Determining when the second World War began is a matter of perspective. From a European point of view, it began the first week in September, 1939, when the German invasion of Poland triggered British and French declarations of war against the Nazi regime. From an Asian point of view, the war began earlier, perhaps as early as 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in northern China. For Russians, the war began on June 22, 1941 when the Germans invaded their homeland. And from an American perspective, the war started on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The sense of gloomy foreboding--that another war is coming--began to build significantly in the late 1930s. And the causes of the war stretch back to the 1920s and to problems (including the Great Depression) that were never solved after World War I. In that sense some historians consider the entire period from 1914 to 1945 to be a single historical episode. It's far simpler to say when World War II ended. Germany surrendered May 7, 1945, and Japan surrendered just over three months later, after American atomic bombs annihilated two major Japanese cities. The most destructive war in the history of the world was over. It claimed approximately 78 million lives (see the casualty figures on p. 272 of The Modern World). 

The meaning of the Battle of Britain can be better understood by looking at this map. In 1942, Nazi Germany dominated Europe. Greater Germany had been enlarged at the expense of its neighbors. Austria and Luxembourg were completely incorporated. Territories from Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, and the Baltic states were seized by Greater Germany. German military forces occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern France, Serbia, parts of northern Greece, and vast tracts of territory in the Soviet Union. Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia, and Vichy France were all either allied to Germany or subject to heavy German influence. Only Great Britain stood between Germany and total domination of the European world. Between 1942 and 1944, German military forces extended the area under their occupation to southern France, central and northern Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary. Life in Nazi-occupied Europe was harsh at best; at worst, it was cruel and barbaric in ways never seen before in modern times. Read these very powerful Eyewitness Accounts (Document 9-3) of life during wartime under Nazi rule.

The Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 - February 1943) was the decisive World War II Soviet victory that stopped the German advance and turned the tide of the war in Europe. At Stalingrad Soviet armies began the series of offensives that were to take them to Berlin. The first onslaught of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazis' name for the invasion of the Soviet Union) in 1941 had carried the German armies to the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad. In summer 1942 Hitler's main target was the oil fields of the Caucasus in - their capture would deprive the Russians of their fuel supply. Simultaneously the German Sixth Army was ordered to take Stalingrad. Hitler was determined to capture it as it was a major manufacturing center and the key to the communications system of southern Russia. But Stalin was equally determined to defend it, not least as it bore his name. His order was read out to every Soviet soldier - "Not a step backwards!"  By July 1942 the oil fields seemed to be at Hitler's mercy. Then he changed his mind and ordered part of the forces that were to occupy them to the siege of Stalingrad instead.  From August 23, when German Sixth Army forces, commanded by General Friedrich Paulus, reached the Volga River at Stalingrad, Soviet and German infantry fought a long, house-to-house battle for the city. The occupying Russian army was fanatical. It contested every street and factory, whether still standing or totally destroyed. Territory which the Germans, with their superior fire power, had won by day was regained by night. See this Appeal of the Stalingrad City Committee of Defense (Document 9-4). At the same time Soviet armies, ultimately numbering an estimated 1 million men, built up. On November 19, preceded by an enormous barrage, forces under General Zhukov attacked on both German flanks.  Within 5 days they had encircled 250,000-300,000 German and satellite troops - the besiegers were besieged. 

On June 6, 1944 an invasion force led by Americans and commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower (pictured below with American soldiers) came ashore on the beaches of Normandy, in northern France. The invasion opened a "second front" against the Nazis in Europe (in addition to the eastern front where the Soviets had been fighting since 1941). By the end of the summer Paris, northern France, and Belgium had been liberated from the Nazis. A German counterattack in the winter (the "Battle of the Bulge") slowed Allied progress, but by the end of January 1945 the advance into Germany toward Berlin was well underway. In recent years D-Day has been celebrated in many documentaries, books, and in feature films like "Saving Private Ryan." The invasion remains a powerful memory--not just for the soldiers who were there, but for all--especially the French-- who lived through the war years and the struggle to defeat Nazi Germany. These Letters from the Front (Document 9-6) describe the experience of American soldiers who fought their way into Germany after landing at Normandy on D-Day. For a very impressive audio/video narrative of the history of D-Day, see this National Geographic Web Site (Document 9-7). 

Image source: Library of Congress American Memory Project. memory.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, resentment and hostility against Japan and fear of an attack on the American mainland intensified. Early in 1942 President Roosevelt authorized the detention of all people of Japanese descent. The detainees--roughly 110,000, most from California and the West Coast and many of them native-born American citizens--were forced from their homes and resettled in internment camps far from the coast where, it was feared, they might provide intelligence to the Japanese military. Two online exhibitions can help us to understand this terrible experience. The first (Internment Camps in Utah [Document 9-11]), includes photographs of the camps and reminiscences by the detainees. The second (San Francisco Deportations [Document 9-12]) traces the story--in photographs and newspaper articles--of how San Francisco's large Japanese-American population was arrested and deported to internment camps.  Two years after these arrests, in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the decision to intern Japanese-Americans. (See Korematsu v. United States, in Documenting the Modern World, pp. 182-183). Was internment a necessary policy? Was it constitutional? The question raised in 1944 seems very relevant today, when a new conflict has once again raised the issue of how we balance security and civil liberties.

Most of the dead in World War II were civilians. In Europe and in Asia, the war was fought with a viciousness and mercilessness that demanded total surrender and aimed for total domination. Both Germany and Japan subscribed to racial theories that assumed their right to dominate "inferior" peoples and to rule their respective parts of the world. On the eastern front in Europe, the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was truly a war to the death in which atrocities and mass murder were commonplace. In China, Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia, the Japanese occupation was similarly brutal. Before the war ended, attacks on civilians also included American firebombing of Tokyo and the German city of Dresden. In 1937, in the midst of its long war against China and after a fiercely fought battle in Shanghai, Japanese forces conquered and occupied the city of Nanking (or Nanjing). The events that followed are sometimes called the "Nanking Massacre" and sometimes called "The Rape of Nanking." Read this New York Times Story about the events in Nanking (Document 9-13) to get a sense of how the story was reported at the time. Events in Nanking have been interpreted in very different ways. Although there is no doubt a massacre took place, today the Japanese and Chinese do not agree on exactly what happened or on how many people were killed. To examine the story in great depth and with close attention to questions of historical truth and interpretation, see this excellent online documentary called The Nanking Atrocities (Document 9-14), developed by a journalism student at the University of Missouri.

Nazi ideology was based on racism. In the Nazi view, Germans and other "Aryans"--people of northern European background--were a "master race" destined to rule over racially inferior peoples. For complex historical reasons, Jews were the special target of Nazi racial hatred. In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, Jews in Germany were stripped of their civil rights by The Nuremberg Laws (see Documenting the Modern World, pp. 158-159). Three years later, on the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazi government organized and sponsored an explosion of violence directed at Germany's Jewish community. This orgy of murder, beatings, imprisonment, the burning of synagogues, and looting of homes and businesses became known as Kristallnacht (Document 9-16), or the "Night of Broken Glass." By 1942, with almost all of Europe's Jewish population living in German-ruled lands, the Nazi regime determined to attempt genocide--the murder of an entire race of people. What we now call "The Holocaust" was a very complex and sophisticated system of engineering, science, and bureaucratic organization designed to transport millions of people across thousands of miles in order to kill them. German technology and science, among the most advanced in the world, was put to the task of figuring the most efficient ways to accomplish these goals. This meant, for example, industrial chemical laboratories synthesizing "Zyklon B," the gassing agent used in death camps. It mean architectural engineers designing the crematoria, or ovens, in which thousands of corpses could be destroyed each day. This is the most horrifying realization or "lesson" of the Holocaust: that the most primitive barbarism of modern times--deliberate mass murder on a scale never seen before--was committed by a highly educated, professional, and "civilized" modern Germany. See the 1943 speech by Heinrich Himmler, commander of the elite SS units responsible for the killing operations, in Documenting the Modern World (p. 173 ), and see also the description of the Treblinka death camp on pp. 174-176. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Document 9-17) web site has very ample resources for learning more about the Holocaust.

Dawn of the Atomic Age