World War Ⅱ

The Second World War developed, in part, from the resolution of the First World War. The peace conferences ending World War Ⅰ resulted in a victor’s peace, and the vanquished harbored a sense of unfair treatment.The worldwide economic depression that began in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s helped bring about totalitarian regimes in Italy, Japan, and Germany. When democracies could not agree on a forceful, common program to halt aggression, a worldwide war began in the late 1930s and expanded with the inclusion of the Soviet Union in June and the United States in December 1941. When the fighting finally stopped in September 1945, tens of millions of people had died worldwide, the great European colonial empires in Asia and Africa soon would end, and two great powers, the USSR and the U.S., found themselves unable to bridge the divide between them and plunged much of the world into a Cold War that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the apparent rise of a war against terrorism.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was established by the U.S.War Department in 1944 “for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attacks on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense” (http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm). The extract below describes the effects of dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Eyewitness accounts of the explosion all describe similar pictures. The bombs exploded with a tremendous flash of blue-white light, like a giant magnesium flare. The flash was of short duration and accompanied by intense glare and heat. It was followed by a tremendous pressure wave and the rumbling sound of the explosion.This sound is not clearly recollected by those who survived near the center of the explosion, although it was clearly heard by others as much as fifteen miles away. A huge snow-white cloud shot rapidly into the sky and the scene on the ground was obscured first by a bluish haze and then by a purplebrown cloud of dust and smoke.

Penetrating rays such as gamma-rays exposed Xray films stored in the basement of a concrete hospital almost a mile from ground zero. Symptoms of their effect on human beings close to the center of the explosion, who survived other effects thereof, were generally delayed for two or three days. The bone marrow and as a result the process of blood formation were affected. The white corpuscle count went down and the human processes of resisting infection were destroyed. Death generally followed shortly thereafter.

The majority of radiation cases who were at greater distances did not show severe symptoms until 1 to 4 weeks after the explosion. The first symptoms were loss of appetite, lassitude and general discomfort. Within 12 to 48 hours, fever became evident in many cases, going as high as 104 degrees to 105 degrees F., which in fatal cases continued until death. If the fever subsided, the patient usually showed a rapid disappearance of other symptoms and soon regained his feeling of good health. Other symptoms were loss of white blood corpuscles, loss of hair, and decrease in sperm count.

Source: United States strategic bombing survey, summary report (Pacific War) (pp. 22-23). (1946). Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Retrieved June 29, 2004, from http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm

The Build-Up to War

On 18 September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army claimed that Chinese bandits had blown up the main track of the South Manchurian Railway, and, within a year, Japan seized control of Manchuria and created a puppet regime, Manchukuo. Japan then moved into Inner Mongolia and Chinese provinces outside the Great Wall. In July 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, minor hostilities expanded into war. Within several years, the conflict settled into a strange, three-sided affair, as Chinese Nationalist forces, Chinese Communist guerrillas, and the Japanese army faced one another, with Japan largely controlling populated eastern China and the Chang (Yangzi) valley, the Communists in their base area at Yanan, and the Nationalists at Qongqing in Sichuan.

Japanese aggression in Manchuria may have encouraged other dictators to disregard the League of Nations and to challenge the entire Versailles Peace Treaty structure. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) became chancellor of Germany, and he expanded the army and navy, established an air force, and reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland without serious protest from France or Great Britain. In March 1938, Hitler forced a unification of Germany and Austria, the Anschluss, and in September 1938 signed a peace accord with France and Great Britain that handed him the Sudeten-land of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, German forces seized Memel in Lithuania and took control of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. During the summer of 1939, France and Great Britain approached the Soviet Union to assure Poland’s territorial integrity, but the USSR shocked the world when it signed a treaty with Nazi Germany in late August.

The Japanese attack plan on Pearl Harbor launched on December 7, 1941.

Hostilities Begin

Hitler turned to war. On 1 September 1939, the Germany army unleashed a blitzkrieg against Poland, crushing the Polish army in three weeks. After a winter pause, Germany attacked Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, securing Norwegian ports and Swedish iron ore shipments. On 10 May 1940, Germany threatened a wheeling movement through the Low Countries and then struck through the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest, unleashing its panzer forces behind the advancing allies, driving in several weeks to the English Channel. Only the valiant effort of British seamen lifting more than 300,000 British and Allied soldiers from Dunkirk prevented a complete German victory. Germany turned south against France and forced the French surrender. Hitler apparently wanted to invade Great Britain, in Operation Sea Lion, and the Luftwaffe fought for control over the skies of Britain. Germany’s air force was designed for tactical support of advancing ground forces and not for a strategic air campaign, and changed objectives too often from coastal radar stations to fighter air bases to industrial factories, to terrorizing cities, so by late summer 1940 the air offensive had failed. Strangely, from late summer 1940 until spring 1941, the German army launched no new offensives, and perhaps this represented a major opportunity lost.

Germany next turned east. On 7 April 1941, Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, and quickly conquered both countries. On 22 June 1941, Hitler sent more than 3 million German troops, 3,300 tanks, 7,700 artillery pieces, 2,500 planes, and forces from satellite countries plunging into the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Germany lacked accurate information on its enemy and greatly underestimated the challenge. But, in early summer, it appeared Germany would land the knockout blow, as its Army Group North drove on Leningrad, Army Group Center pulled off several huge encirclements of Soviet troops on the way to Moscow, and Army Group South neared Kiev. In late summer, the troops rested, and Hitler ordered the panzer forces of Army Group Center to turn north and south to help these peripheral drives. Turning south, tank forces of Heinz Guderian helped surround 665,000 Soviet troops around Kiev, the largest prisoner-of-war capture in history. When Germany resumed the advance on Moscow, the Soviet Union was ready. Operation Typhoon failed within sight of the Kremlin and the Soviets counterattacked, catching the German army desperately unprepared. When the Soviet attack petered out in late winter, Germany had suffered grievous losses, and it seemed the Soviet Union could survive.

A no parking sign posted by American forces in Rome during World War Ⅱ.

War in the Pacific

Meanwhile, Japan had struck Pearl Harbor, and begun a general offensive in East Asia and the Pacific. The Battle of Nomonhan (Khalkin Gol) in August 1939 caused Japan to look south for raw materials, and Japanese military leaders settled on a centrifugal offensive centered on the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked, and gained a series of striking victories, including capturing Hong Kong, the Malay Peninsula and the British stronghold of Singapore, the Mariana and Gilbert Islands, the Philippines, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, and other island groups to secure a vast resource area and territory behind which to defend these gains.

However, Japanese leaders suffered from “victory disease,” and, instead of building up their defenses in depth to withstand the American counterattack, they continued their offensive. They tried to isolate Australia and threaten India. The result was the flawed Japanese attack against Midway in early June 1942, which led to the destruction of four fleet carriers, fatally weakening the Japanese navy.

Russia Fights Back

Hitler returned to the offensive on the eastern front in summer 1942, but only had strength to attack to the south, aiming for Stalingrad and Soviet oil facilities by the Caspian coast. The distances exceeded German logistical capacity, and General Friedrich Paulus made a fateful decision to commit the German Sixth Army to a fight for Stalingrad. Under General Vasili Chuikov, the Soviet Sixty-second Army engaged in a valiant, desperate defense featuring house-to-house and even floor-to-floor resistance.

As the battle for Stalingrad raged from summer into the fall of 1942, General, later Marshal, Georgi Zhukov planned for a riposte, positioning vast Soviet forces on the vulnerable flanks of the German position at Stalingrad; the Soviets intended to crash through Romanian and Hungarian positions, race around the German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army, and effect a double envelopment. The Soviets struck on 12 November, and several days later the spearheads met at Kalach and cut off the Germans; in early February 1943, the last survivors surrendered. The Soviets followed this victory with an offensive that pushed the Germans out of Caucasia.

When the spring thaw halted operations, there was a bulge into German defenses around Kursk, and Hitler planned for a double envelopment to destroy Soviet positions after which, presumably, he would go on the defensive. But Hitler delayed the start of Operation Citadel many times, waiting for the new, heavy German tanks, and this delay allowed Zhukov to plan for the expected German advance. The greatest tank battle in history began on 5 July 1943, and the German pincer effort from the north quickly stalled; however the attack from the south, featuring the cream of the German ground forces, made some headway before Hitler suspended offensive operations owing to the Allied invasion of Sicily. Thereafter, the Soviets seized the initiative and by early fall 1943 freed the eastern Ukraine of German forces, and continued advancing into winter 1943 into the western Ukraine, creating a huge bulge on the southern flank of German Army Group Center.

The force and space ratios on the eastern front clearly favored the Soviet Union. Had Germany not attacked at Kursk and had it dedicated its limited productive capacity to defense, German tactical superiority might have withstood Soviet logistical superiority. But Hitler threw away precious panzers and artillery at Kursk, and the Soviets halted operations only when their supply lines ran out.

On 20 June 1944, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration. The Soviet military achieved a great surprise, fooling German commanders in the east into believing that the attack would go south, so the Germans concentrated their limited panzer resources there, largely leaving Army Group Center without tanks. The Soviets attacked, and surged past German positions before the infantry could react or retreat. The advance carried from pre-1939 Russia all the way to the Vistula River and Warsaw in August, when Soviet forces outran their supply lines and halted.

Allied Actions in the Air and at Sea

Meanwhile, on other fronts, the Axis powers retreated.To respond to Soviet calls for a “second front,” the United States and Great Britain opened a strategic bombing campaign. Before the development of long-range fighters, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, bombing in daylight, suffered heavy losses, while the nighttime Royal Air Force did little damage against German industrial targets. However, Hitler wanted to maintain home front support, and gradually withdrew fighter squadrons from the eastern front and later from France and Italy to defend Germany. After mid-1943 and the appearance of long-range American fighter planes, the outcome began to favor the Allies.

Similarly, the United States won the Battle of the Atlantic. At first, German U-boats enjoyed great success against the vulnerable American east coast, and later in Caribbean and South Atlantic waters. Soon the United States constructed more cargo ships than the Germans could sink, and also built many escort carriers, carrying only twenty airplanes, but the U.S. Tenth Fleet, organized around these baby carriers and their support ships, hounded German submarines, denying them open areas in which to operate and to surface to recharge batteries. The Allies sank more than 80 percent of German submarines.

Deciding on D-Day

In the extract below, Dwight D. Eisenhower describes how June 6th came to be the date for the invasion of Normandy.

When the conference started the first report given us by Group Captain Stagg and the Meteorologic Staff was that the bad conditions predicted the day before for the coast of France were actually prevailing there and that if we had persisted in the attempt to land on June 5 a major disaster would almost surely have resulted. This they probably told us to inspire more confidence in their next astonishing declaration, which was that by the following morning a period of relatively good weather, heretofore completely unexpected, would ensure, lasting probably thirtysix hours. The longterm prediction was not good but they did give us assurance that this short period of calm weather would intervene between the exhaustion of the storm we were then experiencing and the beginning of the next spell of really bad weather.

The prospect was not bright because of the possibility that we might land the first several waves successfully and then find later build-up impracticable, and so have to leave the isolated attacking forces easy prey to German counteraction. However, the consequences of the delay justified great risk and I quickly announced the decision to go ahead with the attack on June 6. The time was then 4:15 A.M., June 5. No one present disagreed and there was a definite brightening of faces as, without a further word, each went off to his respective post of duty to flash out to his command the messages that would set the whole host in motion.

Source: Eisenhower, D. D. (1948). Crusade in Europe (p. 250). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

The War on the Ground

Finally, the Western Allies began to contest the German army. In November 1942, they launched Operation Torch, against French Northwest Africa to complement the British Eighth Army’s attack on Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps positions near El Alamein in the Western Desert of Egypt. By early May 1943 they forced the Axis surrender in Africa. On July 10, they launched Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, and after a six-week campaign crossed into Italy. The Italian government surrendered in September, and most Italian army divisions melted away. The Germans under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring defended well, and progress up the Italian peninsula was slow and costly, but the drain on German resources meant that German commanders could not count on reinforcements from other theaters. On 6 June 1944, the Allies launched Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, commanded by U.S. army general Dwight Eisenhower. Three airborne divisions landed during the night, and five infantry divisions assaulted five beaches, Gold, Sword, Juno, Omaha, and Utah. Despite the difficulty of the hedgerows in Normandy, the Allies brought men and equipment ashore in the expanding beachhead. In late July 1944, the U.S. army launched Operation Cobra; as American forces moved down the Cotentin Peninsula to Avranches and broke out and around the German defense, the U.S. Third Army under General George Patton became operational, and it quickly spread west into the Brittany peninsula and east toward the Seine above Paris. German troops were surrounded near Falaise, and an invasion in southern France, Operation Dragoon, sent American and Free French troops up the Rhone River Valley to meet Patton’s forces near Dijon, cutting off German forces in France.

Charles de Gaulle inspects troops in North Africa after the region was freed from German control by American and British forces.

After Midway, the United States seized the initiative against Japan. At first, it was the desperate fighting on Guadalcanal from August 1942 to February 1943, and then the U.S. advanced on two axes. Admiral Chester Nimitz led the navy advance to the Gilbert Islands and Tarawa in November 1943, to the Marshall Islands and Kwajalein in February 1944, and then to the Marianas in June 1944, and the invasions of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian along with the Battle of the Philippine Sea, also called the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Army general Douglas MacArthur commanded a mixed force that moved up the Solomon Islands chain and leapfrogged Japanese strongpoints on the New Guinea coast, while isolating the 100,000-man Japanese Army in Rabaul in New Britain. In October 1944, MacArthur invaded the Philippines, although fighting would continue there until war’s end. Meanwhile, the Central Pacific offensive moved to Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands in January 1945 and Okinawa in the Ryukyus in April 1945.

The attack on the Philippines cut off Japanese forces in Southeast Asia, and an Anglo-Indian offensive pushed the Japanese through Burma, though progress, owing to the difficult terrain, was slow. Meanwhile, Chinese government forces managed to occupy a great many Japanese divisions while conserving strength for the expected renewal of the civil war with the Communists.

Victory in Europe

In fall 1944, the pressure on Germany continued. Strategic bombing of Germany caused many casualties, although Albert Speer achieved a production miracle for war goods.The Red Army paused in the center, sweeping into the Balkans and trapping the Germans along the Baltic. By December 1944, the Soviets were at the 1939 German-Polish border and near Budapest in Hungary waiting to resume the offensive. In the west, Eisenhower ordered a halt in operations for winter, owing to supply difficulties. In late December 1944, Hitler launched a desperate gamble, an attack against weak American forces in the Ardennes, hoping to drive toward Antwerp, cut off the British, and force the Americans to surrender. But the German attack lacked sufficient fuel reserves; the Americans, especially around Bastogne, defended fiercely, and when skies cleared Allied airpower battered German formations. As the Soviets launched a winter offensive, the Allies drove to the Rhine and in March 1945 crossed, first at Remagen, and then along the upper Rhine and finally to the north. Meanwhile, the Red Army drove on Berlin, and Soviet forces under Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Koniev engaged in a race to Berlin, which was won by Zhukov’s men at terrible cost. In late April elements of the U.S. and Red armies met at Torgau on the Elbe, and Germany was divided. Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Germany, and on 7 May, German commanders surrendered to Eisenhower in Rheims, France, followed on 8 May 1945 with a surrender to Soviet commanders in Berlin.

Japan Surrenders

The Japanese continued to resist, and American experts predicted a bloody and costly attack on the Japanese home islands. However, in July 1945, at Alamagordo, New Mexico, scientists exploded the first atomic bomb, and several weeks later the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6) and one on Nagasaki (August 9), compelling Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 in Tokyo Bay. World War Ⅱ had ended.

Charles M. Dobbs

See also American Empire; Churchill, Winston; Fascism; Genocide; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; United Nations

【Famous sayings】：

The German invasion of Czechoslovakia is necessary to safeguard the human rights of its Sudetengermans · Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)

I, I was France, the state, the government. I, I spoke in the name of France. I, I was the independence and sovereignty of France. · Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries. · Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

【Further Reading】：

Crozier, A. J. (1997). The causes of the Second World War. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Delaney, J. (1996). The Blitzkrieg campaigns: Germany’s “Lightning War” strategy in action. New York: Sterling.

Donnelly, M. (1999). Britain in the Second World War. New York: Routledge.

Dupuy, T. N., & Martell, P. (1982). Great battles on the eastern front: The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Glantz, D. M. (2001). Barbarossa: Hitler’s invasion of Russia, 1941. Stroud, UK: Tempus.

Glantz, D. M., & House, J. M. (1995). When titans clashed: How the red army stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Hart, B. H. L. (1971). History of the Second World War. New York: Putnam.

Howard, M. E. (1968). The Mediterranean strategy in the Second World War. New York: Praeger.

Hoyt, E. P. (1993). 199 days: The battle of Stalingrad. New York: Tor.

Iriye, A. (1987). The origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. New York: Longman.

James, D. C., & Wells, A. S. (1995). From Pearl Harbor to V-J day: The American armed forces in World War II. Chicago: Ivan Dee.

Keegan, J. (1990). The Second World War. New York: Penguin Books.

Kitchen, M. (1990). A world in flames: A short history of the Second World War in Europe and Asia, 1939-1945. New York: Longman.

Levine, A. J. (1995). The Pacific war: Japan versus the Allies. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Morison, S. E. (1963). The two-ocean war: A short history of the United States Navy in the Second World War. Boston: Little, Brown.

Overy, R. (1995). Why the Allies won. London: Jonathan Cape.

Smith, E. D. (1979). Battle for Burma. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Spector, R. H. (1985). Eagle against the sun: The American war with Japan. New York: Free Press.

Tucker, S. C. (2004). The Second World War. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Weinberg, G. L. (1994). A world at arms: A global history of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Williamson, M., & Millett, A. R. (2000). A war to be won: Fighting in the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Wynn, K. (1997). U-Boat operations of the Second World War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.

Zapantis, A. L. (1987). Hitler’s Balkan campaign and the invasion of the USSR. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ziemke, E. F. (1968). Stalingrad to Berlin: The German defeat in the east. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Ziemke, E. F., & Bauer, M. F. (1987). Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the east. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.