Pearl Harbour Goldmünze Zweiter Weltkrieg alte Schlachtschiffe Flugzeuge I Honolulu Pacific

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Attack on Pearl Harbor

Part of the Asiatic-Pacific Theater of World War II

Attack on Pearl Harbor Japanese planes view.jpg

Photograph of Battleship Row taken from a Japanese plane at the beginning of the attack. The explosion in the center is a torpedo strike on USS West Virginia. Two attacking Japanese planes can be seen: one over USS Neosho and one over the Naval Yard.

Date December 7, 1941; 81 years ago

Location

Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, US

Result

Japanese victory

Precipitated the entry of the United States into World War II on the side of the Allies

See other consequences

 

Belligerents

 United States Empire of Japan

Commanders and leaders

Husband E. Kimmel

Walter Short

Isoroku Yamamoto

Chūichi Nagumo

Mitsuo Fuchida

Units involved

United States US Pacific Fleet

Empire of Japan 1st Air Fleet

Strength

8 battleships

8 cruisers

30 destroyers

4 submarines

3 USCG cutters[nb 1]

47 other ships[3]

390 aircraft

6 aircraft carriers

2 battleships

2 heavy cruisers

1 light cruiser

9 destroyers

8 tankers

23 fleet submarines

5 midget submarines

414 aircraft (353 took part in the raid)

Casualties and losses

4 battleships sunk

4 battleships damaged

1 ex-battleship sunk

1 harbor tug sunk

3 cruisers damaged[nb 2]

3 destroyers damaged

3 other ships damaged

188 aircraft destroyed

159 aircraft damaged

109 Marines killed

208 soldiers killed[5]

2,335 total killed

1,143 wounded

4 midget submarines sunk

1 midget submarine grounded

29 aircraft destroyed

74 aircraft damaged

64 killed

1 sailor captured[6]

Civilian casualties

68 killed[7][8]

35 wounded[9]

3 aircraft shot down

vte

Hawaiian Islands Campaign

vte

Japanese offensives,

1940–1942

vte

Pacific War

The attack on Pearl Harbor[nb 3][10] was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 8:00 a.m. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The United States was a neutral country at the time; the attack led to its formal entry into World War II the next day. The Japanese military leadership referred to the attack as the Hawaii Operation and Operation AI,[11][nb 4] and as Operation Z during its planning.[13]

Japan intended the attack as a preventive action. Its aim was to prevent the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and those of the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the US-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.[14]

The attack commenced at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time (6:18 p.m. GMT).[nb 5][15] The base was attacked by 353[16] Imperial Japanese aircraft (including fighters, level and dive bombers, and torpedo bombers) in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers.[16] Of the eight US Navy battleships present, all were damaged, with four sunk. All but USS Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship,[nb 6] and one minelayer. More than 180 US aircraft were destroyed.[18] 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded.[19] Important base installations such as the power station, dry dock, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 64 servicemen killed. Kazuo Sakamaki, the commanding officer of one of the submarines, was captured.[20]

Japan announced declarations of war on the United States and the British Empire later that day (December 8 in Tokyo), but the declarations were not delivered until the following day. The British government declared war on Japan immediately after learning that their territory had also been attacked, while the following day (December 8) the United States Congress declared war on Japan. On December 11, though they had no formal obligation to do so under the Tripartite Pact with Japan, Germany and Italy each declared war on the US, which responded with a declaration of war against Germany and Italy. There were numerous historical precedents for the unannounced military action by Japan, but the lack of any formal warning (required by part III of the Hague Convention of 1907), particularly while peace negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy". Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was later judged in the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.[21][22]

Background

Main article: Events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor

Diplomacy

War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility that each nation had been aware of, and planned for, since the 1920s. Japan had been wary of American territorial and military expansion in the Pacific and Asia since the late 1890s, followed by the annexation of islands, such as Hawaii and the Philippines, which they felt were close to or within their sphere of influence.[23][page needed][24][page needed][25][26]

Although Japan had begun to take a hostile policy against the United States after the rejection of the Racial Equality Proposal,[27] the relationship between the two countries was cordial enough that they remained trading partners.[28][29] Tensions did not seriously grow until Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Over the next decade, Japan expanded into China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and endeavored to secure enough independent resources to attain victory on the mainland. The "Southern Operation" was designed to assist these efforts.[24][page needed][30][page needed]

Pearl Harbor on October 30, 1941, looking southwest. Ford Island is at its center.

Starting in December 1937, events such as the Japanese attack on USS Panay, the Allison incident, and the Nanking Massacre swung Western public opinion sharply against Japan. The US unsuccessfully proposed a joint action with the British to blockade Japan.[31] In 1938, following an appeal by President Roosevelt, US companies stopped providing Japan with implements of war.[32]

In 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina, attempting to stymie the flow of supplies reaching China. The United States halted shipments of airplanes, parts, machine tools, and aviation gasoline to Japan, which the latter perceived as an unfriendly act.[nb 7] The United States did not stop oil exports, however, partly because of the prevailing sentiment in Washington that given Japanese dependence on American oil, such an action was likely to be considered an extreme provocation.[23][page needed][34]

In mid-1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii.[35] He also ordered a military buildup in the Philippines, taking both actions in the hope of discouraging Japanese aggression in the Far East. Because the Japanese high command was (mistakenly) certain any attack on the United Kingdom's Southeast Asian colonies, including Singapore,[36] would bring the US into the war, a devastating preventive strike appeared to be the only way to prevent American naval interference.[37][page needed] An invasion of the Philippines was also considered necessary by Japanese war planners. The US War Plan Orange had envisioned defending the Philippines with an elite force of 40,000 men; this option was never implemented due to opposition from Douglas MacArthur, who felt he would need a force ten times that size.[citation needed] By 1941, US planners expected to abandon the Philippines at the outbreak of war. Late that year, Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, was given orders to that effect.[38]

The US finally ceased oil exports to Japan in July 1941, following the seizure of French Indochina after the Fall of France, in part because of new American restrictions on domestic oil consumption.[39] Because of this decision, Japan proceeded with plans to take the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.[nb 8] On August 17, Roosevelt warned Japan that America was prepared to take opposing steps if "neighboring countries" were attacked.[41][page needed] The Japanese were faced with a dilemma: either withdraw from China and lose face or seize new sources of raw materials in the resource-rich European colonies of Southeast Asia.[citation needed]

Japan and the US engaged in negotiations during 1941, attempting to improve relations. In the course of these negotiations, Japan offered to withdraw from most of China and Indochina after making peace with the Nationalist government. It also proposed to adopt an independent interpretation of the Tripartite Pact and to refrain from trade discrimination, provided all other nations reciprocated. Washington rejected these proposals. Japanese Prime Minister Konoye then offered to meet with Roosevelt, but Roosevelt insisted on reaching an agreement before any meeting.[41][page needed][42] The US ambassador to Japan repeatedly urged Roosevelt to accept the meeting, warning that it was the only way to preserve the conciliatory Konoye government and peace in the Pacific.[43] However, his recommendation was not acted upon. The Konoye government collapsed the following month when the Japanese military rejected a withdrawal of all troops from China.[44]

Japan's final proposal, delivered on November 20, offered to withdraw from southern Indochina and to refrain from attacks in Southeast Asia, so long as the United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands supplied one million U.S. gallons (3.8 million liters) of aviation fuel, lifted their sanctions against Japan, and ceased aid to China.[45][44] The American counter-proposal of November 26 (November 27 in Japan), the Hull note, required Japan completely evacuate China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with Pacific powers. On November 26 in Japan, the day before the note's delivery, the Japanese task force left port for Pearl Harbor.[citation needed]

The Japanese intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the US-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.[14] Additionally, from the Japanese viewpoint, it was seen as a preemptive strike "before the oil gauge ran empty."[23][page needed]

Military planning

Preliminary planning for an attack on Pearl Harbor to protect the move into the "Southern Resource Area" (the Japanese term for the Dutch East Indies and Southeast Asia generally) had begun very early in 1941 under the auspices of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, then commanding Japan's Combined Fleet.[46] He won assent to formal planning and training for an attack from the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff only after much contention with Naval Headquarters, including a threat to resign his command.[47] Full-scale planning was underway by early spring 1941, primarily by Rear Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka, with assistance from Captain Minoru Genda and Yamamoto's Deputy Chief of Staff, Captain Kameto Kuroshima.[48] The planners studied the 1940 British air attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto intensively.[nb 9][nb 10]

Over the next several months, pilots were trained, equipment was adapted, and intelligence was collected. Despite these preparations, Emperor Hirohito did not approve the attack plan until November 5, after the third of four Imperial Conferences called to consider the matter.[51] Final authorization was not given by the emperor until December 1, after a majority of Japanese leaders advised him the "Hull Note" would "destroy the fruits of the China incident, endanger Manchukuo and undermine Japanese control of Korea".[52]

By late 1941, many observers believed that hostilities between the US and Japan were imminent. A Gallup poll just before the attack on Pearl Harbor found that 52% of Americans expected war with Japan, 27% did not, and 21% had no opinion.[53] While US Pacific bases and facilities had been placed on alert on many occasions, US officials doubted Pearl Harbor would be the first target; instead, they expected the Philippines would be attacked first. This presumption was due to the threat that the air bases throughout the country and the naval base at Manila posed to sea lanes, as well as to the shipment of supplies to Japan from territory to the south.[nb 11] They also incorrectly believed that Japan was not capable of mounting more than one major naval operation at a time.[37][page needed]

Objectives

The Japanese attack had several major aims. First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and enabling Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference. Second, it was hoped to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength before shipbuilding authorized by the 1940 Vinson-Walsh Act erased any chance of victory.[55][56] Third, to deliver a blow to America's ability to mobilize its forces in the Pacific, battleships were chosen as the main targets, since they were the prestige ships of any navy at the time.[55] Finally, it was hoped that the attack would undermine American morale such that the US government would drop its demands contrary to Japanese interests and would seek a compromise peace with Japan.[57][page needed][58][page needed]

Striking the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor carried two distinct disadvantages: the targeted ships would be in very shallow water, so it would be relatively easy to salvage and possibly repair them, and most of the crews would survive the attack since many would be on shore leave or would be rescued from the harbor. A further important disadvantage was the absence from Pearl Harbor of all three of the US Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga). Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) top command was attached to Admiral Mahan's "decisive battle" doctrine, especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships. Despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.[37][page needed][59][page needed][60][page needed]

Japanese confidence in their ability to win a short war also meant other targets in the harbor, especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, were ignored since by their thinking the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt.[59][page needed]

Route followed by the Japanese fleet to Pearl Harbor and back

An Imperial Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter on the aircraft carrier Akagi

Approach and attack

See also: Order of battle of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

On November 26, 1941, a Japanese task force (the Striking Force) of six aircraft carriers – Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku – departed Hittokapu Bay on Kasatka (now Iterup) Island in the Kuril Islands, en route to a position northwest of Hawaii, intending to launch its 408 aircraft to attack Pearl Harbor: 360 for the two attack waves and 48 on defensive combat air patrol (CAP), including nine fighters from the first wave.

The first wave was to be the primary attack, while the second wave was to attack carriers as its first objective and cruisers as its second, with battleships as the third target.[61] The first wave carried most of the weapons to attack capital ships, mainly specially adapted Type 91 aerial torpedoes which were designed with an anti-roll mechanism and a rudder extension that let them operate in shallow water.[62] The aircrews were ordered to select the highest value targets (battleships and aircraft carriers) or, if these were not present, any other high-value ships (cruisers and destroyers). First-wave dive bombers were to attack ground targets. Fighters were ordered to strafe and destroy as many parked aircraft as possible to ensure they did not get into the air to intercept the bombers, especially in the first wave. When the fighters' fuel got low they were to refuel at the aircraft carriers and return to combat. Fighters were to serve CAP duties where needed, especially over US airfields.[citation needed]

Before the attack commenced, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched reconnaissance floatplanes from cruisers Chikuma and Tone, one to scout over Oahu and the other over Lahaina Roads, Maui, respectively, with orders to report on US fleet composition and location.[citation needed] Reconnaissance aircraft flights risked alerting the US,[63] and were not necessary. US fleet composition and preparedness information in Pearl Harbor were already known due to the reports of the Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa. A report of the absence of the US fleet in Lahaina anchorage off Maui was received from the Tone's floatplane and fleet submarine I-72.[64] Another four scout planes patrolled the area between the Japanese carrier force (the Kidō Butai) and Niihau, to detect any counterattack.[65]

Submarines

Fleet submarines I-16, I-18, I-20, I-22, and I-24 each embarked a Type A midget submarine for transport to the waters off Oahu.[66] The five I-boats left Kure Naval District on November 25, 1941.[66] On December 6, they came to within 10 nmi (19 km; 12 mi) of the mouth of Pearl Harbor[67] and launched their midget subs at about 01:00 local time on December 7.[68] At 03:42 Hawaiian Time, the minesweeper Condor spotted a midget submarine periscope southwest of the Pearl Harbor entrance buoy and alerted the destroyer Ward.[69][70] The midget may have entered Pearl Harbor. However, Ward sank another midget submarine at 06:37[70][nb 12] in the first American shots in the Pacific Theater. A midget submarine on the north side of Ford Island missed the seaplane tender Curtiss with her first torpedo and missed the attacking destroyer Monaghan with her other one before being sunk by Monaghan at 08:43.[70]

A third midget submarine, Ha-19, grounded twice, once outside the harbor entrance and again on the east side of Oahu, where it was captured on December 8.[72] Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki swam ashore and was captured by Hawaii National Guard Corporal David Akui, becoming the first Japanese prisoner of war.[nb 13] A fourth had been damaged by a depth charge attack and was abandoned by its crew before it could fire its torpedoes.[73] It was found outside the harbor in 1960. Japanese forces received a radio message from a midget submarine at 00:41 on December 8 claiming damage to one or more large warships inside Pearl Harbor.[74]

In 1992, 2000, and 2001 Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory's submersibles found the wreck of the fifth midget submarine lying in three parts outside Pearl Harbor. The wreck was in the debris field where much surplus US equipment was dumped after the war, including vehicles and landing craft. Both of its torpedoes were missing. This correlates with reports of two torpedoes fired at the light cruiser St. Louis at 10:04 at the entrance of Pearl Harbor, and a possible torpedo fired at destroyer Helm at 08:21.[75]

Japanese declaration of war

See also: Japanese war crimes

The attack took place before any formal declaration of war was made by Japan, but this was not Admiral Yamamoto's intention. He originally stipulated that the attack should not commence until thirty minutes after Japan had informed the United States that peace negotiations were at an end.[76] However, the attack began before the notice could be delivered. Tokyo transmitted the 5000-word notification (commonly called the "14-Part Message") in two blocks to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Transcribing the message took too long for the Japanese ambassador to deliver it at 1 pm Washington time, as ordered; in the event, it was not presented until more than an hour after the attack began. (In fact, US code breakers had already deciphered and translated most of the message hours before he was scheduled to deliver it.)[77][78]: pp.2ff  The final part is sometimes described as a declaration of war. While it was viewed by a number of senior U.S government and military officials as a very strong indicator negotiations were likely to be terminated[79] and that war might break out at any moment,[80] it neither declared war nor severed diplomatic relations. A declaration of war was printed on the front page of Japan's newspapers in the evening edition of December 8 (late December 7 in the US),[81] but not delivered to the US government until the day after the attack.

For decades, conventional wisdom held that Japan attacked without first formally breaking diplomatic relations only because of accidents and bumbling that delayed the delivery of a document hinting at war to Washington.[82] In 1999, however, Takeo Iguchi, a professor of law and international relations at International Christian University in Tokyo, discovered documents that pointed to a vigorous debate inside the government over how, and indeed whether, to notify Washington of Japan's intention to break off negotiations and start a war, including a December 7 entry in the war diary saying, "[O]ur deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success." Of this, Iguchi said, "The diary shows that the army and navy did not want to give any proper declaration of war, or indeed prior notice even of the termination of negotiations ... and they clearly prevailed."[83][84]

In any event, even if the Japanese had decoded and delivered the 14-Part Message before the beginning of the attack, it would not have constituted either a formal break of diplomatic relations or a declaration of war.[85] The final two paragraphs of the message read:[86]

Thus the earnest hope of the Japanese Government to adjust Japanese-American relations and to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost.

The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.

U.S. Naval intelligence officers were alarmed by the unusual timing for delivering the message – 1 pm on a Sunday, which was 7:30 am in Hawaii – and attempted to alert Pearl Harbor. But due to communication problems the warning was not delivered before the attack.[78]: Ch. 1 

Ships lost or damaged

Twenty-one American ships were damaged or lost in the attack, of which all but three were repaired and returned to service.[129]

Battleships

Arizona (Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd's flagship of Battleship Division One): hit by four armor-piercing bombs, exploded; total loss. 1,177 dead.

Oklahoma: hit by five torpedoes, capsized; total loss. 429 dead.

West Virginia: hit by two bombs, seven torpedoes, sunk; returned to service July 1944. 106 dead.

California: hit by two bombs, two torpedoes, sunk; returned to service January 1944. 100 dead.

Nevada: hit by six bombs, one torpedo, beached; returned to service October 1942. 60 dead.

Pennsylvania (Admiral Husband E. Kimmel's flagship of the United States Pacific Fleet):[130] in dry dock with Cassin and Downes, hit by one bomb and debris from USS Cassin; remained in service. 9 dead.

Tennessee: hit by two bombs; returned to service February 1942. 5 dead.

Maryland: hit by two bombs; returned to service February 1942. 4 dead (including floatplane pilot shot down).

Ex-battleship (target/AA training ship)

Utah: hit by two torpedoes, capsized; total loss. 64 dead.

Cruisers

Helena: hit by one torpedo; returned to service January 1942. 20 dead.

Raleigh: hit by one torpedo; returned to service February 1942.

Honolulu: near miss, light damage; remained in service.

Destroyers

Cassin: in drydock with Downes and Pennsylvania, hit by one bomb, burned; reconstructed and returned to service February 1944.

Downes: in drydock with Cassin and Pennsylvania, caught fire from Cassin, burned; reconstructed and returned to service November 1943.

Helm: underway to West Loch, damaged by two near-miss bombs;[131] continued patrol; dry-docked January 15, 1942, and sailed January 20, 1942.

Shaw: hit by three bombs; returned to service June 1942.

Auxiliaries

Oglala (minelayer): damaged by torpedo hit on Helena, capsized; returned to service (as engine-repair ship) February 1944.

Vestal (repair ship): hit by two bombs, blast and fire from Arizona, beached; returned to service by August 1942.

Curtiss (seaplane tender): hit by one bomb, one crashed Japanese aircraft; returned to service January 1942. 19 dead.

Sotoyomo (harbor tug): damaged by explosion and fires in Shaw; sunk; returned to service August 1942.

YFD-2 (yard floating dock): damaged by bombs; sunk; returned to service January 25, 1942, servicing Shaw.

Captain Homer N. Wallin (center) supervises salvage operations aboard USS California, early 1942.

Salvage

After a systematic search for survivors, Captain Homer N. Wallin was ordered to lead a formal salvage operation.[132][nb 20]

Around Pearl Harbor, divers from the Navy (shore and tenders), the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, and civilian contractors (Pacific Bridge Company and others) began work on the ships that could be refloated. They patched holes, cleared debris, and pumped water out of ships. Navy divers worked inside the damaged ships. Within six months, five battleships and two cruisers were patched or refloated so they could be sent to shipyards in Pearl Harbor and on the mainland for extensive repair.[134]

Intensive salvage operations continued for another year, a total of some 20,000 man-hours under water.[135][page needed] Arizona and the target ship Utah were too heavily damaged for salvage and remain where they were sunk,[136] with Arizona becoming a war memorial. Oklahoma, while successfully raised, was never repaired and capsized while under tow to the mainland in 1947. The Nevada proved particularly difficult to raise and repair; two men involved in the operation died after inhaling poisonous gases that had accumulated in the ship's interior.[134] When feasible, armament and equipment were removed from vessels too damaged to repair and put to use aboard other craft.[citation needed]

News coverage

The initial announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor was made by the White House Press Secretary, Stephen Early, at 2:22 p.m. Eastern time (8:52 a.m. Hawaiian time): "The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the island of Oahu, principal American base in the Hawaiian islands."[137] As information developed, Early made a number of additional announcements to approximately 150 White House reporters over the course of the afternoon.[138]

Initial reports of the attack moved on news wires at approximately 2:25 p.m. Eastern time. The first radio coverage (which, at the time, represented the earliest opportunity for ordinary people to learn of the attack) was on the CBS radio network's scheduled news program, World News Today, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time. John Charles Daly read the initial report, then switched to London, where Robert Trout ad-libbed on the possible London reaction. The first report on NBC cut into a play, a dramatization of The Inspector-General, at 2:33 p.m. Eastern time and lasted only 21 seconds. Unlike the later practice with major news stories, there were only brief interruptions of scheduled commercial programming.[139]

A contemporaneous newspaper report compared the attack to the Battle of Port Arthur in which the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the Imperial Russian Navy, triggering the Russo-Japanese War, 37 years prior.[140] Modern writers have continued to note parallels between the attacks, albeit more dispassionately.[141]

Pennsylvania, behind the wreckage of Downes and Cassin

Aftermath

Main articles: Consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor and Day of Infamy speech

The day after the attack, Roosevelt delivered his famous Day of Infamy speech to a Joint Session of Congress, calling for a formal declaration of war on the Empire of Japan. Congress obliged his request less than an hour later. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, even though the Tripartite Pact did not require it.[nb 21] Congress issued a declaration of war against Germany and Italy later that same day.

The United Kingdom had already been at war with Germany since September 1939 and with Italy since June 1940, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had promised to declare war "within the hour" of a Japanese attack on the United States.[145] Upon learning of the Japanese attacks on Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Churchill promptly determined there was no need to either wait or further consult the US government and immediately summoned the Japanese Ambassador. As a result, the UK declared war on Japan nine hours before the US did.

The attack was an initial shock to all the Allies in the Pacific Theater. Further losses compounded the alarming setback. Japan attacked the Philippines hours later (because of the time difference, it was December 8 in the Philippines). Only three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk off the coast of Malaya, causing Churchill later to recollect "In all the war I never received a more direct shock. As I turned and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor who were hastening back to California. Over this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme and we everywhere were weak and naked."[146]

Poster by Allen Saalburg issued in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information

Throughout the war, Pearl Harbor was frequently used in American propaganda.[147]

One further consequence of the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath (notably the Niihau incident) was that Japanese-American residents and citizens were relocated to nearby Japanese-American internment camps. Within hours of the attack, hundreds of Japanese-American leaders were rounded up and taken to high-security camps such as Sand Island at the mouth of Honolulu harbor and Kilauea Military Camp on the island of Hawaii.[148][page needed][149] Eventually, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, nearly all who lived on the West Coast, were forced into interior camps, but in Hawaii, where the 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were interned.[150][page needed][151][152]

The attack also had international consequences. The Canadian province of British Columbia, bordering the Pacific Ocean, had long had a large population of Japanese immigrants and their Japanese-Canadian descendants. Pre-war tensions were exacerbated by the Pearl Harbor attack, leading to a reaction from the Government of Canada. On February 24, 1942, Order-in-Council P.C. no. 1486 was passed under the War Measures Act, allowing for the forced removal of any and all Canadians of Japanese descent from British Columbia, as well as prohibiting them from returning to the province. On March 4, regulations under the Act were adopted to evacuate Japanese-Canadians.[153] As a result, 12,000 were interned in interior camps, 2,000 were sent to road camps, and another 2,000 were forced to work in the prairies on sugar beet farms.[154]

In the wake of the attack, 15 Medals of Honor, 51 Navy Crosses, 53 Silver Stars, four Navy and Marine Corps Medals, one Distinguished Flying Cross, four Distinguished Service Crosses, one Distinguished Service Medal, and three Bronze Star Medals were awarded to the American servicemen who distinguished themselves in combat at Pearl Harbor.[155] Additionally, a special military award, the Pearl Harbor Commemorative Medal, was later authorized for all military veterans of the attack.

Petty Officer Shigenori Nishikaichi's aircraft ten days after it crashed

Niihau Incident

Main article: Niihau incident

Japanese planners of the Pearl Harbor attack had determined that some means were required for rescuing fliers whose aircraft were damaged too badly to return to the carriers. The island of Niihau, only thirty minutes by air from Pearl Harbor, was designated as the rescue point.[citation needed]

During the second wave, one Zero fighter flown by Petty Officer Shigenori Nishikaichi of the Hiryu was damaged in the attack on Wheeler, so he flew to the rescue point. The aircraft was further damaged on the crash landing. Nishikaichi was helped from the wreckage by one of the native Hawaiians, who, aware of the tension between the United States and Japan, took the pilot's pistol, maps, codes, and other documents. The island's residents had no telephones or radios and were completely unaware of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nishikaichi enlisted the support of three Japanese-American residents in an attempt to recover the documents. During the ensuing struggles, Nishikaichi was killed, and a Hawaiian civilian was wounded; one collaborator committed suicide, and his wife and the third collaborator were sent to prison.[citation needed]

The ease with which the local ethnic Japanese residents had apparently gone to Nishikaichi's assistance was a source of concern for many and tended to support those who believed that local Japanese could not be trusted.[156]

Strategic implications

Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."[157]

While the attack accomplished its intended objective, it turned out to be largely unnecessary. Unbeknownst to Yamamoto, who conceived the original plan, the US Navy had decided as far back as 1935 to abandon 'charging' across the Pacific towards the Philippines in response to an outbreak of war (in keeping with the evolution of Plan Orange).[37][page needed] The US instead adopted "Plan Dog" in 1940, which emphasized keeping the IJN out of the eastern Pacific and away from the shipping lanes to Australia, while the US concentrated on defeating Nazi Germany.[158][better source needed]

Fortunately for the United States, the American aircraft carriers were untouched; otherwise the Pacific Fleet's ability to conduct offensive operations would have been crippled for a year or more (given no diversions from the Atlantic Fleet). As it was, the US Navy was left with no choice but to rely on carriers and submarines, the very weapons with which the US Navy halted and eventually reversed the Japanese advance. While six of the eight battleships were repaired and returned to service, their relatively low speed and high fuel consumption limited their deployment, and they served mainly in shore bombardment roles (their only major action being the Battle of Surigao Strait in October 1944). A major flaw of Japanese strategic thinking was a belief that the ultimate Pacific battle would be fought by battleships, in keeping with the doctrine of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. As a result, Yamamoto (and his successors) hoarded battleships for a "decisive battle" that never happened.[59][page needed][159][page needed]

The Japanese confidence in their ability to win a quick victory meant that they neglected Pearl Harbor's navy repair yards, oil tank farms, submarine base, and old headquarters building.[59][page needed] All of these targets were omitted from Genda's list, yet they proved more important than any battleship to the American war effort in the Pacific. The survival of the repair shops and fuel depots allowed Pearl Harbor to maintain logistical support to the US Navy's operations,[160][161] such as the Doolittle Raid and the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway. It was submarines that immobilized the Imperial Japanese Navy's heavy ships and brought Japan's economy to a virtual standstill by crippling the importation of oil and raw materials: by the end of 1942, the amount of raw materials brought in was cut in half, "to a disastrous ten million tons", while oil "was almost completely stopped".[nb 22] Lastly, the basement of the Old Administration Building was the home of the cryptanalytic unit which contributed significantly to the Midway ambush and the Submarine Force's success.[162]

Retrospective debate on American intelligence

Main article: Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory

USS Arizona Memorial

Ever since the Japanese attack, there has been debate as to how and why the United States had been caught unaware, and how much and when American officials knew of Japanese plans and related topics. As early as 1924, Chief of US Air Service Mason Patrick displayed a concern for military vulnerabilities in the Pacific, having sent General Billy Mitchell on a survey of the Pacific and the East. Patrick called Mitchell's subsequent report, which identified vulnerabilities in Hawaii, a "theoretical treatise on employment of airpower in the Pacific, which, in all probability undoubtedly will be of extreme value some 10 or 15 years hence".[163]

At least two naval war games, one in 1932 and another in 1936, proved that Pearl was vulnerable to such an attack. Admiral James Richardson was removed from command shortly after protesting President Roosevelt's decision to move the bulk of the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor.[164][page needed][165] The decisions of military and political leadership to ignore these warnings have contributed to conspiracy theories. Several writers, including decorated World War II veteran and journalist Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit, and former United States Rear Admiral Robert Alfred Theobald, author of The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Background of the Pearl Harbor Attack, have argued that various parties high in the US and British governments knew of the attack in advance and may even have let it happen or encouraged it in order to force the US into war via the so-called "back door". However, this conspiracy theory is rejected by mainstream historians.[166][page needed][167][168][page needed][169][nb 23]

In popular culture

Main article: Attack on Pearl Harbor in popular culture

See also

Air warfare of World War II

Bombing of Dublin in World War II

Bombings of Switzerland in World War II

Japanese Attack on Howland Island

List of attacks on U.S. territory

List of Medal of Honor recipients for the Attack on Pearl Harbor

List of United States Navy ships present at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Nagao Kita

National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Operation K

Pacific Theater aircraft carrier operations during World War II

Pearl Harbor National Memorial

Pearl Harbor Survivors Association

Winds Code

References

Notes

 USCGC Taney (WHEC-37), USCGC Reliance (WSC-150), USCGC Tiger (WSC-152).[1][2]

 Unless otherwise stated, all vessels listed were salvageable.[4]

 Also known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor

 For the Japanese designator of Oahu.[12]

 In 1941, Hawaii was half an hour different from the majority of other time zones. See UTC−10:30.

 USS Utah (AG-16, formerly BB-31); Utah was moored in the space intended to have been occupied by the aircraft carrier Enterprise which, returning with a task force, had been expected to enter the channel at 0730 on December 7; delayed by weather, the task force did not reach Pearl Harbor until dusk the following day.[17]

 After it was announced in September that iron and steel scrap export would also be prohibited, Japanese Ambassador Horinouchi protested to Secretary Hull on October 8, 1940, warning this might be considered an "unfriendly act".[33]

 This was mainly a Japanese Navy preference; the Japanese Army would have chosen to attack the Soviet Union.[37][page needed][40][page needed]

 "The Dorn report did not state with certainty that Kimmel and Short knew about Taranto. There is, however, no doubt that they did know, as did the Japanese. Lt. Cdr. Takeshi Naito, the assistant naval attaché to Berlin, flew to Taranto to investigate the attack first hand, and Naito subsequently had a lengthy conversation with Cdr. Mitsuo Fuchida about his observations. Fuchida led the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941."[49]

 "A torpedo bomber needed a long, level flight, and when released, its conventional torpedo would plunge nearly a hundred feet deep before swerving upward to strike a hull. Pearl Harbor deep averages 42 feet. But the Japanese borrowed an idea from the British carrier-based torpedo raid on the Italian naval base of Taranto. They fashioned auxiliary wooden tail fins to keep the torpedoes horizontal, so they would dive to only 35 feet, and they added a breakaway "nosecone" of soft wood to cushion the impact with the surface of the water."[50]

 Noted by Arthur MacArthur in the 1890s.[54]

 She was located by a University of Hawaii research submersible on August 28, 2002, in 400 m (1,300 ft) of water, 6 nmi (11 km) outside the harbor.[71]

 While the nine sailors who died in the attack were quickly lionized by the Japanese government as Kyūgunshin ("The Nine War Heroes"), the news of Sakamaki's capture, which had been publicized in US news broadcasts, was kept secret. Even after the war, however, he received recriminating correspondence from those who despised him for not sacrificing his own life.

 The Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, Planning and Execution. First wave: 189 planes, 50 Kates w/bombs, 40 Kates with torpedoes, 54 Vals, 45 Zekes Second wave: 171 planes, 54 Kates w/bombs, 81 Vals, 36 Zekes. The Combat Air Patrol over the carriers alternated 18 plane shifts every two hours, with 18 more ready for takeoff on the flight decks and an additional 18 ready on hangar decks.[88]

 In the twenty-five sorties flown, USAF Historical Study No.85 credits six pilots with ten planes destroyed: 1st Lt Lewis M. Sanders (P-36) and 2nd Lts Philip M Rasmussen (P-36), Gordon H. Sterling Jr. (P-36, killed in action), Harry W. Brown (P-36), Kenneth M. Taylor (P-40, 2), and George S. Welch (P-40, 4). Three of the P-36 kills were not verified by the Japanese and may have been shot down by naval anti-aircraft fire.[full citation needed]

 Odd though it may sound, "not" is correct, in keeping with standard Navy telegraphic practice. This was confirmed by Beloite and Beloite after years of research and debate.

 The gunners that did get in action scored most of the victories against Japanese aircraft that morning, including the first of the attack by Tautog, and Dorie Miller's Navy Cross-worthy effort. Miller was an African-American cook aboard West Virginia who took over an unattended anti-aircraft gun on which he had no training. He was the first African-American sailor to be awarded the Navy Cross.[99]

 The wreck has become a memorial to those lost that day, most of whom remain within the ship. She continues to leak small amounts of fuel oil, decades after the attack.

 USAAF pilots of the 46th and 47th Pursuit Squadrons, 15th Pursuit Group, claim to have destroyed ten. Overall, the Americans claimed to have shot down 41 Japanese aircraft.

 Wallin had been assigned to go to Massawa in East Africa. The harbor there was blocked by scuttled Italian and German ships, which prevented British use of the port. Commander Edward Ellsberg was sent instead.[133][page needed]

 The pact had one of its objectives limiting US intervention in conflicts involving the three nations.[142][143][144]

 In less than eleven months, most of Japan's elite naval aviators who had been at Pearl Harbor were lost in subsequent battles. Lack of fuel and an inflexible training policy meant that they could not be replaced.[37][page needed]

 Gordon Prange specifically addresses some revisionist works, including Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming War 1941; William Henry Chamberlin, America's Second Crusade; John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth; George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor; Frederic R. Sanborn, Design for War; Robert Alfred Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor; Harry E. Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and The Court Historians versus Revisionism; Husband E. Kimmel, Admiral Kimmel's Story.[170]

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Stephen, Martin (1988), Grove, Eric (ed.), Sea Battles in Close-up: World War 2, vol. 1, Shepperton, Surrey: Ian Allan, pp. 34–38, ISBN 0-7110-1596-1

Thomas, Evan (2007), Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941–1945, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-0-7432-5222-5, archived from the original on September 6, 2015, retrieved June 27, 2015

Toland, John (1970), The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, Random House, ISBN 0-394-44311-X

Toland, John (1983), Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, New York: Berkley, ISBN 0-425-05991-X, OCLC 9331838

Totani, Yuma (2009), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II, Harvard University Asia Center, p. 57

Wallin, Homer N. (1968), "Ships Sunk at Pearl Harbor" (PDF), Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal, Naval History Division, pp. 203–269, archived (PDF) from the original on July 30, 2018, retrieved July 30, 2018

Watson, Patrick (December 1, 2007), Watson's Really Big WWII Almanac, Volume 2: July to December, Xlibris, ISBN 9781425789930, retrieved December 9, 2021

Wetzler, Peter (1998), Hirohito and war: imperial tradition and military decision making in prewar Japan, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1925-5, retrieved June 27, 2015

Willmott, H. P. (1983), The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942, Naval Institute Press, ISBN 0-87021-092-0, retrieved December 8, 2021

Willmott, H.P. (2001). Pearl Harbor. London, England: Cassell & Co. ISBN 978-0-304-35884-7.

Worth, Roland H. Jr. (2014), No Choice but War: The United States Embargo Against Japan and the Eruption of War in the Pacific, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, Incorporated, ISBN 978-0786477524

Yergin, Daniel (1991), The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-79932-0

Zimm, Alan D. (2011), Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions, Havertown, Pennsylvania: Casemate Publishers, ISBN 978-1-61200-010-7, archived from the original on September 6, 2015, retrieved June 27, 2015

US government documents

Department of State (1943), Peace and War, United States Foreign Policy 1931–1941, Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, archived from the original on May 12, 2008, retrieved December 8, 2007

Matloff, Maurice; Snell, Edwin M. (1980) [1952], "IV: The Showdown with Japan: August–December 1941", Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941–1942, United States Army in World War II, Washington, D.C.: US Army Center of Military History, CMH Pub 1-3, retrieved December 10, 2021

Morton, Louis (1962), Strategy and Command: The First Two Years, United States Army in World War II, Washington, D.C.: US Army Center of Military History, CMD Pub 5-1, archived from the original on February 11, 2021, retrieved December 10, 2021 – via HyperWar Foundation

Nimitz, Chester (February 15, 1942), CINCPAC Report of Japanese Raid on Pearl Harbor, 7 December, 1941 (Report), Enclosure (C) Damages Sustained by Ships as a Results of the Japanese Raid, December 7, 1941, Cincpac File No. A16-3/Serial 0479, archived from the original on January 11, 2012 – via HyperWar Foundation

United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific), Naval Analysis Division (1946), Daniels, Gordon (ed.), The Campaigns of the Pacific War, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, retrieved December 7, 2021

U.S. Navy Report of Japanese Raid on Pearl Harbor, United States National Archives, Modern Military Branch, 1942, archived from the original on January 13, 2008, retrieved December 25, 2007

"Part II: The Japanese Attack And Its Aftermath", Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946, archived from the original on May 1, 2019, retrieved December 8, 2007

"Appendix D: Review of the Diplomatic Conversations", Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946, archived from the original on April 29, 2013

"USS Aylwin III (DD-355)". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Navy Department, Naval History and Heritage Command. Retrieved December 10, 2021.

"USS Shaw II (DD-373)". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Navy Department, Naval History and Heritage Command. Retrieved December 11, 2021.

Journal articles

Caravaggio, Angelo N. (Winter 2014), "'Winning' the Pacific War: The Masterful Strategy of Commander Minoru Genda", Naval War College Review, 67 (1): 85–118, archived from the original on July 14, 2014

Lauren, Paul Gordon (1978), "Human Rights in History: Diplomacy and Racial Equality at the Paris Peace Conference", Diplomatic History, 2 (3): 257–278, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1978.tb00435.x, ISSN 0145-2096, JSTOR 24909920, S2CID 154765654

Wilford, Timothy (January 2002), "Decoding Pearl Harbor: USN Cryptanalysis and the Challenge of JN-25B in 1941" (PDF), The Northern Mariner, XII (1): 17–37, doi:10.25071/2561-5467.571, S2CID 247550000, retrieved December 8, 2021

Parshall, Jonathan (March 21, 2010). "Reflecting on Fuchida or "A Tale of Three Whoppers"". Naval War College Review. Newport, Rhode Island, United States of America: Naval History and Heritage Command/United States Naval War College (United States Department of the Navy). 63 (2): 127–138. ISSN 0028-1484. JSTOR 26397106. LCCN 75617787. OCLC 01779130. Archived from the original on November 27, 2011. Retrieved August 15, 2021.

Potter, Joseph V. (Winter 1982), "A Handful of Pilots" (PDF), Journal of American Aviation Historical Society: 282–285, archived (PDF) from the original on April 17, 2021, retrieved December 10, 2021

Magazine articles

Dorr, Robert F.; Borch, Fred L. (December 8, 2008), "Pajama-clad pilot took on Japanese at Pearl Harbor", Army Times, archived from the original on January 2, 2013, retrieved October 27, 2022

Fukudome, Shigeru (December 1955b), "Hawaii Operation", Proceedings, United States Naval Institute, vol. 81, no. 12, pp. 13, 15–31

Hone, Thomas C. (December 1977), "The Destruction of the Battle Line at Pearl Harbor", Proceedings, United States Naval Institute, vol. 103, no. 12, pp. 56–57

Peck, Michael (August 5, 2016), "Russia's Pearl Harbor: The Battle of Port Arthur", The National Interest, archived from the original on August 14, 2020, retrieved June 26, 2019

Stewart, A. J. (December 1974), "Those Mysterious Midgets", Proceedings, United States Naval Institute

Wolk, Herman S. (July 2007), "Mason Patrick's Inside Game", Air Force Magazine, Air Force Association, archived from the original on July 15, 2019, retrieved July 13, 2019

Online sources

Bjorkman, James (March 2, 2019), "December 7, 1941: Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor", Filminspector.com, archived from the original on March 6, 2019, retrieved March 3, 2019

DiGiulian, Tony (March 7, 2021), "Order of Battle: Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941", Navweaps.com, archived from the original on June 30, 2011, retrieved December 10, 2021

Yarnell, Paul R. (November 2003), "Organization of the Japanese Air Attack Units December 7, 1941", NavSource Naval History, archived from the original on December 13, 2007, retrieved December 8, 2007

Further reading

Beach, Edward L. Jr. (1995), Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor, Naval Institute Press, ISBN 1-55750-059-2

Clausen, Henry C.; Lee, Bruce (2001), Pearl Harbor: Final Judgment, HarperCollins. An account of the secret "Clausen Inquiry" undertaken late in the war by order of Congress to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Clausen was given the authority to go anywhere and question anyone under oath. Ultimately, he traveled more than 55,000 miles and interviewed over a hundred US and British Army, Navy, and civilian personnel, in addition to being given access to all relevant Magic intercepts.

Condon-Rall, M. E. (1989), "The U.S. Army medical department and the attack on Pearl Harbor", J Mil Hist, 53 (1): 65–78, doi:10.2307/1986020, JSTOR 1986020, PMID 11617401. This article discusses the state of medical readiness prior to the attack, and the post-attack response by medical personnel.

Dorsey, James (2009), "Literary Tropes, Rhetorical Looping, and the Nine Gods of War: 'Fascist Proclivities' Made Real", in Tansman, Alan (ed.), The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Durham, North Carolina / London: Duke University Press, pp. 409–431. A study of Japanese wartime media representations of the submarine component of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Fish, Hamilton, III (1983), Tragic Deception: FDR and America's Involvement in World War II, Devin-Adair, ISBN 0-8159-6917-1

Gannon, Michael V. (2001), Pearl Harbor Betrayed, Henry Holt and Company. A recent examination of the issues surrounding the surprise of the attack.

Haynok, Robert J. (2009), "How the Japanese Did It", Naval History Magazine, vol. 23, no. 6, United States Naval Institute, archived from the original on June 7, 2013, retrieved February 6, 2013

Hixson, Walter L., ed. (2003), The United States and the Road to War in the Pacific, The American Experience in World War II, vol. 3, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-94031-1. Part of a twelve-volume series.

Holmes, W. J. (1979), Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II, United States Naval Institute. Contains some important material, such as Holmes's argument that, had the US Navy been warned of the attack and put to sea, it would have likely resulted in an even greater disaster.

Hughes-Wilson, John (2004) [First published 1999], Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups (revised ed.), Robinson. Contains a brief but insightful chapter on the particular intelligence failures, and a broader overview of what causes them.

Kimmett, Larry; Regis, Margaret (2004), The Attack on Pearl Harbor: An Illustrated History, NavPublishing. Using maps, photos, unique illustrations, and an animated CD, this book provides a detailed overview of the surprise attack that brought the United States into World War II.

Krepinevich, Andrew F. (February 25, 2002), Lighting the Path Ahead: Field Exercises and Transformation (PDF) (Report), Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, archived (PDF) from the original on September 24, 2021, retrieved December 11, 2021. Contains a passage regarding the Yarnell attack, as well as reference citations.

Layton, Edwin T.; Pineau, Roger; Costello, John (1985), And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets, New York: W. Morrow, ISBN 978-0-688-06968-1. Layton, Kimmel's Combat Intelligence Officer, says that Douglas MacArthur was the only field commander who had received any substantial amount of Purple intelligence.

Madsen, Daniel (2003), Resurrection-Salvaging the Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Naval Institute Press

McCollum, Arthur H. (October 7, 1940), Memorandum for the Director: Estimate of the Situation in the Pacific and Recommendations for Action by the United States (Memorandum), Office of Naval Intelligence. The McCollum memo is a 1940 memo from a Naval headquarters staff officer to his superiors outlining possible provocations to Japan, which might lead to war (declassified in 1994).

Melber, Takuma (2016), Pearl Harbor: Japans Angriff und der Kriegseintritt der USA [Pearl Harbor: Japan's Attack and the US Entry into the War] (in German), München: C.H. Beck, ISBN 978-3-406-69818-7.

Moorhead, John J. (1942), "Surgical Experience at Pearl Harbor", The Journal of the American Medical Association, 118 (9): 712, doi:10.1001/jama.1942.62830090002009. An overview of different surgical procedures at the hospital at the scene of the event.

Morgenstern, George Edward (1947), Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War, The Devin-Adair Company. Conspiracy theory.

Parker, Frederick D. (1994), Pearl Harbor Revisited: United States Navy Communications Intelligence 1924–1941, National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History – via Naval History and Heritage Command. Contains a detailed description of what the Navy knew from intercepted and decrypted Japan's communications prior to Pearl.

Rodgaard, John; Hsu, Peter K.; Lucas, Carroll L. & Biache, Andrew Jr. (December 1999), "Pearl Harbor – Attack from Below", Naval History, United States Naval Institute, vol. 13, no. 6, archived from the original on September 30, 2006

Seki, Eiji (2006), Mrs. Ferguson's Tea-Set, Japan and the Second World War: The Global Consequences Following Germany's Sinking of the SS Automedon in 1940, London: Brill/Global Oriental, ISBN 978-1-905246-28-1.

Stille, Mark E. (2011), Tora! Tora! Tora!: Pearl Harbor 1941, Raid Series, vol. 26, Osprey Publishing, ISBN 978-1-84908-509-0

Stinnett, Robert (1999), Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-0129-9, archived from the original on June 16, 2005. A study of the Freedom of Information Act documents that led Congress to direct clearance of Kimmel and Short.

Takeo, Iguchi (2010), Demystifying Pearl Harbor: A New Perspective From Japan, I-House Press

Theobald, Robert A. (1954), Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, Devin-Adair, ISBN 0-8159-5503-0. Foreword by Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr.

Toll, Ian W. (2011), Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942, New York: W. W. Norton

Wedemeyer, Albert C. (1958), Wedemeyer Reports!, Henry Holt Co., ISBN 0-89275-011-1

Wohlstetter, Roberta (1962), Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford University Press. The most cited scholarly work on the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. Her introduction and analysis of the concept of "noise" persist in understanding intelligence failures.

Wohlstetter, Roberta (1965), "Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight" (PDF), Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations, 43 (4): 691–707, doi:10.2307/20039133, JSTOR 20039133, archived from the original (PDF) on December 10, 2017

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LTC Jeffrey J. Gudmens; COL Timothy R. Reese (2009). Staff Ride Handbook for the Attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941: A Study of Defending America (PDF) (Report). Combat Studies Institute.

Pearl Harbor collected news and commentary at The New York Times

Accounts

Guarding The United States And Its Outposts, in Guarding the United States and Its Outposts Archived December 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine Official US Army history of Pearl Harbor by the United States Army Center of Military History

War comes to Hawaii Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Monday, September 13, 1999

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Video of first Newsreel from December 23, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbour – British Movietone News, 1942

Historic footage of Pearl Harbor during and immediately following attack on December 7, 1941

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World War II

1939–1945

    

Alternate titles: Second World War, WWII

By Thomas A. HughesSee All Article History

World War II: Germany invading Poland

World War II: Germany invading Poland

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Date: September 3, 1939 - September 2, 1945

Participants: Axis powers China Free French Greece Honduras Italy Netherlands Yugoslavia Guatemala Allied powers

Major Events: Battle of Crete Cowra breakout atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Invasion of Poland Operation Market Garden

Key People: Winston Churchill Adolf Hitler Alessandro Pertini Franklin D. Roosevelt Joseph Stalin

Top Questions

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Summary

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World War II: Pacific Theatre of Operations

World War II: Pacific Theatre of Operations

World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I. The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin

Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin

atomic bombing of Hiroshima

atomic bombing of Hiroshima

Along with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It resulted in the extension of the Soviet Union’s power to nations of eastern Europe, enabled a communist movement to eventually achieve power in China, and marked the decisive shift of power in the world away from the states of western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union.

Axis initiative and Allied reaction

The outbreak of war

By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and occupy Poland. Poland, for its part, had guarantees of French and British military support should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize the possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western neighbour. Secret negotiations led on August 23–24 to the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow. In a secret protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland should be divided between them, with the western third of the country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds being taken over by the U.S.S.R.

Having achieved this cynical agreement, the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even without divulgence of the secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could attack Poland with no danger of Soviet or British intervention and gave orders for the invasion to start on August 26. News of the signing, on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to supersede a previous though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of hostilities for a few days. He was still determined, however, to ignore the diplomatic efforts of the western powers to restrain him. Finally, at 12:40 PM on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45 the next morning. The invasion began as ordered. In response, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM, respectively. World War II had begun.

Britannica Quiz United States at War Quiz

Forces and resources of the European combatants, 1939

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

In September 1939 the Allies, namely Great Britain, France, and Poland, were together superior in industrial resources, population, and military manpower, but the German Army, or Wehrmacht, because of its armament, training, doctrine, discipline, and fighting spirit, was the most efficient and effective fighting force for its size in the world. The index of military strength in September 1939 was the number of divisions that each nation could mobilize. Against Germany’s 100 infantry divisions and six armoured divisions, France had 90 infantry divisions in metropolitan France, Great Britain had 10 infantry divisions, and Poland had 30 infantry divisions, 12 cavalry brigades, and one armoured brigade (Poland had also 30 reserve infantry divisions, but these could not be mobilized quickly). A division contained from 12,000 to 25,000 men.

It was the qualitative superiority of the German infantry divisions and the number of their armoured divisions that made the difference in 1939. The firepower of a German infantry division far exceeded that of a French, British, or Polish division; the standard German division included 442 machine guns, 135 mortars, 72 antitank guns, and 24 howitzers. Allied divisions had a firepower only slightly greater than that of World War I. Germany had six armoured divisions in September 1939; the Allies, though they had a large number of tanks, had no armoured divisions at that time.

WWII: D-Day in pictures

BRITANNICA EXCLUSIVE ARCHIVE

WWII: D-DAY IN PICTURES

After a prolonged naval and aerial bombardment of German defenses on the Channel coast of France and the Low Countries, the Allied invasion of Normandy began in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. This collection of pictures documents the historic event that created a turning point in World War II.

German tanks

German tanks

Stuka

Stuka

The six armoured, or panzer, divisions of the Wehrmacht comprised some 2,400 tanks. And though Germany would subsequently expand its tank forces during the first years of the war, it was not the number of tanks that Germany had (the Allies had almost as many in September 1939) but the fact of their being organized into divisions and operated as such that was to prove decisive. In accordance with the doctrines of General Heinz Guderian, the German tanks were used in massed formations in conjunction with motorized artillery to punch holes in the enemy line and to isolate segments of the enemy, which were then surrounded and captured by motorized German infantry divisions while the tanks ranged forward to repeat the process: deep drives into enemy territory by panzer divisions were thus followed by mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. These tactics were supported by dive bombers that attacked and disrupted the enemy’s supply and communications lines and spread panic and confusion in its rear, thus further paralyzing its defensive capabilities. Mechanization was the key to the German blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” so named because of the unprecedented speed and mobility that were its salient characteristics. Tested and well-trained in maneuvers, the German panzer divisions constituted a force with no equal in Europe.

The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, was also the best force of its kind in 1939. It was a ground-cooperation force designed to support the Army, but its planes were superior to nearly all Allied types. In the rearmament period from 1935 to 1939 the production of German combat aircraft steadily mounted. The table shows the production of German aircraft by years.

WORLD WAR II EVENTS

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Samuel Bak: Smoke

Holocaust

1933 - 1945

Invasion of Poland

Invasion of Poland

September 1, 1939 - October 5, 1939

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Battle of the Atlantic

September 3, 1939 - May 8, 1945

Dunkirk evacuation

Dunkirk evacuation

May 26, 1940 - June 4, 1940

North Africa campaigns

North Africa campaigns

June 1940 - May 13, 1943

the Blitz

Battle of Britain

July 1940 - September 1940

France, Battle of; Vichy France

Vichy France

July 1940 - September 1944

German bombing of London during the Blitz

the Blitz

September 7, 1940 - May 11, 1941

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Battle of Crete

May 20, 1941 - June 1, 1941

German soldiers during Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa

June 22, 1941

Operation Barbarossa

Battle of Moscow

September 30, 1941 - January 7, 1942

Pearl Harbor attack

Pearl Harbor attack

December 7, 1941

Wake Island

Battle of Wake Island

December 8, 1941 - December 23, 1941

U.S. troops advancing on Tarawa, Gilbert Islands, in 1943

Pacific War

December 8, 1941 - September 2, 1945

Bataan Death March

Bataan Death March

April 9, 1942

Map of eastern New Guinea from the 10th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, c. 1902.

Kokoda Track Campaign

July 1942 - January 1943

Stalingrad, Battle of

Battle of Stalingrad

August 22, 1942 - February 2, 1943

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

April 19, 1943 - May 16, 1943

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Normandy Massacres

June 1944

Normandy Invasion

Normandy Invasion

June 6, 1944 - July 9, 1944

U.S. Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944

Battle of Saipan

June 15, 1944 - July 9, 1944

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Operation Bagration

June 23, 1944 - August 19, 1944

Cowra, New South Wales, Australia

Cowra breakout

August 5, 1944

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Operation Market Garden

September 17, 1944 - September 27, 1944

Battle of the Bulge

Battle of the Bulge

December 16, 1944 - January 16, 1945

Yalta Conference

Yalta Conference

February 4, 1945 - February 11, 1945

Battle of Iwo Jima

Battle of Iwo Jima

February 19, 1945 - March 26, 1945

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Battle for Castle Itter

May 5, 1945

atomic bombing of Hiroshima

atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

August 6, 1945 - August 9, 1945

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German aircraft production by year

year combat types other types

1933 0 368

1934 840 1,128

1935 1,823 1,360

1936 2,530 2,582

1937 2,651 2,955

1938 3,350 1,885

1939 4,733 3,562

The standardization of engines and airframes gave the Luftwaffe an advantage over its opponents. Germany had an operational force of 1,000 fighters and 1,050 bombers in September 1939. The Allies actually had more planes in 1939 than Germany did, but their strength was made up of many different types, some of them obsolescent. The corresponding table shows the number of first-line military aircraft available to the Allies at the outbreak of war.

Allied air strength, September 1939

aircraft British French Polish

bombers 536 463 200

fighters 608 634 300

reconnaissance 96 444 —

coastal command 216 — —

fleet air arm 204 194 —

Great Britain, which was held back by delays in the rearmament program, was producing one modern fighter in 1939, the Hurricane. A higher-performance fighter, the Spitfire, was just coming into production and did not enter the air war in numbers until 1940.

View archival footage of German troops invading Poland and forcing Europe into war

View archival footage of German troops invading Poland and forcing Europe into warSee all videos for this article

The value of the French Air Force in 1939 was reduced by the number of obsolescent planes in its order of battle: 131 of the 634 fighters and nearly all of the 463 bombers. France was desperately trying to buy high-performance aircraft in the United States in 1939.

Bismarck battleship

Bismarck battleship

At sea the odds against Germany were much greater in September 1939 than in August 1914, since the Allies in 1939 had many more large surface warships than Germany had. At sea, however, there was to be no clash between the Allied and the German massed fleets but only the individual operation of German pocket battleships and commerce raiders.

The invasion of the Low Countries and France

See how German troops parachuted behind the Maginot Line as part of the blitzkrieg against Allied forces

See how German troops parachuted behind the Maginot Line as part of the blitzkrieg against Allied forcesSee all videos for this article

Learn about the German invasion of France and the neutral nations of Belgium and Holland and the Dunkirk evacuation

Learn about the German invasion of France and the neutral nations of Belgium and Holland and the Dunkirk evacuationSee all videos for this article

France’s 800,000-man standing army was thought at the time to be the most powerful in Europe. But the French had not progressed beyond the defensive mentality inherited from World War I, and they relied primarily on their Maginot Line for protection against a German offensive. The Maginot Line was an extremely well-developed chain of fortifications running from the Swiss frontier opposite Basel northward along the left bank of the Rhine and then northwestward no farther than Montmédy, near the Belgian frontier south of the Ardennes Forest. The line consisted of a series of giant pillboxes and other defensive installations constructed in depth, equipped with underground supply and communications facilities, and connected by rail lines, with all its heavy guns pointed east at the German frontier. Depending heavily on the line as a defense against German attack, the French had 41 divisions manning it or backing it, whereas only 39 divisions were watching the long stretch of frontier north of it, from Montmédy through the Ardennes and across Flanders to the English Channel.

In their plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries, the Germans kept General Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group C facing the Maginot Line so as to deter the French from diverting forces from it, while launching Bock’s Army Group B into the basin of the Lower Maas River north of Liège and Rundstedt’s Army Group A into the Ardennes. Army Group B comprised Küchler’s 18th Army, with one armoured division and airborne support, to attack the Netherlands, and Reichenau’s 6th, with two armoured divisions, to advance over the Belgian plain. These two armies would have to deal not only with the Dutch and Belgian armies but also with the forces that the Allies, according to their plan, would send into the Low Countries, namely two French armies and nine British divisions. Rundstedt’s Army Group A, however, was much stronger, comprising as it did Kluge’s 4th Army, List’s 12th, and General Ernst Busch’s 16th, with General Maximilian von Weichs’s 2nd in reserve, besides a large armoured group under Paul Ludwig von Kleist and a smaller one under General Hermann Hoth, and amounting in all to 44 divisions, seven of them armoured, with 27 divisions in reserve. Army Group A thus amounted to more than 1,500,000 men and more than 1,500 tanks, and it would strike at the weak hinge of the Allies’ wheel into Belgium—that is to say, at two French armies, General Charles Huntziger’s 2nd and General André Corap’s 9th, which together mustered only 12 infantry and four horsed cavalry divisions and stood, respectively, east and west of Sedan on the least-fortified stretch of the French frontier. Against this weak centre of the Allied line were thus massed nearly two-thirds of Germany’s forces in the west and nearly three-quarters of its tank forces.

The Dutch Army comprised 10 divisions and the equivalent of 10 more in smaller formations, and thus totaled more than 400,000 men. It apparently had a good chance of withstanding the German invasion, since the attacking German army comprised only seven divisions, apart from the airborne forces it would use. The Dutch, however, had a wide front, a very sensitive and loosely settled rear, very few tanks, and no experience of modern warfare. On May 10, the German attack on the Netherlands began with the capture by parachutists of the bridges at Moerdijk, at Dordrecht, and at Rotterdam and with landings on the airfields around The Hague. On the same day, the weakly held Peel Line, south of the westward-turning arc of the Maas, was penetrated by the German land forces; and on May 11 the Dutch defenders fell back westward past Tilburg to Breda, with the consequence that the French 7th Army, under General Henri Giraud, whose leading forces had sped forward across Belgium over the 140 miles to Tilburg, fell back to Breda likewise. The German tanks thus had a clear road to Moerdijk, and by noon on May 12 they were in the outskirts of Rotterdam. North of the Maas, meanwhile, where the bulk of the Dutch defense was concentrated, the Germans achieved a narrow breach of the Geld Valley line on May 12, whereupon the Dutch, unable to counterattack, retreated to the “Fortress of Holland” Line protecting Utrecht and Amsterdam. Queen Wilhelmina and her government left the country for England on May 13; and the next day the Dutch commander in chief, General Henri Gerard Winkelman, surrendered to the Germans, who had threatened to bomb Rotterdam and Utrecht, as places in the front line of the fighting, if resistance continued. In fact, Rotterdam was bombed, after the capitulation, by 30 planes through a mistake in the Germans’ signal communications.

The news of the German onslaught in the Low Countries, dismaying as it was to the Allies, had one effect that was to be of momentous importance to their fortunes: Chamberlain, whose halfhearted conduct of the war had been bitterly criticized in the House of Commons during the debate of May 7–8 on the campaign in Norway, resigned office in the evening of May 10 and was succeeded as prime minister by Churchill, who formed a coalition government.

For the first phase of the invasion of the Belgian plain north of Liège, Reichenau had four army corps, one armoured corps, and only 500 airborne troops; but he also had massive cooperation from the German Luftwaffe, whose dive bombers and fighters played a major role in breaking down the Belgian defenses. West of the Maastricht “appendix” of indefensible Dutch territory separating Belgium from Germany, the fortress of Eben Emael, immediately opposite Maastricht, and the line of the Albert Canal constituted the Belgians’ foremost defensive position. On May 10 German airborne troops landed in gliders on the top of the fortress and on bridges over the canal. On May 11 the Belgian front was broken, the German tanks running on westward and some of the infantry turning southward to take Liège from the rear, while the Belgians made a general retreat to the Antwerp–Namur, or Dyle, Line. French and British divisions had just arrived on this Dyle Line, and General René Prioux’s two tank divisions went out from it to challenge the German advance. After a big battle on May 14, however, Prioux’s tanks had to retire to the consolidated Dyle Line; and on May 15, notwithstanding a successful defense against a German attack, Gamelin ordered the abandonment of the position, because events farther to the south had made it strategically untenable.

The chances for success of the German offensive against France hinged on a German advance through the hilly and dense Ardennes Forest, which the French considered to be impassable to tanks. But the Germans did succeed in moving their tank columns through that difficult belt of country by means of an amazing feat of staff work. While the armoured divisions used such roads through the forest as were available, infantry divisions started alongside them by using field and woodland paths and marched so fast across country that the leading ones reached the Meuse River only a day after the armoured divisions had.

The decisive operations in France were those of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. Kleist’s tanks on May 10 took only three hours to cover the 30 miles from the eastern border of independent Luxembourg to the southeastern border of Belgium; and on May 11 the French cavalry divisions that had ridden forward into the Ardennes to oppose them were thrown back over the Semois River. By the evening of May 12 the Germans were across the Franco-Belgian frontier and overlooking the Meuse River. The defenses of this sector were rudimentary, and it was the least-fortified stretch of the whole French front. Worse still, the defending French 2nd and 9th armies had hardly any antitank guns or antiaircraft artillery with which to slow down the German armoured columns and shoot down their dive bombers. Such was the folly of the French belief that a German armoured thrust through the Ardennes was unlikely.

On May 13 Kleist’s forces achieved a threefold crossing of the Meuse River. At Sedan wave after wave of German dive bombers swooped on the French defenders of the south bank. The latter could not stand the nerve-racking strain, and the German troops were able to push across the river in rubber boats and on rafts. The tremendous air bombardment was the decisive factor in the crossings. A thousand aircraft supported Kleist’s forces, while only a few French aircraft intervened in a gallant but hopeless effort to aid their troops on the ground. Next day, after the tanks had been brought across, Guderian widened the Sedan bridgehead and beat off French counterattacks. On May 15 he broke through the French defenses into open country, turning westward in the direction of the English Channel. On May 16 his forces swept on west for nearly 50 miles. His superiors tried to put on the brake, feeling that such rapid progress was hazardous, but the pace of the German drive upset the French far more, and their collapse spread as Reinhardt’s corps joined in the pressure. When more German tanks crossed the Meuse between Givet and Namur, the breach of the French front was 60 miles wide.

Driving westward down the empty corridor between the Sambre and the Aisne rivers, Guderian’s tanks crossed the Oise River on May 17 and reached Amiens two days later. Giraud, who on May 15 had superseded Corap in command of the French 9th Army, was thus frustrated in his desperate plan of checking the Germans on the Oise; and Kleist, meanwhile, by lining the Aisne progressively with tanks until the infantry came up to relieve them, was protecting the southwestern flank of the advance against the danger of a counteroffensive from the south. Indeed, when the Germans, on May 15, were reported to be crossing the Aisne River between Rethel and Laon, Gamelin told Reynaud that he had no reserves in that sector and that Paris might fall within two days’ time. Thereupon Reynaud, though he postponed his immediate decision to move the government to Tours, summoned General Maxime Weygand from Syria to take Gamelin’s place as commander in chief; but Weygand did not arrive until May 19.

Guderian’s tanks were at Abbeville on May 20, and on May 22 he turned northward to threaten Calais and Dunkirk, while Reinhardt, swinging south of the British rear at Arras, headed for the same objectives, the remaining ports by which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) could be evacuated.

The evacuation from Dunkirk

Learn how Nazi panzers wedged between French and British troops and trapped the latter at Dunkirk

Learn how Nazi panzers wedged between French and British troops and trapped the latter at DunkirkSee all videos for this article

For the Allies, all communication between their northern and southern forces was severed by the arc of the westward German advance from the Ardennes to the Somme. The Allied armies in the north, having fallen back from the Dyle Line to the Escaut (Schelde), were being encircled, and already on May 19 the British commander, Viscount Gort, was considering the withdrawal of the BEF by sea. On May 21, however, to satisfy orders from London for more positive action, he launched an attack from Arras southward against the right flank of the Germans’ corridor; but, though it momentarily alarmed the German high command, this small counterstroke lacked the armoured strength necessary for success. Meanwhile, Guderian’s tanks had swept up past Boulogne and Calais and were crossing the canal defense line close to Dunkirk when, on May 24, an inexplicable order from Hitler not only stopped their advance but actually called them back to the canal line just as Guderian was expecting to drive into Dunkirk.

Dunkirk was now the only port left available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe, and the British Cabinet at last decided to save what could be saved. The British Admiralty had been collecting every kind of small craft it could find to help in removing the troops, and the British retreat to the coast now became a race to evacuate the troops before the Germans could occupy Dunkirk. Evacuation began on May 26 and became still more urgent the next day, when the Belgians, their right wing and their centre broken by Reichenau’s advance, sued for an armistice. On May 27, likewise, bombing by the Luftwaffe put the harbour of Dunkirk out of use, so that many of the thousands of men thronging the 10-mile stretch of beaches had to be ferried out to sea by petty craft pressed into service by the Royal Navy and manned largely by amateur seamen, though the harbour’s damaged breakwater still offered a practicable exit for the majority. By June 4, when the operation came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops had been saved; but virtually all of their heavy equipment had to be abandoned, and, of the 41 destroyers participating, six were sunk and 19 others damaged. The men who were saved represented a considerable part of the experienced troops possessed by Great Britain and were an inestimable gain to the Allies. The success of the near-miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk was due, on the one hand, to fighter cover by the Royal Air Force from the English coast and on the other to Hitler’s fatal order of May 24 halting Guderian. That order had been made for several reasons, chiefly: Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, had mistakenly assured Hitler that his aircraft alone could destroy the Allied troops trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk; and Hitler himself seems to have believed that Great Britain might accept peace terms more readily if its armies were not constrained into humiliating surrender. Three days passed before Walther von Brauchitsch, the German Army commander in chief, was able to persuade Hitler to withdraw his orders and allow the German armoured forces to advance on Dunkirk. But they met stronger opposition from the British, who had had time to solidify their defenses, and almost immediately Hitler stopped the German armoured forces again, ordering them instead to move south and prepare for the attack on the Somme–Aisne line.

The campaign in northern France was wound up by Küchler’s forces, after both Guderian and Reichenau had been ordered southward. Altogether, the Germans had taken more than 1,000,000 prisoners in three weeks, at a cost of 60,000 casualties. Some 220,000 Allied troops, however, were rescued by British ships from France’s northwestern ports (Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire), thus bringing the total of Allied troops evacuated to about 558,000.

There remained the French armies south of the Germans’ Somme–Aisne front. The French had lost 30 divisions in the campaign so far. Weygand still managed to muster 49 divisions, apart from the 17 left to hold the Maginot Line, but against him the Germans had 130 infantry divisions as well as their 10 divisions of tanks. The Germans, after redisposing their units, began a new offensive on June 5 from their positions on the Somme. The French resisted stiffly for two days, but on June 7 the German tanks in the westernmost sector, led by Major General Erwin Rommel, broke through toward Rouen, and on June 9 they were over the Seine. On June 9 the Germans attacked on the Aisne: the infantry forced the crossings, and then Guderian’s armour drove through the breach toward Châlons-sur-Marne before turning eastward for the Swiss frontier, thus isolating all the French forces still holding the Maginot Line.

Italy’s entry into the war and the French Armistice

Italy had been unprepared for war when Hitler attacked Poland, but if the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, was to reap any positive advantages from partnership with Hitler it seemed that Italy would have to abandon its nonbelligerent stance before the western democracies had been defeated by Germany singlehanded. The obvious collapse of France convinced Mussolini that the time to implement his Pact of Steel with Hitler had come, and on June 10, 1940, Italy declared war against France and Great Britain. With about 30 divisions available on their Alpine frontier, the Italians delayed their actual attack on southeastern France until June 20, but it achieved little against the local defense. In any case, the issue in France had already been virtually settled by the victory of Italy’s German ally.

To complete their conquest of Cyrenaica, it remained for the British to take the port of Benghazi. On February 3, 1941, however, O’Connor learned that the Italians were about to abandon Benghazi and to retreat westward down the coast road to Agheila (al-ʿUqaylah). Thereupon he boldly ordered the 7th Armoured Division to cross the desert hinterland and intercept the Italian retreat by cutting the coast road well to the east of Agheila. On February 5, after an advance of 170 miles in 33 hours, the British were blocking the Italians’ line of retreat south of Beda Fomm (Bayḍāʾ Fumm); and in the morning of February 6, as the main Italian columns appeared, a day of battle began. Though the Italians had, altogether, nearly four times as many cruiser tanks as the British, by the following morning 60 Italian tanks had been crippled, 40 more abandoned, and the rest of Graziani’s army was surrendering in crowds. The British, only 3,000 strong and having lost only three of their 29 tanks, took 20,000 prisoners, 120 tanks, and 216 guns.

The British, having occupied Benghazi on February 6 and Agheila on February 8, could now have pushed on without hindrance to Tripoli, but the chance was foregone: the Greek government had accepted Churchill’s reiterated offer of British troops to be sent to Greece from Egypt, which meant a serious reduction of British strength in North Africa.

The reduction was to have serious consequences, because on February 6, the very day of Beda Fomm, a young general, Erwin Rommel, had been appointed by Hitler to command two German mechanized divisions that were to be sent as soon as possible to help the Italians. Arriving in Tripolitania, Rommel decided to try an offensive with what forces he had. Against the depleted British strength, he was rapidly and brilliantly successful. After occupying Agheila with ease on March 24 and Mersa Bréga (Qasr al-Burayqah) on March 31, he resumed his advance on April 2—despite orders to stand still for two months—with 50 tanks backed by two new Italian divisions. The British evacuated Benghazi the next day and began a precipitate retreat into Egypt, losing great numbers of their tanks on the way (a large force of armour, surrounded at Mechili, had to surrender on April 7). By April 11 all Cyrenaica except Tobruk had been reconquered by Rommel’s audacious initiative.

Tobruk, garrisoned mainly by the 9th Australian Division, held out against siege; and Rommel, though he defeated two British attempts to relieve the place (May and June 1941), was obliged to suspend his offensive on the Egyptian frontier, since he had overstretched his supply lines.

East Africa

Wavell, the success of whose North African strategy had been sacrificed to Churchill’s recurrent fantasy of creating a Balkan front against Germany (Greece in 1941 was scarcely less disastrous for the British than the Dardanelles in 1915), nevertheless enjoyed one definitive triumph before Churchill, doubly chagrined at having lost Cyrenaica for Greece’s sake and Greece for no advantage at all, removed him, in the summer of 1941, from his command in the Middle East. That triumph was the destruction of Italian East Africa and the elimination, thereby, of any threat to the Suez Canal from the south or to Kenya from the north.

In August 1940 Italian forces mounted a full-scale offensive and overran British Somaliland. Wavell, however, was already assured of the collaboration of the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in raising the Ethiopians in patriotic revolt against the Italians; and, whereas in June he had disposed only of meagre resources against the 200,000 men and 325 aircraft under the Duca d’Aosta, Amedeo di Savoia, his troops in the Sudan were reinforced by two Indian divisions before the end of the year. After Haile Selassie and a British major, Orde Wingate, with two battalions of Ethiopian exiles, had crossed the Sudanese frontier directly into Ethiopia, General William Platt and the Indian divisions invaded Eritrea on January 19, 1941 (the Italians had already abandoned Kassala); and, almost simultaneously, British troops from Kenya, under General Alan Cunningham, advanced into Italian Somaliland.

Platt’s drive eastward into Eritrea was checked on February 5, at Keren, where the best Italian troops, under General Nicolangelo Carnimeo, put up a stiff defense facilitated by a barrier of cliffs. But when Keren fell on March 26, Platt’s way to Asmara (Asmera), to Massawa (Mitsiwa), and then from Eritrea southward into Ethiopia was comparatively easy. Meanwhile, Cunningham’s troops were advancing northward into Ethiopia; and on April 6 they entered the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Finally, the Duca d’Aosta was caught between Platt’s column and Cunningham’s; and at Amba Alaji, on May 20, he and the main body of his forces surrendered.

Iraq and Syria, 1940–41

In 1940 Prince ʿAbd al-Ilāh, regent of Iraq for King Fayṣal, had a government divided within itself about the war; he himself and his foreign minister, Nuri as-Said, were pro-British, but his prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gailani, had pro-German leanings. Having resigned office in January 1941, Rashid Ali on April 3 seized power in Baghdad with help from some army officers and announced that the temporarily absent regent was deposed. The British, ostensibly exercising their right under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 to move troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April 19 and rejected Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into Palestine before any further landings. Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the British air base at Ḥabbānīyah, west of Baghdad; and on May 2 the British commander there opened hostilities, lest the Iraqis should attack first. Having won the upper hand at Ḥabbānīyah and been reinforced from Palestine, the British troops from the air base marched on Baghdad; and on May 30 Rashid Ali and his friends took refuge in Iran. ʿAbd al-Ilāh was reinstated as regent; Nuri became prime minister; and the British military presence remained to uphold them.

German military supplies for Rashid Ali were dispatched too late to be useful to him; but they reached Iraq via Syria, whose high commissioner, General H.-F. Dentz, was a nominee of the Vichy government of France. Lest Syria and Lebanon should fall altogether under Axis control, the British decided to intervene there. Consequently, Free French forces, under General Georges Catroux, with British, Australian, and Indian support, were sent into both countries from Palestine on June 8, 1941; and a week later British forces invaded Syria from Iraq. Dentz’s forces put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance, particularly against the Free French, but were finally obliged to capitulate: an armistice was signed at Acre on July 14. By an arrangement of July 25 the Free French retained territorial command in Syria and Lebanon subject to strategic control by the British.

The beginning of lend-lease

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On June 10, 1940, when Italy entered the war on the German side and when the fall of France was imminent, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the United States would “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.” After France fell, he pursued this policy by aiding the British in their struggle against Germany. Roosevelt arranged for the transfer of surplus American war matériel to the British under various arrangements, including the exchange of 50 old American destroyers for certain British-held Atlantic bases, and he facilitated the placing of British orders for munitions in the United States. The British decided to rely on the United States unreservedly and without regard to their ability to pay. By December 1940 they had already placed orders for war materials that were far more than they could possibly muster the dollar exchange to finance.

Churchill suggested the concept of lend-lease to Roosevelt in December 1940, proposing that the United States provide war materials, foodstuffs, and clothing to the democracies (and particularly to Great Britain). Roosevelt assented, and a bill to achieve this purpose was passed by the Congress in early 1941. The Lend-Lease Act not only empowered the president to transfer defense materials, services, and information to any foreign government whose defense he deemed vital to that of the United States, but also left to his discretion what he should ask in return. An enormous grant of power, it gave Roosevelt virtually a free hand to pursue his policy of material aid to the “opponents of force.” Congress appropriated funds generously, amounting to almost $13,000,000,000 by November 1941. Other countries besides Britain began receiving lend-lease aid by this time, including China and the Soviet Union. From the time of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., Roosevelt had been clearly determined to aid the Soviet Union, but the American public’s suspicions of Communism delayed his declaring that country eligible for lend-lease until November 1941. American deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and other supplies to the U.S.S.R. began shortly thereafter.

The Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1940–41

At the outbreak of World War II, the primary concerns of the British Navy were to defend Great Britain from invasion and to retain command of the ocean trading routes, both in order to protect the passage of essential supplies of food and raw materials for Britain and to deny the trading routes to the Axis powers, thus drawing tight once again the blockade that had proved so successful during World War I. Britain had adequate forces of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and other ships to fulfill these tasks.

U-218

U-218

The German Navy’s role was to protect Germany’s coasts, to defend its sea communications and to attack those of the Allies’, and to support land and air operations. These modest goals were in keeping with Germany’s position as the dominant land-based power in continental Europe. Germany’s main naval weapon during the war was to be the submarine, or U-boat, with which it attacked Allied shipping much as it had in World War I.

Learn how the Third Reich utilized U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic to destroy Allied supply convoys

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German control of the Biscay ports after the fall of France in June 1940 provided the U-boats with bases from which they could infest the Atlantic without having to pass either through the Channel or around the north of the British Isles at the end of every sortie. Thenceforward, so long as naval escorts for outgoing convoys from the British Isles could go only 200 or 300 miles out to sea before having to turn back to escort incoming convoys, the U-boats had a very wide field for free-ranging activity: sinkings rose sharply from 55,580 tons in May 1940 to 352,407 tons in October, achieved mainly by solitary attacks by single U-boats at night. But the beginning of lend-lease and the freeing of British warships after the German invasion threat waned enabled the British to escort their convoys for 400 miles by October 1940 and halfway across the Atlantic by April 1941. Since air cover for shipping could also be provided from the British Isles, from Canada, and from Iceland, the Atlantic space left open to the U-boats was reduced by May 1941 to a width of only 300 miles. Moreover, British surface vessels had the ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) device to detect submerged U-boats. By the spring of 1941, under the guidance of Admiral Karl Dönitz, the U-boat commanders were changing their tactic of individual operation to one of wolf-pack attacks: groups of U-boats, disposed in long lines, would rally when one of them by radio signaled a sighting and overwhelm the convoy by weight of numbers. Between July and December 1941 the German U-boat strength was raised from 65 to more than 230.

Furthermore, the German surface fleet became more active against Allied seaborne trade. Six armed German raiders disguised as merchantmen, with orders to leave convoys alone and to confine their attacks to unescorted ships, roamed the oceans with practical impunity from the spring of 1940 and had sunk 366,644 tons of shipping by the end of the year. German battleships—the Admiral Scheer, the Admiral Hipper, the Scharnhorst, and the Gneisenau—one after another began similar raiding operations, with considerable success, from October 1940; and in May 1941 a really modern battleship, the Bismarck, and a new cruiser, the Prinz Eugen, put out to sea from Germany. The Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, however, were located by British reconnaissance in the North Sea near Bergen, and an intensive hunt for them was immediately set in motion. Tracked from a point northwest of Iceland by two British cruisers, the two German ships were engaged on May 24 by the battle cruiser Hood and by the new battleship Prince of Wales; and, though the Hood was sunk, the Bismarck ’s fuel supply was put out of action, so that its commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, decided to make for the French coast. Separating from the Prinz Eugen (which escaped), the Bismarck threw off her pursuers early on May 25 but was sighted again the next day some 660 miles west of Brest. Paralyzed by torpedo aircraft from the Ark Royal, it was bombarded by the King George V, the Rodney, and the Dorsetshire on May 27 and sank.

In the Mediterranean the year 1941 ended with some naval triumphs for the Axis: U-boats torpedoed the Ark Royal on November 13 and the Barham 12 days later; Italian frogmen, entering the harbour of Alexandria, on December 19 crippled the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant; and two British cruisers and a destroyer were also sunk in Mediterranean waters in December.

German strategy, 1939–42

German strategy in World War II is wholly intelligible only if Hitler’s far-reaching system of power politics and his racist ideology are borne in mind. Since the 1920s his program had been first to win power in Germany proper, next to consolidate Germany’s domination over Central Europe, and then to raise Germany to the status of a world power by two stages: (1) the building up of a continental empire embracing all Europe, including the European portion of the Soviet Union, and (2) the attainment for Germany of equal rank with the British Empire, Japan, and the United States—the only world powers to be left after the elimination of France and the U.S.S.R.—through the acquisition of colonies in Africa and the construction of a strong fleet with bases on the Atlantic. In the succeeding generation Hitler foresaw a decisive conflict between Germany and the United States, during which he hoped that Great Britain would be Germany’s ally.

The conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union, which in Hitler’s calendar was dated approximately for 1943–45, was to be preceded, he thought, by short localized campaigns elsewhere in Europe to provide a strategic shield and to secure Germany’s rear for the great expedition of conquest in the East, which was also bound up with the extermination of the Jews. The most important of the localized campaigns would be that against France. While this European program remained unfulfilled, it was imperative to avoid any world war, since only after the German Reich had come to dominate the whole European continent would it have the economic base and the territorial extent that were prerequisite for success in a great war, especially against maritime world powers.

Hitler had always contemplated the overthrow of the Soviet regime, and though he had congratulated himself on the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 as a matter of expediency, anti-Bolshevism had remained his most profound emotional conviction. His feelings had been stirred up afresh by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June 1940 and by the consequent proximity of Soviet forces to the Romanian oil fields on which Germany depended. Hitler became acutely suspicious of the intentions of the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and he began to feel that he could not afford to wait to complete the subjugation of western Europe before dealing with the Soviet Union. Hitler and his generals had originally scheduled the invasion of the U.S.S.R. for mid-May 1941, but the unforeseen necessity of invading Yugoslavia and Greece in April of that year had forced them to postpone the Soviet campaign to late June. The swiftness of Hitler’s Balkan victories enabled him to keep to this revised timetable, but the five weeks’ delay shortened the time for carrying out the invasion of the U.S.S.R. and was to prove the more serious because in 1941 the Russian winter would arrive earlier than usual. Nevertheless, Hitler and the heads of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, or German Army High Command), namely the army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch and the army general staff chief Franz Halder, were convinced that the Red Army could be defeated in two or three months, and that, by the end of October, the Germans would have conquered the whole European part of Russia and Ukraine west of a line stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan. The invasion of the Soviet Union was given the code name “Operation Barbarossa.”

Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941

Watch the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German Wehrmacht invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941

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For the campaign against the Soviet Union, the Germans allotted almost 150 divisions containing a total of about 3,000,000 men. Among these were 19 panzer divisions, and in total the “Barbarossa” force had about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. It was in effect the largest and most powerful invasion force in human history. The Germans’ strength was further increased by more than 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops.

The Soviet Union had twice or perhaps three times the number of both tanks and aircraft as the Germans had, but their aircraft were mostly obsolete. The Soviet tanks were about equal to those of the Germans, however. A greater hindrance to Hitler’s chances of victory was that the German intelligence service underestimated the troop reserves that Stalin could bring up from the depths of the U.S.S.R. The Germans correctly estimated that there were about 150 divisions in the western parts of the U.S.S.R. and reckoned that 50 more might be produced. But the Soviets actually brought up more than 200 fresh divisions by the middle of August, making a total of 360. The consequence was that, though the Germans succeeded in shattering the original Soviet armies by superior technique, they then found their path blocked by fresh ones. The effects of the miscalculations were increased because much of August was wasted while Hitler and his advisers were having long arguments as to what course they should follow after their initial victories. Another factor in the Germans’ calculations was purely political, though no less mistaken; they believed that within three to six months of their invasion, the Soviet regime would collapse from lack of domestic support.

The German attack on the Soviet Union was to have an immediate and highly salutary effect on Great Britain’s situation. Until then Britain’s prospects had appeared hopeless in the eyes of most people except the British themselves; and the government’s decision to continue the struggle after the fall of France and to reject Hitler’s peace offers could spell only slow suicide unless relief came from either the United States or the U.S.S.R. Hitler brought Great Britain relief by turning eastward and invading the Soviet Union just as the strain on Britain was becoming severe.

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On June 22, 1941, the German offensive was launched by three army groups under the same commanders as in the invasion of France in 1940: on the left (north), an army group under Leeb struck from East Prussia into the Baltic states toward Leningrad; on the right (south), another army group, under Rundstedt, with an armoured group under Kleist, advanced from southern Poland into Ukraine against Kyiv (Kiev), whence it was to wheel southeastward to the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov; and in the centre, north of the Pripet Marshes, the main blow was delivered by Bock’s army group, with one armoured group under Guderian and another under Hoth, thrusting northeastward at Smolensk and Moscow.

The invasion along a 1,800-mile front took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise and caught the Red Army in an unprepared and partially demobilized state. Piercing the northern border, Guderian’s tanks raced 50 miles beyond the frontier on the first day of the invasion and were at Minsk, 200 miles beyond it, on June 27. At Minsk they converged with Hoth’s tanks, which had pierced the opposite flank, but Bock’s infantry could not follow up quickly enough to complete the encirclement of the Soviet troops in the area; though 300,000 prisoners were taken in the salient, a large part of the Soviet forces was able to escape to the east. The Soviet armies were clumsily handled and frittered their tank strength away in piecemeal action like that of the French in 1940. But the isolated Soviet troops fought with a stubbornness that the French had not shown, and their resistance imposed a brake by continuing to block road centres long after the German tide had swept past them. The result was similar when Guderian’s tanks, having crossed the Dnieper River on July 10, entered Smolensk six days later and converged with Hoth’s thrust through Vitebsk: 200,000 Soviet prisoners were taken; but some Soviet forces were withdrawn from the trap to the line of the Desna, and a large pocket of resistance lay behind the German armour. By mid-July, moreover, a series of rainstorms were turning the sandy Russian roads into clogging mud, over which the wheeled vehicles of the German transport behind the tanks could make only very slow progress. The Germans also began to be hampered by the scorched earth policy adopted by the retreating Soviets. The Soviet troops burned crops, destroyed bridges, and evacuated factories in the face of the German advance. Entire steel and munitions plants in the westernmost portions of the U.S.S.R. were dismantled and shipped by rail to the east, where they were put back into production. The Soviets also destroyed or evacuated most of their rolling stock (railroad cars), thus depriving the Germans of the use of the Soviet rail system, since Soviet railroad track was of a different gauge than German track and German rolling stock was consequently useless on it.

Nevertheless, by mid-July the Germans had advanced more than 400 miles and were only 200 miles from Moscow. They still had ample time to make decisive gains before the onset of winter, but they lost the opportunity, primarily because of arguments throughout August between Hitler and the OKH about the destination of the next thrusts thence: whereas the OKH proposed Moscow as the main objective, Hitler wanted the major effort to be directed southeastward, through Ukraine and the Donets Basin into the Caucasus, with a minor swing northwestward against Leningrad (to converge with Leeb’s army group).

In Ukraine, meanwhile, Rundstedt and Kleist had made short work of the foremost Soviet defenses, stronger though the latter had been. A new Soviet front south of Kyiv was broken by the end of July; and in the next fortnight the Germans swept down to the Black Sea mouths of the Bug and Dnieper rivers—to converge with Romania’s simultaneous offensive. Kleist was then ordered to wheel northward from Ukraine, Guderian southward from Smolensk, for a pincer movement around the Soviet forces behind Kyiv; and by the end of September the claws of the encircling movement had caught 520,000 men. These gigantic encirclements were partly the fault of inept Soviet high commanders and partly the fault of Stalin, who as commander in chief stubbornly overrode the advice of his generals and ordered his armies to stand and fight instead of allowing them to retreat eastward and regroup in preparation for a counteroffensive.

Winter was approaching, and Hitler stopped Leeb’s northward drive on the outskirts of Leningrad. He ordered Rundstedt and Kleist, however, to press on from the Dnieper toward the Don and the Caucasus; and Bock was to resume the advance on Moscow.

Bock’s renewed advance on Moscow began on October 2, 1941. Its prospects looked bright when Bock’s armies brought off a great encirclement around Vyazma, where 600,000 more Soviet troops were captured. That left the Germans momentarily with an almost clear path to Moscow. But the Vyazma battle had not been completed until late October; the German troops were tired, the country became a morass as the weather got worse, and fresh Soviet forces appeared in the path as they plodded slowly forward. Some of the German generals wanted to break off the offensive and to take up a suitable winter line. But Bock wanted to press on, believing that the Soviets were on the verge of collapse, while Brauchitsch and Halder tended to agree with his view. As that also accorded with Hitler’s desire, he made no objection. The temptation of Moscow, now so close in front of their eyes, was too great for any of the topmost leaders to resist. On December 2 a further effort was launched, and some German detachments penetrated into the suburbs of Moscow; but the advance as a whole was held up in the forests covering the capital. The stemming of this last phase of the great German offensive was partly due to the effects of the Russian winter, whose subzero temperatures were the most severe in several decades. In October and November a wave of frostbite cases had decimated the ill-clad German troops, for whom provisions of winter clothing had not been made, while the icy cold paralyzed the Germans’ mechanized transport, tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The Soviets, by contrast, were well clad and tended to fight more effectively in winter than did the Germans. By this time German casualties had mounted to levels that were unheard of in the campaigns against France and the Balkans; by November the Germans had suffered about 730,000 casualties.

In the south, Kleist had already reached Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, on November 22, but had exhausted his tanks’ fuel in doing so. Rundstedt, seeing the place to be untenable, wanted to evacuate it but was overruled by Hitler. A Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Rostov on November 28, and Rundstedt was relieved of his command four days later. The Germans, however, managed to establish a front on the Mius River—as Rundstedt had recommended.

As the German drive against Moscow slackened, the Soviet commander on the Moscow front, General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, on December 6 inaugurated the first great counteroffensive with strokes against Bock’s right in the Elets (Yelets) and Tula sectors south of Moscow and against his centre in the Klin and Kalinin sectors to the northwest. Levies of Siberian troops, who were extremely effective fighters in cold weather, were used for these offensives. There followed a blow at the German left, in the Velikie Luki sector; and the counteroffensive, which was sustained throughout the winter of 1941–42, soon took the form of a triple convergence toward Smolensk.

These Soviet counteroffensives tumbled back the exhausted Germans, lapped around their flanks, and produced a critical situation. From generals downward, the invaders were filled with ghastly thoughts of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. In that emergency Hitler forbade any retreat beyond the shortest possible local withdrawals. His decision exposed his troops to awful sufferings in their advanced positions facing Moscow, for they had neither the clothing nor the equipment for a Russian winter campaign; but if they had once started a general retreat it might easily have degenerated into a panic-stricken rout.

The Red Army’s winter counteroffensive continued for more than three months after its December launching, though with diminishing progress. By March 1942 it had advanced more than 150 miles in some sectors. But the Germans maintained their hold on the main bastions of their winter front—such towns as Schlüsselburg, Novgorod, Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk, Orël (Oryol), Kursk, Kharkov, and Taganrog—despite the fact that the Soviets had often advanced many miles beyond these bastions, which were in effect cut off. In retrospect, it became clear that Hitler’s veto on any extensive withdrawal worked out in such a way as to restore the confidence of the German troops and probably saved them from a widespread collapse. Nevertheless, they paid a heavy price indirectly for that rigid defense. One immediate handicap was that the strength of the Luftwaffe was drained in the prolonged effort to maintain supplies by air, under winter conditions, to the garrisons of these more or less isolated bastion towns. The tremendous strain of that winter campaign, on armies which had not been prepared for it, had other serious effects. Before the winter ended, many German divisions were reduced to barely a third of their original strength, and they were never fully built up again.

The German plan of campaign had begun to miscarry in August 1941, and its failure was patent when the Soviet counteroffensive started. Nevertheless, having dismissed Brauchitsch and appointed himself army commander in chief in December, Hitler persisted in overruling the tentative opposition of the general staff to his strategy.

The first three months of the German–Soviet conflict produced cautious rapprochements between the U.S.S.R. and Great Britain and between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. The Anglo-Soviet agreement of July 12, 1941, pledged the signatory powers to assist one another and to abstain from making any separate peace with Germany. On August 25, 1941, British and Soviet forces jointly invaded Iran, to forestall the establishment of a German base there and to divide the country into spheres of occupation for the duration of the war; and late in September—at a conference in Moscow—Soviet, British, and U.S. representatives formulated the monthly quantities of supplies, including aircraft, tanks, and raw materials, that Great Britain and the United States should try to furnish to the Soviet Union.

The critical situation on the Eastern Front did not deter Hitler from declaring Germany to be at war with the United States on December 11, 1941, after the Japanese attack on the U.S., British, and Dutch positions in the Pacific and in the Far East (see below Japanese policy, 1939–41), since this extension of hostilities did not immediately commit the German land forces to any new theatre but at the same time had the merit of entitling the German Navy to intensify the war at sea.

The war in the Pacific, 1938–41

The war in China, 1937–41

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Japanese expansion

Japanese expansion

In 1931–32 the Japanese had invaded Manchuria (Northeast China) and, after overcoming ineffective Chinese resistance there, had created the Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo. In the following years the Nationalist government of China, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, temporized in the face of Japanese military and diplomatic pressures and instead waged an internal war against the Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, who were based in Shensi Province in north-central China. Meanwhile, the Japanese began a military buildup in North China proper, which in turn stimulated the formation of a unified resistance by the Nationalists and the Communists.

Overt hostilities between Japan and China began after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7, 1937, when shots were exchanged between Chinese and Japanese troops on the outskirts of Peking. Open fighting broke out in that area, and in late July the Japanese captured the Peking-Tientsin area. Thereupon full-scale hostilities began between the two nations. The Japanese landed near Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and took Shanghai in November and the Chinese capital, Nanking, in December 1937. Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Han-k’ou (one of the Wu-han cities), which lay 435 miles west of Shanghai along the Yangtze. The Japanese also pushed southward and westward from the Peking area into Hopeh and Shansi provinces. In 1938 the Japanese launched several ambitious military campaigns that brought them deep into the heart of central China. They advanced to the northeast and west from Nanking, taking Suchow and occupying the Wu-han cities. The Nationalists were forced to move their government to Chungking in Szechwan Province, about 500 miles west of the Wu-han cities. The Japanese also occupied Canton and several other coastal cities in South China in 1938.

Nationalist Chinese resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in north-central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on the immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China (including Manchuria).

Japanese policy, 1939–41

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When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the Japanese, despite a series of victorious battles, had still not brought their war in China to an end: on the one hand, the Japanese strategists had made no plans to cope with the guerrilla warfare pursued by the Chinese; on the other, the Japanese commanders in the field often disregarded the orders of the supreme command at the Imperial headquarters and occupied more Chinese territory than they had been ordered to take. Half of the Japanese Army was thus still tied down in China when the commitment of Great Britain and France to war against Germany opened up the prospect of wider conquests for Japan in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. Japan’s military ventures in China proper were consequently restricted rather more severely henceforth.

The German victories over the Netherlands and France in the summer of 1940 further encouraged the Japanese premier, Prince Konoe, to look southward at those defeated powers’ colonies and also, of course, at the British and U.S. positions in the Far East. The island archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) along with French Indochina and British-held Malaya contained raw materials (tin, rubber, petroleum) that were essential to Japan’s industrial economy, and if Japan could seize these regions and incorporate them into the empire, it could make itself virtually self-sufficient economically and thus become the dominant power in the Pacific Ocean. Since Great Britain, single-handedly, was confronting the might of the Axis in Europe, the Japanese strategists had to reckon, primarily, with the opposition of the United States to their plans for territorial aggrandizement. When Japanese troops entered northern Indochina in September 1940 (in pursuance of an agreement extorted in August from the Vichy government of France), the United States uttered a protest. Germany and Italy, by contrast, recognized Japan as the leading power in the Far East by concluding with it the Tripartite, or Axis, Pact of September 27, 1940: negotiated by Japanese foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke, the pact pledged its signatories to come to one another’s help in the event of an attack “by a power not already engaged in war.” Japan also concluded a neutrality pact with the U.S.S.R. on April 13, 1941.

On July 2, 1941, the Imperial Conference decided to press the Japanese advance southward even at the risk of war with Great Britain and the United States; and this policy was pursued even when Matsuoka was relieved of office a fortnight later. On July 26, in pursuance of a new agreement with Vichy France, Japanese forces began to occupy bases in southern Indochina.

This time the United States reacted vigorously, not only freezing Japanese assets under U.S. control but also imposing an embargo on supplies of oil to Japan. Dismay at the embargo drove the Japanese naval command, which had hitherto been more moderate than the army, into collusion with the army’s extremism. When negotiations with the Dutch of Indonesia for an alternative supply of oil produced no satisfaction, the Imperial Conference on September 6, at the high command’s insistence, decided that war must be undertaken against the United States and Great Britain unless an understanding with the United States could be reached in a few weeks’ time.

General Tōjō Hideki, who succeeded Konoe as premier in mid-October 1941, continued the already desperate talks. The United States, however, persisted in making demands that Japan could not concede: renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which would have left Japan diplomatically isolated); the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and from Southeast Asia (a humiliating retreat from an overt commitment of four years’ standing); and an open-door regime for trade in China. When Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, on November 26, 1941, sent an abrupt note to the Japanese bluntly requiring them to evacuate China and Indochina and to recognize no Chinese regime other than that of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese could see no point in continuing the talks. (See Sidebar: Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory.)

Since peace with the United States seemed impossible, Japan set in motion its plans for war, which would now necessarily be waged not only against the United States but also against Great Britain (the existing war effort of which depended on U.S. support and the Far Eastern colonies of which lay within the orbit of the projected Japanese expansion) and against the Dutch East Indies (the oil of which was essential to Japanese enterprises, even apart from geopolitical considerations).

The evolving Japanese military strategy was based on the peculiar geography of the Pacific Ocean and on the relative weakness and unpreparedness of the Allied military presence in that ocean. The western half of the Pacific is dotted with many islands, large and small, while the eastern half of the ocean is, with the exception of the Hawaiian Islands, almost devoid of landmasses (and hence of usable bases). The British, French, American, and Dutch military forces in the entire Pacific region west of Hawaii amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most of them lacking combat experience and being of disparate nationalities. Allied air power in the Pacific was weak and consisted mostly of obsolete planes. If the Japanese, with their large, well-equipped armies that had been battle-hardened in China, could quickly launch coordinated attacks from their existing bases on certain Japanese-mandated Pacific islands, on Formosa (Taiwan), and from Japan itself, they could overwhelm the Allied forces, overrun the entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia, and then develop those areas’ resources to their own military-industrial advantage. If successful in their campaigns, the Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified defensive perimeter extending from Burma in the west to the southern rim of the Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea in the south and sweeping around to the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the southeast and east. The Japanese believed that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter could be repelled, after which those nations would eventually seek a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly won empire.

Until the end of 1940 the Japanese strategists had assumed that any new war to be waged would be against a single enemy. When it became clear, in 1941, that the British and the Dutch as well as the Americans must be attacked, a new and daring war plan was successfully sponsored by the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku.

Yamamoto’s plan prescribed two operations, together involving the whole strength of his navy, which was composed of the following ships: 10 battleships, six regular aircraft carriers, four auxiliary carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 20 light cruisers, 112 destroyers, 65 submarines, and 2,274 combat planes. The first operation, to which all six regular aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and 11 destroyers were allocated, was to be a surprise attack, scheduled for December 7 (December 8 by Japanese time), on the main U.S. Pacific Fleet in its base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The rest of the Japanese Navy was to support the army in the “Southern Operation”: 11 infantry divisions and seven tank regiments, assisted by 795 combat planes, were to undertake two drives, one from Formosa through the Philippines, the other from French Indochina and Hainan Island through Malaya, so as to converge on the Dutch East Indies, with a view to the capture of Java as the culmination of a campaign of 150 days—during which, moreover, Wake Island, Guam, the Gilbert Islands, and Burma should also have been secured as outer bastions, besides Hong Kong.

Pearl Harbor and the Japanese expansion, to July 1942

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Watch Japanese dive-bombers attack the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor to spark the Pacific War

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In accordance with Yamamoto’s plan, the aircraft carrier strike force commanded by Admiral Nagumo Chuichi sailed eastward undetected by any U.S. reconnaissance until it had reached a point 275 miles north of Hawaii. From there, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a total of about 360 aircraft, composed of dive-bombers, torpedo bombers, and a few fighters, was launched in two waves in the early morning at the giant U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The base at that time was accommodating 70 U.S. fighting ships, 24 auxiliaries, and some 300 planes. The Americans were taken completely by surprise, and all eight battleships in the harbour were hit (though six were eventually repaired and returned to service); three cruisers, three destroyers, a minelayer, and other vessels were damaged; more than 180 aircraft were destroyed and others damaged (most while parked at airfields); and more than 2,330 troops were killed and over 1,140 wounded. Japanese losses were comparatively small. The Japanese attack failed in one crucial respect, however; the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were at sea at the time of the attack and escaped harm, and these were to become the nucleus of the United States’ incipient naval defense in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor’s shore installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage. The Pearl Harbor attack, unannounced beforehand by the Japanese as it was, unified the American public and swept away any remaining support for American neutrality in the war. On December 8 the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote.

On the day of the attack, December 8 by local time, Formosa-based Japanese bombers struck Clark and Iba airfields in the Philippines, destroying more than 50 percent of the U.S. Army’s Far East aircraft; and, two days later, further raids destroyed not only more U.S. fighters but also Cavite Naval Yard, likewise in the Philippines. Part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, however, had already gone south in November; and the surviving major ships and bomber aircraft, which were vulnerable for lack of fighter protection, were withdrawn in the next fortnight to safety in bases in Java and Australia.

Japanese forces began to land on the island of Luzon in the Philippines on December 10. The main assault, consisting of the bulk of one division, was made at Lingayen Gulf, 100 miles north-northwest of Manila, on December 22, and a second large landing took place south of Manila two days later. Manila itself fell unopposed to the Japanese on January 2, 1942, but by that time the U.S. and Filipino forces under General Douglas MacArthur were ready to hold Bataan Peninsula (across the bay from Manila) and Corregidor Island (in the bay). The Japanese attack on Bataan was halted initially, but it was reinforced in the following eight weeks. MacArthur was ordered to Australia on March 11, leaving Bataan’s defense to Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright. The latter and his men surrendered on April 9; Corregidor fell in the night of May 5–6; and the southern Philippines capitulated three days later.

Japanese bombers had already destroyed British air power at Hong Kong on December 8, 1941, and the British and Canadian defenders surrendered to the ground attack from the Kowloon Peninsula (the nearest mainland) on December 25. To secure their flank while pushing southward into Malaya, the Japanese also occupied Bangkok on December 9 and Victoria Point in southernmost Burma on December 16. The Japanese landings in Malaya, from December 8 onward, accompanied as they were by air strikes, overwhelmed the small Australian and Indian forces; and the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse, sailing from Singapore to cut Japanese communications, were sunk by Japanese aircraft on December 10. By the end of January 1942, two Japanese divisions, with air and armoured support, had occupied all Malaya except Singapore Island. In Burma, meanwhile, other Japanese troops had taken Moulmein and were approaching Rangoon and Mandalay.

On the eastern perimeter of the war zone, the Japanese had bombed Wake Island on December 8, attempted to capture it on December 11, and achieved a landing on December 23, quickly subduing the garrison. Guam had already fallen on December 10. Having also occupied Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in the first days of the war, the Japanese successfully attacked Rabaul, the strategic base on New Britain (now part of Papua New Guinea), on January 23, 1942.

A unified American–British–Dutch–Australian Command, ABDACOM, under Wavell, responsible for holding Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and the approaches to Australia, became operative on January 15, 1942; but the Japanese had already begun their advance on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. They occupied Kuching (December 17), Brunei Bay (January 6), and Jesselton (January 11), on the northern coast of Borneo, as well as Tarakan Island (off northeastern Borneo) and points on Celebes. Balikpapan (on Borneo’s east coast) and Kendari (in southeastern Celebes) fell to the Japanese on January 24, 1942, Amboina on February 4, Makasar City (in southwestern Celebes) on February 8, and Bandjarmasin (in southern Borneo) on February 16. Bali was invaded on February 18, and by February 24 the Japanese were also in possession of Timor.

The fall of Singapore

Meanwhile, on February 8 and 9, three Japanese divisions had landed on Singapore Island; and on February 15 they forced the 90,000-strong British, Australian, and Indian garrison there, under Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, to surrender. Singapore was the major British base in the Pacific and had been regarded as unassailable due to its strong seaward defenses. The Japanese took it with comparative ease by advancing down the Malay Peninsula and then assaulting the base’s landward side, which the British had left inadequately defended. On February 13, moreover, Japanese paratroopers had landed at Palembang in Sumatra, which fell to an amphibious assault three days later.

When ABDACOM was dissolved on February 25, 1942, only Java remained to complete the Japanese program of conquest. The Allies’ desperate attempt to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet was defeated in the seven-hour Battle of the Java Sea on February 27, in which five Allied warships were lost and only one Japanese destroyer damaged. The Japanese landed at three points on Java on February 28 and rapidly expanded their beachheads. On March 9 the 20,000 Allied troops in Java surrendered. In the Indian Ocean, the Japanese captured the Andaman Islands on March 23, and began a series of attacks on British shipping. After the failure of ABDACOM, the U.S.–British Combined Chiefs of Staff placed the Pacific under the U.S. Joint Chiefs’ strategic direction. MacArthur became supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, which comprised the Dutch East Indies (less Sumatra), the Philippines, Australia, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomons; and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz became commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas, which comprised virtually every area not under MacArthur. Their missions were to hold the U.S.–Australia line of communications, to contain the Japanese within the Pacific, to support the defense of North America, and to prepare for major amphibious counteroffensives.

Japan’s initial war plans were realized with the capture of Java. But despite their military triumphs, the Japanese saw no indication that the Allies were ready for a negotiated peace. On the contrary, it seemed evident that an Allied counterstroke was in the making. The U.S. Pacific Fleet bombed the Marshall Islands on February 1, 1942, Wake Island on February 23, and Marcus Island (between Wake and Japan) on March 1. These moves, together with the bombing of Rabaul on February 23 and the establishment of bases in Australia and a line of communications across the South Pacific, made the Japanese decide to expand so as to cut the Allied line of communications to Australia. They planned to occupy New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, and Samoa and also to seize eastern New Guinea, whence they would threaten Australia from an air base to be established at Port Moresby. They planned also to capture Midway Island in the North Pacific and to establish air bases in the Aleutians. In pursuance of this new program, Japanese troops occupied Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea and Buka in the Solomon Islands in March 1942 and Bougainville in the Solomons and the Admiralty Islands (north of New Guinea) early in April.

Learn how Japan failed to invade Port Moresby despite winning the Battle of the Coral Sea

Learn how Japan failed to invade Port Moresby despite winning the Battle of the Coral SeaSee all videos for this article

Something to raise the Allies’ morale was achieved on April 18, 1942, when 16 U.S. bombers raided Tokyo—though they did little real damage except to the Japanese government’s prestige. Far more important were the consequences of the U.S. intelligence services’ detection of Japanese plans to seize Port Moresby and Tulagi (in the southern Solomons). Had these two places fallen, Japanese aircraft could have dominated the Coral Sea. In the event, after U.S. aircraft on May 3, 1942, had interfered with the Japanese landing on Tulagi, U.S. naval units, with aircraft, challenged the Japanese ships on their circuitous detour from Rabaul to Port Moresby. On May 5 and 6 the opposing carrier groups sought each other out, and the four-day Battle of the Coral Sea ensued. On May 7 planes from the Japanese carriers sank a U.S. destroyer and an oil tanker, but U.S. planes sank the Japanese light carrier Shoho and a cruiser; and the next day, though Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. carrier Lexington and damaged the carrier Yorktown, the large Japanese carrier Shokaku had to retire crippled. Finally, the Japanese lost so many planes in the battle that their enterprise against Port Moresby had to be abandoned.

Examine how the U.S. Navy defeated Japan's fleet to check Japanese expansion in the Battle of Midway

Examine how the U.S. Navy defeated Japan's fleet to check Japanese expansion in the Battle of MidwaySee all videos for this article

Despite the mixed results of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese continued with their plan to seize Midway Island. Seeking a naval showdown with the remaining ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and counting on their own numerical superiority to secure a victory, the Japanese mustered four heavy and three light aircraft carriers, two seaplane carriers, 11 battleships, 15 cruisers, 44 destroyers, 15 submarines, and miscellaneous small vessels. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had only three heavy carriers, eight cruisers, 18 destroyers, and 19 submarines, though there were some 115 aircraft in support of it. The Americans, however, had the incomparable advantage of knowing the intentions of the Japanese in advance, thanks to the U.S. intelligence services’ having broken the Japanese Navy’s code and deciphered key radio transmissions. In the ensuing Battle of Midway, the Japanese ships destined to take Midway Island were attacked while still 500 miles from their target by U.S. bombers on June 3. The Japanese carriers were still able to launch their aircraft against Midway early on June 4, but in the ensuing battle, waves of carrier- and Midway-based U.S. bombers sank all four of the Japanese heavy carriers and one heavy cruiser. Appalled by this disaster, the Japanese began to retreat in the night of June 4–5. Though the U.S. carrier Yorktown was sunk by torpedo on June 6, Midway was saved from invasion. In the Aleutians, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor effectively and on June 7 occupied Attu and Kiska.

The Battle of Midway was probably the turning point of the war in the Pacific, for Japan lost its first-line carrier strength and most of its navy’s best trained pilots. Henceforth, the naval strengths of the Japanese and of the Allies were virtually equal. Having lost the strategic initiative, Japan canceled its plans to invade New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa.

The Chinese front and Burma, 1941–42

K'un-ming, China, during World War II

K'un-ming, China, during World War II

Japan’s entry into war against the western Allies had its repercussions in China. Chiang Kai-shek’s government on December 9, 1941, formally declared war not only against Japan (a formality long overdue) but also, with political rather than military intent, against Germany and Italy. Three Chinese armies were rushed to the Burmese frontier, since the Burma Road was the only land route whereby the western Allies could send supplies to the Nationalist Chinese government. On January 3, 1942, Chiang was recognized as supreme Allied commander for the China theatre of war; and a U.S. general, Joseph W. Stilwell, was sent to him to be his chief of staff. In the first eight weeks after Pearl Harbor, however, the major achievement of the Chinese was the definitive repulse, on January 15, 1942, of a long-sustained Japanese drive against Ch’ang-sha, on the Canton–Han-k’ou railway.

Thereafter, Chiang and Stilwell were largely preoccupied by efforts to check the Japanese advance into Burma. By mid-March 1942 two Chinese armies, under Stilwell’s command, had crossed the Burmese frontier; but before the end of the month the Chinese force defending Toungoo, in central Burma between Rangoon and Mandalay, was nearly annihilated by the more soldierly Japanese. British and Indian units in Burma fared scarcely better, being driven into retreat by the enemy’s numerical superiority both in the air and on the ground. On April 29 the Japanese took Lashio, the Burma Road’s southern terminus, thus cutting the supply line to China and turning the Allies’ northern flank. Under continued pressure, the British and Indian forces in the following month fell back through Kalewa to Imphāl (across the Indian border), while most of the Chinese retreated across the Salween River into China. By the end of 1942 all of Burma was in Japanese hands, China was effectively isolated (except by air), and India was exposed to the danger of a Japanese invasion through Burma.

Since the U.S. bombers that raided Tokyo on April 18 flew on to Chinese airfields, particularly to those in Chekiang (the coastal province south of Shanghai), the Japanese reacted by launching a powerful offensive to seize those airfields. By the end of July they had generally achieved their objectives.

Developments from autumn 1941 to spring 1942

Allied strategy and controversies, 1940–42

In the year following the collapse of France in June 1940, British strategists, relying as they could on supplies from the nonbelligerent United States, were concerned first with home defense, second with the security of the British positions in the Middle East, and third with the development of a war of attrition against the Axis powers, pending the buildup of adequate forces for an invasion of the European continent. For the United States, President Roosevelt’s advisers, from November 1940, based their strategic plans on the “Europe first” principle; that is to say, if the United States became engaged in war simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan, merely defensive operations should be conducted in the Pacific (to protect at least the Alaska–Hawaii–Panama triangle) while an offensive was being mounted in Europe.

Atlantic Charter

Atlantic Charter

Japan’s entry into the war terminated the nonbelligerency of the United States. The three weeks’ conference, named Arcadia, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers opened in Washington, D.C., on December 22, 1941, reassured the British about U.S. maintenance of the “Europe first” principle and also produced two plans: a tentative one, code-named “Sledgehammer,” for the buildup of an offensive force in Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France; and another, code-named “Super-Gymnast,” for combining a British landing behind the German forces in Libya (already planned under the code name “Gymnast”) with a U.S. landing near Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same conference furthermore created the machinery of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked continuously, through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied in concert. It was on January 1, 1942, during the Arcadia Conference, that the Declaration of the United Nations was signed in Washington, D.C., as a collective statement of the Allies’ war aims in sequel to the Atlantic Charter.

Meanwhile, Churchill became anxious to do something to help the embattled Soviets—who were clamouring for the United States and Britain to invade continental Europe so as to take some of the German pressure off the Eastern Front. Roosevelt was no less conscious than Churchill of the fact that the Soviet Union was bearing by far the greatest burden of the war against Germany; and this consideration inclined him to listen to the arguments of his Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization for a change of plan. After some hesitation, he sent his confidant Harry Hopkins and his army chief of staff General George C. Marshall to London in April 1942 to suggest the scrapping of “Super-Gymnast” in favour of “Bolero,” namely the concentration of forces in Great Britain for a landing in Europe (perhaps at Brest or at Cherbourg) in the autumn; then “Roundup,” an invasion of France by 30 U.S. and 18 British divisions, could follow in April 1943. The British agreed but soon began to doubt the practicability of mounting an amphibious invasion of France at such an early date.

Attempts to conclude an Anglo-Soviet political agreement were renewed without result, but a 20-year Anglo-Soviet alliance was signed on May 26, 1942; and, though Churchill warned the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, not to expect an early second front in Europe, Molotov seemed gratified by what he was told about Anglo-U.S. plans.

Visiting Roosevelt again in the latter part of June 1942, Churchill at Hyde Park, New York, and in Washington, D.C., pressed for a revised and enlarged joint operation in North Africa before the end of the year, instead of a buildup for the invasion of France; but the U.S. Joint Chiefs resolutely upheld the latter plan. After further debate and disagreement, in July the U.S. Joint Chiefs yielded at last to British obstinacy in favour of a North African enterprise: it was decided that “Torch,” as this combined Anglo-U.S. operation came to be called, should begin the following autumn.

Already, on July 17, 1942, Churchill had had to notify Stalin that convoys of Allied supplies to northern Russia must be suspended because of German submarine activity on the Arctic sea route (on June 2 a convoy from Iceland had lost 23 out of 34 vessels). Consequently, it was the more awkward to inform Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe before 1943. In mid-August 1942, when Churchill went to Moscow to break the news, Stalin raged against the retreat from the plan for a second front in Europe but had to admit the military logic of “Torch.”

Battle of Guadalcanal

On July 6 the Japanese landed troops on Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomons, and began to construct an air base. The Allied high command, fearing further Japanese advances southeastward, sped into the area to dislodge the enemy and to obtain a base for later advances toward Japan’s main base in the theatre, Rabaul. The U.S. 1st Marine Division poured ashore on August 7 and secured Guadalcanal’s airfield, Tulagi’s harbour, and neighbouring islands by dusk on August 8—the Pacific war’s first major Allied offensive. During the night of August 8–9, Japanese cruisers and destroyers, attempting to hold Guadalcanal, sank four U.S. cruisers, themselves sustaining one cruiser sunk and one damaged and later sunk. On August 23–25, in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Japanese lost a light carrier, a destroyer, and a submarine and sustained damage to a cruiser and to a seaplane carrier but sank an Allied destroyer and crippled a cruiser. On August 31 another U.S. carrier was disabled, and on September 15 Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged a battleship. Meanwhile, more than 6,000 Japanese reinforced their Guadalcanal garrison, attacking the Marines’ beachhead on August 20–21 and on September 12–14. On September 18 some U.S. reinforcements arrived, and mid-October saw about 22,000 Japanese ranged against 23,000 U.S. troops. The sea battles of Cape Esperance and of the Santa Cruz Islands—in which two Japanese cruisers and two destroyers were sunk and three carriers and two destroyers damaged in return for the loss of one U.S. carrier and two destroyers, besides damage to six other Allied ships—thwarted an attempt to reinforce further the Japanese ground troops, whose attack proved a failure (October 20–29).

After October, Allied strength was built up. Another Japanese attempt at counter-reinforcement led to the naval Battle of Guadalcanal, fought on November 13–15: it cost Japan two battleships, three destroyers, one cruiser, two submarines, and 11 transports and the Allies (now under Admiral William F. Halsey) two cruisers and seven destroyers sunk and one battleship and one cruiser damaged. Only 4,000 Japanese troops out of 12,500 managed to reach land, without equipment; and on November 30 eight Japanese destroyers, attempting to land more troops, were beaten off in the Battle of Tassafaronga, losing one destroyer sunk and one crippled, at an Allied cost of one cruiser sunk and three damaged.

By Jan. 5, 1943, Guadalcanal’s Allied garrison totaled 44,000, against 22,500 Japanese. The Japanese decided to evacuate the position, carrying away 12,000 men in early February in daring destroyer runs. In ground warfare Japanese losses were more than 24,000 for the Guadalcanal campaign, Allied losses about 1,600 killed and 4,250 wounded (figures that ignore the higher number of casualties from disease). On February 21, U.S. infantry began occupying the Russell Islands, to support advances on Rabaul.

Earlier, before Allied plans to secure eastern New Guinea had been implemented, the Japanese had landed near Gona on the north coast of Papua (the southeastern extremity of the great island) on July 24, 1942, in an attempt to reach Port Moresby overland, via the Kokoda Trail. Advanced Japanese units from the north, despite Australian opposition, had reached a ridge 32 miles from Port Moresby by mid-September. Then, however, they had to withdraw exhausted to Gona and to nearby Buna, where there were some 7,500 Japanese assembled by November 18. The next day U.S. infantry attacked them there. Each side was subsequently reinforced; but the Australians took Gona on December 9 and the Americans Buna village on December 14. Buna government station fell to the Allies on Jan. 2, 1943, Sanananda on January 18, and all Japanese resistance in Papua ceased on January 22.

The retaking of Guadalcanal and Papua ended the Japanese drive south, and communications with Australia and New Zealand were now secure. Altogether, Papua cost Japan nearly 12,000 killed and 350 captured. Allied losses were 3,300 killed and 5,500 wounded. Allied air forces had played a particularly important role, interdicting Japanese supply lines and transporting Allied supplies and reinforcements.

Japan, having lost Guadalcanal, fought henceforth defensively, with worsening prospects. Its final effort to reinforce the Lae–Salamaua position in New Guinea from the stronghold of Rabaul was a disaster: in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, on March 2–4, 1943, the Japanese lost four destroyers and eight transports, and only 1,000 of the 7,000 troops reached their destination. On March 25 the Japanese Army and Navy high commands agreed on a policy of strengthening the defense of strategic points and of counterattacking wherever possible, priority being given to the defense of the remaining Japanese positions in New Guinea, with secondary emphasis on the Solomon Islands. In the following three weeks, however, the Allies improved their own position in New Guinea, and Japanese intervention was confined to air attacks. Before the end of April, moreover, the Japanese Navy sustained a disaster: the guiding genius of the Japanese war effort, Yamamoto, was sent late in March to command the forces based on Rabaul but was killed in an American air ambush on a flight to Bougainville.

Developments of the Allies’ war against Japan also took place outside the southwest Pacific area. British forces in the summer of 1942 invaded Vichy French-held Madagascar. A renewed British offensive in September 1942 overran the island; hostilities ceased on November 5, and a Free French administration of Madagascar took office on Jan. 8, 1943. In the North Pacific, meanwhile, the United States had decided to expel the Japanese from the Aleutians. Having landed forces on Adak in August 1942, they began air attacks against Kiska and Attu from Adak the next month and from Amchitka also in the following January, while a naval blockade prevented the Japanese from reinforcing their garrisons. Finally, U.S. troops, bypassing Kiska, invaded Attu on May 11, 1943—to kill most of the island’s 2,300 defenders in three weeks of fighting. The Japanese then evacuated Kiska. Bases in the Aleutians thenceforth facilitated the Allies’ bombing of the Kuril Islands.

Burma, autumn 1942–summer 1943

On the Burmese front the Allies found they could do little to dislodge the Japanese from their occupation of that country, and what little the Allies did attempt proved abortive. Brigadier General Orde Wingate’s “Chindits,” which were long-range penetration groups depending on supplies from the air, crossed the Chindwin River in February 1943 and were initially successful in severing Japanese communications on the railroad between Mandalay and Myitkyina. But the Chindits soon found themselves in unfavourable terrain and in grave danger of encirclement, and so they made their way back to India.

In May 1943, however, the Allies reorganized their system of command for Southeast Asia. Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed supreme commander of the South East Asia Command (SEAC), and Stilwell was appointed deputy to Mountbatten. Stilwell at the same time was chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. The British–Indian forces destined for Burma meanwhile constituted the 14th Army, under Lieutenant General William Slim, whose operational control Stilwell agreed to accept. Shortly afterward, Auchinleck succeeded Wavell as commander in chief in India.

Montgomery’s Battle of el-Alamein and Rommel’s retreat, 1942–43

While Churchill was still chafing in London about his generals’ delay in resuming the offensive in Egypt, Montgomery waited for seven weeks after ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ in order to be sure of success. He finally chose to begin his attack in the night of Oct. 23–24, 1942, when there would be moonlight for the clearing of gaps in the German minefields.

By mid-October the British 8th Army had 230,000 men and 1,230 gun-armed tanks ready for action, while the German–Italian forces numbered only 80,000 men, with only 210 tanks of comparable quality ready; and in air support the British enjoyed a superiority of 1,500 to 350. Allied air and submarine attacks on the Axis supply lines across the Mediterranean, moreover, had prevented Rommel’s army from receiving adequate replenishments of fuel, ammunition, and food; and Rommel himself, who had been ill before ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ, was convalescing in Austria.

The British launched their infantry attack at el-Alamein at 10:00 PM on Oct. 23, 1942, but found the German minefields harder to clear than they had foreseen. Two days later, however, some of those tanks were deploying six miles beyond the original front. When Rommel, ordered back to Africa by Hitler, reached the front in the evening of October 25, half of the Germans’ available armour was already destroyed. Nevertheless, the impetus of the British onslaught was stopped the next day, when German antitank guns took a heavy toll of armour trying to deepen the westward penetration. In the night of October 28 Montgomery turned the offensive northward from the wedge, but this drive likewise miscarried. In the first week of their offensive the British lost four times as many tanks as the Germans but still had 800 available against the latter’s remaining 90.

When Montgomery switched the British line of attack back to its original direction, early on Nov. 2, 1942, Rommel was no longer strong enough to withstand him. After expensive resistance throughout the daytime, he ordered a retreat to Fūka (Fūkah); but in the afternoon of November 3 the retreat was fatally countermanded by Hitler, who insisted that the Alamein position be held. The 36 hours wasted in obeying this long-distance instruction cost Rommel his chance of making a stand at Fūka: when he resumed his retreat, he had to race much farther back to escape successive British attempts to intercept him on the coast road by scythelike sweeps from the south. A fortnight after resuming his withdrawal from el-Alamein, Rommel was 700 miles to the west, at the traditional backstop of Agheila. As the British took their time to mount their attacks, he fell back farther by stages: after three weeks, 200 miles to Buerat (al-Buʾayrāt); after three more weeks, in mid-January 1943, the whole distance of 350 miles past Tripoli to the Mareth Line within the frontiers of Tunisia. By that time the Axis position in Tunisia was being battered from the west, through the execution of “Torch.”

Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer 1942–February 1943

Learn about the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), a brutal military campaign between Russia and Germany during World War II

Learn about the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), a brutal military campaign between Russia and Germany during World War IISee all videos for this article

The German 4th Panzer Army, after being diverted to the south to help Kleist’s attack on Rostov late in July 1942 (see above The Germans’ summer offensive in southern Russia, 1942), was redirected toward Stalingrad a fortnight later. Stalingrad was a large industrial city producing armaments and tractors; it stretched for 30 miles along the banks of the Volga River. By the end of August the 4th Army’s northeastward advance against the city was converging with the eastward advance of the 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, with 330,000 of the German Army’s finest troops. The Red Army, however, put up the most determined resistance, yielding ground only very slowly and at a high cost as the 6th Army approached Stalingrad. On August 23 a German spearhead penetrated the city’s northern suburbs, and the Luftwaffe rained incendiary bombs that destroyed most of the city’s wooden housing. The Soviet 62nd Army was pushed back into Stalingrad proper, where, under the command of General Vasily I. Chuikov, it made a determined stand. Meanwhile, the Germans’ concentration on Stalingrad was increasingly draining reserves from their flank cover, which was already strained by having to stretch so far—400 miles on the left (north), as far as Voronezh, 400 again on the right (south), as far as the Terek River. By mid-September the Germans had pushed the Soviet forces in Stalingrad back until the latter occupied only a nine-mile-long strip of the city along the Volga, and this strip was only two or three miles wide. The Soviets had to supply their troops by barge and boat across the Volga from the other bank. At this point Stalingrad became the scene of some of the fiercest and most concentrated fighting of the war; streets, blocks, and individual buildings were fought over by many small units of troops and often changed hands again and again. The city’s remaining buildings were pounded into rubble by the unrelenting close combat. The most critical moment came on October 14, when the Soviet defenders had their backs so close to the Volga that the few remaining supply crossings of the river came under German machine-gun fire. The Germans, however, were growing dispirited by heavy losses, by fatigue, and by the approach of winter.

A huge Soviet counteroffensive, planned by generals G.K. Zhukov, A.M. Vasilevsky, and Nikolay Nikolayevich Voronov, was launched on Nov. 19–20, 1942, in two spearheads, north and south of the German salient whose tip was at Stalingrad. The twin pincers of this counteroffensive struck the flanks of the German salient at points about 50 miles north and 50 miles south of Stalingrad and were designed to isolate the 250,000 remaining men of the German 6th and 4th armies in the city. The attacks quickly penetrated deep into the flanks, and by November 23 the two prongs of the attack had linked up about 60 miles west of Stalingrad; the encirclement of the two German armies in Stalingrad was complete. The German high command urged Hitler to allow Paulus and his forces to break out of the encirclement and rejoin the main German forces west of the city, but Hitler would not contemplate a retreat from the Volga River and ordered Paulus to “stand and fight.” With winter setting in and food and medical supplies dwindling, Paulus’ forces grew weaker. In mid-December Hitler allowed one of the most talented German commanders, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to form a special army corps to rescue Paulus’ forces by fighting its way eastward, but Hitler refused to let Paulus fight his way westward at the same time in order to link up with Manstein. This fatal decision doomed Paulus’ forces, since the main German forces now simply lacked the reserves needed to break through the Soviet encirclement singlehandedly. Hitler exhorted the trapped German forces to fight to the death, but on Jan. 31, 1943, Paulus surrendered; 91,000 frozen, starving men (all that was left of the 6th and 4th armies) and 24 generals surrendered with him.

Besides being the greatest battle of the war, Stalingrad proved to be the turning point of the military struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union. The battle used up precious German reserves, destroyed two entire armies, and humiliated the prestigious German war machine. It also marked the increasing skill and professionalism of a group of younger Soviet generals who had emerged as capable commanders, chief among whom was Zhukov.

Meanwhile, early in January 1943, only just in time, Hitler acknowledged that the encirclement of the Germans in Stalingrad would lead to an even worse disaster unless he extricated his forces from the Caucasus. Kleist was therefore ordered to retreat, while his northern flank of 600 miles was still protected by the desperate resistance of the encircled Paulus. Kleist’s forces were making their way back across the Don at Rostov when Paulus at last surrendered. Had Paulus surrendered three weeks earlier (after seven weeks of isolation), Kleist’s escape would have been impossible.

Even west of Rostov there were threats to Kleist’s line of retreat. In January, two Soviet armies, the one under General Nikolay Fyodorovich Vatutin, the other under General Filipp Ivanovich Golikov, had crossed the Don upstream from Serafimovich and were thrusting southwestward to the Donets between Kamensk and Kharkov: Vatutin’s forces, having crossed the Donets at Izyum, took Lozovaya Junction on February 11, Golikov’s took Kharkov five days later. Farther to the north, a third Soviet army, under General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, had initiated a drive westward from Voronezh on February 2 and had retaken Kursk on February 8. Thus, the Germans had to retreat from all the territory they had taken in their great summer offensive in 1942. The Caucasus returned to Soviet hands.

A sudden thaw supervened to hamper the Red Army’s transport of supplies and reinforcements across the swollen courses of the great rivers. With the momentum of the Soviet counteroffensive thus slowed, the Germans made good their retreat to the Dnepr along the easier routes of the Black Sea littoral and were able, before the end of February 1943, to mount a counteroffensive of their own.

The invasion of northwest Africa, November–December 1942

When the U.S. and British strategists had decided on “Torch” (Allied landings on the western coast of North Africa) late in July 1942, it remained to settle the practical details of the operation. The purpose of “Torch” was to hem Rommel’s forces in between U.S. troops on the west and British troops to the east. After considerable discussion, it was finally agreed that landings, under the supreme command of Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, should be made on November 8 at three places in the vicinity of Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and on beaches near Oran and near Algiers itself on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. The amphibious landings would involve a total of about 110,000 troops, most of them Americans.

German-occupied Europe

Hitler’s racist ideology and his brutal conception of power politics caused him to pursue certain aims in those European countries conquered by the Germans in the period 1939–42. Hitler intended that those western and northern European areas in which civil administrations were installed—the Netherlands and Norway—would at some later date become part of the German Reich, or nation. Those countries left by Germany under military administration (which originally had been imposed everywhere), such as France and Serbia, would eventually be included more loosely in a German-dominated European bloc. Poland and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were to be a colonial area for German settlement and economic exploitation.

Without regard to these distinctions, the SS, the elite corps of the Nazi Party, possessed exceptional powers throughout German-dominated Europe and in the course of time came to perform more and more executive functions, even in those countries under military administration. Similarly, the powers that Hitler gave to his chief labour commissioner, Fritz Sauckel, for the compulsory enrollment of foreign workers into the German armaments industry were soon applied to the whole of German-dominated Europe and ultimately turned 7,500,000 people into forced or slave labourers. Above all, however, there was the Final Solution of the “Jewish question” as ordered by Hitler, which meant the physical extermination of the Jewish people throughout Europe wherever German rule was in force or where German influence was decisive.

Witness the horrors of the Holocaust committed in Nazi concentration camps as Allied forces liberate survivors

Witness the horrors of the Holocaust committed in Nazi concentration camps as Allied forces liberate survivorsSee all videos for this article

The Final Solution—that is to say the step beyond half-measures such as the concentration of Poland’s Jews into overcrowded ghettoes—was introduced concurrently with Germany’s preparations for the military campaign against the Soviet Union, since Hitler believed that the annihilation of the Communists entailed not only the extermination of the Soviet ruling class but also what he believed to be its “biological basis”—the millions of Jews in western Russia and Ukraine. Accordingly, with the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, special mobile killing squads began systematically shooting the Jewish population on conquered Soviet territory in the rear of the advancing German armies; in a few months, up to the end of 1941, they had killed about 1,400,000 people. Meanwhile, plans were made in 1941 to similarly exterminate the Jews of central and western Europe. At the Wannsee Conference of Nazi and SS chiefs in January 1942, it was agreed that those Jews would be deported and sent to camps in eastern Poland where they would be killed en masse or made to work as slave labourers until they perished. In the period from May 1942 to September 1944 more than 4,200,000 Jews were killed in such death camps as Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Treblinka, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, and Sobibor. About 5,700,000 Jews died in the course of the Final Solution.

execution during the Holocaust

execution during the Holocaust

While Hitler destined the Jews in his empire to physical extermination, he regarded the Slavs, principally the Poles and the Russians, as “subhumans” who were to be subjected to continual decimation and used as a pool of cheap labour, that is to say, reduced to slavery. Poland became the training ground for this purpose. Upon the German conquest of Poland in 1939, Hitler ordered the SS to kill a large proportion of the Polish intelligentsia. A reign of terror against the nationalistic-minded Polish ruling classes began, and by the war’s end a total of 3,000,000 Poles (in addition to 3,000,000 Polish Jews) had been killed. Hitler further willed that the whole mass of Slavs and Balts in the occupied portions of the Soviet Union should be indiscriminately subjected to German domination and should be economically exploited without hindrance or compassion. In the event, Ukraine was the major area subject to economic exploitation and also became the main source of slave labour. When the German armies first entered Ukraine in July 1941, many Ukrainians had welcomed the Germans as their liberators from Stalinist terror and collectivization. But this goodwill soon turned to resentment as the Germans requisitioned large quantities of grain from the farms, forcibly deported several million Ukrainians for work in Germany, and engaged in brutal reprisals against civilians for acts of resistance or sabotage.

These inhumane occupation policies were practiced to a greater or lesser extent in all the countries occupied by the Germans, and the result was the beginning in 1940–41 of armed, underground resistance movements in those countries. Underground resistance was especially effective in the Soviet Union because it functioned behind fronts on which the German armies were still engaged in battle with the Red Army. The Soviet Partisans, as they were called, could thus covertly receive arms, equipment, and direction from the Soviet forces at the front itself. Soviet Partisans, like the members of other nations’ Resistance movements, harassed and disrupted German military and economic activities by blowing up ammunition dumps and communications and transport facilities, sabotaging factories, ambushing small German units, and gathering military intelligence for use by the Allied armies. By 1944 the Resistance organizations in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, France, and Greece had grown quite large and were holding down many German divisions that were badly needed at the battlefront. In eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the Resistance came to control large tracts of land in more inaccessible areas such as forests, mountain ranges, and swamplands. Some Resistance organizations, such as the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the National Liberation Movement in Greece, were Communist ones, while others, such as the Maquis in France and the Home Army in Poland, comprised people of many different political persuasions, though they were invariably anti-Fascists.

The German occupation authorities’ attempts to eradicate the Resistance in most cases merely fanned the flames, due to the Germans’ use of indiscriminate reprisals against civilians. It is generally agreed that by 1944 the Germans had earned the overwhelming antipathy of most of the people in the occupied nations of Europe. It should be noted, however, that the German occupation was in general far harsher in eastern Europe and the Balkans than in western Europe. In the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece, a process of Resistance guerrilla warfare and Nazi reprisals began in 1941 and rose to a crescendo in 1943–44 as the fury of Nazi racism resulted in a war of annihilation upon the Slavic peoples.

Casablanca and Trident, January–May 1943

Henri Giraud, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill; Casablanca Conference

Henri Giraud, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill; Casablanca Conference

To decide what should be done after victory in North Africa, Roosevelt and Churchill, with their advisers, met at Casablanca in mid-January 1943. After long argument, it was eventually agreed that Sicily should be the next Axis area to be taken, in July. For the war against Japan, it was decided that two offensive operations should be undertaken: MacArthur should move toward the Japanese base at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain; and convergent movements on Burma should be made by the British from the mainland of India and by the Americans from the sea. Politically, the Casablanca Conference owes its importance to the fact that, at its end, Roosevelt publicly announced a demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Only four months after Casablanca it became necessary to hold another Anglo-U.S. conference. In mid-May 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers met, in Washington, D.C., for the conference code-named Trident. There the Sicilian project was effectively confirmed, and the date May 1, 1944, was prescribed—definitively in the U.S view, provisionally in the British—for the landing of 29 divisions in France; but the question whether the conquest of Sicily should be followed, as the British proposed, by an invasion of Italy was left unsettled.

The Eastern Front, February–September 1943

battle of Kursk

battle of Kursk

The German counteroffensive of February 1943 threw back the Soviet forces that had been advancing toward the Dnepr River on the Izyum sector of the front, and by mid-March the Germans had retaken Kharkov and Belgorod and reestablished a front on the Donets River. Hitler also authorized the German forces to fall back, in March, from their advanced positions facing Moscow to a straighter line in front of Smolensk and Orël. Finally, there was the existence of the large Soviet bulge, or salient, around Kursk, between Orël and Belgorod, which extended for about 150 miles from north to south and protruded 100 miles into the German lines. This salient irresistibly tempted Hitler and Zeitzler into undertaking a new and extremely ambitious offensive instead of remaining content to hold their newly shortened front.

Hitler concentrated all efforts on this offensive without regard to the risk that an unsuccessful attack would leave him without reserves to maintain any subsequent defense of his long front. The Germans’ increasing difficulty in building up their forces with fresh drafts of men and equipment was reflected in the increased delay that year in opening the summer offensive. Three months’ pause followed the close of the winter campaign.

By contrast, the Red Army had improved much since 1942, both in quality and in quantity. The flow of new equipment had greatly increased, as had the number of new divisions, and its numerical superiority over the Germans was now about 4 to 1. Better still, its leadership had improved with experience: generals and junior commanders alike had become more skilled tacticians. That could already be discerned in the summer of 1943, when the Soviets waited to let the Germans lead off and commit themselves deeply to an offensive, and so stood well-poised to exploit the Germans’ loss of balance in lunging.

The German offensive against the Kursk salient was launched on July 5, 1943, and into it Hitler threw 20 infantry divisions and 17 armoured divisions having a total of about 3,000 tanks. But the German tank columns got entangled in the deep minefields that the Soviets had laid, forewarned by the long preparation of the offensive. The Germans advanced only 10–30 miles, and no large bag of Soviet prisoners was taken, since the Red Army had withdrawn their main forces from the salient before the German attack began. After a week of effort the German armoured divisions were seriously reduced by the well-prepared Soviet antitank defenses in the salient. On July 12, as the Germans began to pull out, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive upon the German positions in the salient and met with great success, taking Orël on August 5. By this time the Germans had lost 2,900 tanks and 70,000 men in the Battle of Kursk, which was the largest tank battle in history. The Soviets continued to advance steadily, taking Belgorod and then Kharkov. In September the Soviet advance was accelerated, and by the end of the month the Germans in Ukraine had been driven back to the Dnepr.

The Southwest and South Pacific, June–October 1943

A Pacific military conference held in Washington, D.C., in March 1943 produced a new schedule of operations calling for the development of some counterattacks against the Japanese. The reduction of the threat from the large Japanese naval base at Rabaul, by encirclement if not by the capture of that stronghold, was a primary objective for MacArthur.

Between June 22 and June 30, 1943, two U.S. regiments invaded Woodlark and Kiriwina islands (northeast of the tip of Papua), whence aircraft could range over not only the Coral Sea but also the approaches to Rabaul and to the Solomons. At the same time, U.S. and Australian units advanced from Buna along the coast of New Guinea toward Lae and Salamaua, while other Australian forces simultaneously advanced from Wau in the hinterland; and in the night of June 29–30, U.S. forces secured Nassau Bay as a base for further advances against the same positions.

U.S. landings on New Georgia and on Rendova in the Solomons, however, also made in the night of June 29–30, provoked the Japanese into strong counteraction: between July 5 and July 16, in the battles of Kula Gulf and of Kolombangara, the Allies lost one cruiser and two destroyers and had three more cruisers crippled; and the Japanese, though they lost a cruiser and two destroyers, were able to land considerable reinforcements (from New Britain). Only substantial counter-reinforcement secured the New Georgia group of islands for the Allies, who, moreover, began on August 15 to extend their operation to the island of Vella Lavella also. In the last two months of the struggle, which ended with the Japanese evacuation of Vella Lavella on October 7, the Japanese sank an Allied destroyer and crippled two more but lost a further six of their own; and their attempt to defend the Solomon Islands cost them 10,000 lives, as against the Americans’ 1,150 killed and 4,100 wounded.

Meanwhile, U.S. planes on August 17–18 had attacked Japanese bases at Wewak (on the New Guinea coast far to the west of Lae) and destroyed more than 200 aircraft there. On September 4 an Australian division landed near Lae, and the next day U.S. paratroops dropped at Nadzab, above Lae on the Markham River, where they were soon joined by an Australian airborne division. Salamaua fell to the Allies on September 12, Lae on September 16, and Finschhafen, on the Huon Peninsula behind Lae, on October 2. On Sept. 30, 1943, the Japanese made a new policy decision: a last defense line was to be established from western New Guinea and the Carolines to the Marianas by spring 1944, to be held at all costs, and also to be used as a base for counterattacks.

The Allied landings in Europe and the defeat of the Axis powers

Developments from autumn 1943 to summer 1944

Sicily and the fall of Mussolini, July–August 1943

Hitler’s greatest strategic disadvantage in opposing the Allies’ imminent reentry into Europe lay in the immense stretch of Germany’s conquests, from the west coast of France to the east coast of Greece. It was difficult for him to gauge where the Allies would strike next. The Allies’ greatest strategic advantage lay in the wide choice of alternative objectives and in the powers of distraction they enjoyed through their superior sea power. Hitler, while always having to guard against a cross-Channel invasion from England’s shores, had cause to fear that the Anglo-American armies in North Africa might land anywhere on his southern front between Spain and Greece.

Having failed to save its forces in Tunisia, the Axis had only 10 Italian divisions of various sorts and two German panzer units stationed on the island of Sicily at midsummer 1943. The Allies, meanwhile, were preparing to throw some 478,000 men into the island—150,000 of them in the first three days of the invasion. Under the supreme command of Alexander, Montgomery’s British 8th Army and Patton’s U.S. 7th Army were to be landed on two stretches of beach 40 miles long, 20 miles distant from one another, the British in the southeast of the island, the Americans in the south. The Allies’ air superiority in the Mediterranean theatre was so great by this time—more than 4,000 aircraft against some 1,500 German and Italian ones—that the Axis bombers had been withdrawn from Sicily in June to bases in north-central Italy.

On July 10 Allied seaborne troops landed on Sicily. The coastal defenses, manned largely by Sicilians unwilling to turn their homeland into a battlefield for the Germans’ sake, collapsed rapidly enough. The British forces had cleared the whole southeastern part of the island in the first three days of the invasion. The Allies’ drive toward Messina then took the form of a circuitous movement by the British around Mount Etna in combination with an eastward drive by the Americans, who took Palermo, on the western half of the northern coast, on July 22. Meanwhile, the German armoured strength in Sicily had been reinforced.

After the successive disasters sustained by the Axis in Africa, many of the Italian leaders were desperately anxious to make peace with the Allies. The invasion of Sicily, representing an immediate threat to the Italian mainland, prompted them to action. On the night of July 24–25, 1943, when Mussolini revealed to the Fascist Grand Council that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the southern half of Italy, the majority of the council voted for a resolution against him, and he resigned his powers. On July 25 the king, Victor Emmanuel III, ordered the arrest of Mussolini and entrusted Marshal Pietro Badoglio with the formation of a new government. The new government entered into secret negotiations with the Allies, despite the presence of sizable German forces in Italy.

A few days after the fall of Mussolini, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in chief in Italy, decided that the Axis troops in Sicily must be evacuated; the local Italian commander thought so too. While rearguard actions held up the Allies at Adrano (on the western face of Mount Etna) and at Randazzo (to the north), 40,000 Germans and 60,000 Italian troops were safely withdrawn across the Strait of Messina to the mainland, mostly in the week ending on August 16, 1943—the day before the Allies’ entry into Messina.

The Allies sustained about 22,800 casualties in their conquest of Sicily. The Axis powers suffered about 165,000 casualties, of whom 30,000 were Germans.

The Quadrant Conference (Quebec I)

Atlantic Charter

Atlantic Charter

The success of the Sicilian operation and the fall of Mussolini converted the American military and political leadership into supporters of a campaign in Italy. Furthermore, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, who after Casablanca had been designated chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), produced a detailed and realistic plan for the long-envisaged invasion of France from Great Britain, thus enabling the U.S. strategists to calculate more precisely how much of the Allies’ resources were needed for that purpose and how much could be spared for operations in the Mediterranean and for the Pacific. With regard to the Pacific, plans sponsored by Admiral Nimitz for operations against the Gilbert and Marshall islands apart from the enterprise against Rabaul were approved early in August 1943.

The new turn of strategical thought necessitated a new Anglo-U.S. conference, which took place in Quebec in mid-August 1943 and was code-named “Quadrant.” After vigorous debate, the question of the timing of “Overlord” was eventually left open, but it was agreed that the strength of the assault force should exceed the original estimate by 25 percent, that the cross-Channel landing should be supported by a landing in southern France, and that a U.S. officer should be in command of “Overlord.” It was also decided that a new Southeast Asia theatre of war should be organized, under British command.

The Allies’ invasion of Italy and the Italian volte-face, 1943

From Sicily, the Allies had a wide choice of directions for their next offensive. Calabria, the “toe” of Italy, was the nearest and most obvious possible destination, and the “shin” was also vulnerable; and the “heel” was also very attractive. The two army corps of Montgomery’s 8th Army crossed the Strait of Messina and landed on the “toe” of Italy on September 3, 1943; but, though the initial resistance was practically negligible, they made only very slow progress, as the terrain, with only two good roads running up the coasts of the great Calabrian “toe” prevented the deployment of large forces. On the day of the landing, however, the Italian government at last agreed to the Allies’ secret terms for a capitulation. It was understood that Italy would be treated with leniency in direct proportion to the part that it would take, as soon as possible, in the war against Germany. The capitulation was announced on September 8.

The landing on the “shin” of Italy, at Salerno, just south of Naples, was begun on September 9, by the mixed U.S.–British 5th Army, under U.S. General Mark Clark. Transported by 700 ships, 55,000 men made the initial assault, and 115,000 more followed up. At first they were faced only by the German 16th Panzer Division; but Kesselring, though he had only eight weak divisions to defend all southern and central Italy, had had time to plan since the fall of Mussolini and had been expecting a blow at the “shin.” His counterstroke made the success of the Salerno landing precarious for six days, and it was not until October 1 that the 5th Army entered Naples.

By contrast, the much smaller landing on the “heel” of Italy, which had been made on September 2 (the day preceding the invasion of the “toe”), took the Germans by surprise. Notwithstanding the paucity of its strength in men and in equipment, the expedition captured two good ports, Taranto and Brindisi, in a very short time; but it lacked the resources to advance promptly. Nearly a fortnight passed before another small force was landed at Bari, the next considerable port north of Brindisi, to push thence unopposed into Foggia.

Ortona during World War II

Ortona during World War II

It was the threat to their rear from the “heel” of Italy and from Foggia that had induced the Germans to fall back from their positions defending Naples against the 5th Army. When the Italian government, in pursuance of a Badoglio–Eisenhower agreement of September 29, declared war against Germany on October 13, 1943, Kesselring was already receiving reinforcements and consolidating the German hold on central and northern Italy. The 5th Army was checked temporarily on the Volturno River, only 20 miles north of Naples, then more lastingly on the Garigliano River, while the 8th Army, having made its way from Calabria up the Adriatic coast, was likewise held on the Sangro River. Autumn and midwinter passed without the Allies’ making any notable impression on the Germans’ Gustav Line, which ran for 100 miles from the mouth of the Garigliano through Cassino and over the Apennines to the mouth of the Sangro.

The western Allies and Stalin: Cairo and Tehrān, 1943

Relations between the western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were still delicate. Besides their inability to satisfy Soviet demands for convoys of supplies and for an early invasion of France, the Americans and the British were embarrassed by the discrepancy between their political war aims and Stalin’s.

The longest-standing difference was about Poland. While Poles were still fighting on the Allies’ side and acknowledging the authority of General Władysław Sikorski’s London-based Polish government in exile, Stalin was trying to get the Allies to consent to the U.S.S.R.’s retention, after the war, of all the territory taken from Poland by virtue of the German–Soviet pacts of 1939. On January 16, 1943, the Soviet government announced that Poles from the border territories in dispute were being treated as Soviet citizens and drafted into the Red Army. On April 25, the Soviet government severed relations with the London Poles, and Moscow subsequently began to build up its own puppet government for postwar Poland.

Besides the quarrel over Poland, the western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were also at variance with regard to the postwar fate of other European states still under German domination; but the Americans and the British were really more interested in maintaining the Soviet war effort against Germany than in insisting, at the risk of offense to Stalin, on the detailed application of their own loudly but vaguely enunciated war aims.

Sextant, the conference of November 22–27, 1943, for which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo, was, on Roosevelt’s insistence, devoted mainly to discussing plans for a British–U.S.–Chinese operation in northern Burma. Little was produced by Sextant except the Cairo Declaration, published on December 1, a further statement of war aims. It prescribed inter alia that Japan was to surrender all Pacific islands acquired since 1914, to retrocede Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores to China, and to give up all other territory “taken by violence and greed”; and, in addition, it was stipulated that Korea was in due course to become independent.

Tehrān Conference: Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill

Tehrān Conference: Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill

From Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill went to Tehrān, to meet Stalin at the Eureka conference of November 28–December 1. Stalin renewed the Soviet promise of military intervention against Japan, but he primarily wanted an assurance that “Overlord” (the invasion of France) would indeed take place in 1944. Reassured about this by Roosevelt, he declared that the Red Army would attack simultaneously on the Eastern Front. On the political plane, Stalin now demanded the Baltic coast of East Prussia for the U.S.S.R. as well as the territories annexed in 1939–40. The main communique of the conference was accompanied by a joint declaration guaranteeing the postwar restoration of Iran. Returning to Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill spent six more days, December 2–7, in staff talks to compose their differences on strategy. They finally agreed that “Overlord” (with Eisenhower in command) should have first claim on resources.

German strategy, from 1943

From late 1942 German strategy, every feature of which was determined by Hitler, was solely aimed at protecting the still very large area under German control—most of Europe and part of North Africa—against a future Soviet onslaught on the Eastern Front and against future Anglo-U.S. offensives on the southern and western fronts. The Germans’ vague hopes that the Allies would shrink from such costly tasks or that the “unnatural” coalition of Western capitalism and Soviet Communism would break up before achieving victory were disappointed, so Hitler, in accordance with his dictum that “Germany shall either be a world power or not be at all,” consciously resolved to preside over the downfall of the German nation. He gave inflexible orders whereby whole armies were made to stand their ground in tactically hopeless positions and were forbidden to surrender under any circumstances. The initial success of this strategy in preventing a German rout during the Soviet winter counteroffensive of 1941–42 had blinded Hitler to its impracticability in the very different military circumstances on the Eastern Front by 1943, by which time the Germans simply lacked sufficient numbers of troops to defend an extremely long front against much more numerous Soviet forces. (By December 1943 the 3,000,000 German troops there were opposed by about 5,500,000 Soviet troops.)

The strategy of keeping his armies stationary was made easier for Hitler by the complete ascendancy he had achieved over his generals, who disputed with Hitler only at the risk of losing their commands or worse. Frequent changes were made in the command of the various army groups and armies, with the result that during 1943–44 most of the talented commanders who had been associated with Germany’s past successes were removed, and everyone who was suspected of a critical attitude at headquarters was silenced.

From late 1943 on, Hitler’s strategy, which from a political standpoint remains inexplicable to most Western historians, was to strengthen the German forces in western Europe at the expense of those on the Eastern Front. In view of the danger of the great Anglo-U.S. invasion of western Europe that seemed imminent by early 1944, the loss of some part of his eastern conquests evidently seemed to Hitler to be less serious. Hitler continued to insist on the primacy of the war in the west after the start of the Allied invasion of northern France in June 1944, and while his armies made strenuous efforts to contain the Allied bridgehead in Normandy for the next two months, Hitler accepted the annihilation of the German Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front by the Soviet summer offensive (from June 1944), which brought the Red Army in a few weeks’ time to the Vistula River and the borders of East Prussia. But the Western Front likewise crumbled in a few weeks, whereupon the Allies advanced to Germany’s western borders. Then, still adhering to his guiding principle, Hitler assembled on the Western Front all that was left of his forces there and tried to drive the British and Americans back in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. This campaign had some successes but meant that Germany’s last battleworthy units were used on the Western Front while the Red Army, heavily outnumbering the remaining German troops in the east, resumed its drive on the eastern frontiers of Germany and reached the Oder River by the end of January 1945.

The Eastern Front, October 1943–April 1944

By the end of the first week of October 1943, the Red Army had established several bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dnieper River. Then, while General N.F. Vatutin’s drive against Kyiv was engaging the Germans’ attention, General Ivan Stepanovich Konev suddenly pushed so far forward from the Kremenchug bridgehead (more than halfway downstream between Kyiv and Dnepropetrovsk) that the German forces within the great bend of the Dnieper to the south would have been isolated if Manstein had not stemmed the Soviet advance just in time to extricate them. By early November the Red Army had reached the mouth of the Dnieper also, and the Germans in Crimea were isolated. Kyiv, too, fell to Vatutin on November 6, and Zhitomir, 80 miles to the west, and Korosten, north of Zhitomir, fell in the next 12 days. Farther north, however, the Germans, who had already fallen back from Smolensk to a line covering the upper Dnieper, repelled with little difficulty five rather predictable Soviet thrusts toward Minsk in the last quarter of 1943.

Vatutin’s forces from the Zhitomir–Korosten sector advanced westward across the prewar Polish frontier on January 4, 1944, and, though another German flank attack, by troops drawn from adjacent fronts, slowed them down, they had reached Lutsk, 100 miles farther west, a month later. Vatutin’s left wing, meanwhile, wheeled southward to converge with Konev’s right, so that 10 German divisions were encircled near Korsun, on the Dnieper line south of Kyiv. Vainly trying to save those 10 divisions, the Germans had to abandon Nikopol, in the Dnieper bend far to the south, with its valuable manganese mines.

March 1944 saw a triple thrust by the Red Army: Zhukov, succeeding to Vatutin’s command, drove southwest toward Tarnopol, to outflank the Germans on the upper stretches of the southern Bug River. General Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, in the south, advanced across the mouth of the latter river from that of the Dnieper; and between them Konev, striking over the central stretch of the Bug, reached the Dniester, 70 miles ahead, and succeeded in crossing it. When Zhukov had crossed the upper Prut River and Konev was threatening Iaşi on the Moldavian stretch of the river, the Carpathian Mountains were the only natural barrier remaining between the Red Army and the Hungarian Plain. German troops occupied Hungary on March 20, since Hitler suspected that the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, might not resist the Red Army to the utmost.

A German counterstroke from the Lwów area of southern Poland against Zhukov’s extended flank early in April not only put an end to the latter’s overhasty pressure on the Tatar (Yablonitsky) Pass through the Carpathians but also made possible the withdrawal of some of the German forces endangered by the Red Army’s March operation. Konev, too, was halted in front of Iaşi; but his left swung southward down the Dniester to converge with Malinovsky’s drive on Odessa. That great port fell to the Red Army on April 10. On May 9 the Germans in Crimea abandoned Sevastopol, caught as they were between Soviet pincers from the mainland north of the isthmus and from the east across the Strait of Kerch.

At the northern end of the Eastern Front, a Soviet offensive in January 1944 had been followed by an orderly German retreat from the fringes of the long-besieged Leningrad area to a shorter line exploiting the great lakes farther to the south. The retreat was beneficial to the Germans but sacrificed their land link with the Finns, who now found themselves no better off than they had been in 1939–40. Finland in February 1944 sought an armistice from the U.S.S.R., but the latter’s terms proved unacceptable.

The war in the Pacific, October 1943–August 1944

Considering that it might be necessary for them to invade Japan proper, the Allies drew up new plans in mid-1943. The main offensive, it was decided, should be from the south and from the southeast, through the Philippines and through Micronesia (rather than from the Aleutians in the North Pacific or from the Asian mainland). While occupation of the Philippines would disrupt Japanese communications with the East Indian isles west of New Guinea and with Malaya, the conquest of Micronesia, from the Gilberts by way of the Marshalls and Carolines to the Marianas, would not only offer the possibility of drawing the Japanese into a naval showdown but also win bases for heavy air raids on the Japanese mainland prior to invasion.

For the approach to the Philippines, it was prerequisite, on the one hand, to complete the encirclement of Rabaul, thereby nullifying the threat from the Japanese positions in the Solomon Islands and in the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, etc.) and, on the other, to reduce the Japanese hold on western New Guinea. Great emphasis, however, was put on the advance across the central Pacific through Micronesia, to be begun via the Gilberts.

The encirclement of Rabaul

Allied moves to isolate the large Japanese garrison on Rabaul proceeded by land and air. The encirclement of Rabaul by land began during October and November 1943 with the capture by New Zealand troops of the Treasury Islands in the Solomons and was accompanied on November 1 by a U.S. landing at Empress Augusta Bay on the west of Bougainville. U.S. reinforcements subsequently repulsed Japanese counterattacks in December, when they sank two destroyers, and in March 1944, when they killed almost 6,000 men. What remained of the Japanese garrison on Bougainville was no longer capable of fighting, though it did not surrender until the end of the war.

U.S. Marines during World War II

U.S. Marines during World War II

U.S. Marines during World War II

U.S. Marines during World War II

Continuing the approach to Rabaul, U.S. troops landed on December 15 at Arawe on the southwestern coast of New Britain, thereby distracting Japanese attention from Cape Gloucester, on the northwestern coast, where a major landing was made on December 26. By January 16, 1944, the airstrip at Cape Gloucester had been captured and defense lines set up. Talasea, halfway to Rabaul, fell in March 1944. The conquest of western New Britain secured Allied control of the Vitiaz and Dampier straits between that island and New Guinea.

By constructing air bases on each island that they captured, the Allies systematically blocked any westward movement that the Japanese might have made: New Zealand troops took the Green Islands southeast of New Guinea on February 15; and U.S. forces invaded Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands on February 29 and captured Manus on March 9.

With the fall of the Emirau Islands on March 20, the Allies’ stranglehold on Rabaul and Kavieng was practically complete, so that they could thenceforth disregard the 100,000 Japanese immobilized there.

Western New Guinea

Before they could push northward to the Philippines, the Allies had to subdue Japanese-held western New Guinea. U.S. troops took Saidor, on the Huon Peninsula, on January 2, 1944, and established an air base there; and the Australians took Sio, to the east of Saidor, on January 16. Then reinforcements were landed at Mindiri, west of Saidor, on March 5, and Australian infantry began to move westward up the coast, to take Bogadjim, Madang, and Alexishafen.

Bypassing Hansa Bay (which was eventually captured on June 15) and Wewak, whither the Japanese had retreated, the Allies, on April 22, 1944, made two simultaneous landings at Hollandia: having in the past weeks already destroyed 300 Japanese planes, they captured the airfields there in four days’ time. In the following months Hollandia was converted into a major base and command post for the Southwest Pacific area. The Allies also took Aitape, on the coast east of Hollandia, and held it against counterattacks by more than 200,000 Wewak-based Japanese during July and August. Biak, the isle guarding the entrance to Geelvink Bay, west of Hollandia, was invaded by U.S. troops on May 27, 1944; but the Japanese defense of it was maintained until early August. Though westernmost New Guinea fell likewise to the Allies in August 1944, the Japanese garrison at Wewak held out until May 10, 1945.

The central Pacific

U.S. troops advancing on Tarawa, Gilbert Islands, in 1943

U.S. troops advancing on Tarawa, Gilbert Islands, in 1943

invasion of Tarawa by U.S. Marines

invasion of Tarawa by U.S. Marines

Though the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff envisaged no major offensive westward across the Pacific toward Formosa until mid-1944, they nevertheless decided to launch a limited offensive in the central Pacific in 1943, hoping thereby both to speed the pace of the war and to draw the Japanese away from other areas. Accordingly, Nimitz’ central Pacific forces invaded the Gilberts on November 23, 1943. Makin fell easily, but well-fortified Japanese defenses on Tarawa cost the U.S. Marines 1,000 killed and 2,300 wounded. Japanese losses in the Gilberts totaled about 8,500 men.

Marshall Islands during World War II

Marshall Islands during World War II

U.S. Marines taking a Japanese prisoner in the Marshall Islands

U.S. Marines taking a Japanese prisoner in the Marshall Islands

Having been forced to cede the Gilberts, the Japanese elected next to defend the Marshalls, in order both to absorb Allied forces and to strain the latters’ extended lines of supply. Nimitz subjected Kwajalein Atoll, which he chose first to attack, to so heavy a preliminary bombardment that the U.S. infantry could land on it on January 31, 1944; and U.S. forces moved on to Enewetak on February 17.

In support of the landings on the Marshalls, the U.S. fleet on February 17, 1944, started a series of day and night attacks against the Japanese base at Truk in the Caroline Islands, where they destroyed some 300 aircraft and 200,000 tons of merchant shipping. Henceforth, the Allies could confidently ignore Truk and bypass it.

U.S. Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944

U.S. Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944

U.S. Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944

U.S. Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944

The Allies’ next objective, for which they required more than 500 ships and 125,000 troops, was to reduce the Mariana Islands, lying 1,000 miles from Enewetak and 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor. Against this threat, after the destruction at Truk, the Japanese hastily drew up a new defense plan, “Operation A,” relying on their remaining 1,055 land-based aircraft in the Marianas, in the Carolines, and in western New Guinea and on timely and decisive intervention by a sea force, which should include nine aircraft carriers with 450 aircraft. But in the spring of 1944 the Japanese air strength was still further depleted, and, moreover, on March 31 the sponsor of the plan, Admiral Koga Mineichi (Yamamoto’s successor), and his staff were killed in an air disaster. When, on June 15, two U.S. Marine divisions went ashore on Saipan Island in the Marianas, the 30,000 Japanese defenders put up so fierce a resistance that an army division was needed to reinforce the Marines. Using the same defensive tactics as on other small islands, the Japanese had fortified themselves in underground caves and bunkers that afforded protection from American artillery and naval bombardment. Notwithstanding this, the Japanese defenders were gradually compressed into smaller and smaller pockets, and they themselves ended most organized resistance with a suicidal counterattack on July 7, the largest of its kind during the war.

The loss of Saipan was such a disaster for Japan that when the news was announced in Tokyo the prime minister, Tōjō Hideki, and his entire Cabinet resigned. To realists in the Japanese high command, the loss of the Marianas spelled the ultimate loss of the war, but no one dared say so. Tōjō’s Cabinet was succeeded by that of General Koiso Kuniaki, which was pledged to carrying on the fight with renewed vigour.

Air power enthusiasts have called the conquest of Saipan “the turning point of the war in the Pacific,” for it enabled the United States to establish air bases there for the big B-29 bombers, which had been developed for the specific purpose of bombing Japan. The first flight of 100 B-29s took off from Saipan on November 24, 1944, and bombed Tokyo, the first bombing raid on the Japanese capital since 1942.

While the Japanese were still resisting on Saipan, the Japanese Combined Fleet, under Admiral Ozawa Jisaburō, was approaching from Philippine and East Indian anchorages, in accordance with “Operation A,” to challenge the U.S. 5th Fleet, under Admiral Raymond Spruance. Ozawa, with only nine aircraft carriers against 15 for the United States, was obviously inferior in naval power, but he counted heavily on help from land-based aircraft on Guam, Rota, and Yap. The encounter, which took place west of the Marianas and is known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, has been called the greatest carrier battle of the war. It began on June 19 when Ozawa sent 430 planes in four waves against Spruance’s ships. The result was a disaster for the Japanese. U.S. airmen shot down more than 300 planes and sank two carriers, and as the Japanese fleet retreated northward toward Okinawa it lost another carrier and almost 100 more planes. The United States lost about 130 planes. The hasty and incomplete training of the Japanese pilots and the inadequate armour plating of their planes were decisive factors in the numerous aerial combats of this battle, which was ultimately of more strategic importance than the fall of Saipan. Nimitz’ forces could thereafter occupy other major islands in the Marianas: Guam on July 21 and Tinian on July 24. The Marianas cost the Japanese 46,000 killed or captured, the Americans only 4,750 killed.

The Burmese frontier and China, November 1943–summer 1944

For the dry season of 1943–44 both the Japanese and the Allies were resolved on offensives in Southeast Asia. On the Japanese side, Lieutenant General Kawabe Masakazu planned a major Japanese advance across the Chindwin River, on the central front, in order to occupy the plain of Imphāl and to establish a firm defensive line in eastern Assam. The Allies, for their part, planned a number of thrusts into Burma: Stilwell’s NCAC forces, including his three Chinese divisions and “Merrill’s Marauders” (U.S. troops trained by Wingate on Chindit lines), were to advance against Mogaung and Myitkyina; while Slim’s 14th Army was to launch its XV Corps southeastward into Arakan and its IV Corps eastward to the Chindwin. Because the Japanese had habitually got the better of advanced British forces by outflanking them, Slim formulated a new tactic to ensure that his units would stand against attack in the forthcoming campaign, even if they should be isolated: they were to know that, when ordered to stand, they could certainly count both on supplies from the air and on his use of reserve troops to turn the situation against the Japanese attackers.

On the southern wing of the Burmese front, the XV Corps’s Arakan operation, launched in November 1943, had achieved most of its objectives by the end of January 1944. When the Japanese counterattack surrounded one Indian division and part of another, Slim’s new tactic was brought into play, and the Japanese found themselves crushed between the encircled Indians and the relieving forces.

The Japanese crossing of the Chindwin into Assam, on the central Burmese front, when the fighting in Arakan was dying down, played into Slim’s hands, since he could now profit from the Allies’ superiority in aircraft and in tanks. The Japanese were able to approach Imphāl and to surround Kohīma, but the British forces protecting these towns were reinforced with several Indian divisions that were taken from the now-secure Arakan front. With air support, Slim’s reinforced forces now defended Imphāl against multiple Japanese thrusts and outflanking movements until, in mid-May 1944, he was able to launch two of his divisions into an offensive eastward, while still containing the last bold effort of the Japanese to capture Imphāl. By June 22 the 14th Army had averted the Japanese menace to Assam and won the initiative for its own advance into Burma. The Battle of Imphāl–Kohīma cost the British and Indian forces 17,587 casualties (12,600 of them sustained at Imphāl), the Japanese forces 30,500 dead (including 8,400 from disease) and 30,000 wounded.

On the northern Burmese front, Stilwell’s forces were already approaching Mogaung and Myitkyina before the southern crisis of Imphāl–Kohīma; and the subsidiary Chindit operation against Indaw was going well ahead when, on March 24, 1944, Wingate himself was killed in an air crash. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek was constrained by U.S. threats of a suspension of lend-lease to finally authorize some action by the 12 divisions of his Yunnan Army, which on May 12, 1944, with air support, began to cross the Salween River westward in the direction of Myitkyina, Bhamo, and Lashio. Myitkyina airfield was taken by Stilwell’s forces, with “Merrill’s Marauders,” on May 17, Mogaung was taken by the Chindits on June 26, and finally Myitkyina itself was taken by Stilwell’s Chinese divisions on August 3. All of northwest and much of northern Burma was now in Allied hands.

In China proper, a Japanese attack toward Ch’ang-sha, begun on May 27, won control not only of a further stretch of the north–south axis of the Peking–Han-K’ou railroad but also of several of the airfields from which the Americans had been bombing the Japanese in China and were intending to bomb them in Japan.

The Italian front, 1944

The Allies’ northward advance up the Italian peninsula to Rome was still blocked by Kesselring’s Gustav Line, which was hinged on Monte Cassino. To bypass that line, the Allies landed some 50,000 seaborne troops, with 5,000 vehicles, at Anzio, only 33 miles south of Rome, on January 22, 1944. The landing surprised the Germans and met, at first, with very little opposition; but, instead of driving on over the Alban Hills to Rome at once, the force at Anzio spent so much time consolidating its position there that Kesselring was able, with his reserves, to develop a powerful counteroffensive against it on February 3. The beachhead was thereby reduced to a very shallow dimension, while the defenses at Monte Cassino held out unimpaired against a new assault by Clark’s 5th Army.

For a final effort against the Gustav Line, Alexander decided to shift most of the 8th Army, now commanded by Major General Sir Oliver Leese, from the Adriatic flank of the peninsula to the west, where it was to strengthen the 5th Army’s pressure around Monte Cassino and on the approaches to the valley of the Liri (headstream of the Garigliano). The combined attack, which was started in the night of May 11–12, 1944, succeeded in breaching the German defenses at a number of points between Cassino and the coast. Thanks to this victory, the Americans could push forward up the coast, while the British entered the valley and outflanked Monte Cassino, which fell to a Polish corps of the 8th Army on May 18. Five days later, the Allies’ force at Anzio struck out against the investing Germans (whose strength had been diminished in order to reinforce the Gustav Line); and by May 26 it had achieved a breakthrough. When the 8th Army’s Canadian Corps penetrated the last German defenses in the Liri Valley, the whole Gustav Line began to collapse.

Nisei unit in Livorno, Italy, during World War II

Nisei unit in Livorno, Italy, during World War II

Concentrating all available strength on his left wing, Alexander pressed up from the south to effect a junction with the troops thrusting northward from Anzio. The Germans in the Alban Hills could not withstand the massive attack. On June 5, 1944, the Allies entered Rome. The propaganda value of their occupying the Eternal City, Mussolini’s former capital, was offset, however, by an unforeseen strategical reality: Kesselring’s forces retreated not in the expected rout but gradually, to the line of the Arno River; Florence, 160 miles north of Rome, did not fall to the Allies until August 13; and by that time the Germans had made ready yet another chain of defenses, the Gothic Line, running from the Tyrrhenian coast midway between Pisa and La Spezia, over the Apennines in a reversed S curve, to the Adriatic coast between Pesaro and Rimini.

Alexander might have made more headway against Kesselring’s new front if some of his forces had not been subtracted, in August 1944, for the American-sponsored but eventually unnecessary invasion of southern France (“Operation Anvil,” finally renamed “Dragoon” [see below]). As it was, the 8th Army, switched back from the west to the Adriatic coast, achieved only an indecisive breakthrough toward Rimini. After this September offensive, the autumn rains set in, to make even more difficult Alexander’s indirect movements, against Kesselring’s resolute opposition, toward the mouth of the Po River.

Developments from summer 1944 to autumn 1945

The Allied invasions of western Europe, June–November 1944

Learn about the Allies' invasion routes and the German defenses in northern France during the Normandy Invasion

Learn about the Allies' invasion routes and the German defenses in northern France during the Normandy Invasion

Hear about the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944, by the Allied force to liberate western Europe and surrender of Nazi Germany

Hear about the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944, by the Allied force to liberate western Europe and surrender of Nazi GermanySee all videos for this article

Erwin Rommel

Erwin Rommel

The German Army high command had long been expecting an Allied invasion of northern France but had no means of knowing where precisely the stroke would come: while Rundstedt, commander in chief in the west, thought that the landings would be made between Calais and Dieppe (at the narrowest width of the Channel between England and France), Hitler prophetically indicated the central and more westerly stretches of the coast of Normandy as the site of the attack; and Rommel, who was in charge of the forces on France’s Channel coast, finally came around to Hitler’s opinion. The fortifications of those stretches were consequently improved, but Rundstedt and Rommel still took different views about the way in which the invasion should be met: while Rundstedt recommended a massive counterattack on the invaders after their landing, Rommel, fearing that Allied air supremacy might interfere fatally with the adequate massing of the German forces for such a counterattack, advocated instead immediate action on the beaches against any attempted landing. The Germans had 59 divisions spread over western Europe from the Low Countries to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France; but approximately half of this number was static, and the remainder included only 10 armoured or motorized divisions.

Learn about the Normandy Invasion planned by Dwight Eisenhower to give Allied powers a foothold in France

Learn about the Normandy Invasion planned by Dwight Eisenhower to give Allied powers a foothold in FranceSee all videos for this article

Postponed from May, the western Allies’ “Operation Overlord,” their long-debated invasion of northern France, took place on June 6, 1944—the war’s most celebrated D-Day—when 156,000 men were landed on the beaches of Normandy between the Orne estuary and the southeastern end of the Cotentin Peninsula: 83,000 British and Canadian troops on the eastern beaches, 73,000 Americans on the western. Under Eisenhower’s supreme direction and Montgomery’s immediate command, the invading forces initially comprised the Canadian 1st Army (Lieutenant General Henry Duncan Graham Crerar); the British 2nd Army (Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey); and the British 1st and 6th airborne divisions, the U.S. 1st Army, and the U.S. 82nd and 101st airborne divisions (all under Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley).

D-Day; Sherman tank

D-Day; Sherman tank

By 9:00 AM on D-Day the coastal defenses were generally breached, but Caen, which had been scheduled to fall on D-Day and was the hinge of an Allied advance, held out until July 9, the one panzer division already available there on June 6 having been joined the next day by a second. Though the heavy fighting at Caen attracted most of the German reserves, the U.S. forces in the westernmost sector of the front likewise met a very stubborn resistance. But when they had taken the port of Cherbourg on June 26 and proceeded to clear the rest of the Cotentin, they could turn southward to take Saint-Lô on July 18.

The Allies could not have made such rapid progress in northern France if their air forces had not been able to interfere decisively with the movement of the German reserves. Allied aircraft destroyed most of the bridges over the Seine River to the east and over the Loire to the south. The German reserves thus had to make long detours in order to reach the Normandy battle zone and were so constantly harassed on the march by Allied strafing that they suffered endless delays and only arrived in driblets. And even where reserves could have been brought up, their movement was sometimes inhibited by hesitation and dissension on the Germans’ own side. Hitler, though he had rightly predicted the zone of the Allies’ landings, came to mistakenly believe, after D-Day, that a second and larger invasion was to be attempted east of the Seine and so was reluctant to allow reserves to be moved westward over that river. He also forbade the German forces already engaged in Normandy to retreat in time to make an orderly withdrawal to new defenses.

Rundstedt, meanwhile, was slow in obtaining Hitler’s authority for the movement of the general reserve’s SS panzer corps from its position north of Paris to the front; and Rommel, though he made prompt use of the forces at hand, had been absent from his headquarters on D-Day itself, when a forecast of rough weather had seemed to make a cross-Channel invasion unlikely. Subsequently, Rundstedt’s urgent plea for permission to retreat provoked Hitler, on July 3, to appoint Günther von Kluge as commander in chief in the west in Rundstedt’s place; and Rommel was badly hurt on July 17, when his car crashed under attack from Allied planes.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini after the July Plot failed

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini after the July Plot failed

Learn about the July plot, 1944 to assassinate Hitler by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators

Learn about the July plot, 1944 to assassinate Hitler by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his co-conspiratorsSee all videos for this article

There was something else, besides the progress of the Allies, to demoralize the German commanders—the failure and the aftermath of a conspiracy against Hitler. Alarmed at the calamitous course of events and disgusted by the crimes of the Nazi regime, certain conservative but anti-Nazi civilian dignitaries and military officers had formed themselves into a secret opposition, with Karl Friedrich Goerdeler (a former chief mayor of Leipzig) and Colonel General Ludwig Beck (a former chief of the army general staff) among its leaders. From 1943 this opposition canvased the indispensable support of the active military authorities with some notable success: General Friedrich Olbricht (chief of the General Army Office) and several of the serving commanders, including Rommel and Kluge, became implicated to various extents. Apart from General Henning von Tresckow, however, the group’s most dynamic member was Colonel Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, who as chief of staff to the chief of the army reserve from July 1, 1944, had access to Hitler. Finally, it was decided to kill Hitler and to use the army reserve for a coup d’état in Berlin, where a new regime under Beck and Goerdeler should be set up. On July 20, therefore, Stauffenberg left a bomb concealed in a briefcase in the room where Hitler was conferring at his headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb duly exploded; but Hitler survived, and the coup in Berlin miscarried. The Nazi reaction was savage: besides 200 immediately implicated conspirators, 5,000 people who were more remotely linked with the plot or were altogether unconnected with it were put to death. Kluge committed suicide on August 17, Rommel on October 14. Fear permeated and paralyzed the German high command in the weeks that followed.

World War II: Caen, France

World War II: Caen, France

On July 31, 1944, the Americans on the Allies’ right, newly supported by the landing of the U.S. 3rd Army under Patton, broke through the German defenses at Avranches, the gateway from Normandy into Brittany. On August 7 a desperate counterattack by four panzer divisions from Mortain, east of Avranches, failed to seal the breach, and American tanks poured southward through the gap and flooded the open country beyond. Though some of the U.S. forces were then swung southwestward in the hope of seizing the Breton ports in pursuance of the original prescription of “Overlord” and though some went on in more southerly directions toward the crossings of the Loire, others were wheeled eastward—to trap, in the Falaise “pocket,” a large part of the German forces retreating southward from the pressure of the Allies’ left at Caen. The Americans’ wide eastward flanking maneuver after the breakout speedily produced a general collapse of the German position in northern France.

Meanwhile, more and more Allied troops were being landed in Normandy. On August 1, two army groups were constituted: the 21st (comprising the British and Canadian armies) under Montgomery; and the 12th (for the Americans) under Bradley. By the middle of August an eastward wheel wider than that which had cut off the Falaise pocket had brought the Americans to Argentan, southeast of Falaise and level with the British and Canadian advance on the left (north) of the Allies’ front, so that a concerted drive eastward could now be launched; and on August 19 a U.S. division successfully crossed the Seine at Mantes-Gassicourt. Already on August 17 the Americans on the Loire had taken Orléans. The clandestine French Resistance in Paris rose against the Germans on August 19; and a French division under General Jacques Leclerc, pressing forward from Normandy, received the surrender of the German forces there and liberated the city on August 25.

The German forces would have had ample time to pull back to the Seine River and to form a strong defensive barrier line there had it not been for Hitler’s stubbornly stupid orders that there should be no withdrawal. It was his folly that enabled the Allies to liberate France so quickly. The bulk of the German armoured forces and many infantry divisions were thrown into the Normandy battle and kept there by Hitler’s “no withdrawal” orders until they collapsed and a large part of them were trapped. The fragments were incapable of further resistance, and their retreat (which was largely on foot) was soon outstripped by the British and American mechanized columns. More than 200,000 German troops were taken prisoner in France, and 1,200 German tanks had been destroyed in the fighting. When the Allies approached the German border at the beginning of September, after a sweeping drive from Normandy, there was no organized resistance to stop them from driving on into the heart of Germany.

World War II: paratroopers

World War II: paratroopers

Strasbourg, World War II

Strasbourg, World War II

Meanwhile, “Operation Dragoon” (formerly “Anvil”) was launched on August 15, 1944, when the U.S. 7th Army and the French 1st Army landed on the French Riviera, where there were only four German divisions to oppose them. While the Americans drove first into the Alps to take Grenoble, the French took Marseille on August 23 and then advanced eastward through France up the Rhône Valley, to be rejoined by the Americans north of Lyon early in September. Both armies then moved swiftly northeastward into Alsace.

In the north, however, some discord had arisen among the Allied commanders after the crossing of the Seine. Whereas Montgomery wanted to concentrate on a single thrust northeastward through Belgium into the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley (an area vital to Germany’s war effort), the U.S. generals argued for continuing to advance eastward through France on a broad front, in accordance with the pre-invasion plan. Eisenhower, by way of compromise, decided on August 23 that Montgomery’s drive into Belgium should have the prior claim on resources until Antwerp should have been captured but that thereafter the pre-invasion plan should be resumed.

Consequently, Montgomery’s 2nd Army began its advance on August 29, entered Brussels on September 3, took Antwerp, with its docks intact, on September 4, and went on, three days later, to force its way across the Albert Canal. The U.S. 1st Army, meanwhile, supporting Montgomery on the right, had taken Namur on the day of the capture of Antwerp and was nearing Aachen. Far to the south, however, Patton’s U.S. 3rd Army, having raced forward to take Verdun on August 31, was already beginning to cross the Moselle River near Metz on September 5, with the obvious possibility of achieving a breakthrough into Germany’s economically important Saarland. Eisenhower, therefore, could no longer devote a preponderance of supplies to Montgomery at Patton’s expense.

Montgomery nevertheless attempted a thrust to cross the Rhine River at Arnhem, the British 1st Airborne Division being dropped ahead there to clear the way for the 2nd Army, but the Germans were just able to check the thrust, thus isolating the parachutists, many of whom were taken prisoner. By this time, indeed, the German defense was rapidly stiffening as the Allies approached the German frontiers: the U.S. 1st Army spent a month grinding down the defenses of Aachen, which fell at last on October 20 (the first city of prewar Germany to be captured by the western Allies); and the 1st Canadian Army, on the left of the British 2nd, did not clear the Schelde estuary west of Antwerp, including Walcheren Island, until early November. Likewise, Patton’s 3rd Army was held up before Metz.

The Allies’ amazing advance of 350 miles in a few weeks was thus brought to a halt. In early September the U.S. and British forces had had a combined superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft over the Germans, but by November 1944 the Germans still held both the Ruhr Valley and the Saarland, after having been so near collapse in the west in early September that one or the other of those prizes could have easily been taken by the Allies. The root of the Allied armies’ sluggishness in September was that none of their top planners had foreseen such a complete collapse of the Germans as occurred in August 1944. They were therefore not prepared, mentally or materially, to exploit it by a rapid offensive into Germany itself. The Germans thus obtained time to build up their defending forces in the west, with serious consequences both for occupied Europe and the postwar political situation of the Continent.

The Eastern Front, June–December 1944

After a successful offensive against the Finns on the Karelian Isthmus had culminated in the capture of Viipuri (Vyborg) on June 20, 1944, the Red Army on June 23 began a major onslaught on the Germans’ front in Belorussia. The attackers’ right wing took the bastion town of Vitebsk (Vitebskaya) and then wheeled southward across the highway from Orsha to Minsk; their left wing, under General Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, broke through just north of the Pripet Marshes and then drove forward for 150 miles in a week, severing the highway farther to the west, between Minsk and Warsaw. Minsk itself fell to the Red Army on July 3; and, though the Germans extricated a large part of their forces from the Soviet enveloping movement, the Soviet tanks raced ahead, bypassing any attempts to block their path, and were deep into Lithuania and northeastern Poland by mid-July. Then the Soviet forces south of the Pripet Marshes struck too, capturing Lwów and pushing across the San River. This increase of pressure on the Germans enabled Rokossovsky’s mobile columns to thrust still farther westward: they reached the Vistula River, and one of them, on July 31, even penetrated the suburbs of Warsaw. The Polish underground in Warsaw thereupon rose in revolt against the Germans and briefly gained control of the city. But three SS armoured divisions arrived to suppress the revolt in Warsaw, and the Soviet Red Army stood idly by across the Vistula while the Germans crushed the insurrection. Although the Soviet halt outside Warsaw was a purposeful move, it is true that the unprecedented length and speed of the Red Army’s advance—450 miles in five weeks—had overstrained the Soviet communications. The halt on the Vistula was to last six months.

On August 20, however, two Soviet thrusts were launched in another direction—against the German salient in Bessarabia. A new government came to power in Romania on August 23 and not only suspended hostilities against the U.S.S.R. but also, on August 25, declared war against Germany. This long-premeditated volte-face opened the way for three great wheeling movements by the Red Army’s left wing through the vast spaces of southeastern and central Europe: southwestward across Bulgaria, where they met no opposition; westward up the Danube Valley and over the Yugoslav frontier; and northwestward through the Carpathians into Transylvania. The Germans could only try to hold the threatened centres of communication long enough for the withdrawal of their forces from Greece and from southern Yugoslavia. Belgrade fell to a concerted action by the Red Army and Tito’s Partisan forces on October 20, 1944; and a rapid drive from the Transylvanian sector into the Hungarian Plain brought Soviet forces up to the suburbs of Budapest on November 4. Budapest, however, was stubbornly defended: by the end of the year, it was enveloped but still holding out.

At the northern end of the Eastern Front, Finland had capitulated early in September, and the following weeks saw a series of scythelike strokes by the Red Army against the German forces remaining in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. By mid-October the remnants of those forces were cornered in Courland, but the subsequent Soviet attempt to break through from Lithuania into East Prussia was repelled.

Air warfare, 1944

The Allies’ strategic air offensive against Germany began to attain its maximum effectiveness in the opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air forces concerned, namely, the 8th in England and the 15th in Italy, were increased in numbers and improved in technical proficiency. By the end of 1943 the 8th Bomber Command alone could mount attacks of 700 planes, and early in 1944 regular 1,000-bomber attacks became possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective long-range fighters, chief of which, the P-51 Mustang, was capable of operating at maximum bomber range. The U.S. fighters could now get the better of the Luftwaffe in the air over Germany, so that whereas 9.1 percent of bombers going out had been lost and 45.6 percent damaged in October 1943, the corresponding figures were only 3.5 percent and 29.9 percent in February 1944, though in that very month a massive and very difficult attack at extreme range had been made on the German aircraft industry. Carl Spaatz, commanding general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, in May 1944 initiated an offensive against Germany’s synthetic-oil production—an offensive that was to become more and more harmful to the German war effort after the loss of Romania’s oil fields to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s resistance dwindled almost to nothing as its fighter plane production dropped and most of its remaining trained pilots died in aerial combat.

The RAF Bomber Command launched nearly 10,000 sorties in March 1944 and dropped some 27,500 tons of bombs, about 70 percent of this effort being concentrated on Germany; but in the following months its offensive was largely diverted to the intensive preparation and, later, to the support of the Allied landings in France. Nevertheless, it joined usefully in the U.S. offensive against German oil production, continued to play its part in the Battle of the Atlantic, and also assumed the task of bombing the launching ramps of the Germans’ “V” missiles. By early 1945, the unending Allied bombing and strafing raids on bridges, roads, rail facilities, locomotives, and supply columns had paralyzed the German transportation system.

Wernher von Braun: V-2 missile

Wernher von Braun: V-2 missile

The “V” missiles, flying bombs and long-range rockets, were the new weapons on which Hitler had vainly been counting to reduce Great Britain to readiness for peace. His faith in them had indeed been a major motive for his insistence on holding the sites, in northernmost France, from which they were initially to be aimed at London. The V-1 missiles were first launched on June 13, 1944, mostly from sites in the Pas-de-Calais; the V-2 missiles were launched a few months later, on September 8, from sites in the Netherlands (after the Allies’ occupation of the Pas-de-Calais on their way to Belgium). The V-2 offensive was maintained until March 1945.

Allied policy and strategy: Octagon (Quebec II) and Moscow, 1944

The progress of the Soviet armies toward central and southeastern Europe made it all the more urgent for the western Allies to come to terms with Stalin about the fate of the “liberated” countries of eastern Europe. London had already proposed to Moscow in May 1944 that Romania and Bulgaria should be zones for Soviet military operation, Yugoslavia and Greece—whose royalist governments in exile were under British protection—for British; and Roosevelt had approved this proposition in June.

The Soviet Union had in February 1944 sent a military mission to Josip Tito’s Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia (the Partisans had become the sole Yugoslavian recipients, since the Tehrān Conference, of western aid, though their royalist rivals, the Chetniks, were not publicly disavowed by Churchill until May 25). Along with this, a would-be government of Greece had been set up in March by the EAM (National Liberation Front), which was a Communist movement controlling a military organization, the ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army), in opposition to the EDES (Greek Democratic National Army), which was loyal to the British-backed government in exile. The Polish question, moreover, was still unresolved, and in July the Soviets established, at Lublin, a Committee of National Liberation independent of the London Poles. In Romania, despite the government’s change of side in August, the Soviets proceeded to disband the Romanian Army; and early in September they declared war on Bulgaria, invaded that country, and sponsored a Communist revolution there.

With this background, Churchill and Roosevelt met again for their second Quebec Conference, code-named “Octagon,” which lasted from September 11 to 16. The most important decision made at the conference was that Roosevelt and Churchill together approved the European Advisory Commission’s scheme for the division of defeated Germany into U.S., British, and Soviet zones of occupation (the southwest, the northwest, and the east, respectively) and also the radical plan elaborated by the U.S. secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., for turning Germany “into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral” without “war-making industries.” The Morgenthau Plan, however, was subsequently revoked.

The next conference of the Allies was held in Moscow October 9–20, 1944, between Churchill and Stalin, with U.S. ambassador W. Averell Harriman also present at most of their talks. Disagreement persisted over Poland. Stalin, however, consented readily to Churchill’s provisional suggestion for zones of influence in southeastern Europe: the U.S.S.R. should be preponderant in Romania and in Bulgaria, the western powers in Greece, and western and Soviet influences should counterbalance one another evenly in Yugoslavia and in Hungary. The timing of the next western and Soviet offensives against Germany was also agreed, and some accord was reached about the scale of the eventual Soviet participation in the war against Japan.

The Philippines and Borneo, from September 1944

On July 27–28, 1944, Roosevelt had approved MacArthur’s argument that the next objective in the Pacific theatre of the war should be the Philippine Archipelago (which was comparatively near to the already conquered New Guinea). The initial steps toward the Philippines were taken almost simultaneously, in mid-September 1944: MacArthur’s forces from New Guinea seized Morotai, the northeasternmost isle of the Moluccas, which was on the direct route to Mindanao, southernmost landmass of the Philippines; and Nimitz’ fleet from the east landed troops in the Palau Islands.

Already by mid-September the Americans had discovered that the Japanese forces were unexpectedly weak not only on Mindanao but also on Leyte, the smaller island north of the Surigao Strait. With this knowledge they decided to bypass Mindanao and to begin their invasion of the Philippines on Leyte. On October 17–18, 1944, American forces seized offshore islets in Leyte Gulf, and on October 20 they landed four divisions on the east coast of Leyte.

The threat to Leyte was the signal for the Japanese to put into effect their recently formulated plan “Sho-Go” (“Operation Victory”), whereby the Allies’ next attempts at invasion were to be countered by concerted air attacks. Though in the case of Leyte the Japanese Army and Navy air forces in the immediate theatre numbered only 212 planes, it was hoped that the dispatch of four carriers under Vice Admiral Ozawa, with 106 planes, southward from Japanese waters would lure the U.S. aircraft carriers away from Leyte Gulf and that the suicidal “kamikaze” tactics of the Japanese airmen would save the situation. (Kamikaze pilots deliberately crashed their bomb-armed planes into enemy ships.) At the same time, however, a Japanese naval force from Singapore was to sail to Brunei Bay and there split itself into two groups that would converge on Leyte Gulf from the north and from the southwest: the stronger group, under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo, would enter the Pacific through the San Bernardino Strait between the Philippine islands of Samar and Luzon; the other, under Vice Admiral Nishimura Teiji, would pass through the Surigao Strait.

Kurita’s fleet (five battleships, 12 cruisers, 15 destroyers) lost two of its heavy cruisers to U.S. submarine attack on October 23, when it was off Palawan; and one of the mightiest of Japan’s battleships, the Musashi, was sunk by aerial attack the next day. On October 25, however, Kurita made his way unopposed through the San Bernardino Strait, since the commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet, Admiral Halsey, had diverted his main strength toward the bait dangled by Ozawa farther to the north. Three groups of U.S. escort carriers, met by Kurita on his way toward Leyte Gulf, suffered heavy damage; but, meanwhile, Nishimura’s fleet (two battleships, one heavy cruiser, four destroyers) had been detected on its way to the Surigao Strait and, on its entry into Leyte Gulf in the early hours of October 25, had been practically annihilated by the U.S. 7th Fleet. Kurita consequently turned back from his rendezvous in Leyte Gulf; and the Japanese defeat in the war’s greatest naval confrontation was sealed by Ozawa’s losses to Halsey: all of his four carriers, together with a light cruiser and two destroyers. The Japanese Navy’s “Sho-Go” as it transpired in the Battle of Leyte Gulf had not only failed to inflict serious damage on the Americans but had resulted in serious losses for the Japanese. These losses amounted to three battleships, one large aircraft carrier, three light carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, while the United States lost only one light carrier, two escort carriers, and three destroyers. The battle reduced the Japanese Navy to vestigial strength and cleared the way for the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.

Defeat in the gulf, however, did not prevent the Japanese from landing reinforcements on the west coast of Leyte. They put up so stubborn a resistance that the Americans themselves had to be reinforced before Ormoc fell on December 10, 1944; it was not before December 25 that the Americans could claim control of all Leyte—though there was still some mopping up to be done. Altogether, the defense of Leyte cost the Japanese some 75,000 combatants killed or taken prisoner.

World War II: invasion of Mindoro, Philippines

World War II: invasion of Mindoro, Philippines

From Leyte the Americans proceeded first, on December 15, to the invasion of Mindoro, the largest of the islands immediately south of Luzon. Kamikaze counterattacks made this conquest more costly; and they were to be continued after the Americans had surprised the Japanese by landing, on January 9, 1945, at Lingayen Gulf on the west coast of Luzon itself, the most important island of the Philippines. The local Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Yamashita Tomoyuki, with no hope of reinforcement, opted for tying the enemy forces down as long as possible by a static defense in three mountainous sectors—west, northwest, and east of the Central Plains behind Manila.

World War II: Allied forces recaptured Manila, Philippines

World War II: Allied forces recaptured Manila, Philippines

Manila itself was also strongly defended by the Japanese. One U.S. corps, however, was approaching it from Lingayen over the Central Plains; a second corps was landed at Subic Bay, at the northern end of the Bataan Peninsula, on January 29, 1945, to make contact with the former corps at Dinalupihan a week later; and troops made an amphibious landing at Nasugbu, south of Manila Bay, on January 31. Manila was then invested, and during the siege the bay was cleared by the occupation of the southern tip of Bataan Peninsula on February 15 and by the reduction of Corregidor Island in the following fortnight. On March 3 Manila fell at last to the Americans.

The Japanese resistance on Luzon continued in the mountains, and east of Manila it went on until mid-June 1945. Mindanao, meanwhile, was likewise being reduced. A U.S. division landed at Zamboanga, on the southwestern peninsula, on March 10, 1945, and a corps began the occupation of the core of the island on April 17.

The last phase of the U.S. campaign in the Philippines coincided with the opening of the reconquest of Borneo from the Japanese, chiefly by Australian forces. Tarakan Island, off the northeast coast, was invaded on May 1; Brunei on the northwest coast was invaded on June 10; and Balikpapan, on the east coast far to the south of Tarakan, was attacked on July 1. The subsequent collapse of the Japanese defenses around Balikpapan deprived Japan of the oil supplies of southern Borneo.

Burma and China, October 1944–May 1945

Chiang Kai-shek’s demand for the recall of the talented but abrasive Stilwell was satisfied in October 1944, and some reorganization of the Allies’ commands in Southeast Asia followed. While Lieutenant General Daniel Sultan took Stilwell’s place, Major General A.C. Wedemeyer became commander of U.S. forces in the China theatre and Sir Oliver Leese commander of the land forces under Mountbatten.

On the northern wing of the Burma front, a three-pronged drive by NCAC forces southward from Myitkyina to the Irrawaddy River had been planned by Stilwell. Launched under Sultan, the triple drive was at first only partially successful: the right took Indaw and Katha early in December and effected a junction with Slim’s British 14th Army, and the centre reached Shwegu, across the river; but the left, though it took Bhamo, was checked 60 miles west of Wan-t’ing. Sultan thereupon decided to push farther southward, both on the right against Kyaukme, on the Burma Road northeast of Mandalay, and on the left against Wan-t’ing. Threatened with envelopment, the Japanese fell back from Wan-t’ing, which Sultan’s troops promptly occupied. Convoys up the Burma Road from Wan-t’ing to K’un-ming were resumed on January 18, 1945.

For central Burma, meanwhile, Slim had thought, after his victory at Imphāl, that he must immediately seize the crossings of the Chindwin River at Sittaung and at Kalewa and then advance southward against Mandalay itself. He did indeed effect the Chindwin crossings, but in mid-December 1944 he saw that the Japanese were in any case going to withdraw altogether to the left bank of the Irrawaddy. Thereupon, he changed his plan: his objective should rather be Meiktila, which lay east of the Irrawaddy and was a vital centre of Japanese communications between Mandalay and Rangoon to the south. To conceal his new intention, he allowed one of the corps already directed against Mandalay to continue its eastward advance, but the other corps was surreptitiously moved over a circuitous route of 300 miles southward to Pakokku, which lay south of the Chindwin–Irrawaddy confluence and northwest of Meiktila. While the crossing of the Irrawaddy by the former corps on both sides of Mandalay distracted the attention of the Japanese, the latter corps took Meiktila on March 3, 1945, and held it against fierce counterattacks. Mandalay fell 10 days later, and the whole area was under the 14th Army’s control by the end of the month. When the action was over, two Japanese armies had lost one-third of their fighting strength.

It remained for Slim to capture the Burmese capital, Rangoon. Allied ground forces advanced on Rangoon along two routes from the north: one corps, having moved down the Sittang Valley east of the Irrawaddy, took Pegu; the other, moving down the river, took Prome (Pye). The monsoon, however, was imminent, and to forestall it a small combined operation was undertaken: parachute troops were dropped at Elephant Point, on the coast south of Rangoon, on May 1, 1945; and an Indian division, landing at Rangoon itself the next day, took the city without opposition, just when the monsoon rains were beginning to fall. The recapture of Burma was essentially complete with the taking of Rangoon.

The German offensive in the west, winter 1944–45

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Hitler still hoped to drive the Allies back and still adhered to his principle of concentrating on the war in the west. Late in 1944, therefore, he assembled on the Western Front all the manpower that had become available as a consequence of his second “total mobilization”: a decree of October 18 had raised a Volkssturm, or “home guard,” for the defense of the Third Reich, conscripting all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 years.

In mid-November all six Allied armies on the Western Front had launched a general offensive; but, though the French 1st Army and the U.S. 7th had reached the Rhine River in Alsace, there were only small gains on other sectors of the front. Meanwhile, the German defense was being continuously strengthened with hastily shifted reserves and with freshly raised forces, besides the troops that had managed to make their way back from France. The German buildup along the front was by now progressing faster than that of the Allies, despite Germany’s great inferiority of material resources. In mid-December 1944 the Germans gave the Allied armies a shock by launching a sizable counteroffensive. The Germans amassed 24 divisions for the attack. Under the overall command of the reinstated Rundstedt, this attack was to be delivered through the wooded hill country of the Ardennes against the weakest sector of the U.S.-manned front, between Monschau (southwest of Aachen) and Echternach (northwest of Trier). While the 5th Panzer Army on the left, under the talented commander General Hasso von Manteuffel, with its own left flank covered by the German 7th Army, was to wheel northwestward after the breakthrough and to cross the Meuse River of Namur in a drive on Brussels, the 6th Panzer Army on the right, under SS General Sepp Dietrich, was to wheel more sharply northward against the Allies’ important supply port of Antwerp. Thus, it was hoped, the British and Canadian forces at the northern end of the front could be cut off from their supplies and crushed, while the U.S. forces to the south were held off by the German left.

The offensive was prepared with skill and secrecy and was launched on December 16, 1944, at a time when mist and rain would minimize the effectiveness of counteraction from the air. The leading wedge of the attack by eight German armoured divisions along a 75-mile front took the Allies by surprise; and the 5th Panzer Army, which achieved the deeper penetration, reached points within 20 miles of the crossings of the Meuse River at Givet and at Dinant. U.S. detachments, however, stood firm, albeit outflanked, at Bastogne and at other bottlenecks in the Ardennes; and there followed what is popularly remembered as the Battle of the Bulge. By December 24 the German drive had narrowed but deepened, having penetrated about 65 miles into the Allied lines along a 20-mile front. But by this time the Allies had begun to respond. Montgomery, who had taken charge of the situation in the north, swung his reserves southward to forestall the Germans on the Meuse. Bradley, commanding the Allied forces south of the German wedge, sent his 3rd Army under Patton to the relief of Bastogne, which was accomplished on December 26. The weather cleared, and as many as 5,000 Allied aircraft began to bomb and strafe the German forces and their supply system. During January 8–16, 1945, the German attackers were compelled to withdraw, lest the salient that they had driven into the Allied front be cut off in its turn. Though their abortive offensive inflicted much damage and upset the Allies’ plans, the Germans spent too much of their strength on it and thereby forfeited whatever chance they had had of maintaining prolonged resistance later. The Germans sustained 120,000 casualties and the Americans sustained about 75,000 in the Battle of the Bulge.

The crisis made Hitler renounce any idea of pursuing his offensive in the west; but, despite Guderian’s advice, he switched the 6th Panzer Army not to Poland but to Hungary in an attempt to relieve Budapest. The Soviets could thus continue their advance through Poland for two more weeks. While Konev’s spearheads crossed the Oder River in the vicinity of Breslau (Wrocław) and thus cut Silesia’s important mineral resources off from Germany, Zhukov made a sweeping advance in the centre by driving forward from Warsaw, past Poznań, Bydgoszcz, and Toruń, to the frontiers of Brandenburg and of Pomerania. At the same time Rokossovsky pushed on, through Allenstein (Olsztyn), to the Gulf of Danzig, thus cutting off the 25 German divisions in East Prussia. To defend the yawning gap in the centre of the front, Hitler created a new army group and put Heinrich Himmler in command of it with a staff of favoured SS officers. Their fumbling helped to clear the path for Zhukov, whose mechanized forces by January 31, 1945, were at Küstrin, on the lower Oder, only 40 miles from Berlin.

Zhukov’s advance now came to a halt. Konev, however, could still make a northwesterly sweep down the left bank of the middle Oder, reaching Sommerfeld, 80 miles from Berlin, on February 13, and the Neisse River two days later. The Germans’ defense benefited from being driven back to the straight and shortened line formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers. This front, extending from the Baltic coast to the Bohemian frontier, was less than 200 miles long. The menace of the Soviets’ imminent approach to Berlin led Hitler to decide that most of his fresh drafts of troops must be sent to reinforce the Oder; the way was thus eased for the crossing of the Rhine River by the American and British armies.

On February 13, 1945, the Soviets took Budapest, the defense of which had entailed the Germans’ loss of Silesia.

Potsdam

Learn about the Potsdam Conference attended by Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin to decide the future of Germany and Europe after World War II

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The last inter-Allied conference of World War II, code-named “Terminal,” was held at the suburb of Potsdam, outside ruined Berlin, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. It was attended by the Soviet, U.S., and British heads of government and foreign ministers: respectively, Stalin and Molotov; President Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt’s successor) and James F. Byrnes; and Churchill and Anthony Eden, the last-named pair being replaced by Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin after Great Britain’s change of government following a general election.

Operations against Japan were discussed, and the successful testing of an atomic bomb in the United States was divulged to Stalin. Pending the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, a declaration was issued on July 26 calling on Japan to surrender unconditionally and forecasting the territorial spoliation of the empire and the military occupation of Japan proper as well as the prosecution of war criminals, yet still promising that the Japanese people would not be enslaved or the nation destroyed.

Time was spent discussing the peace settlement and its procedure. Stalin induced Truman and Attlee to consent provisionally to the Soviet Union’s demands that it should take one-third of Germany’s naval and merchant fleet; have the right to exact reparations from its occupied zones of Germany and of Austria and also from Finland, Hungary, Romania, and even Bulgaria; and should furthermore receive a percentage of reparation from the western-occupied zones. The total amounts of all these exactions were, however, to be determined at a later date.

There was a profound disagreement at the conference about the Balkan areas occupied by the Red Army in which representatives of the western powers were allowed little say, and about the area east of the Oder–Neisse line, all of which the Soviets had arbitrarily put under Polish administration. The western statesmen protested at these lone-handed arrangements but perforce accepted them.

The end of the Japanese war, February–September 1945

While the campaign for the Philippines was still in progress, U.S. forces were making great steps in the direct advance toward their final objective, the Japanese homeland. Aerial bombardment was, of course, the prerequisite of the projected invasion of Japan—which was to begin, it was imagined, with landings on Kyushu, the southernmost of the major Japanese islands.

Iwo Jima and the bombing of Tokyo

World War II: Iwo Jima

World War II: Iwo Jima

With U.S. forces firmly established in the Mariana Islands, the steady long-range bombing of Japan by B-29s under the command of General Curtis E. LeMay continued throughout the closing months of 1944 and into 1945. But it was still 1,500 miles from Saipan to Tokyo, a long flight even for the B-29s. Strategic planners therefore fixed their attention on the little volcanic island of Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, which lay about halfway between the Marianas and Japan. If Iwo Jima could be eliminated as a Japanese base, the island could then be immensely valuable as a base for U.S. fighter planes defending the big bombers.

injured U.S. Marines at the Battle of Iwo Jima

injured U.S. Marines at the Battle of Iwo Jima

The Japanese were determined to hold Iwo Jima. As they had done on other Pacific islands, they had created underground defenses there, making the best possible use of natural caves and the rough, rocky terrain. The number of Japanese defenders on the island, under command of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, was more than 20,000.

Battle of Iwo Jima

Battle of Iwo Jima

Day after day before the actual landing the island was subjected to intense bombardment by naval guns, by rockets, and by air strikes using napalm bombs. But the results fell far short of expectations. The Japanese were so well protected that no amount of conventional bombing or shelling could knock them out. U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, and encountered an obstinate resistance. Meanwhile, kamikaze counterattacks from the air sank the light carrier Bismarck Sea and damaged other ships; and, though the U.S. flag was planted on Mount Suribachi on February 23, the isle was not finally secured until March 16. Iwo Jima had cost the lives of 6,000 Marines, as well as the lives of nearly all the Japanese defenders; but in the next five months more than 2,000 B-29 bombers were able to land on it.

Meanwhile, a new tactic had been found for the bombing of Japan from bases in the Marianas. Instead of high-altitude strikes in daylight, which had failed to do much damage to the industrial centres attacked, low-level strikes at night, using napalm firebombs, were tried, with startling success. The first, in the night of March 9–10, 1945, against Tokyo, destroyed about 25 percent of the city’s buildings (most of them flimsily built of wood and plaster), killed more than 80,000 people, and made 1,000,000 homeless. This result indicated that Japan might be defeated without a massive invasion by ground troops, and so similar bombing raids on such major cities as Nagoya, Ōsaka, Kōbe, Yokohama, and Toyama followed. Japan literally was being bombed out of the war.

Okinawa

Plans for invasion, however, were not immediately discarded. Okinawa, largest of the Ryukyu Islands strung out northeastward from Taiwan, had been regarded as the last stepping-stone to be taken toward Kyushu, which was only 350 miles away from it. It had therefore been subjected to a series of air raids from October 1944, culminating in March 1945 in an attack that destroyed hundreds of Japanese planes; but there were still at least 75,000 Japanese troops on the island, commanded by Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru. The invasion of Okinawa was, in fact, to be the largest amphibious operation mounted by the Americans in the Pacific war.

U.S. Marines on Okinawa

U.S. Marines on Okinawa

Under the overall command of Nimitz, with Admiral Raymond Spruance in charge of the actual landings and with Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commanding the ground forces, the operation began with the occupation of the Kerama Islets, 15 miles west of Okinawa, on March 26, 1945. Five days later a landing was made on Keise-Jima, whence artillery fire could be brought to bear on Okinawa itself. Then, on April 1, some 60,000 U.S. troops landed on the central stretch of Okinawa’s west coast, seizing two nearby airfields and advancing to cut the island’s narrow waist. Koiso’s government in Tokyo resigned on April 5, and the U.S.S.R. on the same day refused to renew its treaty of nonaggression with Japan.

The first major counterattack on Okinawa by the Japanese, begun on April 6, involved not only 355 kamikaze air raids but also the Yamato, the greatest battleship in the world (72,000 tons, with nine 18.1-inch [460-millimetre] guns), which was sent out on a suicidal mission with only enough fuel for the single outward voyage and without sufficient air cover. The Japanese hoped the Yamato might finish off the Allied fleet after the latter had been weakened by kamikaze attacks. In the event, the Yamato was hit repeatedly by bombs and torpedoes and was sunk on April 7. Equally suicidal was a new Japanese weapon, baka, which claimed its first victim, the U.S. destroyer Abele, off Okinawa on April 12. Baka was a rocket-powered glider crammed with explosives which was towed into range by a bomber and was then released to be guided by its solitary pilot into the chosen target for their mutual destruction.

World War II: Okinawa

World War II: Okinawa

The U.S. ground forces invading Okinawa met little opposition on the beaches because Ushijima had decided to offer his main resistance inland, out of range of the enemy’s naval guns. In the southern half of the island this resistance was bitterest: it lasted until June 21, and Ushijima killed himself the next day. The campaign for Okinawa was ended officially on July 2. For U.S. troops it had been the longest and bloodiest Pacific campaign since Guadalcanal in 1942. Taking the island had cost the Americans 12,000 dead and 36,000 wounded, with 34 ships sunk and 368 damaged, and the Japanese losses exceeded 100,000 dead.

On April 3, 1945, two days after the first landing on Okinawa, the U.S. command in the Pacific was reorganized: MacArthur was henceforth to be in command of all army units and also in operational control of the U.S. Marines for the invasion of Japan; Nimitz was placed in command of all navy units.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Throughout July 1945 the Japanese mainlands, from the latitude of Tokyo on Honshu northward to the coast of Hokkaido, were bombed just as if an invasion was about to be launched. In fact, something far more sinister was in hand, as the Americans were telling Stalin at Potsdam.

Watch U.S. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay decimate Hiroshima with a nuclear bomb in the Pacific War

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World War II: total destruction of Hiroshima, Japan

World War II: total destruction of Hiroshima, Japan

In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the possibility of nuclear fission and had understood that the potential energy might be released in an explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s forestalling other states in the development of an atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941 and given joint responsibility with the war department in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. After four years of intensive and ever-mounting research and development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area near Alamogordo, New Mexico, generating an explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japan’s unsatisfactory response to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration decided the matter. (See Sidebar: The decision to use the atomic bomb.) On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from Tinian Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, at the southern end of Honshu: the combined heat and blast pulverized everything in the explosion’s immediate vicinity, generated fires that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and immediately killed some 70,000 people (the death toll passed 100,000 by the end of the year). A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number, and devastated 1.8 square miles.

The Japanese surrender

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News of Hiroshima’s destruction was only slowly understood in Tokyo. Many members of the Japanese government did not appreciate the power of the new Allied weapon until after the Nagasaki attack. Meanwhile, on August 8, the U.S.S.R. had declared war against Japan. The combination of these developments tipped the scales within the government in favour of a group that had, since the spring, been advocating a negotiated peace. On August 10 the Japanese government issued a statement agreeing to accept the surrender terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that the emperor’s position as a sovereign ruler would not be prejudiced. In their reply the Allies granted Japan’s request that the emperor’s sovereign status be maintained, subject only to their supreme commander’s directives. Japan accepted this proviso on August 14, and the emperor Hirohito urged his people to accept the decision to surrender. It was a bitter pill to swallow, though, and every effort was made to persuade the Japanese to accept the defeat that they had come to regard as unthinkable. Even princes of the Japanese Imperial house were dispatched to deliver the Emperor’s message in person to distant Japanese Army forces in China and in Korea, hoping thus to mitigate the shock. A clique of diehards nevertheless attempted to assassinate the new prime minister, Admiral Suzuki Kantarō; but by September 2, when the formal surrender ceremonies took place, the way had been smoothed.

Witness Douglas MacArthur offering surrender terms to imperial Japan aboard the battleship USS Missouri

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Truman designated MacArthur as the Allied powers’ supreme commander to accept Japan’s formal surrender, which was solemnized aboard the U.S. flagship Missouri in Tokyo Bay: the Japanese foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru, signed the document first, on behalf of the Emperor and his government. He was followed by General Umezu Yoshijiro on behalf of the Imperial General Headquarters. The document was then signed by MacArthur, Nimitz, and representatives of the other Allied powers. Japan concluded a separate surrender ceremony with China in Nanking on September 9, 1945. With this last formal surrender, World War II came to an end.

Costs of the war

Killed, wounded, prisoners, or missing

Learn about the horrible conditions of German and Soviet prisoners of war during World War II

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The statistics on World War II casualties are inexact. Only for the United States and the British Commonwealth can official figures showing killed, wounded, prisoners or missing for the armed forces be cited with any degree of assurance. For most other nations, only estimates of varying reliability exist. Statistical accounting broke down in both Allied and Axis nations when whole armies were surrendered or dispersed. Guerrilla warfare, changes in international boundaries, and mass shifts in population vastly complicated postwar efforts to arrive at accurate figures even for the total dead from all causes.

Witness the sinking of the German cruise liner MV Wilhelm Gustloff after the Soviet attack in the Baltic Sea

Witness the sinking of the German cruise liner MV Wilhelm Gustloff after the Soviet attack in the Baltic SeaSee all videos for this article

Civilian deaths from land battles, aerial bombardment, political and racial executions, war-induced disease and famine, and the sinking of ships probably exceeded battle casualties. These civilian deaths are even more difficult to determine, yet they must be counted in any comparative evaluation of national losses. There are no reliable figures for the casualties of the Soviet Union and China, the two countries in which casualties were undoubtedly greatest. Mainly for this reason, estimates of total dead in World War II vary anywhere from 35,000,000 to 60,000,000—a statistical difference of no small import. Few have ventured even to try to calculate the total number of persons who were wounded or permanently disabled.

However inexact many of the figures, their main import is clear. The heaviest proportionate human losses occurred in eastern Europe where Poland lost perhaps 20 percent of its prewar population, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union around 10 percent. German losses, of which the greater proportion occurred on the Eastern Front, were only slightly less severe. The nations of western Europe, however great their suffering from occupation, escaped with manpower losses that were hardly comparable with those of World War I. In East Asia, the victims of famine and pestilence in China are to be numbered in the millions, in addition to other millions of both soldiers and civilians who perished in battle and bombardment.

The table contains what appear to be the best available statistics on armed forces casualties of all types resulting from battle, of civilian deaths from war-related causes, and estimated total deaths in each of the major nations involved in World War II. Figures rounded to thousands (and this device has been employed in all cases for total deaths) are estimates of varying reliability while omissions in any category indicate that any estimate would be the wildest of conjectures. Estimated casualties of resistance movements have been included in military figures, other victims of Nazi persecution in the civilian ones. In the latter category fall about 5,700,000 Jews, more than half of them from Poland, who died in Nazi concentration and death camps.

World War II casualties

1Figures for deaths, insofar as possible, exclude those who died of natural causes or were suicides.   2As far as possible the figures in this column exclude those who died in captivity.   3Figures for all Commonwealth nations include those still missing in 1946, some of whom may be presumed dead.   4This figure comprises 60,595 killed in aerial bombardment, 30,248 in the merchant marine service, 624 in women's auxiliary services, and 1,206 in the Home Guard.   5The figures for China comprise casualties of the Chinese Nationalist forces during 1937–45, as reported in 1946, and do not include figures for local armies and communists. Estimates of 2,200,000 military dead and 22,000,000 civilian deaths appear in some compilations but are of doubtful accuracy.   6Czech military figures include only those who fought on the Allied side, not Sudeten Germans and others who served in the German army.   7Includes merchant marine personnel who served with Allies.   8French military casualties include those dead from all causes in the campaign of 1939–40, those of Free French, of rearmed French units that fought with Allies during 1942–45, and of French units that fought with Axis forces in Syria and North Africa during 1941–42 (1,200 dead).   9These figures released in 1946 are possibly too high. Merchant seamen are included with military dead.   10Military figures drawn from statement released by Polish government in 1946 and include casualties in the campaign of 1939, those of the underground, of Polish forces serving with British and Soviet armies, and those incurred in the Warsaw Uprising. Civilian casualty figures, which include 3,200,000 Jews, are based on this statement as modified by the calculations of population experts.   11Military figures include those of Army Ground and Air Forces and those of the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. There were an additional 115,187 deaths of U.S. servicemen from non-battle causes. Civilians listed in 1946 as dead or missing include 5,638 of the merchant marine service.   12Available estimates of Soviet casualties vary widely. A Soviet officer who served with the high command in Berlin and left the Soviet service in 1949 placed total military losses at 13,600,000—8,500,000 dead or missing in battle; 2,600,000 dead in prison camps; 2,500,000 died of wounds—and estimated civilian casualties at 7,000,000. These figures have been widely accepted in Germany, but most U.S. compilations, based on Soviet announcements, list 6,000,000 to 7,500,000 battle deaths. Calculations made on the basis of population distribution by age and sex in the 1959 U.S.S.R. census give some credence to the higher figures, for they seem to indicate losses of from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 males of military age in World War II. The figures used here are a compromise estimate, not intended to obscure the fact that Soviet casualties are, in reality, unknown in the West.   13Estimates based on fragmentary data.   14Military estimates include men from outside Germany who served with the German armed forces and are based on the assumption that about 1,000,000 of the 1,250,000 men still listed as missing in Soviet territory in 1955 were dead. In addition, perhaps 250,000 military personnel died of natural causes, committed suicide, or were executed. Civilian figures are for Germany and Austria only, and they do not include an estimated 2,384,000 German deaths during 1944–46 resulting from Soviet invasion and forced transfers of population in the eastern provinces given to Poland after the war.   15Figures for dead include those listed as still missing in compilation made by the Italian government in 1952 (131,419 military personnel and 3,651 civilians), but not 49,144 military deaths from natural causes or suicide. Known dead from enemy action amounted to 110,823, making a total of 159,957 military deaths from all causes if the missing are not included. Of this number, 92,767 occurred before the 1943 Armistice, 67,190 afterward.   16Based on an estimate of 1,600,000 total military deaths on the assumption that about half of those listed as missing in Soviet territory in 1949 were dead. About 300,000 of these probably resulted from causes not related to battle.

military

country killed, died of wounds, or in prison1 wounded prisoners

or

missing2 civilian deaths due to war estimated total deaths

Allied Powers

Belgium 12,000 — — 76,000 88,000

Brazil 943 4,222 — — 1,000

British Commonwealth 373,372 475,047 251,7243 92,673 466,000

  Australia

23,365 39,803 32,393 — 24,000

  Canada

37,476 53,174 10,888 — 38,000

  India

24,338 64,354 91,243 — —

  New Zealand

10,033 19,314 10,582 — 10,000

  South Africa

6,840 14,363 16,430 — 7,000

  United Kingdom

264,443 277,077 213,919 92,6734 357,000

  Colonies

6,877 6,972 22,323 — 7,000

China5 1,310,224 1,752,951 115,248 — —

Czechoslovakia6 10,000 — — 215,000 225,000

Denmark 1,800 — — 2,0007 4,000

France8 213,324 400,000 — 350,000 563,000

Greece9 88,300 — — 325,000 413,000

Netherlands 7,900 2,860 — 200,000 208,000

Norway 3,000 — — 7,000 10,000

Poland10 123,178 236,606 420,760 5,675,000 5,800,000

Philippines 27,000 — — 91,000 118,000

United States11 292,131 671,801 139,709 6,000 298,000

U.S.S.R.12 11,000,000 — — 7,000,000 18,000,000

Yugoslavia 305,000 425,000 — 1,200,000 1,505,000

Axis Powers

Bulgaria13 10,000 — — 10,000 20,000

Finland 82,000 50,000 — 2,000 84,000

Germany14 3,500,000 5,000,000 3,400,000 780,000 4,200,000

Hungary13 200,000 — 170,000 290,000 490,000

Italy15 242,232 66,000 350,000 152,941 395,000

Japan 1,300,00016 4,000,000 810,000 672,000 1,972,000

Romania13 300,000 — 100,000 200,000 500,000

Human and material cost

Learn about Allied and Axis leaders, the Allied invasion of Normandy, and the dropping of atomic bombs

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There can be no real statistical measurement of the human and material cost of World War II. The money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000,000 but this figure cannot represent the human misery, deprivation, and suffering, the dislocation of peoples and of economic life, or the sheer physical destruction of property that the war involved.

Europe

The Nazi overlords of occupied Europe drained their conquered territories of resources to feed the German war machine. Industry and agriculture in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were forced to produce to meet German needs with a resulting deprivation of their own peoples. Italy, though at first a German ally, fared no better. The resources of the occupied territories in eastern Europe were even more ruthlessly exploited. Millions of able-bodied men and women were drained away to perform forced labour in German factories and on German farms. The whole system of German economic exploitation was enforced by cruel and brutal methods, and the guerrilla resistance it aroused was destructive in itself and provoked German reprisals that were even more destructive, particularly in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the occupied portions of the Soviet Union.

Great Britain, which escaped the ravages of occupation, suffered heavily from the German aerial blitz of 1940–41 and later from V-bombs and rockets. On the other side, German cities were leveled by Allied bombers, and in the final invasion of Germany from both east and west there was much retaliatory devastation, destruction, and pillage.

The destruction of physical plant was immense and far exceeded that of World War I, when it was largely confined to battle areas. France estimated the total cost at an amount equivalent to three times the total French annual national income. Belgium and the Netherlands suffered damage roughly in similar proportions to their resources. In Great Britain about 30 percent of the homes were destroyed or damaged; in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands about 20 percent. Agriculture in all the occupied countries suffered heavily from the destruction of facilities and farm animals, the lack of machinery and fertilizers, and the drain on manpower. Internal transport systems were completely disrupted by the destruction or confiscation of railcars, locomotives, and barges, and the bombing of bridges and key rail centres. By 1945 the economies of the continental nations of western Europe were in a state of virtually complete paralysis.

In eastern Europe the devastation was even worse. Poland reported 30 percent of its buildings destroyed, as well as 60 percent of its schools, scientific institutions, and public administration facilities, 30–35 percent of its agricultural property, and 32 percent of its mines, electrical power, and industries. Yugoslavia reported 20.7 percent of its dwellings destroyed. In the battlegrounds of the western portion of the Soviet Union, the destruction was even more complete. In Germany itself, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that in 49 of the largest cities, 39 percent of the dwelling units were destroyed or seriously damaged. Central business districts had generally been reduced to rubble, leaving only suburban rings standing around a destroyed core.

View the mass migration of German refugees, as the Soviet army advances into East Prussia, January 12, 1945

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Witness struggles of Europeans lacking food and shelter after World War II

Witness struggles of Europeans lacking food and shelter after World War IISee all videos for this article

Discover the life of the refugees and displaced people migrating from East to West Germany after World War II

Discover the life of the refugees and displaced people migrating from East to West Germany after World War IISee all videos for this article

Millions throughout Europe were rendered homeless. There were an estimated 21,000,000 refugees, more than half of them “displaced persons” who had been deported from their homelands to perform forced labour. Other millions who had remained at home were physically exhausted by five years of strain, suffering, and undernourishment. The roads of Europe were swamped by refugees all through 1945 and into 1946 as more than 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers returned eastward to their homeland and more than 8,000,000 Germans fled or were evacuated westward out of the Soviet-occupied portions of Germany. Millions of other persons of almost every European nationality also returned to their own countries or emigrated to new homes in other lands.

The Far East

The devastation of World War II in China was inflicted on a country that was already suffering from the economic ills of overpopulation, underdevelopment, and a half-century of war, political disunity, and unrest. The territory occupied by Japanese forces was roughly equivalent to that occupied by the Axis in Europe and the period of occupation was longer. That area of China unoccupied by the Japanese was virtually cut off from the outside world after the Japanese conquest of Burma in early 1942, and its economy continually tottered on the brink of collapse. In both areas, famines, epidemics, and civil unrest were recurrent, much farmland was flooded, and millions of refugees fled their homes, some several times. Cities, towns, and villages were laid waste by aerial bombardment and marching armies. The transportation system, poor to begin with, was thoroughly disrupted. Most of the limited number of hospitals and health institutions in China were destroyed or lost.

In India famine was recurrent, and the Indian economy was severely strained to support the burden the Allied military authorities placed upon it. The Philippines suffered from three years of Japanese occupation and exploitation and from the destruction wrought in the reconquest of the islands by the Americans in 1944–45. The harbour at Manila was wrecked by the retreating Japanese, and many portions of the city were demolished by bombardment.

In Japan the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found the damage to urban centres comparable to that in Germany. In the aggregate, 40 percent of the built-up areas of 66 Japanese cities was destroyed, and approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the peculiar and lasting damage done by atomic explosion and radiation.

  • Condition: In Excellent Condition
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  • Modification Description: WW2
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