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World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated
WWII or WW2) was a global military conflict which
involved a majority of the world's nations, including all of the
great powers, organized into two
opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. The war
involved the mobilization of over 100 million military
personnel, making it the most widespread war in history. In a
state of "total war", the major participants placed their
complete economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at
the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between
civilian and military resources. Over 70 million people, the
majority of them civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest
conflict in human history.
The starting date of the war is generally held to be September
1939 with the German invasion of Poland and subsequent
declarations of war on Germany by the United Kingdom, France and
the British Dominions. However, as a result of other events,
many belligerents entered the war before or after this date,
during a period which spanned from 1937 to 1941. Amongst these
main events are the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the start of
Operation Barbarossa, and the attack on Pearl Harbor and British
and Dutch colonies in South East Asia.
The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war as
the world's leading superpowers. This set the stage for the Cold
War, which lasted for the next 45 years. The United Nations was
formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The self
determination spawned by the war accelerated decolonisation
movements in Asia and Africa, while Western Europe itself began
moving toward integration.
In
the aftermath of World War I, a defeated Germany signed the
Treaty of Versailles. This caused Germany to lose a significant
portion of its territory, prohibited the annexation of other
states, limited the size of German armed forces and imposed
massive reparations. Russia's civil war led to the creation of
the Soviet Union which soon was under the control of Joseph
Stalin. In Italy, Benito Mussolini seized power as a fascist
dictator promising to create a "New Roman Empire." The
Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign
against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the
mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its
former Chinese communist allies. In 1931, an increasingly
militaristic Japanese Empire, which had long sought influence in
China as the first step of its right to rule Asia, used the
Mukden Incident as justification to invade Manchuria; the
two nations then fought several small conflicts, in Shanghai,
Rehe and Hebei until the Tanggu Truce in 1933. Afterwards
Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese
aggression in Manchuria, and Chahar and Suiyuan.
Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the
German government in 1923, became the leader of Germany in 1933.
He abolished democracy, espousing a radical racially motivated
revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearming
campaign. This worried France and the United Kingdom, who had
lost much in the previous war, as well as Italy, which saw its
territorial ambitions threatened by those of Germany. To secure
its alliance, the French allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia,
which Italy desired to conquer. The situation was aggravated in
early 1935 when the Saarland was legally reunited with Germany
and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, speeding up
remilitarization and introducing conscription. Hoping to contain
Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the Stresa
Front. The Soviet Union, concerned due to Germany's goals of
capturing vast areas of eastern Europe, concluded a treaty of
mutual assistance with France.
Before taking effect though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required
to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations,
rendering it essentially toothless and in June 1935, the United
Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany easing
prior restrictions. The United States, concerned with events in
Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August. In
October, Italy invaded Ethiopia, with Germany the only major
European nation supporting her invasion. Italy then revoked
objections to Germany's goal of making Austria a satellite
state.
In
direct violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, Hitler
remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936. He received little
response from other European powers. When the Spanish Civil War
broke out in July, Hitler and Mussolini supported fascist
Generalísimo Francisco Franco's nationalist forces in his civil
war against the Soviet-supported Spanish Republic. Both sides
used the conflict to test new weapons and methods of warfare and
the nationalists would prove victorious in early 1939.
With tensions mounting, efforts to strengthen or consolidate
power were made. In October, Germany and Italy formed the
Rome-Berlin Axis and a month later Germany and Japan, each
believing communism and the Soviet Union in particular to be a
threat, signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy would join
in the following year. In China, the Kuomintang and communist
forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose
Japan.
Air War against Germany.
On the eve of World War II the German Air Force
(GAF) was the most powerful in the world. However, it was
designed primarily for the direct support of ground armies, a
circumstance that would cripple it in its coming battle with the
British Royal Air Force (RAF) and U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF).
Overall Allied strategy for the war in western Europe called
for an assault in force launched from Britain as a base and
aimed at the heart of Germany. At the Casablanca Conference in
January 1943, the RAF and USAAF made Allied air superiority a
top priority. To cripple Adolf Hitler's plane production, the
USAAF focused its initial bombing efforts on German aircraft and
ballbearing plants. Its effort during 1943 was disappointing,
however, owing primarily to the severe losses suffered by bomber
forces operating over Germany beyond the reach of escort
fighters. Between February and May 1944, long-range escort
fighters began to accompany the U.S. bombers all the way to
their targets and back. Although German aircraft production
continued to increase until September 1944, the GAF could not
make effective use of the growing number of aircrafts because of
(1) the loss of experienced GAF pilots brought on by the attempt
to halt the bombing offensive, and (2) a critical gasoline
shortage beginning in May 1944, which also made it difficult to
train new GAF pilots.
In late 1944, the USAAF bomber forces concentrated on
Germany's synthetic oil plants and transportation network.
The GAF, already so weakened by June 1944 that it could not
oppose the landings at Normandy, fell into disarray. Hopelessly
outnumbered by the combined forces of the USAAF and RAF, and
undergoing unceasing attack by day
and night, the GAF had lost the battle. Not even the
introduction of the new high-speed jet fighter (Messerschmitt
262) could stem the tide.
The inability of the German high command, including Adolf
Hitler, to see the GAF as anything more than a supporting arm of
the army contributed measurably to the Allied victory in the
air. Despite the threat posed by Allied bombing from 1940
onward, it was late 1942 before any serious effort was made to
increase the size and capabilities of the GAF. Then, when
massive energies were applied to the task, the USAAF and RAF
buildup already out-paced that of Germany, while the Allied
bombing of the aircraft factories and fuel sources further
hampered German efforts. With the destruction of surface
transportation between and within its bases and factories during
the winter of 1944–45, the GAF could offer but token resistance.
Air War against Japan.
The first attack on Japan by American airmen in World War II
was on 18 April 1942. In an extraordinary feat, they flew
sixteen twin-engine B-25s off the carrier Hornet about
688 miles west of Japan and hit Tokyo and other nearby targets
before heading for landing in China. This isolated raid, led by
Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, came less than five
months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. By late 1943,
anxious to begin a sustained air campaign against Japan,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt arranged with British and
Chinese authorities to build bases in India and western China
for the B-29, a four-engine strategic bomber the prototype of
which had gone into development in 1939. By the spring of 1944,
130 were available for deployment to India and China.
On 14 June 1944, B-29 crews struck Japan from China for the
first time. Sixty-three planes bombed a steel plant on Kyushu
but caused only minor damage. Seven planes and fifty-five
crewmen were lost on the raid. As mainland Japan lay beyond the
B-29's 1,500-mile maximum combat radius, the U.S. airmen flew
only five other missions against Japan from China. Mostly, they
bombed closer enemy targets in Manchuria, China, Formosa, and
Southeast Asia. By 29 March 1945, when the last raid was flown
from the China-India theater, they had undertaken 3,058
individual sorties and dropped 11,691 tons of bombs on military
and industrial targets.
The long-awaited sustained air war against Japan did not
begin until U.S. forces had seized the Mariana Islands,
beginning their assault on 15 June 1944. From Saipan, Tinian,
and Guam, the B-29s could reach Japan's major industrial cities.
Construction of runways on Saipan began even before the fighting
there ended on 9 July 1944. The first bomber reached Saipan on
12October. On 24 November, Major General Haywood S. Hansell
launched the first air raid against Tokyo since Doolittle's
raid. Nearly 90 B-29s struck at the enemy capital from an
altitude of more than 25,000 feet, beyond the effective range of
most Japanese aircraft and antiaircraft artillery. Their
target—an aircraft plant—was almost completely obscured by
clouds and was hit by only 24 planes. Sixty-four others bombed
the general urban area. Although bomb damage was minimal, the
Japanese soon began dispersing their industries, causing more
disruption to their war production than did the initial B-29
attacks. Hansell staged six more raids in 1944.
These high-altitude bombing raids proved ineffective. In
January 1945 Roosevelt's top airman, General Henry H. Arnold,
replaced Hansell with Major General Curtis E. LeMay, who had
commanded B-17s over Europe and the B-29s in the China-India
theater. Other important changes followed. Washington directed
that the B-29s carry more incendiaries on future raids, to take
advantage of the known flammability of Japanese buildings. On 4
February a heavy incendiary strike against Ko[UNK]be destroyed
2.5 million square feet of the city's urban area. It was a
precursor of the great fire raids.
The Japanese, meanwhile, had launched preemptive air strikes
against the Saipan bases from Iwo Jima, a fortress island some
725 miles north of the Marianas. Between 26 November and 31
December 1944, some 80 Japanese planes had attacked and
destroyed 11 B-29s on Saipan and damaged 43. American
strategists determined to seize Iwo Jima; D day was set for 19
February 1945. Three days before, to support the invasion, a
U.S. Navy fast-carrier force sailed into Tokyo harbor and
launched more than 1,200 aircraft against Honshu targets,
destroying some 500 Japanese planes. Navy carrier pilots
returned to Japan on eighteen more occasions, bombing and
strafing enemy facilities.
The B-29s, however, wreaked the greatest damage on Japan,
LeMay having ordered his airmen to attack with incendiaries at
altitudes of less than 8,000 feet, and individually rather than
in formation. These new tactics were employed for the first time
on the night of 9–10 March, when 285 bombers dropped two
thousand tons of incendiaries on Tokyo. High winds fanned the
flames into a huge firestorm that
gutted 16 square miles in the city's center, killing 83,783,
injuring 40,918, and leaving 1 million homeless. Similar fire
raids were subsequently flown against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and
fifty smaller Japanese cities. By midsummer, 180 square miles of
Japan's urban area had been destroyed. To add to Japan's
troubles, B-29s dropped 12,953 mines in enemy waters,
effectively blocking many Japanese ports and the Shimonoseki
Strait.
The final blows came in August 1945. On 6 August a B-29
dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 78,000
people and injuring 51,000. When Japanese officials did not
immediately respond to Washington's call for surrender, a second
atomic bomb was dropped 9 August on Nagasaki, killing 35,000
people and injuring 60,000. On 15 August, beset on all sides,
Japan capitulated. |
