World War II

World War II (1939–1945) The Second World War was a truly global conflict which pitted the forces of democracy and liberalism against the forces of fascism and nationalistic militarism. On one side stood the Western democracies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, together with two regimes themselves essentially totalitarian in nature, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. On the other side crouched Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, a Japanese Empire dominated by militarists, and right-wing authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Although an enormously complex affair in which events in one hemisphere impacted upon events half a world away, World War II can be conveniently divided into two parts: the war in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and the Atlantic Ocean and the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Motivated by the desire to expand the territory of the German Reich, gather in ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, and dominate Central Europe, German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thereby provoking the British and French to declare war on Germany on September 3. Hitler's well-trained and well-equipped forces quickly conquered Poland, which was also attacked simultaneously from the east by the Soviet Union, and turned to the west where a standoff, known as the Sitzkrieg or the “Phony War,” lasted until the Germans invaded Norway in April 1940. On May 10, 1940, the Nazis mounted a strong offensive which took the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in short order and drove across the French border on May 12, quickly defeating the French and their British allies. The remaining British forces were withdrawn under fire from the beaches of Dunkirk (May 26– June 3), and the German forces entered Paris (June 14). On June 10, Italy declared war on Britain and France and invaded French territory. The demoralized French subsequently signed an armistice at Compiégne (where German forces had surrendered to end World War I) on June 22, and France was divided into a northern zone occupied by the Germans and a southern area which, for the time being, was controlled by the authoritarian, pro-Nazi Vichy regime led by Marshal Henri Pétain.

Unable to proceed directly to an amphibious invasion of England, Hitler launched an air campaign against Britain accompanied by unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic designed to isolate Britain from the resources of her empire and America. By dint of organizational skill and raw courage, the British Royal Air Force prevailed over the German Luftwaffe in the aerial campaign known as the Battle of Britain in the summer and early fall of 1940.

Meanwhile, the German Afrika Korps under Gen. Erwin Rommel reinforced Italian forces in North Africa and drove toward Egypt and the Suez Canal, engaging the defending British Commonwealth forces in a see-saw battle in the Western Desert. The British were defeated at Tobruk (June 1942) but won a substantial victory at El Alamein under British Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery (October 23– November 4, 1942), preventing the loss of Egypt.

In 1941, the Germans conquered Yugoslavia (April 17) and then Greece (April 27) thus securing their flanks for their most ambitious project, the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. At first the Germans encountered only weak resistance from the stunned Soviet forces, but the Red Army rallied to establish a successful defense before Leningrad in the north and Moscow in the center. In the south, the Germans seized the Crimea and pushed on into the Caucasus, but Soviet resistance stiffened at Stalingrad on the Volga. The war in the East was enormous in scope and magnitude, and the Germans found themselves stymied as much by the vast spaces and inclement climate as by the Soviet armed forces. Eventually the Soviet forces went over to the offensive (November 1942), and the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad (February 1–2, 1943), marking the turning point of the war in the East. Thereafter, the Soviet force inexorably pushed the Germans back toward Berlin. The largest tank battle of the war was fought at Kursk in July 1943, and the Germans never recovered from the loss of armored forces in that battle.

From September 1939 to December 1941, the United States followed a policy of neutrality with respect to the war raging in Europe. However, Britain and the United States discussed possible mutual action against the Axis powers, and in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act legitimizing the flow of war materials to Britain which had been going on for some time. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and Congress reciprocated with a declaration of war on them on December 11, 1941.

Allied strategy and policy were subsequently coordinated in a series of meetings of the various Allied heads of state (U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and after his death on April 12, 1945, President Harry S. Truman; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; Soviet Premier Josef Stalin; and Nationalist Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) at the Anglo-American Arcadia Conference (December 1941); Casablanca (January 1943); Quebec (August 1943); Cairo (November 1943); Tehran (November-December 1943); and Yalta (February 1945). The strategic decision was made to defeat the Axis forces in Europe first before turning to deal with the Japanese in Asia and the Pacific, and U.S. air and ground forces were rushed to England in anticipation of an early invasion of Continental Europe.

First, however, U.S. and British forces mounted an invasion of French North Africa at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers (November 8, 1942) and, following a galling American defeat by the Germans at the Kasserine Pass (February 1943), proceeded to roll up the German and Italian forces in Tunisia and Libya, pushing them against Montgomery's British 8th Army moving westward from Egypt. The remnants of the vaunted Afrika Korps surrendered at Cap Bon, Tunisia, on May 12, 1943, ending the war in North Africa.

In July, U.S. and British forces invaded Sicily and completed the defeat of its German and Italian defenders by September 3. On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was deposed and Marshal Badoglio was named premier, and on September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies. However, strong German forces remained in Italy, and on September 9, 1943, the Allies landed at Salerno south of Naples and began the long, arduous drive toward Rome, a drive stalled for some time in the winter of 1943–1944 along the line of the Rapido River south of Cassino. On January 22, 1944, the U.S. and British forces conducted another amphibious landing at Anzio on the west coast of Italy just below Rome. Although heavily pounded by the German defenders, the Allies managed to break out of the Anzio beachhead as well as cross the Rapido River line, and on June 4, 1944, the Allies entered Rome and subsequently continued the tough fight up the Italian peninsula lasting until the end of the war in May 1945.

The news of the taking of Rome was overshadowed by the most massive and elaborate amphibious operation of the war, the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Bogged down for a time in the beachhead and the hedgerow country of Normandy, the Allies broke out in July 1944, and the Germans quickly retreated behind the Rhine River pursued closely by the Allied forces. A second Allied landing was made in the south of France on August 15, and Paris was liberated on August 25. In far-off Greece, Athens was freed by the Allies on October 13.

During the fall and early winter of 1944, the Allies focused on closing up to the Rhine and securing the logistical bases necessary for carrying the war into Germany. On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a last ditch counterattack against the Allied forces in Belgium, and the resulting Battle of the Bulge, although a near-run thing, ultimately resulted in an Allied victory. On March 9, 1945, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine at Remagen and a few weeks later joined with Field Marshal Montgomery's forces to trap some 350,000 German troops in the Ruhr. Thereafter, the Allies quickly drove deep into Germany.

Meanwhile, on May 2, 1945, Soviet forces took Berlin, and on May 7, 1945, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies at Rheims. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans at Lake Como on April 28, and Adolf Hitler took his own life on May 1, as did other Nazi leaders. The remaining Nazi leaders were rounded up by Allied forces and put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945–1946.

Air and naval forces also played an important role in the war in the West. Although the Germans neglected the development of long-range strategic bombers, the Stuka dive-bombers, light bombers, and fighters of the Luftwaffe were an integral part of the successful German blitzkrieg tactics. After failing to destroy the British Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940, the Luftwaffe turned to the bombing of British cities and industrial facilities, and the RAF Bomber Command retaliated in kind. With the American entry into the war, the U.S. 8th Air Force in England (on August 17, 1942) and the U.S. 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean took up the strategic bombing of Germany and her allies, and American light bombers and fighters took on the task of gaining air superiority over Germany and supporting Allied ground forces with reconnaissance, interdiction strikes and close air support. Air transport also played a role in supporting the rapid movement of critical supplies, air evacuation of casualties, liaison flights, and troop carriers for airborne operations. Allied air forces also performed coastal surveillance and convoy security duties. In England, the RAF Bomber Command and U.S. 8th Air Force worked out a plan (the Combined Bomber Offensive) for the round-the-clock bombing of Germany, with 8th Air Force taking on the daylight precision bombing task and Bomber Command that of night area bombing of German cities. Lacking a strategic bomber force and increasingly dominated by Allied air power, the Germans resorted to new technology and attacked Britain with rocket-powered flying bombs (the V-1”buzzbomb”) and the more powerful V-2 rocket.

At sea, German surface forces were rendered impotent after the successful British attacks against German capital ships in the Norwegian fjords and the North Sea (April-June 1940) and the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy (May 27, 1941). However, the greatest threatcame from German submarine operations in the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. By mid-1943, German submarines threatened to isolate Britain as they had in World War I, and Allied shipping losses were surpassing the capacity of British and American shipyards to produce new vessels. However, the tide turned in the spring of 1943 as the Allies capitalized on their intelligence advantages (such as ULTRA intercepts of German communications), introduced more effective convoy protection methods (such as the escort carrier and land-based air cover), and new technology (such as better radar and sonar and improved depth charges) became available for the detection and destruction of German submarines. By the end of the war, the German submarine fleet commanded by Admiral Karl Doenitz, having lost 800 U-boats and 28,000 sailors in sinking some 2,700 Allied ships, was all but driven from the seas, and a massive stream of men and supplies flowed from America to Britain.

Japan had long sought to expand her economic hegemony in Asia in order to obtain the raw materials necessary for her industries. Accordingly, Japan had invaded China in 1937. The principal obstacle to the establishment of the Japanese “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was the United States, and in 1941 the Japanese decided to take action. The war in the Pacific began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, accompanied by coordinated attacks on U.S. forces in the Philippines; on British Commonwealth forces in Hong Kong, Malaya, and New Guinea; and on the Dutch in the East Indies. The British surrendered Singapore on February 15, 1942, and the U.S. forces in the Philippines surrendered on May 6, 1942, following a desperate defense of Bataan and the fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was severely damaged by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, but the U.S. aircraft carriers were unharmed. The U.S. Navy thus immediate took the offensive and blunted the Japanese offensive in the indecisive Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7–8, 1942) and the Battle of Midway (June 4, 1942) in which the Japanese lost four carriers and 253 aircraft, losses from which the Japanese carrier forces never recovered. A token attack on Tokyo was also carried out on April 18, 1942, by sixteen U.S. Army Air Corps B–25 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The bombers under the command of Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle did only minor damage but greatly shocked the Japanese.

Following the fall of the Philippines, the American commander in the Southwest Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, established U.S. forces in Australia and began the long island-hopping drive back to liberate the Philippines. Japanese forces invaded New Guinea and took Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, but Australian and American forces halted the Japanese advance in New Guinea and held against six months of Japanese counterattacks. On August 7, 1942, U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal and, later aided by U.S. Army forces, fought three major land battles on Guadalcanal and six major naval engagements in nearby waters before securing the island on February 9, 1943.

While MacArthur's forces fought the Japanese in New Guinea and the Solomons, U.S. air, naval, and amphibious forces under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz began a drive in the Central Pacific westward toward Formosa (Taiwan), taking Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands in 1943 and the Marshall Islands and Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas in 1944 and destroying the remaining Japanese carrier forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944). Meanwhile, MacArthur's Southwest Pacific forces returned to the Philippines, landing on Leyte (October 20, 1944) and destroying the Japanese surface fleet in the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23–26, 1944), the largest naval engagement in history. American forces subsequently landed on Luzon (January 9, 1945), and Manila was liberated on March 3.

While MacArthur's forces secured the Philippines and began preparations for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, Nimitz' forces cleared key islands necessary for forward airbases for the strategic bombing of Japan. The U.S. Army Air Forces had begun the strategic bombing of Japan from bases in China in 1944 but transferred operations to the Marianas Islands after they were secured in November 1944. To secure an additional forward base, primarily for the recovery of bombers damaged over Japan, the island of Iwo Jima was invaded on February 19, 1945, and fell to American forces after 36 days of terrible fighting . On April 1, 1945, U.S. forces invaded Okinawa, where the battle raged until June 22, again with heavy losses, including several ships to Japanese kamikaze attacks, which became common over the American fleet off Okinawa.

Elsewhere Nationalist Chinese forces continued to oppose Japanese advances in China, and British Commonwealth, Nationalist Chinese, and a small contingent of American ground troops fought in Burma to prevent a Japanese invasion of India. The Dutch and other Allied forces were overwhelmed in the East Indies in early 1942, and the retaking of the East Indies was largely delegated to British Commonwealth forces who also bore the brunt of the defense of New Guinea.

By the summer of 1945, Allied forces had retaken most of the areas earlier conquered by the Japanese and were closing in on the Japanese homeland, which had already been effectively isolated by Allied airpower. Facing the possibility of terrible casualties on both sides in a massive amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands, U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorized the use of America's newest and most powerful weapon, the atomic bomb. The U.S. B-29” Enola Gay” dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Japanese military leaders still hesitated to surrender, but the Japanese Emperor Hirohito prevailed upon them, and Japanese authorities surrendered on to the Allies unconditionally on August 14. Formal surrender ceremonies presided over by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, attended by many of the Allied commanders who had surrendered at the beginning of the war and had been prisoners of the Japanese, were held aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, thus ending the Second World War. Japan, like Germany, was subsequently occupied by Allied forces, and her leaders were put on trial for war crimes, although the Emperor was spared and left in place as a figurehead.

The commitment of resources and the destruction brought about by the Second World War far exceeded anything seen before or since as did the scope and magnitude of the war itself. The human toll of the Second World War was frightful. As many as 50 million military personnel and civilians were killed, some 14 million in the Soviet Union alone. Military casualties were heavy on both sides. The Germans lost 3.25 million combatants dead and another 7.25 million wounded; the Italians 149,496 dead and 66,716 wounded; and the Japanese 1.27 million dead and 140,000 wounded. Allied casualties were equally heavy. The Soviet Union lost at least 6.2 million killed and over 14 million wounded. Nationalist China lost 1.33 million killed and 1.76 million wounded, and Great Britain lost 357,116 killed and 369,267 wounded not counting Commonwealth forces. U.S. military casualties totaled 291,557 battle deaths, 113,842 deaths from other causes, and 670,846 wounded. The civilian death toll included over 6 million Jews and other “undesirables” murdered by the Nazis in the death camps and during the campaigns in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The outcome of the war shaped the remaining half of the twentieth century and continues to have an important impact well into the twenty-first century. Although the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan were defeated, the war left many unresolved political, social, and economic problems in its wake and brought the Western democracies into direct confrontation with their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, thereby initiating a period of nearly half a century of skirmishing and nervous watchfulness as two blocs, each armed with nuclear weapons, faced each other probing for any sign of weakness.