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World War II

World War II was the most destructive enterprise in human history. It is sobering to consider that more resources, material, and human lives (approximately 50 million) were expended on the war than on any other human activity. Indeed, this con�ict was so all-encompassing that very few "side" wars took place simultaneously, the 1939–1940 Finnish-Soviet War (Winter War) being one of the few exceptions. The Early Phases of the War The traditional and widely accepted date for the start of World War II is September 1, 1939, with the quick but not quite blitzkrieg-speed German invasion of Poland. This action brought France and Great Britain into the con�ict two days later in accordance with their guarantees to Poland. (The Soviet Union's invasion of eastern Poland on September 17 provoked no such reaction.)

The Germans learned from their Polish Campaign and mounted a true blitzkrieg o�ensive against the Low Countries and France that commenced on May 10, 1940. The Allies were simply outmaneuvered, losing France in six weeks. The Germans found that the French Routes Nationales (National Routes), designed to enable French forces to reach the frontiers, could also be used in the opposite direction by an invader. The Germans themselves would relearn this military truth on their autobahns in 1945.

Germany su�ered its �rst defeat of the war when its air o�ensive against Great Britain, the world's �rst great air campaign, was thwarted in the Battle of Britain. The main advantages of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in this battle were radar and the geographic fact that its pilots and their warplanes were shot down over home territory. German pilots and aircraft in a similar predicament were out of action for the duration of the war, and they also had farther to �y from their bases. But Britain's greatest advantage throughout this stage of the war was its prime minister, Winston L. S. Churchill, who gave stirring voice and substance to the Allied de�ance of Adolf Hitler.

Nonetheless, by spring 1941, Nazi Germany had conquered or dominated all of the European continent, with the exception of Switzerland, Sweden, and Vatican City. Greece, which had held o� and beaten back an inept Italian o�ensive, �nally capitulated to the German Balkan blitzkrieg in spring 1941.

Nazi Germany then turned on its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, in Operation BARBAROSSA. Joseph Stalin's own inept generalship played a major role in the early Soviet defeats, and German forces drove almost to within sight of the Kremlin's towers in December 1941 before being beaten back.

The United States Enters the War

Early that same month, war erupted in the Paci�c with Japan's coordinated combined attacks on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and on British, Dutch, and American imperial possessions. With the Soviet Union holding out precariously and the United States now a belligerent, the Axis had lost the war, even though few recognized that fact at the time. The United States' "great debate" as to whether and to what extent to aid Britain was silenced in a national outpouring of collective wrath against the new enemy.

Japanese forces surprised and outfought their opponents by land, sea, and air. British and Dutch forces in Asia, superior only in numbers, had been routed in one of the most successful combined-arms campaigns in history. Singapore, the linchpin of imperial European power in Asia, surrendered ignominiously on February 16, 1942. Only the Americans managed to delay the Japanese seriously, holding out on the Bataan Peninsula and then at

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the Corregidor forti�cations until May. The end of imperialism, at least in Asia, can be dated to the capitulation of Singapore, as Asians witnessed other Asians with superior technology and professionalism completely defeat European and American forces.

And yet, on Pearl Harbor's very "day of infamy," Japan actually lost the war. Its forces missed the American aircraft carriers there, as well as the oil tank farms and the machine shop complex. On that day, the Japanese killed many U.S. personnel, and they destroyed mostly obsolete aircraft and sank a handful of elderly battleships. But, above all, they outraged Americans, who determined to avenge the attack. Japan would receive no mercy in the relentless land, sea, and air war that the United States was now about to wage against it. More signi�cantly, American industrial and manpower resources vastly surpassed those Japan could bring to bear in a protracted con�ict.

The tide would not begin to turn until the drawn-out naval-air clash in the Coral Sea (May 1942), the �rst naval battle in which neither side's surface ships ever came within sight of the opponent. The following month, the U.S. Navy avenged Pearl Harbor in the Battle of Midway, sinking no fewer than four Japanese carriers, again without those surface ships involved ever sighting each other. The loss of hundreds of superbly trained, combat- experienced naval aviators and their expert maintenance crews was as great a blow to Japan as the actual sinking of its invaluable carriers. The Americans could make up their own losses far more easily than the Japanese.

By this time, U.S. production was supplying not only American military needs but also those of most of the Allies. Everything from aluminum ingots and the canned-meat product Spam to Sherman tanks and �nished aircraft crossed the oceans to the British Isles, the Soviet Union, the Free French, the Nationalist Chinese, the Fighting Poles, and others. Moreover, quantity was not produced at the expense of quality. Although some of the Allies might have had reservations in regard to Spam, the army trucks, the boots, the small arms, and the uniforms provided by the United States were unsurpassed. The very ships that transported the bulk of this war material? the famous mass-produced Liberty ships ("rolled out by the mile, chopped o� by the yard")?could still be found on the world's oceanic trade routes decades after they were originally scheduled to be scrapped.

The War in Europe Although considered a sideshow by the Soviets, Operation TORCH was of the utmost strategic importance, and until mid-1943, it was the only continental land campaign that the Western Allies were strong enough to mount. Had North Africa, including Egypt, fallen to the Axis, the Suez Canal could not have been held and German forces could have gone through the Middle East, mobilizing Arab nationalism, threatening the area's vast oil �elds, and even menacing the embattled Soviet Union. Not until the British commander in North Africa, General Bernard Montgomery, amassed a massive superiority in armor was Germany's General Erwin Rommel defeated at El Alamein in October 1942 and slowly pushed back toward Tunisia. U.S. and British landings in Algeria and Morocco to the rear of Rommel's forces were successful, but the American troops received a bloody nose at Kasserine Pass. The vastly outnumbered North African Axis forces did not capitulate until May 1943.

After the North African Campaign ended in 1943, the Allies drove the Axis forces from Sicily, and then, in September 1943, they began the interminable Italian Campaign. It is perhaps indicative of the frustrating nature of the war in Italy that the lethargic Allies allowed the campaign to begin with the escape of most Axis forces from Sicily to the Italian peninsula. The Germans conducted well-organized retreats from one mountainous forti�ed line to the next. The Italian Campaign was occasionally justi�ed for tying down many German troops, but the truth is that it tied down far more Allied forces?British, Americans, Free French, Free Poles, Brazilians, Canadians, Indians, and British and French African colonials among them. German forces in Italy ultimately surrendered in late April 1945, only about a week before Germany itself capitulated.

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The aftermath of World War II proved considerably di�erent from that of World War I, with its prevailing spirit of disillusionment. Amazingly, all of World War II's belligerents, winners and losers alike, could soon look back and realize that the destruction of the murderous, archaic, racialist Axis regimes had genuinely cleared the way to a better world. All enjoyed peace and the absence of major war. Even for the Soviets, the postwar decades were in�nitely better than the prewar years, although much of this measure of good fortune might be attributed simply to the death of Stalin. The United States and much of the British Commonwealth emerged from the war far stronger than when they entered it. By the 1950s, both war-shattered Western Europe and Japan were well on their way to becoming major economic competitors with the United States. The uniquely sagacious and foresighted Western Allied military occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria in many ways laid the foundations for the postwar prosperity of these former enemy nations. (For the most part, however, similar good fortune bypassed the less developed nations.) Within a few years, former belligerents on both sides could agree that, despite its appalling casualties and destruction, World War II had been if not perhaps "the Good War" then at least something in the nature of a worthwhile war. H. P. Willmott Michael B. Barrett Further Reading

Andrieu d'Albas, Emmanuel M.A. Death of a Navy: Japanese Naval Action of World War II. New York: Devin-Adair, 1954, 1957; Baldwin, Hanson W. Battles Lost and Won: Great Campaigns of World War II. New York: Harper and Row, 1966, 1994, 2000.

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Image Credits

Germans surrender to 100th Infantry Battalion: Center for Military History

Pearl Harbor naval base a�ame: Library of Congress

Caen, France after the Allied invasion: Corel

APA Citation Willmott, H. P. , & Barrett, M. B. (2024). World War II. World at War: Understanding Con�ict and Society. Retrieved July 14, 2024, from https://worldatwar2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1098821   http://worldatwar2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1098821? sid=1098821&cid=0&oid=0&subId=0&view=print&lang=&useConcept=False Entry ID: 1098821

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