Second World War

The Second World War (1939-1945)

Juan Carlos Ocaña Aybar

[4º ESO] Geography and History – Bilingual Studies – IES Parque de Lisboa, Alcorcón (Madrid)

The Second World War

The combatant powers

Year The Allies The Axis Powers

1939 France, Britain Germany

1940 Japan, Italy

1941-45 Soviet Union, USA

The features of the war

The Second World War was by far the most destructive war in history. This war had different

characteristics:

The scale of the war:

• It was a genuine world war. Military operations occurred in Europe, Africa, Asia, the

Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean Sea…

• More than one hundred million troops fought over the war and more than eight

hundred million civilians went through occupation, bombardment, misery and

hardship.

• Sixty countries were involved in the war.

Belligerents

Allies

Soviet Union (1941–45)

United States (1941–45)

United Kingdom

China (1937–45)

France

Poland

Canada

Australia

New Zealand

South Africa

Yugoslavia (1941–45)

Greece (1940–45)

Denmark (1940–45)

Norway (1940–45)

Netherlands (1940–45)

Axis

Germany

Japan

Italy (1940–43)

Hungary (1940–45)

Romania (1941–44)

Bulgaria (1941–44)

Co-belligerents

Finland (1941–44)

Thailand (1942–45)

Iraq (1941)

Client and puppet states

Manchukuo

Belgium (1940–45)

Czechoslovakia

Brazil (1942–45)

Mexico (1942–45)

...and others

Client and puppet states

Philippines (1941–45)

Mongolia (1941–45)

...and others

Italian Social

Republic (1943–45)

Croatia (1941–45)

Slovakia

...and others

Commanders and leaders

Joseph Stalin

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Winston Churchill

Chiang Kai-shek

Charles de Gaulle

...and others

Adolf Hitler

Hirohito

Benito Mussolini

...and others

Duration:

• WWII started in September 1939, although some historians claimed it started in 1937

when Japan invaded China, and ended in August 1945. Almost six years.

Extreme brutality:

• Totalitarian regimes caused many atrocities, such as genocide (Jews, Gypsies…),

systematic torture, concentration and extermination camps…

• The Allies practiced a sort of warfare based upon bombing civil population. It

culminated with the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• The civil populations suffered much more than in previous wars.

• Deportation over and after the war was a

normal practice. It caused millions of

refugees.

• All these atrocities were facilitated by the

usage of extremely powerful and

sophisticated weapons (planes, gas, atomic

bomb…)

The belligerent powers dedicated their whole

economies to the war effort. Berlin, 1945

The stages of the War

The war lasted almost six years and went through different phases:

War in Europe (1939-1941)

This is the period of the victories of the Axis powers.

Once guaranteed USSR’s neutrality, Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. In a few

months, the III Reich conquered most of Western Europe (Denmark, Norwar, the Netherlands,

Belgium) and France, which surprisingly collapsed in May 1940. Italy joined the German attack

on France and entered the war alongside Germany.

The warfare tactic used by the Wehrmacht (German army) was the “blitzkrieg” or lightning

war. It was based upon concentrating tanks and planes to break through enemy lines.

The only power that resisted Hitler was the United Kingdom which resisted the continuous

German air attacks.

France was forced to sign an armistice and was divided in two sections: north and west was

occupied by Germany, south and east was organized as a collaborationist state, led my general

Pétain and capital in Vichy (The “France of Vichy”).

The Nazis attacked the British and French colonies in Northern Africa from Lybia, an Italian

colony, and invaded the Balkans (Yugoslavia, Greece…)

In June 1941, Hitler made its greatest mistake: he launched the “Barbarossa Operation”, the

invasion of the USSR. Nazism and Communism eventually faced each other.

The turning point (1941)

On 22 June 1941, over 4 million soldiers of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a

2,900 km front, the largest invasion in the history of warfare. The first months were

characterized by continuous German victories. The Soviet army was pushed back up to

Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Moscow and Ukraine.

Japan had started an expansionist policy in Asia in the 1930s. In 1937 brutally attacked

China (for some historians this moment marked the beginning of WWII) and on 27

September 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, thus

entering the military alliance known as the "Axis."

In 1941, Japan decided to attack the USA, its great rival in the fight for the supremacy

in the Pacific Ocean. The US naval base of Pearl Harbour in the Hawaii Islands was

attacked by surprise on 7 December 1941. This attack caused the USA joining the Allies

against the Axis Powers.

The US and USSR entrance in WWII was the turning point of the war. Although the Axis forces

had great victories in the next months, the industrial, technological and human weight of the

US and the Soviet Union unbalanced the war in favour of the Allies.

The victory of the Allies (1942-1945)

Three battles in three different theatres of war changed the course of the war: Midway (1942)

in the Pacific, El Alamein (1943) in Northern Africa and, most importantly, Stalingrad (1943) in

the Russian front were great defeats of the Axis powers and led to the Allies hegemony.

Soviet attack in Stalingrad, February 1943

Consequently, the Allies (Americans and British mainly) assaulted the European continent

dominated by the Axis: Italy (1943), France (D-Day Normandy invasion in 1944). Meanwhile

the Red Army marched towards Germany in the East, liberating the Soviet lands and

conquering Poland, the Baltic states and the Balkans.

The Battle of Germany culminated when the Soviets took over Berlin. Shortly before, Hitler

had committed suicide. Two days later, Mussolini was captured and executed in Milan.

WWII came to an end in the Pacific. The US army slowly had conquered the Japanese

possessions in the Pacific and started its assault on the Japanese archipelago. In August 1945,

US President Truman (Roosevelt had died few months before) decided to try the new weapon

the Americans had been investigating on the years before. Two atomic bombs were dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After a total devastation of these cities, Japan surrendered. The

war had ended.

The consequences of the war

The worst: 55 million deaths and a much bigger of wounded military and civilians.

The material devastation, mainly in Europe, was much extended than in any previous war. The

Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany suffered the most of the destruction, although

other areas of Western Europe were also ruined.

The victors gathered in different conferences to organize the new world after the war. The “Big

Three” (Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill) met in Yalta and agreed on dividing Germany into

occupation zones, while Berlin was divided into four military territories (American, British,

French and Soviet).

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in the Yalta Conference

Italy was occupied by Anglo-American forces and Japan by the US army.

The Soviet Union enlarged importantly its frontiers towards the west and occupied several

Eastern European countries on which imposed Communist regimes.

Europe was the great loser of the war. Its hegemony was replaced by a new international

order led by two non-European powers, the USA and the USSR.

The cruelty of the war, the genocide and the nuclear threat left a deep mark in mankind’s

conscience. The United Nations were created in 1945 to maintain international peace and

protect human rights.

The Holocaust: the extermination of the Jews and other peoples

The Holocaust also known as the Shoah (from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the mass

murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a programme of

systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party,

throughout German-occupied territory (exterminated Jews came from Poland, the Soviet

Union, the Baltic states, Hungary, Greece...).

Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-

thirds were killed. Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were

approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men. A network of over

40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold,

and kill Jews and other victims.

Some scholars argue that the mass murder of the Romani (Gypsies) and people with

disabilities should be included in the definition, and some use the common noun "holocaust"

to describe other Nazi mass murders, including those of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and

Soviet civilians, and homosexuals. Recent estimates based on figures obtained since the fall of

the Soviet Union indicates some ten to eleven million civilians and prisoners of war were

intentionally murdered by the Nazi regime.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages:

Various laws to remove the Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws in

1935 that deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and

other German people, were enacted in Germany years before the outbreak of World War II.

Boycott on Jewish shops in Nazi Germany

Concentration camps were established in which inmates were subjected to slave labor until

they died of exhaustion or disease. Where Germany conquered new territory in Eastern

Europe, specialized SS units called Einsatzgruppen (“task forces”) murdered Jews and political

opponents in mass shootings.

Nazi Einsatzgruppen in action

The occupiers required Jews and Romani to be confined in overcrowded ghettos before being

transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most

were systematically killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved

in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust

scholar has called "a genocidal state".

Auschwitz was the largest German concentration camp and more than one million people

were killed there. The victims (Jews, Gypsies and war prisioners) were killed in gas chambers

using Zyklon B, a pesticide that caused death in less than ten minutes.

Auschwitz: in their way to the gas chambers

At Auschwitz the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele (the “Angel of Death”) carried out experiments

on humans to “research” the effects of terrible practices such as sterilization, poisonous

injection, and skin graft trials.