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Casualties
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An estimated 55 million people died in World War II—25 million in the military and 30 million civilians. (Note: World War II casualty statistics vary greatly from source to source. Official records are often lacking and based on differing criteria. Figures remain open to interpretation and debate.)
Sources- http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761563737/World_War_II.html |
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World War 2 cuases
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World War II lasted from September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945. It was the most devastating war in human history and killed an estimated 55 million people (military and civilians). What began as a conflict between Germany and an Anglo-French coalition eventually widened to include most of the nations of the world. It ended leaving a new world order dominated by the United States and the USSR. Extreme nationalism and racist fascism under dictator Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led to military aggression by Germany, which began the war with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Dominated by a imperialist military, Japan spread the war to parts of Asia and Oceania with an attack on Pearl Harbor and countries in the Pacific in 1941. The Allies (led by Britain, USSR, and the United States) defeated the Axis Powers (led by Germany, Italy, and Japan).1939
source- http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761563737/World_War_II.html |
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Blitzkrieg Period
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During the prewar years, Germany perfected the Blitzkrieg attack and unleashed it on countries who were still preparing for World War I type trench warfare. By using the radical new concepts of the Blitzkrieg, Germany proved to be the exception to the adage that countries always prepare for the last war they fought instead of the next one. The blitzkrieg tactics gave the Germans quick successes even though the total force arrayed against them was often numerically larger than their own.\
source- http://vanrcook.tripod.com/blitzkrieg1.htm
Blitzkrieg was first used on any serious scale by the German Wehrmacht in World War II. While operations in Poland were rather conventional (see detailed discussion below), later operations early in the war — particularly the invasions of France, The Netherlands and initial operations in the Soviet Union — were effective owing to surprise penetrations, general enemy unpreparedness and an inability to react swiftly enough to the superior German military doctrines. The Germans faced numerically superior forces and technically superior vehicles in the invasion of France, proving the early effectiveness of their tactics and strategies. From this peak, the Wehrmacht's cohesion deteriorated. Heinz Guderian, an early implementor of blitzkrieg, was relieved of command on 25 December 1941, for ordering a withdrawal in contradiction of Hitler's "standfast" order. This showed a fundamental doctrinal difference between Hitler's view of military strategy and the Wehrmacht's proven system. This event undermined confidence and military effectiveness from that point onwards. After this point, German offensive operations were severely limited; the last major blitzkrieg style operation in the East was at Kursk in July 1943, and the last in the west was the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944. By this period, the Allies had developed effective defensive tactics to deal with these operations (see below).
Methods of blitzkrieg operations centered on using manoeuvre rather than attrition to defeat an opponent. The blitzkrieg thus first and foremost required a combined arms concentration of mobile assets at a focal point, armour closely supported by mobile infantry, artillery and close air support assets. These tactics required the development of specialised support vehicles, new methods of communication, new tactics, and an effective decentralised command structure. Broadly speaking, blitzkrieg operations required the development of mechanised infantry, self-propelled artillery and engineering assets that could maintain the rate of advance of the tanks. German forces avoided direct combat in favour of interrupting an enemy's communications, decision-making, logistics and of reducing morale. In combat, blitzkrieg left little choice for the slower defending forces but to clump into defensive pockets that were encircled and then destroyed by following German infantry.
source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg |
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The Eastern Front
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The Eastern Front of World War II was the theatre of war covering the conflict in eastern Europe, notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life. Many sources include the German-Polish War of 1939 in this World War II theatre but this article concentrates on the much larger conflict which was fought from June 1941 to May 1945 in which the two principal belligerent nations were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It resulted in the rise of the Soviet Union as a military and industrial superpower, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, and the partition of Germany.
source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Patriotic_War |
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North Afirca (desert war)
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During World War II the North African Campaign, also known as the Desert War, took place in the North African desert from September 13, 1940 (The USA started to directly supply the British in this effort on May 11, 1942) to May 13, 1943.
Fighting in this region began with Italian attacks on British occupied areas. When the Italians suffered terrible reverses, the German Afrika Korps commanded by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel came to their assistance. After a back-and-forth series of battles for control of Libya and parts of Egypt, British Commonwealth forces under the command of General Bernard Montgomery eventually pushed the Axis forces back to Tunisia. Following on the US Operation Torch landings in north west Africa in late 1942 under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower, and after US battles against Vichy France forces, Commonwealth and US forces finally pincered the Axis forces and forced their surrender.
By making the Axis powers fight on a second front in North Africa, the Western Allies provided some relief to the Soviet Union fighting the Axis on the Eastern Front. Information learned from the British Ultra codebreaking operation was a major contributor to Allied success in the North African campaign.
source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Campaign |
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The Pacific War
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war had begun in East Asia before World War II started in Europe. On 7 July 1937, Japan, after occupying northeastern China (Manchuria) in 1931, launched another attack against China near Beijing (see Marco Polo Bridge Incident) The Japanese made large initial advances, but were stalled in Shanghai for months in the Battle of Shanghai. The city eventually fell to the Japanese and in December 1937, the capital city, Nanking (now Nanjing), fell and the Chinese government moved its seat to Chongqing for the rest of the war. Surprised by the unanticipated level of resistance from China, the Japanese forces committed brutal atrocities against civilians and POWs when Nanking was occupied (see Nanjing Massacre), killing as many as 300,000 civilians within a month.
Roosevelt responded in May 1940 by signing an unpublished (secret) executive order allowing U.S. military personnel to resign from the service so that they could participate in a covert operation in China: the American Volunteer Group, also known as Chennault's Flying Tigers. Over a seven-month period, Chennault's Flying Tigers destroyed an estimated 115 Japanese aircraft, sank numerous Japanese ships, and had a notable participation in the campaign of Burma.
Also in 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the Vichy Government. On 27 September 1940, the Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy, and Japan , formalising their alignment as the "Axis Powers." These actions angered the United States, which reacted by making loans to China and instituting progressively more inclusive boycotts of raw materials. In the summer of 1941 the United States began boycotting oil, which was the last straw for the Japanese, who decided to go to war against the Allies with the exception of the Soviet Union.
Pearl Harbor under attack on 7 December 1941Japan planned a strike on Pearl Harbor to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet while consolidating oil fields in Southeast Asia. On 7 December 1941, Japanese warplanes commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo carried out a surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the largest U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The Japanese forces met little resistance and devastated the harbor. This attack resulted in eight battleships — California, Utah, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania — either sunk or damaged, 3 light cruisers and 3 destroyers sunk as well as damage to some auxiliaries and 343 aircraft either damaged or destroyed. 2408 Americans were killed including 68 civilians; 1178 were wounded. Japan lost only 29 aircraft and their crews and five midget submarines. However, the attack failed to strike targets that could have been crippling losses to the US Pacific Fleet, such as the aircraft carriers, which were out at sea for practice shooting at the time of the attack, or the base's ship fuel storage and repair facilities. The survival of these assets has led many to consider this attack a catastrophic long term strategic blunder for Japan.
The following day, 8 December 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. The same day, China officially declared war on Japan despite having been engaged in warfare for over four years (it had not done so in order to receive military aid without creating neutrality complications). Simultaneous to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan also attacked U.S. air bases in the Philippines. Immediately following these attacks, Japan invaded the Philippines and also the British Colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo and Burma, with the intention of seizing the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. In a matter of months, all these territories and more fell to the Japanese. The British island fortress of Singapore was captured in what Churchill considered one of the most humiliating British defeats of all time.
source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II |
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The Invasions
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British and American troops invaded North Afirca, and in the axis hands had complete control . Allies invaded Sicily and mainland Italy. Then Italians regected their Facist dictator and joined the allies. The Alllies in 1944 landed in Normandy, in Northern France, from Britain. The Allies liberated Paris in Agust and drove the Germans back across the river Rhine early in 1945. The Russians had mounted a new offensive and by the end of 1944 took over Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania. Russian and American troops met on the river Elbe iun the heart of Germany in April 1945. Defeated, the German leader committed suicide in Berlin and seven days later the rest of the German forces surrendered.
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The Defeat of Japan
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U.S. capture of islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa brought the Japanese homeland within easier range of naval and air attack. Amongst dozens of other cities, Tokyo was firebombed, and about 90,000 people died from the initial attack. The dense living conditions around production centres and the wooden residential constructions contributed to the large loss of life. In addition, the ports and major waterways of Japan were extensively mined by air in Operation Starvation which seriously disrupted the logistics of the island nation.
On 6 August 1945, the B-29 "Enola Gay", piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb (Little Boy) on Hiroshima, effectively destroying it. On 8 August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, as had been agreed to at Yalta, and launched a large-scale invasion of Japanese occupied Manchuria (Operation August Storm).
On 9 August, the B-29 "Bocks Car", piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped an atomic bomb (Fat Man) on Nagasaki.
The American use of atomic weapons against Japan prompted the emperor of Japan to bypass the existing government and intervene to end the war. The new inclusion of the Soviet Union in the war may have also played a part, but in his radio address to the nation the emperor did not mention it as a major reason for the surrender of Japan.
The Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945 (V-J day), signing official surrender papers on 2 September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Japan's surrender to the Allied powers did not fully end the war, however, because Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a peace agreement. In the last days of the armed conflict, the Soviet Union occupied the southern Kuril Islands, an area previously held by Japan and claimed by the Soviets.
source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II |
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War Ended
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Page Updated Wed Mar 22, 2006 12:23am EST
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