3.7.World War II

Lesson 24/30 | Study Time: 20 Min

Course: World History

3.7.World War II

World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries

# The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan

#The Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China.

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 westeAlong with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geo-political 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. Secret negotiations led on August 23–24 to the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow.

In 1946 former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill vividly described an “Iron Curtain” separating West and East, with both sides on the precipice of another massive conflict, now including atomic weapons.

No one wanted war, but the power vacuums in defeated countries and the struggle to control their future made peace hard to maintain. What observers called a “Cold War” emerged as the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to rebuild the places destroyed by the war.

Britain and France lost most of their empires due to World War II. Germany, Italy, and Japan were conquered and occupied.

The Soviet Union lost its most productive citizens—more than twenty million died in the war