World War II (conflict)

 

World War II (abbreviated WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War and the Second Great War, was a global military conflict, the joining of what had initially been two separate conflicts. The first began in Asia in 1937 as the Second Sino-Japanese War; the other began in Europe in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland.

This global conflict split the majority of the world's nations into two opposing military alliances: the Allies on one side, and the Axis powers on the other. It involved the mobilization of over 100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war in history, and placed the participants in a state of total war, erasing the distinction between civil and military resources. This resulted in the complete activation of a nation's economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities for the purposes of the war effort. 62 million people, the majority of them civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. The financial cost of the war is estimated at about 1944 US$1 trillion worldwide, making it the most costly war in capital as well as lives.

The Allies were victorious, and, as a result, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged 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 hopes of preventing another such conflict. The self determination spawned by the war accelerated decolonization movements in Asia and Africa, while Europe itself began moving toward integration.

Cause of the War
The seeds of World War II were sown with the aftermath of World War I and the almost complete neutering of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1922 Benito Mussolini and his fascists took control of Italy and set the model for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. Hitler's rise to power was aided by the civil unrest caused by the Great Depression, and this combined with his charismatic and polemic speeches resulted in growing support for the Nazis. After several incidents, including the burning of the Reichstag and the Enabling Act of 1933, the Weimar Republic was dissolved and Hitler took power in Germany.

Because of their expansionist views, Hitler and Mussolini began to re-militarize and become increasingly hostile. Mussolini soon conquered many parts of North Africa, while both Italy and Germany actively supported General Franco during the Spanish Civil War against the Second Spanish Republic (which was supported by the Soviet Union). Hitler then broke the Treaty of Versailles by increasing the size of Germany's military, and re-militarized the Rhineland. He started his own expansion by annexing Austria and sought the same against the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland.

The British and French governments followed a policy of appeasement in order to avoid military confrontation after the high cost of the First World War. This policy culminated in the Munich Agreement in 1938, which would give the Sudetenland to Germany as lebensraum or "living space" in exchange for Germany making no further territorial claims in Europe; British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously declared "Peace for our time" after the signing of the Agreement. However, in March 1939, Germany disregarded the agreement and annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Mussolini, following suit, then annexed Albania in April.

The failure of the Munich Agreement showed that negotiations with Hitler could not be trusted, and that his aspirations for dominance in Europe went beyond anything that the United Kingdom and France could handle.

The Second Great War
On September 1939, Germany, with the aid of Slovakia, invaded Poland, and World War II broke out. The United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany in retaliation for its invasion of Poland. During the winter of 1939/1940 there was little indication of hostilities since neither side was willing to engage the other directly.

In 1940, Germany captured Denmark and Norway in the spring, and followed this with the capture of France and the Low Countries in the early summer. The United Kingdom was then targeted; Germany attempted to cut the island off from supplies and obtain air superiority in order to allow invasion. Germany never got to attack, but the Germans continued to bomb the British mainland throughout the war.

Unable to engage the German forces on the continent, the United Kingdom concentrated on combating German and Italian forces in the Mediterranean Basin. It had limited success, however, because it failed to prevent the Axis conquest of the Balkans and fought indecisively in the Western Desert Campaign. It had greater success in the Mediterranean Sea, causing severe damage to the Italian Navy.

On 1941, the war expanded dramatically when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, bringing the Soviet Union into alliance with the United Kingdom. The German attack started strong, overrunning great tracts of Soviet territory. The Red Army was dealt millions of casualties and lost thousands of planes, tanks, and artillery pieces in the summer battles.

In early December 1941, the war again expanded when Japan, already into its fifth year of war with China, launched near-simultaneous attacks against the United States and the British in Southeast Asia. Four days later, Germany declared war on the United States. This brought the United States and Japan into the greater conflict and turned previously separate Asian and European wars into a single global one. The United States' entry into the war came just days before the German offensive against Moscow ground to a halt. The exhausted German forces were caught out in the open, suffering horrendous casualties from one of the worst Russian winters in recorded history. Using reserves from Siberia, the Red Army staged a massive counteroffensive which prompted bitter fighting throughout the winter. By February, however, the German line had stabilized. These events meant that from 1942 onward, the strategic balance had shifted decisively against the Axis.

1942 marked several important turning points in the war. The fighting in the North African desert shifted decisively against the Germans, who failed to break through the British line and began losing ground. In November, American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria, quickly driving east to meet the British 8th Army, which was pursuing the retreating Germans. On the steppes of the Ukraine, the most decisive phase of the war in the east was being played out. The Germans crushed a Soviet offensive aimed at retaking the city of Kharkov, inflicting half a million casualties and destroying most of the Soviet Union's reserves. They followed this victory with a massive assault aimed at seizing the Caucasus oilfields and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. The Germans reached the outskirts of the city early in September, and heavy fighting continued through October and November. Halfway through November, the Soviets used new reserves in a dashing counteroffensive. They smashed through the Germans' flanks and encircled roughly 300,000 Axis troops in and around Stalingrad. Adolf Hitler refused to pull his troops out of the encirclement. By February 1943 the pocket had been defeated. The battle was the most destructive and deadly in all of human history, with casualties approaching 2 million. In the Pacific, the Battle of Midway and the destruction of 4 Japanese aircraft carriers for the loss of only a single American carrier marked the turning point. The Allies would advance throughout 1943.

1943 marked some of the most important battles of the war. In the Mediterranean, British and American forces destroyed German forces in Tunisia, and landed on Sicily, and, later, Italy, which capitulated immediately thereafter. The Pacific theater saw several islands retaken by American landings. In the East, the Germans massed the entirety of their reserves for an attack on the Kursk salient. The Soviet Union foresaw this offensive and constructed defenses along the correct axes of attack. Both sides built up forces as quickly as possible throughout the spring and early summer; finally, on July 4th, the Germans launched their attack. The Soviet defenses prevented the German Panzers from breaking into the open and the offensive was repulsed with heavy casualties for both sides. However, the Germans had exhausted all their reserves and truncated their armored force, and the Red Army unleashed massive strategic offensives across many sectors of the front. By 1944 the Ukraine and most of Russia proper had been liberated.

As 1944 began, things did not look good for the Axis. German cites were reduced to ruins by the massive Allied bombing campaign. The massive battles with the Red Army had shrunk the Wehrmacht to a shadow of its former self. The Allies were moving up the Italian peninsula and a landing in Northern Europe was expected sometime that year. Japan was being drowned by the deluge of American industrial might. On June 6th, Allied armies entered Rome, and Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion from Britain to France, was launched. Allied armies landed and fought across the French countryside for two months in the Battle of Normandy, which ended in August with the encirclement of roughly 90,000 German troops. The Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration on June 22nd, utterly destroying three German field armies. In the Pacific, the Allies seized airfields within bombing range of Tokyo and Japan's Home Islands. By the end of 1944, the Russians were streaking across the Balkans and had reached the river Vistula in central Poland. The Western Allies had cleared the Germans from France.

1945 saw the end of the war. The Red Army launched the massive Vistula-Oder offensive on January 12th, reaching the Oder River and inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans. The German Ardenne offensive, begun in December 1944, failed ignominiously. The Americans consolidated and continued to advance in the Pacific against fanatical and literally suicidal Japanese resistance. In April the Red Army began the final major operation of World War 2 in Europe, the Berlin Strategic Offensive. Massive Soviet Forces overwhelmed the German defenses east of the capital and stormed westward, encircling Berlin and fighting their way into the city from all sides. The Germans had about 80,000 personnel available to defend the capital, against a force of 2.5 million Soviet troops with 6,000 tanks, 7,500 planes, and about 41,000 artillery pieces. On April 30th Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and on May 8th the German government surrendered unconditionally the Allies. The Japanese continued to resist even as their major cities were destroyed by heavy Allied bombing. On August 6 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on August 9 another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. These attacks caused several tens of thousands of direct deaths and injuries and affected thousands more people via radiation. Days later, the Japanese government surrendered unconditionally. World War Two, one of the world's deadliest conflicts and one of the worse ones ever to happen, had finally ended.

Results
The United Nations (UN) was formed as a direct result of the war. The cold war between the Western Allies and the USSR started. Much of Eastern Europe was annexed by Russia, while Poland and also the Eastern half of Germany was also taken by Russia, while the rest of the Allies took the Western half of the country. Due to this, NATO was formed.

Allied Powers

 * United Kingdom
 * United States
 * Canada
 * China
 * India
 * Australia
 * New Zealand
 * Philippines
 * South Africa
 * France
 * Soviet Union
 * Poland
 * Yugoslavia
 * Brazil
 * Greece

Axis Powers

 * Nazi Germany
 * Italy
 * Japan
 * Finland
 * Hungary
 * Bulgaria
 * Romania
 * Croatia

Call of Duty games
World War II is the war played in every Call of Duty game, with the exception of Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ,and Call of Duty 7. Call of Duty 1, 2, and 3 focus upon the European theatre. Call of Duty World at War focuses on the U.S.M.C. in the Pacific theatre and the Red Army in the European theatre.