Sixty to Seventy-Five Million People
World War II — 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945 — was a global conflict between two coalitions, the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly every country on Earth participated, many engaging in total war on an unprecedented scale.
It was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the deaths of 60 to 75 million people. The detail that matters most in that figure is who died: a majority were civilians.
Millions died from massacres, starvation, disease and genocides including the Holocaust. This was not a war whose casualties were mostly soldiers at fronts; it was a war conducted across populations. Its causes included unresolved tensions left over from the First World War, the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan.
It Started Before It Started
The conflict is dated from 1939, but the machinery was already running.
Key preceding events included Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland.
The formal beginning came on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, after which the United Kingdom and France declared war. Poland was also invaded by the Soviet Union in mid-September and partitioned between the two states under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania, while Germany conquered Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. After the fall of France in June 1940, the war continued mainly between Germany, now assisted by Fascist Italy, and the British Empire and Commonwealth — through the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Year It Turned
In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front. In December 1941 Japan attacked American and British territories across Asia and the Pacific, including Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.
Then the momentum reversed, and it happened in roughly eighteen months. Japan's advances were halted in June 1942 at the Battle of Midway. In early 1943, Axis forces were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad.
An Allied invasion of Italy in July 1943 brought down its fascist regime, and offensives in the Pacific and by the Soviet Union forced the Axis into retreat on all fronts. In 1944 the Western Allies landed in France at Normandy, opening a new front, while the Soviet Union advanced into Central Europe. Japan lost key Western Pacific islands, saw its navy crippled, and was defeated in Burma.
Two Bombs, and a New World Order
The war in Europe ended with the liberation of occupied territories, the invasion of Germany, the fall of Berlin, and unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
In the Pacific it ended differently. On 6 and 9 August the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by a Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Japan announced unconditional surrender on 15 August and signed the surrender document on 2 September 1945. Afterwards Germany, Austria, Japan and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.
The aftermath built the world that followed. The United Nations was created to foster cooperation and prevent future conflicts, with the victorious great powers — China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States — becoming the permanent members of its Security Council. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting up the Cold War, while the waning influence of Europe's great powers triggered the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
