World War 2

In September 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria under false pretexts and captured it from the Chinese.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party became leader of Germany. Under the Nazis, Germany began to rearm and to pursue a new nationalist foreign policy. By 1937, Hitler also began demanding the cession of territories which had historically been part of Germany, like the Rhineland and Gdansk.

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

In Europe, Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, asserted increasingly hostile and aggressive foreign policies and demands, which the United Kingdom and France initially attempted to defuse primarily through diplomacy and appeasement.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and war in Europe followed. The French and British did not declare war at first, hoping they could persuade Hitler through appeasement, but Hitler did not respond. The United Kingdom and France declared war. During the winter of 1939-1940 there was little overt indication of hostilities since neither side was willing to engage the other directly. This period was called the Phoney War.

In spring 1940, Germany captured Denmark and Norway, and in the early summer France and the Low Countries. Italy declared war in June 1940 and the Italian Army attacked France just before the surrender. The United Kingdom was then targeted; the Germans attempted to cut the island off from vitally needed supplies and obtain air superiority in order to make a seaborne invasion possible. This never came to pass, but the Germans continued to attack the British mainland throughout the war, primarily from the air. Unable to engage German forces on the continent, the United Kingdom concentrated on combating German and Italian forces in the Mediterranean Basin. It had limited success however; it failed to prevent the Axis conquest of the Balkans and fought indecisively in the Western Desert Campaign. It had greater success in the Mediterranean Sea, dealing severe damage to the Italian Navy, and inflicted the first major defeat on Germany by winning the Battle of Britain.

In June 1941, the extent of the war increased when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, bringing the Soviet Union into alliance with the United Kingdom. The German attack was initially highly successful, overrunning great tracts of Soviet territory, but began to stall by the winter.

Since invading mainland China and French Indochina in 1940, Japan had been subject to increasing economic sanctions by the United States, Great Britain and Netherlands, and was attempting to reduce these sanctions through diplomatic negotiations. In December 1941, however, the war expanded once more when Japan, already in its fifth year of war with China, launched near simultaneous attacks against the United States and British assets in Southeast Asia; four days later, Germany declared war on the United States. This brought the United States and Japan into the greater conflict and turned previously separate Asian and European wars into a single global one.

In 1942, though Axis forces continued to make gains, 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.

In 1943 Germany suffered devastating losses to the Soviets at Stalingrad, and then again at Kursk, the greatest tank battle in military history. Their 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 was clearly becoming 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 Western Allies invaded mainland Europe, liberating France and the Low Countries and reaching Germany's western borders. While Japan launched a successful major offensive in China, in the Pacific, their navy suffered continued heavy losses as American forces captured airfields within bombing range of Tokyo.

In 1945 the war ended. In Europe, a final German counter-attack in the west failed, while Soviet forces captured Berlin in May, forcing Germany to surrender. In Asia, American forces captured the Japanese islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa while British forces in Southeast Asia managed to expel Japanese forces there. Initially unwilling to surrender, Japan finally capitulated after the Soviet Union invaded Manchukuo and the United States dropped atomic bombs on the mainland of Japan.

European Theatre

Main article: European Theatre of World War II

Events leading up to the war in Europe

Main articles: Causes of World War II, Events preceding World War II in Europe, and Interwar period

Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy (left) and Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany.

Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy (left) and Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany.

Germany and France had been struggling for dominance in Continental Europe for 80 years and had fought two previous wars, the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Communist revolutionary movements began spreading across Europe, briefly taking power in both Budapest and Bavaria; in response, fascist and nationalist groups were born.[2]

In 1922, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his fascist party took control of the Kingdom of Italy and set the model for German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, which, aided by the civil unrest caused by the Great Depression, took power in Germany and eliminated its democratic government, the Weimar Republic. These two leaders began to re-militarize their countries and become increasingly hostile. Mussolini first conquered the African nation of Abyssinia and then seized Albania, with both Italy and Germany actively supporting Francisco Franco's fascist Falange party in the Spanish Civil War against the Second Spanish Republic (which was supported by the Soviet Union). Hitler then broke the Treaty