World War II, or the
Second World
War (often abbreviated
WWII or
WW2), was a global
military
conflict which involved
most of the world's nations,
including all
great powers, organised
into two opposing military alliances: the
Allies and the
Axis. The war involved the mobilisation of over
100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war
in history. In a state of "
total war," the
major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and
scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing
the distinction between civilian and military resources. Over
seventy million people, the
majority civilians, were killed, making it
the deadliest
conflict in
human
history.
The start
of the war is generally held to be September 1, 1939, with the
German invasion of Poland
and subsequent declarations of
war on Germany
by most of
the countries in the British Empire
and Commonwealth, and by
France. Many countries were
already at war before this date, such as Ethiopia
and Italy
in the
Second Italo-Abyssinian
War and China
and Japan
in the Second
Sino-Japanese War. Many who were not initially involved joined
the war later, as a result of events such as the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
the attacks on Pearl Harbor
and British colonies, and subsequent declarations
of war on Japan by the United States
, the
Netherlands
, and
British
Commonwealth.
In 1945 the war ended in a victory for the Allies.
The Soviet Union
and the United States
subsequently emerged as the world's superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War. This cold war would last for the
next 46 years. The
United Nations was
formed in the hope of preventing another world conflict. The
acceptance of the principle of
self-determination accelerated
decolonization movements in Asia and Africa,
while
Western Europe itself began
moving toward
integration.
Chronology
The start of the war is generally held to be September 1, 1939 with
the German invasion of Poland; Britain and France declared war on
Germany two days later. Other dates for the beginning of war
include the
Japanese
invasion of Manchuria September 13, 1931, the start of the
Second Sino-Japanese War on
July 7, 1937, or one of several other events. Other sources follow
A. J.
P. Taylor, who holds that there was a
simultaneous Sino-Japanese War in East Asia, and a Second European
War in Europe and her colonies. Neither war became a global
conflict until they merged in 1941, at which point the war
continued until 1945. This article uses the conventional
dating.Among other starting dates sometimes used for World War II
are the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia;
(Ben-Horin,
Eliahu (1943). The Middle East: Crossroads of History, p.
169; Taylor, Alan (1979). How Wars Begin, p. 124;
Yisreelit, Hevrah Mizrahit (1965). Asian and African
Studies, p. 191). For 1941 see
(Taylor, AJP (1961). The Origins of the
Second World War, p. vii; Kellogg, William O. (2003).
American History the Easy Way, p. 236). There also
exists the viewpoint that both World War I and World War II are
part of the same "
European Civil
War" or "
Second Thirty Years
War".
(Canfora, Luciano; Jones, Simon (2006).
Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology, p. 155;
Prin, Gwyn (2002). The Heart of War: On Power, Conflict and
Obligation in the Twenty-First Century, p. 11). Other
important events that happened at the dawn of the war include the
Second Italo-Abyssinian War between Ethiopia and Italy on October
1935 that led to the collapse of the
League of Nations.Barker, A. J.,
The
Rape of Ethiopia 1936, pp. 131-132 The exact date of the war's
end is not universally agreed upon. It has been suggested that the
war ended at the armistice of August 14, 1945, rather than the
formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945); in some European
histories, it ended on
V-E Day (May 8,
1945). The
Treaty of Peace with
Japan was not signed until 1951.
Background
A variety of events led to the escalation of hostilities between
the Axis and Allied powers prior to the start of the war. In the
aftermath of World War I, a defeated
Germany signed the
Treaty of Versailles. This
caused Germany to lose around 13 percent of its territory, stripped
it of its colonies, prohibited German annexation of other states,
imposed massive reparations and limited the size and makeup of
Germany's armed forces.
The Russian
Civil War led to the creation of the Soviet Union
, which soon was under the control of Joseph Stalin. In Italy,
Benito Mussolini seized power as a
fascist dictator promising
to create a "
New Roman
Empire."
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 allies.
In 1931,
an increasingly
militaristic Japanese
Empire
, which had long sought influence in China as the
first step of its right to rule Asia,
used the Mukden Incident as
justification to invade
Manchuria and anex two Chinese provinces. The two
nations then fought several small conflicts, in
Shanghai,
Rehe and
Hebei, until the
Tanggu Truce in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese
volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in
Manchuria, and
Chahar and
Suiyuan.
Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful
attempt to overthrow the German government
in 1923, became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
He abolished
democracy, espousing a
radical, racially-motivated revision of
the world order, and soon began a massive
rearmament campaign. 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 Saarland
was legally reunited with Germany and Hitler
repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, speeding up his rearmament
programme and introducing conscription. Hoping to contain Germany,
the United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the
Stresa Front. The Soviet Union, concerned due
to
Germany's goals of capturing vast
areas of eastern Europe, wrote 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. In June 1935, the United Kingdom made an
independent naval
agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The United
States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the
Neutrality Act in August. In October,
Italy invaded Ethiopia, with Germany the only major European nation
supporting her invasion.
Italy then revoked objections to Germany's
goal of absorbing Austria
.
Hitler defied the Versailles and
Locarno treaties by
remilitarizing the
Rhineland in March 1936. He received
little response from other European powers.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July,
Hitler and Mussolini supported fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco's nationalist
forces
in his civil war against the Soviet-supported
Spanish Republic.
Both sides used the conflict to test new weapons and methods of
warfare, and the nationalists won the war in early 1939. Mounting
tensions led to several efforts to strengthen or consolidate power.
In October 1936 Germany and Italy formed the
Rome-Berlin Axis and a month later Germany
and Japan, each believing communism and the Soviet Union to be a
threat, signed the
Anti-Comintern
Pact, which Italy would join in the following year. In China,
the Kuomintang and communist forces agreed on a ceasefire in order
to present a
united
front to oppose Japan.
Pre-war events
Invasion of Ethiopia
The
Second
Italo–Abyssinian War was a brief
colonial war that started in October 1935 and
ended in May 1936.
The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy
(Regno d'Italia) and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia
). 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).
Politically, the war is best remembered for exposing the inherent
weakness of the League of Nations. Like the Mukden Incident in
1931, the
Abyssinia Crisis in 1934
is often seen as a clear example of the ineffectiveness of the
League. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations and yet the
League was unable to control Italy or to protect Ethiopia when
Italy clearly violated the League's own
Article
X. The war is also remembered for the Italian armed forces'
illegal use of
mustard gas and
phosgene.
Invasion of China
In
mid-1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
, the Second
Sino-Japanese War culminated in the Japanese
campaign to invade all of China. The Soviets
quickly signed a
non-aggression pact with
China, effectively ending China's prior
cooperation with
Germany.
Starting at
Shanghai, the Japanese pushed the Chinese forces back,
capturing the capital Nanjing in December.
In June
1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding the Yellow River; although
this manoeuvre bought time for the Chinese to prepare their
defences at Wuhan
, the
city was taken by October.
During
this time, Japanese and Soviet forces engaged in a skirmish at
Lake Khasan
; in May 1939, they became involved in a more
serious border
war
that ended with their signing a cease-fire
agreement on September 15 and restoring the status quo. On April 13, 1941, Japan
and the Soviet Union signed the
Soviet–Japanese
Neutrality Pact, pledging to respect the territorial integrity
and inviolability of
Manchukuo and
Mongolian People's
Republic.
European occupations and agreements
In Europe, Germany and Italy were becoming bolder. In March 1938
Germany
annexed Austria, again provoking
little response from other
European powers.
Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German
claims on the Sudetenland, an area of
Czechoslovakia
with a predominantly ethnic German population; France and Britain
conceded this territory to him,
against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for
a promise of no further territorial demands. However, soon
after that, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to
cede additional territory to Hungary and
Poland. In March 1939
Germany invaded the
remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the
German
Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia and the pro-German independent client
state, the
Slovak
Republic.
Alarmed,
and with Hitler making further demands on Danzig
, France and Britain guaranteed
their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April
1939, the same guarantee was extended to Romania and Greece
.
Shortly after the
Franco-British pledge to
Poland, Germany and Italy formalized their own alliance with the
Pact of Steel. In August 1939 Germany
and the Soviet Union signed
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a
non-aggression pact.
This treaty included a secret protocol
placing Western Poland
and Lithuania
in the German sphere of influence while placing
eastern
Poland, Finland
, Estonia
, Latvia
and the
Romanian province of Bessarabia
in the Soviet sphere of influence.
Course of the war
War breaks out in Europe
On September 1, 1939, Germany and
Slovakia a
client state in 1939
attacked Poland and World War II
broke out. France, Britain, and the countries of the
Commonwealth declared war on Germany
but provided little military support to Poland other than a
small French attack into the
Saarland. On September 17, 1939, after signing an armistice
with Japan, the Soviets launched their own invasion of Poland. By
early October, Poland was divided among
Germany,
the Soviet Union,
Lithuania
(returned Vilnius capital province) and
Slovakia, although Poland
never officially surrendered and
continued the fight outside
its borders. At the same time as the battle in Poland, Japan
launched its
first attack
against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but
was repulsed by late September.
Following the invasion of Poland and a
German-Soviet treaty governing Lithuania, the Soviet Union
forced the
Baltic countries to allow
it
to station Soviet troops in their countries under pacts of "mutual
assistance." Finland rejected territorial demands and was
invaded by the Soviet Union in November 1939. The
resulting conflict ended in March 1940 with
Finnish concessions. France and
the United Kingdom, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as
tantamount to entering the war on the side of the Germans,
responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting its expulsion from
the League of Nations. In June 1940, the
Soviet Armed Forces invaded and
occupied the neutral
Baltic States.
In Western Europe, British troops deployed to the Continent, but in
a phase nicknamed the
Phoney War by the
British and "Sitzkrieg" by the Germans, neither side launched major
operations against the other until April 1940. The Soviet Union and
Germany entered a
trade pact in February
of 1940, pursuant to which the Soviets received German military
and industrial equipment in exchange for supplying raw materials to
Germany to help circumvent a British blockade. In April,
Germany invaded Denmark and Norway
to secure shipments of
iron ore
from Sweden, which the allies would try to disrupt.
Denmark
immediately capitulated, and despite Allied support, Norway
was
conquered within two months. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign
led to the replacement of Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain by
Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940.
Axis advances
On that same day, Germany
invaded
France,
Belgium,
the Netherlands, and
Luxemboug.
The
Netherlands
and Belgium
were overrun using blitzkrieg tactics in a few days and weeks
respectively. The French fortified Maginot Line was circumvented by a flanking
movement through the thickly wooded Ardennes
region, mistakenly perceived by French planners as
an impenetrable natural barrier against armoured vehicles.
British troops were forced to
evacuate the continent at Dunkirk,
abandoning their heavy equipment by the end of the month. On June
10,
Italy invaded,
declaring war on both France and the United Kingdom; twelve days
later
France
surrendered and was soon divided into
German and
Italian occupation zones,
and an unoccupied
rump state under the
Vichy Regime.
On July 14, the
British attacked the French fleet
in Algeria to prevent
its possible seizure by Germany.
With France neutralised, Germany began an air superiority campaign
over Britain (the
Battle of
Britain) to prepare for
an
invasion. The campaign failed and by September the invasion
plans were cancelled. 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. Italy
began operations in the Mediterranean, initiating a
siege of Malta in June,
conquering
British Somaliland in August, and
making an incursion into British-held
Egypt in September 1940. Japan increased its blockade of China
in September by
seizing
several bases in the northern part of the now-isolated
French Indochina.
Throughout this period, the neutral United States took measures to
assist China and the Western Allies. In November 1939, the American
Neutrality Act was amended to allow
'Cash and carry' purchases by
the Allies.
In 1940, following the German capture of
Paris
, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased and, after the
Japanese incursion into Indochina, the United States embargoed iron, steel and mechanical parts against
Japan. In September, the United States further agreed to a
trade of American
destroyers for British bases. Still, a large majority of the
American public continued to oppose any direct military
intervention into the conflict well into 1941.
At the end of September 1940, the
Tripartite Pact united Japan, Italy, and
Germany to formalize the
Axis Powers.
The pact stipulated that any country, with the exception of the
Soviet Union, not in the war which attacked any Axis Power would be
forced to go to war against all three. During this time, the United
States continued to support the United Kingdom and China by
introducing the
Lend-Lease policy
authorizing the provision of war materiel and other items and
creating a security zone spanning roughly half of the Atlantic
Ocean where the
United States
Navy protected British convoys. As a result, Germany and the
United States found themselves engaged in sustained, if undeclared,
naval warfare in the North and Central Atlantic by October 1941,
even though the United States remained officially neutral.
The Axis
expanded in November 1940 when Hungary
, Slovakia, and Romania joined the Tripartite
Pact. These countries participated in the subsequent
invasion of the USSR, with
Romania making the
largest
contribution to recapture
territory
ceded to the USSR and pursue its leader
Ion Antonescu's desire to combat communism. In
October 1940,
Italy invaded Greece
but within days was repulsed and pushed back into Albania, where a
stalemate soon occurred. In December 1940, British Commonwealth
forces began counter-offensives against
Italian forces in Egypt and
Italian
East Africa. By early 1941, with Italian forces having been
pushed back into Libya by the Commonwealth, Churchill ordered a
dispatch of troops from Africa to
bolster the Greeks.
The Italian Navy
also suffered significant defeats, with the Royal Navy putting
three Italian battleships out of commission by carrier
attack at Taranto
, and several more warships neutralised at Cape
Matapan
.
The Germans soon intervened to assist Italy. Hitler
sent German forces to Libya in February,
and by the end of March they had
launched an offensive against
the diminished Commonwealth forces. In under a month, Commonwealth
forces were pushed back into Egypt with the exception of the
besieged port of Tobruk.
The
Commonwealth attempted
to dislodge Axis forces in May
and again in
June, but failed on both occasions. In early April
following Bulgaria's
signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Germans
intervened in the Balkans, by invading
Greece and Yugoslavia
following a coup; here too they made rapid progress, eventually
forcing the Allies to evacuate after Germany conquered the Greek island of Crete by the
end of May.
The Allies did have some successes during this time. In the
Middle East, Commonwealth forces first
quashed a coup in Iraq which had
been supported by German aircraft from bases within
Vichy-controlled
Syria,
then, with the assistance of the
Free
French,
invaded Syria and
Lebanon to prevent further such occurrences. In the Atlantic,
the British scored a much-needed public morale boost by
sinking the German
flagship Bismarck. Perhaps most importantly, during
the Battle of Britain the
Royal Air
Force had successfully resisted the Luftwaffe's assault, and on
May 11, 1941, Hitler called off the bombing campaign.
In Asia, despite several offensives by both sides, the war between
China and Japan was stalemated by 1940. In August of that year,
Chinese communists launched
an
offensive in Central
China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures (the
Three Alls Policy) in occupied
areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists.
Continued antipathy between Chinese communist and nationalist
forces
culminated in armed
clashes in January 1941, effectively ending their co-operation.
With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany,
Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations. 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. By contrast, the Germans were
steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union,
amassing forces on the Soviet border.
The war becomes global
On June 22, 1941, Germany, along with other European Axis members
and Finland, invaded the Soviet Union in
Operation Barbarossa.
The primary targets
of this surprise offensive were the Baltic
region, Moscow
, and
Ukraine
, with an ultimate goal of ending the 1941
campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line,
connecting the Caspian
and White
Seas
. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the
Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate
Communism, generate so-called '
living space' by
dispossessing the native population and
guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat
Germany's remaining rivals. Although before the war the
Red Army was preparing for strategic
counter-offensives,
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 personnel and materiel. However, by
the middle of August, the German
Army High Command decided to
suspend the offensive of a
considerably depleted Army Group Centre, and to divert the
Second Panzer Group to reinforce troops
advancing toward central Ukraine and Leningrad. The
Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly
successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four
Soviet armies, and made further
advance
into Crimea and industrially developed Eastern Ukraine (the
First Battle of Kharkov)
possible.

German infantry and armoured vehicles
battle the Soviet defenders on the streets of Kharkov in
1941.
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
prompted the United Kingdom to reconsider its grand strategy. In
July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a
military alliance against Germany and
shortly after
jointly
invaded Iran to secure the
Persian
Corridor and Iran's oilfields. In August, the United Kingdom
and the United States jointly issued the
Atlantic Charter.
By
October, when Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic
region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol
continuing, a major offensive against Moscow
had been renewed. After two months of fierce
battles, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of
Moscow, where the exhausted troops were forced to suspend their
offensive. Despite impressive territorial gains, the Axis 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 WWII in Europe had ended.
By early December, freshly mobilized
reserves allowed the Soviets to
achieve numerical parity with Axis troops. This, as well as
intelligence data that established a minimal number of Soviet
troops in the East sufficient to prevent any attack by the Japanese
Kwantung Army, allowed the Soviets to
begin a
massive counter-offensive that started on December 5 along a
front and pushed German troops west. Japan had
seized military control of southern
Indochina the previous year, partly to increase pressure on
China by blocking supply routes, but also to better position
Japanese forces in the event of a war with the Western powers.
Japan,
hoping to capitalise on Germany's success in Europe, made several
demands, including a steady supply of oil, of the Dutch East
Indies
; these attempts, however, broke down in June
1941. The United States, United Kingdom, and other Western
governments reacted to the seizure of Indochina with a freeze on
Japanese assets, while the United States (which supplied 80 percent
of Japan's oil) responded by placing a complete oil embargo. Thus
Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its
ambitions in Asia and the prosecution of the war against China, or
seizing the natural resources it needed by force; the Japanese
military did not consider the former an option, and many officers
considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war. Japanese
Imperial General
Headquarters thus planned to rapidly 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. To prevent American
intervention while securing the perimeter it was further planned to
neutralise the
United States
Pacific Fleet from the outset. On December 7 (December 8 in
Asian time zones), 1941, Japan attacked British and American
holdings with near simultaneous
offensives against
Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific.
These included an
attack on the
American fleet at Pearl Harbor
and landings in
Thailand and Malaya.
Australian anti-tank gunners firing on Japanese tanks at the
Muar-Parit Sulong Road.
These attacks prompted the United States,
United
Kingdom,
Australia, other Western
Allies, and China (already fighting the Second Sino-Japanese War),
to formally declare war on Japan. Germany and the other members of
the Tripartite Pact responded by declaring war on the United
States. In January, the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet
Union, China, and twenty-two smaller or exiled governments issued
the
Declaration by United
Nations which affirmed the
Atlantic
Charter. The Soviet Union did not adhere to the declaration,
maintained a neutrality agreement with Japan and exempted itself
from the principle of self-determination.
Meanwhile, by the end of April 1942, Japan
had almost fully conquered Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies,
Singapore
, and the key base of Rabaul
, inflicting
severe losses on Allied troops and taking a large number of prisoners. Despite
a stubborn resistance in
Corregidor,
the Philippines
was eventually captured in May 1942, forcing the government of the
Philippine Commonwealth into
exile.
Japanese forces also achieved naval
victories in the South China Sea,
Java Sea and Indian Ocean and bombed the Allied naval
base at Darwin
, Australia. The
only real Allied success against Japan was a
victory at Changsha in early
January 1942. These easy victories over unprepared opponents left
Japan severely overconfident, as well as overextended.
Germany retained the initiative as well. Exploiting dubious
American naval command decisions, the
German navy ravaged Allied shipping off the American
Atlantic coast. Despite considerable losses, European Axis members
stopped a major Soviet offensive in Central and Southern Russia,
keeping most territorial gains they achieved during the previous
year. In North Africa, the Germans launched an offensive in
January, pushing the British back to positions at the
Gazala Line by early February, followed by a
temporary lull in combat which Germany used to prepare for their
upcoming offensives.
The tide turns
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 Allies, however,
intercepted and turned back Japanese
naval forces, preventing the invasion.
Japan's next plan,
motivated by the earlier bombing on Tokyo
, 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 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 force dispositions and used this
knowledge to achieve a
decisive victory
over the Imperial
Japanese Navy.
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. 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. 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
. 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
. 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. The
second was the
insertion of
irregular forces behind Japanese front-lines in February which,
by the end of April, had achieved dubious results.
On Germany's
eastern front, the Axis defeated Soviet offensives in the
Kerch Peninsula and at
Kharkov and then launched
their main
summer offensive against
southern Russia in June 1942, to seize the oil fields of the
Caucasus. The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad
which was in the path of the advancing German armies.
By mid-November the
Germans had nearly
taken Stalingrad
in bitter street
fighting when the Soviets began their second winter
counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad
and an assault on the Rzhev salient near
Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously. By early
February 1943, the German Army had taken tremendous losses; German
troops at Stalingrad had been forced to surrender 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 Russian city of Kursk
.

px225
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.
In the West, concerns the Japanese might
utilize bases in Vichy-held Madagascar
caused the British to invade the island in early May
1942. This success was offset soon after by an
Axis offensive in Libya which
pushed the Allies back into Egypt until Axis forces were stopped at
El Alamein
. On the Continent, raids of Allied
commandos on strategic targets, culminating in the
disastrous
Dieppe Raid, demonstrated the
Western allies' inability to launch an invasion of continental
Europe without much better preparation, equipment, and operational
security.
In August
1942, the Allies succeeded in repelling a second
attack against El Alamein
and, at a high cost, managed to get desperately needed supplies to the
besieged Malta. 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. This attack was followed up shortly after
by an Anglo-American invasion of French North
Africa
, which resulted in the region joining the
Allies. Hitler responded to the French colony's defection by
ordering the
occupation of Vichy France;
although Vichy forces did not resist this violation of the
armistice, they managed to
scuttle their fleet
to prevent its capture by German forces.
The now pincered Axis
forces in Africa withdrew into Tunisia
, which was conquered by
the Allies by May 1943.
Allies gain momentum
Following the Guadalcanal Campaign, the Allies initiated several
operations against Japan in the Pacific. In May 1943, American
forces were sent to
eliminate Japanese
forces from the Aleutians, and soon after began major
operations to
isolate Rabaul by
capturing surrounding islands, and to
breach the Japanese
Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.
By the
end of March 1944, the Allies had completed both of these
objectives, and additionally neutralised another major Japanese base
in the Caroline
Islands
. In April, the Allies then launched an
operation to
retake Western
New Guinea.
In the Soviet Union, both the Germans and the Soviets spent the
spring and early summer of 1943 making preparations for large
offensives in
Central Russia.
On July
4, 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 and, for the first time in the war,
Hitler cancelled the operation before it had achieved tactical or
operational success. This decision was partially affected by the
Western Allies'
invasion of
Sicily launched on July 9 which, combined with previous Italian
failures, resulted in the ousting and arrest of Mussolini later
that month. On July 12, 1943, the Soviets launched their own
counter-offensives, thereby
dispelling any hopes of the German Army for victory or even
stalemate in the east. The Soviet victory at Kursk was one of the
decisive turning points of the war, giving the Soviet Union the
initiative on the Eastern Front.
The Germans attempted to stabilise their
eastern front along the hastily fortified Panther-Wotan line, however, the Soviets
broke through it at Smolensk
and by the Lower Dnieper
Offensives.
In early September 1943, the Western Allies
invaded the Italian mainland,
following an
Italian
armistice with the Allies. Germany responded by disarming
Italian forces, seizing military control of Italian areas, and
creating a series of defensive lines.
German special forces
then rescued
Mussolini
, who then
soon established a new client state in German occupied Italy named
the Italian Social
Republic. The Western Allies fought through several
lines until reaching the
main German
defensive line in mid-November.
German operations in the Atlantic also suffered. By
May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became
increasingly effective, the resulting sizable German submarine
losses forced a temporary halt of the German Atlantic naval
campaign . In November 1943,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met
with
Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and then with Joseph Stalin
in Tehran. The former conference
determined the post-war return of Japanese territory 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.
In
January 1944, the Allies launched a series of
attacks in Italy against the line at Monte Cassino
and attempted to outflank it with landings at Anzio. By the end of
January, a major Soviet offensive expelled
German forces from the Leningrad region
, ending the longest and most
lethal siege in history. 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. 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.
The Allied offensives
in Italy had succeeded and, at the expense of allowing several
German divisions to retreat, on June 4 Rome
was
captured.
The Allies experienced mixed fortunes in mainland Asia. In March
1944, the Japanese launched the first of two invasions,
an operation against British positions in Assam,
India, and soon besieged Commonwealth positions at
Imphal and
Kohima.
In May 1944, British forces mounted a
counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma, and
Chinese forces that had invaded Northern Burma in late 1943
besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina
. The
second
Japanese invasion attempted to destroy China's main fighting
forces, secure railways between Japanese-held territory and capture
Allied airfields.
By June, the Japanese had conquered the
province of Henan
and begun
a renewed attack against
Changsha in the Hunan
province.
Allies close in
On June
6, 1944 (known as D-Day), the Western Allies
invaded
northern France
and, after reassigning several Allied divisions
from Italy, southern
France. These landings were successful, and led to
the defeat of the German
Army units
in
France. Paris was
liberated by the
local resistance assisted by the
Free French forces on August 25 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 spear-headed by
a major airborne operation in
Holland was not successful. The Allies also continued their advance
in Italy until they ran into the
last major
German defensive line.
On June 22, the Soviets launched a strategic offensive in Belarus
(known as "
Operation Bagration")
that resulted in the almost complete destruction of the
German Army Group Centre. Soon
after that,
another Soviet
strategic offensive forced German troops from Western Ukraine
and Eastern Poland. The successful advance of Soviet troops
prompted
resistance forces in Poland
to
initiate several uprisings,
though the largest of these, in
Warsaw, as well as a
Slovak Uprising in the south, were
not assisted by the Soviets and were put down by German forces. The
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.
In September 1944, Soviet
Red Army troops
advanced into
Yugoslavia and forced the
rapid withdrawal of the German Army Groups
E and
F in
Greece,
Albania and
Yugoslavia to rescue them from
being cut off. By this point,
Communist-led partisans under Marshal
Josip Broz Tito controlled much of
the territory of Yugoslavia and were engaged in delaying efforts
against the German forces further south. In northern
Serbia, the
Red Army, with limited support from
Bulgarian
forces, assisted the partisans in a joint
liberation of the capital city of
Belgrade on October 20. A few days later, the Soviets launched
a
massive assault against
German-occupied Hungary that
lasted until
the fall of Budapest
in February 1945.
In contrast with impressive Soviet victories
in the Balkans, the bitter Finnish
resistance to the Soviet offensive in
the Karelian
Isthmus
denied the Soviets occupation of Finland and led to
the signing of Soviet-Finnish
armistice on relatively mild conditions with subsequent
Finland's shift to the Allied
side.
By the
start of July, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled
the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the
Chindwin
River
while the Chinese captured Myitkyina.
In China,
the Japanese were having greater successes, having finally captured
Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang
by early August. Soon after, they further
invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against
Chinese forces at
Guilin and
Liuzhou by the end of November and successfully linking up
their forces in China and Indochina by the middle of
December.
In the Pacific, American forces continued to press back the
Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944 they began their
offensive against the Mariana
and Palau islands, scoring a decisive victory against Japanese
forces in the
Philippine
Sea within a few days. These defeats led to the resignation of
Japanese Prime Minister
Tōjō
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 during the
Battle of
Leyte Gulf
, the largest naval battle in history.
Axis collapse, Allied victory
On
December 16, 1944, Germany attempted its last desperate measure for
success on the Western Front by marshalling German reserves to
launch a massive counter-offensive
in the Ardennes to attempt to split the Western Allies,
encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and capture their
primary supply port at Antwerp
in order to prompt a political settlement.
The offensive had been repulsed by January with no strategic
objectives fulfilled. In Italy, the Western Allies remained
stalemated at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the
Soviets attacked in Poland,
pushing from the Vistula to the Oder
river in Germany, and
overran
East Prussia.
On February 4, U.S., British, and Soviet
leaders met in
Yalta
. They agreed on the occupation of post-war
Germany, and when the Soviet Union would join the war against
Japan.
In
February, the Soviets invaded
Silesia and Pomerania,
while Western Allied forces entered Western Germany and closed to
the Rhine
river. In March, the Western Allies crossed the
Rhine north and south
of the
Ruhr, encircling a
large number of German troops, while the Soviets advanced to
Vienna
.
In early April the Western Allies finally
pushed forward in Italy and
swept across Western Germany, while in late April Soviet forces
stormed Berlin;
the two forces linked up on Elbe river on April
25.
Several changes in leadership occurred during this period. On April
12, U.S. President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by
Harry Truman. Benito Mussolini was killed by
Italian partisans on
April 28. Two days later,
Hitler
committed suicide, and was succeeded by
Grand Admiral Karl
Dönitz.
German forces surrendered in Italy on April 29 and
in Western Europe on May 7. On the
Eastern Front, Germany surrendered to the
Soviets on May 8. A German Army
Group Centre
resisted in Prague
until May 11.
In the Pacific theatre, American forces
accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in
the Philippines, clearing
Leyte
by the end of 1944. They
landed on Luzon in January 1945 and
seized Manila in March leaving it in
ruins;
Mindanao was captured
later that month.
British and Chinese forces defeated the
Japanese in northern Burma from October to March, then the British
pushed on to Rangoon
by May 3. American forces also moved toward Japan,
taking Iwo
Jima
by March, and Okinawa by June. American bombers
destroyed Japanese cities, and
American submarines
cut off Japanese
imports.
On July 11, the Allied leaders
met in
Potsdam, Germany. They
confirmed
earlier agreements about Germany, and reiterated the demand for
unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces by Japan,
specifically stating that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and
utter destruction". During this conference the
United Kingdom held its
general election and
Clement
Attlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister. When Japan
continued to reject the Potsdam terms, the United States then
dropped atomic
bombs on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in early August. Between the two
bombs, the Soviets
invaded
Japanese-held Manchuria, as agreed at Yalta.
On August 15, 1945
Japan surrendered, with the
surrender documents
finally signed aboard the deck of the American battleship USS
Missouri
on September 2, 1945, ending the war.
Aftermath
[[Image:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-14059-0018, Berlin, Oberbefehlshaber
der vier Verbündeten.jpg|thumb|The Supreme Commanders on June 5,
1945 in Berlin:
Bernard
Montgomery,
Dwight D.
Eisenhower,
Georgy Zhukov and
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny]]
In an effort to maintain international peace, the Allies formed the
United Nations, which officially came
into existence on October 24, 1945, and adopted The
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948, as a common standard of achievement for
all member nations.
The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had
begun to deteriorate even before the war was over, and the two
powers each quickly established their own
spheres of influence. In Europe, the
continent was essentially divided between Western and Soviet
spheres by the so-called
Iron Curtain
which ran through and partitioned
Allied occupied Germany
and
occupied Austria.
The
Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc
by directly annexing several countries it occupied as Soviet Socialist Republics that
were originally effectively ceded to it by Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, such as
Eastern Poland
, the
three Baltic countries, part of
eastern Finland and northeastern Romania. Other states that the
Soviets occupied at the end of the war were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the
People's Republic of
Poland, the People's
Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak
Socialist Republic
, the People's Republic of Romania,
the People's Republic of
Albania, and later East Germany
from the Soviet zone of German occupation.
In Asia,
the United States occupied Japan
and administrated
Japan's former islands in the Western Pacific while the Soviets
annexed Sakhalin
and the Kuril Islands
; the former Japanese governed Korea was
divided and occupied between the two
powers. Mounting tensions between the United States
and the Soviet Union soon evolved into the formation of the
American-led NATO
and the
Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military
alliances and the start of the Cold War
between them.
Soon after the end of World War II, conflict flared again in many
parts of the world. In China, nationalist and communist forces
quickly resumed their
civil war.
Communist
forces were eventually victorious and established the People's
Republic of China
on the mainland while nationalist forces ended up
retreating to the reclaimed island of Taiwan
. In Greece,
civil
war broke out between Anglo-American supported royalist forces
and
communist forces, with
the royalist forces victorious.
Soon after these conflicts ended, North Korea invaded South Korea
, which was backed by the United Nations, while
North
Korea
was backed by the Soviet Union and China.
The war resulted in essentially a stalemate and ceasefire, after
which North Korean leader
Kim Il Sung
created a highly centralised and brutal
dictatorship, according himself unlimited power
and generating a formidable
cult of
personality.
Following the end of the war, a rapid period of
decolonization also took place within the
holdings of the various European colonial powers. These primarily
occurred due to shifts in ideology, the economic exhaustion from
the war and increased demand by indigenous people for
self-determination. For the most part, these transitions happened
relatively peacefully, though notable exceptions occurred in
countries such as
Indochina,
Madagascar,
Indonesia and
Algeria. In many regions, divisions, usually
for ethnic or religious reasons, occurred following European
withdrawal.
This was seen prominently in the Mandate of Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel
, and in India, resulting in the creation of the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan.
Economic recovery following the war was varied in differing parts
of the world, though in general it was quite positive.
In Europe, West Germany
recovered quickly
and doubled production from its pre-war levels by the 1950s.
Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition, but by 1950s,
the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth. The
United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin after the war, and
continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to
follow. France rebounded quite quickly, and enjoyed rapid economic
growth and modernisation. The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid
increase in production in the immediate post-war era. In Asia,
Japan experienced
incredibly rapid economic
growth, and led to Japan becoming one of the most powerful
economies in the world by the 1980s. China, following the
conclusion of its civil war, was essentially a bankrupt nation. By
1953 economic restoration seemed fairly successful as production
had resumed pre-war levels. This growth rate mostly persisted,
though it was briefly interrupted by the disastrous
Great Leap Forward economic experiment.
At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of
the world's industrial output; by the early 1970s though, this
dominance had lessened significantly.
Impact
Casualties and war crimes
Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, but most
suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including
about
20 million
soldiers and 40 million civilians.Many civilians died because
of
disease,
starvation,
massacres,
bombing and deliberate
genocide. The Soviet Union lost around 27
million people during the war, almost half of all World War II
deaths. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85
percent were on the Allied side (mostly Soviet and Chinese) and 15
percent on the Axis side. One estimate is that 12 million civilians
died in Nazi concentration camps, 1.5 million by bombs, 7 million
in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other
causes.
Many of these deaths were a result of genocidal actions committed
in Axis-occupied territories and other war crimes
committed by German as well as
Japanese forces. The most
notorious of German atrocities was
The
Holocaust, the systematic genocide of
Jews
in territories controlled by Germany and its allies. The Nazis also
targeted other groups, including the
Roma (targeted in the
Porajmos),
Slavs, and
gay
men, exterminating an estimated five million additional people.
The targets of the Axis-aligned Croatian
Ustaše regime were mostly
Serbs. The best-known Japanese atrocity is the
Nanking Massacre, in which several
hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered. The
Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 million to over 10 million
civilians, mostly Chinese. Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported 2.7 million
casualties occurred during the
Sankō Sakusen. General
Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in
Heipei and
Shantung.Limited Axis usage of
biological and
chemical weapons is also known.
The
Italians used mustard gas during their conquest of Abyssinia, while
the Japanese Imperial Army
used a variety of such weapons during their invasion and occupation of China
(see Unit 731) and in early
conflicts against the Soviets
. Both the Germans and
Japanese
tested such weapons against civilians and, in some cases, on
prisoners of war.
While many of the Axis's acts
were brought to trial in the
world's first international tribunals,
incidents caused by the
Allies were not.
Examples of such Allied actions include
population
transfer in the Soviet Union, the Soviet forced labour camps
(Gulag), Japanese American internment in
the United States, the Operation
Keelhaul, expulsion of Germans
after World War II, the Soviet massacre of Polish
citizens
and the
mass-bombing of civilian areas in enemy territory, including
Tokyo
and most notably at Dresden. Large numbers of deaths
can also be attributed, if even partially, indirectly to the war,
such as the
Bengal famine of
1943 and the
Vietnamese
famine of 1944–45.
Concentration camps and slave work
The Nazis were responsible for The Holocaust, the killing of
approximately six million Jews (overwhelmingly
Ashkenazim), as well as two million
ethnic Poles and four
million others who were deemed "
unworthy of life" (including the
disabled and
mentally ill,
Soviet POWs,
homosexuals,
Freemasons,
Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Roma) as
part of a programme of deliberate extermination. About 12 million,
most of whom were
Eastern Europeans,
were employed in the German war economy as
forced labor in
Germany during World War II.
In addition to Nazi
concentration
camps, the Soviet
gulags, or
labor camps, led to the death of citizens of
occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
as well as German
prisoners of war
(
POWs) and even Soviet citizens who had been or
were thought to be supporters of the Nazis. Sixty percent of
Soviet POWs of the
Germans died during the war.
Richard
Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POWs. Of those, 57
percent died or were killed, a total of 3.6 million. Some of the
survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors.
(See
Order No. 270)
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 27.1 percent (for American POWs, 37 percent),
seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians The death
rate among Chinese POWs was much larger; a directive ratified on
August 5, 1937 by
Hirohito declared that
the Chinese were no longer protected under international law. While
37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the Netherlands and
14,473 from United States were released after the
surrender of Japan, the number for the
Chinese was only 56.
According
to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta,
more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army
and enslaved by the East
Asia Development Board for slave labor in Manchukuo and north China
. The
U.S.
Library of Congress estimates that in
Java
, between 4
and 10 million romusha (Japanese:
"manual laborers"), were forced to work by the Japanese
military. About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent
to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia, and only 52,000
were repatriated to Java.
On
February 19, 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
interning thousands of Japanese, Italians, German Americans, and some emigrants from
Hawaii who fled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
for the duration of the war. The U.S. and
Canadian governments interned 150,000 Japanese-Americans, as well
as nearly 11,000 German and Italian residents of the U.S.
Allied use of
involuntary labor occurred mainly in the east, such as in
Poland, but more than a million were also put to work in the
west.In Hungary's case,
Hungarians were
forced to work for the Soviet Union until 1955.
Home fronts and production

Allied to Axis GDP ratio
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 British
Dominions) had a 30 percent larger population and a 30 percent
higher
gross domestic product
than the European Axis (Germany and Italy); if colonies are
included, it then gives the Allies more than a 5:1 advantage in
population and nearly 2:1 advantage in GDP. 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.
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. While the Allies' ability to
out-produce the Axis is often attributed 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, Allied
strategic bombing, and
Germany's late shift to a
war economy
contributed significantly. Additionally, neither Germany nor Japan
planned to fight a protracted war, and were not equipped to do so.
To improve their production, Germany and Japan used millions of
slave labourers;
Germany used
about 12 million people, mostly from
Eastern Europe, while
Japan pressed more than 18 million people
in
Far East Asia.
Occupation
In Europe, occupation came under two very different 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
reichmarks by the end of the war; this
figure does not include the
sizable
plunder of industrial products, military equipment, raw
materials and other goods. 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.
In the east, the much hoped for bounties of lebensraum were never
attained as fluctuating front-lines and Soviet
scorched earth policies denied resources to
the German invaders. Unlike in the west, the
Nazi racial policy encouraged
excessive brutality against what it considered to be the "
inferior people" of Slavic descent; most German
advances were thus followed by
mass
executions. Although
resistance groups did form in
most occupied territories, they did not significantly hamper German
operations in either the east or the west 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. Although Japanese forces were
originally welcomed as liberators from European domination in many
territories, their excessive brutality turned local public opinions
against them within weeks. During Japan's initial conquest it
captured 4 million barrels of oil (~5.5×10
5 tonnes) left
behind by retreating Allied forces, and by 1943 was able to get
production in the Dutch East Indies up to , 76 percent of its 1940
output rate.
Advances in technology and warfare
During the war, aircraft continued their roles of reconnaissance,
fighters,
bombers and ground-support from World War I, though
each area was advanced considerably. Two important additional roles
for aircraft were those of the
airlift, the
capability to quickly move high-priority supplies, equipment and
personnel, albeit in limited quantities; and of
strategic bombing, the targeted use of
bombs against civilian areas in the hopes of hampering enemy
industry and morale.
Anti-aircraft
weaponry also continued to advance, including key defences such
as
radar and greatly improved anti-aircraft
artillery, such as the German
88 mm gun.
Jet aircraft saw their first limited
operational use during World War II, and though their late
introduction and limited numbers meant that they had no real impact
during the war itself, the few which saw active service pioneered a
mass-shift to their usage following the war.
At sea, while advances were made in almost all aspects of naval
warfare, the two primary areas of development were focused around
aircraft carriers and submarines. Although at the start of the war
aeronautical warfare had relatively
little success, actions at Taranto, Pearl Harbor, the South China
Sea and the Coral Sea soon established the carrier as the dominant
capital ship in place of the battleship. In the Atlantic,
escort carriers proved to be a vital part of
Allied convoys, increasing the effective protection radius
dramatically and helping to seal the
Mid-Atlantic gap. Beyond their increased
effectiveness, carriers were also more economical than battleships
due to the relatively low cost of aircraft and their not requiring
to be as heavily armoured. Submarines, which had proved to be an
effective weapon during the first World War were anticipated by all
sides 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
Wolf pack tactics. Gradually, continually
improving Allied technologies such as the
Leigh light,
hedgehog,
squid, and
homing torpedoes proved
victorious.
Land warfare changed drastically from the static front lines
predominating in World War I to become much more fluid and mobile.
An important change was the concept of
combined arms warfare, wherein tight
coordination was sought between the various elements of military
forces; the
tank, which had been used
predominantly for infantry support in the First World War, had
evolved into the primary weapon of these forces during the second.
In the late 1930s, tank design was considerably more advanced in
all areas then it had been during World War I, and
advances continued throughout the war
in increasing speed, armour and firepower. At the start of the war,
most armies considered the tank to be the best weapon against
itself, and developed special-purpose tanks to that effect. This
line of thinking was all but negated by the poor performance of the
relatively light early tank armaments against armour, and German
doctrine of avoiding tank-versus-tank combat; the latter factor,
along with Germany's use of combined arms, were among the key
elements of their highly successful blitzkrieg tactics across
Poland and France. 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 utilised. Even with large-scale
mechanisation of the various armies, the infantry remained the
backbone of all forces, and throughout the war, most infantry
equipment was similar to that utilised in World War I. However, the
United States became the first country to arm its soldiers with a
semi-automatic rifle, in this
case the
M-1 Garand. Some of the primary
advances though, were the widespread incorporation of portable
machine guns, a notable example being
the German
MG42, and various
submachine guns which were well suited to
close-quarters combat in urban and jungle settings. The
assault rifle, a late war development which
incorporated many of the best features of the
rifle and submachine gun, became the standard postwar
infantry weapon for nearly all armed forces. In terms of
communications, most of the major belligerents attempted to solve
the problems of complexity and security presented by using large
codebooks for
cryptography with the creation of various
ciphering machines, the most well known being
the German
Enigma machine.
SIGINT (
signals
intelligence) was
the countering process of decryption, with the notable examples
being the British
ULTRA and the Allied
breaking of
Japanese naval
codes. Another important aspect of
military intelligence was the use of
deception operations, which the Allies
successfully used on several occasions to great effect, such as
operations
Mincemeat and
Bodyguard.
Other important
technological and engineering feats achieved during, or as a result
of, the war include the worlds first programmable computers (Z3,
Colossus, and ENIAC
), guided missiles and modern rockets, the Manhattan Project's development of
nuclear weapons, the development of
artificial
harbours
and oil pipelines under
the English Channel.
See also
Notes
- Fairbank, John King , Albert Feuerwerker, Denis Crispin
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References
External links
- Directories
- General
- On-line documents
- Stories
- Documentaries
- The World at War
(1974) is a 26-part Thames
Television 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 colour ( Imdb
link)
- Battlefield is a
television documentary series initially issued in 1994–1995 that
explores many of the most important battles fought during the
Second World War.
- The War (2007) is
7-part PBS documentary
recounting the experiences of a number of individuals from American
communities.