“The Second World War has usually been agreed to have been under way before the launch of Barbarossa; among favored dates for its beginning are 1937 (in China) or 1936 (in Spain). What can truly be said was that it was an assemblage of wars, and that some were going on before 1939.”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe, page 496
The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, had believed since 1940 that it was in the interest of the U.S. to support Great Britain, but only up to the limits permitted by American public opinion and the law of neutrality.
By summer of 1941 Hitler considered the U.S. an undeclared enemy. Mainly due to the Lend-Lease Act of March, which provided production and services to the Allies without payment. Once the Lend-Lease program began America extended naval patrols and shipping protection further east in the Atlantic. The first meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt resulted in a statement of shared principles (the Atlantic Charter).
“Hitler’s second fateful and foolish decision of 1941, was the declaration of war on the United States on 11 December, after a Japanese attack on British, Dutch, and American possessions four days earlier.”
In 1941 the war had gone global. The British and American declarations of war on Japan could have left two separate wars to rage, with only Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Dutch government in exile engaged in both. War with the U.S. was a gamble that failed; after the first victories, the Japanese faced a prolonged war they were certain to lose. Pearl Harbor had united American like nothing before and Roosevelt held the nation’s popular support to a degree that Wilson never had.
Hitler’s decision brought American power into Europe when it would otherwise have been deployed only in the Pacific. He had brought about the eclipse of European power, whose future would not be settled by its own efforts, but by American and Soviet Russia. However, Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy amounted to little in practice. The prospects of rapid gains, mostly in raw materials and oil, by conquering the European possessions of the Far East, were the deciders in the Japanese offensive.
Only five European countries remained outside of the struggle: Turkey’s small holdings, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.
War in North Africa raged back and forth in Libya and Egypt. It spread to Syria and Iraq where a nationalist government supported by German aircraft was removed by British force. Iran was occupied by Britain and Russia in 1941. Ethiopia was liberated and the Italian colonial empire destroyed.
In early 1942 Japan seized the former European colonies in Indonesia, Indo-China, Malaya, and the Philippines. They pressed through Burma to the Indian border and were soon bombing Australia from New Guinea.
“The War’s demands carried social and economic mobilization much further than had the First World War. The role of the United States was decisive.”
Four great and very different battles were turning points:
- In June 1942 a Japanese fleet attacking Midway Island was broken in a battle fought largely by aircraft. Japan lost her strategic initiative and a long American counter-attack began to unfurl.
- The British army in Egypt decisively defeated the Germans and Italians and began marching west to join Anglo-American forces in French North Africa. Axis forces were evicted from all of North Africa by May 1943.
- At the end of 1942 the Soviet army trapped the German army at Stalingrad. Its remnants surrendered in February; it was the most demoralizing defeat yet suffered by the Germans.
- The culmination of the Battle of the Atlantic. The peak came in the early months of 1942: In March 850,000 tons of shipping were lost and six U-boats sunk, by the end of the early nearly 8,000,000 tons of shipping had been lost and 87 U-boats sunk. The battle was the most crucial for the Allies and their ability to draw on American production and it was prevailed over by British superiority in signals intelligence.
“The invasion of northern France in June that year (1944) was the greatest seaborne expedition in history. Mussolini had by then been overthrown by Italians and Italy had been invaded from the south; now Germany was fighting on three European land fronts.”
Soon after the landings in Normandy, the Russians entered Poland and by April 1945 they reached Berlin. Allied forces in the west had by then broken out of Italy into central Europe and from the Low Countries into northern Germany. An air offensive had destroyed large portions of German cities. On April 30th, 1945, Hitler killed himself in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin. On May 8th the nominal government of Germany surrendered unconditionally.
The war in the Far East kept on, but was swiftly ended when two nuclear weapons of a destructive power hitherto unknown were dropped by the Americans on two Japanese cities. Between the explosions, Russia declared war on Japan. On September 2nd the Japanese government signed a surrender and the Second World War came to an end.
The Normal Times 