1937-1945

World War II

The beginning of World War II can be assigned validly to three years: 1937, 1939, and 1941. In 1937, Japan invaded China. This was a prelude to the war but it involved nations on opposite sides of the larger conflict. World War II acquired a completely global dimension with the Japanese attack on the USA and this was a continuation of the war policy that Japan had been applying since 1937. The war in Europe began in 1939. It grew exponentially in scope when Germany attacked the USSR in 1941. Both because of this event and the subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor, it could be argued that the war began in 1941. Nevertheless, after the start of the Japan-China war, for one thing, the momentum for war was irresistible, and for another, warfare on a large scale commenced and did not cease until 1945.

In 1937, there was heavy fighting across the Marco Polo bridge on the outskirts of Beijing between Japanese and Chinese troops. An armistice was arranged, but the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek attacked Japanese land, sea, and air forces in Shanghai and war was on between China and Japan. The Japanese invasion of China was accompanied by the naked used of terror, which had a culmination in the wholesale slaughters and atrocities committed against the civilian population of Nanjing. Japanese operations in China went practically unimpeded. The only effective resistance the Nationalists put up was against the Japanese drive to Wuhan, which eventually fell (1938). The communists at Yan'an, who had gotten off lightly from Japanese attack, put their Eighth Route Army in march and the Japanese responded with the infamous sanko tactics (burn all, kill all, steal all).

Chiang Kai-shek had moved his capital to Chongqing, in far inland Sichuan province. Although the war in China was lopsided, the Japanese were not exactly unscathed and by December 1938 they had suffered 62,000 fatal casualties from various causes. In 1939, Japan started bombing Chongqing heavily. The same year the Japanese engaged in a brief war with the USSR and incurred heavy losses (Nomohan incident). From that moment, Soviet and Japanese eyed each other warily and in 1941, as their priorities were elsewhere, they signed a neutrality pact.

In August of 1939, Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet dictator Stalin by which Germany and the USSR secretly agreed to share Poland between themselves. The Soviets were given a free hand in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

From Finland, the USSR demanded the cession of bases on the gulf of Finland, which the Finns refused leading to a Soviet invasion. Led by marshal Carl Mannerheim, Finland fought valiantly, keeping the Soviets at bay during the winter of 1939-1940, but in the end it was overwhelmed by numbers and lost Karelia by the treaty of Moscow. When Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, Finland allowed German troop movements to encircle Leningrad. The Finns took back Karelia.

Hitler demanded the Danzig corridor from Poland, who, based on its alliance with Great Britain and France, refused to cede. In a blitzkrieg that began on 1 September 1939, Poland was overrun in a matter of weeks. Great Britain and France declared war. The Soviets invaded from the east. Italy, under Benito Mussolini, entered the war as Germany's ally with the occupation of Albania.

In May 1940, after a short period of phony war, in which the sides just glared at each other, Germany overran the Low Countries and, adopting marshal Erich von Manstein's war plans, sent Panzers (tank regiments) through the hilly Belgian Ardennes region into France, whose armies were caught in a pincers. France capitulated in June. Hitler allowed the creation of a puppet French state south of the Loire with Vichy as its capital, presided by the World War I hero marshal Henri Pétain. The Rome-Berlin Axis, formed in 1936, was joined by Japan in September.

The British cabinet recognized Gen. Charles de Gaulle, a survivor of the French debacle, as a legitimate representative of France. De Gaulle founded the Free French Forces (FFF) with the scant personnel that escaped the German invasion. The British government impounded French warships in Portsmouth and Plymouth. British ships sank most of the French ships moored at Mers el Kebir, near Oran, Algeria. Chad, Cameroon, and Congo recognized the authority of de Gaulle. An attempt by the Free French with British naval backing to take Dakar, Senegal, was repulsed by forces loyal to Vichy.

After the conquest of France, the German Luftwaffe tried to cow the UK into neutrality during the air battle of Britain. Despite nearly crippling losses of air bases from incessant attacks by the German Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force (RAF) held its own and the battle wound down towards the end of the year. 

To counter a British attempt to establish bases on the eastern coast of the North sea, Germany invaded Norway, and Denmark because it was obviously in the way. Hitler didn't even think of invading Sweden, which was armed to the teeth. Besides Sweden permitted German troop movements across its territory and was perfectly willing to trade on the purest formal terms. Even though Winston Churchill as first lord of the admiralty was to blame for the Scandinavian repulse, Parliament chose him to succeed Neville Chamberlain at the head of a coalition government.

Despite the huge chunks of Chinese territories the Japanese occupied, which required the engagement of most of their armies, often acting independently of central command, Japan's strategic interests lay elsewhere: in the oil of Indonesia, in Malay rubber, and in other natural resources in South East Asia. The first Japanese move in that direction was the occupation of Hanoi in September 1940. The USA became alarmed and began to take serious measures. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had commanded the Philippine army and retired in 1937. In July 1941, he was brought out of retirement by president Franklin Roosevelt and made commander in chief of American forces in the Far East, based in the Philippines. The air defenses in the Philippines were strengthened. Much more seriously, in August the USA froze Japanese assets and imposed an oil embargo, which the Japanese interpreted as economic aggression. By November 1941, the Japanese army had over two million men in the field.

Although formally a non-belligerent, the USA was backing Britain in its struggle with Germany. In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met on a warship off Newfoundland and signed the Atlantic Charter, which established an alliance between the USA and the UK, defined global goals to be pursued after the war, and foreshadowed the creation of the United Nations (UN).

Japanese strategic planning was to create an empire so vast that it could resist any enemy. To do so it had to destroy American naval power in the Pacific Ocean and that is what Japan, without consulting Germany, decided to do by attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. American intelligence had not yet cracked the Japanese military code and the sneak attack on Hawaii could have been called a total success but for the fact that no carriers were anchored at Pearl Harbor at the time and so the Pacific Ocean carrier force was intact. Germany declared war on the USA. Willy-nilly, America and the USSR became allies against Germany. During 1942, Allied material aid to the Russians began arriving via Murmansk in significant quantities.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces very quickly overran South East Asia to the Indian Assam frontier meeting only gritty resistance from the Americans and Filipinos in the Bataan peninsula, across Manila bay. Singapore was surrendered to the Japanese, who also occupied the Indian islands of Andaman and Nicobar. MacArthur was evacuated from the Philippine island-fortress of Corregidor to Australia.

The Japanese moved to establish a defense perimeter in the Gilbert Islands, New Guinea, the Bismarck archipelago. and the Solomon Islands. The American's struck at Japan with a one-way raid on Tokyo by sixteen B-25 bombers launched from a carrier on April 18, 1942. It was only a symbolic gesture, but it livened all the apprehensions of admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander of the Japanese fleet and the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Though obedient to emperor Hirohito, himself a willing instrument of Japanese militarists, Yamamoto knew in his heart of hearts (as did other Japanese militarists) that Japan could not win the war. There was an "unless" and it was the destruction of the American carrier fleet. For this Yamamoto now designed the invasion of the island of Midway, a tiny American base 1,150 miles north west of Honolulu.

His plan was to feint towards the Aleutians, concentrate his main striking force (consisting basically of four carriers) north west of Midway, set up a submarine screen between Midway and Oahu, and have an invasion force ready to approach Midway directly from the west. An additional force of battleships would sail leisurely to confront, together with the carrier force, any American counter-attack. Since the American fleet's battleships had been crippled in the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese had an obvious advantage. If the plan had worked, it would have been the largest naval engagement in history and Japan would have had the run of the Pacific Ocean.

Unfortunately for Yamamoto, the Americans had deciphered the Japanese naval code. They knew he was going to strike but not where. Through the ruse of sending an open message the Japanese could intercept and relay, they figured out that Midway was Yamamoto's target and the American carrier force was there before the Japanese fleet, whose precise location was still to be established although its general whereabouts was suspected.

Not knowing of the American presence, the Japanese started by bombing Midway from their carriers. An American reconnaissance plane located the Japanese carrier force and American aircraft struck before the Japanese could have their fighter cover in the air. The Japanese lost their four carriers, various other warships, and hundreds of aircraft. The Americans lost one carrier. Japanese losses would never again be fully replenished and America's economic power, as Yamamoto feared, would soon tip the scale decisively in its favor. The battle of Midway took place on June 2-3, 1942. Adm. Chester Nimitz was chief of the American Pacific Fleet during the entire war. The victor at Midway was Adm. Raymond Spruance.

When Hitler was getting ready for what he considered a fast knock-out of Russia, the Italians, invading from conquered Albania, could not defeat the Greeks and were in addition losing their grip on Libya. The Germans sent Gen. Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps to stiffen the Italians in Tripolitania in February 1941. Yugoslavia, which before had been willing to follow the German lead, in March 1941 opted for neutrality. Underestimating the Germans in Libya, the British sent reinforcements to Greece. Hitler decided to fix the Balkan bungle, which German armies accomplished in less than a month. German troops entered Athens on April 27, 1941.

Hitler launched Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR, on June 22, one month later than he had expected. The delay in the invasion is considered crucial by some historians. The Soviets were unprepared and the Germans quickly advanced in three general directions: two strong blitzkriegs towards Moscow and the industrial Donetks region in the Ukraine and a third lesser one through the Baltic republics towards Leningrad. By the end of July the Germans had taken Kiev in the south and in the center had gone beyond Smolensk to within 150 miles of Moscow. However, by now it was apparent that this was not going to be a blitzkrieg. The Germans were not fighting in a country the size of France or Poland where armies were concentrated in relatively small areas and short, decisive battles were possible. Russia and the Ukraine were huge continental expanses and Soviet armies and reserves were immense, greater than the Germans had estimated. At its zenith, the Nazi empire occupied or neutralized all of continental Europe and Scandinavia, save Soviet Russia, and northern Africa from Vichy-held Morocco to the western border of Egypt.

After their initial losses, and they were enormous, the Russians reacted promptly and vigorously. They proved efficient at dismantling and transporting entire war plants to their rear, far behind Moscow, and in applying scorched-earth tactics, which of course would be more hurtful for civilians than for the Germans, but the USSR was inured to this kind of human devastation. It didn't take Stalin long to call for a "great patriotic war" and Russians, who were kept abreast of the German menace and who by now were also thoroughly permeated with the message that Stalin knew best, responded like patriots indeed.

The German onslaught continued during October and November 1941. The lower Don River basin was reached and Leningrad was surrounded with the connivance of the Finns. But instead of finding their way clear to Moscow, the Germans kept coming up against new Soviet armies. With the onset of winter weather, some German commanders in the field urged consolidating an advanced line, but Hitler and the front commander Werner von Brauchitsch were still imbued with blitzkrieg mentality. The offensive against Moscow was pursued. On December 6, when some advance German units had penetrated the western suburbs of Moscow, Gen. Georgi Zhukov ordered a counter-offensive. Moscow was saved and the German front was driven back some 100 miles by March 1942. Attrition had begun. The Germans braced the Russian front in the north and center.

After losing their footholds in the Balkans and Crete, the British concentrated forces in Egypt to oppose Gen. Erwin Rommel's rapidly advancing Afrika Korps. From 23 October to 3 November 1942, at the battle of El Alamein, the British, under the command of Gen. Bernard Montgomery, defeated Rommel and his German and Italian forces.

Morocco adhered to the collaborationist Vichy French regime. The Americans opened a new front with landings in Morocco and Algeria. French authorities initially opposed the USA invasion, but shortly after Adm J.F. Darlan signed an armistice with the Allies. Germany overran Vichy, which retained Bizerte in Tunisia and placed it at the disposal of the Germans Gen. Henri Giraud, who had been captured by the Germans in 1940, escaped to Algiers and became second in command to Darlan. The French fleet at Toulon, blocked by German mines, was scuttled. When Darlan was assassinated, Giraud substituted him as French commander in Algiers.

Early in 1943, in Casablanca, Morocco, Roosevelt and Churchill declared that only the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan was acceptable to the Allies. Both leaders, but especially Roosevelt, were antagonistic to de Gaulle, who was advised to serve under Giraud in Algiers. Through skillful political maneuvering, de Gaulle edged out Giraud, who retained his military role, and a French Committee for the Liberation of France was formed, which in 1944 de Gaulle converted into the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

On the Russian front, Hitler made the capture of Stalingrad, a city on the Volga (today Volgograd), the priority objective of the Wehrmacht. The battle for Stalingrad started in late 1942. The Russians were reduced to a few landings on the west bank of the river. German resources were much diminished from the time of the invasion of the USSR. Gradually, the Russians held them back from Stalingrad and settled the issue of the battle with a huge pincers movement that enveloped various German armies and not only the forces, under Gen. Friedrich von Paulus, fighting in Stalingrad itself. The outcome of the battle in 1943 was decisive and after Stalingrad the Germans were generally on the retreat in the USSR. Stalin pressured the Americans and British to open a front in western Europe.

The Americans initiated operations against Tunis from the west while the British attacked from the east. The Germans momentarily contained the Americans at Kasserine pass. A breakthrough there, coincided with the successful British offensive. In 1943, Germans and Italians surrendered in the corner of northeastern Tunisia they still occupied.

American efforts were at first concentrated on the Pacific theater against Japan, but soon America's huge economic resources were feeding all the Allied fronts. From their base in Australia, American and allied forces, principally Anzac (Australia and New Zealand), contained the Japanese in the Solomon islands and in New Guinea in 1942. Some historians consider that the decisive battles in the Pacific theatre were in the Coral Sea and Guadalcanal in 1942-1943, but it was in Midway that the USA used all its strategic advantages in one fell blow whereas Guadalcanal was war of attrition, which the economics of the conflict had decided beforehand.

The American offensive in the Pacific had three large prongs with various subprongs. One big prong originated in Australia and was directed at New Guinea. Another prong went in the direction of the Solomon Islands. These two prongs had as further objectives the East Indies and the Philippines. MacArthur was undoubtedly the architect and leader of this strategy. Another large prong emanated from Hawaii and was aimed at the Marshalls, Gilberts (Tarawa, Makin), and Marianas (Guam, Saipan, Tinian) islands. From the Marianas further prongs would head to the Philippines, the Ryukus, and Iwo Jima. The capture of the Marianas (July 1944) made possible the intensive bombing of the home islands of Japan. The B-29 Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, took of from Tinian.

In July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily. There was strong German and Italian resistance, but the island was finally occupied. In September, Italy itself was invaded. In Rome, Mussolini was dismissed and arrested on orders from king Victor Emmanuel III, who also named marshal Pietro Badoglio as head of government. Italy capitulated and formally joined the Allies against Germany. The Germans, under Gen. Albert Kesselring, placed Italy under occupation and resisted every inch of the Allied advance along the Italian peninsula, which went on slowly during 1944 and until the capture of Florence in 1945.

In June 1944 the Allies, led by general Dwight D. Eisenhower, future USA President, landed in Normandy (Operation Overlord). After breaking out of the beachheads, the Allies moved forward in all directions in France. In August, FFF under Gen. Philippe Leclerc liberated Paris. The Allied advance towards Germany only suffered a momentary setback during the battle of Bulge (1944-1945), but this was a last gasp for the Germans, although they were at the time and almost to the end of the war bombarding London with V1s (the original cruise missiles) and V2 rockets.

After the war turned against Germany, Mannerheim was elected president of Finland in 1944. He negotiated a peace with the Soviets which recognized Finnish sovereignty but imposed reparations and a border which ceded Karelia to the USSR.

From 1944 to 1945, Tojo Hideki was the war leader of Japan. The Japanese massed land and naval forces in the Philippines. After sinking what remained of the Japanese imperial navy in a series of lopsided engagements known globally as the Battle of Leyte Gulf or Second Battle of the Philippine Sea (December 1944), American forces landed in Lingayen Gulf and in Nasugbu, south of Manila, and in January 1945 converged on Manila itself. Between land and air bombardment, central Manila was nearly leveled. However, the battle for the Philippines went on and the Japanese there did not surrender until after Japan itself had capitulated.

In February 1945, during the Yalta conference, in the Crimea, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin made plans for Post-War Europe. Germany was to be divided into four occupation zones: the USA in southern Germany, Britain in northern Germany, France in the Rhineland, and the USSR in eastern Germany (surrounding Berlin).

Germany was assailed from both east and west in early 1945. The Russians reached Berlin first, but the Yalta agreements were determining the progress of the Allied armies, so the meeting of American and Soviet troops on the Elbe River was foreordained. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the submarine fleet, succeeded him and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945. The surrender was ratified in Berlin the following day.

President Roosevelt, re-elected in 1940 and in 1944, was fell by a stroke on April 12, 1945. He had been president of the USA for fifteen years. J.N. Garner was Roosevelt's vicepresident during his first two terms but he opposed his re-election for a third term. When Roosevelt died, the vicepresident was Harry S. Truman, who finalized with the other Allied heads of state the arrangements for the post-war administration of Germany at Potsdam in July-August 1945. Stalin was there as well as Churchill, but during the conference Churchill was defeated in national elections and substituted by the Labor Party primer minister Clement Attlee. Potsdam was a continuation of Yalta, where spheres of influence in eastern Europe were more or less accorded, but Potsdam was supposed to be much more specific about post-war cooperation. In Potsdam also, Japan was called upon to either surrender or suffer destruction. Truman knew how literally that threat had to be taken, for on July 16, 1945, the day before Potsdam, the first operational nuclear device, that is, portable and droppable, was exploded in the desert around Los Alamos, New Mexico.

After the fall of Manila and the retreat of the Japanese to central Luzon, the Americans concentrated their efforts on subduing Japan itself.  Japan seemed bent on repeating the Manila harakiri on a catastrophic national scale. They had done it again during the battle for the island of Iwo Jima during February-March 1945. Kamikaze—"divine wind", from the storm that had foiled a Mongol invasion of Japan in 1274—was the honorific name given to pilots and planes loaded with explosives that first began crashing into American warships during the battle of Leyte Gulf. They were particularly destructive during the battle for Okinawa, which began on April 1 and lasted until June 21. Only 17,000 out of 120,000 Japanese soldiers survived. American forces suffered 45,000 casualties.

Okinawa was considered home territory by the Japanese. But Okinawa was a small island and if the rest of Japan was going to put up the same resistance when its turn came, pro rata casualty estimates were daunting. The USA was understandably hesitant about mounting an immediate invasion of Japan.

During July the American air force pounded Japan, but the Japanese gave no signs of giving up. Despite the bombings, Japan suffered fewer civilian casualties than would have been expected. Once America had the atomic bomb, it was just a question of time before it had to use it on such an obdurate enemy.

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. As still no word was heard from the Japanese, another one was dropped three days later on Nagasaki. Hiroshima was larger than Nagasaki. Both bombs had the same power and they utterly destroyed the centers of both cities and produced an estimated 205,000 casualties. It still took Hirohito five more days before announcing Japan's capitulation.  Hirohito was not tried as a war criminal but was kept on by Gen. MacArthur as a symbol of America's desire for reconciliation.

The USSR had declared war after the bombing of Hiroshima and occupied Manchuria and northern Korea. It took southern Sakhalin and the Kuriles. Japan has maintained its right of ownership to the Kuriles.

During August-October of 1944, the Dumbarton Oaks conference, in Washington, D.C., was the prelude to the UN. During April-June of 1945, the UN was founded in San Francisco. The Security Council became its executive core with the USA, the USSR, Britain, France, and China given veto power over all military actions.

1938

In a paper titled "Energy production in stars", Hans Bethe explains the hydrogen-fusion reaction that fuels stars. In 1967, he was awarded the Noble prize for physics.

1938-1945

Nuclear "fission" was first achieved in late 1938. Its discoverers were the German chemists Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassman. What they had done was convert uranium into a lighter element, thus releasing a tiny amount of energy. Fission was soon the most current and urgent topic in physicists' agendas. Unlike relativity or quantum physics, which had not had immediate acceptance, fission was readily accepted. What's more its implications were carefully weighed, because if you could obtain a "chain reaction" of splitting atoms what you got was not a "glow" or the wobble of a needle but a great deal of energy known as an atomic bomb. To have this what were needed were left over neutrons from the initial fission, which would split infinitely more atoms, and these in turn another infinity of atoms, and so on. It was soon shown that there were such subproducts in fission. At that stage, scientists in America and Britain agreed spontaneously not to print any more papers having to do with nuclear fission. The Germans, for their part, also kept their research to themselves. Science for the first time became a crucial, concrete instrument of war. The process from conventional weapons to atomic warfare was the shortest and most momentous military revolution in history. Fortunately for mankind, America had vastly more resources of all types than Germany and on July 16, 1945, the first operational nuclear device, that is, portable and droppable, was exploded in the desert around Los Alamos, New Mexico.

1939

The Russian-American I. Sikorksky builds the first practical helicopter.

1939-1942

The Heinkel He 178 is sometimes credited as the first jet-propelled airplane. The Messerchsmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter, was first tested in 1942.

1940

The electron microscope is developed by RCA.

1941

The USA initiates the Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb.

E. Macmillan and G.T. Seaborg discover plutonium.

1942

Enrico Fermi heads the team which splits the atomic nucleus.

1942-1945

The Germans launch the first missile, the V2, at Peenemünde. It was used intensively against London in 1945. Wernher von Braun, one of the German rocketry experts, was later a driving force behind America’s missiles and space programs.

1944-1962

At the Bretton Woods conference, the International Monetary Fund is created to stabilize currency exchange rates.