World War 2 was the most deadly conflict in human history, a global war in the mid-20th Century lasting from 1939-1945 (though some regional conflicts that became part of World War 2 started earlier than that). The conflict involved the vast majority of nations in the world, who essentially divided up into two camps knows as the Allies and the Axis. The major participants of World War 2 were in a state of ‘total war’, putting their entire economic, industrial and scientific capabilities behind the war effort and blurring the distinction between military and civilian resource.
Between 50 million and 85 million people died, including 6 million
Jews in the genocide known as The Holocaust, mass Japanese war atrocities against the Chinese, a German-Russian bloodbath on the eastern front, the bombing of civilian population centres by all sides, and around 250,000 killed in the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and thus far only use of nuclear weapons in war. World War 2 was the darkest period of human history, and it is all so staggeringly recent. So how did it happen?
Discontent and nationalism had been brewing in Central Europe, particularly Germany, since the end of World War 1. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement seized power in Italy in the 1920s, repressing socialism and liberalism and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy aimed to re-position Italy as a world power. Inspired, Adolph Hitler established the Nazi Party as a fascist force in Germany, sweeping to power and establishing a totalitarian regime in Germany in the 1930s – complete with sinister racial undertones about establishing a German ‘master race’. Germany and Italy supported the fascist nationalists to victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 and both began to make tentative land-grabs which the ineffective League of Nations organisation (the forerunner of the U.N.) did little to censure. America, burned from its costly involvement in World War 1, had vowed to remain neutral and not again become entangled in the affairs of Europe. On the other side of the world, Japan was seeking to assert its dominance over Asia, invading mainland China.
So, China and Japan were already at war by 1937 but World War 2 is generally acknowledged to have started in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, causing France and the UK to declare war on Germany. From 1939-1941, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (the Axis) together conquered and subdued much of Central Europe (including France) and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union to divide up much of Eastern Europe between them. The UK and its Commonwealth allies were the only remaining opposition to the Axis powers and would likely have fallen to defeat had two events not occurred in 1941 – first, Germany taking the disastrous decision to double-cross and invade Russia, which tied down Axis forces in a bloody conflict for the rest of the war and second, Japan formally joining the Axis in 1941 and attacking territories in the Pacific, including the Pearl Harbor US naval base in Hawaii.
Japan’s 1941 attack formally brought America into the war on the side of the Allies and the tide of battle began to turn. While America battled Japan in the Pacific in 1942, the British rallied to defeat the Germans in North Africa. The Russians began to win against the Germans and push them back on the eastern front. In 1943, Allied forces (UK, US & Canada) invaded Italy, leading to the Italian surrender the following year. Germany began to retreat on both the western and eastern fronts, losing former Axis countries back to the Allies – including France, which the Western Allies re-took at the Normandy Landings in 1944 – while Japan began to lose momentum against both the Americans and the Chinese.
World War 2 ended in 1945 when the US, UK & France invaded Germany from the west and Russia invaded Germany from the east, forcing its unconditional surrender. In the Pacific, the US took the decision to drop two nuclear bombs, newly-invented weapons of mass destruction, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 250,000, bringing about Japan’s unconditional surrender, and ensuring total Allied victory over the Axis Powers.
Following the conclusion of World War 2, the United Nations organisation was established to promote international co-operation, maintain peace and security, and prevent another world war from ever occurring. The ‘great powers’ who won the war (the US, USSR, UK, China & France) became the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and remain so to this day.
In the aftermath of the war, the true extent of war atrocities committed by both sides on civilians became clear: bombings, concentration camps, slave labour, exterminations and, most starkly of all, the Nazi racial genocide committed against the Jews now known as the Holocaust. The U.N. drafted and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure that such inhumanities as occurred during World War 2 could never be allowed to happen again.
To learn more about the Holocaust, jump to Chapter 16: Holocaust
To learn more about Nuclear Weapons, jump to to Chapter 17: Nuclear Weapons
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