World War II

The EventGlobal military conflict in which the United States and Canada fought alongside the Western Allies against the Axis Powers, led by the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy

Date September 1939–August 1945

Places Europe, North Africa, Japan, Southeast Asia, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

Although far from being the most prolonged military conflict in world history, World War II was easily the largest-scale, most far-reaching, and most destructive conflict in history. It killed more than 50 million people—many by mass murder—and physically and psychologically wounded more than 100 million more. Vast regions of Europe and Asia were laid waste by ground, air, and naval actions. Far removed from the main combat arenas in Europe and the Far East, the United States and Canada suffered little direct damage from the war, but both nations were heavily involved in supplying combat forces, ships, planes, weapons, and other military matériel to the Allied effort. The war ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan and redefined the international balance of power.

As the storm clouds of war darkened over Europe during the late 1930’s, most North Americans favored isolation from European conflicts. The United States and Canada had fought vigorously and at considerable cost in World War I, believing that the “Great War” had been a war to end all wars. Such idealism was crushed when European nationalistic interests and squabbles reemerged in the postwar era. Consequently, many disillusioned Americans chose to stand aside when World War II began in Europe with Germany’s invasion of Poland in early September 1939, which was followed by Great Britain’s and France’s declarations of war. Bound by its membership in the British Commonwealth, Canada soon followed Britain into the war, but not without internal conflict.

Background to the European War

The root causes of the European theater of World War II can be found in issues left unresolved by the settlement that ended World War I in November 1918. Although the Central Powers’ defeat in that war had been far from total, Germany and its allies were harshly treated by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). The postwar settlement took territories from Germany in the east and west, destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, humiliated Germans by including a “war guilt” clause, imposed disarmament, and demanded heavy reparation payments for war damage. Dispirited by postwar inflation and the effects of the world depression, a substantial minority of Germans voted for candidates in Adolf Hitler’s extremist Nazi Party in the nation’s 1933 elections. The Nazis won and Hitler legally became chancellor of Germany. Under his leadership, Germany pursued policies of economic control and rearmament. The Nazis were both anticommunist and anti-Semitic, blaming Reds and Jews for Germany’s problems. Himself an Austrian by birth, Hitler saw a need for “living space” for ethnic Germans that was to be carved from lands occupied by “inferior” Slavic peoples living to the east. To achieve his aims, he pursued an aggressive foreign policy while rearming Germany.

In violation of the Treaty of Versailles, German troops occupied the demilitarized German Rhineland in 1936, Austria in 1938, and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Meanwhile, Great Britain and France sought to appease his regime by granting concessions in the hope that they would satisfy German ambitions. The height of their appeasement efforts came at the 1938 Munich Conference that condoned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. However, in the eyes of the Western democracies, concessions to Hitler appeared only to encourage more aggression. Britain and France decided to guarantee the integrity of several small states in Europe, including Poland. After Germany invaded Poland in early September, 1939, the British and French honored their pledges by declaring war on Germany. This turning point was followed by a long lull during which no major fighting occurred. This quiet phase, which became known as the “Phony War,” continued through early 1940. Meanwhile, a desultory war at sea began in the Atlantic, featuring submarine sinkings and sorties by units of the German surface fleet.

Meanwhile, shortly before invading Poland, Hitler negotiated an unexpected treaty with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin . The agreement called for peaceful economic cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union and divided Poland between them. Freed from a major military power in the east, Hitler turned his attention to the west. In the late spring of 1940, German divisions met surprisingly little resistance as they advanced through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France.

Germany’s invasion of Poland had utilized a new form of warfare featuring fast-moving armored ground advances supported by air assaults that became known as Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war” in English. Powerful columns of tanks, mobile troops, and artillery punched through soft spots in defensive lines, surrounded, and crushed defenders. The Germans employed the same tactics in their rapid advance through Western Europe. With the static trench warfare of World War I still fresh in many memories, the world marveled at the unprecedented speed, power, and efficiency of the German army in 1940.

Great Britain and the United States

After the German advance through Western Europe ended, Britain stood alone as a significant European power not under Axis domination. Most of the British troops that had tried to aid in France’s defense were brought home without their equipment through a heroic evacuation from Dunkirk on the Atlantic coast of France by a flotilla of ships and boats, including many civilian craft. The next challenge to the Germans was to cross the English Channel to invade Great Britain. However, Britain’s Royal Navy was too strong for Germany to move an invasion force by sea, even the short distance across the channel, so the Germans then concentrated on bombarding England by air.

The ensuing Battle of Britain was fought entirely in the air from July to November 1940. Britain managed to survive the Nazi onslaught, thanks to its Royal Air Force, in which many Canadians and citizens of other Commonwealth countries served. Indeed, the German air force suffered such severe losses in the Battle of Britain that it eventually limited its air assaults to nighttime bombing raids, particularly against London. Britain was also threatened on the seas by a growing submarine campaign against merchant ships, which provided the imports necessary to sustain industry and feed the nation. In the Battle of the North Atlantic, which continued throughout the war, the British lost many ships, making the need for outside help ever greater. Because the Germans never achieved air superiority over Britain, a surface invasion was impossible. Britain’s success in holding out against the German assault made it the paramount staging area for the Allied counterinvasion of continental Europe that would come later.

US president Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to help Britain, but because American public sentiment favored neutrality, he had to act carefully to find ways to get around international conventions that forbade neutral nations from aiding belligerent powers. One way he did this was by creating the Lend-Lease program to send money and matériel to Britain and other countries fighting Axis Powers. Anticipating that it was only a matter of time until the United States would be drawn into the war, Roosevelt oversaw a major buildup of American military forces and equipment.

New German Campaigns

After occupying France in mid-1940, Germany partitioned the country. It administered the northern part of France, while allowing French collaborators to set up a fascist state, based in Vichy, in southern France under France’s World War I hero General Henri-Philippe Pétain. As France was falling, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy came into the war on Germany’s side. Another important fascist state, Spain, managed to remain neutral throughout the war, even though its leader, Francisco Franco , had been aided by the Germans when he was fighting in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 that had brought him to power.

One of Italy’s reasons for entering the war was to gain more territory in Africa. Italy then launched unsuccessful campaigns against British forces in North Africa in the summer of 1940 and against Greece in October. German forces had to rescue Italian troops in both campaigns. To save the Italians, Hitler had to conquer the Balkans and send the German Afrika Corps to North Africa, led by General Erwin Rommel .

In June 1941, after German troops had accomplished almost all that Hitler could reasonably hope for them to accomplish in western Europe, Hitler turned his attention back to the east and launched his greatest military gamble—a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. He had long plotted to topple Stalin’s communist regime, thereby gaining vast territory and natural resources. The ensuing German campaign saw some of the most ferocious fighting and greatest human suffering of World War II. Hitler hoped for another Blitzkrieg victory, and the German invasion started well. However, Hitler had not reckoned on the terrible conditions that his army would face when they confronted the Soviet winter. By December, German troops were freezing to death on the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad as Soviet troops began counterattacking. When weather conditions improved in the spring of 1942, the Germans renewed their advance, this time on southern Russia. However, they got only as far as Stalingrad (now Volgograd) on the Volga River.

The Pacific Theater of the War

World War II actually began earlier in East Asia than it did in Europe. After a period of rapid modernization, the comparatively small island nation of Japan looked to China and other parts of Asia for resource-rich territories to conquer. By the 1930s, military leaders were dominating Japanese domestic politics and dictating a policy of ruthless military aggression that would lead their nation into a full-scale war with China. In 1931, the Japanese moved against the rich northern Chinese province of Manchuria. In 1936, Japan signed a defensive pact with Germany and Italy, with whom it would later ally to form the core of the Axis Powers. Meanwhile, the United States appeared to stand in the way of Japanese domination of East Asia, so the Japanese military made preparations to neutralize American naval power in the Pacific.

On December 7, 1941, aircraft-based planes from a large Japanese armada attacked the US Pacific Fleet as it lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor. In the days that followed, the Japanese moved rapidly against the Philippines and European colonies in Southeast Asia. By attacking European possessions in Asia, Japan could claim to be liberating fellow Asians from European rule. In reality, however, the Japanese covered Southeast Asia’s rich oil and rubber resources.

Despite the Japanese alliance with Germany and Italy, Japan’s major contribution to the European theater of the war was to force the United States and Great Britain to commit troops, ships, planes, and equipment to the Pacific. The Japanese fought against British and American forces on their own but were fortunate to have the Soviet Union not join in the Pacific war until well into 1945.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did enough damage to the US fleet to permit Japan to dominate actions in the Pacific for several months, during which Japan rapidly added to its conquests. However, while the Japanese destroyed a number of American battleships at Pearl Harbor, the vitally important American aircraft carriers were away from the harbor and thus escaped unharmed. The Japanese strategy called for the rapid conquest of Southeast Asia after crippling the US fleet. US forces held out in the Philippines as long as possible, but Japanese forces stormed to victory all through the area, easily conquering the British bastion of Singapore in early 1942.

Japanese expansion in the Pacific was finally checked by a brilliant American naval victory in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, when the American aircraft carriers came fully into play, and all the Japanese carriers were put out of action. Later that same year, American forces began a slow, two-pronged advance through the Pacific, essentially fighting from island to island, starting at Guadalcanal. Navy admiral Chester W. Nimitz led one thrust toward Japan, and Army general Douglas MacArthur led the other toward the Philippines.

Turning Points in the War, 1942–43

At the beginning of 1942, the Axis Powers reached the peak of their conquests, dominating continental Europe and the western Pacific. The Soviet Union appeared ready to collapse, and Britain was being strangled by Germany’s submarine warfare. The United States was finally in the war, but it appeared unable to stop the Japanese in the Pacific. The course of the war then changed because of three dramatic turning points in the Pacific, in North Africa, and in Russia.

In the Pacific, the US finally began winning significant victories over Japan in the battles of the Coral Sea (May 3–8, 1942), Midway (June 4, 1942), and Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942–February 9, 1943).

Between October 23 and November 4, 1942, the North African campaign turned against Germany and Italy when British field marshal Bernard Montgomery defeated Rommel at El Alamein in western Egypt. The most important turning point, however, was the long Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 23, 1942, until February 2, 1943, when the Red Army halted the German advance on the Soviet Union and sent the badly beaten Germans limping back home, with the German reputation for invincibility shattered.

When the Germans were still advancing into Russia, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin pressed his Western Allies to open a second front against Germany in the west to force the Germans to divert troops and equipment from the eastern front. The British and American leaders responded cautiously, however, contenting themselves with fighting Axis forces in North Africa and mounting a steadily intensifying bombing campaign against German cities. Meanwhile, the Allies’ improving convoy system, increased long-range air power, and new equipment were reducing the German submarine menace in the Atlantic.

Many Allied leaders thought it would be wiser to advance on Germany from the south, rather than the west, and victory in the North African campaign put the Allies in position to advance on southern Europe in 1943. An invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland followed, causing Italy to change sides in that year, and Benito Mussolini was captured and eventually killed by Italian partisans. By the end of the year, Axis forces were in retreat in all theaters of the war. Allied bombers continued to pound Germany and German-occupied positions in Europe. In the Pacific, carrier-borne planes raided Japanese bases and prepared islands for Marine occupation.

Allied Victories, 1944–45

The last two years of the war featured a steady allied advance: on the plains of eastern Europe and then into eastern Germany, up the peninsula of Italy and, after the Normandy invasion of June 1944, across France and into western Germany. Simultaneously, the Allies advanced in Asia. Mostly Anglo-Indian forces began to push the Japanese out of Burma. Meanwhile American forces got closer to the home islands of Japan by island hopping in the Pacific.

In August 1942, Canadian troops had tested German defenses on the French coast in the ill-fated Dieppe raid. In June 1944, the Allies returned to the French Coast in much greater force, to begin the reconquest of Europe by landing a massive invasion force at Normandy on a date remembered as D Day. In this invasion, British, Canadian, and American forces successfully stormed the Germans’ formidable West Wall defenses. After bitter fighting, an American breakout under General George S. Patton raced deep into France, while British and Canadian troops under Bernard Montgomery edged up along the coast.

Meanwhile, Soviet forces had already begun advancing toward Germany from the east. Casualties on the eastern front were enormous, accounting for three quarters of German wartime military deaths. Estimates of Soviet fatalities during the war have ranged as high as 25 million military and civilian victims.

The last gasp of German forces in the West came during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After the Western Allies counterattacked, Germany was relentlessly invaded from the west and east. After Soviet and American forces met in the center of Germany, Soviet forces turned to the costly conquest of Berlin. As they approached, Hitler committed suicide. What was left of the Nazi regime capitulated unconditionally a short time afterward.

Japan remained at war a few months longer, increasingly pounded by American planes. Costly invasions captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa, near the home islands. In these last stages the Soviet Union, which had hitherto remained neutral toward Japan, declared war and advanced on the Asian mainland. Firebombing caused the Japanese capital, Tokyo, to be devastated by a fire storm, and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. Japan surrendered shortly thereafter, and what would have been a bloody and costly Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland was thus avoided.

Impact

The victory of democracy over fascism was extremely costly: World War II was marked by horrendous murder and brutality, massive destruction, and staggering loss of life. The Nazis practiced genocide against Jews and other ethnic groups, whom they exterminated by the millions. Simultaneously, millions of Soviet prisoners were allowed to die in camps, as were German prisoners.

The United States and the Soviet Union emerged from the war as the only two significant world powers. Japan, Germany, France, and Britain lost that status as a result of the war. The wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers fell apart after the war, and the United States and the Soviet Union would soon face off in a new contest that would become known as the Cold War.

The United States and Canada both made major contributions to the Allied war effort. Because the United States had ten times as many people as Canada, its material contribution was proportionately greater. However, both nations fully mobilized to fight a total war, and their contributions clearly made a difference. Huge numbers of American planes, tanks, guns, ships, and other military equipment poured off the production lines to keep the Allies supplied. This remarkable expansion of industry brought significant social changes. To meet the great need for workers in America, large numbers of women and members of minority groups were brought into the workforce to hold jobs from which they had previously been excluded. Both Canada and the United States grew more urban and less rural during the war. Patriotism united diverse peoples in a common cause. While there were some wartime shortages and consumption restrictions through rationing in North America, these deprivations were insignificant compared to the sufferings of nations directly involved in the fighting in Europe and Asia.

While Canada and the United States lost hundreds of thousands of men and women in the war, their losses were proportionately much lower than those of Continental European and East Asian nations. The total number of people who died because of the war will never be known, but most estimates have centered around 50 million, with much higher numbers of physically and mentally wounded victims of the war.

Apart from the Japanese attack on the then-US territory of Hawaii and a brief Japanese occupation of the Aleutian Islands in the territory of Alaska, neither the United States nor Canada was bombed or invaded during the war. Consequently, in contrast to the massive rebuilding that European and Asian nations faced after the war, the United States and Canada were prepared to take their expanded industrial capacity into an unprecedented period of economic expansion and prosperity.

World War II had a significant and long lasting impact on prosperity and innovation that impacted multiple facets of life within the United States. Industrial efforts, for example, that were required to support Allied forces during the war resulted in post–war factories across the country employing skilled and experienced laborers who manufactured high-quality products using advanced production methods. The housing and construction industries also benefited with a housing boom that continued into the 1970s. Increased demand for new housing also spurred an increase in the production and purchasing of construction materials and consumer goods such as appliances and other modern conveniences. The Cold War stimulated scientific and technological innovations in the race to space between the United States and the USSR, and high-tech advances continued into the twenty-first century.

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