World War II (also called the Second World War) was a global conflict that lasted from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945. It was fought between two coalitions, the Allies and the Axis powers. The main Axis members were Germany, Italy and Japan. The main Allies were the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States and China, with France also a major Ally. Nearly every country in the world took part, and many waged total war, putting their whole economic, industrial and scientific capacity into the fighting. It is the deadliest conflict in history. Estimates of the dead commonly range from about 60 to 85 million people, most of them civilians. Among them were some six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Origins
The war grew out of problems left unresolved by World War I. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) imposed territorial losses and reparations on Germany. Many Germans resented these terms. The Great Depression of the 1930s then weakened democratic governments and helped authoritarian movements win support, especially fascism. In Germany, Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and built the dictatorship known as Nazi Germany. He rearmed the country, annexed Austria in March 1938, and took the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia under the Munich Agreement of 1938. Britain and France accepted these moves under a policy of appeasement. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. In East Asia, the Empire of Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931. In July 1937 it began a full-scale invasion of China, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War. For this reason, many historians date the war in Asia from 1937.
In August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. It was a non-aggression treaty with a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe between the two powers. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.
Course of the war
Axis expansion (1939–1941). Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also occupied the Baltic states and fought Finland in the Winter War. In spring 1940 Germany conquered Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France, using fast combined-arms operations often called Blitzkrieg. The Battle of Britain followed in 1940. The German air force failed to win control of the skies over Britain, and Germany called off its planned invasion. Italy entered the war in June 1940, which opened fronts in North Africa and the Balkans. In September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. In March 1941 the still-neutral United States began supplying the Allies under Lend-Lease.
Globalization of the war (1941–1942). On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. This opened the Eastern Front, which became the largest and deadliest theatre of the war. German forces reached the outskirts of Moscow before Soviet counterattacks and the winter stopped them. On 7 December 1941 Japan made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It also attacked British, Dutch and American territories across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The United States then entered the war against both Japan and Germany.
Turning points (1942–1943). Japan's naval advance was halted at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The British victory at El Alamein in late 1942 and the Allied landings in North Africa pushed Axis forces out of Africa by May 1943. On the Eastern Front, the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943) ended with a German army destroyed. In July 1943 the Battle of Kursk left the strategic initiative firmly with the Soviets. The Allies invaded Sicily, and in September 1943 Italy signed an armistice. Fighting continued on the Italian peninsula.
Allied victory (1944–1945). The Normandy landings of 6 June 1944 opened a Western Front in France. At the same time, Soviet offensives pushed into Eastern and Central Europe. Allied forces entered Germany from both sides. Hitler died by suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945, and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7–8 May 1945. In the Pacific, American forces advanced from island to island toward Japan, and Japanese cities came under heavy strategic bombing. On 6 and 9 August 1945 the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Japan announced its surrender on 15 August and signed the formal instrument on 2 September 1945.
Atrocities and civilian losses
Civilians died in greater numbers than soldiers. Nazi Germany carried out the systematic genocide of European Jews. It also killed Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles and others through mass shootings, death camps, starvation and forced labour. Japanese forces committed mass atrocities across Asia, including the Nanjing Massacre of 1937–1938, forced labour, and the "comfort women" system of sexual slavery. Both sides bombed cities from the air, causing heavy civilian casualties, as did famine and disease. The Soviet Union and China suffered the heaviest losses. Common estimates put Soviet deaths at around 27 million and Chinese deaths at about 15 to 20 million or more.
Science, technology and the war economy
The war speeded up technological change enormously. The Manhattan Project turned discoveries in nuclear physics into the first nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein signed a 1939 letter warning President Roosevelt that such weapons were possible, and Niels Bohr was among the scientists who worked on the project. Codebreaking at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing helped break German Enigma traffic, made cryptography a central part of military intelligence. The demand for faster calculation drove early electronic computers such as Colossus in Britain and ENIAC in the United States. Other major wartime developments included radar, jet aircraft and rockets, and the mass production of penicillin. Industrial mobilization drew millions of women into the workforce. Allied industry, above all in the United States, outproduced the Axis by a wide margin.
Aftermath and legacy
The war changed the international order. The United Nations was founded in 1945 to replace the failed League of Nations. The Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. At the Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo Trial, Axis leaders were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which helped establish modern international criminal law. In 1948 the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were adopted.
Germany and Korea were divided. Europe split into a Soviet-dominated East and a Western bloc backed by the United States. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers, and their rivalry became the Cold War. The war also weakened the European colonial empires and sped up decolonization in Asia and Africa. India became independent in 1947 and Indonesia in 1949. In China, the end of the war against Japan was followed by renewed civil war, which ended with the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
References
- World War IIen.wikipedia.org
- World War II: Causes, Timeline, Key Battles, Facts & Legacyhistory.com
- Causes, events, and casualties of World War IIbritannica.com
- World War II casualtiessimple.wikipedia.org
- Casualties of World War IIebsco.com