An international military conflict, World War II resulted in more loss of life and

material destruction than any other war in recorded human history. From
Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 until the Allies' victory in 1945, armed
clashes between two opposing alliances--known as the Axis and the Allies--ravaged
cities and towns across Europe, Asia, Africa and the islands of the Pacific. The war
strained the military, financial, scientific and civilian resources of the countries
involved, leaving many on the verge of collapse and ushering in a new world order.
The United States and the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as global
superpowers and soon became locked in a tense ideological and military competition
known as the Cold War.

Background
After World War I, the Germans, unreconciled to defeat, turned to a leader who
prescribed a restructuring of German society along dictatorial and racial lines. Germany
would fight wars to increase vastly its living space, and the soil, not the people living on
it, would be Germanized. Adolf Hitler preached this program of demographic revolution
in writings and speeches. Rather than continue ruling themselves, many Germans
preferred to surrender their will to his; once lifted into power in 1933, he proceeded to
fulfill his promises.

Germany initiated a rearmament program in 1933, anticipating these wars of expansion.

The country was just beginning to recover from the Depression, and this program drew
on unutilized labor and capital resources; initially, it appeared to improve the economy
without causing massive inflation.

Hitler's Early Moves

Hitler's first military goals were to annex Austria and destroy Czechoslovakia. Weapons
such as the tanks built during the 1930s were slated for the ensuing war with France and
Britain, which was anticipated to be more difficult. The third war--against the Soviet
Union--was expected to be quick and easy, and no special weapons systems were built to
expedite it. The rapid conquest of the Soviet Union would provide vast lands for German
settlers after the inhabitants had been killed or expelled. The fourth war, against the
United States, was also predicted to be simple once battle had been engaged--the
Americans were considered to be almost as weak and inferior as the Soviets. But because
they were far away and had a large navy, preparations for that war began early. In 1937
orders went out for the development of the "American-Bomber" (the Me 264), which
could fly from Germany to bomb the United States and return without refueling, and for
construction of a fleet of super battleships, which, together with other large surface ships,
could defeat the American navy (keels of the first 56,000-ton monsters were laid down in
early 1939).

The Germans pulled back from war at the last moment in 1938 and were then determined
not to hold back the next time. War against the western powers, which Hitler planned for
the winter of 1938-1939, required a quiet eastern front: Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary
had to be subordinated to Germany. Poland would not surrender to German demands, and
it therefore had to be crushed as a preliminary to war against France and Britain. An
alignment with the Soviet Union could speed that process. Hitler would give Stalin
whatever concessions he demanded because once Germany had won in western Europe, a
quick campaign in the east would reclaim those concessions and more as well. A Nazi-
Soviet pact was signed on August 23, 1939, dividing eastern Europe between the two and
assuring Germany of economic assistance from the Soviet Union.

Why were these plans not nipped in the bud? Inside Germany, massive and increasing
support for the regime among civilians and the military, combined with the controls of
the dictatorship so many had wanted, muted any opposition. Outside Germany, the Soviet
Union and the United States concentrated on internal affairs: the Soviet Union was in the
throes of Joseph Stalin's push for industrialization and his great purges; the United States
was recovering from the devastating Great Depression. Italy and Japan, which had been
members of the World War I alliance against Germany, were now thinking of working
with that country to satisfy their own imperialistic ambitions. This left France and Britain,
the two countries that had suffered most in World War I. They would try to accommodate
Germany's grievances, both before and after 1933, hoping thereby to avoid another war
when they had not recovered from the past one, could not count on allies, and were not
certain they would win. In this, both governments were in accord with their publics,
which during the depression had pushed for further disarmament rather than rearmament.

Invasion of Poland and Western Europe

The Poles, fighting bravely, but isolated and lacking modern equipment, were quickly
defeated in September 1939; but some of their soldiers escaped and fought on. Even
before the German invasion of September 1, they had shared with the French and British
their success against German code machines (the Enigma) and thereby provided a highly
important--if long secret--intelligence weapon to the western powers, who declared war
on Germany on September 3, 1939.

The use of armored thrusts to cut off substantial forces had been a feature of the German
attack on Poland and was to be repeated in the west. Originally scheduled for November
1939, the attack was postponed primarily because of bad weather. During the pause, the
Germans began the demographic revolution: the mass killing of the elderly, the
handicapped, the mentally ill, and other Germans believed to be unproductive; in Poland
they began killing the Polish elite and large numbers of Jews.

The invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940 at the urging of the German navy's
commander, Admiral Erich Raeder, to gain better bases on the Atlantic, involved two
innovations. First, it was aided by traitors within Norway. Their leader, Vidkun Quisling,
gave his name to this type of activity. Second, the use of navy, army, and air force made
this invasion a model of combined operations--showing that the rapid seizure of air bases
was a central feature of such operations--but also led to the loss or damage of most major
German surface warships. For the rest of 1940, Germany was practically without a
surface navy. Thus, German victory in the west could not be followed up by an invasion
of Britain.

The Germans had intended to attack in the west through Holland and Belgium at least
since May 1938. They had originally hoped to seize bases in Belgium and northern
France for the war against England, but they changed plans in order to cut off Allied
troops, which might have moved forward to aid the Belgians and Dutch. The first of these
measures worked: a German drive, led by armored divisions, punched through the French
lines near Sedan in the Ardennes and rushed to the Channel coast in ten days. But then
the effort to destroy the cut-off Allied forces collapsed. First the German air force and
then the army failed to prevent evacuation of much of the British Expeditionary Force
from Dunkirk, because the attack south against the French had priority and the Royal Air
Force was able to batter the German Luftwaffe.

Though the new French government of Marshal Philippe Pétain pulled out of the war, the
British fought on. At first the Germans did not believe their resistance would continue for
long and turned their military preparations toward the next wars. Resumption of
construction of the fleet for war against the United States was ordered on July 11. When
Germany demanded bases in Spain for that fleet and its intended intercontinental
bombers, the negotiation for Spain's entrance into the war as a German ally broke down.
At Benito Mussolini's insistence, Italy had already come into the war, imagining that the
main fighting was over. The Germans, however, were planning the war against the
USSR, originally scheduled for the fall of 1940, but now set for 1941.

Operation Barbarossa
That invasion would provide the material basis (especially oil and steel) for war against
the United States, enormous tracts of land for German farmers, and an opportunity to
complete new stages in the demographic revolution: the killing of all Jews and the
decimation of the Slavic population through sterilization or killing. This campaign
(Barbarossa) was forecast to be quick and easy; the Germans began building weapons
such as large tanks with heavy treads for the east only after they discovered that they had
miscalculated the difficulty of the task. In the meantime they needed to defeat Britain,
and an alliance with Japan appeared helpful when defeat in the Battle of Britain and lack
of a surface navy made an invasion look too risky. That invasion had been planned in
great detail--even the arrest list was printed in book form--but it had to be postponed
because of the failure to obtain air superiority and the absence of a fleet. If Japan joined
in, however, Germany could have a big navy on its side before it built its own. Therefore,
as soon as Japan attacked the United States, Germany joined in its war.

The attack on the Soviet Union, which had tried to keep out of the war by helping
Germany, at first appeared to go as the Germans hoped. A series of enormous victories
was won by the Germans in June and July 1941, but they did not collapse the Soviet
system. After the first weeks, the Germans pointlessly argued over whether to attack
toward Moscow or the Ukraine, despite the fact that the Germans were logistically
incapable of resuming the offensive toward Moscow. They overlooked the implications
of Soviet control of the unoccupied country, from which Stalin could mobilize resources
to fight on. And the murderous conduct of the Germans (for the first seven months they
killed or let die about ten thousand prisoners of war every day) assured Stalin's
government of the allegiance of most of the disaffected in the country. The first major
Red Army counterattacks pushed back the Germans in August and September 1941,
showing that the gamble on a quick Soviet collapse had been lost.

When the German offensives were halted and thrown back in November at the northern
and southern ends of the front and in December before Moscow, even the Germans
realized that their blitzkrieg strategy had failed. The Soviet Union and Japan had signed a
neutrality treaty in April 1941. The Soviet Union would not allow the United States to
bomb Japan from East Asian bases but could move some of its units from Siberia to
Europe. On the other hand, the Germans watched in anger as American supplies poured
into Soviet Far Eastern ports unimpeded by the Japanese. The Germans now intended to
seize key Soviet industries and raw material and to inflict massive losses in order to win
in 1942. This approach failed disastrously; they blamed the allies they had dragooned into
helping them in the Stalingrad and Caucasus campaigns for the defeat, which cost the
Germans, Italians, and Hungarians one army each, and Romania two. A successful local
German counteroffensive in February-March 1943 at Kharkov was followed by a final
attempt to reclaim the initiative in July. Soviet victory in the great tank battle at Kursk
instead shifted initiative permanently to the Red Army. Major victories in the winter of
1943-1944, in the summer of 1944, and finally in the winter of 1945 brought the Red
Army to Berlin in April 1945.

The British government in 1940 had decided to defend itself against air attack and
invasion, hoping to win the war eventually by attacking Germany by air, weakening
Germany by blockade, and assisting expected uprisings in occupied Europe. When these
measures had sapped Germany to the point of collapse, a small British army would return
to the Continent. Before that happy moment, Britain had to maintain control of the sea-
lanes and hope that reactions to German aggression would bring in allies.

The Soviet Union had not recognized the menace of Nazi Germany but was forced into
war by invasion. The United States had become increasingly willing to provide aid; it
was then pushed into the conflict by the actions of Japan, Germany, and Italy. Hoping to
take advantage of Germany's victories in Europe and the assumed unwillingness of
Americans to expend the blood and treasure needed to retake whatever Japan might
conquer, the government in Tokyo opted for war against Britain, the United States, and
the Netherlands in the summer of 1941. The Japanese occupied southern French
Indochina as a base for new adventure--moving away from China, with which Japan had
been fighting since 1937.

Japanese Aggression
After seizing Manchuria from China in 1937, the Japanese continued to increase their
pressure on the Chinese; major hostilities commenced in July 1937. In the subsequent
fighting, they had occupied many of the ports and important industrial centers of the
country but had failed to end the resistance of the Chinese Nationalist government. As if
that fighting was not enough, the Japanese had also become involved in conflict with the
Soviet Union over border issues in the summers of 1938 and 1939. In the latter case
especially, they had suffered serious defeat at the hands of the Red Army. That
experience, together with a lack of key raw materials unavailable in the Far Eastern
provinces of the Soviet Union, led Japanese expansionists to look to the south when the
German victories in Europe in 1940 appeared to invite cheap expansion in that direction.
Since the Philippines seemed to threaten the route to conquest in Southeast Asia, and the
United States did not plan to leave its bases in those islands until 1946, a war with the
United States was seen in Tokyo as a necessary part of their imperialist war.

But instead of keeping to their original plan--to seize an empire in Southeast Asia and
then overwhelm the American navy as it headed across the Pacific, thereafter making
peace with the United States--the Japanese navy in October 1941 accepted the Pearl
Harbor plan of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku when he threatened resignation. That attack,
which damaged much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (but not its aircraft carriers) was a tactical
success but, as should have been anticipated, a strategic disaster for Japan. The majority
of the U.S. ships were repaired, most of the crew members survived, and the outraged
American public would pay any price for victory over a treacherous enemy.

The Japanese onrush conquered Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Burma,
and many South Pacific islands, but was then held back. Rather than try to meet the
Germans across the Indian Ocean, Japanese forces postponed such a move and pushed to
take Port Moresby in New Guinea; they were checked at Coral Sea in May 1942. The
next month, another foolish scheme of Yamamoto's was adopted when he again
threatened to resign. It involved seizing Midway and crushing the remaining American
fleet. A major American victory followed, allowing Americans and Australians to
counterattack on New Guinea and in the Solomons. The Japanese never thereafter
developed a coherent strategy for a war they had started but had no way to finish. They
simply hoped to make the war too costly for their enemies to continue it.

Allied Strategy
The Americans decided on an offensive on two axes: One was based on Australia and
headed along the New Guinea coast and through the Solomons toward the Philippines
and on to Tokyo, bypassing many substantial Japanese garrisons along the way. The
other axis lay across the smaller islands of the South and Central Pacific to the Marianas,
then to the Philippines, Formosa, or the China coast, and finally to the Japanese home
islands. Basing an attack on Japan in China meant keeping that country in the war, a
project that failed in spite of a massive airlift over the Himalayas (called "the Hump") and
victories in Burma by the British and Americans at the same time that Japan was crushing
the Chinese Nationalist armies in 1944. The slow, bitter fight was therefore concentrated
on the two American offensives, which culminated in landings on the Marianas in June
and July 1944 and in the Philippines beginning in October. From there, the Americans
moved to the Bonin Islands (Iwo Jima) in February and the Ryukyus (Okinawa) in April
1945.
In the meantime, the British and the Americans had argued over the best way to defeat
Germany. They agreed that this had to precede the defeat of Japan and that priority had to
be given to defeating Germany's submarines, a struggle in which Canada played an
increasing role. But they disagreed concerning an early invasion of northwest Europe.
The British thought of this as a last resort, emphasizing the Mediterranean--first, because
it appeared to offer greater opportunities and fewer risks of disaster, and second, because
they were committed to the defense of imperial interests there. But the Americans
opposed a peripheral strategy, seeing no prospect of a decisive victory in the mountains
of southern and southeastern Europe, and no hope of playing a major role in securing a
permanent peace unless their power was projected into the heart of Europe.

Defeat of Germany & Japan, 1942-1945

In 1942 the Allies landed in northwest Africa, but the Pétain government's collaboration
with Germany made it impossible to take Tunisia quickly and forced postponement of a
landing in the northwest to 1944. Instead, they landed on Sicily and the Italian mainland.
Their bombing of Germany, to weaken that country and assist the Soviets, was troubled
by the German fighter defenses in the fall of 1943. But Allied long-range fighters turned
this around and gave the Allies air superiority in 1944. With a large American army in
England, control of the sea and air, and deception diverting German forces, the Allies
succeeded in getting ashore in Normandy in June 1944 (see D-Day) and eventually
breaking out into France. Supply shortages and German resistance made it impossible to
finish the war in 1944; the Germans made one final effort with their last reserves in
December. This Ardennes offensive failed, and in 1945 the Allies drove into Germany,
meeting the Red Army and settling into occupation zones devised by the British.
Germany had been crushed, and surrendered on May 7, 1945. But even before the end of
fighting in Europe, both the Russians and the Americans had begun transferring forces to
East Asia to finish the war against Japan. Poised to invade the home islands in November
1945, with the British intending to land in Malaya in September, the Allies instead ended
the war in August by dropping atomic bombs and securing the entrance of the Soviet
Union into the war. The large Japanese forces in the home islands and in control of much
of China, Southeast Asia, and several Pacific islands obeyed the surrender orders from
Tokyo on August 15 (a day earlier in the United States). To the relief of the Allies, the
war came to an end in September 1945 with a number of official surrender ceremonies,
the most famous of which occurred on the USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay.

GERHARD L. WEINBERG

The Reader's Companion to Military History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey
Parker. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights
reserved.

United States Enters World War II

When the Japanese seized Manchuria and then invaded China and began a drive to the
south, they put their country on the road to war with the United States. But this
aggression was at least in part a result of the West's efforts to weaken Japan as an
economic rival after World War I. The Great Depression, Japan's population explosion,
and the need to find new resources and markets to continue as a first-rate power were
other causes of the invasion.

Neither Japan nor America would have come to the brink of war except for the social and
economic disruption of Europe after World War I and the rise of communism and
fascism. These two sweeping forces brought about the tragedy of war between Japan and
America. Unfortunately both countries were inept negotiators driven by paranoiac fear--
Japan, fear of communism from both Russia and Mao Tse-tung, and America, fear of the
"yellow peril."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought their differences to a head on the night of July
26, 1941. After learning that the Japanese army had pushed into Indochina, he froze all
Japanese assets in America. In consequence, not only did all trade with the United States
cease, but the fact that America had been Japan's major source of oil imports now left
Japan in an untenable position.

On September 6 an imperial conference was convened in Tokyo to decide on war or

peace. Traditionally the emperor was supposed to remain silent. Instead Hirohito recited a
poem of peace written by his grandfather. Startled, the military leaders promised to give
first consideration to diplomacy. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye was forced to resign,
and it was suggested that Gen. Hideki Tojo, the war minister, replace him. Only he could
control the army. Tojo, although shocked by the offer, accepted and was ordered to "go
back to blank paper," that is, to start with a clean slate and negotiate with America for
peace.

Despite protests from the military, a new offer was sent to Washington on November 20.
Japan promised not to make any more aggressive moves south, and once peace was
restored with China or a general peace in the Pacific established, all troops would be
pulled out of Indochina. In the meantime Japan would at once move all troops in southern
Indochina to the north of that country. In return, America was to sell Japan a million tons
of aviation gasoline. Roosevelt was so impressed that he wrote out a reply in pencil and
sent it to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The secretary passed on copies to Chiang Kai-
shek and Winston Churchill. Both protested so forcefully that the message was never sent
to the Japanese. On November 26 news came of another Japanese expedition to
Indochina, and the president "fairly blew up" when informed by Hull. In place of
Roosevelt's earlier message a harsh note was sent calling for Japan to withdraw all
military forces from China and Indochina. It was regarded as an insult by the Japanese
cabinet. It is possible that if Hull had sent Roosevelt's original note Japan would have
either come to some agreement with America or been forced to debate the issue, thus
compelling postponement of an attack until the spring of 1942 because of weather
conditions. By this time it would have been obvious that Moscow would not fall. This
would dangerously weaken the Axis and cause the Japanese leaders to reconsider a Pearl
Harbor attack at such an inauspicious moment. Then the implausible series of chances
and coincidences that led to December 7 might not have occurred.

A war that could possibly have been avoided now broke out because of mutual
misunderstanding and language difficulties, along with Japanese opportunism,
irrationality, pride, and fear and American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the
Orient, self-righteousness, and pride.

Bitter political controversy had clouded the issue of war or peace in America. The
interventionists, convinced that the nation's future safety depended on its helping crush
the aggressor nations, had pushed through Congress the Lend-Lease Act committing
America to unlimited aid, "short of war," to the enemies of the Axis. The United States
would be the "arsenal of democracy." The opponents of intervention included strange
bedfellows: the right-wing America Firsters of Charles Lindbergh, Senator William E.
Borah, and the German-American Bund, the "American peace mobilization" of the
Communist and Labor parties, and the traditionally isolationist Midwest, which, though
sympathetic to Great Britain and China, wanted no part of a shooting war.

The bombs at Pearl Harbor brought Americans together, but the honeymoon ended when
Roosevelt put the blame for Pearl Harbor on the commanders in Hawaii, Adm. Husband
Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short. To quell protests the president appointed Supreme Court
Justice Owen Roberts to head a Pearl Harbor inquiry. It found Kimmel and Short the
principal culprits. Rather than ending the dispute this stirred vigorous protests, which
resulted in several minor inquiries followed by major army and navy inquiries in the
summer of 1944. When a Naval Intelligence officer testified that key messages indicating
a possible raid on Pearl Harbor had been destroyed, and two army officers revealed that
they had been forced to change testimony concerning Gen. George C. Marshall, both the
army and the navy courts concluded that the principal blame lay in Washington. These
conclusions were kept from the public.

After the war Congress held public hearings that convinced the majority of Americans
that Kimmel and Short should carry the burden of blame and that Roosevelt and Marshall
had done their best to prevent war with a nation run by bandits. Most historians agreed
with these findings, but there was evidence to suggest that the truth had been distorted by
reversions of testimony, cover-ups, and outright lies. There was evidence, for instance,
that President Roosevelt knew as early as December 2, 1941, that Japanese carriers were
approaching Pearl Harbor. According to the testimony of Capt. Johan Ranneft, naval
attaché of the Netherlands in Washington, he was informed by U.S. Naval Intelligence on
December 2 that two Japanese carriers were halfway between Japan and Hawaii. Four
days later they were some three hundred to four hundred miles from Pearl Harbor. He
reported this to his government and wrote the details in his war diary. Of course, where
the carriers were going and for what purpose was unclear.

Roosevelt had been assured by Marshall that Oahu was the strongest fortress in the world
and any enemy task force would be destroyed. The president, therefore, took a calculated
risk and lost. This was understandable, but if he instigated a cover-up, as some evidence
indicates, that was a serious offense. Perhaps the whole truth will never be known.

J. O. Richardson, as told to George C. Dyer, On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor (1973);

John Toland, Infamy (1982).

John Toland

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors.
Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights
reserved.

WWII Events and Results, 1936-1941, 1936-1941

Adolf Hitler's plan to seize all of Europe was set into motion on March 7, 1936, when he
sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of earlier treaties. The British did
not seriously consider taking action and the French feared to do so. Ironically, the fuehrer
had given orders to retreat if challenged by the French; thus, his occupation of the
Rhineland was accomplished by default. Then followed moves into Austria, where he
was greeted with enthusiasm, and into Czechoslovakia. Finally on September 1, 1939, his
forces invaded Poland. This at last brought a declaration of war from England.

As Poland was about to fall, the opportunistic Joseph Stalin occupied the eastern half of
the country. On September 28, the two dictators signed a nonaggression treaty. With his
rear thus protected, Hitler made plans to invade the West and in May 1940 sent troops
across the borders of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Caught by surprise, the British
and French were soon overwhelmed. The survivors of a British expeditionary force
escaped across the English Channel, and the French capitulated on June 22.

Now Hitler prepared to turn on his ally, Stalin, and so become the master of all Europe.
When massive air raids on England failed to subdue the stubborn British, he sought to
bring them to the negotiating table by capturing Gibraltar. This would not only keep the
Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, thus ensuring Hitler's takeover of North Africa and
the Middle East, but drastically lengthen England's lifelines to the Far East. Britain would
be forced to surrender and become a silent partner in his crusade against Jewish
Bolshevism.

All he needed was Francisco Franco's permission to transport troops through Spain. But
to his dismay, the Spanish dictator, though he seemed to agree, kept stalling. He did
nothing, thus saving Gibraltar for England. Besides fear of aligning himself with a
possible loser, Franco had a compelling personal motive. He was part Jewish.

Operation Barbarossa

This setback was followed by another when Italy's Benito Mussolini, who so far had
avoided going to war, attempted to seize the Balkans and failed. Hitler felt compelled to
do so himself before his attack on Russia could safely be launched; this forced him to
postpone that invasion for at least a month. It finally began on June 22, 1941. Great
advances were made until early October, and then sleet turned into snow and the mud
froze. The cold intensified, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt radioed Hitler that his
troops must retreat or "they will be destroyed." Instead the fuehrer ordered the attack to
continue and was caught completely off balance on the night of December 4 when the
Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive. Hitler not only lost Moscow but appeared
destined to suffer Napoleon's fate in the winter snows of Russia. Despondent, he admitted
to Gen. Alfred Jodl that "victory could no longer be achieved."

America Enters the War

On December 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, whereupon Hitler made still another
mistake. He declared war on America, thus saving President Roosevelt from the risk of
incurring the opposition of German-Americans by asking Congress to declare war on
Germany first.

Two hours after the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes hit Clark Field, the
main U.S. base in the Philippines, wiping out half of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Far East
air force. Within three days he had little air defense, and soon forty-three thousand
Japanese troops landed 135 air miles north of Manila. MacArthur withdrew the bulk of
his U.S.-Filipino forces to Bataan Peninsula and the adjoining island of Corregidor. After
a bitter struggle the defenders of Bataan were driven back, and MacArthur was ordered to
fly to Australia. On April 7 more than seventy-six thousand survivors on Bataan
surrendered, and a month later Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur's replacement,
surrendered the remaining troops in the Philippines.

WWII Events and Results, 1942-1943, 1942-1943

Battle of Midway

With Indochina, Thailand, and the chain of islands from Sumatra to Guadalcanal
occupied, Japanese naval leaders decided that operations should be started against
Australia and Hawaii. The army protested, but a surprise bombing of Tokyo by Col.
James Doolittle in mid-April allowed Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto to prevail. Preparations
were made to attack Midway Island, fifteen hundred miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. It
was thought that this would all but wipe out the U.S. Pacific Fleet and leave Hawaii open
to invasion.

But the Americans had broken the Japanese code, and Adm. Chester Nimitz was ready.
In the most crucial sea battle of the war, U.S. Navy and Marine airmen sank four carriers
on June 4. America now controlled the Pacific. The Japanese commanders had fought the
battle too carefully. In contrast, Rear Adm. Raymond Spruance, bold at the right moment,
had launched his strike early. What gave Spruance the chance to win was Nimitz back in
Pearl Harbor. He had made all the right decisions before a shot was fired.
German Defeats in North Africa and Stalingrad

The spring of 1942 saw almost no change in Germany's military situation. The eastern
front remained stagnant, and Gen. Erwin Rommel was not quite ready for a new
offensive in North Africa. Still determined to crush Russia, Hitler ordered a drive into the
Caucasus, but rains held it up until June. Then, encouraged by an early success, the
fuehrer made another mistake. He decided to mount a major attack on Stalingrad, an
industrial city on the Volga, while continuing the drive to the Caucasus. By mid-
September double victory seemed certain--and then the Soviets' defense abruptly
stiffened.

November proved to be a month of disaster. Although Hitler had ordered him not to
retreat "one inch" from North Africa, Rommel was forced to withdraw. An even more
critical reversal occurred at Stalingrad. On November 22 two arms of a tremendous
Soviet pincer movement encircled the entire Sixth Army, and more than 200,000 German
troops along with a hundred tanks, eighteen hundred big guns, and more than ten
thousand vehicles were caught in a giant trap. On February 2, 1943, the Germans
capitulated.

American Victories in Pacific

In the Far East the Americans were advancing on two fronts. While MacArthur slogged
across New Guinea toward the Philippines, Nimitz's amphibious forces were
leapfrogging from island to island in the Pacific. On August 7, 1942, U.S. Marines landed
at Guadalcanal, and after five months of deadly battle, the Japanese survivors were
evacuated by ship. Nimitz's forces continued toward Japan and by February 4, 1944, had
reached the western limit of the Marianas, a chain of volcanic islands.

WWII Events and Results, 1944-1945, 1944-1945

The next target was the most strategic island of the chain, Saipan. On June 15, 1944, two
Marine divisions landed on the west coast and began pushing across Saipan to link up
with G.I.s of the Twenty-seventh Division. This brought swift reaction from the Japanese
navy. Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa was ordered to annihilate Admiral Spruance's Task
Force 58, but in a savage air battle on June 19 Ozawa lost 346 planes while shooting
down only 50 Americans. In a bold stroke Japan's naval power had been fatally crippled.
This crushing defeat doomed the defenders of Saipan, and it was all over a month later.
Close to 22,000 Japanese civilians--two out of three--perished, many of them by suicide.
Almost the entire garrison--at least 30,000--died. The Americans suffered 14,111
casualties. But the main island bastion protecting Japan's homeland had been won by the
United States. More important, the lowlands of southern Saipan offered a base from
which massive B-29 bombing raids could be launched at the heart of the Japanese
empire, Tokyo.

Allied Invasion of Europe

While the Americans were taking Saipan, the Allies in Europe landed in Normandy on
June 6. Hitler was taken by surprise, and within ten days the Allies had managed to land a
million men and 500,000 tons of matériel. While the U.S. and British forces swept
forward, an attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20 almost succeeded. On August 25
Paris was liberated, and by late autumn the Germans were driven back to their own
borders.

Faced with disaster, Hitler made one final attempt to win in the West. The plan was to
drive through the Ardennes and reach the English Channel, thus splitting the Americans
and British. On the night of December 15 three German armies moved secretly to the line
of departure. The next morning they struck, taking the Americans off guard. But after
retreating for eight days, the U.S. troops regrouped and stopped the Nazis. The Battle of
the Bulge soon ended with the Germans in full retreat. Two weeks later they suffered
another defeat, and the Red Army crossed the Vistula.

German Defeat and Hitler's Death

Now Hitler was being crushed from two sides. He had a momentary flash of hope on
April 12 upon learning that President Roosevelt had died. But as the Soviets approached
his bunker, he realized the end had come and shot himself. When he died so did National
Socialism and the "Thousand-Year Reich."

Adolf Hitler was probably the greatest mover and shaker of the twentieth century.
Certainly no other human disrupted so many lives in our times or incurred so much
hatred. He was driven by a number of forces. Blinded by gas in 1918, he had resolved
that if he recovered his sight, he would abandon his goal of becoming an architect and
enter politics. One night, like Saint Joan, he heard voices summoning him to save his
country. All at once, as he recorded in Mein Kampf, "a miracle came to pass." He could
see! He vowed he would become a politician and "bring Germany from the depths of
despair to the greatness she deserved."

Like millions of frontline troops, Hitler believed that they had been betrayed by those
back home--strikers, malingerers, Jews, politicians, profiteers. They had forced the
generals to surrender and accept the unjust and shameful Versailles treaty. Soon he
became convinced that the greatest enemy to his crusade for a new Germany was
communism, which he believed had been engendered by Jews. Anti-Semitism had
flourished throughout Europe for centuries, and Hitler found many adherents. Obsessed
by his dream of cleansing the Continent of Jews, he became a warped archangel. He had
intended the elimination of Jews to be his great gift to the world. Ironically, it would lead
instead to the formation of a Jewish state.
Japanese Defeat

In the Far East, also, there were impressive American victories. MacArthur, who had
landed on Leyte in October 1944, had cleared the island of defenders by January 12,
1945. While he continued to advance toward Luzon, marines were wiping out the
Japanese on the tiny but important island of Iwo Jima.

After Okinawa was occupied on July 12, the defeat of Japan was inevitable. Convinced
that a direct attack on the four main islands of Japan would be too costly, President Harry
S. Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At an
imperial conference Emperor Hirohito announced that the time had come to bear the
unbearable. On August 15 he informed his people over a nationwide radio hookup that
Japan was surrendering.

World War II was, in fact, two separate wars. In the West Hitler had two aims: the first to
seize all of Europe and North Africa so he could dominate the Mediterranean, and the
second to wipe out communism and eliminate the Jews. His ally, Mussolini, had his own
aims: domination of both the Mediterranean and the Balkans.

As for the Allies, both England and France fought to preserve their countries and stabilize
Europe. Roosevelt's aim was broader: destruction of Nazism and establishment of
democracy throughout Europe. The Soviet aim was to drive out the Nazis and emerge
strong enough to continue communization of the world.

In the Far East the Americans fought to rid themselves of a foe who some thought
threatened their Pacific island possessions and their own West Coast. In addition they
were eager to aid Chiang Kai-shek's China. Some Americans also felt it was a good time
to eliminate Japan as a serious economic rival.

As for the Japanese, they attacked Hawaii because it harbored the Pacific Fleet and was
perceived as a spear aimed at their proposed conquest of Southeast Asia for oil.

The Allies won in Europe because of the blows inflicted on the Germans by the Russians,
the endurance of the British, and the air and armaments superiority supplied by the might
of American production. On the other hand, the victory in Europe resulted in a takeover
of eastern Europe, despite Stalin's promises at Yalta, and a cold war between the Soviets
and the democracies. In Asia victory resulted in the takeover of China and Manchuria by
the People's Republic of China, chaos in Southeast Asia, and a division of Korea, with
the Soviets in the North and the Americans in the South, that would lead to another war.

John Keegan, The Second World War (1990); John Toland, Adolf Hitler (1976); John
Toland, The Rising Sun (1970).

John Toland
The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors.
Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights
reserved.