one, which allowed them to reinforce their position and capture the island in a little over one week.

In June 1941, Allied forces invaded Syria and Lebanon, capturing Damascus on June 17. In August, British and Soviet troops occupied neutral Iran to secure its oil and a southern supply line to Russia.

Pacific theater

Sino-Japanese war

A war had begun in East Asia before World War II started in Europe. On July 7, 1937, Japan, after occupying Manchuria in 1931, launched another attack against China near Beijing. The Japanese made initial advances but were stalled at Shanghai. The city eventually fell to the Japanese and in December 1937, the capital city Nanking (now Nanjing) fell. As a result, the Chinese government moved its seat to Chongqing for the rest of the war. The Japanese forces committed brutal atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war when Nanking was occupied, slaughtering as many as 300,000 civilians within a month. The war by 1940 had reached a stalemate with both sides making minimal gains. The Chinese had successfully defended their land from oncoming Japanese on several occasions while strong resistance in areas occupied by the Japanese made a victory seem impossible to the Japanese.

Japan and the United States

In the summer of 1941, the United States began an oil embargo against Japan, which was a protest to Japan’s incursion into French Indo-China and the continued invasion of China. Japan planned an attack on Pearl Harbor to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet before consolidating oil fields in the Dutch East Indies. On December 7, a Japanese carrier fleet launched a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The raid resulted in two U.S. battleships sunk, and six damaged but later repaired and returned to service. The raid failed to find any aircraft carriers and did not damage Pearl Harbor’s usefulness as a naval base. The attack strongly united public opinion in the United States against Japan. The following day, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan. On the same day, China officially declared war against Japan. Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, even though it was not obliged to do so under the Tripartite Pact. Hitler hoped that Japan would support Germany by attacking the Soviet Union. Japan did not oblige, and this diplomatic move by Hitler proved a catastrophic blunder which unified the American public’s support for the war.

Japanese offensive

Japan soon invaded the Philippines and the British colonies of Hong Kong, Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, and Burma, with the intention of seizing the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Despite fierce resistance by American, Philippine, British, Canadian, and Indian forces, all these territories capitulated to the Japanese in a matter of months. The British island fortress of Singapore was captured in what Churchill considered one of the most humiliating British defeats of all time.

Deadlock: 1942

European theater

Western and Central Europe

In May, top Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Allied agents in Operation Anthropoid. Hitler ordered severe reprisals.

On August 19, British and Canadian forces launched the Dieppe Raid (codenamed Operation Jubilee) on the German occupied port of Dieppe, France. The attack was a disaster but provided critical information utilized later in Operation Torch and Operation Overlord.

Soviet winter and early spring offensive

In the north, Soviets launched the Toropets-Kholm Operation January 9 to February 6 1942, trapping a German force near Andreapol. The Soviets also surrounded a German garrison in the Demyansk Pocket which held out with air supply for four months (February 8 until April 21), and established themselves in front of Kholm, Velizh and Velikie Luki.

In the south, Soviet forces launched an offensive in May against the German Sixth Army, initiating a bloody 17 day battle around Kharkov, which resulted in the loss of over 200,000 Red Army personnel.

Axis summer offensive

On June 28, the Axis began their summer offensive. German Army Group B planned to capture the city of Stalingrad, which would secure the German left while Army Group A planned to capture the southern oil fields. In the Battle of the Caucasus, fought in the late summer and fall of 1942, the Axis forces captured the oil fields.

Stalingrad

After bitter street fighting which lasted for months, the Germans captured 90 percent of Stalingrad by November. The Soviets, however, had been building up massive forces on the flanks of Stalingrad. They launched Operation Uranus on November 19, with twin attacks that met at Kalach four days later and trapped the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. The Germans requested permission to attempt a break-out, which was refused by Hitler, who ordered Sixth Army to remain in Stalingrad where he promised they would be supplied by air until rescued. About the same time, the Soviets launched Operation Mars in a salient near the vicinity of Moscow. Its objective was to tie down Army Group Center and to prevent it from reinforcing Army Group South at Stalingrad.

In December, German relief forces got within 50 kilometers (30 mi) of the trapped Sixth Army before they were turned back by the Soviets. By the end of the year, the Sixth Army was in desperate condition, as the Luftwaffe was only able to supply about a sixth of the provisions needed. The battle ended in February 1943, when the Soviet forces succeeded in over-running the German positions.

The Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II and is considered the bloodiest battle in human history, with more combined casualties suffered than in any battle before. The battle was marked by brutality and disregard for military and civilian casualties on both sides. Total deaths are estimated to have approached 2.5 million. When it was over, the Axis powers had lost one fourth of their strength on that front.

Eastern North Africa

At the beginning of 1942, the Allied forces in North Africa were weakened by detachments to the Far East. Rommel once again attacked and recaptured Benghazi. Then he defeated the Allies at the Battle of Gazala, and captured Tobruk with several thousand prisoners and large quantities of supplies. Following up, he drove deep into Egypt but with overstretched forces.

The First Battle of El Alamein took place in July 1942. Allied forces had retreated to the last defensible point before Alexandria and the Suez Canal. The Afrika Korps, however, had outrun its supplies, and the defenders stopped its thrusts. The Second Battle of El Alamein occurred between October 23 and November 3. Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery was in command of the Commonwealth forces, now known as the British Eighth Army. The Eighth Army took the offensive and was ultimately triumphant. After the German defeat at El Alamein, the Axis forces made a successful strategic withdrawal to Tunisia.

Western North Africa

Operation Torch, launched on November 8, 1942, aimed to gain control of Morocco and Algiers through simultaneous landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, followed a few days later with a landing at Bône, the gateway to Tunisia. It was hoped that the local forces of Vichy France (the puppet government in France under the Nazis) would put up no resistance and submit to the authority of Free French General Henri Giraud. In response, Hitler invaded and occupied Vichy France and Tunisia, but the German and Italian forces were caught in the pincers of a twin advance from Algeria and Libya. Rommel’s victory against American forces at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass could only hold off the inevitable.

Pacific theater

Central and South West Pacific

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed United States Executive Order 9066, leading to the internment of approximately 110,000 Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war.

In April, the Doolittle Raid, the first U.S. air raid on Tokyo, boosted morale in the U.S. and caused Japan to shift resources to homeland defense, but did little actual damage.

In early May, a Japanese naval invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea, was thwarted by Allied navies in the Battle of the Coral Sea. This was both the first successful opposition to a Japanese attack and the first battle fought between aircraft carriers.

On June 5, American carrier-based dive-bombers sank four of Japan’s best aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. Historians mark this battle as a turning point and the end of Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Cryptography played an important part in the battle, as the United States had broken the Japanese naval codes and knew the Japanese plan of attack.

In July, a Japanese overland attack on Port Moresby was led along the rugged Kokoda Track. An outnumbered and untrained Australian battalion defeated the 5,000-strong Japanese force, the first land defeat of Japan in the war and one of the most significant victories in Australian military history.

On August 7, United States Marines began the Battle of Guadalcanal. For the next six months, U.S. forces fought Japanese forces for control of the island. Meanwhile, several naval encounters raged in the nearby waters, including the Battle of Savo Island, Battle of Cape Esperance, Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, and Battle of Tassafaronga. In late August and early September, while battle raged on Guadalcanal, an amphibious Japanese attack on the eastern tip of New Guinea was met by Australian forces in the Battle of Milne Bay.

Sino-Japanese War

Japan launched a major offensive in China following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The aim of the offensive was to take the strategically important city of Changsha which the Japanese had failed to capture on two previous occasions. For the attack, the Japanese massed 120,000 soldiers under 4 divisions. The Chinese responded with 300,000 men, and soon the Japanese army was encircled and had to retreat.

War turns: 1943

European theater

German and Soviet spring offensives

After the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, the Red Army launched eight offensives during the winter. Many were concentrated along the Don basin near Stalingrad, which resulted in initial gains until German forces were able to take advantage of the weakened condition of the Red Army and regain the territory it lost.

Operation Citadel

On July 4, the Wehrmacht launched a much-delayed offensive against the Soviet Union at the Kursk salient. Their intentions were known by the Soviets, and they hastened to defend the salient with an enormous system of earthwork defenses. Both sides massed their armor for what became a decisive military engagement. The Germans attacked from both the north and south of the salient and hoped to meet in the middle, cutting off the salient and trapping 60 Soviet divisions. The German offensive was ground down as little progress was made through the Soviet defenses. The Soviets then brought up their reserves, and the largest tank battle of the war occurred near the city of Prokhorovka. The Germans had exhausted their armored forces and could not stop the Soviet counter-offensive that threw them back across their starting positions.

Soviet fall and winter offensives

In August, Hitler agreed to a general withdrawal to the Dnieper line, and as September proceeded into October, the Germans found the Dnieper line impossible to hold as the Soviet bridgeheads grew. Important Dnieper towns started to fall, with Zaporozhye the first to go, followed by Dnepropetrovsk.

Early in November the Soviets broke out of their bridgeheads on either side of Kiev and recaptured the Ukrainian capital.

The First Ukrainian Front attacked at Korosten on Christmas Eve. The Soviet advance continued along the railway line until the 1939 Polish-Soviet border was reached.

Italy

The surrender of Axis forces in Tunisia on May 13, 1943 yielded some 250,000 prisoners. The North African war proved to be a disaster for Italy, and when the Allies invaded Sicily on July 10, in Operation Husky, capturing the island in a little over a month, the regime of Benito Mussolini collapsed. On July 25, he was removed from office by the King of Italy, and arrested with the positive consent of the Great Fascist Council. A new government, led by Pietro Badoglio, took power but declared that Italy would stay in the war. Badoglio actually had begun secret peace negotiations with the Allies.

The Allies invaded mainland Italy on September 3, 1943. Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, as had been agreed in negotiations. The royal family and Badoglio government escaped to the south, leaving the Italian army without orders, while the Germans took over the fight, forcing the Allies to a complete halt in the winter of 1943-44 at the Gustav Line south of Rome.

In the north, the Nazis let Mussolini create what was effectively a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic or «Republic of Salò,» named after the new capital of Salò on Lake Garda.

Mid-1943 brought the fifth and final German Sutjeska offensive against the Yugoslav Partisans.

Pacific theater

Central and South West Pacific

On January 2, Buna, New Guinea was captured by the Allies. This ended the threat to Port Moresby. By January 22, 1943, the Allied forces had achieved their objective of isolating Japanese forces in eastern New Guinea and cutting off their main line of supply.

American authorities declared Guadalcanal secure on February 9. Australian and U.S. forces undertook the prolonged campaign to retake the occupied parts of the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Dutch East Indies, experiencing some of the toughest resistance of the war. The rest of the Solomon Islands were retaken in 1943.

In November, U.S. Marines won the Battle of Tarawa. This was the first heavily opposed amphibious assault in the Pacific theater. The high casualties taken by the Marines sparked off a storm of protest in the United States, where the large losses could not be understood for such a tiny and seemingly unimportant island.

Sino-Japanese War

A vigorous, fluctuating battle for Changde in China’s Hunan province began on November 2, 1943. The Japanese threw over 100,000 men into the attack on the city, which changed hands several times in a few days but ended up still held by the Chinese. Overall, the Chinese ground forces were compelled to fight a war of defense and attrition while they built up their armies and awaited an Allied counteroffensive.

South East Asia

The Nationalist Kuomintang Army, under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Chinese Army, under Mao Zedong, both opposed the Japanese occupation of China but never truly allied against the Japanese. Conflict between Nationalist and Communist forces emerged long before the war; it continued after and, to an extent, even during the war, though more implicitly. The Japanese and its auxiliary Indian National Army had captured most of Burma, severing the Burma Road by which the Western Allies had been supplying the Chinese Nationalists. This forced the Allies to create a large sustained airlift, known as «flying the Hump.» U.S.-led and trained Chinese divisions, a British division and a few thousand U.S. ground troops cleared the Japanese forces from northern Burma so that the Ledo Road could be built to replace the Burma Road.

Beginning of the end: 1944

European theater

Soviet winter and spring offensives

In the north, a Soviet offensive in January 1944, had relieved the siege of Leningrad. The Germans conducted an orderly retreat from the Leningrad area to a shorter line based on the lakes to the south.

In the south, in March, two Soviet fronts encircled Generaloberst Hans-Valentin Hube’s German First Panzer Army north of the Dniestr river. The Germans escaped the pocket in April, saving most of their men but losing their heavy equipment.

In early May, the Red Army’s 3rd Ukrainian Front engaged German Seventeenth Army of Army Group South which had been left behind after the German retreat from the Ukraine. The battle was a complete victory for the Red Army, and a botched evacuation effort across the Black Sea led to over 250,000 German and Romanian casualties.

During April 1944, a series of attacks by the Red Army near the city of Iaşi, Romania was aiming at capturing the strategically important sector. The German-Romanian forces successfully defended the sector throughout the month of April. The attack aiming at Târgul Frumos was the final attempt by the Red Army to achieve its goal of having a spring-board into Romania for a summer offensive.

With Soviet forces approaching, German troops occupied Hungary on March 20, as Hitler thought that the Hungarian leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, might no longer be a reliable ally.

Finland sought a separate peace with Stalin in February 1944, but the terms offered were unacceptable. On June 9, the Soviet Union began the Fourth strategic offensive on the Karelian Isthmus that after three months would force Finland to accept an armistice.

Soviet summer offensive

Operation Bagration, a Soviet offensive involving 2.5 million men and 6,000 tanks, was launched on June 22, and was intended to clear German troops from Belarus. The subsequent battle resulted in the destruction of German Army Group Center and over 800,000 German casualties, the greatest defeat for the Wehrmacht during the war. The Soviets swept forward, reaching the outskirts of Warsaw on July 31.

Soviet fall and winter offensives

After the destruction of Army Group Center, the Soviets attacked German forces in the South in mid-July 1944 and in a month’s time cleared the Ukraine of German presence.

The Red Army’s 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts engaged German Heeresgruppe Südukraine, which consisted of German and Romanian formations, in an operation to occupy Romania and destroy the German formations in the sector. The result of the battle was complete victory for the Red Army, and a switch of Romania from the Axis to the Allied camp.

In October 1944 General der Artillerie Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s Sixth Army encircled and destroyed three corps of Marshal Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky’s Group Pliyev near Debrecen, Hungary. This was to be the last German victory in the Eastern front.

The Red Army’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Baltic Fronts engaged German Army Group Center and Army Group North to capture the Baltic region from the Germans. The result of the series of battles was a permanent loss of contact between Army Groups North and Center, and the creation of the Courland Pocket in Latvia.

From December 29, 1944, to February 13, 1945, Soviet forces laid siege to Budapest, which was defended by German Waffen-SS and Hungarian forces. It was one of the bloodiest sieges of the war.

Warsaw uprising

The proximity of the Red Army led the Poles in Warsaw to believe they would soon be liberated. On August 1, they rose in revolt as part of the wider Operation Tempest. Nearly 40,000 Polish resistance fighters seized control of the city. The Soviets however stopped outside the city and gave the Poles no assistance, as German army units moved into the city to put down the revolt. The resistance ended on October 2. German units then destroyed most of what was left of the city.

Allied invasion of Western Europe

On «D-Day» (June 6, 1944) the western Allies of mainly Britain, Canada and America invaded German-held Normandy. German resistance was stubborn and during the first month, the Allies measured progress in hundreds of yards and bloody rifle fights in the Bocage. An Allied breakout was effected at St.-Lô, and German forces were almost completely destroyed in the Falaise pocket while counter-attacking. Allied forces stationed in Italy invaded the French Riviera on August 15, and linked up with forces from Normandy. The clandestine French Resistance in Paris rose against the Germans on August 19, and a French division under General Jacques Leclerc, pressing forward from Normandy, received the surrender of the German forces there and liberated the city on August 25.

Operation Market Garden

Allied paratroopers attempted a fast advance into the Netherlands with Operation Market Garden in September but were repulsed. Logistical problems were starting to plague the Allies’ advance west as the supply lines still ran back to the beaches of Normandy. A decisive victory by the Canadian First Army in the Battle of the Scheldt secured the entrance to the port of Antwerp, freeing it to receive supplies by late November 1944.

German winter offensive

In December 1944, the German Army made its last major offensive in the West, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler sought to drive a wedge between the western Allies, causing them to agree to a favorable armistice, after which Germany could concentrate all its efforts on the Eastern front and have a chance to defeat the Soviets. The mission was doomed to failure, since the Allies had no intention of granting an armistice under any conditions. At first, the Germans scored successes against the unprepared Allied forces. Poor weather during the initial days of the offensive favored the Germans because it grounded Allied aircraft. However, with clearing skies allowing Allied air supremacy to resume, the German failure to capture Bastogne, and with the arrival of the United States Third Army, the Germans were forced to retreat back into Germany. The offensive was defeated but was the bloodiest battle in U.S. military history.

Italy and the Balkans

During the winter the Allies tried to force the Gustav line on the southern Apennines of Italy but they could not break enemy lines until the landing of Anzio on January 22, 1944, on the southern coast of Latium, named Operation Shingle. Only after some months was the Gustav line broken and the Allies marched towards the north of the peninsula. On June 4, Rome fell to Allies, and the Allied army reached Florence in August, then stopped along the Gothic Line on the Tuscan Apennines during the winter.

Germany withdrew from the Balkans and held Hungary until February 1945.

Romania turned against Germany in August 1944 and Bulgaria surrendered in September.

Pacific theater

Central and South West Pacific

The American advance continued in the southwest Pacific with the capture of the Marshall Islands before the end of February. 42,000 U.S. Army soldiers and Marines landed on Kwajalein atoll on January 31. Fierce fighting occurred and the island was taken on February 6. U.S. Marines next defeated the Japanese in the Battle of Eniwetok.

The main objective was the Marianas, especially Saipan and to a lessor extent, Guam. The Japanese in both places were strongly entrenched. On June 11, Saipan was bombarded from the sea and a landing made four days later; it was captured by July 9. The Japanese committed much of their declining naval strength in the Battle of the Philippine Sea but suffered severe losses in both ships and aircraft and after the battle the Japanese aircraft carrier force was no longer militarily effective. With the capture of Saipan, Japan was finally within range of B-29 bombers.

Guam was invaded on July 21, and taken on August 10, but Japanese fought fanatically and mopping up operations continued long after the Battle of Guam was officially over. The island of Tinian was invaded on July 24, and saw the first usage of napalm. The island fell on August 1.
General MacArthur’s troops invaded the Philippines, landing on the island of Leyte on October 20. The Japanese had prepared a rigorous defense and then used the last of their naval forces in an attempt to destroy the invasion force in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, October 23 through October 26, 1944, arguably the largest naval battle in history. The battle saw the first use of kamikaze (suicide) attacks.

Throughout 1944 American submarines and aircraft attacked Japanese merchant shipping, depriving Japan’s industry of the raw materials it had gone to war to obtain. The effectiveness of this stranglehold increased as U.S. Marines captured islands closer to the Japanese mainland. In 1944 submarines sank three million tons of shipping while the Japanese were only able to replace less than one million tons.

Sino-Japanese War

In April 1944, the Japanese launched Operation Ichigo whose aim was to secure the railway route across Japanese occupied territories of North East China and Korea and those in South East Asia and to destroy airbases in the area which serviced USAAF aircraft. In June 1944, the Japanese deployed 360,000 troops to invade Changsha for the fourth time. The Operation involved more Japanese troops than any other campaign in the Sino-Japanese war and after 47 days of bitter fighting, the city was taken but at a very high cost. By November, the Japanese had taken the cities of Guilin and Liuzhou which served as USAAF airbases from which it conducted bombing raids on Japan. However, despite having destroyed the airbases in this region, the USAAF could still strike at the Japanese main islands from newly acquired bases in the Pacific. By December, the Japanese forces reached French Indochina and achieved the purpose of the operation but only after incurring heavy losses.

South East Asia

In March 1944, the Japanese began their «march to Delhi» by crossing the border from Burma into India. On March 30, they attacked the town of Imphal which involved some of the most ferocious fighting of the war. The Japanese soon ran out of supplies and withdrew resulting in a loss of 85,000 men, one of the largest Japanese defeats of the war. The Anglo-Indian forces were constantly re-supplied by the RAF.

End of the war: 1945

European theater

Soviet winter offensive

On January 12, the Red Army was ready for its next big offensive. Konev’s armies attacked the Germans in southern Poland, expanding out from their Vistula River bridgehead near Sandomierz. January 14, Rokossovsky’s armies attacked from the Narew River north of Warsaw. They broke the defenses covering East Prussia. Zhukov’s armies in the center attacked from their bridgeheads near Warsaw. The German front was now in shambles.

Zhukov took Zhukov took Warsaw on January 17, and Lódz on the 19th. The same day, his forces reached the German pre-war border. At the end of the first week of the offensive the Soviets had penetrated 100 miles deep on a front that was 400 miles wide. By February 13, the Soviets took Budapest. The Soviet onslaught finally halted at the end of January only 40 miles from Berlin, on the Oder river.

Yalta Conference

At the Yalta Conference (February 1945), Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt made arrangements for post-war Europe. Many important resolutions were made:

• An April meeting would be held to form the United Nations;
• Poland would have free elections (though in fact they were heavily rigged by Soviets);
• Soviet nationals were to be repatriated;
• The Soviet Union was to attack Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.

Soviet spring offensive

The Red Army (including 78,556 soldiers of the 1st Polish Army) began its final assault on Berlin on April 16. By this point, the German Army was in full retreat and Berlin had already been battered due to preliminary air bombings.

By April 24, the three Soviet army groups had completed the encirclement of the city. Hitler had sent the main German forces which were supposed to defend the city to the south as he believed that was the region where the Soviets would launch their spring offensive and not in Berlin. As a final resistance effort, Hitler called for civilians, including teenagers, to fight the oncoming Red Army in the Volkssturm militia. Those forces were augmented by the battered German remnants that had fought the Soviets in Seelow Heights. But even then the fighting was heavy, with house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. The Soviets sustained 305,000 dead; the Germans sustained as many as 325,000, including civilians. Hitler and his staff moved into the Führerbunker, a concrete bunker beneath the Chancellery, where on April 30, 1945, he committed suicide, along with his bride, Eva Braun.

Western Europe

The Allies resumed their advance into Germany once the Battle of the Bulge officially ended on January 27, 1945. The final obstacle to the Allies was the river Rhine which was crossed in late March 1945.

Once the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the British fanned out northeast towards Hamburg crossing the river Elbe and on towards Denmark and the Baltic. The U.S. Ninth Army went south as the northern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement and the U.S. First Army went north as the southern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement. On April 4 the encirclement was completed and the German Army Group B commanded by Field Marshal Walther Model was trapped in the Ruhr Pocket and 300,000 soldiers became POWs. The Ninth and First U.S. armies then turned east and then halted their advance at the Elbe river where they met up with the Soviet forces in mid-April, letting them take Berlin.

Italy

Allied advances in the winter of 1944-45 up the Italian peninsula had been slow due the troop re-deployments to France. But by April 9, the British/American 15th Army Group which was composed of the U.S. Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army broke through the Gothic Line and attacked the Po Valley, gradually enclosing the main German forces. Milan was taken by the end of April and the U.S. 5th Army continued to move west and linked up with French units while the British 8th Army advanced towards Trieste and made contact with the Yugoslav partisans.

A few days before the surrender of German troops in Italy, Italian partisans intercepted a party of Fascists trying to make their escape to Switzerland. Hiding underneath a pile of coats was Mussolini. The whole party, including Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, were summarily shot on April 28, 1945. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung up on public display, upside down.

Germany surrenders

Admiral Karl Dönitz became leader of the German government after the death of Hitler, but the German war effort quickly disintegrated. German forces in Berlin surrendered the city to the Soviet troops on May 2, 1945.

German forces in Italy surrendered May 2, 1945 at General Alexander’s headquarters and German forces in northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands surrendered on May 4; and the German High Command under Generaloberst Alfred Jodl surrendered unconditionally all remaining German forces on May 7 in Reims, France. The western Allies celebrated «V-E Day» on May 8.

The Soviet Union celebrated «Victory Day» on May 9. Some remnants of German Army Group Center continued resistance until May 11 or 12.

Potsdam

The last Allied conference of World War II was held at the suburb of Potsdam, outside Berlin, from July 17 to August 2. The Potsdam Conference saw agreements reached between the Allies on policies for occupied Germany. An ultimatum was issued calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan.

Pacific theater

Central and South West Pacific

In January the U.S. Sixth Army landed on Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. Manila was re-captured by March. U.S. capture of islands such as Iwo Jima in February and Okinawa (April through June) brought the Japanese homeland within easier range of naval and air attack. Amongst dozens of other cities, Tokyo was firebombed, and about 90,000 people died from the initial attack. The dense living conditions around production centers and the wooden residential constructions contributed to the large loss of life. In addition, the ports and major waterways of Japan were extensively mined by air in Operation Starvation which seriously disrupted the logistics of the island nation.

The last major offensive in the South West Pacific Area was the Borneo campaign of mid-1945, which was aimed at further isolating the remaining Japanese forces in South East Asia and securing the release of Allied prisoners of war.

South East Asia

In South-East Asia, from August 1944, to November 1944, British 14th Army pursued the Japanese to the Chindwin River in Burma after their failed attack on India. The British Commonwealth forces launched a series of offensive operations back into Burma during late 1944 and the first half of 1945. On May 2, 1945, Rangoon, the capital city of Myanmar (Burma) was taken in Operation Dracula. The planned amphibious assault on the western side of Malaya was canceled after the dropping of the atomic bombs and Japanese forces in South-East Asia surrendered soon afterwards.

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The U.S. military and political chiefs had decided to use their new super-weapon to bring the war to a speedy end. The battle for Okinawa had shown that an invasion of the Japanese mainland (planned for November), seen as an Okinawa type operation on a far larger scale, would result in more casualties than the United States had suffered so far in all theaters since the war began.

On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, dropped a nuclear weapon named «Little Boy» on Hiroshima, destroying the city. After the destruction of Hiroshima, the United States again called upon Japan to surrender. No response was made, and accordingly on August 9, the B-29 BOCKS CAR, piloted by Maj. Charles Sweeney, dropped a second atomic bomb named «Fat Man» on Nagasaki.

Soviet invasion of Manchuria

On August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, having renounced its nonaggression pact with Japan, attacked the Japanese in Manchuria, fulfilling its Yalta pledge to attack the Japanese within three months after the end of the war in Europe. The attack was made by three Soviet army groups. In less than two weeks the Japanese army in Manchuria consisting of over a million men had been destroyed by the Soviets. The Red Army moved into North Korea on August 18. Korea was subsequently divided at the 38th parallel into Soviet and U.S. zones.

Japan Surrenders

The American use of atomic weapons against Japan prompted Emperor Hirohito to bypass the existing government and intervene to end the war. The entry of the Soviet Union to the war may have also played a part, but in his radio address to the nation Emperor Hirohito did not mention it as a major reason for his country’s surrender.

The Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945 (V-J day), signing the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) anchored in Tokyo Bay. The Japanese troops in China formally surrendered to the Chinese on September 9, 1945. This did not fully end the war, however, as Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a peace agreement. In the last days of the war, the Soviet Union occupied the southern Kuril Islands, an area claimed by the Soviets and still contested by Japan.

World War Two: Religious Aspects

World War II was declared to be a just war by many church leaders in the Allied nations. Support for the just cause of the war, though, was famously withdrawn by Church of England Bishop George Bell of Chichester following the mass bombing of Dresen. This is said to have cost him the most senior appointment in the Anglican Church, as Archbishop of Canterbury. It has even been suggested that World War II is the definitive example of a just war. In Germany, Hitler attempted to bring state and church policy together with his German Christian church, combining religious and Teutonic symbolism and deifying his concept of the superiority of the German race. Many supported this arguing that God spoke through Hitler and nature just as God speaks though scripture. A minority, the Confessing Church, led by Martin Niemoeller, opposed Hitler. Bishop Bell was very close to the Confessing Church and met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer one of its leading members, who was executed for plotting against Hitler. While the Confessing Church denounced what they saw as Hitler-worship they failed to condemn the «Final Solution» although they did protest against Hitler’s Jewish policy. For many theologians, issues raised by some of the atrocities of World War II remain a matter of profound concern, since they illustrate the human potential for utter evil. The scale of involvement in mass murder begs the question whether many felt that they had no choice but to comply with orders, or whether they really believed that Jews should be exterminated. Jewish thought especially would be transformed in the post-Holocaust world, in which the questions «why» and «where was God» loom large.

Aftermath

Europe in ruins

At the end of the war, millions of refugees were homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and 70 percent of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed.

Partitioning of Germany and Austria

Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation. An Allied Control Council was created to co-ordinate the zones. The original divide of Germany was between America, Soviet Union, and Britain. Stalin agreed to give France a zone but it had to come from the American or British zones and not the Soviet zone. The American, British, and French zones joined in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic.

Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation, which eventually reunited and became the Republic of Austria.

Reparations

Germany paid reparations to France, Britain and Russia, in the form of dismantled factories, forced labor, and shipments of coal. The U.S. settled for confiscating German patents and German owned property in the U.S., mainly subsidiaries of German companies.

In accordance with the Paris Peace Treaties, 1947, payment of war reparations was assessed from the countries of Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland.

Morgenthau Plan

The initial occupation plans proposed by the United States were harsh. The Morgenthau Plan of 1944 called for dividing Germany into two independent nations and stripping her of the industrial resources required for war. All heavy industry was to be dismantled or destroyed, the main industrial areas (Upper Silesia, Saar, Ruhr, and the German speaking parts of Alsace-Lorraine), were to be annexed.

While the Morgenthau Plan itself was never implemented per se, its general economic philosophy did end up greatly influencing events. Most notable were the toned-down offshoots, including the Potsdam Conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (April 1945-July 1947), and the industrial plans for Germany.

Marshall Plan

Germany had long been the industrial giant of Europe, and its poverty held back the general European recovery. The continued scarcity in Germany also led to considerable expenses for the occupying powers, which were obligated to try and make up the most important shortfalls. Learning a lesson from the aftermath of World War I when no effort was made to systematically rebuild Europe, and when Germany was treated as a pariah, the United States made a bold decision to help reconstruct Europe. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed the «European Recovery Program,» better known as the Marshall Plan, which called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe. Also as part of the effort to rebuild global capitalism and spur post-war reconstruction, the Bretton Woods system for international money management was put into effect after the war.

Border revisions and population shifts

As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The main benefactor of these border revisions was the Soviet Union, which expanded its borders at the expense of Germany, Finland, Poland, and Japan. Poland was compensated for its losses to the Soviet Union by receiving most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. The German state of the Saar temporarily became a protectorate of France but it later returned to German administration.

The number of Germans expelled totaled roughly 15 million, including 11 million from Germany proper and 3,500,000 from the Sudetenland.

Germany officially states that 2,100,000 of these expelled lost their lives due to violence on the part of the Russians, Polish, and Czech, though Polish and Czech historians dispute this figure.

United Nations

Because the League of Nations had failed to actively prevent the war, in 1945 a new international body was considered and then created: The United Nations.

The UN operates within the parameters of the United Nations Charter, and the reason for the UN’s formation is outlined in the Preamble to the United Nations Charter. Unlike its predecessor, the United Nations has taken a more active role in the world, such as fighting diseases and providing humanitarian aid to nations in distress. The UN also served as the diplomatic front line during the Cold War.

The UN also was responsible for the initial creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in part as a response to the Holocaust.

Casualties, civilian impact, and atrocities

Casualties

Possibly 62 million people lost their lives in World War II—about 25 million soldiers and 37 million civilians, with estimates varying widely. This total includes the estimated 12 million lives lost due to The Holocaust. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 80 percent were on the Allied side and 20 percent on the Axis side.

Allied forces suffered approximately 17 million military deaths, of which about 10 million were Soviet and 4 million Chinese. Axis forces suffered about 8 million, of which more than 5 million were German. The Soviet Union suffered by far the largest death toll of any nation in the war; perhaps 23 million Soviets died in total, of which more than 12 million were civilians. The figures include deaths due to internal Soviet actions against its own people. The statistics available for Soviet and Chinese casualties are only rough guesses, as they are poorly documented. Some modern estimates double the amount of Chinese casualties.

Genocide

The Holocaust was the organized murder of at least nine million people, about two-thirds of whom were Jewish. Originally, the Nazis used killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, to conduct massive open-air killings, shooting as many as 33,000 people in a single massacre, as in the case of Babi Yar. By 1942, the Nazi leadership decided to implement the Final Solution (Endlösung), the genocide of all Jews in Europe, and increase the pace of the Holocaust. The Nazis built six extermination camps specifically to kill Jews. Millions of Jews who had been confined to massively overcrowded Ghettos were transported to these «Death-camps» where they were gassed or shot, usually immediately after arriving.

Concentration camps, labor camps and internment

In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag or labor camps, led to the death of many citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war and even Soviet citizens themselves: opponents of Stalin’s regime and large proportions of some ethnic groups (particularly Chechens). Japanese POW camps also had high death rates; many were used as labor camps, and starvation conditions among the mainly U.S. and Commonwealth prisoners were little better than many German concentration camps. Sixty percent (1,238,000) of Soviet POWs died during the war. Vadim Erlikman puts it at 2.6 million Soviet POWs that died in German Captivity.

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Japanese North Americans were interned by the U.S. and Canadian governments. Though these camps did not involve heavy labor, forced isolation and sub-standard living conditions were the norm.

War crimes and attacks on civilians

From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel were prosecuted for war crimes. Top German officials were tried at the Nuremberg Trials and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region.

None of the alleged Allied war crimes such as the bombing of Dresden, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the alleged Red Army atrocities on the Eastern front were ever prosecuted.

Resistance and collaboration

Resistance during World War II occurred in every occupied country by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation, disinformation, and propaganda to outright warfare.

Among the most notable resistance movements were the Polish Home Army, the French Maquis, and the Yugoslav Partisans. Germany itself also had an anti-Nazi movement. The Communist resistance was among the fiercest since they were already organized and militant even before the war and they were ideologically opposed to the Nazis.

Before D-Day there were also many operations performed by the French Resistance to help with the forthcoming invasion. Communications lines were cut, trains derailed, roads, water towers, and ammunition depots were destroyed and some German garrisons were attacked.

Although Great Britain did not suffer invasion in World War II, the British made preparations for a British resistance movement, called the Auxiliary Units. Various organizations were also formed to establish foreign resistance cells or support existing resistance movements, like the British SOE and the American OSS.

The home fronts

«Home front» is the name given to the activities of the civilians of a nation that is in a state of total war.

In the United Kingdom, women joined the work force doing jobs that were typically reserved for men. Food, clothing, petrol, and other items were rationed. Access to luxuries was severely restricted, though there was also a significant black market. Families grew small home vegetable gardens to supply themselves with food, and the Women’s Land Army recruited or conscripted over 80,000 women to work on farms. Civilians also served as Air Raid Wardens, volunteer emergency services, and other critical functions. Schools and organizations held scrap drives and money collections to help the war effort. Many things were conserved to turn into weapons later, such as fat to turn into nitroglycerin.

In the United States and Canada women also joined the workforce. In the United States these women were called «Rosies» for Rosie the Riveter. President Roosevelt stated that the efforts of civilians at home to support the war through personal sacrifice were as critical to winning the war as the efforts of the soldiers themselves. In Canada, the government established three military compartments for women: the CWAAF (Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), CWAC (Canadian Women’s Army Corps) and WRCNS (Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Services).

In Germany, until 1943 there were few restrictions on civilian activities. Most goods were freely available. This was due in large part to the reduced access to certain luxuries already experienced by German civilians prior to the beginning of hostilities; the war made some less available, but many were in short supply to begin with. It was not until comparatively late in the war that the civilian population was effectively organized to support the war effort. For example, women’s labor was not mobilized as thoroughly as in the United Kingdom or the United States. Foreign slave labor substituted for the men who served in the armed forces.

American production was the major factor in keeping the Allies better supplied than the Axis. For example, in 1943 the United States produced 369 warships (1.01/day). In comparison, Japan produced 122 warships, and Germany only built three. The United States also succeeded in rebuilding the Merchant Marine, reducing the build time of a Liberty or Victory ship from 105 days to 56 days. Much of this improved efficiency came from technological advances in shipbuilding. Hull plates were being welded rather than bolted, plastics were beginning to take the place of certain metals, and modular construction was being used.

Technologies

Weapons and technology improved rapidly during World War II and played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the war. Many major technologies were used for the first time, including nuclear weapons, radar, jet engines, and electronic computers. Enormous advances were made in aircraft, and tank design such that models coming into use at the beginning of the war were long obsolete by its end.

More new inventions, as measured in the U.S. by numbers of patent applications and weapon contracts issued to private contractors, were deployed to the task of killing humans more effectively and to a lesser degree, avoiding being killed, than ever before.

The massive research and development demands of the war had a great impact on the growth of the scientific community. After the war ended, these developments led to new sciences like cybernetics and computer science, and created entire new institutions of weapons design.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gilbert, Martin. 1995. Second World War. NY: Phoenix. ISBN 1857993462
• Keegan, John. 1989. The Second World War. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0091740118
• Liddel, Basil Henry. 1970. History of the Second World War. London: Cassell. ISBN 0304935646.
• Murray, Williamson. 2000. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 067400163X
• Overy, Richard. 1995 Why the Allies Won. Pimlico. NY: W W Norton. ISBN 0712674535.
• Smith, J. Douglas and Richard Jensen. 2003. World War II on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites. Lanham, MD: S R Books. ISBN 0842050205

External links

All links retrieved October 10, 2020.

• Directory of Online World War II Indexes & Records.
• World War II Military Situation Maps. Library of Congress.
• US National Archives Photos.
• Multimedia map — Presentation that covers the war from the invasion of Russia to the fall of Berlin.
• Virtual Museum of World War II — pictures & info.
• WW2 People’s War — A project by the BBC to gather the stories of ordinary people from World War II.
• Workers’ War: Home Front Recalled — A project by London Metropolitan University, TUC and the National Pensioners Convention to document the history of workers during World War II.
• Memories of Leutnant d.R. Wilhelm Radkovsky 1940-1945 Experiences as a German soldier on the Eastern and Western Front.
• The World at War (1974) is a 36-part BBC series that covers most aspects of World War II from many points of view. It includes interviews with many key figures (Karl Dönitz, Albert Speer, Anthony Eden etc.) (Imdb link).
• The Second World War in Colour (1999) is a three episode documentary showing unique footage in color (Imdb link).

World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I. The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

Along with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It resulted in the extension of the Soviet Union’s power to nations of eastern Europe, enabled a communist movement to eventually achieve power in China, and marked the decisive shift of power in the world away from the states of western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union.

(Read Sir John Keegan’s Britannica entry on the Normandy Invasion.)

Axis initiative and Allied reaction

The outbreak of war

By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and occupy Poland. Poland, for its part, had guarantees of French and British military support should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize the possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western neighbour. Secret negotiations led on August 23–24 to the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow. In a secret protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland should be divided between them, with the western third of the country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds being taken over by the U.S.S.R.

Britannica Quiz

History: Fact or Fiction?

Having achieved this cynical agreement, the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even without divulgence of the secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could attack Poland with no danger of Soviet or British intervention and gave orders for the invasion to start on August 26. News of the signing, on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to supersede a previous though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of hostilities for a few days. He was still determined, however, to ignore the diplomatic efforts of the western powers to restrain him. Finally, at 12:40 pm on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45 the next morning. The invasion began as ordered. In response, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, at 11:00 am and at 5:00 pm, respectively. World War II had begun.

World War II, also known as Second World War and often abbreviated as WWIIor WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the world’s countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of total war, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 million to 85 million fatalities, most of which were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres like The rape of Nanking, the deliberate genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, starvation, disease and the first use of nuclear weapons in history.^[1][2][3][4]

Political climate[]

[]

The Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler began to undergo power in 1919, and it started off with him joining the German Workers’ Party. It was then renamed to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or more commonly known as Nazi Party. In the 1920s, the Nazis had already latched onto the political government of Weimar, making them able to express their ideals easier. As the years went on, Hitler rallied more and more people to join on his side, as he would «lead them to a better life». Germany after WWI was devastated by debt, which was worse than the United States.This made it even easier for Hitler to gain power. By the early 1930s, the Nazis had become the largest party in Germany.

By the 1929 market crash in the US, the communists and Nazis were able to denounce democracy, and have a chance to prove that their political ideology was better than the USA’s. This led to the democracy campaigners to suffer from heavy losses in the political elections due to a spread of word of how evil democracy is. At this time, the Nazis had about a million people who were apart of them. The Nazis had tried several times to put Hitler onto the Chancellor’s seat but fell just short of it by other political leaders. However, the inability to gain control wasn’t very short, as in 1933, he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Many of the people who opposed the Nazis had failed to react against it, and Hitler was able to seize total control.

Eventually the Nazis began to suspending civil rights and political opposition. All of the communists were kicked out of any seat in power. He continues to take away freedoms from the people. He even got a stamped letter saying that he had the free will to do what he wants without consent of parliament. He and his party also spread antisemitism amongst the people, allowing them to have a common enemy. Hitler took his control and used it with force and intimidation.

Fascism in Italy[]

At the same time in Italy, Benito Mussolini was gaining power from a new political ideology called fascism. They would claim themselves to be the best nationalists and wanted what was only right for their country. The Italian fascists took against Liberalism and gathered a stronger suit of being a heavily conservative ideology. The people known as the Blackshirts, which were a mix of World War I veterans and ideal socialists, were taken under Mussolini’s wing. However, it wasn’t just democracy that was against fascism, but instead feminists as well, as Mussolini had a deal of women’s suffrage movement in Italy, which was partially taken into account by the fascists.

Military Rule in Japan[]

Century after the Tokugawa Shogunate was defeated by imperial troops loyal to Emperor Meiji took over in Japan, the military became more powerful. In the 1930s, the Military made a «control faction» which won almost every seat in the National Diet. In 1940, four political parties (Seiyūkai, Minseitō, Kokumin Dōmei, and Shakai Taishūtō) merged in the IRAA or Imperial Rule Assistance Association created a military dictatorship under General Hideki Tojo who replaced many civilian leaders with 3 and 4 star generals.

Beginnings[]

World War II officially began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, which was to look like a Polish espionage mission against Germany. At this time, Hitler made a non-aggression pact with Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, which that they wouldn’t attack each other. They also made an agreement to invade Poland together: Germany from the west, and the Soviets from the east. Two days later, the UK and France, along with the British Commonwealth, declared war on Germany. The Germans made a new style of warfare, Blitzkrieg, which was a lightning-fast attack with full armor. Poland fell in just a week and a half. The remaining soldiers of Poland evacuated to Romania.

On the sixth of October of that year, Hitler wanted a peace agreement with France and the UK. Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at that time, rejected the peace offering. Hitler answered to the denial with a full attack against France. Due to bad weather, it was postponed to Spring of the next year. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, they were stationing troops along twith he Baltic nations, as for peace. Finland rejected this idea, causing the Soviets to invade Finland. This gave the USSR bad relations with the Allies, causing the Russian seat to be kicked out of the League of Nations.

Blitzkrieg[]

On Spring of 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, both falling in just two months. By this time, the UK was doing nothing to protect themselves, which forced Chamberlain out of office, who was replaced by Winston Churchill. Before invading France, Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg for a closer front. The French were using an outdated form of military equipment, which wouldn’t hold against the German’s Blitzkrieg offensive. However, the French also put their strongest fortifications on the Maginot Line (French fortifications built in the 1930s to protect themselves from the growing German threat), which the Germans easily avoided by going around the Line by going through Belgium. France did not expect this, and quickly abandoned their posts, leaving all of the artillery behind. As the French were fleeing for their lives, Italy declared war on both the UK and Franc, and invaded them from the south. Paris fell to the Germans soon after and France surrendered. The remaining French militants were being evacuated off the coast into the UK. France was then divided into Italian zones and German zones.

Ariel strategy[]

By now Hitler had his sights on the UK. He figured if he could get the United Kingdom, he could move across north and invade Canada, and finally the United States. In order to do this, he ordered for bombers and fighter planes to attack the city of London in hopes of gaining air superiority. Then he could move on to destroying the ships blocking the English Channel, and finally, move-in ships carrying soldiers to invade Britain. The Germans began bombing, in hopes of succeeding, as they have so far never lost in the war. Over the course of several months, the Royal Air Force (RAF) managed to keep the Germans from attaining air superiority, and eventually Hitler called back his bombers.

Submarine strategy[]

The Germans had been using U-boats for the first and now the second World War. They’re easy and cheap to make, which is why Germans continued to build them. Hitler figured that they should build a battleship, which would go around and destroy all of the other battleships that the Allies had. After construction, Hitler was proud of creating the Bismarck, which lived a short time before being destroyed by small British boats. Hitler wanted to make another, but was advised to stay with the U-boats, as building another battleship would be too expensive and not worth it.

Belligerents[]

Major Battles[]

Major Battles
Battle	Countries	Date	Victory	Type of Battle	Casualties
Blitzkrieg
Invasion of Poland	Poland Germany Soviet Union	September 1, 1939 — October 6, 1939	Axis	Land	256,800
Battle of France	France Germany	May 10, 1940 — June 22, 1940	Axis	Land	523,650
Battle of Britain	Britain Germany	July 10, 1940 — October 31, 1940	Allied	Arial	93,880
The War in the Mediterranean
Battle of El Alamein	Britain Germany Italy	October 23, 1942 — November 11, 1942	Allied	Land	44,102
Battle of Anzio	Britain United States Germany Italy	January 22, 1944 — June 5, 1944	Allied	Land	12,000
Battle of Monte Cassino	Britain United States France Germany	January 17, 1944 — May 18, 1944	Allied	Land	75,000
The Invasion of the Soviet Union
Siege of Leningrad	Soviet Union Germany	September 8, 1941 — January 27, 1944	Allied	Siege	5,058,051
Battle of Moscow	Soviet Union Germany	October 2, 1941 — January 7, 1942	Allied	Land	528,000
Battle of Stalingrad	Soviet Union Germany	August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943	Allied	Siege	1,979,619
Battle of Kursk	Soviet Union Germany	July 5, 1943 – July 16, 1943	Allied	Land	684,499
Germany’s Defeat
Normady Landings	United States Britain Canada Germany	June 6, 1944	Allied	Naval Invasion	19,000
Battle of Berlin	Soviet Union Germany	April 16, 1945 – May 2, 1945	Allied	Land	181,116
Battle of Arnhem	Britain Germany	September 17, 1944 — September 26, 1944	Axis	Land	3,284
Battle of the Bulge	United States Britain Germany	December 16, 1944 – January 25, 1945	Allied	Land	158,108

War in The Pacific[]

• The Battle of the Philippines, occurred in 1941-1942, land battle, Japanese Victory
• The Battle of Singapore, occurred in 1942, siege, Japanese Victory
• The Battle of Coral Sea, occurred in 1942, naval battle, American Victory
• The Battle of Guadalcanal, occurred in 1942-1943, land battle, Allied (American) Victory
• The Battle of Midway, occurred in 1942, naval battle, Allied (American) Victory
• The Battle of Leyte Gulf, occurred in 1944, land battle, Allied (American) Victory
• The Battle of Philippine Sea, occurred in 1944, Allied (American) Victory
• The Battle of Iwo Jima, occurred in 1945, land battle, Allied (American) Victory
• The Battle of Okinawa, occurred in 1945, land battle, Allied (American) Victory

Timeline[]

Date	Battle	Detailed Information
January 1933	—	Adolf Hitler becomes Germany’s Chancellor.
July 1937	Second Sino — Japanese War	The Japan Empire invades the Republic of China.
March — Oct 1938	—	Germany annexes Austria and the Sudetenland.
March 1939	Germany invades Czechoslovakia	Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia despite the assurances given by him.
March /April 1939	—	The Great Britain rearms and reassures Poland, who was being threatened by the Fuhrer.
23 August 1939	—	Hitler and Stalin signed a non — aggression pact which included secret clauses for the division of Poland.
1 September 1939	Germany invades Poland	Germany had occupied Poland.
3 September 1939	—	Britain and France declare war on Germany.
17 September 1939	The Soviet Union invades Poland	The Soviet Union invades Poland, honoring the German — Soviet pact.
September 1939 — May 1940	Phoney War	The months following Britain’s declaration of war are referred to as the ‘Phoney War’ because Britain saw no military action.
November 1939 — March 1940	The Winter War	The Soviet Union occupied Finland.
April 1940	Germany invades Luxembourg, Denmark and Norway	Germany occupied Luxembourg, Denmark and Norway.
10 May 1940	Blitzkrieg	Hitler launched his blitzkrieg ( Lightning War ) against Netherlands and Belgium. Both countries were occupied.
13 May 1940	—	Neville Chamberlain resigned after pressure from Labour members for a more active prosecution of the war and Winston Churchill became the new head of the wartime coalition government.
26 May 1940 — 4 June 1940	—	The British commander-in-chief, General Gort, had been forced to retreat to the coast at Dunkirk. The troops waited, under merciless fire, to be taken off the beaches. A call went out to all owners of sea-worthy vessels to travel to Dunkirk to take the troops off the beaches of Dunkirk. More than 338,000 men were rescued, among them some 140,000 French who would form the nucleus of the Free French army under a little known general, Charles de Gaulle. More than 330,000 surrounded Allied soldiers escape into England.
May 1940 — June 1940	Battle of France	Germany’s Mobile Warfare defeats the Allies.
10 June 1940	Italy invades France	Italy occupied France.
11 June 1940	—	Italy enter war on side of Axis powers
22 June 1940	—	France signs armistice with Germany
10 July 1940 – 31 October 1940	Battle of Britain	The Battle of Britain comprised four phases: 1. During July, Hitler sent his Luftwaffe bombers to attack British ports. His aim was also to assess the speed and quality of response by the RAF. 2. During August, the attacks on shipping continued but bombing raids were concentrated on RAF airfields. 3. The Blitz – From September 7th, the city of London was heavily bombed. Hitler hoped to destroy the morale of the British people. 4. Night Bombing – With the failure of daylight bombing raids, Hitler began a series of nightly bombing raids on London and other important industrial cities. The Royal Air Force faced the Laftwaffe. The RAF defended the skies and by October 31, the raids had ceased.
9 September 1940	Italy invades British’ Egypt	Italy occupies British’ Egypt, the North African Campaign begins.
22 Sept 1940	Japan invades French Indochina	Japan occupies French Indochina, effectively blockading China from importing arms.
25 September 1940	—	Tripartite Pact of mutual alliance was signed by Germany, Italy and Japan.
November 1940 — March 1941	—	Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria joined the Axis Powers.

References[]