This entry is a subentry of World War II (1939 – 45).
Officially, the United States remained neutral during the first two years of World War II and did not enter the conflict until December 1941, when it was forced to do so in response to both the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a German declaration of war. In reality, however, it became an unofficial belligerent and ally of England in mid‐1940, and by the fall of 1941 it was engaged in an undeclared naval war with Germany.
The fundamental reason for this shift in U.S. policy was the series of dramatic German military victories in the spring of 1940, culminating in the June conquest of France. The speed and totality of these victories, largely the result of a very effective use of mechanized forces and airpower commonly referred to as Blitzkrieq, or “lightning war,” led many Americans to question their traditional belief that the Atlantic Ocean constituted a defensive moat that freed them from concern with the European balance of power and provided extensive time to prepare for any threat. German power now appeared to pose such a threat, one capable of crossing the Atlantic at will and easily defeating the meager U.S. military forces then in existence.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a twofold response to this perceived menace: national rearmament and sufficient aid to maintain British resistance and thereby keep the Germans preoccupied in Europe. Congress quickly agreed to rearmament with the first peacetime conscription and billion‐dollar defense bills in U.S. history, but aid to England aroused much more controversy. Consequently, Roosevelt used his executive powers in September to transfer fifty overage destroyers to Britain in return for ninety‐nine‐year leases on British bases in the western hemisphere, and justified the agreement as a net strategic gain.
British prime minister Winston S. Churchill soon made clear that such aid was insufficient, however, and that Britain was running out of money to purchase American supplies. Roosevelt responded in December 1940 by proposing that Congress agree to lend or lease London extensive war material on the grounds that England constituted the first line of American defense and that its continued survival could preclude U.S. entry into the war. His critics maintained that such unneutral activities would bring about U.S. entry, but in March 1941 they were outvoted as Congress passed the Lend‐Lease Act and Agreements.
Determined to force a favorable end to the Sino‐Japanese War that had been raging since 1937 and achieve hegemony in the Far East, Japan during this time period decided to take advantage of the German victories by extending its influence into the European colonies of Southeast Asia. The British, French, and Dutch authorities were powerless to act against Tokyo due to the military events in Europe, but the United States responded with economic sanctions and the movement of its fleet to Hawaii. Japan in turn responded with the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, a defensive military alliance asserting that an attack by a present neutral on one of them would be considered an attack on all. In actuality, this pact was a diplomatic bluff, never supported by actual military collaboration, to scare the United States out of assistance to England or China via the threat of a two‐front war. It failed to do even that, however, and in effect only hardened the American opposition to all three nations while convincing U.S. strategists of the need to plan for a two‐front, global war against all three Axis powers.
This thought had actually begun to dominate U.S. strategic planning as early as 1939 with the inception of the RAINBOW war plans. Yet throughout that year and most of 1940, attention had centered on continental and hemispheric defense. Then in late 1940, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold E. Stark proposed in his “Plan Dog” memorandum that the United States focus instead on a scenario in which it would be allied with England and would concentrate its forces in the Atlantic/European theater to defeat Germany first, while assuming the strategic defensive against Japan. Secret Anglo‐American staff conversations in Washington during early 1941 led to agreement in the so‐called ABC‐1 accord, and then the revised U.S. RAINBOW 5 plan, that this would constitute Anglo‐American global strategy should the two powers find themselves at war with the Axis.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 only reinforced the validity of this strategic approach while providing Britain and the United States with another ally, albeit one perceived as weak and not to be trusted. Nevertheless, Churchill and Roosevelt quickly welcomed Soviet leader Josef Stalin and promised him material assistance. In July, Moscow and London signed an accord pledging mutual assistance and no separate peace. Then, in August, Churchill and Roosevelt met off the coast of Newfoundland in their first wartime summit conference and issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of lofty war aims focusing on national self‐determination and eschewing any territorial desires.
Roosevelt still refused to commit the United States to entering the conflict, however, or even to convoying Lend‐Lease material to England. Yet he did create a de facto convoy system via the gradual extension of his definition of the western hemisphere “security zone,” including the occupation of Greenland in April and Iceland in July, and naval cooperation with the British fleet. By September this had resulted in a German U‐boat attack upon the U.S. destroyer Greer and a subsequent presidential “shoot on sight” order against German submarines. By late November, Congress had agreed to requested revisions of the U.S. Neutrality Acts that enabled Roosevelt to send Lend‐Lease supplies on armed and escorted U.S. merchant vessels, and the United States found itself engaged in a full‐scale if undeclared naval war with German submarines in the Atlantic.
War officially came in the Pacific when Japan responded to increasing U.S. economic sanctions, including a total freeze in the summer on Japanese assets, with a decision to go to war against Britain and the United States in an effort to obtain economic self‐sufficiency before the sanctions crippled its warmaking potential. The 7 December surprise naval air attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to remove the naval threat to the flank of the Japanese invasion forces moving into the resource‐rich Southeast Asia, thereby assuring military victory. It did so, but at the cost of infuriating the American people and guaranteeing Japan the unlimited war it could not win instead of the limited, colonial war it desired.
Adolf Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States three days later formally globalized the conflict. It also enabled Roosevelt and Churchill to reaffirm their “Germany First” strategy during the ensuing Arcadia summit conference in Washington. At that conference, they further agreed to the creation of a Combined Chiefs of Staff organization to run the global war and report directly to them; additional combined boards to meld their war efforts; full unity of command of all British and American land, naval, and air forces in all theaters; specific priorities for those theaters; and a combined Anglo‐American invasion of French North Africa (Gymnast) in 1942. In March 1942, they further agreed to a global division of responsibility whereby the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) assumed primary responsibility for the Pacific and the British chiefs for the Middle East, while the European theater remained a combined responsibility.
The Arcadia decisions would create a very special and unparalleled wartime relationship between Britain and the United States within the framework of a larger coalition. That so‐called Grand Alliance officially came into existence on 1 January 1942, when all the nations at war with any of the Axis powers signed the Declaration of the United Nations, pledging themselves to military victory and the creation of a postwar world based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Union insisted upon retaining the Baltic States and portions of Poland and Romania that it had obtained as a result of the 1939 Ribbentrop‐Molotov Pact, however, and in meetings with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in December, Stalin pressed for recognition of this frontier shift as well as other postwar territorial agreements. Eden was ready to consider such accords as a means of strengthening the alliance, but Roosevelt disagreed vehemently. Remembering the disastrous impact of the World War I secret treaties, he feared that territorial discussions would lead to acrimony within the alliance and endanger public support for the war effort; consequently, postponement of all such discussions would remain a fundamental U.S. policy until 1945.
The Arcadia decisions were accompanied and followed by a series of Allied military defeats, which called into question the very survival of the coalition and some of its members. In the Pacific, Japanese forces quickly destroyed all Allied resistance and conquered the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines, and Burma. They also appeared capable of conquering India as well as Australia and New Zealand, and of forcing a Chinese withdrawal from the war. In Libya and Egypt, German forces under Gen. Erwin Rommel advanced to within sixty miles of Alexandria and striking distance of the Suez Canal by June 1942. Simultaneously, German forces in Russia, checked in December for the first time in front of Moscow, now launched an offensive in the south that brought them to the Caucasus oil fields and Stalingrad on the Volga River. A complete Soviet collapse was widely predicted.
The American military response to these defeats was to propose the strategic defensive in all theaters except Europe and the immediate concentration of all available Anglo‐American forces in England for a cross‐Channel invasion in late 1942 or early 1943 in order to relieve the hard‐pressed Red Army and prevent its collapse, as well as to force the Germans into a two‐front war. Roosevelt concurred in March and Churchill in April, but in June the prime minister came to Washington once again and argued that the Channel could not be successfully crossed in 1942; rather than remain idle, Anglo‐American forces should invade French North Africa, as originally planned during the Arcadia Conference, and in conjunction with a British offensive in Egypt trap Rommel's forces. The JCS objected vehemently to such a strategic shift, and the conference ended inconclusively. A few weeks later, however, London vetoed cross‐Channel operations in 1942 and pressed for a North African substitute. Intent upon some 1942 offensive to bolster both public opinion and Soviet morale, Roosevelt concurred, and in mid‐July sent his dissenting military advisers to London for a second time to reach accord. The result was an Anglo‐American agreement to invade North Africa instead of northern France in the fall of 1942 (Torch).
Stalin, however, had been promised a cross‐Channel operation. Indeed, Roosevelt had used this operation as a means of obtaining Soviet agreement not to press for any territorial agreements during the negotiations that led to the Anglo‐Soviet Alliance of May 1942. Churchill therefore flew to Moscow in August to inform Stalin personally of the shift in Anglo‐American plans for 1942. Simultaneously, he promised a large cross‐Channel operation in 1943. With German forces at the gates of Stalingrad, the Soviet leader's response was frosty at best.
So, too, was the response of the JCS. From their perspective, Torch was a dangerous diversion and part of a badly flawed, politically inspired, peripheral strategy. Roosevelt had forced them to agree to it, but they now fought to limit its scope and free resources for Asia and the Pacific, where Japanese successes had created political as well as military crises. Most notable in this regard were continued Japanese movements into the South Pacific to cut Allied lines of communication to Australia and New Zealand, leading to pleas for assistance from those two governments and threats to remove their forces from the Middle East. Equally if not more ominous were warnings from Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai‐shek that collapse was imminent unless additional U.S. aid was forthcoming. Such aid was quickly sent and temporarily quieted the crisis on the mainland. The Pacific crisis, however, would lead to a series of major battles.
In the spring of 1942, U.S. forces had first succeeded in blunting the Japanese Pacific threat in two pivotal naval air engagements. The Battle of the Coral Sea on 7–8 May, the first naval battle in which the opposing fleets did not even see each other, was tactically a draw but strategically a U.S. victory since the Japanese Navy halted its southern advance. The Battle of Midway on 4 June was a much more decisive victory, one of the most decisive of the war and of naval history in general. Rather than surprising and destroying the remnants of the U.S. Fleet as planned, the Japanese were themselves surprised as U.S. forces broke their naval code and destroyed 4 of their aircraft carriers as well as 253 planes. Tokyo was never able to recover from this loss of capital ships, aircraft, and trained pilots. Nevertheless, Japanese forces continued their advance southward by launching a land offensive along the northeastern coast of New Guinea and by seizing Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomons astride the U.S.‐Australian lines of communication. Finding this intolerable, the JCS ordered the retaking of these islands at the same time the British were vetoing cross‐Channel operations and proposing the North African substitute.
The fall of 1942 witnessed the end result of all these decisions—a series of major battles and campaigns that, taken together, constitute what is usually referred to as the “turning point” of the war. In October, British Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery defeated Rommel at El Alamein and forced the latter to retreat westward. A few weeks later, on 8 November, combined Anglo‐American forces under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower invaded Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers in French North Africa, secured French surrender, and drove eastward toward Tunisia, effectively trapping Rommel. Simultaneously, Australian, New Zealand, and U.S. forces halted the Japanese offensive on New Guinea and counterattacked while U.S. forces took Guadalcanal and in a six‐month campaign of attrition succeeded in holding it against numerous Japanese counterattacks. In November, the Red Army counterattacked and succeeded in first isolating and then forcing the January surrender of the entire German Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Taken together, these victories ended all Axis hopes of total victory and gave the strategic initiative to the Allies. The Axis still controlled enormous populations, resources, and territory, however, and their defeat was far from secured or predetermined. Indeed, Allied forces were badly dispersed in numerous theaters, and future military stalemate remained a distinct possibility.
In January 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers met once again to plan future strategy, this time in the recently captured Casablanca. Once again the British were able to win American acquiescence in their strategy, now in the form of an invasion of Sicily (Husky) after Rommel had been cleared from Tunisia and the probable postponement of cross‐Channel operations until 1944. In return, the Americans under the prodding of naval chief Adm. Ernest J. King insisted that more attention be given to the war against Japan, both in the Pacific and via operations in Burma to reopen supply lines to China. Both nations further agreed that first priority had to be given to the war against German submarines in the Atlantic, and that a combined bomber offensive should be launched against Germany from the United Kingdom.
The Casablanca Conference is best known not for these strategic decisions, but for Roosevelt's announcement at a press conference of the Allied policy of “Unconditional Surrender.” Actually, this had long been the unstated policy of and lowest common denominator within the Grand Alliance. Roosevelt verbalized it on this occasion for multiple political reasons: to reassure Stalin in the continued absence of a second front; to reassure Chiang in the continued absence of a major military effort in the China theater; and to reassure British and American public opinion in the aftermath of controversial compromises that Eisenhower had made with the Vichy French official, Adm. Jean Darlan, in North Africa. In doing so, however, Roosevelt made Unconditional Surrender the official Allied policy and thereby indirectly reinforced his own policy of postponing territorial issues until war's end.
Anglo‐American forces in 1943 obtained most of the objectives outlined at Casablanca, albeit not as rapidly as anticipated nor with the decisive results desired. Simultaneously, and to an extent consequently, serious military and political disputes arose once again within the Grand Alliance and threatened to disrupt the coalition. These disputes were successfully resolved in a series of high‐level conferences at year's end, thereby establishing both an agreed‐upon strategy for the duration of the war and a framework for establishing a postwar peace.
The greatest Allied successes in 1943 were on the eastern front and in the Atlantic. In July, Soviet intelligence enabled the Red Army to prepare for and halt, in the largest tank battle of the war, Hitler's thrust at the Kursk salient; German forces never recovered from the ensuing destruction of their armor. Simultaneously, Anglo‐American forces made effective use of their own intelligence breakthroughs, most notably cryptographic intercepts from the Enigma Machine (ULTRA), as well as new naval and air tactics to turn the tide against German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic. In other areas, however, Anglo‐American successes were far more limited.
Unable to reconcile U.S. precision daylight bombing with British nighttime area bombing, the Combined Chiefs of Staff in effect allowed each nation to pursue its favored approach simultaneously under the umbrella of the Combined Bomber Offensive. While German cities were devastated and civilian casualties mounted, this controversial campaign also resulted in very high Allied casualties and destroyed neither German industrial capacity nor the civilian will to resist. In that sense it was a failure and revealed serious shortcomings in the strategic bombing concept. It did force the German Luftwaffe into an extensive war of attrition, however, one it could not win due to the enormous U.S. productive capacity. The result would be complete Anglo‐American control of the air by the time their forces invaded France in June 1944.
In Tunisia, Rommel in February 1943 was able to inflict a stinging defeat on the still green U.S. forces at Kasserine Pass. The Germans were soon overwhelmed by British forces under Montgomery coming from the south and the revived American forces under Gen. George S. Patton and Gen. Omar N. Bradley coming from the west, however, and on 13 May they surrendered in Tunis. Then, on 10 July, Anglo‐American forces under Eisenhower's overall command successfully invaded Sicily. Consequently, the Italians deposed Benito Mussolini and began secret peace negotiations that culminated in a 3 September surrender. Simultaneously, Eisenhower's forces invaded the toe and heel of the Italian “boot” and Salerno just below Naples.
In the Pacific, U.S. naval forces completed their victory at Guadalcanal and moved up the chain of Solomon Islands, while Gen. Douglas MacArthur's forces stopped the Japanese advance in New Guinea and in a series of “leapfrogging” moves along the northern coast dealt Japanese forces a series of stinging defeats. By year's end these dual lines of advance had isolated the major Japanese base at Rabaul and precluded the necessity of a costly invasion. Where to go next aroused heated controversy. Reverting to their prewar ORANGE war plan, naval planners called for a major thrust across the central Pacific toward Formosa. MacArthur disagreed and argued instead for a major offensive in his Southwest Pacific theater aimed at liberation of the Philippines. The JCS temporarily resolved this dispute by sanctioning both offensives, a resolution made possible by U.S. productive capacity and the subsequent availability of resources, with the final territorial objectives remaining undetermined. While MacArthur's forces continued their leapfrogging along the New Guinea coast, U.S. naval and Marine forces under Adm. Chester Nimitz began their central Pacific advance in November with bloody but successful assaults on Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands. The availability of resources did not extend to Southeast Asia, however, and the Burma invasion had to be canceled.
While American preoccupation with the Pacific deeply disturbed the British, their own preoccupation with the Mediterranean at the expense of cross‐Channel operations deeply upset the Americans. This strategic disagreement was heatedly debated and compromised during the May Trident and August Quadrant summit conferences in Washington and Quebec. At these meetings, the Americans agreed to the Italian campaign but only within limits that would allow for a May 1944 cross‐Channel assault (Overlord) under an American commander. In September and October, Churchill requested additional delays in the movement of landing craft and troops from the Mediterranean to England so as to take advantage in the Aegean of the Italian surrender, reinforce Eisenhower's forces in the wake of Hitler's rescue of Mussolini and decision to hold the Italian peninsula, and break the resulting military stalemate south of Rome.
Along with this Anglo‐American conflict came continuing problems with the Chinese due to the cancellation of the Burma operation and a very serious split with the Soviets over both Poland and cross‐Channel operations. In April 1943, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government‐in‐exile, supposedly over Polish demands for investigation of the recently revealed Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers, but actually due to Polish refusal to cede eastern Poland to Russia. Less than two months later, Stalin angrily denounced the further postponement of cross‐Channel operations until 1944. Secret low‐level German‐Soviet contacts took place during the spring, but without any concrete results. By the summer, separate peace rumors were filling the air.
All of these conflicts were resolved in a series of high‐level Allied conferences held between October and December 1943. The first of these was the Tripartite Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow, during which the British and Americans reaffirmed their intention to cross the Channel in the spring of 1944 and the Soviets responded with formal agreement to the Unconditional Surrender policy, Allied occupation of Germany, and a postwar collective security organization. Then, in November, Roosevelt met with Chiang as well as Churchill in Cairo and mollified the former with promises of an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal as well as postwar return of territory and equality as a great power. Immediately thereafter, Roosevelt and Churchill flew to Teheran for the first “Big Three” meeting, during which Roosevelt and Stalin finally forced Churchill to abandon additional Mediterranean campaigns and agree to lanch Overlord across the Channel in May 1944, with forces in Italy shifted to a supporting invasion of southern France (Anvil). Stalin in turn promised a simultaneous Soviet offensive in the east and entry into the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated. Informal political talks also took place, most notably over a possible shift in Polish boundaries westward and the future status of Germany. Churchill and Roosevelt then returned to Cairo for yet another conference, during which the Burma operation was once again postponed so as to provide Overlord with sufficient landing craft and Roosevelt appointed Eisenhower to command the operation.
This series of conferences would prove critical, both militarily and politically. It by no means ended Allied conflicts and differences, but it did result in an agreed‐upon strategy that would preserve the alliance and lead to total military victory. It also established the essential prerequisites for a new postwar order based on Allied dominance and cooperation, verbalized by Roosevelt as the “Four Policemen,” within a global collective security framework. Additionally, it marked both a decline in British power and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States. Henceforth, these two emerging superpowers would exercise more and more control over both the war effort and postwar plans.
The year 1944 witnessed the results of these 1943 accords in an extraordinary series of Allied military victories. The most notable of these involving U.S. forces was Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious invasion in history. After meticulous preparation, including an extensive deception plan, it was successfully launched on 6 June 1944 against the Normandy coast under Eisenhower's overall command. Progress was extremely slow, however, even after the launching a few weeks later of the promised and massive Soviet offensive in Byelorussia, and only in late July did Allied forces break out of the bridgehead. Their progress after that date was extremely rapid, however, partially because Hitler's simultaneous decision to counterattack at Avranches enabled them to form a pincer that almost destroyed his entire army in the west. In the ensuing debacle, Anglo‐American forces were able to sweep through France very rapidly, liberating Paris on 25 August and moving into the Low Countries. But large numbers of German forces managed to escape before the pincers closed around the so‐called Falaise pocket, and they would effectively regroup in the fall to fight again.
The Anglo‐American sweep through France was aided not only by the Soviet offensive in the east, but also by a breakthrough in Italy that culminated in the capture of Rome on 4 June and the subsequent invasion of southern France in August. These took place long after they were supposed to, however, and were subjects of great controversy. Seeking to break the Italian deadlock in late 1943, Churchill had pressed for an amphibious landing at Anzio. Although successfully launched in January 1944, it remained an isolated and endangered bridgehead until May–June, when Allied forces under Gen. Mark Clark finally broke through the main German lines. Clark's decision to take Rome enabled the main body of German troops to escape northward and thus to fight on until the spring of 1945.
The Anzio fiasco delayed preparations for Anvil and reinforced Churchill's desire to cancel that operation in favor of a movement eastward into Yugoslavia. Fed up with the prime minister's continued interest in the Balkans, and aware of Eisenhower's desperate need for additional port facilities, the Americans bluntly refused such a shift and insisted that a delayed Anvil be launched, even after Overlord. Churchill was forced to accede to the renamed Operation Dragoon, and on 15 August, Allied forces landed in southern France and quickly advanced up the Rhône Valley, where they joined Eisenhower's forces moving eastward. Those forces now included nine armies organized into three army groups: the British‐Canadian 21st under Montgomery, the American 12th under Bradley, and the Franco‐American 6th under Gen. Jacob Devers.
A similar string of military successes took place in the Pacific during 1944 as the “dual advance” picked up momentum. While MacArthur's forces continued to leapfrog along the northern coast of New Guinea and nearby islands, Nimitz took Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. During the summer his forces conquered Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas, and destroyed what remained of the Japanese naval air forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In October, the joint chiefs finally decided to invade the Philippines rather than Formosa, and MacArthur's forces landed at Leyte Gulf. In the ensuing naval Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement in history, the Japanese surface fleet was virtually destroyed. Simultaneously, U.S. submarines sank much of the Japanese merchant fleet.
The first nine months of 1944 were also marked by substantial progress in postwar planning. In July, representatives of forty‐four nations meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, established the basis of a new postwar economic order, including a World Bank and an International Monetary Fund. Then from August to October, British, Chinese, Soviet, and U.S. diplomats meeting at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., reached agreement on the essentials of a postwar collective security organization. In September, Churchill, Roosevelt, and their advisers met for a second time in Quebec (Octagon), both to plan their next military moves and to consider numerous postwar issues. As Churchill noted at the beginning of this conference, virtually everything the Allies had touched in the last nine months had turned to gold.
The luster was quickly tarnished, however. Throughout 1944, the China theater and Burma had remained notable exceptions to the string of Allied victories, with the Japanese repelling Allied ground and air offensives and launching major counteroffensives of their own. By May, the Allies had successfully halted an invasion of India; but in China, the Japanese overran the U.S. air bases that had recently been established by Gen. Claire Chennault and precipitated a near collapse of Chinese forces. U.S. Gen. Joseph Stilwell, who had been sent to China in 1942 to serve as Chiang's chief of staff, blamed the Chinese leader for the fiasco. So did his superiors in Washington, who now demanded that control of Chinese forces be ceded to Stilwell. Chiang, however, insisted that Stilwell was the problem and in the fall demanded his recall. Roosevelt complied and replaced him with Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, but the combination of success in the Pacific and failure on the Asian mainland led the JCS to downgrade the future importance of the China theater, put increased emphasis on obtaining Soviet entry into the Far Eastern war, and focus even more intently on the naval advance in the Pacific. By October that advance was running into problems of its own, largely as a result of new Japanese suicidal tactics (most notably but far from exclusively the kamikaze air attacks) that increased both the length of battles and the number of U.S. casualties.
The situation in the European theater during the fall was not much better. In August, German forces had appeared to be on the brink of collapse, but they were able to rally in the fall and postpone total defeat—most significantly when they checked Montgomery's September attempt to use airborne forces to cross the Rhine River defenses in the Netherlands (Market‐Garden). Thereafter, Eisenhower's controversial “broad‐front” approach, involving a series of slower, methodical offensive operations to bring his entire front to the Rhine defenses, dominated Anglo‐American strategy despite heated protests by his subordinates, each of whom insisted he could end the war if given all the supplies. Then, in December, Hitler launched a counteroffensive against the thin U.S. forces in the Ardennes in an effort to reach Antwerp and thereby split the British and American armies. The resulting “bulge” in the American lines gave this largest U.S. engagement of the war its name, and led Eisenhower to temporarily transfer control of two U.S. armies north of the German advance to Montgomery. The bulge never developed into an open break, largely because of fierce resistance by the outnumbered Americans, combined with reinforcements and counterattacks by Patton in the south and Montgomery in the north, the return to good weather and with it Allied airpower, and a massive Soviet offensive that brought the Red Army to within thirty‐five miles of Berlin. In the end, Hitler wasted the last of his reserves on this operation. Its only accomplishment was to delay further Anglo‐American advances until the spring and thereby guarantee that the Red Army would reach Berlin before the British or the Americans.
By early 1945 this probability, along with the extent of Soviet conquests in Eastern and Central Europe, had begun to worry numerous American as well as British officials. Stalin's August–September halting of the Red Army on the east bank of the Vistula River and abject refusal to assist the Polish Home Army in its uprising against the Germans in Warsaw appalled these individuals and led to deep worries over the extent of Soviet territorial conquests and postwar goals. With American vetoes foreclosing his proposed military operations to secure some postwar influence in the Balkans, Churchill in October flew to Moscow for a second time and arranged with Stalin for British and Soviet spheres of influence in the Balkans; two months later, he made use of this agreement to suppress forcibly a Communist uprising in Greece.
Given this fait accompli as well as military events and the deterioration in Allied relations, Roosevelt realized that he could no longer avoid discussion of postwar issues. Such issues, as well as strategy for termination of the war, would dominate the second Big Three conference, held in February 1945 at Yalta in the Crimea. There the Big Three were able to reach agreement on operations for the final defeat of Germany, military occupation zones in Germany and Berlin, a shift of Polish boundaries westward and a Communist‐dominated Polish provisional government, free postwar elections for all of Europe, the outline of a charter for what would become the United Nations, and Soviet entry into the war against Japan within three months of German defeat in return for territorial concessions focusing on reacquisition of Russian losses from the Russo‐Japanese War of 1904–05. The advent of the Cold War after 1945 led to severe condemnation of Roosevelt for many of these agreements, most notably those concerning Poland and the Far East. At the time, however, he and his advisers believed that they had guaranteed both total victory in the war and a stable postwar peace, and in the ensuing years his supporters defended the accords as both understandable and unavoidable in light of the power, position, and continued importance of the Red Army to the war effort.
The post–Yalta Conference euphoria proved to be totally justified militarily but largely unjustified diplomatically. In March, U.S. First Army forces captured an intact Rhine River bridge at Remagen, leading Eisenhower to alter his plans and allow these forces rather than Montegomery's to seize the initiative. When Montgomery did cross a few weeks later, the two forces linked up and trapped 350,000 German troops in the Ruhr. After another heated Anglo‐American debate, Eisenhower then ordered a limited U.S. movement southeastward to the Elbe River rather than a move by Montgomery against Berlin, on the grounds that he needed to prevent a collision with the Red Army and a Nazi movement into the Bavarian Alps for protracted guerrilla warfare, and that the German capital was no longer a military objective or worth U.S. casualties—especially in light of the fact that by the Yalta accords the city would be divided into zones of occupation anyway. Meanwhile, Soviet behavior in Poland and Romania led Churchill and Roosevelt to accuse Stalin of breaking the Yalta accords, while the Soviet leader in turn accused them of trying to negotiate a separate peace on the Italian front. Amidst bitter recriminations, Roosevelt died unexpectedly on 12 April, leaving a host of unresolved military and diplomatic issues to his unprepared successor, Harry S. Truman. A few weeks later, Soviet and American forces met along the Elbe at Torgau, splitting Germany in half. On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker as Red Army forces took the city, and on 7–8 May his successor, Adm. Karl Doenitz, surrendered unconditionally.
With the common enemy totally defeated, Soviet‐American relations continued to deteriorate throughout the spring. Some differences were resolved by Harry Hopkins's June visit to Moscow and the July Big Three summit conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, but only partially and temporarily as the two nations' definitions of a secure postwar world began to collide and mutual suspicions increased. The method by which the war against Japan came to an end both reflected and reinforced those collisions and suspicions.
American forces made substantial progress in the Pacific War during the first half of 1945, liberating the Philippines, destroying what remained of the Japanese merchant fleet, conquering the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and launching a devastating strategic bombing campaign against Japanese cities from their bases in the Marianas. Nevertheless, the Japanese used their new suicide tactics to exact a heavy toll on American troops and naval forces in the Philippine, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa campaigns. Although Japan's position was clearly hopeless, its armed forces fought on fanatically in the hope of forcing a negotiated peace with the Americans. Simultaneously, American scientists successfully developed and in July successfully tested the first nuclear weapon. Seeing this weapon as a means of shocking the Japanese into a quick surrender and obtaining the “diplomatic bonus” of impressing the Soviets with this new, awesome power, Truman and his advisers ordered the use of atomic weapons against Japanese cities. On 6 August, Hiroshima was destroyed, and on 9 August, Nagasaki. In between, on 8 August, the Soviet Union entered the war, thereby fulfilling its Yalta pledge and depriving Japan of all hopes for a mediated end to the war. On 14 August, Japanese leaders agreed to surrender, albeit with the proviso that the emperor be retained, and on 2 September, they signed the official surrender documents.
World War II thus ended militarily. Diplomatically, however, continued friction within the Grand Alliance would preclude the possibility of any general peace treaty and would lead instead to the forty‐five‐year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.
[See also Air Force, U.S.: Predecessors of, 1907–46; Army, U.S.: Since 1941; China‐Burma‐India Theater; Holocaust, U.S. War Effort and the; Marine Corps, U.S.: 1914–45; Navy, U.S.: 1899–1945; World War II, U.S. Air Operations in: The Air War in Europe; World War II, U.S. Air Operations in: The War Against Japan; World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The North Atlantic; World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The Pacific.]
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