World War II

n. (Abbr. WWII)
A war fought from 1939 to 1945, in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and other allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan.

For more information on World War II, visit Britannica.com.

World War II (1939-45), usually abbreviated ‘WW II’, was the largest war in history, fought between September 1939 and September 1945. More than 40 million men and women were serving in the armed forces by 1944, and civilian and military deaths exceeded 55 million. The major battles involved millions of men and thousands of tanks and aircraft. The scale of wartime mobilization exceeded that of WW I. The second global conflict was in every sense a total war.

The war was not a single, unitary conflict. It was in reality a number of different wars that gradually coalesced as the world's major powers were drawn in between 1939 and 1941. The war that broke out in 1939 was a war for the European balance of power, like the war of 1914. The immediate cause of the conflict was the German demand for the return of Danzig and part of the Polish ‘corridor’ granted to Poland from German territory in the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Poland refused to agree to German demands, and on 1 September 1939 overwhelming German forces launched the Polish campaign and defeated her in three weeks. In March 1939 Britain and France had guaranteed Polish sovereignty, and in honour of that pledge first demanded that German forces withdraw, then on 3 September declared war on Germany.

The outbreak of a major war over Poland had much deeper causes. During the 1930s the European order established after WW I was destabilized by the emergence of two new superpowers, the USSR and Germany. Under Hitler, German chancellor from 1933, and a man committed to a war of revenge for defeat in 1918 and the acquisition of a land empire by conquest in the east, Germany embarked on a programme of remilitarization after fifteen years of enforced disarmament. At the same time the USSR under Stalin became on paper the largest military power in the world. Neither state could ultimately be contained in the post-war liberal international order dominated by Britain and France. As the relative power of the western states declined, concern for their global security became profound. Inhibited by economic weakness and popular hostility to war, neither state was able to prevent Hitler from overturning the Versailles Treaty using force or the threat of force. In March 1938 Austria was annexed to the Nazi Reich (the Anschluss) ; in October 1938 Germany took over the Czech Sudetenland, and in March 1939 Bohemia and Moravia. In April 1939 Hitler planned a short local war against Poland so that Poland's economic resources, like those of Austria and Czechoslovakia, could be exploited in Germany's bid to become a superpower.

In 1938-9 Britain and France rearmed energetically and began to face the serious prospect of war with Germany if Hitler could not be deterred. Overtures were made to the USSR to try to tilt the balance of power against Hitler. The USSR chose instead to reach a non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) with Hitler, signed on 23 August 1939. Hitler was convinced that the western states would not obstruct his war with Poland now the USSR was neutralized. German military plans were based on the prospect of a major conflict at some point in the mid-1940s. British and French war preparations were geared much more to 1939. Western strategy was predicated on a long war of attrition and closely resembled the strategy which they believed had prevailed in WW I. A large part of the French front and its strategic thinking was dominated by the static Maginot Line, behind which the armies were to wait until long-range bombing and sea blockade had so weakened Germany that she could be defeated by western armies after a build-up of two or three years.

The European war fought between 1939 and 1941 was not a war of attrition, but was marked by brief campaigns and decisive battles. German forces, absorbing lessons from WW I on mobility and striking power, used aircraft and armoured formations as a powerful spearhead to break the enemy line and make possible annihilating encirclements. Poland was defeated in three weeks, the victim not only of German military effectiveness but of the German-Soviet agreement which led to a Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and the division of the conquered state between the two on 28 September. On 10 May 1940, following the Danish and Norwegian campaigns to protect the northern flank of their operations, German armies invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France and within six weeks defeated western forces. Britain's small expeditionary force was compelled to retreat from Dunkirk back across the Channel and on 20 June France capitulated. A rump French state under Pétain was established. Britain was able to resist German air attacks in the battle of Britain in August and September 1940, and survived a German bombing offensive (the ‘Blitz’) in the winter of 1940-1, but there existed no possibility of Britain defeating Germany unaided. Nazi leaders began to construct a new European order centred on Berlin, and hoped that Britain would sue for peace now that she had no allies.

By this stage Britain was engaged in a second and quite distinct war. On 10 June 1940 Mussolini's Italy, allied with Germany in the ‘pact of steel’ signed in May 1939, declared war on Britain and France. Mussolini hoped to use western defeat to complete his aim of establishing Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean basin and North Africa which had begun with the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in 1935-6, and had continued through Italian participation in the Spanish civil war and annexation of Albania in April 1939. From 1940 to 1942 British Commonwealth forces fought a more traditional naval and imperial war against Italy. British air and naval power was used to limit Italy's superior naval forces and by 1943 had sunk two-thirds of Italian shipping. In North Africa, Commonwealth forces stationed in Egypt drove Italian armies back across Libya by February 1941; in Abyssinia and Somaliland Italian forces were forced to surrender by May 1941. Italy's complete defeat in Africa was avoided only by Hitler's decision to send German reinforcements under Rommel, and the weak logistical position of Commonwealth forces. In November 1942 at Alamein a predominantly Italian force was defeated by Montgomery and by May 1943 Italian and German forces finally surrendered in Tunisia, enabling the Allies to mount the invasion of Sicily and then Italy.

The third component of world war was the largest and most sanguinary of all. Hitler's appetite for imperial conquest had always been directed eastwards to the USSR with its vast supplies of food, materials, manpower, and territory to colonize. In December 1940 Hitler turned away from Britain and approved BARBAROSSA, the large-scale invasion of the USSR. The motives for the contest were not only imperial. Soviet communism represented a profound social and political threat and Hitler, an ardent anti-communist throughout the inter-war years, saw the final contest with Marxism as a necessity. Following the German-Soviet pact of 1939 the threat became greater. A Soviet-Finnish war in the winter of 1939-40 resulted in Soviet encroachments in the Baltic. In June 1940 Soviet troops occupied the Baltic states and seized Bessarabia from Romania. Hitler ordered the conquest of the USSR before it became too entrenched in eastern Europe.

The war in the Pacific was part of a wider imperial struggle for Asia. In east Asia Japanese nationalists and militarists, frustrated by what they saw as western domination of the world order and Japan's economic vulnerability, began a fourteen-year war in China when in 1931 Japanese forces seized the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. Full-scale war followed in the autumn of 1937 against Chinese nationalist and communist forces, and much of the northern and eastern part of China was occupied by Japan by 1941. Nazi and Japanese leaders viewed the USSR and China as states that were politically fragile and corrupt, ripe for colonization by a superior race and culture. Both wars were fought with an exceptional savagery against enemies viewed as racially inferior and contaminated by communism. Yet in both cases the sheer scale and geography of Asian conflict powerfully inhibited Nazi and Japanese ambitions.

BARBAROSSA was launched on 22 June 1941 when three million German, Finnish, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers attacked the whole length of the Soviet western frontier. Unprepared for the assault the Red Army collapsed and in three months enemy forces had reached Leningrad, were approaching Moscow, and had seized the rich industrial and grain area of the Ukraine. High losses and the onset of winter brought the German attack to a halt, but in 1942 the campaign was renewed on the southern flank with a drive to capture Soviet oil resources in the Caucasus before turning north to capture Moscow. Frantic efforts by the rump Soviet state to reform its armed forces and rebuild its shattered economy resulted in a remarkable revival in the later part of 1942. In November 1942 Germany and her allies attacking Stalingrad (now Volgograd) were cut off by a massive Soviet encirclement, URANUS. The German forces in Stalingrad surrendered in January 1943. Both sides mobilized enormous forces for a renewed summer campaign and around the city of Kursk the German ZITADELLE was defeated and the German front rolled back towards Kiev, which was retaken in November 1943. Under Deputy Supreme Commander Zhukov, the Red Army inflicted a series of crippling blows on the Germans as Soviet forces mastered the art of the modern war of manoeuvre using aircraft, radio, and armour in large numbers. BAGRATION in June 1944 was the largest military operation of the war and it ended with the decisive defeat of remaining German forces on Soviet soil.

The fourth and final component of the wider war had the effect of binding the other elements together. This was the war for the protection and assertion of US interests. Though lightly armed in the 1930s and formally committed by the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 to non-intervention in overseas conflicts, the USA was profoundly affected by the events of war in Europe and the Far East. In 1940 and 1941 America gave increasing economic assistance to Britain and China following President Roosevelt's pledge to act as the ‘arsenal of democracy’. During 1941 the US navy became closely involved in the battle of the Atlantic in efforts to break the German submarine blockade of shipping destined for Britain. In March 1941 Congress approved the Lend-Lease Bill which allowed almost unlimited material aid, including weapons, for any state fighting aggression. In the autumn of 1941 this came to include the USSR, despite strong American anti-communism. Throughout 1940 and 1941 the USA tightened an economic blockade of Japan which threatened to cut off most Japanese oil supplies.

Though not an active belligerent, American actions provoked both Japanese and German retaliation. In November 1941, following months of planning and argument in Tokyo between those who favoured finishing off China and those who argued for a Pacific naval war to secure oil supplies and drive western states from south-east Asia, the southern campaign was approved by the emperor. On 7 December 1941 Japanese naval aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, followed by the rapid conquest of western colonies in south-east Asia and the southern Pacific. On 11 December Germany declared war on the USA, fortuitously allowing Franklin D. Roosevelt to pursue the strategy preferred by the US army COS George Marshall, of giving priority to the European theatre over the Pacific. The USA embarked on a rapid and large-scale rearmament which allowed generous military supplies and reinforcements to be sent to all the theatres of war: in Asia, the Pacific, the USSR, and the Mediterranean. American material wealth made more certain that the turning point achieved at Alamein and Stalingrad would be sustained.

The USA fought a largely naval and air war between 1942 and 1945, using its very great naval power to deploy troops in major amphibious operations, first in the Solomon Islands to halt the Japanese Pacific advance, then in TORCH, a combined American-British landing in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, and subsequently in the Anglo-American landings in Sicily and southern Italy in the summer of 1943, and in northern France in June 1944. Air power was a central feature of the American war effort and was used effectively at sea to defeat the Japanese advance at the Coral Sea in May 1942 and at Midway in June that year. In the battle of the Atlantic very long-range aircraft were used to plug the Atlantic Gap where German submarines had exacted a high toll of Allied shipping during 1942. American air-force leaders were also committed to long-range bombing of the enemy economy and in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference agreed a Combined Bomber Offensive to unite the efforts of RAF Bomber Command (whose aircraft had been bombing Germany since 1940) and the US Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces. The daylight bombing campaign began in earnest in the summer of 1943 and suffered crippling losses. Once a long-distance fighter was developed bombing was able to play its part in diverting German resources to home defence and limiting the expansion of German war output.

The entry of the USA signalled a change in the political balance of the war of great significance. Roosevelt was the driving force behind closer Allied co-operation in what became known as the Grand Coalition of the USA, USSR, China, and the British Commonwealth. At conferences with British leaders in 1943 in Casablanca, Quebec, and Cairo, the American leadership insisted on defeating Germany first by a cross-Channel invasion to be mounted in 1944. Though the British PM Churchill favoured exploiting Anglo-American strength in the Mediterranean theatre, and feared the consequences of defeat in northern Europe, the American insistence on a large-scale re-entry to Europe won the day, thanks to the support it enjoyed from the USSR at the major inter-Allied conference in Tehran in November 1943. American economic might and political interests helped to bind together the different theatres of conflict, while America's worldwide system of supply and logistics provided the sinews of war necessary to complete the defeat of the aggressor states.

That defeat was assured by the summer of 1944 when OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy, allowed American, British Commonwealth, and French forces to establish a viable bridgehead in France. A major intelligence deception operation and declining air power weakened the German response and by September 1944 German forces had been driven from France. Italy had sued for an armistice in September 1943 and German resources were now stretched to defending a line in central Italy and garrisoning the Balkans. Economic collapse produced by bombing and the massive operations executed in the spring of 1945 on both fronts brought German surrender on 7 May 1945 following Hitler's suicide on 30 April. With the full weight of US and Soviet forces available for the war with Japan, defeat in the Far East was only a matter of time. A long-range bombing campaign destroyed the Japanese cities, while offensives around the perimeter of the Japanese empire tightened the noose further, and destroyed most of the Japanese navy and merchant marine. When atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and Soviet forces destroyed the Japanese army in Manchuria, Japan finally capitulated on 2 September.

Japanese and Italian defeat was always likely following American entry into the war. They were limited regional powers with a comparatively weak economic base, made more fragile by their joint vulnerability to blockade by aircraft and submarine. German defeat was less predictable. It owed a great deal to the revival of Red Army fighting power, which absorbed the bulk of Germany's war effort until American and British air and naval power could be brought to bear more effectively in the Mediterranean and the battle of the Atlantic. Germany's war effort was hampered by the impact of bombing and the permanent quantitative inferiority of the German air force over Europe following American entry. The Allies also enjoyed better intelligence (largely thanks to the breaking of the German Enigma system), larger material supplies, and societies more united in the pursuit of victory. Germany also suffered domestic constraints generated by a damaging competition for resources between the different armed services and the inefficient mobilization of resources in the early years of war. Finally a bitter hostility to German occupation absorbed a great deal of effort in maintaining German rule and extracting the economic fruits of empire, exemplified by the long guerrilla war fought against Tito's partisans in occupied Yugoslavia.

The consequences of the war were far-reaching. The technical threshold of warfare was pushed forward with extraordinary speed: radar, jet propulsion, ballistic rocketry, and nuclear weapons were all the products of WW II. The cost of waging science-based warfare was exceptional. Most combatant states devoted more than half their national output and two-thirds of their industrial workforce to war production. The victims of aggression lost a large fraction of their national wealth from occupation and combat. In Germany half the dwellings in her major cities were destroyed or damaged by bombing. The barbarous character of the wars for Asia led to an estimated 20 million Chinese dead and 26 million Soviet, of whom more than 1 million were Soviet Jews, victims of the Nazi programme of extermination launched in 1941 that claimed the lives of 6 million European Jews. Germany was divided between the conquerors and millions of Germans displaced from eastern Europe.

The international political balance was transformed by the war. The Axis states were defeated and disarmed. Communism, whose threat had prompted the Nazi-Soviet war, triumphed in most of Eurasia: in eastern Europe under Soviet control, in China, following civil war between 1945 and 1949, and in North Korea and North Vietnam. The spread of communism prompted the USA to maintain the global presence it had adopted during the war in collaboration with western European allies, and the world became divided into two heavily armed camps. Britain and France, whose defence of the old balance of power had led them to declare war on Germany in 1939, were reduced to second-rank powers, while their empires gradually disintegrated under pressure from the USA and local nationalist movements. Despite the terrible cost of the largest of all wars, the aggressor states of the 1930s, (West) Germany, Italy, and Japan were welcomed back into the western camp in the 1950s as Allies in face of the threat posed by the communist bloc.

Bibliography

• Glantz, D., and House, J., When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, Kan., 1995).
• Harrison, M., The Economics of WW II (Cambridge, 1998).
• Kimball, W., et al. (eds.), Allies at War: The Soviet, American and British Experience, 1939-1945 (New York, 1994).
• Overy, R. J., Why the Allies Won (London, 1995).
• Parker, R. A. C., Struggle for Survival (Oxford, 1989).
• Weinberg, G., A World at Arms (Cambridge, 1994)

— Richard Overy

(1939 – 45)

Causes
Military and Diplomatic Course
Domestic Course
Postwar Impact
Changing Interpretations

During the period 1941–1945, the United States waged total war against Germany and Japan, fully mobilizing both its population and its economy in a struggle to defeat the Axis enemy. The Supreme Court enlisted in this national crusade, giving constitutional sanction to the steps taken by the president and Congress to achieve military victory. Although protecting freedom of expression, it rejected all challenges to the economic controls adopted by the federal government and repeatedly subordinated other constitutional rights to the supposed demands of military necessity.

Complicating the Court's efforts to deal with the legal issues raised by total war were personal and philosophical conflicts among the justices. Chief Justice Harlan Stone (1941–1946), who seemed utterly unable to control his fractious colleagues, once compared them to a team of wild horses. They disagreed, for example, over the extent to which judges should defer to legislative determinations. All subscribed to judicial self‐restraint in cases challenging the constitutionality of economic regulatory legislation, but while Justice Felix Frankfurter thought this same approach should be followed when civil liberties were at issue, a number of his colleagues insisted that individual rights should be accorded a preferred position and that governmental actions impinging on them should be subjected to rigorous judicial scrutiny (see Preferred Freedoms Doctrine). World War II also revealed disagreements within the Stone Court over the appropriateness of subjecting actions of the commander in chief and the armed forces to judicial examination.

The Court did not have to wrestle with that issue until well after the United States formally declared war in December 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt took a number of constitutionally questionable actions between the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. These included initiating an undeclared naval war with Germany in the North Atlantic and seizing several defense plants threatened with strikes. None of these presidential actions ever came before the Supreme Court.

Economic Regulation

The Court did pass judgment on one of Roosevelt's creations, the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Originally established by Roosevelt in the exercise of his inherent emergency powers, OPA received congressional sanction in the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which empowered it to set prices. In Yakus v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court rejected the contention that this statute delegated too much legislative authority to an administrative agency. While technically the Court did not rule on the issue of whether federal war powers gave Congress itself the authority to fix prices, Stone's opinion left little doubt that the six members of the majority believed it did. In a companion case, Bowles v. Willingham (1944), the justices rejected a procedural due process challenge to a requirement that OPA rent controls had to go into effect before their validity might be litigated. The Court even upheld the right of OPA to suspend, without benefit of any judicial process, fuel‐oil deliveries to a retail dealer who sold oil in violation of the agency's coupon‐rationing system. In Steuart and Bros. v. Bowles (1944), the Court reasoned, somewhat implausibly, that no judicial process was required because OPA's suspension order did not constitute punishment but was merely a means of promoting the efficient distribution of fuel oil. So tolerant were the justices of governmental actions in the economic realm that they upheld as a valid exercise of the war power the Housing and Rent Act of 1947, which was not even enacted until after the fighting was over and the president had proclaimed hostilities to be at an end.

Freedom of Expression

The Court's willingness to uphold almost any economic regulation based on wartime necessity resembled the its posture during World War I. In the area of freedom of speech, though, the Supreme Court's performance during this war contrasted sharply with its response to World War I. The federal government had vigorously repressed dissent during the first war, prosecuting socialists, German‐Americans, and other critics of government policy under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The Court affirmed the convictions the government obtained, consistently rejecting arguments that these violated the First Amendment. American liberals came to regret the repression of those years, and, during World War II, Attorney General Francis Biddle sought to prevent another wholesale assault on freedom of expression. The liberal Stone Court shared his commitment. In Hartzel v. United States (1944), it overturned the Espionage Act conviction of a fascist sympathizer who had mailed to army officers and Selective Service registrants literature urging the occupation of the United States by foreign troops. The same day, in Baumgartner v. United States (1944), the Court unanimously set aside the denaturalization of a German‐born citizen accused of continued loyalty to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, and in Keegan v. United States (1945), it ruled that the evidence against twenty‐four members of the German‐American bund was insufficient to support convictions for conspiracy to counsel resistance to the draft. Although decided on narrow grounds and without declaring any legislation unconstitutional, these decisions afforded considerable protection to the exercise of First Amendment rights.

The Court's most important defense of freedom of expression came in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Three years earlier, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), it had upheld a Pennsylvania school board's expulsion of Jehovah's Witnesses' children for refusing to salute the flag, with Frankfurter emphasizing in his majority opinion that the flag salute served to build national unity and that national unity was the basis of national security (see Religion). Now, in the midst of a war, the Court reversed Minersville. Frankfurter dissented, arguing that the justices should not substitute their policy views for those of the legislators who had adopted the flag‐salute law. Rejecting his pleas for judicial restraint, the majority emphasized that the First Amendment permitted censorship of expression only when the expression in question presented a clear and present danger of an evil the state was empowered to prevent and that it demanded an even more urgent and immediate reason for compelling affirmation.

Although the Supreme Court rigorously protected freedom of expression, it proved to be an unreliable guardian of other constitutional values. It is true that its ruling in Cramer v. United States (1945), expansively interpreting the Constitution's requirement that treason be proved by the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, provided a remarkable degree of protection against the overuse of one of the most serious and abused charges in criminal law. But Justice William O. Douglas pointed out in dissent that this decision went so far as to make future treason prosecutions virtually impossible. Apparently concerned about that, the Court in Haupt v. United States (1947) voted 8 to 1 to sustain a conviction based on evidence that did not really satisfy the requirements of Cramer. That ruling facilitated numerous treason prosecutions of American nationals, such as “Tokyo Rose,” for allegedly assisting the Germans and Japanese during the war.

The Court's decision in Duncan v. Kahanamoku (1946) also did little to protect civil liberties. At issue was the imposition of martial law in the Territory of Hawaii. The Supreme Court ruled that establishing military tribunals to try civilians there had been illegal, but it based its decision on the failure of the armed forces to comply with the provisions of the Hawaiian Organic Act rather than on the constitutional provision governing suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Furthermore, the Court did not decide Duncan until two years after the termination of military government in Hawaii and one year after the war ended (see Military Trials and Martial Law).

It likewise extended protection to conscientious objectors only after the fighting ended. In Girouard v. United States (1946) the Court overruled three earlier decisions, holding that they were ineligible for naturalization. Earlier, however, in In re Summers (1945), the Court had held it was constitutional for Illinois to refuse to permit a conscientious objector to practice law.

Japanese‐Americans

While the fighting raged, the Court would do nothing that might interfere with the quest for victory. Convinced that protection of individual rights should not hamper the nation's ability to wage total war, the Court upheld as constitutional any governmental action that the executive branch insisted was required by military necessity. It even allowed 112,000 Japanese‐Americans living on the West Coast, 70,000 of whom were United States citizens, to be punished without indictment or trial and blatantly discriminated against on the basis of race. They were subjected to a curfew, then banned from coastal areas, and subsequently shipped to inland detention camps, known euphemistically as “relocation centers.” In Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), the Court ruled unanimously that the curfew order was constitutional. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), it upheld the validity of the exclusion order. Speaking for the Court, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that in the absence of a war, this sort of curtailment of the civil rights of a single racial group would have been unconstitutional. He observed, however, that hardships are part of war and argued that the Japanese‐Americans could be required to bear this one because national security required it. In fact, War Department officials and even government lawyers (who willfully deceived the Court about this matter) knew there was no military necessity for the exclusion and confinement of the Japanese Americans. Justice Frank Murphy, who dissented, characterized Korematsu as a plunge into the ugly abyss of racism. In Ex parte Endo (1944), the Court ruled that a Japanese‐American girl whose loyalty to the United States had been clearly established was entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, freeing her from a relocation center. In neither this case nor Korematsu, though, was the Court willing to examine the constitutionality of the relocation program itself.

Military Trials

As these Japanese‐American cases reveal, during World War II the Supreme Court succumbed to a constitutional relativism that made the security of individual rights dependent on the extent to which their exercise might interfere with the fight against Germany and Japan. The justices did not want to impede prosecution of the war, and they deferred completely to the president and the armed forces on the question of what military necessity required. They practiced such deference even when it required ignoring judicial precedent. Relying on the Fifth Amendment's requirement of a grand jury indictment and the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a trial by jury, the Court had ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that military trials were unconstitutional where the civilian courts were open and functioning. The World War II Justice Department regarded Milligan as an inconvenient relic, and in Ex parte Quirin (1942) it persuaded the Supreme Court to disregard it. The president had determined that military necessity required trying eight captured Nazi saboteurs before a secret military commission. Although Milligan required that at least some of them be granted civilian trials, the Supreme Court upheld a presidential order creating the commission that failed even to comply with applicable statutes.

At least in Quirin the Court started from the assumption that the Constitution applied, stoutly maintaining that, even in wartime, judges might examine the legality of executive actions. When the defeated Japanese commander in the Philippines sought review of his military conviction for war crimes, it refused even to consider his case. In In re Yamashita (1946), the Court took the position that an enemy general could have no constitutional rights. What that meant, of course, as the dissenters recognized, was that in dealing with some people the government was not constrained by the Constitution from which it derived its authority.

The idea that the enemy had no rights was to have enormous appeal amid the anticommunist hysteria associated with the early years of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union (see Communism and Cold War). So would the sort of constitutional relativism that authorized the sacrifice of individual rights to the perceived demands of national security. These lines of reasoning were an unfortunate legacy of a wartime Court that, though committed to the protection of civil liberties, was so determined to advance the war effort that it often subverted them.

See also Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy; Presidential Emergency Powers.

Bibliography

• Michal R. Belknap, The Supreme Court Goes to War: The Meaning and Implications of the Nazi Saboteur Case, Military Law Review 89 (1980): 59–96.
• J. Woodford Howard, Mr. Justice Murphy (1968).
• Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (1983).
• Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States 1941–1945 (1972)

— Michal R. Belknap

(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.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

War involving most of the world's nations that was launched in 1939 and lasted until 1945. It began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and ended in Europe with the German surrender on May 7, 1945 and in the Pacific with the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945. Alongside Germany fought Italy and Japan, known as the Axis powers. Fighting against them were France and Great Britain, and later on the Soviet Union and the United States, or the Allied powers. The destruction and devastation caused by World War II were mammoth in breadth. It is difficult to say how many people perished during the war. The estimates for Europe run between 30--35 million deaths, while nearly 55 million people died world over. Included in that number are six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

World War II was the result of Nazi Germany's desire to take control of Europe and establish the dominance of the "Germanic-Nordic Aryans." The Nazi ideals of racial Antisemitism and Lebensraum (the desire for more "living space" for the German people) were closely linked. Although the Nazis had no functional plans for a total annihilation of the Jewish people before 1941, the seed of the Holocaust was contained in Nazi ideology.

Soon after he rose to national power in Germany in early 1933, Adolf Hitler took steps to acquire territory and prepare the German economy and army for war. He entered into alliances with Italy and later with Japan and other countries. By the time Hitler had taken over and carved up Czechoslovakia in March 1939 (after promising the Western powers that he would refrain from doing so), most of the world realized that it was just a matter of time until the outbreak of war.

In late August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union, formerly enemies, shocked the world by signing a non-aggression agreement called the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This opened the door to the outbreak of war: on September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Great Britain and France, whose governments had promised to defend Poland, declared war on Germany. However, they never sent troops to Poland, so Germany and the Soviet Union greedily divided up the newly conquered territories of Poland as stipulated in their pact.

After the fall of Poland at the end of September, several months passed with no active fighting on the part of the Germans; this period was called the Phony War. The only real fighting to take place during the Phony War was in Finland, which was invaded by the Soviet Union on November 30, 1939. The Finns put up a staunch fight, but they were ultimately defeated in March 1940 (although Finland remained an independent state).

The Nazis waited until April 1940 to make their next major move: the invasion of several Western European countries. German troops invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9; Denmark surrendered almost immediately, while Norway resisted but could not hold out for more than a few weeks (although the port of Narvik continued to be held by the Allies until June 10). On May 10 the Germans attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France using the Blitzkrieg strategy of war. They conquered the Netherlands in five days, while Belgium surrendered on May 28. In France, the fighting raged until early June. At the Battle of Dunkirk in northern France, some 350,000 Allied troops, British, French, and Belgian, managed to evacuate as France fell to Germany. Paris fell to the Germans on June 14, and a new government under World War I hero Marshal Philippe Petain was set up to negotiate a French surrender. Italy had officially joined the war on June 10 and became a co-victor with Germany. France signed armistice agreements with Germany on June 22 and with Italy on June 24. As a result, France was divided up: its northern zone was occupied by the Germans, while most of its southern zone was put under the control of a French administration that was based in the spa town of Vichy. Another small section in the south was put under Italian control. By late June 1940 Germany and its partners dominated Europe.

During the fighting in France, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had resigned his post and Winston Churchill took his place. British troops in Oran, Algeria attacked French naval forces to make sure the area did not fall into German hands, while other French naval forces outside of Europe were put under British control.

In the meantime, the Soviet Union entered the Baltic states---Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia---and over the course of two months stripped them of their independence. On June 28 the Soviets occupied Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. In August 1940 Germany mediated between Hungary and Romania. As a result, Germany gave northern Transylvania to Hungary, winning Hungary's loyalty, and the royal Romanian government was dissolved and an authoritarian regime under Ion Antonescu took its place. Both Romania and Hungary were now firmly under German influence. Not to be outdone, Italy attacked Greece from Albania in October 1940, but did not make many breakthroughs.

Originally, the Germans planned to take out their major opponent---Britain---and end the war in the early fall of 1940. However, the date was pushed off again and again due to growing technical difficulties. The German Air Force could not make any headway against the British Royal Air Force, so it changed tactics: bombing British cities to break the citizens' morale in assaults that came to be known as the "Blitz." However, that strategy did not work either, and by the spring of 1941 it looked like neither the Germans nor the British could beat the other.

In the meantime, in September 1940 Italian troops invaded Egypt, which was under British control. The Italians failed to conquer the country and were even put under attack by the British. At that point, Germany sent troops to help its ally in North Africa, where the war was to continue in a seesaw fashion for almost two years. Until early 1941 the British had the upper hand after gaining control of Cyrenaica in Libya. This changed when Germany's Gen. Erwin Rommel and his forces entered the scene. The British were pushed back to Tobruk, but then managed to retake Cyrenaica. Meanwhile, in Iraq, British forces clashed with the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. The British successfully took control of Baghdad on May 30, 1941; by doing so, they also stopped the anti-Jewish pogrom that had broken out there.

Meanwhile, back in Europe: during the second half of 1940 Hitler had begun planning an attack on his ally, the Soviet Union. This was part of his ideological desire to obtain living space for Germany by conquering the Soviet Union. Preparations for this attack, code-named "Operation Barbarossa," went on throughout the winter of 1940--1941 and the spring of 1941. An order issued in March 1941, known as the Kommissarbefehl, called for the murder of all political officers of the Soviet armed forces, as well as all Communists. Since Hitler equated Jews with Communists, some historians see the Kommissarbefehl as an order by Hitler to murder the Jews.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia officially joined the Axis alliance in early 1941, but the Yugoslav government was overthrown by an anti-Nazi military group under Gen. Dusan Simovic. As a result, in April 1941 Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece---Yugoslavia to topple the anti-German government, and Greece to bail out the Italian forces who were floundering there in their fight against the British. Once again using the Blitzkrieg strategy, Germany defeated Yugoslavia and Greece easily.

Next, after postponing the attack several times due to the situation in the Balkans, Germany launched its surprise invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The German forces consisted of some three million men, including Finnish, Romanian, and Hungarian units. Despite brave resistance in some areas, millions of Soviet soldiers were soon killed. German forces overran the Baltic states in July, with the local populations actively helping the Germans (although the Soviets managed to stop the Germans before they reached Leningrad). In the south, the Germans moved in on the Ukraine in September, conquering Kiev and then Odessa and Kharkov in mid and late October. They invaded and conquered the Crimea in November, and laid siege to the Crimean city of Sevastopol on November 15. The Germans' main attack in July 1941 brought them to Minsk and then Smolensk. Both in the Ukraine and in the Briansk-Viazma region, huge Soviet armies were defeated and most of their soldiers were taken prisoner. In November the Germans continued their advance on Moscow, and by December 1941 they had nearly reached the Russian capital. However, at that point there was a turnaround: the Soviets launched a counteroffensive on December 6 and pushed the Germans back, away from Moscow. It is possible that this was the war's turning point. The Germans were no longer as confident, and they were forced to fight throughout the winter in the bitter Russian cold.

In the spring of 1942 the Germans managed to rekindle their offensive. Conquering the Don River basin, they reached the outskirts of Stalingrad---a strategically crucial city from their standpoint---on August 20, 1942. In September they broke out of the Crimean peninsula and soon occupied the Caucasian oil fields. By mid-September they had penetrated Stalingrad itself; the Soviet troops there held on desperately. On November 19, the Soviets renewed their counteroffensive, and closed in on 22 German divisions that included 300,000 soldiers. In January 1943 the Soviet offensive in Leningrad relieved the 17-month German siege of the city. On February 2, 1943 the German Sixth Army, fighting at Stalingrad, surrendered to the Soviets. Some 91,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner.

In spite of mutual distrust, the British, Americans, and the Soviets agreed to work together against the German threat. At first the Americans only meant this in terms of aiding the British and Soviets with war materials. In March 1941 the US Congress had approved the Lend-Lease Act, and the Soviet Union became the recipient of massive American assistance. However, on December 7, 1941 the Japanese (German allies) attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, causing great loss of life and equipment. The United States declared war on Japan, and a few days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Now that the war had expanded to the Far East, it had truly become a "world war." Like the Germans in Europe, the Japanese wanted to become the dominant power in East Asia, and the United States, greatly weakened by Pearl Harbor, was unable to stop them. The US was powerless to defend Guam and the Wake Islands, which fell to the Japanese on December 13 and 20, respectively. The Japanese then invaded the Philippines in late December and vanquished them in January (although US troops held out on the Philippines' Bataan peninsula and Corregidor until May 1942).

Also in December 1941, the British surrendered to the Japanese in Hong Kong, and in January the Japanese conquered the Netherlands East Indies. Next, Malaya was overrun, Singapore fell on February 15, and Thailand allied itself with Japan. In March the Japanese conquered Burma and threatened India, but were halted by the British. In addition, the Allies (mainly Australians and New Zealanders) stopped the Japanese advance in New Guinea, and in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, some 100,000 tons of Japanese materials were sunk.

The turning point on the Pacific front came in June 1942 when the US defeated the Japanese in the battle for the Island of Midway. American troops then landed on the Solomon Islands in August. In November a Japanese fleet was defeated there, while the Battle of Guadalcanal cost the lives of large numbers of both Americans and Japanese. In 1943 American and British Commonwealth troops slowly retook control of the Pacific Islands and invaded Burma. Allied soldiers taken as Prisoners of War and jailed Allied civilians were subjected to extreme brutality at the hands of the Japanese.

Back in North Africa the seesaw battles continued. The British lost ground in Cyrenaica in January 1942, and in June Tobruk was taken by the Germans under Rommel. However, in July German tanks were stopped at El Alamein. The British then launched their major offensive on October 23, 1942. Less than two weeks later Rommel's troops were in full retreat; they had fallen back to Tunisia by January 1943. On November 8, 1942 American and British troops invaded North Africa. Algiers was occupied by a local anti-Nazi militia composed mainly of Jews. The pro-German French administration in North Africa arranged to surrender to the Allies, and was given the right to continue its rule (and kept the Vichy government's anti-Jewish laws intact for another few months). In Tunis, the Axis forces surrendered on May 12, 1943 after a bitter fight. Thus, the first region to be cleared of Axis troops was North Africa.

In July the Allied forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower invaded Sicily in southern Italy. This resulted in the resignation and imprisonment on July 25 of Benito Mussolini and the establishment of a military government, which surrendered to the Allies. However, the Germans freed Mussolini and set up a Fascist puppet government in northern Italy. While the Allies liberated Rome on June 4, 1944 and Florence on August 12, the Germans held onto northern Italy until April 1945.

During 1943 the Soviets liberated most of the Ukraine, and in the spring of 1944 they liberated much of Poland. In their advance southward they caused the Romanian king to change his colors and overthrow the pro-Nazi dictator, Antonescu. Soon, Romania surrendered to the Allies and joined the fight against Germany on August 23. On September 5 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria; Bulgaria soon surrendered and the Soviets occupied the capital, Sofia, on September 16. In March 1944 Hungary, a German ally, tried to make peace with the Allies. In response, Germany invaded Hungary and appointed a pro-German government that collaborated in the Deportation of most of the country's Jews. In October, Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy again tried to arrange a peace agreement with the Allies; Germany responded by toppling Horthy's government and setting up an antisemitic, fascist, collaborative government under the Arrow Cross Party. Now, most of the remnant of the Hungarian Jewish community was destroyed.

Meanwhile, the British and American air forces worked together to strategically bomb the German enemy: the Americans concentrated on daytime bombings of military and industrial targets, while the British devastated German cities at night. In 1944 the Allied air forces, now operating from Italy, achieved complete supremacy in the air. By June, the Allies were ready for their major offensive. On June 6, 1944 (known as D-Day), some 250,000 Allied soldiers landed on the shores of Normandy in northwestern France. By July 31 American forces broke through the German lines of defense, and by the end of August they had liberated France. By the fall of 1944 the Allies were poised to defeat Germany. However, German resistance continued for eight more months: the Allies were held back in the southern part of the Netherlands in September, and were taken by total surprise in December when German forces tried to break through American lines in Belgium. The Allies finally managed to push the Germans back in this battle that came to be known as the "Battle of the Bulge."

On January 12, 1945 the Soviets began a powerful offensive, taking Warsaw just five days later (the Poles had tried to defend Warsaw in August of the previous year, but the Soviets refused to help them, so Warsaw was ravaged and many Poles were killed). Budapest, Hungary was also liberated in January and February. In March 1945 the final Allied offensive was launched both in the east and in the west. Allied troops made their way through Germany (discovering the Nazi Concentration Camps in the process), and in April, met at the Elbe River. The Germans were surrounded, and on April 30 Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker (Mussolini had been shot by anti-fascist Partisans on April 28). Soviet troops liberated Berlin in early May, and on May 7 the Germans surrendered. May 8 was proclaimed to be Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day).

The war in the Pacific lasted another three months. American Gen. Douglas MacArthur had advanced from one chain of Pacific islands to another, while in October 1944 American forces had begun liberating the Philippines, and at the end of that month they sank a large part of the Japanese fleet. Air raids on Japan itself began in November, while British forces began to retake Burma. After bitter battles that cost the lives of many Americans (especially on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa), the US government decided to end the war, once and for all, by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Over 80,000 people were killed on the spot, and many more died later from the aftereffects of the atomic radiation. Three days later another equally devastating bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 8 the Soviet Union joined the war against Japan in order to gain control of certain territories they were fighting over. Japan finally surrendered on August 11, and Victory in Japan (V-J Day) was celebrated on August 15, 1945. With the formal signing of the Japanese surrender on September2, 1945, the war had finally come to an end.

In the aftermath of World War I, the United States attempted to disengage itself from European affairs. The U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations, and in the 1920s American involvement in European diplomatic life was limited to economic affairs. Moreover, the United States dramatically reduced the size of its military in the postwar years, a measure widely supported by a public increasingly opposed to war. Events in Europe and Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s, however, made it impossible for the United States to maintain a position of neutrality in global affairs.

Rise of the Nazi Party and German Aggression

After its defeat and disarmament in World War I, Germany fell into a deep economic decline that ultimately led to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party during the 1930s. The Nazis rearmed the nation, reentered the Rhineland (1936), forced a union with Austria (1938), seized Czechoslovakia under false promises (1938), made a nonaggression pact with Russia to protect its eastern frontier (1939), and then overran Poland (September 1939), bringing France and Great Britain into the war as a consequence of their pledge to maintain Polish independence. In May 1940 a power thrust swept German troops forward through France, drove British forces back across the English Channel, and compelled France to surrender. An attack on England, aimed to deny use of Britain as a springboard for reconquest of the Continent, failed in the air and did not materialize on land. Open breach of the nonaggression treaty was followed by a German invasion of Russia in June 1941.

Prior to America's formal entry into war, the United States assisted France and Britain by shipping tanks and weapons. The United States turned over naval destroyers to Britain to hold down the submarine menace and itself patrolled large areas of the Atlantic Ocean against the German U-boats, with which U.S. ships were involved in prewar shooting incidents. The United States also took over rights and responsibilities at defense bases on British possessions bordering the Atlantic.

In 1940 the U.S. course was mapped by rapidly passing events. The German invasions of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France triggered American actions. In his Chicago speech of 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised to quarantine aggressors. In his Charlottesville, Virginia, speech on 10 June 1940, he went further. He not only indicted Germany's new partner, Italy, but also issued a public promise of help to "the opponents of force." In June also he assured himself of bipartisan political support by appointing the Republicans Frank Knox and Henry L. Stimson to head the Navy and War Departments, respectively.

The Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 instituted peacetime conscription for the first time in U.S. history, registering sixteen million men in a month. In August 1941 Roosevelt and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, met at Argentia, Newfoundland, to formulate war aims; with their staffs they delved into overall strategy and war planning. For the first time in U.S. history the country was militarily allied before a formal declaration of war. At this meeting the Atlantic Charter was established. In September 1941 the draft act was extended beyond its previous limit of one year—even though by the slim margin of a single vote in Congress—and the full training, reorganization, and augmentation of U.S. forces began.

Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

During the Nazi buildup in Germany, Japan had been fortifying Pacific islands in secret violation of treaties, encroaching on China in Manchuria and Tientsin in 1931 and in Shanghai in 1932, starting open war at Peking in 1937, and thereafter, as Germany's ally, planning further conquests.

The United States opposed this Japanese expansion diplomatically by every means short of war, and military staff planning began as early as 1938 for the possibility of a two-ocean war. American policymakers determined that the nation's security depended on the survival of the British Commonwealth in Europe and the establishment in the Pacific of a U.S. Navy defense line that must run from Alaska through Hawaii to Panama.

On 7 December 1941, a sneak attack by Japanese carrier-based planes surprised and severely crippled the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, dooming American forces in the Philippines. Japan was now free to expand into Southeast Asia and the East Indies, toward Australia. On 8 December, Congress declared war on Japan, and on 11 December it responded to war declarations from Italy and Germany—allied to Japan by treaties—by similar declarations put through in a single day of legislative action in committees and on the floor of both houses of Congress.

Before the month of December was out, Churchill was again in Washington, bringing with him military and naval experts for what has been called the Arcadia conference. Within weeks Washington had created the Combined Chiefs of Staff, an international military, naval, and air body that was used throughout the war to settle strategy, establish unified command in the separate theaters of war, and issue strategic instructions to theater commanders.

Organization, Preparation, and Strategy

Almost immediately after the declaration of war, under the first War Powers Act, the United States began a reorganization and expansion of the army and the navy, including the National Guard already in federal service. Increasing numbers of reservists were called to active duty, not as units but as individuals, to fill gaps in existing units, to staff the training centers, and to serve as officers in new units being formed. Additional divisions were created and put into training, bearing the numbers of World War I divisions in most cases, but with scarcely any relation to them in locality or in personnel of previously existing reserve divisions. New activities were created for psychological warfare and for civil affairs and military government in territories to be liberated or captured. The air force also underwent a great expansion, in personnel, in units, and in planes. Notable was the creation and shipment to England of high-level, precision daylight bombing units, which worked with the British to rain tons of bombs on enemy centers. Later they assisted the invasions and major attacks. Disrupting German factories and rail lines and weakening the entire German economy, the bombing campaign was extremely important in Hitler's downfall. The armed forces of the United States, in general, expanded their strength and put to use a host of details in tactics and in equipment that had been merely experimental in the preceding years. From new planes to new rifles, from motorization to emergency rations, from field radio telephones to long-range radar, progress was widespread.

In addition to new concepts of operation and new and improved mechanized matériel, there was an all-out popular war effort, a greater national unity, a greater systematization of production, and, especially, a more intense emphasis on technology, far surpassing the efforts of World War I. The U.S. effort would truly be, as Churchill predicted after the fall of France in 1940, "the new world with all its power and might" stepping forth to "the rescue and liberation of the old."

In an unprecedented burst of wartime legislative activity, Congress passed the Emergency Price Control Act and established the War Production Board, the National War Labor Board, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Economic Stabilization. Critical items such as food, coffee, sugar, meat, butter, and canned goods were rationed for civilians, as were heating fuels and gasoline. Rent control was established. Two-thirds of the planes of civilian airlines were taken over by the air force. Travel was subject to priorities for war purposes. There was also voluntary censorship of newspapers, under general guidance from Washington.

There was special development and production of escort vessels for the navy and of landing craft—small and large—for beach invasions. There was a program of plane construction for the air force on a huge scale and programs for the development of high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber. Local draft boards had been given great leeway in drawing up their own standards of exemption and deferment from service and at first had favored agriculture over industry; soon controls were established according to national needs. By 1945 the United States had engaged more than sixteen million men under arms and improved its economy.

The grand strategy, from the beginning, was to defeat Germany while containing Japan, a strategy maintained and followed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The strategy was closely coordinated by Roosevelt and Churchill—except on one occasion when, in the early summer of 1942, Admiral Ernest J. King (chief of naval operations) and General George C. Marshall (army chief of staff) responded to the news that there would be no attempt to create a beachhead in Europe that year by suggesting a shift of U.S. power to the Pacific. Roosevelt promptly overruled them.

Campaign in the Pacific

Almost immediately after the strike at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and overran American garrisons on Guam and Wake Island in late December. They soon captured Manila and then conquered the U.S. forces on the Bataan peninsula by April 1942, along with the last U.S. stronghold on Corregidor on 6 May. Japan then feinted into the North Pacific, easily seizing Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, which it held until March 1943.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur had been pulled out of the Philippines before the fall of Corregidor and sent to Australia to assume responsibility for protecting that continent against Japanese invasion, increasingly imminent since Singapore and Java had been taken. With great skill, MacArthur used American and Australian forces to check Japanese inroads in New Guinea at Port Moresby. He also used land and sea forces to push back the Japanese and take the villages of Buna and Sanananda, although not until January 1943. To block a hostile thrust against MacArthur's communications through New Zealand, marine and infantry divisions landed in the Solomon Islands, where they took Guadalcanal by February 1943 after bitter, touch-and-go land, sea, and air fighting.

Almost concurrently, the navy, with marine and army troops, was attacking selected Japanese bases in the Pacific, moving steadily westward and successfully hitting the Marshall Islands at Eniwetok and Kwajalein, the Gilberts at Makin and Tarawa, and—turning north—the Marianas at Guam and Saipan in June and July 1944. To assist the army's move on the Philippines, the navy and the marines also struck westward at the Palau Islands in September 1944 and had them in hand within a month. American control of the approaches to the Philippines was now assured. Two years earlier, in the Coral Sea and also in the open spaces near Midway, in May and June 1942, respectively, the U.S. Navy had severely crippled the Japanese fleet. MacArthur's forces returned in October 1944 to the Philippines on the island of Leyte. Their initial success was endangered by a final, major Japanese naval effort near Leyte, which was countered by a U.S. naval thrust that wiped much of the Japanese fleet. U.S. forces seized Manila and Corregidor in February 1945, thus bringing to a successful conclusion the Bataan-Corregidor Campaign.

American land and sea forces were now in position to drive north directly toward Japan itself. Marines had landed on Iwo Jima on 19 February and invaded Okinawa on 1 April, both within good flying distance of the main enemy islands. The Japanese navy and air force were so depleted that in July 1945 the U.S. fleet was steaming off the coast of Japan and bombarding almost with impunity. Between 10 July and 15 August 1945, forces under Adm. William F. Halsey destroyed or damaged 2,084 enemy planes, sank or damaged 148 Japanese combat ships, and sank or damaged 1,598 merchant vessels, in addition to administering heavy blows at industrial targets and war industries.

Until the island hopping brought swift successes in 1944, it had been expected that the United States would need the China mainland as a base for an attack on Japan. The sea and land successes in the central and western Pacific, however, allowed the United States, by the spring of 1945, to prepare for an attack on Japan without using

China as a base. This situation was the result of three major factors: (1) the new naval technique of employing the fleet as a set of floating air bases, as well as for holding the sea lanes open; (2) the augmentation and improvement of U.S. submarine service to a point where they were fatal to Japanese shipping, sinking more than two hundred enemy combat vessels and more than eleven hundred merchant ships, thus seriously disrupting the desperately needed supply of Japanese troops on the many islands; and (3) MacArthur's leapfrogging tactics, letting many advanced Japanese bases simply die on the vine. Not to be overlooked was MacArthur's personal energy and persuasive skill.

Campaigns in Africa and Italy

Pressures, notably from Russian leaders, began building early in the war for an invasion of the European mainland on a second front. Because of insufficient buildup in England for a major attack across the English Channel in 1942—even for a small preliminary beachhead—U.S. troops were moved, some from Britain with the British and some directly from the United States, to invade northwest Africa from Casablanca to Oran and Algiers in November 1942. After the long coastal strip had been seized and the temporarily resisting French brought to the side of the Allies, British and American forces under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed east. The Germans were reinforced and concentrated. Sharp and costly fighting by air, army, and armor attacks and counterattacks, notably in February 1943 at the Kasserine Pass, ended with the Allied conquest of Tunisia and a great German surrender at Tunis, Bizerte, and Cape Bon. Meanwhile, at the Casablanca Conference in late January, Roosevelt and Churchill called for the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers. It would be a war to the finish, not a negotiated, temporary peace.

The next step was an invasion of Sicily, using large-scale parachute drops and perfected beach-landing skills, as a step toward eliminating Italy from the war. In September, Italy proper was invaded, the British crossing the Strait of Messina and the Americans landing at Salerno near Naples. Five days later, Italy surrendered, but the Germans occupied Rome and took control of the Italian government. After a long check midway up the "boot" of Italy on a line through Cassino, a dangerous landing was made at Anzio. Fierce German counterattacks there were stopped, and a following breakthrough carried U.S. forces past Rome, which fell on 4 June 1944. In July the Allied forces pushed through to the line of Florence and the

Arno River, the British on the east and the Americans on the west. Thereafter, although some British and American advances were made and a final offensive in April 1945 sent American troops to the Po Valley, Italy ceased to be the scene of major strategic efforts; the theater was drained to support the Normandy invasion, in southern France.

Invasion At Normandy and the Liberation of France

For the principal invasion of France, an inter-Allied planning staff had been created in March 1943 in London. In May the first tentative attack date was set, for early May of the following year, in what was called Operation Over-lord. The buildup of units and supplies proceeded steadily for nearly a year, aided by improved successes against German submarines targeting seagoing convoys. Finally, after several weeks of delays, on 6 June 1944—popularly known as D Day—the greatest amphibious invasion in history was launched across the English Channel, involving more than 5,300 ships and landing craft. It was a huge, carefully and intricately coordinated land, sea, and air action, with a precisely scheduled flow of reinforcements and supplies. The Germans anticipated that the Allies would land at Calais, so the landings along the Normandy coast caught the Germans completely by surprise.

The battle on the Normandy beaches on 6 June was vicious, particularly at Omaha Beach, where U.S. troops encountered stubborn German resistance. By nightfall the Allies had established a beachhead on the French coast, and within weeks they drove from the Normandy coast deep into the French countryside. Thick hedgerows provided the Germans with excellent defensive terrain, but relentless Allied aerial bombardment and a flank attack by U.S. infantry and tanks, under the command of Gen. George Patton, split the German lines.

The Germans reacted to this penetration by finally drawing their reserve Fifteenth Army out of the Calais area, where it had been held by an Allied ruse and the threat of a second beach landing there. They struck directly west across the American front to try to cut off the leading U.S. troops who had already begun entering Brittany. This German effort was blocked by General Omar Bradley's forces. Relentless Allied attacks shattered German resistance in northern France and on 25 August Paris fell to American divisions with scarcely a battle.

The Germans retreated rapidly and skillfully for the distant frontier and their defense lines, except where they at points resisted the British in order to try and hold the seaports along the northern coast. While these events were taking place, a landing had been made in southern France on 15 August 1944, by a Franco-American force under U.S. command. It swept from the Riviera up the Rhone Valley and joined U.S. forces that had come east across northern France from Normandy. By September Brest fell into U.S. hands, and a German army in southwest France had surrendered, completely cut off. France was almost completely liberated from German occupation.

Battle of the Bulge and German Surrender

In the fall of 1944, Allied forces began the invasion of Germany, which many observers believed tottered on the brink of collapse. On 16 December, however, the Germans launched a sweeping counterattack that caught American and British forces completely by surprise. In several days of intense fighting, the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge hung in the balance. On Christmas Eve, however, an American counterattack sent German forces reeling. American air bombardments turned the German retreat into a crushing rout. The Battle of the Bulge was the Germans' final major effort of the war. They had used up their last major resources and had failed.

Through large-scale production and mass transportation, the U.S. air forces in Europe had been built to high strength so that they could take severe losses and still defeat the enemy. From bases in Britain and from bases successively in North Africa and Italy, American bombers had struck at the heart of the German economy. Through large-scale air raids, like those on Ploesti, Romania, a decisive proportion of German oil refinery production was disabled. German planes and tanks faced severe fuel shortages. German fighter planes, beaten back by the British in 1940, were later cut down by the Americans' heavily armed bombers and their long-range fighter escorts. Except for a short, sharp, and costly new campaign in the final month of 1944, German planes had ceased to be a serious threat. At the same time, to aid the ground troops, the U.S. fighter-bombers were taking to the air under perilous conditions over the Ardennes. German flying bombs (V-1s) and rocket bombs (V-2s) had continued to blast Britain until their installations were overrun in late March 1945, but they had no effect on ground operations or on air superiority as a whole.

In February 1945 the American armies struck out into the Palatinate and swept the German forces across the Rhine. The enemy forces destroyed bridges as they crossed—all but one. On 7 March an advanced armored unit of the U.S. First Army approached the great railway bridge at Remagen, downstream from Koblenz, found it intact, dashed over it, tore the fuses from demolition charges, and drove local Germans back. Troops were hustled over the bridge for several days before it collapsed from damage, but by then pontoon bridges were in place.

Avoiding the heavily wooded Ruhr region in the center, the previously planned northern crossing of the Rhine was effected with navy, air, and parachute help on 2 March 1945; all arms drove directly eastward into Germany while the First and Third Armies drove eastward below the Ruhr, the First Army soon swinging north through Giessen and Marburg to make contact at Paderborn and Lippstadt with the northern force. More than 300,000 Germans were thus enclosed in the Ruhr pocket.

Germany's military strength had now all but collapsed. The British on the American left raced toward Hamburg and the Baltic. The U.S. First Army pressed through to Leipzig and met the Russians on 25 April 1945 at Torgau on the Elbe River, which had been established at the Yalta Conference as part of the posthostilities boundary with Russia. The U.S. Third Army dashed toward

Bavaria to prevent possible German retreat to a last stand in the south. The southernmost flank of the American forces swung southward toward Austria at Linz and toward Italy at the Brenner Pass. The U.S. Seventh Army, on 4 May, met the Fifth Army at Brenner Pass, coming from Italy, where German resistance had likewise collapsed. Germany asked for peace and signed its unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters at Reims on 7 May 1945.

Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japanese Surrender

Progress in the Pacific theater by this time had been substantial. U.S. ships and planes dominated sea and air close to Japan. Troops were soon to be redeployed from the European theater. Protracted cleanup operations against now-isolated Japanese island garrisons were coming to a close. American planes were bombing Tokyo regularly. A single raid on that city on 9 March 1945 had devastated sixteen square miles, killed eighty thousand persons, and left 1.5 million people homeless, but the Japanese were still unwilling to surrender. Approved by Roosevelt, scientists working under military direction had devised a devastating bomb based on atomic fission. A demand was made on Japan on 26 July for surrender, threatening the consecutive destruction of eleven Japanese cities if it did not. The Japanese rulers scorned the threats. President Harry S. Truman gave his consent for the use of the atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, killing 75,000. There were more warnings, but still no surrender. On 9 August, Nagasaki was bombed. Two square miles were devastated, and 39,000 people were killed. Five days later, on 14 August, the Japanese agreed to surrender. The official instrument of surrender was signed on 2 September 1945, on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

The defeat of the Axis powers did not resolve all of the geopolitical issues arising from World War II. The spirit of amity among the Allied powers collapsed shortly after the war, as the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly assumed a position of mutual hostility and distrust. Germany was divided in half by the Allied victors, with West Germany aligned with the United States and East Germany with the Soviet Union. The United States also established security pacts with Japan and Italy, bringing them within the American defense shield against the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, during the Cold War the United States found itself allied with the former Axis nations and found itself at odds with its former ally, the USSR. Not until 1990, when the Cold War finally came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was Germany reunited as one nation.

Bibliography

Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Feis, Herbert. The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War between the United States and Japan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950.

Linderman, Gerald F. The World Within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Spector, Ronald H. Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

World War II began in the Far East where Japan, having invaded China in 1931, became involved in full-scale hostilities in 1937. In Europe the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, brought Britain and France into the war two days later. Italy declared war on Britain on June 10, 1940, shortly before the French surrender on June 21. Having defeated France but not Britain, Germany attacked the Soviet Union a year later on June 22, 1941. Then the Japanese attacked United States naval forces in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and British colonies in Hong Kong and Malaya the following day. The subsequent German and Italian declarations of war on the United States completed the lineup: Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis powers of the Anti-Comintern Treaty of 1936, against the Allies: the United States of America, the British Empire and Dominions, and the Soviet Union. Only the Soviet Union and Japan remained at peace with each other until the Soviet declaration of war on August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

The pattern of the war resembled a tidal flow. Until the end of 1942 the armies and navies of the Axis continually extended their power through Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Toward the end of 1942 the tide turned. The Allies won decisive victories in each theater: the Americans over the Japanese fleet at Midway and over the Japanese army on the island of Guadalcanal; the British over the German army in North Africa at el Alamein; and the Soviet army over the German army at Stalingrad. From 1943 onward the tide reversed, and the powers of the Axis shrank continually. Italy surrendered to an Anglo-American invasion on September 3, 1943; Germany to the Anglo-American forces on May 7, 1945, and to the Red Army the following day; and Japan to the Americans on September 7, 1945. The war was over.

Events Leading to the War

Why did the Soviet Union become entangled in this war? German preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1940, following the French surrender, for three reasons. First, the German leader Adolf Hitler believed that the presence of the Red Army to his rear was the main reason that Britain, isolated since the fall of France, had not come to terms. He expected that a knockout blow in the east would finish the war in the west. Second, if the war in the west continued, Hitler believed that Britain would use its naval superiority to blockade Germany; he planned to ensure Germany's food and oil supplies by means of overland expansion to the east. Third, Hitler had become entangled in the west only because of his aggression against Poland, but Poland was also a means to an end: a gateway to Ukraine and Russia where he sought Germany's "living space." Thus an immediate attack on the Soviet Union promised to over-come all the obstacles barring his way in foreign affairs.

At the same time the Soviet Union was not a passive victim of the war. Soviet preparations for a coming war began in the 1920s. They were stepped up following the war scare of 1927, which strengthened Josef Stalin's determination to accelerate military and industrial modernization. At this stage Soviet leaders understood that an immediate war was unlikely. They did not fear Germany - which was still a democracy and a relatively friendly power - but Poland, Finland, France, or Japan. They feared for the relatively distant future, and this is one reason why Soviet rearmament, although determined, was slow at first; they understood that the first task was to build a Soviet industrial base.

In the early 1930s Stalin became sharply aware of new real threats from Japan under military rule in the Far East and from Germany under the Nazis in the west. In the years that followed he gave growing economic priority to the needs of external security. However, for much of the decade Stalin was much more concerned with domestic threats; he believed his external opponents to be working against him by plotting secretly with his internal enemies rather than openly by conventional military and diplomatic means. In 1937 - 1938 he directed a savage purge of the Red Army general staff and officer corps that gravely weakened the armed forces in which he was simultaneously investing billions of rubles. The same purges damaged his own credibility on the world stage; as a result those countries with which he shared common interests became less likely to see him as a worthy ally, and his external enemies became more likely to attack him. Stalin therefore approached World War II with several deadly enemies, few friends in foreign capitals, and an army that was growing and well equipped but morally broken.

Conflict between the Soviet Union and Japan was different from conflict with Germany. Japan first: From their base in north China in May 1939, the Japanese armed forces began a series of probing border attacks on the Soviet Union that culminated in August with fierce fighting and a decisive victory for the Red Army at Khalkin-Gol (Nomonhan). After that, deterred from encroaching further on Soviet territory, the Japanese shifted their attention to the softer targets represented by British and Dutch colonial possessions in southeast Asia. In April 1941 the USSR and Japan concluded a treaty of neutrality that lasted until August 1945; it lasted because, while Japan was fighting America and the Soviet Union was fighting Germany, neither wanted war on a second front.

In contrast to Japan, Germany was too near and too powerful for the Soviet Union to be able to deter single-handedly. Stalin's difficulty was that he lacked willing partners. Therefore, when Hitler unexpectedly offered the hand of friendship in the summer of 1939 Stalin accepted it. The result was the notorious nonaggression pact of August 23, 1939, that secretly delineated the Soviet and German spheres of influence in eastern Europe, giving western Poland to Hitler and eastern Poland and the Baltic to Stalin. Germany was to move first. When Germany did so, Britain and France entered the war.

For nearly two years Stalin stood aloof from the war in the west, exploiting the conditions created by the pact with Hitler. He traded with Germany while still preparing for war. The preparations were costly and extensive. The Red Army continued to rearm and recruit. Stalin annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the northern part of Romania, and moved his defensive lines toward the new western frontier with Greater Germany. Attacking Finland he won a few kilometers of extra territory with which to defend Leningrad at a cost of nearly 400,000 casualties, one-third of them dead or missing. The utility of these preparations appeared doubtful. The communities living in the Soviet Union's new buffer zone were embittered by the imposition of Soviet rule; when war broke out the territory passed almost immediately into the hands of the invader. Moreover, Stalin believed these preparations to be more effective than his enemy did. He thought he had postponed war several years into the future just as Hitler was accelerating forward plans to end the peace with a surprise attack.

Stalin's true intentions, had he successfully put off a German attack in 1941, are still debated. Some have read his speeches and the plans of his generals as indicating that he envisaged launching an aggressive war on Germany; beyond that lay a future in which a defeated Germany and an exhausted Britain would leave it open to him to dominate the whole continent. Some of Hitler's generals promoted this idea after the war in order to justify themselves. While Stalin's generals sometimes entertained the idea of a preemptive strike, and Soviet military doctrine supported attack as the best means of defense, the Russian archives have demonstrated clearly that Stalin's main concern was to head off Hitler's colonial ambitions on Soviet territory; he had no plans to conquer Europe himself.

At all events it is clear that Hitler caught Stalin and the Red Army by surprise. Stalin's culpability for this has been much debated. His view of Hitler's intentions was strongly held and incorrect, and he did not permit those around him to challenge it. Still, it is worth recalling that democratic leaders could also be taken by surprise. For example, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, though not a brutal dictator, was surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Course of the War

Barbarossa, the German operation to destroy the Red Army and seize most of the European part of Russia, began on June 22, 1941. For the next three years Hitler committed no less than 90 percent of his ground forces to the campaign that followed. German troops quickly occupied the Baltic region, Belarus, Ukraine, now incorporating eastern Poland, and a substantial territory in Russia. Millions of Soviet soldiers were surrounded. By the end of September, having advanced more than a thousand kilometers on a front more than a thousand kilometers wide, the invaders had captured Kiev, established a stranglehold around Leningrad, and stood at the gates of Moscow.

The Germans advanced rapidly but suffered unexpectedly heavy casualties and equipment losses to chaotic and disorganized Red Army resistance. They were met with a policy of scorched earth: The Soviet authorities removed or destroyed industrial facilities, food stocks, and essential services before the occupiers arrived. German supply lines were stretched to breaking point.

In the autumn of 1941 Stalin rallied his people by appealing to Russian nationalism and imposing harsh discipline. Soviet resistance denied Hitler his chance of a quick victory at the cost of hideous casualties. Moscow was saved, and Leningrad did not surrender. In December Stalin ordered the first strategic Soviet counteroffensive. It was too ambitious and only achieved a few of its goals, but for the first time the Germans were caught off balance and had to retreat. There followed a year of inconclusive moves and countermoves on each side, but the new German successes appeared more striking. In the spring and summer of 1942 German forces advanced hundreds of kilometers further across the south of Russia towards Stalingrad and the Caucasian oil fields. Then, at the end of the year, these forces were largely destroyed in the Red Army's defense of Stalingrad and its winter counteroffensive.

After Stalingrad the position of the German forces in the south became untenable, and they were compelled to retreat. In the summer of 1943, Hitler staged his last strategic offensive in the east on the Kursk salient; the offensive failed and was answered by a more devastating Soviet counter-offensive. The German Army could no longer hope to force a stalemate, and its eventual defeat became certain. Even so, the liberation of Soviet territory from German occupation took an additional eighteen months. The German army did not collapse in defeat. As a result, the Red Army's journey from Kursk to Berlin occupied two years of bloody fighting.

The Alliance

The German invasion not only turned friends into enemies but also enemies into friends. In July 1941 the British signed a pact with the Soviet Union for mutual assistance. In September President Roosevelt authorized the supply of aid to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Lend-Lease Act. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, the United States joined the war against Germany and the three countries formed an alliance that laid the foundation for the United Nations.

The Alliance was held together by a common interest in the defeat of the Axis powers. Moreover, the Soviet resistance to Hitler electrified world opinion, nowhere more than in the Allied countries. The courage of the Soviet people in the face of suffering aroused respect and admiration. Much of this was focused on the figure of Stalin, who thereby gained an extraordinary political advantage.

Behind the scenes the Alliance was fraught with tension. This was for two reasons. One was the division of labor that quickly emerged among the Allies: The richer countries supplied economic aid to the Soviet Union, which did most of the fighting. It could not be done more efficiently in any other way. Still, not all Russians felt grateful, and Stalin repeatedly demanded that the British and Americans open a second front to draw off the German ground forces to the west. This did not happen until the Allied invasion of France in June 1944.

The other source of tension was a difference in conceptions of the postwar world. The Americans sought a liberalized global economy without empires, while Stalin wanted secure frontiers and a wide sphere of influence across eastern Europe. The British wanted to defend their own empire but were also committed to an independent postwar Poland, their reason for entering the war in 1939. Anxieties increased as it became clear that Stalin intended eastern Europe generally, and Poland in particular, to become subservient to Soviet interests after the war.

The War Effort

The outbreak of war in 1941 brutally exposed Stalin's miscalculations. Although badly shocked, he was not paralyzed. Among his first measures he created a Chief Headquarters, the Stavka, and began to evacuate the armor steel rolling mills on the Black Sea coast. While ordering ceaseless, often futile counterattacks, he also authorized the establishment of a broader framework for the evacuation of people and assets from the frontline regions. On June 28 his nerve gave way, and he gave in briefly to depression. On the afternoon of June 30, other leaders came to urge him to form a war cabinet, and he pulled himself together. The result was the State Defense Committee (GKO).

The progress of the war forced Stalin to change his style of leadership. At first he closely involved himself in the detail of military operations, requiring the Red Army to attack continually and ordering vengeful punishments on all who authorized or advocated retreat. He executed several generals. Communications with the front were so poor that a degree of chaos was inevitable, but on a number of occasions Stalin prevented large forces from extricating themselves from encirclement and capture. Evidently he came to recognize this style as counterproductive, because he eventually drew back from micromanaging the battlefield. He gave his generals greater freedom to decide operational details and speak their minds on strategy, although he retained unquestioned authority where he chose to exert it. This led to more effective decision making and, combined with the growing experience and confidence of his officers, laid the foundations of later victories.

Soviet victory in World War II is often cited as the justification for Stalin's prewar policies of industrialization and rearmament. From a comparative standpoint the success of the Soviet war effort is nonetheless surprising. Why did the Soviet Union not simply fall apart under massive attack, as Russia had done under rather less pressure in World War I? As industrial production was diverted to the war effort, farmers withdrew from the market. Food remained in the countryside, while the war workers and soldiers went hungry. The burdens of war were not distributed fairly among the population, and this undermined the Russian war effort both materially and psychologically. In World War II the Soviet Union was still relatively poor. Other poor countries such as Italy and Japan also fell apart as soon as the Allies seriously attacked them. Italy and Japan were relatively reliant on foreign trade and thus vulnerable to blockade. The Soviet Union depended on getting food from tens of millions of low-productivity farm workers to feed its armies and industries; this supply could easily have failed under wartime pressures.

Stalin and his subordinates did not allow the Soviet government and economy to disintegrate. The Soviet institutional capacity for integration and coordination matched that of much more developed economies. As a result, despite still being relatively poor, the USSR was able to commit a significant share of national resources to the war effort. After a wobbly start, war production soared. Food was procured and rationed effectively: Enough was allocated to soldiers and defense workers to permit sustained effort in disastrous circumstances. There was not enough to go around, and millions starved, but morale did not collapse in the way that had destroyed the tsarist monarchy. Thus collective agriculture, although a disaster in peacetime, proved effective in war.

Things nearly went the other way. The outbreak of war was a huge shock not only to Stalin personally but more generally to Soviet institutions. The bureaucratic allocation system did not collapse, and planners went on churning out factory plans and coordinating supplies, but these soon became irrelevant. On the supply side, many important military-industrial centers were lost, and the capacities they represented existed only on paper. On the demand side, army requirements to replace early losses with new supplies of soldiers and equipment were far greater than the plans. For some time the gap between real needs and real resources could not be bridged.

The first phases of mobilization were carried out in an uncontrolled way, and this proved very costly. Munitions production soared, but the production of steel, fuel, and other basic industrial goods collapsed. In 1942 an economic crisis resulted not just from the successful German offensives but also from uncontrolled mobilization in 1941. The heart of the war economy now lay in the remote interior, where many defense factories had been relocated from the west and south. But these regions were unprepared for crash industrialization: They lacked transport, power, sources of metals and components, an administrative and commercial infrastructure, and housing and food for the new workforce. Without these there was no basis for a sustained war effort.

After 1942 several factors allowed the situation to ease. Soviet victory at Stalingrad changed the military balance and the growing Allied air offensive against Germany from the west also helped to draw German resources away from the eastern front. More resources also relaxed the pressure: These came from the recovery of output from its post-invasion trough, the completed relocation of defense industry, and greater pooling of Allied resources through economic aid. It is estimated that in 1943 and 1944 the U.S. Lend-Lease program contributed roughly 10 percent of the total resources available to the Soviet economy. From the soviet consumer's point of view, 1943 appears to have been even worse than 1942, but in 1944 and 1945 there were marked improvements.

In the most dangerous periods of the war, Soviet society was held together by a combination of individual voluntarism, national feeling, and brutal discipline. There were crucial moments when the army wavered. In August 1941 and July 1942, Stalin issued notorious orders that stigmatized those who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner as traitors, penalized their families, and ordered the summary execution of all who retreated without orders. By these barbarous methods, order in the armed forces was restored. In the civilian economy minor offenses involving absence from work as well as unauthorized quitting were ruthlessly pursued, resulting in hundreds of thousands of criminal cases each year; those convicted were sent to prison or labor camps. Food crimes involving abuse of the rationing system were severely punished, not infrequently by shooting. Spreading defeatist rumors was punished in the same way, even if it was the truth. It is not so much that everyone who supported the war effort was terrorized into doing so; rather, such measures made it much easier for individuals to choose the path of collective solidarity and individual heroism. The barbarity of German occupation policies also contributed to this outcome.

War Losses

The Soviet experience of warfare was very different from that of its Allies, Britain and the United States. Large in territory and population, the Soviet Union was poorer than the other two by a wide margin in productivity and income. It was Soviet territory that Hitler wanted for his empire, and the Soviet Union was the only one of the three to be invaded. Despite this, the Soviet Union mobilized its resources and contributed combat forces and equipment to Allied fighting power far beyond its relative economic strength.

These same factors meant that the Soviet Union suffered far heavier costs and losses than its Allies. After victory, Hitler planned to resettle Ukraine and European Russia with Germans and to divert their food supplies to feeding the German army. He planned to deprive the urban population of food and drive much of the rural population off the land. Jews and communist officials would be killed and the rest starved into forced migration to the east.

The Soviet Union suffered roughly 25 million war deaths compared with 350,000 war deaths in Britain and 300,000 in the United States; many war deaths were not recorded at the time and must be estimated statistically after the event. Combat losses account for all U.S. and most British casualties; the German bombing of British cities made up the rest. The sources of Soviet mortality were more varied. Red Army records suggest 6.4 million known military deaths from battlefield causes and half a million more from disease and accidents. In addition, 4.6 million soldiers were captured, missing, or killed or presumed missing in units that failed to report. Of these approximately 2.8 million were later repatriated or reenlisted, suggesting 1.8 million deaths in captivity and a net total of 8.7 million Red Army deaths. But the number of Soviet prisoners and deaths in captivity may be understated by more than a million. German records show a total of 5.8 million prisoners, of whom 3.3 million had died by May 1944; most of these were starved, worked, or shot to death. Considering the second half of 1941 alone, Soviet records show 2.3 million soldiers missing or captured, while in the same period the Germans counted 3.3 million prisoners, of whom 2 million had died by February 1942.

Subtracting up to 10 million Red Army war deaths from a 25-million total suggests at least 15 million civilian deaths. Thus many more Soviet civilians died than soldiers, and this is another contrast with the British and American experience. Soviet sources have estimated 11.5 million civilian war deaths under German rule, 7.4 million in the occupied territories by killing, hunger, and disease, and another 2.2 million in Germany where they were deported as forced laborers. This leaves room for millions of civilian war deaths on territory under Soviet control, primarily from malnutrition and overwork; of these, one million may have died in Leningrad alone.

In wartime specifically Soviet mechanisms of premature death continued to operate. For example, Soviet citizens continued to die from the conditions in labor camps; these became particularly lethal in 1942 and 1943 when a 20 percent annual death rate killed half a million inmates in two years. In 1943 and 1944 a new cause of death arose: The deportation and internal exile under harsh conditions of ethnic groups such as the Chechens who, Stalin believed, had collaborated as a community with the former German occupiers.

The war also imposed severe material losses on the Soviet economy. The destruction included 6 million buildings that previously housed 25 million people, 31,850 industrial establishments, and 167,000 schools, colleges, hospitals, and public libraries. Officially these losses were estimated at one-third of the Soviet Union's prewar wealth; being that only one in eight people died, it follows that wealth was destroyed at a higher rate than people. Thus, those who survived were also impoverished.

Consequences of the War

The war had a greater effect on the external position of the Soviet Union than on its internal organization and structure. The Soviet Union became a dominant regional power and quickly thereafter an atomic superpower. The wartime alliance soon fell apart, but the Soviet Union soon replaced it with a network of compliant neighboring states in central and eastern Europe and remodeled them in its own image. This set the stage for the Cold War. In the process the popular sympathy in the west for the Soviet Union's wartime struggle quickly dissipated.

Within the country, the victory of the wartime alliance gave rise to widespread hopes for political relaxation and an opening outward but these hopes were soon dashed. Living conditions remained extremely tough. Millions were homeless; it was just as hard to restore peacetime production as it had been to convert to a war footing; and the pressure to restore food supplies on top of a bad harvest led to one million or more famine deaths in Ukraine and Moldavia in 1946. In addition, Stalin used the victory not to concede reforms but to strengthen his personal dictatorship, promote nationalism, and mount new purges although with less publicity than before the war. After an initial phase of demobilization, the nuclear arms race and the outbreak of a new conventional war in Korea resulted in resumed growth of military expenditures and revived emphasis on the readiness for war. Not until the death of Stalin did the first signs of real relaxation appear.

After the famine of 1946 the Soviet economy restored prewar levels of production of most commodities with surprising speed. It took much longer, possibly several decades, to return to the path that the economy might have followed without a war. It also took decades for the Soviet population to return to demographic balance; in 1959 women born between 1904 and 1924 outnumbered men of the same generation by three to two, despite the fact that women also fought and starved.

One of the most persistent legacies of the war resulted from the wartime evacuation of industry. After the war, despite some reverse evacuation, the war economy of the interior was kept in existence. Weapons factories in the remote interior, adapted to the new technologies of nuclear weapons and aerospace, were developed into closed, self-sufficient company towns forming giant, vertically integrated systems; they were literally taken off the map so that their very existence became a well kept secret. Thus, secretiveness and militarization were taken hand in hand to new levels.

It is easier to describe the Soviet Union after the war than to say what would have happened if the war had gone the other way. World War II was a defining event in world history that engulfed the lives of nearly two billion people, but the eastern front affected the outcome of the war to a much greater extent than is commonly remembered in western culture and historical writing.

Bibliography

Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London: Longman.

Erickson, John. (1962). The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918 - 1941. London: Macmillan.

Erickson, John. (1975). Stalin's War with Germany, vol. 1: The Road to Stalingrad. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Erickson, John. (1983). Stalin's War with Germany, vol. 2: The Road to Berlin. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Erickson, John. (1997). "Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941 - 1945: The System and the Soldier." In Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939 - 1945, eds. Paul Addison and Angus Calder. London: Pimlico.

Erickson, John, and Dilks, David. (1994). Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Glantz, David M. (1991). From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942 - August 1943. London: Cass.

Glantz, David M., and House, Jonathan. (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Gorodetsky, Gabriel. (1999). Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Harrison, Mark. (1996). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940 - 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harrison, Mark, ed. (1998). The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haslam, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933 - 39. London: Macmillan.

Haslam, Jonathan. (1992). The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933 - 41: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War. London: Macmillan.

Kershaw, Ian, and Lewin, Moshe, eds. (1997). Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Moskoff, William. (1990). The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Overy, Richard. (1997). Russia's War. London: Allen Lane.

Reese, Roger R. (2000). The Soviet Military Experience. London: Routledge.

Roberts, Geoffrey. (1995). The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933 - 1941. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Roberts, Geoffrey. (2000). Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History. London: Longman.

Salisbury, Harrison. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. London: Pan.

Suvorov, Viktor [Vladimir Rezun]. (1990). Ice-Breaker: Who Started the Second World War? London: Hamish Hamilton.

Urlanis, B. Ts. (1971). Wars and Population. Moscow: Progress.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Weeks, Albert L. (2002). Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939 - 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wegner, Bernd, ed. (1997). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939 - 1941. Providence, RI: Berghahn.

Weinberg, Gerhard L. (1995). A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Werth, Alexander. (1964). Russia at War, 1941 - 1945. London: Barrie & Rockliff.

—MARK HARRISON

War involving the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) against the Allies (Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and Yugoslavia).

When World War II began on 1 September 1939, the Middle East consisted of independent, semi-independent, and colonial states. From east to west they included the following: Iran and Turkey were independent, with Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi and Turkey a republic. Syria and Lebanon were republics but under French control. Transjordan and Iraq were monarchies but under British control. Palestine was a League of Nations mandate under British control. The Arabian peninsula consisted of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, both independent, and Oman and a variety of Persian/Arabian Gulf states within the British sphere of influence. Egypt (with the strategic Suez Canal) and the Sudan were nominally independent but really under British control. Libya was an Italian colony. The French effectively controlled the rest of North Africa - Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco - except for the western regions under Spanish rule.

In World War II, Britain and France were allied against Germany and Italy. All except Germany had significant imperial holdings and interests in the Middle East. Germany wanted not only the defeat of Britain and France, but German gains in this region. As the war began, the Axis powers controlled only a small part of the Middle East - Libya and some other Italian territory taken during the Ethiopian annexation in 1935. The fall of France to Germany in May 1940 and the establishment of the quasi-independent Vichy republic in June 1940 dramatically
altered the balance of power: In addition to Italy's territories being in their sphere of influence, the Axis powers had acquired France's territories.

North and East African Campaigns

The British initiated their first military action in the Middle East by an attack on French naval vessels at Oran, Algeria, 3 July 1940 - which crippled the French fleet there (and resulted in 1,300 French dead). This was part of an effort to ensure that the Axis powers could not use the French fleet; the French squadron at Alexandria was disarmed while two French submarines in British ports joined the Free French forces fighting with the British. The next day, Italian forces from Ethiopia occupied border towns in the Sudan, and within six weeks they penetrated British Kenya and seized British Somaliland. On 13 September, Italian forces under Rodolfo Graziani invaded Egypt; they penetrated some sixty miles (90 km) within a week, and dug in along a fifty-mile (80 km) front from the coast to Sidi Barrani.

Since the threat to the Suez Canal was of primary importance, the British countered first against Graziani's army of 200,000. General Sir Archibald Wavell launched a surprise attack with an army of 63,000 on 6 December and drove through the Italian lines at Sidi Barrani, capturing 40,000 Italian troops by 12 December. The campaign continued for two months, ending with Italian surrender at Benghazi, Libya, on 7 February 1941. With advance units at al-Agheila, the British had advanced about five hundred miles (800 km), captured 130,000 Italian soldiers, and taken four hundred tanks and one thousand guns.

On 15 January 1941 the British launched an attack against Italian forces in East Africa, from the Sudan. Mogadiscio, capital of Italian Somaliland, fell on 26 February, followed by Neguelli in southern Ethiopia on 22 March; the capital, Addis Ababa, fell on 6 April.

These British successes were soon to be reversed. Germany had not yet committed her forces to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia (22 June 1941), and in February and March was able to reinforce the Italians in western Libya with two divisions under General Erwin Rommel. In the meantime, the British had turned their attention to the defense of Greece, diverting troops from North Africa.

Rommel opened his attack on 3 April, and the British retreated from their recent gains in Libya. The Axis forces drove the British back to the Egyptian frontier by 29 May. The tables then turned when Germany diverted troops from North Africa for the invasion of Russia. The British launched an offensive on 11 December and were able to drive into Libya as far as Benghazi by 25 December. A reinforced Rommel was able to begin a drive on Egypt on 22 May 1942 that did not end until checked at al-Alamayn (El Alamein), just eighty miles (127 km) from Alexandria. General Montgomery's offensive from al-Alamayn began on 23 October, resulting in expulsion of Axis forces from Egypt by 12 November and the end of the threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal.

At about the same time, on 8 November, a British-American force under U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower began Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Allied forces disembarking in French Morocco and Algeria faced some opposition from Vichy forces, but by 11 November, the two sides had reached an armistice. Pressed by Montgomery's Eighth Army in Libya and the new threat from the west, Rommel concentrated the Axis forces in Tunisia. Into 1943, bitter fighting continued, particularly at the Kasserine Pass, but by 12 May all German and Italian resistance had ended. The Axis powers had 950,000 men dead or captured and had lost 8,000 aircraft and 2.4 million tons of shipping.

Southwest Asia and Turkey

While the significant fighting of World War II in the Middle East was in Africa, the British still faced serious threats in Southwest Asia. The regimes in both Iran and Iraq flirted with support of the Axis powers as a means of diminishing British influence over their affairs. On 2 May 1941, pro-Axis sympathizers in Iraq tried to seize power. British forces intervened and put down all resistance by 31 May. Fearing that Reza Shah Pahlavi might take Iran into the German camp in the summer of 1941, British and Soviet forces entered Iran in late August and forced him to abdicate in favor of his son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, on 16 September. These actions effectively secured Iraq and Iran for the Allies.

The fall of France in June 1940 threatened to bring Syria and Lebanon into the Axis sphere of influence. Quick action by the British and Free French forces prevented this. On 8 June these forces occupied Syria and Lebanon. On 16 September Syria was proclaimed an independent nation, as was Lebanon on 26 November. Both remained loyal to the Allies during World War II, but soon after the end of hostilities they were able to assert their independence and obtain the withdrawal of Allied forces from their territory.

World War I had led to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Turkish republic under Kemal Atatürk. Turkey then faced pressure from both sides and from within as World War II loomed on the horizon. Atatürk and his successor, İsmet İnönü, favored the British as the power they believed would ultimately win. Other Turks feared Britain's ally, the Soviet Union, as a traditional enemy and realized that by June 1941 German troops were within 100 miles (160 km) of Istanbul. Still others remembered the disastrous decision of October 1914, when the Ottomans joined the Central Powers in World War I.

Shortly after the beginning of World War II, on 19 October 1939, Britain and France concluded a fifteen-year mutual assistance pact with Turkey. German success in 1940 and the invasion of Russia in 1941, however, led many Turkish leaders to favor the Axis. Thus, on 1 November 1940, İnönü declared it to be Turkish policy to remain a nonbelligerent in the war, while maintaining friendly ties with both Britain and the Soviet Union. The Allies, of course, continued to pressure Turkey for support, and on 3 December 1941, just before the United States declared war, the American Lend-Lease program was extended to Turkey. İnönü still pursued a neutral course but by 1943 realized that the Axis would lose. In August 1944, Turkey broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and on 23 February 1945 it formally declared war to comply with requirements for participation in the UN conference to be held in San Francisco in April.

Palestine

The Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine greeted World War II with mixed emotions. Neither was content with British rule. The Arabs resented the rule of their country by a European power pledged to uphold the Balfour Declaration (sanctioning Palestine as a haven for persecuted Jews from all parts of the world). The Jewish population, the Yishuv, suspected British commitment to the Balfour Declaration, especially since the British banned Jewish immigration into Palestine after 1939.

In light of the antisemitism of Nazi Germany and its extermination of European Jewry as a matter of state policy, the Yishuv had little recourse but to support the Allies. The resources of the Jewish community in Palestine were put at the disposal of the British, and efforts (often resisted by British authorities) were made to raise Jewish military units to support the war effort. Early in the war the Yishuv devised the Carmel Plan, to create a Jewish enclave on the Palestine coast, near Haifa, to resist a German landing and occupation. Fortunately, this never became necessary.

A small minority of Jews did continue to resist British control of Palestine. The LEHI (Stern Gang), under Abraham Stern, urged rebellion against the British and even approached the German representatives in Vichy-controlled Syria with an offer of support against the British in Palestine. Even after this offer was rejected and Stern killed in confrontation with British authorities in early 1942, this splinter group continued to resist the British; other Jewish groups then began to oppose the British as the war progressed, since British support of the Zionist cause seemed less than enthusiastic.

Some Arabs viewed Germany as an instrument to rid themselves of British rule. The mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, lent his support to the Nazi cause, and when fleeing from Jerusalem in 1937 and from Beirut in October 1939 to Baghdad, he established contact with the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, offering Arab support. After an anti-British revolt in 1941, the British reestablished control of Iraq in May 1941. Hajj Amin, who participated in the revolt, left for Turkey and later for Rome and Berlin to support the Axis powers after they promised to free the Arab world and support its independence and unity. He was able to generate some support for the Axis among the Arabs, but the defeat of the Italians and Germans in North Africa prevented this from becoming a factor in the war.

The War's Effect on the Middle East

World War II ended with British and French control of most of the Middle East. The war did, however, shatter the aura of the invincibility of their arms. Consequently, rapid changes occurred in the region - Arab states asserted their independence, and the Jewish population of Palestine declared the State of Israel in 1948. Iran and Turkey insisted on full partnership in the international community. The European powers would no longer have undisputed control over the fates of the peoples in this region.

With the end of the war the United States emerged the premier Western power, but the challenge of the Cold War with the Soviet Union would soon have its own impact on the oil-rich Middle East.

Bibliography

Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991.

Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Peretz, Don. The Middle East Today, 6th edition. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.

Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism toOur Time, 2d revised and updated edition. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Time-Life Books. WW II: Time-Life Books History of the SecondWorld War. New York: Prentice Hall, 1989.

— DANIEL E. SPECTOR

The Second World War was history's largest and most significant armed conflict. It served as the breeding ground for the modern structure of security and intelligence, and for the postwar balance of power that formed the framework for the Cold War. Weapons, materiel, and actual combat, though vital to the Allies' victory over the Axis, did not alone win the war. To a great extent, victory was forged in the work of British and American intelligence services, who ultimately overcame their foes' efforts. Underlying the war of guns and planes was a war of ideas, images, words, and impressions—intangible artifacts of civilization that yielded enormous tangible impact for the peoples of Europe, east Asia, and other regions of the world.

Scope and Consequences of the War

The war pitted some 50 Allied nations, most notable among which were the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China, against the Axis nations. The name "Axis," a reference to the straight geographic line between the capital cities of Rome and Berlin, came from a pact signed by Germany and Italy in 1936, to which Japan became a signatory in 1940. Ultimately a number of other nations would, either willingly or unwillingly, throw in their lot with the Axis, but Germany and Japan remained the principal powers in this alliance.

Although the roots of the conflict lay before the 1930s, hostilities officially began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and ended with the Japanese surrender to the United States six years and one day later. The war can be divided into three phases: 1939–41, when Axis victory seemed imminent; 1941–43, when Axis conquests reached their high point even as the tide turned with the U.S. and Soviet entry into the war; and 1943–45, as the Allies beat back and ultimately defeated the Axis.

Over those six years, armies, navies, air units, guerrilla forces, and clandestine units would fight across millions of square miles of sea and land, from Norway's North Cape to the Solomon Islands, and from Iran to Alaska. The war would include more than a dozen significant theatres in western Europe, the north Atlantic, Italy, eastern and southern Europe, Russia, North Africa, China, southern Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. Less major, but still significant, engagements took place in East Africa, the Middle East, and West Africa. There were even extremely limited engagements—mostly at the level of diplomacy, espionage, or propaganda—in South America and southern Africa.

Death toll. World War II and its attendant atrocities would exact an unparalleled human toll, estimated at 50 million military and civilian lives lost. Combat deaths alone add up to about 19 million, with the largest share of this accounted for by 10 million Soviet, 3.5 million German, 2 million Chinese, and 1.5 million Japanese deaths. (The United States lost about 400,000, and the United Kingdom some 280,000.)

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis killed another 15.5 million in a massive campaign of genocide that included the "Final Solution," whereby some 6 million Jews were killed. Another 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, along with smaller numbers of Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped persons, political prisoners, and other civilians rounded out the total. Principal among the Nazi executioners was the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, which operated a network of slave-labor and extermination camps throughout central and eastern Europe.

About 14 million civilian deaths have been attributed to the Japanese. They imposed a system of forced labor on the peoples of the region they dubbed the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," and literally worked millions of civilians and prisoners of war (POWs) to death in their camps. The Japanese also conducted massacres of civilians that rivaled those undertaken by the Nazis in Russia.

Soviet non-combat atrocities accounted for another 7 million deaths. Victims included members of deported nationalities, sent eastward to prevent collaboration with the Nazis; murdered German POWs; returning Soviet POWs killed because of their exposure to the West; and other campaigns of genocide conducted by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

World War II served as a watershed between the multi-polar world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the bipolar world of the Cold War. It ended the military dominance of European powers, but also ushered in an era in which Europe, heavily aided in its recovery by the United States so as to avoid another European war, became a major economic power.

The war transformed the United States from an isolationist giant, with little interest in affairs outside the Western Hemisphere, to a modern superpower. Symbolic of this transformation was the construction of the Pentagon building, commenced just before the United States entered the war. The war also marked the birth of the modern U.S. intelligence apparatus, of which the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), led by Major General William Donovan, was the progenitor. OSS would cease to function soon after the war's conclusion, but two years later, it would be replaced by a far more lasting organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Despite the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and the creation of the United Nations in an effort to settle international differences peacefully, the Cold War was an all but inevitable result of the war, which left only two superpowers in its wake. Thenceforth, the world would be divided between the United States and its allies—among which would be its two wartime enemies, West Germany and Japan—and the Soviet Union and its affiliates. These would include East Germany and eastern Europe; Communist China from 1949 to the Sino-Soviet rift of the late 1950s; and a number of states in the gradually emerging developing world of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

The conflict spelled an end to the European colonial empires, and brought independence to dozens of countries in the Middle East, Africa, and south and east Asia. Among the many states that owed their existence to the war was Israel. The effects of the Holocaust moved Western leaders to action, and Western sympathy helped ensure support for the establishment of a Jewish state.

The Axis and the Causes of the War

The victory of Benito Mussolini's Black Shirts in Italy in October 1922, introduced the world to Fascism, which reinterpreted nationalism in totalitarian terms, i.e., as an all-encompassing political movement intended to supplant all other centers of influence, such as religion, in the life of the individual. Hitler regarded Mussolini as a mentor, yet the Nazis would eclipse the Fascists in terms of strength, influence, and impact on world history.

Not only was Germany's militarily more powerful than Italy's, but the agenda of the Nazis, who took power in January 1933, had a much greater sense of urgency.

Central to Hitler's plans, outlined in his manifesto Mein Kampf (1924), was the elimination of central and eastern European Jews, who Hitler regarded as the principal barrier to German European dominance. Intimately tied with this plan was his vision of conquest and colonization in Russia and eastern Europe, which would—after the Jews and Slavs had been exterminated—constitute a German empire or reich that Hitler predicted would last a thousand years.

This consciously millenarian vision drew on German history and national mythology, citing as the first and second reichs the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and the German Empire of 1870–1918 respectively. It appealed not only to longstanding strains of anti-Semitism in Europe, which dated back at least to the time of Crusades, but also to disaffection with what the Germans regarded as their betrayal and humiliation in World War I and with the Versailles Treaty of 1919. In a country that had recently been devastated by inflation—Germany's economic crisis preceded the worldwide Great Depression by several years, and was even more severe—Nazism seemed to offer a solution for strengthening a once-great nation that had fallen on difficult times.

Communism and the Spanish Civil War. At a rhetorical and symbolic level, Hitler opposed Communism, and used the threat of Soviet Russia as justification for his moves to arm Germany in the 1930s. In reality, the Nazis and Soviets provided one another with mutual assistance, continuing a pattern begun in World War I, when imperial Germany had aided V. I. Lenin. After the war, German aristocrats, nationalists, and Communists all opposed, and helped bring down, the liberal democratic Weimar Republic. Though Hitler killed thousands of Communists after he gained power in January 1933, German military forces trained in Russia, and Germany provided Russia with equipment.

This secret relationship would become public when the two sides signed the Non-Aggression Pact on August 23, 1939, but until that time, Hitler and Stalin made much of their putative opposition to one another. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) provided them with a proxy battleground, as Germany and Italy tried out new armaments in support of the Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco. The Republican side turned to Stalin for help, but he gave them little assistance while siphoning resources and leaders, some of whom went to Moscow and never returned.

On the other hand, the romance and mythology of the Republican cause provided the Soviets with a propaganda victory that comported well with their current "Popular Front" strategy. In accordance with the latter, Communists worldwide ceased calls for world revolution, and instead formed alliances with liberal, socialist, and anarchist movements. Later, Stalin would form a "popular front" on a grand scale, as he aligned himself with the United States and Great Britain.

Munich and Mussolini. Hitler's rhetorical opposition to Communism won him tacit support from Britain and France, which in the 1930s regarded Nazism as the lesser of two evils. At Munich in September 1938, British and French complicity yielded Germany title to a portion of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. In the view of many historians, the Munich conference and the appeasement efforts of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rendered war all but inevitable.

Munich also sealed the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler. Despite their later alliance, Mussolini, a former Communist, rightly perceived significant differences between his nationalism and Hitler's racism. If Britain and France perceived Hitler as a buffer against Stalin, then Mussolini in the early 1930s seemed like a buffer against Hitler. What brought Italy and Germany together was the same complex of factors that eventually forged a three-way alliance with Japan: a shared desire for greater power, territorial ambitions that had supposedly been frustrated by the democratic powers, and a string of diplomatic and military successes that encouraged ever bolder moves.

Japan, militarism, and expansionism. When its troops marched into Manchuria in 1931, Japan launched the first in the series of conquests and invasions during the 1930s that set the stage for the war. Though nominally led by an emperor, Hirohito, by that time the nation had come under the control of military officers, who had imposed a dictatorship. The Japanese lacked a single powerful leader until Hideki Tojo emerged at the top in 1941.

Although certainly authoritarian and strictly controlled, the Japanese system was technically not totalitarian, in the sense that it did not have a specific, animating modern ideology. Instead, it relied on ancient national myths, combined with an abiding sense that Japan had been wronged in its struggle to make a place for itself as a world power. The Japanese belief system combined nationalistic and racial themes: like the Nazis, they regarded all other peoples as inferior. This would have seemingly made the Japanese and Nazi systems mutually exclusive, but because they were at opposite sides of the world, it provided a convenient formula for dividing the planet between them.

Each of the three future participants in the Axis Pact set out to test the resolve of the other powers to oppose them, and found such opposition all but nonexistent. The League of Nations, formed to put an end to wars after World War I, failed to act decisively when Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1935–36, when Germany occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when Japan conquered most of eastern China in 1937–38, or when Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

1939–41: The Axis triumphant. Over the course of the first nine months of 1939, Germany added the rest of Czechoslovakia, while Italy occupied Albania. Having signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin in August, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1. Britain and France, which on March 29 had pledged to support Poland, declared war, but did not attack Germany. During the next few weeks, Germany and Russia divided Poland between themselves, and in November, the Soviet Union launched a separate war with Finland.

Although the Soviets eventually emerged victorious in March 1940, the Russo-Finnish War convinced Hitler of Stalin's vulnerability. Stalin had decimated his officer corps with his purges in the 1930s, and his collectivization efforts had been accompanied by the imprisonment, starvation, and deaths of millions. The Soviet Union was to prove much stronger, however, than Hitler imagined. And if Hitler believed that Japan would join him in making war on the Soviets, he was mistaken; the Soviet performance against the Japanese during the little-known tank battle at Nomonhan in Manchuria in August, 1939, effectively convinced the Japanese of Russia's true strength.

From 1939 to 1941, the Axis unquestionably had the upper hand in the conflict. During the first part of this period, nicknamed "the Phony War," hardly a shot was fired in western Europe. Only in the spring of 1940 did Hitler's forces resume action, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France. The French, who relied on the defenses of the Maginot Line (designed to fight a World War I–style conflict of limited movement), surrendered after a nominal resistance effort. Most of the country fell under direct Nazi control, which a small portion to the southeast, with the town of Vichy as its capital, formed a pro-Axis government.

The speedy capitulation of the French left the British alone in opposition to the Nazis. In May 1940, Chamberlain resigned, and was replaced by Winston Churchill. In this change, the British people gained an unexpected advantage; over the next five years, Churchill, widely regarded as one of history's great orators, would stir his people to action with a series of memorable speeches. Yet, the position of the British was perilous, and as the Nazi Luftwaffe launched an aerial campaign against them in August, it seemed that German victory was only a matter of time.

Axis victories and blunders. At about the same time that the Battle of Britain began, Mussolini attacked the British in North and East Africa. He thus unexpectedly offered England a venue for fighting the Axis outside of Europe, and eventually German forces would be diverted into the Africa campaign.

In southern Europe, Hitler managed to compel Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania into joining the Axis, but this advantage was overshadowed by another diversion of forces caused by Mussolini. Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940, and Greek resistance proved so fierce that in April 1941, German forces rolled into southern Europe. Churchill attempted to oppose them in Greece, but the Germans pushed back British forces, and in history's first airborne invasion, took the isle of Crete—an important Mediterranean base—in May.

By mid-1941, virtually all of Western Europe, except Britain and neutral Switzerland, Spain, and Sweden, belonged to the Axis. But the Balkan campaign had pushed back Hitler's timetable for the most important campaign of the war, the invasion of Russia. The purpose of all other fighting up to that point had been to eliminate opposition as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and rather than conquer Britain, Hitler preferred to enlist it as an ally against Stalin. He called off attacks on British air bases in May 1941, but by then the Nazi bombardment had inflamed British sentiment against Germany.

1941–43: the Tide Turns

On June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded Russia. Operation Barbarossa, as it was called—its name a reference to the twelfth century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa—was the largest land invasion in history. Fought according to the blitzkrieg ("lightning war") tactics already demonstrated elsewhere in Europe, the invasion relied on mechanized infantry divisions and Panzer (tank) columns with heavy aerial support.

The invasion would initially yield enormous victories for the Nazis, who quickly doubled the size of their territory by annexing most of western Russia. However, the Germans had started the invasion relatively late in the year and were eventually delayed in their advances, given the challenges posed by the Russian winter. This delay was partly due to the incursion into southern Europe, but also resulted from arguments between Hitler and his general staff, which put off the invasion for several weeks.

Not content to be Germany's Führer or supreme leader, Hitler also wished to be generalissimo, and eventually he would push aside all military planners and take personal control of the war effort. Not only did Hitler, a corporal in World War I, lack the generals' understanding of strategy, but he tended to be bold where prudence counseled caution, and vice versa. When he had a good chance of taking Britain, he demurred, but a year later, he swept into Russia without taking adequate stock of the consequences.

German troops were not equipped with clothing for the winter. This was in part a consequence of the fact that Hitler resisted apprising his armies or his people of the sacrifices necessary for war. Whereas the Allies immediately undertook rationing efforts, Hitler was slow to enact rationing for fear of unleashing discontent. Likewise, he was ill-inclined to equip his men for a long campaign, and thus admit that such a campaign likely awaited them.

America enters the war. Japan launched its first major offensive of the war in early December 1941, when, in addition to attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor, it swept into the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand, and Burma. The result of these decisive attacks, combined with German victories in Russia, was to bring the Axis to the height of its powers in 1942. At that point, it seemed possible that the two major Axis powers, taking advantage of anti-British unrest in Iran and India, might even link up, thus controlling a swath of land and sea from Normandy to the Solomon Islands.

In actuality, events of 1941 would serve to bring an end to Axis hopes of world conquest. While the invasion of Russia would ultimately cripple the German Wehrmacht, or army, the introduction of the United States to the war would give the Allied force a seemingly bottomless supply of equipment with which to wage the war. It also brought in a vast military force that, alongside the British, would drive back the Germans in North Africa (despite impressive resistance by the tank commander German Erwin Rommel) and make two key landings on the European continent, in Italy and France.

Thus, the attack on Pearl Harbor, intended as a first strike to eliminate American opposition, would prove a miscalculation on a par with Hitler's invasion of Russia. Hitler welcomed the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor at the time, and quickly declared war on the United States, thus, giving him justification for sinking U.S. ships crossing the north Atlantic in order to deliver supplies to Britain. This proved a benefit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, up to then, had been confronted by strong isolationist opposition to war with Germany.

1943–45: The Allies victorious. Unlike the Axis, the Allies were not bound by one single formal alliance. Instead, there were agreements such as Lend-Lease, whereby the United States provided equipment to Great Britain even before it entered the war. Later, America would extend Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, providing considerable assistance to its future Cold War enemy.

There were also a number of conferences whereby the leaders of the Allied nations planned the postwar world. These included Newfoundland in August 1941, and Casablanca in January 1943, (United States and Britain only), Teheran in November 1943, Yalta in February 1945, and Potsdam in July 1945. (By the latter point, Roosevelt had died and was replaced by Vice-President Harry S. Truman, while Churchill had been voted out in favor of Clement Atlee and the Labour Party.)

As with the Axis alliance of Germany and Italy, there was an alliance within this alliance—that of the United States and Britain. Between Roosevelt and Churchill was a strong personal bond that reflected the ultimate commonality of aims between their two nations. More strained was the relation of these leaders with Stalin. The alliance with Soviet Russia was a marriage of convenience, as all three powers faced a common enemy in Nazi Germany, but Churchill in particular never let down his guard where Stalin was concerned. (And he was right to do so, as Stalin's intelligence services were busy gathering secrets in England.)

To a much smaller extent, the United States and United Kingdom made common cause with the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle. In neither case did these leaders speak for their entire nations. Chiang's Nationalists expended greater resources on fighting the Communists, led by Mao Tse-tung, than they did against the Japanese invaders. The Communists, who enjoyed widespread peasant support, proved able defenders, and though they would become enemies of the United States, at the time America regarded them as a useful ally against the Japanese. As for de Gaulle, who operated from London, he represented only a tiny portion of France, most of which made little effort to resist Nazi and Vichy rule.

Driving back the Axis in Europe. In Russia, the Germans got as far as the suburbs of Moscow before the winter—along with the resurgent Red Army and a defiant populace—caught up with them. Lengthy sieges at Stalingrad and Leningrad (the latter lasting more than 800 days) would spell an end to German hopes of conquest. Led by Georgi Zhukov, the Red Army gradually drove back the Germans and began the long, steady push into central Europe.

After defeating the Germans in North Africa in late 1942, the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, and Italy itself on September 9. This forced Mussolini to retreat to northern Italy, where he would serve as puppet ruler of a Nazi-controlled state for the remaining two years of his life. On June 6, 1944, an Allied force of some 2,700 ships and 176,000 U.S., British, Canadian, and other troops landed at Normandy, in the largest amphibious invasion in history.

By the end of 1944, Allied victory in Europe began to seem all but imminent, but a number of obstacles still stood in the way. Hitler's scientists had developed the V2 rocket, precursor of modern missiles, and Germany fired several of them against England. The Allies, meanwhile, relentlessly bombed German cities, bringing the Reich to its knees. The Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest in December 1944 was the later major Axis offensive in Europe.

With the Soviets surrounding Berlin, Hitler on April 30, 1945, committed suicide in his bunker with his mistress, Eva Braun, along with propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and Goebbels's family. Two days earlier, Mussolini and his mistress, captured by Italian resistance fighters, had been shot. The Germans surrendered to the Allies on May 7. Only after the surrender did the full magnitude of the Holocaust become apparent, and for this and other crimes, those German military and political leaders who did not commit suicide would be tried before the World Court.

The defeat of Japan. In the carrier-dominated Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, the first naval battle in which opposing ships never caught sight of one another, neither side gained a clear victory, but the Allies won the upper hand at the Battle of Midway the following month. Later that summer, the U.S. Marines fought the Japanese at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Late in 1943, the Marines began a series of assaults on Pacific islands, including the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana chains. Allied forces under General Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines in the fall of 1944.

Early in 1945, Allied forces under Major General Curtis LeMay began dropping incendiary bombs on Japanese cities, while the Marines took the nearby islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Still, the Japanese resisted, and Allied leaders contemplated a land invasion, to begin in November. The invasion, they calculated, would cost as many as 1 million American lives, with untold casualties on the among the Japanese.

Instead of invading Japan, the United States unleashed the results of the Manhattan Project, which it had begun secretly 1942. Before dropping the atomic bomb, the Allies issued one more plea for the Japanese to surrender, and when they did not, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Despite the devastation wrought by this, the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare, the Japanese still refused to surrender. On August 9, the United States dropped a second bomb, this one on Nagasaki. At this point, Hirohito urged the nation's leaders to surrender. Tojo and several others committed suicide, and on September 2, 1945, Japanese representatives formally surrendered.

A War of Information, Images, and Ideas

The Manhattan Project was the most dramatic expression of a theme that ran through the entire conflict, that ideas and information often contribute as much to a successful military effort as do troops and weapons. Though the First World War brought airplanes into widespread use, along with tanks, and resulted in the popularization of radio soon afterward, the Second World War saw the first true marriage of science and defense to yield the military-industrial complex familiar today. Its legacy is evident in the many technological innovations that were either introduced during its course, or very soon after the fighting ended. In addition to nuclear power and the missile, these include radar, computers, jet engines, and television.

The war also introduced modern concepts of covert and special operations, on the part of the OSS, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), military intelligence units, and special warfare units that included the Rangers and the precursors to the Navy SEALS of today. The Germans had their spies as well, some of whom even managed to infiltrate the United States, but their efforts in this regard were never as successful as those of the Allies.

Cryptology. In the cryptologic war, the Allies were the unquestioned victors. Perhaps the single greatest intelligence success of the war was the British deciphering of the Germans' secret system of communications. Early in the war, British and Polish intelligence officers obtained a German Enigma cipher machine, to which a team of mathematicians at Bletchley Park applied their expertise. The result was Ultra, the British system for reading the German ciphers.

Thanks to Ultra, the British knew many of the targets in advance during the Battle of Britain. In north Africa in 1942, Ultra helped Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery predict Rommel's actions. So vital was the Ultra secret that the British used it with the utmost of caution, careful not to act to often or too quickly on information it revealed for fear that this might tip off the Germans. Only in the 1970s did the world learn of the Ultra secret.

American successes included the breaking of the Japanese RED cipher by the U.S. Navy, and the PURPLE cipher by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service prior to the war. During the war, the navy proved more successful at breaking the ciphers of its counterpart than did the army. Also notable was the American use of codetalkers transmitting enciphered messages in the Navajo Indian language, which made their transmissions indecipherable to the Japanese. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans scored any major cryptologic victory against the Allies.

Deception, secrets, and covert operations. The Allied invasion of Italy was accompanied by a number of behind-thescenes moves. Just before the invasion of Sicily, British naval intelligence obtained the body of a man who had recently died, and arranged for his body—clad in the uniform of a major in the Royal Marines—to wash up on a shore in Spain. On his person were documents laying out a British plan for an imminent invasion of the Balkans, information the British knew the Germans (who had numerous agents in Spain) would acquire. The ruse, known as Operation Mincemeat (subject of the 1953 film The Man Who Never Was) left the Germans unprepared for the subsequent invasion.

The surrender of most of Italy by Marshal Pietro Badoglio appears to have been the result of behind-thescenes talks with the Allies. During the moments of turmoil in the capital as Mussolini's government was over-thrown, a British intelligence officer provided Badoglio with a safe haven. In 1945, Allen Dulles—future director of the CIA—secretly negotiated with SS General Karl Wolff for the surrender of all German forces in Italy.

Another deception campaign, known as Bodyguard, preceded the Normandy invasion of June 1944. Using German agents in England who had been turned by British intelligence, the Allies conducted an elaborate campaign designed to convince the Germans that they were attacking anywhere but Normandy. Radio transmission from Scotland seemed to indicate a thrust toward Norway, while the appearance of Montgomery near Gibraltar suggested an invasion through Spain. (In fact "Montgomery" was actually a British actor who resembled the general.)

The Normandy deception included the creation an entire unit, the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), from thin air. FUSAG, which was supposed to be landing at Calais rather than Normandy, had a putative commander in General George S. Patton, fresh from victories in North Africa and Italy. Large tent encampments created the illusion of massive troop strength, while fake tanks, landing craft, and other equipment gave indications that the Allies were gearing up for a major operation. So, too, did radio communications from Patton's headquarters, as well as a heavy Allied bombing campaign over Calais in the days leading up to June 6. The ploy succeed in diverting 19 German divisions from Normandy.

The race to develop an atomic bomb involved several covert operations, including British sabotage directed against Nazi weapons materials in Norway, as well as an intelligence-gathering operation known as Alsos. The name was chosen by Major General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, because alsos is Greek for "grove." Members of the Alsos team, which included both U.S. Army and Navy personnel, scoured research laboratories in Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium for information on Axis bomb-making efforts.

Propaganda. At the simplest level of ideas, propaganda—though a feature of wars since the beginning of history—played a particularly significant role in the Second World War. Its importance to the Nazis is symbolized by the fact that in his final hours, Hitler had Goebbels beside him. Goebbels, who like Mussolini was a former Communist, had powerful instincts for making appeals to the populace, using all available media, including print, radio, and film. (The Nazis even conducted early experiments with television.)

Films by Leni Riefenstahl in the 1930s romanticized the myth of Aryan superiority, while cruder propaganda from Goebbels' office excited hatred toward Jews. During the war, Axis powers on both sides of the world made considerable use of radio through broadcasters such as Lord Haw Haw (a.k.a. William Joyce), Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars, an American), and a number of Asian females collectively dubbed "Tokyo Rose" by U.S. forces. The Allies conducted a propaganda war of their own, through radio broadcasts and the efforts of the U.S. Office of War Information and the Voice of America.

Further Reading

Books

Breuer, William B. Undercover Tales of World War II. New York: J. Wiley, 1999.

Farago, Ladislas. The Game of the Foxes: The Untold Story of German Espionage in the United States and Great Britain during World War II. City: Publisher, 1971.

Persico, Joseph E. Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. New York: Random House, 2001.

Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

West, Nigel. A Thread of Deceit: Espionage Myths of World War II. New York: Random House, 1985.

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

World War II began in 1939 as a conflict between Germany and the combined forces of France and Great Britain, and eventually included most of the nations of the world before it ended in August 1945. It caused the greatest loss of life and material destruction of any war in history, killing twenty-five million military personnel and thirty million civilians. By the end of the war, the United States had become the most powerful nation in the world, the possessor of atomic weapons. The war also increased the power of the Soviet Union, which gained control of Eastern Europe and part of Germany.

World War II was caused in large part by the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy and by the domination of the military in Japan. In Germany, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist or Nazi party, became chancellor in 1933. Within a short time, he had assumed dictatorial rule. Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty, which had ended World War I and disarmed Germany, and proceeded with a massive buildup of the German armed forces. Hitler believed that the German people were a master race that needed more territory. His first aim was to reunite all Germans living under foreign governments. In 1936 he reclaimed the Rhineland from French control and in 1938 annexed Austria to Germany. That same year he took over the German areas of Czechoslovakia and in 1939 annexed all of that country.

Though France and Great Britain had acquiesced to Germany's actions, they soon realized that Hitler had greater ambitions. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. With the invasion of Poland, World War II had begun. Poland was quickly defeated, and for a period of time a "phony war" ensued, with neither side making any military moves. This changed in the spring of 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, Belgium, and France. Again, German military forces overwhelmed their opponents, leaving Great Britain the only outpost against Germany.

During the 1930s the United States government had avoided involvement in European affairs. This traditional policy of "isolationism" became more problematic after the war began in 1939. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved away from an isolationist foreign policy and sought to assist Great Britain and France, while keeping the United States a neutral party to the conflict. This led to the repeal of the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act of 1939 (22 U.S.C.A. § 441), allowing the sale of military equipment to Great Britain and France.

After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Roosevelt became even more determined to assist Great Britain. He persuaded Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 (55 Stat. 31). Lend-Lease provided munitions, food, machinery, and services to Great Britain and other Allies without immediate cost.

U.S. interests in the Pacific were threatened by the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 signaled a new direction for Japan. Its military leaders, who dominated the government, sought to conquer large parts of Asia. In 1936 and 1937 Japan signed treaties with Germany and Italy (headed by dictator Benito Mussolini), creating what was called the Axis powers.

In 1937 Japan began an undeclared war against China. When Japan occupied Indochina in 1940, the United States stopped exporting gasoline, iron, steel, and rubber to Japan and froze all Japanese assets in the United States. In the fall of 1941, the extremist Japanese general Hideki Tōjō became leader of the cabinet. His cabinet began planning a war with the United States, as Japan realized it could not attain its imperial goals without defeating the United States.

The devastating Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, resulted in a U.S. declaration of war on Japan the following day. Germany and Italy, as part of the Axis powers alliance, then declared war on the United States.

The attack on the United States led to severe consequences for Japanese Americans. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9,066, directing the forced relocation of all 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast (70,000 of them U.S. citizens) to detention camps in such places as Jerome, Arkansas, and Heart Lake, Wyoming. Roosevelt issued the order after military leaders, worried about a Japanese invasion, argued that national security required such drastic action.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the forced relocation in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193, 89 L. Ed. 194 (1944). Justice Hugo L. Black noted that curtailing the rights of a single racial group is constitutionally suspect but that in this case military necessity justified the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. In retrospect, historians have characterized the removal and detention as the most drastic invasion of individual civil rights by the government in U.S. history.

The United States joined Great Britain and the Soviet Union in an alliance against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allies determined that priority would be given to defeating Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, just days before Germany's invasion of Poland. In June 1941 Hitler renounced the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. The Russian front would prove to be the bloodiest of the war, killing millions of civilians as well as millions of soldiers.

The Allies stemmed Axis advances in 1942. On the Russian front, the Soviet troops won a decisive victory at the Battle of Stalingrad. Following this battle, Soviet forces began the slow process of pushing the German army back toward its border. The U.S. Army achieved success in routing German forces from North Africa in 1942, paving the way for the invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943.

On June 6, 1944 ("D-Day"), the Allies mounted an amphibious landing on France's Normandy coast. The D-Day invasion surprised the German military commanders, who did not expect an invasion at this location. In a short time, U.S. and British forces were able to break out of the coastal areas and move into France. U.S. forces liberated Paris on August 25.

Germany could not succeed in fighting a two-front war. By early 1945 it was clear that an Allied victory was inevitable. On April 30, 1945, with the Russian army entering Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. On May 7 Germany unconditionally surrendered.

The war in the Pacific was primarily a conflict between Japanese and U.S. forces. The U.S. Navy inflicted substantial damage to the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Following Midway, the U.S. forces began invading Japanese-held islands in the South Pacific. This was a slow and costly process because Japanese soldiers were taught to fight to the death. However, the process proved successful. From 1942 to 1945, U.S. forces invaded numerous islands, the last being Okinawa, which is close to the Japanese mainland. Despite fierce resistance, the U.S. forces prevailed.

In 1945 the U.S. military prepared for the invasion of Japan. Though a Japanese defeat appeared inevitable, an invasion would result in heavy U.S. casualties. President Harry S. Truman, who had become president in April 1945 after the death of President Roosevelt, approved the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. On August 6 the city of Hiroshima was bombed, and three days later Nagasaki was devastated by another nuclear attack. Japan opened peace negotiations on August 10 and surrendered on September 2.

Wartime conferences among Roosevelt, Stalin, and British prime minister Winston Churchill led to the creation of the United Nations in 1945. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, the leaders agreed to divide Germany, as well as the city of Berlin, into four zones of occupation, controlled by forces from the three countries and France. Germany was to have its industrial base rebuilt, but its armaments industries were to be abolished or confiscated. The leaders also approved the creation of an international court to try German leaders as war criminals, setting the stage for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet army's occupation of Eastern Europe soon gave way to the creation of Communist governments under the influence of the Soviet Union.

See: Communism; Hirohito; Japanese American Evacuation Cases; Korematsu v. United States; Tokyo Trial; United Nations; War Crimes; Yalta Agreement.

A war fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — and the Allies, including France and Britain, and later the Soviet Union and the United States. The war began when the Germans, governed by the Nazi party, invaded Poland in September 1939 (see invasion of Poland). Germany then conquered France, using blitzkrieg tactics, and forced a desperate British withdrawal at Dunkirk. The Germans tried to wear down the British by heavy bombing, but the British withstood the attacks (see Battle of Britain). The Soviet Union signed a treaty with Adolf Hitler but entered the war on the side of the Allies after Germany invaded Russia in 1941. The United States was drawn into the war in 1941, when the Japanese suddenly attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Japan made extensive conquests in east Asia but was checked by American victories at the Battle of Midway Island and elsewhere. The German invasion of Russia was halted at the Battle of Stalingrad. Allied forces took much of Italy in 1943, forcing its surrender. Beginning with the invasion of Normandy in 1944 (see D-Day), the Allies liberated France from German occupation and pressed on in Europe, defeating the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and elsewhere. Germany surrendered in May 1945 (see V-E Day). The war in the Pacific ended in September 1945 (see V-J Day), after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the aftermath of World War II, more constructive and less punitive measures were applied to the defeated countries than after World War I (see Marshall Plan, Nuremberg trials, and United Nations).

The political leaders of the war included Winston Churchill of Britain, Adolf Hitler of Germany, Benito Mussolini of Italy, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. The military leaders included Charles De Gaulle of France; Bernard Montgomery of Britain; Hermann Goering and Erwin Rommel of Germany; Tito of Yugoslavia; and Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, William Halsey, Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz, and George Patton of the United States.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)