World_War_II

The largest armed conflict the world has ever seen, with a huge scope - for the first time spanning the world - and fought with powerful new weapons, culminating in the atomic bomb, turned against the civilian population (rather than the soldiers) to a larger extent then ever before.

Its origins can be traced to the end of World War I. In the

Treaty of Versailles, Germany was punished with the payment

of reparations of war to the victorious nations. This, among other causes, led to a serious economic crisis and hiperinflation, and civil unrest that made possible for the Nazi Party to get to the power. Adolf Hitler made the

german masses dream with supremacy, while putting the blame for

all the problems of the country in the Jews. Soon he was

asking for Lebensraum, vital space for 'all the german people', that included Austria, and the Sudeten, german

speaking region of Czechoslovakia. Austria was absorbed by Germany in the Ansschluss, and the western leaders allowed him to annex the Sudeten, in a vane attempt to prevent war. Britain and France only reacted when he invaded Poland (Sep 1 1939) and declared war, and even then a week after the fact (they had promised immediate aid).

The League of Nations, that had been created after WWI to

prevent another war, was unable to do anything. Among the reason

for its powerlessness is the fact that the United States, in

a very isolacionist phase after WWI, had refused to join.

France fell quickly to a new tactic, the Blitzkrieg, and Britain was left to fend for itself. Soon, though, the Soviet union was drawn into the conflict. At first it had acted as Hitler's ally, partitioning the east with him - they invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and east Poland in the busy year of 1939. However, on June 22, 1941, the Germans broke the treaty and invaded, advancing almost as far as Moscow before being defeated by the worst Russian winter since Napoleon.

That same year war spread to the Pacific. Japan had been active in attempts to expand its holdings, notably in the Sino-Japanese war. Now in an attempt to eliminate its main potential opposition, the American navy, it attacked Pearl Harbor and proceeded to invade much of southeast Asia and many Pacific islands. Unfortunately for its ally, Germany, this also drew America into the European theatre.

Eventually the allied powers, now including the states, were victorious. Germany's power was broken by his disastrous Russian campaign, and the succesful liberation of France reopened the western front on the continent. Hitler commited suicide, the Russians took Berlin, and the country was partitioned. By then Japan had begun to weaken as well, and surrendered after two of its civilian cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were destroyed by nuclear weapons. The war ended in 1945.

The combatants after 1941 were:

*Allied powers

China

United Kingdom

*Axis powers