Meanwhile, the western Allies invaded Italy (1943) and then liberated France in 1944, following amphibious landings in the Battle of Normandy. The Red Army then pursued the retreating Wehrmacht all the way to Berlin, and won the street-by-street Battle of Berlin, as Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945. The Soviets later encircled and captured the German Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43), decisively defeated the Axis during the Battle of Kursk, and broke the Siege of Leningrad. Despite enormous gains, the invasion bogged down outside of Moscow in late 1941. Hitler then turned on the Soviet Union, opening a surprise attack (Codename: Barbarossa) on June 22, 1941. By summer 1941, Germany had conquered France and most of Western Europe, but it had failed to subdue the United Kingdom due to the success of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. Italian, and later German, troops attacked British forces in North Africa. Germany rapidly overwhelmed Poland, then Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941.
The United Kingdom and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3, initiating a widespread naval war. On September 1, 1939, Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, invaded Poland according to an agreement with the Soviet Union, which joined the invasion on September 17. The war ended in 1945 with an Allied victory. Spanning much of the globe, World War II resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people, making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Armed forces from over seventy nations engaged in aerial, naval, and ground-based combat.
World War II, or the Second World War, was a worldwide conflict fought between the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers, from 1939 until 1945. Decolonisation of the Allied Empires.Įurope – Eastern Europe – Africa – Middle East – Mediterranean – Asia & Pacific – Atlantic Creation of First World and Second World spheres of influence in Europe leading to the Cold War. Emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers. Clockwise from top: Allied landing on Normandy beaches on D-Day, the gate of a Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Red Army soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, the Nagasaki atom bomb, and the 1936 Nuremberg Rally.Įurope, Pacific, South-East Asia, Middle East, Mediterranean and AfricaĪllied victory.
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