World War II
Beginning with Germany's invasion of Poland, the largest war in human history was fought across Europe, Asia and the Pacific.
After the Great Depression (1929) totalitarian movements — fascism and militarism — gained ground in Germany, Italy and Japan. Japan invaded China with the Manchurian Incident (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937), while Hitler’s Germany tore up the Treaty of Versailles, rearmed, annexed Austria and seized Czechoslovakia. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
With Blitzkrieg tactics Germany overran France and in 1941 invaded the Soviet Union; in December of the same year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, starting the Pacific War. The conflict became a world war between the Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan and the Allies led by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China. The battles of Midway and Stalingrad in 1942–1943 marked the turning point, and the Allies went on the offensive.
After the Normandy landings in 1944, Germany surrendered in May 1945. In August atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan, which surrendered and signed the instrument of surrender on 2 September. Some fifty to seventy million soldiers and civilians are estimated to have died, and Nazi Germany murdered about six million Jews in the Holocaust.
After the war the United Nations was founded, the Cold War led by the United States and the Soviet Union began, and colonies across Asia and Africa won independence one after another. Korea was liberated by Japan’s defeat, but as American and Soviet troops occupied the peninsula on either side of the 38th parallel it set out on the road to division.