World War II, the largest and deadliest conflict in human history, involved more

than 50 nations and was fought on land, sea and air in nearly every part of the
world. Also known as the Second World War, it was caused in part by the
economic crisis of the Great Depression and by political tensions left unresolved
following the end of World War I.
The war began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and raged across the
globe until 1945, when Japan surrendered to the United States after atomic
bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of World War II, an
estimated 60 to 80 million people had died, including up to 55 million civilians,
and numerous cities in Europe and Asia were reduced to rubble.
Among the people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration
camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust.
The legacy of the war included the creation of the United Nations as a
peacekeeping force and geopolitical rivalries that resulted in the Cold War.
Leading up to World War II
Did WWI Lead to WWII?
The devastation of the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) had
greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues
left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In particular, political and economic
instability in Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms imposed
by the Versailles Treaty, fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and National
Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated as NSDAP in German and the Nazi
Party in English..
Did you know? As early as 1923, in his memoir and propaganda tract "Mein
Kampf" (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler had predicted a general European war that
would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."
After becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler swiftly consolidated power,
anointing himself Führer (supreme leader) in 1934. Obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” Hitler believed
that war was the only way to gain the necessary “Lebensraum,” or living space,
for the German race to expand. In the mid-1930s, he secretly began the
rearmament of Germany, a violation of the Versailles Treaty. After signing
alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union, Hitler sent troops to
occupy Austria in 1938 and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s
open aggression went unchecked, as the United States and Soviet Union were
concentrated on internal politics at the time, and neither France nor Britain (the
two other nations most devastated by the Great War) were eager for
confrontation.
Outbreak of World War II (1939)
In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-
Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris.
Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and
France had guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact
with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded
Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation
itself. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later,
France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II.
On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from
both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union
had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to
the Nonaggression Pact. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States
(Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-
Finnish War. During the six months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of
action on the part of Germany and the Allies in the west led to talk in the news
media of a “phony war.” At sea, however, the British and German navies faced off
in heated battle, and lethal German U-boat submarines struck at merchant
shipping bound for Britain, sinking more than 100 vessels in the first four months
of World War II.
World War II in the West (1940-41)
Lend-Lease Act
On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied
Denmark, and the war began in earnest. On May 10, German forces swept
through Belgium and the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or
lightning war. Three days later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Meuse River and
struck French forces at Sedan, located at the northern end of the Maginot Line, an
elaborate chain of fortifications constructed after World War I and considered an
impenetrable defensive barrier. In fact, the Germans broke through the line with
their tanks and planes and continued to the rear, rendering it useless. The British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated by sea from Dunkirk in late May, while
in the south French forces mounted a doomed resistance. With France on the
verge of collapse, Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini formed an alliance with
Hitler, the Pact of Steel, and Italy declared war against France and Britain on June
10.
On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal
Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights
later. France was subsequently divided into two zones, one under German
military occupation and the other under Petain’s government, installed at Vichy
France. Hitler now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive
advantage of being separated from the Continent by the English Channel.
To pave the way for an amphibious invasion (dubbed Operation Sea Lion),
German planes bombed Britain extensively beginning in September 1940 until
May 1941, known as the Blitz, including night raids on London and other
industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage. The Royal
Air Force (RAF) eventually defeated the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Battle
of Britain, and Hitler postponed his plans to invade. With Britain’s defensive
resources pushed to the limit, Prime Minister Winston Churchill began receiving
crucial aid from the U.S. under the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in early
1941.
Hitler vs. Stalin: Operation Barbarossa (1941-42)
By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German
troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April. Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans
was a precursor for his real objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast
territory would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed. The
other half of Hitler’s strategy was the extermination of the Jews from throughout
German-occupied Europe. Plans for the “Final Solution” were introduced around
the time of the Soviet offensive, and over the next three years more than 4
million Jews would perish in the death camps established in occupied Poland.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union,
codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Though Soviet tanks and aircraft greatly
outnumbered the Germans’, Russian aviation technology was largely obsolete,
and the impact of the surprise invasion helped Germans get within 200 miles of
Moscow by mid-July. Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the
next German advance until October, when it was stalled by a Soviet
counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather.
World War II in the Pacific (1941-43)
The Path to Pearl Harbor
With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation
capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late 1941 included an
expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial
holdings in the Far East. On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked
the major U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, taking the Americans
completely by surprise and claiming the lives of more than 2,300 troops. The
attack on Pearl Harbor served to unify American public opinion in favor of
entering World War II, and on December 8 Congress declared war on Japan with
only one dissenting vote. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared
war on the United States.
After a long string of Japanese victories, the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of
Midway in June 1942, which proved to be a turning point in the war. On
Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success
against Japanese forces in a series of battles from August 1942 to February 1943,
helping turn the tide further in the Pacific. In mid-1943, Allied naval forces began
an aggressive counterattack against Japan, involving a series of amphibious
assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. This “island-hopping”
strategy proved successful, and Allied forces moved closer to their ultimate goal
of invading the mainland Japan.
Toward Allied Victory in World War II (1943-45)
Battle of Stalingrad
In North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and
Germans by 1943. An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s
government fell in July 1943, though Allied fighting against the Germans in Italy
would continue until 1945.
On the Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942
ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest
combat of World War II. The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and
medical supplies, spelled the end for German troops there, and the last of them
surrendered on January 31, 1943.
On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allies began a massive invasion of
Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches
of Normandy, France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his
army into Western Europe, ensuring Germany’s defeat in the east. Soviet troops
soon advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler
gathered his forces to drive the Americans and British back from Germany in
the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945), the last major German
offensive of the war.
An intensive aerial bombardment in February 1945 preceded the Allied land
invasion of Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8,
Soviet forces had occupied much of the country. Hitler was already dead,
having died by suicide on April 30 in his Berlin bunker.
World War II Ends (1945)
At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S.
Truman (who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and
Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with
Germany. Post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be
controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and France. On the
divisive matter of Eastern Europe’s future, Churchill and Truman acquiesced to
Stalin, as they needed Soviet cooperation in the war against Japan.
Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945)
and Okinawa (April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of
Japan led Truman to authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon.
Developed during a top secret operation code-named The Manhattan Project,
the atomic bomb was unleashed on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in early August. On August 15, the Japanese government issued a
statement declaring they would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration,
and on September 2, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal
surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
African American Servicemen Fight Two Wars

The National Archives

A tank and crew from the 761st Tank Battalion in front of the Prince Albert
Memorial in Coburg, Germany, 1945.
World War II exposed a glaring paradox within the United States Armed Forces.
Although more than 1 million African Americans served in the war to defeat
Nazism and fascism, they did so in segregated units. The same discriminatory Jim
Crow policies that were rampant in American society were reinforced by the U.S.
military. Black servicemen rarely saw combat and were largely relegated to labor
and supply units that were commanded by white officers.
There were several African American units that proved essential in helping to win
World War II, with the Tuskegee Airmen being among the most celebrated. But
the Red Ball Express, the truck convoy of mostly Black drivers were responsible
for delivering essential goods to General George S. Patton’s troops on the front
lines in France. The all-Black 761st Tank Battalion fought in the Battle of the
Bulge, and the 92 Infantry Division, fought in fierce ground battles in Italy. Yet,
despite their role in defeating fascism, the fight for equality continued for African
American soldiers after the World War II ended. They remained in segregated
units and lower-ranking positions, well into the Korean War, a few years after
President Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the U.S. military in
1948.
World War II Casualties and Legacy
World War II proved to be the deadliest international conflict in history, taking the
lives of 60 to 80 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of
the Nazis during the Holocaust. Civilians made up an estimated 50-55 million
deaths from the war, while military comprised 21 to 25 million of those lost
during the war. Millions more were injured, and still more lost their homes and
property.
The legacy of the war would include the spread of communism from the Soviet
Union into eastern Europe as well as its eventual triumph in China, and the global
shift in power from Europe to two rival superpowers–the United States and the
Soviet Union–that would soon face off against each other in the Cold War.