World War II 1939-45, worldwide conflict involving every major power in the world. The two sides were generally known as the Allies and the Axis .

Causes and Outbreak

This second global conflict resulted from the rise of totalitarian, militaristic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan, a phenomenon stemming in part from the Great Depression that swept over the world in the early 1930s and from the conditions created by the peace settlements (1919-20) following World War I .

After World War I, defeated Germany, disappointed Italy, and ambitious Japan were anxious to regain or increase their power; all three eventually adopted forms of dictatorship (see National Socialism and fascism ) that made the state supreme and called for expansion at the expense of neighboring countries. These three countries also set themselves up as champions against Communism, thus gaining at least partial tolerance of their early actions from the more conservative groups in the Western democracies. Also important was a desire for peace on the part of the democracies, which resulted in their military unpreparedness. Finally, the League of Nations , weakened from the start by the defection of the United States, was unable to promote disarmament (see Disarmament Conference ); moreover, the long economic depression sharpened national rivalries, increased fear and distrust, and made the masses susceptible to the promises of demagogues.

The failure of the League to stop the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1931 was followed by a rising crescendo of treaty violations and acts of aggression. Adolf Hitler , when he rose to power (1933) in Germany, recreated the German army and prepared it for a war of conquest; in 1936 he remilitarized the Rhineland. Benito Mussolini conquered (1935-36) Ethiopia for Italy; and from 1936 to 1939 the Spanish civil war raged, with Germany and Italy helping the fascist forces of Francisco Franco to victory. In Mar., 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and in Sept., 1938, the British and French policy of appeasement toward the Axis reached its height with the sacrifice of much of Czechoslovakia to Germany in the Munich Pact .

When Germany occupied (Mar., 1939) all of Czechoslovakia, and when Italy seized (Apr., 1939) Albania, Great Britain and France abandoned their policy of appeasement and set about creating an "antiaggression" front, which included alliances with Turkey, Greece, Romania, and Poland, and speeding rearmament. Germany and Italy signed (May, 1939) a full military alliance, and after the Soviet-German nonaggression pact (Aug., 1939) removed German fear of a possible two-front war, Germany was ready to launch an attack on Poland.

World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939, when Germany, without a declaration of war, invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, and all the members of the Commonwealth of Nations, except Ireland, rapidly followed suit. The fighting in Poland was brief. The German blitzkrieg, or lightning war, with its use of new techniques of mechanized and air warfare, crushed the Polish defenses, and the conquest was almost complete when Soviet forces entered (Sept. 17) E Poland. While this campaign ended with the partition of Poland and while the USSR defeated Finland in the Finnish-Russian War (1939-40), the British and the French spent an inactive winter behind the Maginot Line , content with blockading Germany by sea.

From Norway to Moscow

The inactive period ended with the surprise invasion (Apr. 9, 1940) of Denmark and Norway by the Germans. Denmark offered no resistance; Norway was conquered by June 9. On May 10, German forces overran Luxembourg and invaded the Netherlands and Belgium; on May 13 they outflanked the Maginot Line. Their armored columns raced to the English Channel and cut off Flanders, and Allied forces were evacuated from Dunkirk (May 26-June 4). General Weygand had replaced General Gamelin as supreme Allied commander, but was unable to stop the Allied debacle in the "battle of France." On June 22, France signed an armistice with Germany, followed by an armistice with Italy, which had entered the war on June 10. The Vichy government was set up in France under Marshal Pétain . Britain, the only remaining Allied power, resisted, under the inspiring leadership of Winston Churchill , the German attempt to bomb it into submission.

While Germany was receiving its first setback in the Battle of Britain , fought entirely in the air, the theater of war was widened by the Italian attack on the British in North Africa (see North Africa, campaigns in , by the Italian invasion (Oct. 28, 1940) of Greece, and by German submarine warfare in the Atlantic Ocean. Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria joined the Axis late in 1940, but Yugoslavia resisted German pressure, and on Apr. 6, 1941, Germany launched attacks on Yugoslavia and Greece and won rapid victories. In May, Crete fell.

Great Britain gained a new ally on June 22, 1941, when Germany (joined by Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland), invaded the Soviet Union. By Dec., 1941, German mechanized divisions had destroyed a substantial part of the Soviet army and had overrun much of European Russia. However, the harsh Russian winter halted the German sweep, and the drive on Moscow was foiled by a Soviet counteroffensive.

War Comes to the United States

Though determined to maintain its neutrality, the United States was gradually drawn closer to the war by the force of events. To save Britain from collapse the Congress voted lend-lease aid early in 1941. In Aug., 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Churchill on the high seas, and together they formulated the Atlantic Charter as a general statement of democratic aims. To establish bases to protect its shipping from attacks by German submarines, the United States occupied (Apr., 1941) Greenland and later shared in the occupation of Iceland; despite repeated warnings, the attacks continued. Relations with Germany became increasingly strained, and the aggressive acts of Japan in China, Indochina, and Thailand provoked protests from the United States.

Efforts to reach a peaceful settlement were ended on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan without warning attacked Pearl Harbor , the Philippines, and Malaya. War was declared (Dec. 8) on Japan by the United States, the Commonwealth of Nations (except Ireland), and the Netherlands. Within a few days Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

The first phase of the war in the Pacific was disastrous for the Allies. Japan swiftly conquered the Philippines (where strong resistance ended at Corregidor), Malaya, Burma (Myanmar), Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), and many Pacific islands; destroyed an Allied fleet in the Java Sea; and reached, by mid-1942, its furthest points of advance in the Aleutian Islands and New Guinea.

Australia became the chief Allied base for the countermoves against Japan, directed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur , Admiral Nimitz , and Admiral Halsey . The first Allied naval successes against Japan were scored in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, where U.S. bombers knocked out the major part of Japan's carrier fleet and forced Japan into retreat. Midway was the first decisive blow against the Axis by Allied forces. On land the Allies took the offensive in New Guinea and landed (Aug. 7, 1942) on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

The Turning Point

Despite the slightly improved position in the Pacific, the late summer of 1942 was perhaps the darkest period of the war for the Allies. In North Africa, the Axis forces under Field Marshal Rommel were sweeping into Egypt; in Russia, they had penetrated the Caucasus and launched a gigantic offensive against Stalingrad (see Volgograd ). In the Atlantic, even to the shores of the United States and in the Gulf of Mexico, German submarines were sinking Allied shipping at an unprecedented rate.

Yet the Axis war machine showed signs of wear, while the United States was merely beginning to realize its potential, and Russia had huge reserves and was receiving U.S. lend-lease aid through Iran and the port of Murmansk. The major blow, however, was leveled at the Axis by Britain, when General Montgomery routed Rommel at Alamein in North Africa (Oct., 1942). This was followed by the American invasion of Algeria (Nov. 8, 1942); the Americans and British were joined by Free French forces of General de Gaulle and by regular French forces that had passed to the Allies after the surrender of Admiral Darlan . After heavy fighting in Tunisia, North Africa was cleared of Axis forces by May 12, 1943.

Meantime, in the Soviet stand at Stalingrad and counteroffensive resulted in the surrender (Feb. 2, 1943) of the German 6th Army, followed by nearly uninterrupted Russian advances. In the Mediterranean, the Allies followed up their African victory by the conquest of Sicily (July-Aug., 1943) and the invasion of Italy, which surrendered on Sept. 8. However, the German army in Italy fought bloody rearguard actions, and Rome fell (June 4, 1944) only after the battles of Monte Cassino and Anzio . In the Atlantic, the submarine threat was virtually ended by the summer of 1944. Throughout German-occupied Europe, underground forces, largely supplied by the Allies, began to wage war against their oppressors.

The Allies, who had signed (Jan. 1, 1942) the United Nations declaration, were drawn closer together militarily by the Casablanca Conference , at which they pledged to continue the war until the unconditional surrender of the Axis, and by the Moscow Conferences , the Quebec Conference , the Cairo Conference , and the Tehran Conference . The invasion of German-held France was decided upon, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was put in charge of the operation.

Allied Victory in Europe

By the beginning of 1944 air warfare had turned overwhelmingly in favor of the Allies, who wrought unprecedented destruction on many German cities and on transport and industries throughout German-held Europe. This air offensive prepared the way for the landing (June 6, 1944) of the Allies in N France (see Normandy campaign ) and a secondary landing (Aug. 15) in S France. After heavy fighting in Normandy, Allied armored divisions raced to the Rhine, clearing most of France and Belgium of German forces by Oct., 1944. The use of V-1 and V-2 rockets by the Germans proved as futile an effort as their counteroffensive in Belgium under General von Rundstedt (see Battle of the Bulge ).

On the Eastern Front Soviet armies swept (1944) through the Baltic States, E Poland, Belorussia, and Ukraine and forced the capitulation of Romania (Aug. 23), Finland (Sept. 4), and Bulgaria (Sept. 10). Having evacuated the Balkan Peninsula, the Germans resisted in Hungary until Feb., 1945, but Germany itself was pressed. The Russians entered East Prussia and Czechoslovakia (Jan., 1945) and took E Germany to the Oder.

On Mar. 7 the Western Allies—whose chief commanders in the field were Omar N. Bradley and Montgomery—crossed the Rhine after having smashed through the strongly fortified Siegfried Line and overran W Germany. German collapse came after the meeting (Apr. 25) of the Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony, and after Hitler's death amid the ruins of Berlin, which was falling to the Russians under marshals Zhukov and Konev . The unconditional surrender of Germany was signed at Reims on May 7 and ratified at Berlin on May 8.

Allied Victory in the Pacific

After the completion of the campaigns in the Solomon Islands (late 1943) and New Guinea (1944), the Allied advance moved inexorably, in two lines that converged on Japan, through scattered island groups—the Philippines, the Mariana Islands, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima. Japan, with most of its navy sunk, staggered beneath these blows. At the Yalta Conference , the USSR secretly promised its aid against Japan, which still refused to surrender even after the Allied appeal made at the Potsdam Conference . On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States first used the atomic bomb and devastated Hiroshima ; on Aug. 9, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki . The USSR had already invaded Manchuria. On Aug. 14, Japan announced its surrender, formally signed aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2.

Aftermath and Reckoning

Although hostilities came to an end in Sept., 1945, a new world crisis caused by the postwar conflict between the USSR and the United States—the two chief powers to emerge from the war—made settlement difficult. By Mar., 1950, peace treaties had been signed with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland; in 1951, the Allies (except the USSR) signed a treaty with Japan, and, in 1955, Austria was restored to sovereignty. Germany, however, remained divided—first between the Western powers and the USSR, then (until 1990) into two German nations (see Germany ).

Despite the birth of the United Nations , the world remained politically unstable and only slowly recovered from the incalculable physical and moral devastation wrought by the largest and most costly war in history. Soldiers and civilians both had suffered in bombings that had wiped out entire cities. Modern methods of warfare—together with the attempt of Germany to exterminate entire religious and ethnic groups (particularly the Jews )—famines, and epidemics, had brought death to tens of millions and made as many more homeless. The suffering and degradation of the war's victims were of proportions that passed the understanding of those who had been spared. The conventions of warfare had been violated on a large scale (see war crimes ), and warfare itself was revolutionized by the development and use of nuclear weapons.

Political consequences included the reduction of Britain and France to powers of lesser rank, the emergence of the Common Market (see European Economic Community ; European Union ), the independence of many former colonies in Asia and Africa, and, perhaps most important, the beginning of the cold war between the Western powers and the Communist-bloc nations.

Bibliography

There is a vast amount of literature on World War II, particularly official publications and memoirs. Among notable personal accounts are Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (1948, repr. 1951); Omar H. Bradley, A Soldier's Story (1951, repr. 1970); Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vol., 1948-54); Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (2 vol., 1955-6); Field Marshal Montgomery, Memoirs (1958); Charles de Gaulle, Complete War Memoirs (1964, repr. 1967); Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (1964); Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (1970).

World War II (1 Sept. 1939–2 Sept. 1945) The world's biggest military confrontation, which started with the German invasion of Poland, and was extended into a global war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Causes

While by the late 1930s most of continental Europe was governed by authoritarian regimes, it was Hitler's Nazi regime which outstripped all others in aggressiveness, efficiency, and the resources which it could mobilize. The ideological foundation of the regime, as outlined in Hitler's book, Mein Kampf (1925, 1926), was the Social Darwinian idea that Germans were in the forefront of the superior ‘Aryan’ race. ‘Roman Peoples’ (French, Italians, Spanish, etc.) were considered inferior, while the Slavic Peoples (Poles, Russians, etc.) were penultimate in Hitler's racial ranking, destined at best to be servants to the ‘Aryans’. Most terrifyingly, he considered the Jews to be the most inferior race of all, whose presence posed ‘a problem’ as long as they existed alongside Aryans. These mad, prejudiced, anti-Semitic, and wholly unscientific ideas formed the basis of Nazi aggression and propaganda. They were the source of his hostility to the Versailles Treaty, which through the ‘war guilt clause’ had humiliated the ‘Aryan’ race, through the reparations stifled German development, and through the territorial losses deprived ‘Aryans’ of vital ‘living space’.

Once he was firmly in power, Hitler set about revising the Versailles Treaty to establish German predominance with accelerating speed. After a successful vote by the Saarland to accede to Germany (acquired through legal means on 13 January 1935), he broke the Versailles Treaty by introducing conscription on 16 March 1935. He introduced the racist Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935, and on 7 March 1936 ordered the military occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland (see also Ruhr District). On 12 March 1938, German troops marched into Austria to instigate Anschluss. On 1 October 1938, Hitler ordered the occupation of the Sudetenland. As his foreign policy became more aggressive, so did his racial policy, leading to the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938. The invasion of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia (on 15 March 1939) was the first act of aggression which clearly went beyond a revision of the Versailles Treaty. By now, other powers such as Britain and France had woken up to the possibility of a war, so that on 31 March 1939, Britain assured Poland of its help in the event of a German attack, which was later confirmed by France. Yet Hitler was unimpressed. Having taken the other territories with such ease, he attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, after gaining support from the Soviet Union in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the confirmation of the Fascist German-Italian Axis with the ‘Pact of Steel’ on 22 May 1939.

War in Europe,

1939–1941After Blitzkrieg tactics fully exploited the German technical and military dominance over the inefficient and ill-equipped Polish army, Poland was occupied by 28 September 1939 and, according to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, divided between Germany and the USSR. After a brief phoney war, neutral Denmark was attacked and occupied on 9 April 1940, while the invasion of Norway lasted from 9 April to 10 June 1940. German success in the Norway campaign, only days before the British had planned to land there, provoked a political crisis in Britain, and led to the replacement of Neville Chamberlain with the defiant Churchill.

On 10 May 1940, the German army began its western campaign. As in World War I, Germany disregarded the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg, and this time also of the Netherlands. German forces cut through to the Channel, separating the Low Countries from France, and encircling the British Expeditionary Force, as well as many French and some Belgian troops, at Dunkirk. Blitzkrieg continued to be successful, and led to the surrender of France on 22 June 1940. Northern and western France (including Paris), as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, remained occupied, while in the south of France a puppet government under Pétain was established in Vichy. This left only Britain, and Hitler was at the peak of his success.

Throughout the following year, Germany failed to establish air superiority over the British Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. As a result, in October 1941 Hitler had to postpone his plans for an invasion of Britain, Operation ‘Sea Lion’. In 1941, the war spread significantly. Italy, which had joined the war on 10 June 1940, aimed at establishing its hegemony in the Mediterranean, thus taking the war to North Africa and the Balkans. This proved to be a great liability to Hitler, who was forced to join the North African campaign as well as the costly occupation of the Balkans to prevent the defeat of the ill-prepared Italian forces.

By 22 June 1941, however, Hitler no longer allowed himself to be distracted by the ongoing campaigns in the south or against Britain. Instead, he embarked on the Barbarossa campaign, taking the war to the Soviet Union. This was the absolute conclusion to his dreams: the ultimate gain of ‘living space’ for ‘Aryans’, and the subjection of all Slav peoples as slaves. He complemented this ultimate goal with the final stage in his anti-Semitic policies, agreed at the Wannsee Conference: the extermination of Jews in concentration camps. By the end of 1941, then, German territorial control was at its peak, with the German army stretched to the limit by a 2,200 mile (3,500 km) long front in the USSR, partisan warfare in the Balkans, and an ongoing campaign in North Africa.

Despite its initial reluctance to get involved in the war, by 1941, the USA had become a major player, even before its official entry. Through the Lend-Lease Act and the Atlantic Charter, it was ideologically committed to the defeat of Hitler. The US supported this with extensive, and crucial, arms supplies to Britain and, from 1941, the USSR. The USA was thus emotionally and militarily ready when Hitler declared war on it on 11 December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor. US troops poured into the UK in preparation for a landing in France, postponed after the Dieppe Raid until 1944, and they hastened Rommel's demise in Africa through the ‘Operation Torch’ landings in Morocco.

By the summer of 1943, the war had turned decisively in the Allies' favour: Germany and Italy had been expelled from North Africa, while the Allies landed in Italy on 10 July 1943. Meanwhile, in the main battleground of the war, Zhukov's Red Army had won the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. German troops subsequently fought in rearguard actions, their position becoming more desperate as Italy changed sides after the fall of Mussolini, and joined the war on the side of the Allies (13 October 1943). After the D-Day landings had opened up a new front in the west, at a time when the Red Army had regained virtually all of the Soviet Union from German occupation, Germany collapsed. Once they had overcome the German defensive positions in Normandy on 30 July 1944, it took the US and British forces around two months to liberate France (Normandy and North-West Europe campaigns).

Apart from the German troops being demoralized, overstretched, and exhausted, they were further weakened by Hitler's personal direction of the campaigns, as his high-risk strategies and his orders never to retreat depleted army numbers more rapidly. More importantly, apart from racial objectives, which the SS as well as the army carried out with brutal efficiency, especially in Eastern Europe, there was no political plan for the government of these territories, or the role they should play in the war effort. Indeed, German atrocities dramatically increased popular hostility and resistance, and thus eased the task of the liberating armies.

From May 1944, the strategic bombing of Germany entered a new stage, destroying not only war production, but also supply routes and oil refineries. After a number of last, desperate measures such as the V1 and V2 bombs developed by Braun and the Ardennes offensive, the Allies proceeded to occupy Germany. Berlin fell on 2 May 1945, two days after Hitler had committed suicide. Montgomery accepted the capitulation of Germany's forces in the north and west on 4 May, and on 7 May, Eisenhower accepted the German surrender, signed by Jodl, in Rheims. The act was repeated on 8 May at Berlin, in the presence of representatives of the Soviet Union, and became effective on 9 May 1945.

War in Asia/Pacific

Japan's motives for entering World War II resembled very much those of Germany in World War I. A new, centralized nation had emerged whose self-confidence and self-understanding led to an aggressive foreign policy. This upset the traditional balance of power and was thus diametrically opposed to the concerns of its neighbours in particular, and to the traditional European and US interests in the area in general. Japan had benefited from the European and American preoccupation with Europe in World War I by extending its influence in China (Twenty-One Demands).

In consequence, during the 1920s, over 90 per cent of new foreign investments in China were from Japan, and 25 per cent of Japanese exports went to China. Against a background of worldwide appeasement, in the Washington Conference Japan accepted a limitation on its naval programme, for which it was richly rewarded with US trade: in the 1920s, 40 per cent of Japanese exports went there, while it imported virtually all of its oil and manufactured goods from there. The general prosperity confirmed those forces arguing for peaceful economic and political development, and inaugurated the relatively democratic Taishô period.

Japan's vulnerability as a country virtually devoid of mineral resources, and with a small agricultural sector, became clear during the Great Depression. The USA increased tariffs for Japanese imports, while a new era of Sino-American friendship led to the displacement of Japan as China's major trading partner. Since economic prosperity and foreign policy were seen as two sides of the same coin, these difficulties strengthened the military hardliners, whose prestige was enhanced when in 1931 Manchuria was occupied with very little resistance, and the puppet state of Manchukuo was established. By 1936, the Taishô system had been dismantled, and replaced by a military dictatorship. The new drive for militarism gave the economy its much needed boost, as the value of industrial production rose sixfold between 1930 and 1941. In that period, the four zaibatsu conglomerates tripled their total assets.

This kept the momentum for military expansion going, and in 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Sino-Japanese War broke out. The USA, traditionally well-disposed towards China, finally decided to limit Japanese aggression, and on 26 July 1939, Roosevelt gave six months' warning of trade sanctions. Japan responded by trying to increase its economic self-sufficiency, through further conquest. Taking advantage of the occupation of France, Japanese troops established airbases in northern Indochina as well as Thailand. It also started to import oil from the Dutch East Indies. The USA retaliated with further trade restrictions, so Japan faced the real threat of being cut off from vital oil imports.

Under such circumstances, Japan's oil reserves would have lasted for less than two years, whereupon Japan would have been forced to give in. Yet due to the strength of its military leadership, it chose confrontation, calculating that in 1941 its naval forces in the Pacific were almost at parity with those of the UK and the USA, while increasing US armaments would soon shift this balance in favour of the latter. Japan also took advantage of Hitler's recent attack on the Soviet Union, whose attention was now diverted away from Asia. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the USA as a pre-emptive strike in a war that its leaders regarded as inevitable, in order to prevent an equally unavoidable deterioration of the current balance of power away from itself.

Japan's entry into the war extended World War II to Asia and the USA, and threatened, for the only time in their history, the states of Australia and New Zealand. Through its bases in Indochina and Thailand, it embarked upon a Malayan campaign to reach the British ‘bastion’ of Singapore, which fell in February 1942. Helped by local anti-colonial movements, it occupied Burma as well as Dutch East India (Indonesia), whose oil production was crucial to the Japanese war effort. Within six months of Pearl Harbor, Japanese influence was at its peak, as it also occupied one-third of China.

However, Japan never fully established dominance against the US navy. In May 1942, Japan's efforts to occupy Australian New Guinea were foiled by the US victory at the Battle of the Coral Sea, while the Battle of the Midway Islands checked Japanese expansion eastwards, and confirmed US naval superiority. In preparation for an assault on the Philippines, and ultimately on Japan itself, during 1943, the Pacific campaign was largely focused on the painstaking conquest of the Japanese-controlled Micronesian islands. After success in the Battles of Leyte Gulf and the Philippines Sea, the US forces under MacArthur began with the reconquest of the Philippines. Meanwhile, Mountbatten Burma campaign liberated Burma and destroyed three Japanese armies. After successfully taking the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, the USA began a bombing campaign against Japanese cities, in preparation for an invasion. Encouraged by victory in Europe, and the successful development of the atomic bomb, the Allies under the leadership of the USA issued the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945, demanding unconditional Japanese surrender. As this was not forthcoming, and in order to save US lives and cut short the gruesome war, Truman authorized the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan immediately ended hostilities, effective from 15 August, and formally surrendered unconditionally on 2 September 1945. Five months after the end of hostilities in Europe, World War II had come to an end.

Consequences

The war caused destruction and murder of unparalleled proportions. Of around 110 million participating soldiers, an estimated twenty-seven million were killed. Of these, around half came from the Soviet Union, 6.4 million were Chinese, four million German, 1.2 million Japanese. Great Britain lost 326,000 soldiers, the USA 259,000, Canada 42,000, Australia 27,000, and New Zealand 11,625. Between twenty and thirty million civilians died, including around six million Jews who were murdered in the concentration camps. Through air raids, deportations, mass atrocities, etc., around seven million were killed in the Soviet Union, around six million in China, 4.2 million in Poland, and 3.8 million in Germany. In total, therefore, the Soviet Union lost twenty million people (one-sixth of its total population), China around twelve million, Poland six million (one-sixth of the total population), Germany seven million, Japan two million, Yugoslavia 1.7 million (one-sixth of the total population). France lost 600,000 people (1 in 64), the UK 400,000 (1 in 126), and the USA 300,000 (1 in 716). Relatively unburdened with civilian losses, Australia lost around 1 in 266 people, Canada 1 in 274, and New Zealand 1 in 146.

Apart from the actual horrors of the war, two geopolitical consequences stand out. In south-east Asia, World War II marked the beginning of the end of European imperialism and colonialism. The Philippines became a sovereign state in 1946. Indonesia gained its independence in 1949, after a bitter struggle with the Dutch colonial forces. Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh resisted the return of the French to Indochina, which became independent after the Indochina War in the Geneva Agreements of 1954. In China, the War turned the tide decisively towards Mao's Chinese Communist Party, against Chiang Kai-shek's Guomintang.

The second, and most fundamental, shift concerned the relative decline of European power on the world stage. The ensuing Cold War was determined by two power blocs dominated by the new superpowers, the USA and the USSR. The war had demonstrated their singular geopolitical importance, as they had contributed the lion's share to the Allied victory: the former materially, the latter in human cost.

World War II (1939–45) A war fought between the AXIS POWERS and the Allies, including Britain, the Soviet Union, and the USA. Having secretly rearmed Germany, HITLER occupied (1936) the Rhineland, in contravention of the VERSAILLES PEACE SETTLEMENT. In the same year the Italian fascist dictator, Benito MUSSOLINI, joined Hitler in a Berlin-Rome axis, and in 1937 Italy pledged support for the ANTI-COMINTERN PACT between Germany and Japan. In the 1938 ANSCHLUSS, Germany annexed Austria into the THIRD REICH, and in the same year invaded Czechoslovak SUDETENLAND. Hitler, having secured the MUNICH PACT with CHAMBERLAIN in 1938, signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with STALIN in August 1939. Germany then felt free to invade the POLISH CORRIDOR and divide Poland between itself and the Soviet Union. Britain, which until 1939 had followed a policy of APPEASEMENT, now delivered an ultimatum to Germany demanding its withdrawal from Poland. Failure to do so would result in war. As a consequence of Germany's refusal to withdraw Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September. In 1940 Chamberlain resigned and Winston CHURCHILL became head of a coalition government. The Soviet Union occupied the Baltic States and attacked Finland. Denmark, parts of Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and three-fifths of France fell to Germany in rapid succession, while the rest of France was established as a neutral state with its government at VICHY. A massive BOMBING OFFENSIVE was launched against Britain, but the planned invasion of the country was postponed indefinitely after Germany failed to gain air superiority in the Battle of BRITAIN. Pro-Nazi governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia now joined the Axis Powers, and Greece and Yugoslavia were overrun in March—April 1941. Hitler, breaking his pact with Stalin, invaded the Soviet Union, where his forces reached the outskirts of Moscow. Without declaring war, Japan attacked the US fleet at PEARL HARBOR in December 1941, provoking the USA to enter into the war on the side of Britain. In 1942 the first Allied counter-offensive began against ROMMEL in North Africa (see NORTH AFRICAN CAMPAIGNS), and in 1943 Allied troops began an invasion of the Italian mainland, resulting in the overthrow of Mussolini's government a month later. On the Eastern Front the decisive battles around KURSK and STALINGRAD broke the German hold. The Allied invasion of western Europe was launched in the NORMANDY CAMPAIGN in June 1944 and Germany surrendered, after Hitler's suicide in Berlin, in May 1945. The Pacific Campaigns had eliminated the Japanese navy, and the heavy strategic bombing of Japan by the USA, culminating in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, induced Japan's surrender a month later.

The dead in World War II have been estimated at 15 million military, of which up to 2 million were Soviet prisoners-of-war. An estimated 35 million civilians died, with some 6 million Jews perishing in Nazi CONCENTRATION CAMPS, in mass murders in Eastern Europe. Refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe numbered many millions. The long-term results of the war in Europe were the division of Germany, the restoration to the Soviet Union of lands lost between 1919 and 1921, together with the creation of communist buffer-states along the Soviet frontier. Britain had accumulated a $20 billion debt, while in the Far East nationalist resistance forces were to ensure the decolonization of south-east Asian countries. The USA and the Soviet Union emerged as the two largest global powers. Their war-time alliance collapsed within three years and each embarked on a programme of rearmament with nuclear capability, as the COLD WAR developed.