[334] A Communist uprising in Greece was put down with Anglo-American support and the country remained aligned with the West. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and the delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, European Axis powers declared war on the United States, invasion of Germany by the Western Allies, peace treaty between Japan and the Allies, SovietJapanese Joint Declaration of 1956, unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government, radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe, secretly ordered a major build-up of the German navy, Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia, guaranteed their support for Polish independence, the last large operational unit of the Polish Army, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region, British discontent over the Norwegian campaign, to evacuate a significant number of Allied troops, Luftwaffe attacks on shipping and harbours, trade of American destroyers for British bases, Mediterranean and Middle East theatre of World War II, invaded and occupied the French possessions of Syria and Lebanon, culminated in armed clashes in January 1941, planning an invasion of the Soviet Far East, the Philippines (an American protectorate scheduled for independence in 1946), attack on the American fleets at Pearl Harbor, encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad, the German navy ravaged Allied shipping off the American Atlantic coast, deliver desperately needed supplies to the besieged Malta, Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, eliminate Japanese forces from the Aleutians, isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands, breach the Japanese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, neutralised the major Japanese base at Truk, attacked Soviet forces around the Kursk Bulge, May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became increasingly effective, series of attacks in Italy against the line at Monte Cassino, largely expelled Axis forces from Ukraine, an operation against Allied positions in Assam, India, increasingly successful guerrilla campaign, liberation of the capital city of Belgrade, offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands, a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes, American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe river, the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction, United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, industrial disarmament in Western Germany, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, List of war crimes committed during World War II, hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Forced labour under German rule during World War II, International Military Tribunal for the Far East, their execution by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, "In Many Ways, Author Says, Spanish Civil War Was 'The First Battle Of WWII', "The Spanish Civil War and the Coming of the Second World War", "German-American Relations Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", Why Japan and Russia never signed a WWII peace treaty, "Paris Peace Treaties failed to create a secure, peaceful and lasting world order", "The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939", "Nomonhan: The Second Russo-Japanese War", "Major international events of 1939, with explanation", "The Winter War When the Finns Humiliated the Russians", "Major international events of 1940, with explanation", "Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 19311941", "Japanese Policy and Strategy 1931 July 1941", "Diary: Hirohito prepared for U.S. war before Pearl Harbor attack", Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States, "The First Full Dress Debate over Strategic Deployment. In April, the Allies launched an operation to retake Western New Guinea. [63] The Poles refused to comply with the German demands, and on the night of 3031 August in a confrontational meeting with the British ambassador Nevile Henderson, Ribbentrop declared that Germany considered its claims rejected. [300] Chinese forces started a counterattack in the Battle of West Hunan that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945. "Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre". [70], On 8 September, German troops reached the suburbs of Warsaw. In March 1939, Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state, the Slovak Republic. [40][41] Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai, but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. [168], Since early 1941, the United States and Japan had been engaged in negotiations in an attempt to improve their strained relations and end the war in China. The tide of the war in Europe shifted with the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943). Explore five defining events that led to the conclusion of World War II on September 2, 1945. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies of World War I, such as France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Greece, gained territory, and new nation-states were created out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. [160], Chinese nationalist forces launched a large-scale counter-offensive in early 1940. The use of the jet aircraft was pioneered and, though late introduction meant it had little impact, it led to jets becoming standard in air forces worldwide. Pascale R . The Soviet Union also took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon line,[318] from which 2 million Poles were expelled;[317][319] north-east Romania,[320][321] parts of eastern Finland,[322] and the three Baltic states were annexed into the Soviet Union. World WarII changed the political alignment and social structure of the globe and set the foundation for the international order of the world's nations for the rest of the 20th century and into the present day. [279] By this point, the communist-led Partisans under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who had led an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the occupation since 1941, controlled much of the territory of Yugoslavia and engaged in delaying efforts against German forces further south. [51] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. [117], In early June 1940, the Italian Regia Aeronautica attacked and besieged Malta, a British possession. [201] These easy victories over the unprepared U.S. and European opponents left Japan overconfident, as well as overextended. [42][43], In March 1938, Nationalist Chinese forces won their first major victory at Taierzhuang, but then the city of Xuzhou was taken by the Japanese in May. [297], In the Pacific theatre, American forces accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of April 1945. The Nationalists won the civil war in April 1939; Franco, now dictator, remained officially neutral during World WarII but generally favoured the Axis. Materski and Szarota. [336] The long period of political tensions and military competition between them, the Cold War, would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race and number of proxy wars throughout the world. [277] The Soviet Red Army's strategic offensive in eastern Romania cut off and destroyed the considerable German troops there and triggered a successful coup d'tat in Romania and in Bulgaria, followed by those countries' shift to the Allied side. A few days later, the Soviets launched a massive assault against German-occupied Hungary that lasted until the fall of Budapest in February 1945. By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and occupy Poland. [329] The five permanent members remain so to the present, although there have been two seat changes, between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in 1971, and between the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. [35] The Soviet Union supported the existing government of the Spanish Republic. This, along with Germany's use of combined arms, were among the key elements of their highly successful blitzkrieg tactics across Poland and France. [433] Carriers were also more economical than battleships because of the relatively low cost of aircraft[434] and their not requiring to be as heavily armoured. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.[291]. [266] In May 1944, British and Indian forces mounted a counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma by July,[266] and Chinese forces that had invaded northern Burma in late 1943 besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina. [306], The call for unconditional surrender was rejected by the Japanese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms. The Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad,[217] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously. The main combatants were the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the Allies (France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China). Departmental Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. On May 8, 1945, World War II in Europe came to an end. Italy supported the Nationalists to a greater extent than the Nazis did: altogether Mussolini sent to Spain more than 70,000 ground troops and 6,000 aviation personnel, as well as about 720 aircraft. and fought Communist forces in Pingxingguan. World War Two officially came to an end on September 2, 1945, following the signing of the surrender documents by the Japanese emperor. Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 19411944), "Final Compensation Pending for Former Nazi Forced Laborers", "Japan's Atrocities of Conscripting and Abusing North China Draftees after the Outbreak of the Pacific War", "Indonesia: World War II and the Struggle For Independence, 194250; The Japanese Occupation, 194245", "The Vital Role Of Tanks In The Second World War", "The AK-47: the worlds favourite killing machine", "Deception for Defense of Information Systems: Analogies from Conventional Warfare", "Discovery and Development of Penicillin: International Historic Chemical Landmark", "The Volunteer Armies of Northeast China", "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments", "Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note", "Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943", "The Soviet-German War 194145 Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay", "August Storm: The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria", "The greatest military armada ever launched", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Atlas of the World Battle Fronts (July 1943 to August 1945), Records of World War II propaganda posters are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books, Maps of World War II in Europe at Omniatlas, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_War_II&oldid=1164051913, Buchanan, Andrew. [383], Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. By the 1950s, one-fifth of West Germans were refugees from the east. [391][392] The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million,[393] while figures for women raped by German soldiers in the Soviet Union go as far as ten million. September 2, 1945. [350] Italy also experienced an economic boom[351] and the French economy rebounded. On 22 June 1941, Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history. [154] This, as well as intelligence data which established that a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East would be sufficient to deter any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army,[155] allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on 5 December all along the front and pushed German troops 100250 kilometres (62155mi) west. In Asia, Japan termed nations under its occupation as being part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, essentially a Japanese hegemony which it claimed was for purposes of liberating colonised peoples. The 40,000,00050,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history. July 28, 1914 - November 11, 1918 Participants: Bulgaria France Germany Italy Japan Ottoman Empire Portugal Russia United Kingdom United States . Notable examples were the Allied decryption of Japanese naval codes[448] and British Ultra, a pioneering method for decoding Enigma benefiting from information given to the United Kingdom by the Polish Cipher Bureau, which had been decoding early versions of Enigma before the war. [131] On 31 July 1940, Hitler decided that the Soviet Union should be eliminated and aimed for the conquest of Ukraine, the Baltic states and Byelorussia. [147], By October, Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad[148] and Sevastopol continuing. After the fall of Nanking, tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by the Japanese. The Western Allies fought through several lines until reaching the main German defensive line in mid-November. During this period, the Japanese closed in on China, forcing them to seek war supplies from the US. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. [380][381] The most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered. The causes of World War II are debated, but contributing factors included the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, SovietJapanese border conflicts, the rise of fascism in Europe, and European tensions in the aftermath of World War I. [404] By the end of the war, most Soviet POWs liberated from Nazi camps and many repatriated civilians were detained in special filtration camps where they were subjected to NKVD evaluation, and 226,127 were sent to the Gulag as real or perceived Nazi collaborators. [116] Romania and Hungary later made major contributions to the Axis war against the Soviet Union, in Romania's case partially to recapture territory ceded to the Soviet Union. [290] On 4 February Soviet, British, and U.S. leaders met for the Yalta Conference. [284] In China, the Japanese had more successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August. [99][100] By successfully implementing new Blitzkrieg tactics, the Wehrmacht rapidly advanced to the Channel and cut off the Allied forces in Belgium, trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in a cauldron on the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. [208] The Americans planned a counter-attack against Japanese positions in the southern Solomon Islands, primarily Guadalcanal, as a first step towards capturing Rabaul, the main Japanese base in Southeast Asia. [236], After the Guadalcanal campaign, the Allies initiated several operations against Japan in the Pacific. [287], In the Pacific, U.S. forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. [68] The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country's economy and the war effort. [79][80][81] Finland refused to sign a similar pact and rejected ceding part of its territory to the Soviet Union. On September 25, 1939, Warsaw fell to the armies of Nazi Germany, presaging Poland's ultimate surrender. An attempt to advance into northern Germany spearheaded by a major airborne operation in the Netherlands failed. On 6 October, Hitler made a public peace overture to the United Kingdom and France but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. [88] Meanwhile, German-Soviet political rapprochement and economic co-operation[89][90] gradually stalled,[91][92] and both states began preparations for war. However, when Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, other European countries felt they had to act. The Red Army advanced from the east and effectively claimed all the territory under its control for the Soviet sphere. [181], Japan planned to seize European colonies in Asia to create a large defensive perimeter stretching into the Central Pacific. The formal surrender ceremony took place aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. [237] Soon after, the United States, with support from Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islander forces, began major ground, sea and air operations to isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands, and breach the Japanese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. In mid-February, after the Soviet push had tapered off, the Germans launched another attack on Kharkov, creating a salient in their front line around the Soviet city of Kursk. Hundreds of thousands were killed in firebombings of Japanese cities, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 knocked Japan out of the war. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. [310] On 15 August, the Emperor communicated this decision to the Japanese people through a speech broadcast on the radio (Gyokuon-hs, literally "broadcast in the Emperor's voice"). The Soviet Union and China are believed to have suffered the most total casualties, while an estimated 5,800,000 Poles died, which represents about 20 percent of Polands prewar population. Before taking effect, though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless. [85], In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the entire territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,[80] and the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. [110], In November 1939, the United States was taking measures to assist China and the Western Allies and amended the Neutrality Act to allow "cash and carry" purchases by the Allies. [260], On 27 January 1944, Soviet troops launched a major offensive that expelled German forces from the Leningrad region, thereby ending the most lethal siege in history. The end of the Holocaust is usually thought to be May 8, 1945, or VE . [367], An estimated 11[368] to 17million[369] civilians died as a direct or as an indirect result of Hitler's racist policies, including mass killing of around 6million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, at least 1.9million ethnic Poles[370][371] and millions of other Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and other ethnic and minority groups. American naval and amphibious forces also moved towards Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by the end of June. May 13, 1939 The St. Louis sails from Hamburg, Germany. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. [421] While the Allies' ability to out-produce the Axis is often attributed[by whom?] [123], By late March 1941, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact; however, the Yugoslav government was overthrown two days later by pro-British nationalists. After the horrors of World War I, no one wanted war. March 7. Follow the World War II timeline below to learn about major events at the end of September and the beginning of October in 1939. World War II: Summary, Combatants & Facts | HISTORY [135][189], On 1 January 1942, the Allied Big Four[190]the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and the United Statesand 22 smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations, thereby affirming the Atlantic Charter,[191] and agreeing not to sign a separate peace with the Axis powers. In all, the scale of human losses during World War II was vast. In August, Chinese communists launched an offensive in Central China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures in occupied areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists. [44][unreliable source?] ", Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk, L Deighton, Jonathan Cape, 1993, pp. [231] This attack was followed up shortly after by Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, which resulted in the region joining the Allies. On 30 April, the Reichstag was captured, signalling the military defeat of Nazi Germany,[294] and the Berlin garrison surrendered on 2 May. [212] The second was the insertion of irregular forces behind Japanese front-lines in February which, by the end of April, had achieved mixed results.

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