World War II (Overview)

Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931, capturing it from the Chinese. Two years later in 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Germany began to rearm and to pursue a new nationalist foreign policy. By 1938, Hitler was starting to make moves to expand Germany eastwards.

In July 1937, Japan launched a large-scale invasion of mainland China, beginning with the bombing of Shanghai and Guangzhou and followed by the Nanking massacre in December.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Germany — and to a somewhat lesser extent, Italy — increasingly became more aggressive in their foreign policies.

The British government under Neville Chamberlain however, regarded the Soviet Union as a greater threat to Europe. The United Kingdom and France eventually adopted a policy of appeasement, hoping to maintain a strong, anti-communist Germany to block Soviet expansion.

Finally, in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland in cooperation with the Soviet Union, and Europe was once again at war.

Initially, the French and British did not declare war against Germany, instead they tried to persuade Hitler through diplomacy, but Hitler did not respond. The United Kingdom and France then declared war, but during the winter of 1939–1940, there was little fighting done as neither side was willing to engage the other directly. This period is often referred to as the Phony War.

In the spring of 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, followed by France and the Low Countries in early summer. Italy also declared war against Britain and France in June 1940.

An attack on the United Kingdom was then engaged, with the Germans attempting to cut the island off from vitally needed supplies and obtain air superiority in order to enable a sea borne invasion.

This sea borne invasion never happened, but the Germans continued to attack the British mainland throughout the war. Unable to engage German forces on the European continent, the United Kingdom instead concentrated on combating German and Italian forces in the Mediterranean Basin.

They had limited success however, as they failed to prevent the Axis' conquest of the Balkans and were stalemated in the Western Desert Campaign.

The British had greater success in the theater of the Mediterranean Sea, dealing severe damage to the Italian Navy, and inflicting the first major defeat on Germany at the Battle of Britain.

The extent of the war increased in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, forcing them into an alliance with the United Kingdom. The German attack was initially highly successful, overrunning great tracts of Soviet territory, but by winter, it had begun to stall.

After invading mainland China and French Indochina in 1940, Japan was subjected to increasing economic sanctions by the United States, Great Britain and Netherlands. The Japanese were attempting to reduce these sanctions through diplomatic negotiations. These negotiations did not go well, and in December 1941 the war expanded once more when Japan launched nearly simultaneous attacks against the United States and British assets in Southeast Asia. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany also declared war on the United States. This brought the United States and Japan into the greater conflict and turned the previously separate Asian and European wars into a single global one.

Although Axis forces continued to make gains, in 1942 the tide began to turn. Japan suffered its first major defeat against American forces in the Battle of Midway, where four of Japan's aircraft carriers were destroyed. German forces in Africa were being pushed back by Anglo-American forces, and Germany’s renewed summer offensive in the Soviet Union had ground to a halt.

This was followed In 1943 by a German defeat in which they suffered devastating losses to the Soviets at Stalingrad, and then again at the Battle of Kursk, widely considered the greatest tank battle in military history. German forces were expelled from Africa, and Allied forces began driving northward up through Sicily and Italy. Italy was forced to sign the Italian Armistice in September 1943. The Japanese continued to lose ground as the American forces seized island after island in the Pacific Ocean.

In 1944, the course of the war had clearly become unfavorable for the Axis. Germany became boxed in as the Soviet offensive became a juggernaut in the east, pushing the Germans out of Russia and pressing into Poland and Romania. In the west, the Allies invaded mainland Europe, liberating France and the Low Countries and reaching Germany’s western borders. While Japan did launch a successful major offensive in China, their navy suffered continued heavy losses in the Pacific, as American forces captured airfields within bombing range of Tokyo.

The war finally ended in 1945; in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, a final German counter-attack in the west, failed, while Soviet forces captured Berlin in May. These losses forced Germany to surrender. The Asian theater saw American forces capturing the Japanese islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa while British forces in South East Asia managed to expel Japanese forces there. Though initially unwilling to surrender, Japan finally capitulated after the Soviet Union invaded Manchukuo and the United States dropped atomic bombs on mainland Japan.