World War II
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World War II is the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theaters, and costing approximately 50 million lives. The war was fought mainly between an alliance of the United States, the Soviet Union, China and Britain (known as the Allies), and the Axis Powers, an alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan. Most of the fighting occurred in the European theater in and around Europe, and in the Asian theater in the Pacific and East Asia.
Introduction
The war in Europe began on September 1st, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland. However, Japan had invaded China in 1937, and this is sometimes considered to be the real start of the war.
The war in Europe ended with the surrender of Germany on May 8 1945, but continued in Asia and the Pacific until September 2, 1945, when Japan surrendered.
The war caused more civilian casualties than any war in history, partly due to the use of mass aerial bombings of cities (a policy initiated by the German Luftwaffe The first to use it on purpose was the british. But a German bomber bombed London against Hitler's order first, but later used even more extensively by the Allies). In total, World War II produced about 50 million deaths (about two per cent of the population of the world). (For details, see the list of World War II casualties by country.)
Preliminaries
See: Preceding events of the European Theater of World War II Resentment of the victorious powers' treatment of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I, and economic difficulties caused by war reparations and the Great Depression, allowed Adolf Hitler's extreme nationalist NSDAP movement to come to power in Germany. Due to the fragile political situation, Hitler could assume emergency power and virtually total control of the country. Defying post-World War I treaties he redeveloped the German military by means of the democratic constitution that then was put aside. He remilitarized the border zone next to France, enforced the re-unification with Austria, and with Franco-British approval he annexed parts of Czechoslovakia.
In 1922 Benito Mussolini and the Fascist party had risen to power in Italy. Mussolini's Italian fascists shared some ideological goals with the German National socialists, and although Mussolini distrusted Hitler, the two countries formed an agreement that became known as the "Axis" in 1936.
Benito Mussolini ("Il Duce") with Adolf Hitler
European Theater
See: European Theater of World War II
and The end of World War II in Europe
The period from the conclusion of the invasion of Poland in October 1939, till the German invasion of Benelux and France in May 1940, became known as the Phony War. The German and Soviet forces were moved from the attack on Poland. The Red Army concentrated on the Baltic Countries and on Finland, where the Winter War came in focus of the world's interest in absence of other hostilities. The Wehrmacht moved to the west, and invaded meanwhile Denmark and Norway. France mobilized and manned its heavily defended border against the Rhine; and the British sent a large expeditionary force to France. Apart from a brief attack by the French across the Rhine there were little hostilities as both sides built up their forces.
In May of 1940 German forces attacked the Low Countries and then France. Their Blitzkrieg tactics succeeded in defeating the French and British armies in France. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) evacuated from Dunkirk leaving their heavy equipment behind, and the French government made a peace, which left the Germans in control of the North and the Vichy government in charge of the South.
Luftwaffe was unable to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and gain the air superiority needed to invade Britain. Instead they began a strategic bombing campaign which the British called the Blitz, and to blockade Britain into submission in the Battle of the Atlantic. Britain failed to succumb to either.
In June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union, with whom they had a non-aggression pact, in Operation Barbarossa. The Russians were caught largely by surprise and the Wehrmacht initially conquered vast areas of territory, and captured hundreds of thousands of troops. The Soviets withdrew, and managed to move most of their heavy industry away from the front line and re-establish it in more remote areas. Tenacious, sacrificial defense prevented the Germans from capturing Moscow (Hero City) by the time winter set in (see Battle of Moscow). Hitler, expecting the campaign to be over in a few months, had not equipped their armies for winter fighting.
The German disaster at Stalingrad was promptly followed by a disaster of similar scale in Tunisia, resulting in the loss of the last Axis foothold in North Africa and the capture of a quarter of a million German and Italian POWs (May 1943). Thereafter the Allies used North Africa as a springboard for the invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and mainland Italy (September 1943), which Winston Churchill described as "the soft underbelly of Europe". Italy surrendered, but German troops moved to disarm the Italians and set about defending the country on their own. They established a series of tough defensive lines in mountainous country that was ideally suited to defense, and progress by the Allies was slow.
The Allies invaded Normandy in Operation Overlord in June 1944 and liberated most of France and the Low Countries by the end of the year. After a desperate counteroffensive by the German army in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the Allies entered Germany in 1945. By now the Soviets had reached the Eastern borders of the German Reich, and her fate was sealed. Following Hitler's suicide as the Russians entered Berlin, The German armed forces surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945.
Asian Theater
Main Article: Asian theater of World War II The Japanese had already invaded China before World War II started in Europe. With the United States and other countries cutting exports to Japan, Japan decided to bomb Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 without warning or declaration of war. Severe damage was done to the American Pacific Fleet, although the aircraft carriers escaped as they were at sea. Japanese forces simultaneously invaded the British possessions of Malaya and Borneo and the American occupied Philippines, with the intention of seizing the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. The British island fortress of Singapore was captured in what Churchill considered one of the most humiliating British defeats of all time.
In May 1942, a Japanese naval attack on Port Moresby, New Guinea which had it succeeded would have put them within striking range of Australia, was thwarted by the US Navy in the Battle of the Coral Sea, becoming both the first successful opposition to Japanese plans and the first naval battle fought only between aircraft carriers. A month later the US Navy again prevented the invasion of Midway island, this time destroying four Japanese carriers, which Japanese industry could not replace, and putting the Japanese navy on the defensive.
However, in July the Japanese Army attempted an overland attack on Port Moresby, along the rugged Kokoda Track. Australian reservists, many of them of very young and untrained, fought a stubborn rearguard action, until they were relieved by Australian regular troops returning from action in the Middle East.
The Allied leaders had agreed even prior to the American entry to the war that priority should be given to the defeat of Germany. Nonetheless US and Australian forces under General Douglas MacArthur began to attack captured territories, beginning with, against the bitter and determined defense of Japanese troops, Guadalcanal Island. On August 7, 1942 the island was assaulted by United States Marines. In late August and early September, while battle raged on Guadalacanal, Australian and US forces fought off a Japanese amphibious attack on the eastern tip of New Guinea at Milne Bay, the first conclusive defeat suffered by Japanese land forces. US forces triumphed on Guadalcanal in February 1943.
US and Australian forces then strove to retake the occupied parts of New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. The rest of the Solomon Islands were retaken in 1943, New Britain and New Ireland in 1944. The Philippines were attacked in late 1944 following the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Allied submarines and aircraft also attacked Japanese merchant shipping, depriving Japanese industry of the raw materials she had gone to war to obtain. The effectiveness of this stranglehold increased as the US captured islands closer to the Japanese mainland.
The Nationalist Kuomintang Army under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Chinese Army under Mao Zedong managed to put aside their differences and in opposition to the Japanese in the occupied areas of China, but never cooperated.
Capture by the Allies of islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa close to Japan brought the homeland within range of naval and air attacks, and in early 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, attacking her possessions in Manchuria in August. After Tokyo was firebombed and nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
African and Middle Eastern Theater
The North African Campaign began in 1940, when small British forces in Egypt turned back an Italian advance from Libya. This advance was stopped in 1941 when German forces under Erwin Rommel landed in Libya. In addition, in June 1941 the Australian Army and allied forces invaded Syria and Lebanon, capturing Damascus on June 17. Rommel's Afrika Korps advanced rapidly eastward, laying siege to the vital seaport of Tobruk. The mainly Australian troops in the city resisted all until relieved, but a renewed Axis offensive captured the city and drove the Eighth Army back to a line at El Alamein.
The First Battle of El Alamein took place between July 1 and July 27, 1942. German forces had advanced to the last defensible point before Alexandria and the Suez Canal. However they had outrun their supplies, and a British and Commonwealth defense stopped their thrusts. The Second Battle of El Alamein occurred between October 23 and November 3, 1942 after Bernard Montgomery had replaced Claude Auchinleck as commander of the Eighth Army. Commonwealth forces took the offensive and destroyed the Afrika Korps. Rommel was pushed back, and this time did not stop falling back until Tunisia.
To complement this victory, on 8 November, 1942, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. The local forces of Vichy France put up limited resistance before joining the Allied cause. Ultimately German and Italian forces were caught in the pincers of a twin advance from Algeria and Libya. Advancing from both the east and west, the Allies completely pushed the Wehrmacht out of Africa and on May 13, 1943, the remnants of the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. 250,000 prisoners were taken; as many as at Stalingrad.
North Africa was used as the jumping-off point for the invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943.
Historical significance
In contrast to World War I, the Western victors in the Second World War did not demand compensation from the defeated nations. On the contrary, a plan created by U. S. Secretary of State George Marshall, the "Economic Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan, called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe.
Since the League of Nations had obviously failed to prevent the war, a new international order was constructed. In 1945 the United Nations was founded.
The portion of Europe occupied or dominated by the Soviet Union did not benefit from the Marshall Plan. In the Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union's enemies Hungary, Finland and Romania were required to pay war reparations of $300,000,000 each (in 1938 dollars) to USSR and her satellites. Italy was required to pay $360,000,000, shared chiefly between Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
In the areas occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, puppet regimes were installed, over the objections of the other Allies and the governments in exile. Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation, with the American, British and French zones grouped as West Germany and the Soviet zone becoming a Soviet satellite state, called East Germany. Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation, but the Soviet zone was eventually submerged into a re-united state of Austria. In Churchill's words, "an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe". In due course this would lead to a commitment from America to help protect Western Europe, the formation of NATO and the Cold War.
The repatriation, pursuant to the terms of the Yalta Conference, of two million Russian soldiers who had came under the control of advancing American and British forces, resulted for the most part in their deaths.
The massive research and development involved in the Manhattan Project in order to quickly achieve a working nuclear weapon design greatly impacted the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States.
In the military sphere, World War II marked the coming of age of airpower, mostly at the expense of warships. While the pendulum continues to swing in this never-ending competition, air powers are now a full partner in any military action.
The war was the high-water mark for mass armies. While huge armies of low-quality troops would be seen again (during the Korean War and in a number of African conflicts), after this victory the major powers relied upon small highly-trained and well-equipped militaries.
After the war, many high-ranking Germans were prosecuted for war crimes, as well as the mass murder of the Holocaust committed mainly on the area of General Government, in the Nuremberg trials. Similarly Japanese leaders were prosecuted in the Tokyo War Crime Trial. In other countries, notably in Finland, the Allies demanded the political leadership to be prosecuted in "war-responsibility trials" - i.e. not for crimes of war.
The defeat of Japan, and her occupation by American Forces, led to a westernization of Japan that was surely more far-reaching than would otherwise have occurred. Japan approximated more closely to a Western style democracy and, because of her defeat by the USA, set out to imitate the United States. This huge national effort led to the post-war Japanese economic miracle and Japan's rise to become the world's second largest economy.
Military engagements
Battles
- Battle of Dunkirk "Dynamo"
- Battle of Britain
- Battle of Crete
- Operation Barbarossa
- Battle of Moscow
- Battle of Kursk
- Battle of Stalingrad
- Operation Bagration
- First Battle of El Alamein
- Second Battle of El Alamein
- Battle of Normandy, also known as D-Day or Operation Overlord
- Battle of Tali-Ihantala
- Operation Market Garden (Battle of Arnhem)
- Battle of Monte Cassino
- Battle of Ardennes (1944) (a.k.a. Battle of the Bulge)
- Battle of Hurtgen Forest
- Battle of Berlin
- Battle of Leyte
- Battle of Peleliu
- Battle of Iwo Jima
- Battle of Okinawa
- Battle of Lugou Bridge
- Battle of Tai er zhuang
- Battle of Changsha
- Battle of Hundred Regiments
Sieges
- Siege of Leningrad
- Siege of Lwow
- Siege of Modlin
- Siege of Novorossiysk
- Siege of Odessa
- Siege of Sevastopol
- Siege of Warsaw
Naval engagements
- The Battle of the River Plate
- First Battle of Narvik
- Second Battle of Narvik
- Battle of the Atlantic (1940)
- Battle of Cape Matapan
- Battle of Pearl Harbor
- Battle of the Coral Sea
- Battle of Midway
- Battle of Guadalcanal
- Battle of Leyte Gulf
Major bombing campaigns
- Dresden
- Kassel
- Rostock (Heinckel Airplane Construction Plant, Seaport, and City)
- Luebeck
- Baedeker raids
- London ("The Blitz and the V1 and V2 campaigns)
- Bombing of Stalingrad 23 August 1942
- Helsinki February 1944, was mostly ineffective due to air defense and deception.
- Tallinn February - March 1944. Bombed by Soviet ADD. Large-scale damage.
- Narva March 1944. Evacuated town was destroyed by Soviet ADD.
- Hiroshima
- Nagasaki
- Tokyo
- Warsaw
- Rotterdam
- Hamburg
- Coventry
Defensive lines
Political and Social Aspects of the War
- Occupation of Denmark
- German children 1933-1945
- Nazi children in the times of peace
- Gold Star Mothers Club for those mothers who lost their children, KIA
Production and logistics
The Axis lost, at least partly because the Allies, after the USA's and the Soviet Union's entrance into the war, had greater productive resources, and were able to turn these resources into greater numbers of soldiers and weapons than the Axis.
- American tank production during World War II
- German tank production during World War II
- Soviet tank production during World War II
- WW2 aircraft production
- US weapon production (1942-1945)
Related articles
- Timeline of the Second World War
- Axis Powers
- British military history of World War II
- British Women's Land Army
- Polish contribution to World War II
- Free French Forces
- Deutsches Afrika Korps
- Potsdam Agreement
- U.S. campaigns in WWII
- Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)
- The Dambusters raid
- Devil's_Brigade
- Operation_Shingle
- Persecutions of Nazi collaborators
Lists
- List_of_World_War_II_Theatres_and_Campaigns
- List of countries involved in World War II
- List of World War II casualties by country
- List of people associated with World War II
- List of equipment used in World War II
- List of World War II aces by country
External links
- Photos
- WW2 People's War - A project by the BBC to gather the stories of ordinary people from World War II
- World War II, Wars And Battles
- BBC History of WW2
- Using Historical Statistics To Teach about World War II. ERIC Digest.
- World War II Memorial Pictures
References
- Winston Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (1948-1953)
- Martin Gilbert, Second World War, Phoenix, 1995. ISBN 1857993462
- John Keegan, The Second World War (1989)
- B.H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (1970)
- Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (2000) ISBN 067400163X
- Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, Pimlico, 1995. ISBN 0712674535
- Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994) ISBN 0521443172