The Allies land in Italy. But the Germans move in to hold up any sustained advance. Germany loses the initiative on the Eastern Front and is forced into full retreat by the Red Army. Bitter jungle fighting finally earns the Allies a decisive victory over the Japanese in Burma. The Allies launched the amphibious invasion of Europe on 6 June in Normandy.
They also landed in southern France in August. These operations coincided with a huge Red Army offensive in Eastern Europe that dealt a crushing blow to the Germans.
The Allies' airborne attack aimed at securing a crossing of the Rhine is defeated. Germany's last offensive in the west, a counter-attack in the Ardennes aimed at dividing the advancing Allies, fails. The Red Army captures the German capital. The Allies meet the Russians at the River Elbe shortly after. The Allies pushed into western Germany in February On 25 April, the Red Army entered Berlin. Five days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and the Soviets captured the German parliament building, the Reichstag.
After another Allied breakthrough in Italy, German forces there surrendered on 2 May. This led to the occupation and division of Germany. Commonwealth troops continue to force the Japanese back in Burma. At the same time, US forces seize key Japanese-held islands, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and attempt to destroy enemy cities and industry through firebombing. The United States drops atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing mass destruction and loss of life.
The Red Army also invades Japanese territories between the bombings. The Japanese agree to unconditional surrender on 15 August. Their official surrender document is signed on 2 September , ending the war. Over 65 million people died during the Second World War. The majority were civilians killed by strategic aerial bombing, man-made famine and genocide. The Axis thereafter became the collective term for those countries and their allies.
Hitler launched his own expansionist drive with the annexation of Austria in March The U. In September Hitler threatened war to annex the western border area of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland and its 3. Less than six months later, in March , Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. France already had a mutual defense treaty with Poland.
The turn away from appeasement brought the Soviet Union to the fore. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had offered military help to Czechoslovakia during the crisis, but had been ignored by all the parties to the Munich Agreement. Now that war threatened, he was courted by both sides, but Hitler made the more attractive offer.
Allied with Britain and France, the Soviet Union might well have had to fight, but all Germany asked for was its neutrality. In the part published the next day, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to go to war against each other. The costs of carrying out World War I, as well as the costs to rebuild Western Europe after years of fighting, resulted in enormous debts on the part of the Western European powers to the United States.
The enormous reparations put on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles also increased the debts. Coupled with ineffective governments in many of these European States notably the Weinmar Republic, pre-Mussolini Italy and Socialist France led to slow reconstruction and poor economic growth. Unable to repay these loans, the economies of the West collapsed, beginning the Great Depression.
After winning the Russo-Japanese War in , Japan quickly became the dominant power in its region. Russia recognized Korea as a Japanese sphere of influence and removed all of its forces from there and Manchuria, the sparsely populated northeastern region of China.
In , Japan annexed Korea as its own with little protest or resistance. Still, Japan was a quickly growing country, both population-wise and economically. It founded the South Manchuria Railway company in Manchuria in , and with that company was able to gain government-like control of the area.
By , the Depression had struck a blow to Japan. Instead, the public favored the Japanese army, and soon the civilian government had lost control of its military. Manchuria was vast and thinly populated, and would serve as excellent elbow room for an already overcrowded Japan.
It was also thought that Manchuria was rich in forests, natural resources, and fertile land. The fact that the Japanese believed themselves to be far superior to the Chinese only moved Japan towards conflict faster.
Additionally, the warlord of Manchuria went against Japanese expectations and declared his allegiance to a growing Chinese military movement. So, in , the army staged an explosion at a section of railway near Mukden, a city in Manchuria, as a pretext to invade and annex China. But they're really controlled like a puppet by someone else. And in this case it is the Empire of Japan. And we do remember what is happening in China in the s.
China is embroiled in a civil war. So there is a civil war going on in China. The Kuomintang led by general Chiang Kai-shek. And so they're in the midst of the civil war. So you can imagine Imperial Japan is taking advantage of this to take more and more control over parts of China And that continues through the 30s until we get to And in the Japanese use some pretext with, you know, kind of a false flag, kind of While, some of them say, ok this is the beginning of the Asian Theater of World War II of the all-out war between Japan and China, but it isn't until Germany invades Poland in that you truly have the formal beginning, so to speak, of World War II.
Regardless of whether you consider this the formal beginning or not, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and it's called the second because there was another Sino-Japanese War in the late s that was called the First Sino-Japanese War, this is incredibly, incredibly brutal and incredibly bloody a lot of civilians affected we could do a whole series of videos just on that But at this point it does become all-out war and this causes the civil war to take a back seat to fighting off the aggressor of Japan in And now let's also remind ourselves what's happening As we go through the s Hitler's Germany, the Nazi Party, is getting more and more militaristic.
And so with that in mind the balance of force in Europe in looks extremely ominous, because British rearmament is beginning with real intensity from the beginning of Indeed, on the contrary, he was someone who knew that the odds were stacked against his own country — and yet still wanted violent conflict.
Someone prepared to gamble the future lives of millions of his people on the chance that the Germans could win a swift, decisive war.
Someone who believed with all his heart in a deeply pessimistic view of the human spirit. If only we had been partners we could have ruled the world together! Such a partnership was a fantasy, of course. Not only could Britain never have stood by and seen Hitler enslave mainland Europe, but it was obvious by the spring of that the Nazis could not be trusted to keep to any agreement they signed.
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