World War II

A war fought from 1939 to 1945, in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and other allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan.

World War II (1939-45), usually abbreviated ‘WW II’, was the largest war in history, fought between September 1939 and September 1945. More than 40 million men and women were serving in the armed forces by 1944, and civilian and military deaths exceeded 55 million. The major battles involved millions of men and thousands of tanks and aircraft. The scale of wartime mobilization exceeded that of WW I. The second global conflict was in every sense a total war.

The war was not a single, unitary conflict. It was in reality a number of different wars that gradually coalesced as the world's major powers were drawn in between 1939 and 1941. The war that broke out in 1939 was a war for the European balance of power, like the war of 1914. The immediate cause of the conflict was the German demand for the return of Danzig and part of the Polish ‘corridor’ granted to Poland from German territory in the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Poland refused to agree to German demands, and on 1 September 1939 overwhelming German forces launched the Polish campaign and defeated her in three weeks. In March 1939 Britain and France had guaranteed Polish sovereignty, and in honour of that pledge first demanded that German forces withdraw, then on 3 September declared war on Germany.

The outbreak of a major war over Poland had much deeper causes. During the 1930s the European order established after WW I was destabilized by the emergence of two new superpowers, the USSR and Germany. Under Hitler, German chancellor from 1933, and a man committed to a war of revenge for defeat in 1918 and the acquisition of a land empire by conquest in the east, Germany embarked on a programme of remilitarization after fifteen years of enforced disarmament. At the same time the USSR under Stalin became on paper the largest military power in the world. Neither state could ultimately be contained in the post-war liberal international order dominated by Britain and France. As the relative power of the western states declined, concern for their global security became profound. Inhibited by economic weakness and popular hostility to war, neither state was able to prevent Hitler from overturning the Versailles Treaty using force or the threat of force. In March 1938 Austria was annexed to the Nazi Reich (the Anschluss) ; in October 1938 Germany took over the Czech Sudetenland, and in March 1939 Bohemia and Moravia. In April 1939 Hitler planned a short local war against Poland so that Poland's economic resources, like those of Austria and Czechoslovakia, could be exploited in Germany's bid to become a superpower.

In 1938-9 Britain and France rearmed energetically and began to face the serious prospect of war with Germany if Hitler could not be deterred. Overtures were made to the USSR to try to tilt the balance of power against Hitler. The USSR chose instead to reach a non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) with Hitler, signed on 23 August 1939. Hitler was convinced that the western states would not obstruct his war with Poland now the USSR was neutralized. German military plans were based on the prospect of a major conflict at some point in the mid-1940s. British and French war preparations were geared much more to 1939. Western strategy was predicated on a long war of attrition and closely resembled the strategy which they believed had prevailed in WW I. A large part of the French front and its strategic thinking was dominated by the static Maginot Line, behind which the armies were to wait until long-range bombing and sea blockade had so weakened Germany that she could be defeated by western armies after a build-up of two or three years.

The European war fought between 1939 and 1941 was not a war of attrition, but was marked by brief campaigns and decisive battles. German forces, absorbing lessons from WW I on mobility and striking power, used aircraft and armoured formations as a powerful spearhead to break the enemy line and make possible annihilating encirclements. Poland was defeated in three weeks, the victim not only of German military effectiveness but of the German-Soviet agreement which led to a Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and the division of the conquered state between the two on 28 September. On 10 May 1940, following the Danish and Norwegian campaigns to protect the northern flank of their operations, German armies invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France and within six weeks defeated western forces. Britain's small expeditionary force was compelled to retreat from Dunkirk back across the Channel and on 20 June France capitulated. A rump French state under Pétain was established. Britain was able to resist German air attacks in the battle of Britain in August and September 1940, and survived a German bombing offensive (the ‘Blitz’) in the winter of 1940-1, but there existed no possibility of Britain defeating Germany unaided. Nazi leaders began to construct a new European order centred on Berlin, and hoped that Britain would sue for peace now that she had no allies.

By this stage Britain was engaged in a second and quite distinct war. On 10 June 1940 Mussolini's Italy, allied with Germany in the ‘pact of steel’ signed in May 1939, declared war on Britain and France. Mussolini hoped to use western defeat to complete his aim of establishing Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean basin and North Africa which had begun with the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in 1935-6, and had continued through Italian participation in the Spanish civil war and annexation of Albania in April 1939. From 1940 to 1942 British Commonwealth forces fought a more traditional naval and imperial war against Italy. British air and naval power was used to limit Italy's superior naval forces and by 1943 had sunk two-thirds of Italian shipping. In North Africa, Commonwealth forces stationed in Egypt drove Italian armies back across Libya by February 1941; in Abyssinia and Somaliland Italian forces were forced to surrender by May 1941. Italy's complete defeat in Africa was avoided only by Hitler's decision to send German reinforcements under Rommel, and the weak logistical position of Commonwealth forces. In November 1942 at Alamein a predominantly Italian force was defeated by Montgomery and by May 1943 Italian and German forces finally surrendered in Tunisia, enabling the Allies to mount the invasion of Sicily and then Italy.

The third component of world war was the largest and most sanguinary of all. Hitler's appetite for imperial conquest had always been directed eastwards to the USSR with its vast supplies of food, materials, manpower, and territory to colonize. In December 1940 Hitler turned away from Britain and approved BARBAROSSA, the large-scale invasion of the USSR. The motives for the contest were not only imperial. Soviet communism represented a profound social and political threat and Hitler, an ardent anti-communist throughout the inter-war years, saw the final contest with Marxism as a necessity. Following the German-Soviet pact of 1939 the threat became greater. A Soviet-Finnish war in the winter of 1939-40 resulted in Soviet encroachments in the Baltic. In June 1940 Soviet troops occupied the Baltic states and seized Bessarabia from Romania. Hitler ordered the conquest of the USSR before it became too entrenched in eastern Europe.

The war in the Pacific was part of a wider imperial struggle for Asia. In east Asia Japanese nationalists and militarists, frustrated by what they saw as western domination of the world order and Japan's economic vulnerability, began a fourteen-year war in China when in 1931 Japanese forces seized the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. Full-scale war followed in the autumn of 1937 against Chinese nationalist and communist forces, and much of the northern and eastern part of China was occupied by Japan by 1941. Nazi and Japanese leaders viewed the USSR and China as states that were politically fragile and corrupt, ripe for colonization by a superior race and culture. Both wars were fought with an exceptional savagery against enemies viewed as racially inferior and contaminated by communism. Yet in both cases the sheer scale and geography of Asian conflict powerfully inhibited Nazi and Japanese ambitions.

BARBAROSSA was launched on 22 June 1941 when three million German, Finnish, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers attacked the whole length of the Soviet western frontier. Unprepared for the assault the Red Army collapsed and in three months enemy forces had reached Leningrad, were approaching Moscow, and had seized the rich industrial and grain area of the Ukraine. High losses and the onset of winter brought the German attack to a halt, but in 1942 the campaign was renewed on the southern flank with a drive to capture Soviet oil resources in the Caucasus before turning north to capture Moscow. Frantic efforts by the rump Soviet state to reform its armed forces and rebuild its shattered economy resulted in a remarkable revival in the later part of 1942. In November 1942 Germany and her allies attacking Stalingrad (now Volgograd) were cut off by a massive Soviet encirclement, URANUS. The German forces in Stalingrad surrendered in January 1943. Both sides mobilized enormous forces for a renewed summer campaign and around the city of Kursk the German ZITADELLE was defeated and the German front rolled back towards Kiev, which was retaken in November 1943. Under Deputy Supreme Commander Zhukov, the Red Army inflicted a series of crippling blows on the Germans as Soviet forces mastered the art of the modern war of manoeuvre using aircraft, radio, and armour in large numbers. BAGRATION in June 1944 was the largest military operation of the war and it ended with the decisive defeat of remaining German forces on Soviet soil.

The fourth and final component of the wider war had the effect of binding the other elements together. This was the war for the protection and assertion of US interests. Though lightly armed in the 1930s and formally committed by the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 to non-intervention in overseas conflicts, the USA was profoundly affected by the events of war in Europe and the Far East. In 1940 and 1941 America gave increasing economic assistance to Britain and China following President Roosevelt's pledge to act as the ‘arsenal of democracy’. During 1941 the US navy became closely involved in the battle of the Atlantic in efforts to break the German submarine blockade of shipping destined for Britain. In March 1941 Congress approved the Lend-Lease Bill which allowed almost unlimited material aid, including weapons, for any state fighting aggression. In the autumn of 1941 this came to include the USSR, despite strong American anti-communism. Throughout 1940 and 1941 the USA tightened an economic blockade of Japan which threatened to cut off most Japanese oil supplies.

Though not an active belligerent, American actions provoked both Japanese and German retaliation. In November 1941, following months of planning and argument in Tokyo between those who favoured finishing off China and those who argued for a Pacific naval war to secure oil supplies and drive western states from south-east Asia, the southern campaign was approved by the emperor. On 7 December 1941 Japanese naval aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, followed by the rapid conquest of western colonies in south-east Asia and the southern Pacific. On 11 December Germany declared war on the USA, fortuitously allowing Franklin D. Roosevelt to pursue the strategy preferred by the US army COS George Marshall, of giving priority to the European theatre over the Pacific. The USA embarked on a rapid and large-scale rearmament which allowed generous military supplies and reinforcements to be sent to all the theatres of war: in Asia, the Pacific, the USSR, and the Mediterranean. American material wealth made more certain that the turning point achieved at Alamein and Stalingrad would be sustained.

The USA fought a largely naval and air war between 1942 and 1945, using its very great naval power to deploy troops in major amphibious operations, first in the Solomon Islands to halt the Japanese Pacific advance, then in TORCH, a combined American-British landing in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, and subsequently in the Anglo-American landings in Sicily and southern Italy in the summer of 1943, and in northern France in June 1944. Air power was a central feature of the American war effort and was used effectively at sea to defeat the Japanese advance at the Coral Sea in May 1942 and at Midway in June that year. In the battle of the Atlantic very long-range aircraft were used to plug the Atlantic Gap where German submarines had exacted a high toll of Allied shipping during 1942. American air-force leaders were also committed to long-range bombing of the enemy economy and in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference agreed a Combined Bomber Offensive to unite the efforts of RAF Bomber Command (whose aircraft had been bombing Germany since 1940) and the US Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces. The daylight bombing campaign began in earnest in the summer of 1943 and suffered crippling losses. Once a long-distance fighter was developed bombing was able to play its part in diverting German resources to home defence and limiting the expansion of German war output.

The entry of the USA signalled a change in the political balance of the war of great significance. Roosevelt was the driving force behind closer Allied co-operation in what became known as the Grand Coalition of the USA, USSR, China, and the British Commonwealth. At conferences with British leaders in 1943 in Casablanca, Quebec, and Cairo, the American leadership insisted on defeating Germany first by a cross-Channel invasion to be mounted in 1944. Though the British PM Churchill favoured exploiting Anglo-American strength in the Mediterranean theatre, and feared the consequences of defeat in northern Europe, the American insistence on a large-scale re-entry to Europe won the day, thanks to the support it enjoyed from the USSR at the major inter-Allied conference in Tehran in November 1943. American economic might and political interests helped to bind together the different theatres of conflict, while America's worldwide system of supply and logistics provided the sinews of war necessary to complete the defeat of the aggressor states.

That defeat was assured by the summer of 1944 when OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy, allowed American, British Commonwealth, and French forces to establish a viable bridgehead in France. A major intelligence deception operation and declining air power weakened the German response and by September 1944 German forces had been driven from France. Italy had sued for an armistice in September 1943 and German resources were now stretched to defending a line in central Italy and garrisoning the Balkans. Economic collapse produced by bombing and the massive operations executed in the spring of 1945 on both fronts brought German surrender on 7 May 1945 following Hitler's suicide on 30 April. With the full weight of US and Soviet forces available for the war with Japan, defeat in the Far East was only a matter of time. A long-range bombing campaign destroyed the Japanese cities, while offensives around the perimeter of the Japanese empire tightened the noose further, and destroyed most of the Japanese navy and merchant marine. When atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and Soviet forces destroyed the Japanese army in Manchuria, Japan finally capitulated on 2 September.

Japanese and Italian defeat was always likely following American entry into the war. They were limited regional powers with a comparatively weak economic base, made more fragile by their joint vulnerability to blockade by aircraft and submarine. German defeat was less predictable. It owed a great deal to the revival of Red Army fighting power, which absorbed the bulk of Germany's war effort until American and British air and naval power could be brought to bear more effectively in the Mediterranean and the battle of the Atlantic. Germany's war effort was hampered by the impact of bombing and the permanent quantitative inferiority of the German air force over Europe following American entry. The Allies also enjoyed better intelligence (largely thanks to the breaking of the German Enigma system), larger material supplies, and societies more united in the pursuit of victory. Germany also suffered domestic constraints generated by a damaging competition for resources between the different armed services and the inefficient mobilization of resources in the early years of war. Finally a bitter hostility to German occupation absorbed a great deal of effort in maintaining German rule and extracting the economic fruits of empire, exemplified by the long guerrilla war fought against Tito's partisans in occupied Yugoslavia.

The consequences of the war were far-reaching. The technical threshold of warfare was pushed forward with extraordinary speed: radar, jet propulsion, ballistic rocketry, and nuclear weapons were all the products of WW II. The cost of waging science-based warfare was exceptional. Most combatant states devoted more than half their national output and two-thirds of their industrial workforce to war production. The victims of aggression lost a large fraction of their national wealth from occupation and combat. In Germany half the dwellings in her major cities were destroyed or damaged by bombing. The barbarous character of the wars for Asia led to an estimated 20 million Chinese dead and 26 million Soviet, of whom more than 1 million were Soviet Jews, victims of the Nazi programme of extermination launched in 1941 that claimed the lives of 6 million European Jews. Germany was divided between the conquerors and millions of Germans displaced from eastern Europe.

The international political balance was transformed by the war. The Axis states were defeated and disarmed. Communism, whose threat had prompted the Nazi-Soviet war, triumphed in most of Eurasia: in eastern Europe under Soviet control, in China, following civil war between 1945 and 1949, and in North Korea and North Vietnam. The spread of communism prompted the USA to maintain the global presence it had adopted during the war in collaboration with western European allies, and the world became divided into two heavily armed camps. Britain and France, whose defence of the old balance of power had led them to declare war on Germany in 1939, were reduced to second-rank powers, while their empires gradually disintegrated under pressure from the USA and local nationalist movements. Despite the terrible cost of the largest of all wars, the aggressor states of the 1930s, (West) Germany, Italy, and Japan were welcomed back into the western camp in the 1950s as Allies in face of the threat posed by the communist bloc.

Bibliography

• Glantz, D., and House, J., When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, Kan., 1995).
• Harrison, M., The Economics of WW II (Cambridge, 1998).
• Kimball, W., et al. (eds.), Allies at War: The Soviet, American and British Experience, 1939-1945 (New York, 1994).
• Overy, R. J., Why the Allies Won (London, 1995).
• Parker, R. A. C., Struggle for Survival (Oxford, 1989).
• Weinberg, G., A World at Arms (Cambridge, 1994)

— Richard Overy

Causes
Military and Diplomatic Course
Domestic Course
Postwar Impact
Changing Interpretations

During the period 1941–1945, the United States waged total war against Germany and Japan, fully mobilizing both its population and its economy in a struggle to defeat the Axis enemy. The Supreme Court enlisted in this national crusade, giving constitutional sanction to the steps taken by the president and Congress to achieve military victory. Although protecting freedom of expression, it rejected all challenges to the economic controls adopted by the federal government and repeatedly subordinated other constitutional rights to the supposed demands of military necessity.

Complicating the Court's efforts to deal with the legal issues raised by total war were personal and philosophical conflicts among the justices. Chief Justice Harlan Stone (1941–1946), who seemed utterly unable to control his fractious colleagues, once compared them to a team of wild horses. They disagreed, for example, over the extent to which judges should defer to legislative determinations. All subscribed to judicial self‐restraint in cases challenging the constitutionality of economic regulatory legislation, but while Justice Felix Frankfurter thought this same approach should be followed when civil liberties were at issue, a number of his colleagues insisted that individual rights should be accorded a preferred position and that governmental actions impinging on them should be subjected to rigorous judicial scrutiny (see Preferred Freedoms Doctrine). World War II also revealed disagreements within the Stone Court over the appropriateness of subjecting actions of the commander in chief and the armed forces to judicial examination.

The Court did not have to wrestle with that issue until well after the United States formally declared war in December 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt took a number of constitutionally questionable actions between the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. These included initiating an undeclared naval war with Germany in the North Atlantic and seizing several defense plants threatened with strikes. None of these presidential actions ever came before the Supreme Court.

Economic Regulation

The Court did pass judgment on one of Roosevelt's creations, the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Originally established by Roosevelt in the exercise of his inherent emergency powers, OPA received congressional sanction in the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which empowered it to set prices. In Yakus v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court rejected the contention that this statute delegated too much legislative authority to an administrative agency. While technically the Court did not rule on the issue of whether federal war powers gave Congress itself the authority to fix prices, Stone's opinion left little doubt that the six members of the majority believed it did. In a companion case, Bowles v. Willingham (1944), the justices rejected a procedural due process challenge to a requirement that OPA rent controls had to go into effect before their validity might be litigated. The Court even upheld the right of OPA to suspend, without benefit of any judicial process, fuel‐oil deliveries to a retail dealer who sold oil in violation of the agency's coupon‐rationing system. In Steuart and Bros. v. Bowles (1944), the Court reasoned, somewhat implausibly, that no judicial process was required because OPA's suspension order did not constitute punishment but was merely a means of promoting the efficient distribution of fuel oil. So tolerant were the justices of governmental actions in the economic realm that they upheld as a valid exercise of the war power the Housing and Rent Act of 1947, which was not even enacted until after the fighting was over and the president had proclaimed hostilities to be at an end.

Freedom of Expression

The Court's willingness to uphold almost any economic regulation based on wartime necessity resembled the its posture during World War I. In the area of freedom of speech, though, the Supreme Court's performance during this war contrasted sharply with its response to World War I. The federal government had vigorously repressed dissent during the first war, prosecuting socialists, German‐Americans, and other critics of government policy under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The Court affirmed the convictions the government obtained, consistently rejecting arguments that these violated the First Amendment. American liberals came to regret the repression of those years, and, during World War II, Attorney General Francis Biddle sought to prevent another wholesale assault on freedom of expression. The liberal Stone Court shared his commitment. In Hartzel v. United States (1944), it overturned the Espionage Act conviction of a fascist sympathizer who had mailed to army officers and Selective Service registrants literature urging the occupation of the United States by foreign troops. The same day, in Baumgartner v. United States (1944), the Court unanimously set aside the denaturalization of a German‐born citizen accused of continued loyalty to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, and in Keegan v. United States (1945), it ruled that the evidence against twenty‐four members of the German‐American bund was insufficient to support convictions for conspiracy to counsel resistance to the draft. Although decided on narrow grounds and without declaring any legislation unconstitutional, these decisions afforded considerable protection to the exercise of First Amendment rights.

The Court's most important defense of freedom of expression came in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Three years earlier, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), it had upheld a Pennsylvania school board's expulsion of Jehovah's Witnesses' children for refusing to salute the flag, with Frankfurter emphasizing in his majority opinion that the flag salute served to build national unity and that national unity was the basis of national security (see Religion). Now, in the midst of a war, the Court reversed Minersville. Frankfurter dissented, arguing that the justices should not substitute their policy views for those of the legislators who had adopted the flag‐salute law. Rejecting his pleas for judicial restraint, the majority emphasized that the First Amendment permitted censorship of expression only when the expression in question presented a clear and present danger of an evil the state was empowered to prevent and that it demanded an even more urgent and immediate reason for compelling affirmation.

Although the Supreme Court rigorously protected freedom of expression, it proved to be an unreliable guardian of other constitutional values. It is true that its ruling in Cramer v. United States (1945), expansively interpreting the Constitution's requirement that treason be proved by the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, provided a remarkable degree of protection against the overuse of one of the most serious and abused charges in criminal law. But Justice William O. Douglas pointed out in dissent that this decision went so far as to make future treason prosecutions virtually impossible. Apparently concerned about that, the Court in Haupt v. United States (1947) voted 8 to 1 to sustain a conviction based on evidence that did not really satisfy the requirements of Cramer. That ruling facilitated numerous treason prosecutions of American nationals, such as “Tokyo Rose,” for allegedly assisting the Germans and Japanese during the war.

The Court's decision in Duncan v. Kahanamoku (1946) also did little to protect civil liberties. At issue was the imposition of martial law in the Territory of Hawaii. The Supreme Court ruled that establishing military tribunals to try civilians there had been illegal, but it based its decision on the failure of the armed forces to comply with the provisions of the Hawaiian Organic Act rather than on the constitutional provision governing suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Furthermore, the Court did not decide Duncan until two years after the termination of military government in Hawaii and one year after the war ended (see Military Trials and Martial Law).

It likewise extended protection to conscientious objectors only after the fighting ended. In Girouard v. United States (1946) the Court overruled three earlier decisions, holding that they were ineligible for naturalization. Earlier, however, in In re Summers (1945), the Court had held it was constitutional for Illinois to refuse to permit a conscientious objector to practice law.

Japanese‐Americans

While the fighting raged, the Court would do nothing that might interfere with the quest for victory. Convinced that protection of individual rights should not hamper the nation's ability to wage total war, the Court upheld as constitutional any governmental action that the executive branch insisted was required by military necessity. It even allowed 112,000 Japanese‐Americans living on the West Coast, 70,000 of whom were United States citizens, to be punished without indictment or trial and blatantly discriminated against on the basis of race. They were subjected to a curfew, then banned from coastal areas, and subsequently shipped to inland detention camps, known euphemistically as “relocation centers.” In Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), the Court ruled unanimously that the curfew order was constitutional. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), it upheld the validity of the exclusion order. Speaking for the Court, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that in the absence of a war, this sort of curtailment of the civil rights of a single racial group would have been unconstitutional. He observed, however, that hardships are part of war and argued that the Japanese‐Americans could be required to bear this one because national security required it. In fact, War Department officials and even government lawyers (who willfully deceived the Court about this matter) knew there was no military necessity for the exclusion and confinement of the Japanese Americans. Justice Frank Murphy, who dissented, characterized Korematsu as a plunge into the ugly abyss of racism. In Ex parte Endo (1944), the Court ruled that a Japanese‐American girl whose loyalty to the United States had been clearly established was entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, freeing her from a relocation center. In neither this case nor Korematsu, though, was the Court willing to examine the constitutionality of the relocation program itself.

Military Trials

As these Japanese‐American cases reveal, during World War II the Supreme Court succumbed to a constitutional relativism that made the security of individual rights dependent on the extent to which their exercise might interfere with the fight against Germany and Japan. The justices did not want to impede prosecution of the war, and they deferred completely to the president and the armed forces on the question of what military necessity required. They practiced such deference even when it required ignoring judicial precedent. Relying on the Fifth Amendment's requirement of a grand jury indictment and the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a trial by jury, the Court had ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that military trials were unconstitutional where the civilian courts were open and functioning. The World War II Justice Department regarded Milligan as an inconvenient relic, and in Ex parte Quirin (1942) it persuaded the Supreme Court to disregard it. The president had determined that military necessity required trying eight captured Nazi saboteurs before a secret military commission. Although Milligan required that at least some of them be granted civilian trials, the Supreme Court upheld a presidential order creating the commission that failed even to comply with applicable statutes.

At least in Quirin the Court started from the assumption that the Constitution applied, stoutly maintaining that, even in wartime, judges might examine the legality of executive actions. When the defeated Japanese commander in the Philippines sought review of his military conviction for war crimes, it refused even to consider his case. In In re Yamashita (1946), the Court took the position that an enemy general could have no constitutional rights. What that meant, of course, as the dissenters recognized, was that in dealing with some people the government was not constrained by the Constitution from which it derived its authority.

The idea that the enemy had no rights was to have enormous appeal amid the anticommunist hysteria associated with the early years of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union (see Communism and Cold War). So would the sort of constitutional relativism that authorized the sacrifice of individual rights to the perceived demands of national security. These lines of reasoning were an unfortunate legacy of a wartime Court that, though committed to the protection of civil liberties, was so determined to advance the war effort that it often subverted them.

See also Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy; Presidential Emergency Powers.

Bibliography

• Michal R. Belknap, The Supreme Court Goes to War: The Meaning and Implications of the Nazi Saboteur Case, Military Law Review 89 (1980): 59–96.
• J. Woodford Howard, Mr. Justice Murphy (1968).
• Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (1983).
• Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States 1941–1945 (1972)

— Michal R. Belknap

(1939-1945) The Second World War was a truly global conflict which pitted the forces of democracy and liberalism against the forces of fascism and nationalistic militarism. On one side stood the Western democracies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, together with two regimes themselves essentially totalitarian in nature, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. On the other side crouched Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, a Japanese Empire dominated by militarists, and right-wing authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Although an enormously complex affair in which events in one hemisphere impacted upon events half a world away, World War II can be conveniently divided into two parts: the war in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and the Atlantic Ocean and the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Motivated by the desire to expand the territory of the German Reich, gather in ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, and dominate Central Europe, German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thereby provoking the British and French to declare war on Germany on September 3. Hitler's well-trained and well-equipped forces quickly conquered Poland, which was also attacked simultaneously from the east by the Soviet Union, and turned to the west where a standoff, known as the Sitzkrieg or the “Phony War, ” lasted until the Germans invaded Norway in April 1940. On May 10, 1940, the Nazis mounted a strong offensive which took the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in short order and drove across the French border on May 12, quickly defeating the French and their British allies. The remaining British forces were withdrawn under fire from the beaches of Dunkirk (May 26- June 3), and the German forces entered Paris (June 14). On June 10, Italy declared war on Britain and France and invaded French territory. The demoralized French subsequently signed an armistice at Compiégne (where German forces had surrendered to end World War I) on June 22, and France was divided into a northern zone occupied by the Germans and a southern area which, for the time being, was controlled by the authoritarian, pro-Nazi Vichy regime led by Marshal Henri Pétain.

Unable to proceed directly to an amphibious invasion of England, Hitler launched an air campaign against Britain accompanied by unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic designed to isolate Britain from the resources of her empire and America. By dint of organizational skill and raw courage, the British Royal Air Force prevailed over the German Luftwaffe in the aerial campaign known as the Battle of Britain in the summer and early fall of 1940.

Meanwhile, the German Afrika Korps under Gen. Erwin Rommel reinforced Italian forces in North Africa and drove toward Egypt and the Suez Canal, engaging the defending British Commonwealth forces in a see-saw battle in the Western Desert. The British were defeated at Tobruk (June 1942) but won a substantial victory at El Alamein under British Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery (October 23- November 4, 1942), preventing the loss of Egypt.

In 1941, the Germans conquered Yugoslavia (April 17) and then Greece (April 27) thus securing their flanks for their most ambitious project, the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. At first the Germans encountered only weak resistance from the stunned Soviet forces, but the Red Army rallied to establish a successful defense before Leningrad in the north and Moscow in the center. In the south, the Germans seized the Crimea and pushed on into the Caucasus, but Soviet resistance stiffened at Stalingrad on the Volga. The war in the East was enormous in scope and magnitude, and the Germans found themselves stymied as much by the vast spaces and inclement climate as by the Soviet armed forces. Eventually the Soviet forces went over to the offensive (November 1942), and the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad (February 1-2, 1943), marking the turning point of the war in the East. Thereafter, the Soviet force inexorably pushed the Germans back toward Berlin. The largest tank battle of the war was fought at Kursk in July 1943, and the Germans never recovered from the loss of armored forces in that battle.

From September 1939 to December 1941, the United States followed a policy of neutrality with respect to the war raging in Europe. However, Britain and the United States discussed possible mutual action against the Axis powers, and in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act legitimizing the flow of war materials to Britain which had been going on for some time. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and Congress reciprocated with a declaration of war on them on December 11, 1941.

Allied strategy and policy were subsequently coordinated in a series of meetings of the various Allied heads of state (U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and after his death on April 12, 1945, President Harry S. Truman; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; Soviet Premier Josef Stalin; and Nationalist Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) at the Anglo-American Arcadia Conference (December 1941); Casablanca (January 1943); Quebec (August 1943); Cairo (November 1943); Tehran (November-December 1943); and Yalta (February 1945). The strategic decision was made to defeat the Axis forces in Europe first before turning to deal with the Japanese in Asia and the Pacific, and U.S. air and ground forces were rushed to England in anticipation of an early invasion of Continental Europe.

First, however, U.S. and British forces mounted an invasion of French North Africa at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers (November 8, 1942) and, following a galling American defeat by the Germans at the Kasserine Pass (February 1943), proceeded to roll up the German and Italian forces in Tunisia and Libya, pushing them against Montgomery's British 8th Army moving westward from Egypt. The remnants of the vaunted Afrika Korps surrendered at Cap Bon, Tunisia, on May 12, 1943, ending the war in North Africa.

In July, U.S. and British forces invaded Sicily and completed the defeat of its German and Italian defenders by September 3. On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was deposed and Marshal Badoglio was named premier, and on September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies. However, strong German forces remained in Italy, and on September 9, 1943, the Allies landed at Salerno south of Naples and began the long, arduous drive toward Rome, a drive stalled for some time in the winter of 1943-1944 along the line of the Rapido River south of Cassino. On January 22, 1944, the U.S. and British forces conducted another amphibious landing at Anzio on the west coast of Italy just below Rome. Although heavily pounded by the German defenders, the Allies managed to break out of the Anzio beachhead as well as cross the Rapido River line, and on June 4, 1944, the Allies entered Rome and subsequently continued the tough fight up the Italian peninsula lasting until the end of the war in May 1945.

The news of the taking of Rome was overshadowed by the most massive and elaborate amphibious operation of the war, the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Bogged down for a time in the beachhead and the hedgerow country of Normandy, the Allies broke out in July 1944, and the Germans quickly retreated behind the Rhine River pursued closely by the Allied forces. A second Allied landing was made in the south of France on August 15, and Paris was liberated on August 25. In far-off Greece, Athens was freed by the Allies on October 13.

During the fall and early winter of 1944, the Allies focused on closing up to the Rhine and securing the logistical bases necessary for carrying the war into Germany. On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a last ditch counterattack against the Allied forces in Belgium, and the resulting Battle of the Bulge, although a near-run thing, ultimately resulted in an Allied victory. On March 9, 1945, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine at Remagen and a few weeks later joined with Field Marshal Montgomery's forces to trap some 350, 000 German troops in the Ruhr. Thereafter, the Allies quickly drove deep into Germany.

Meanwhile, on May 2, 1945, Soviet forces took Berlin, and on May 7, 1945, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies at Rheims. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans at Lake Como on April 28, and Adolf Hitler took his own life on May 1, as did other Nazi leaders. The remaining Nazi leaders were rounded up by Allied forces and put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945-1946.

Air and naval forces also played an important role in the war in the West. Although the Germans neglected the development of long-range strategic bombers, the Stuka dive-bombers, light bombers, and fighters of the Luftwaffe were an integral part of the successful German blitzkrieg tactics. After failing to destroy the British Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940, the Luftwaffe turned to the bombing of British cities and industrial facilities, and the RAF Bomber Command retaliated in kind. With the American entry into the war, the U.S. 8th Air Force in England (on August 17, 1942) and the U.S. 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean took up the strategic bombing of Germany and her allies, and American light bombers and fighters took on the task of gaining air superiority over Germany and supporting Allied ground forces with reconnaissance, interdiction strikes and close air support. Air transport also played a role in supporting the rapid movement of critical supplies, air evacuation of casualties, liaison flights, and troop carriers for airborne operations. Allied air forces also performed coastal surveillance and convoy security duties. In England, the RAF Bomber Command and U.S. 8th Air Force worked out a plan (the Combined Bomber Offensive) for the round-the-clock bombing of Germany, with 8th Air Force taking on the daylight precision bombing task and Bomber Command that of night area bombing of German cities. Lacking a strategic bomber force and increasingly dominated by Allied air power, the Germans resorted to new technology and attacked Britain with rocket-powered flying bombs (the V-1”buzzbomb”) and the more powerful V-2 rocket.

At sea, German surface forces were rendered impotent after the successful British attacks against German capital ships in the Norwegian fjords and the North Sea (April-June 1940) and the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy (May 27, 1941). However, the greatest threatcame from German submarine operations in the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. By mid-1943, German submarines threatened to isolate Britain as they had in World War I, and Allied shipping losses were surpassing the capacity of British and American shipyards to produce new vessels. However, the tide turned in the spring of 1943 as the Allies capitalized on their intelligence advantages (such as ULTRA intercepts of German communications), introduced more effective convoy protection methods (such as the escort carrier and land-based air cover), and new technology (such as better radar and sonar and improved depth charges) became available for the detection and destruction of German submarines. By the end of the war, the German submarine fleet commanded by Admiral Karl Doenitz, having lost 800 U-boats and 28, 000 sailors in sinking some 2, 700 Allied ships, was all but driven from the seas, and a massive stream of men and supplies flowed from America to Britain.

Japan had long sought to expand her economic hegemony in Asia in order to obtain the raw materials necessary for her industries. Accordingly, Japan had invaded China in 1937. The principal obstacle to the establishment of the Japanese “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was the United States, and in 1941 the Japanese decided to take action. The war in the Pacific began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, accompanied by coordinated attacks on U.S. forces in the Philippines; on British Commonwealth forces in Hong Kong, Malaya, and New Guinea; and on the Dutch in the East Indies. The British surrendered Singapore on February 15, 1942, and the U.S. forces in the Philippines surrendered on May 6, 1942, following a desperate defense of Bataan and the fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was severely damaged by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, but the U.S. aircraft carriers were unharmed. The U.S. Navy thus immediate took the offensive and blunted the Japanese offensive in the indecisive Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7-8, 1942) and the Battle of Midway (June 4, 1942) in which the Japanese lost four carriers and 253 aircraft, losses from which the Japanese carrier forces never recovered. A token attack on Tokyo was also carried out on April 18, 1942, by sixteen U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The bombers under the command of Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle did only minor damage but greatly shocked the Japanese.

Following the fall of the Philippines, the American commander in the Southwest Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, established U.S. forces in Australia and began the long island-hopping drive back to liberate the Philippines. Japanese forces invaded New Guinea and took Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, but Australian and American forces halted the Japanese advance in New Guinea and held against six months of Japanese counterattacks. On August 7, 1942, U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal and, later aided by U.S. Army forces, fought three major land battles on Guadalcanal and six major naval engagements in nearby waters before securing the island on February 9, 1943.

While MacArthur's forces fought the Japanese in New Guinea and the Solomons, U.S. air, naval, and amphibious forces under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz began a drive in the Central Pacific westward toward Formosa (Taiwan), taking Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands in 1943 and the Marshall Islands and Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas in 1944 and destroying the remaining Japanese carrier forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944). Meanwhile, MacArthur's Southwest Pacific forces returned to the Philippines, landing on Leyte (October 20, 1944) and destroying the Japanese surface fleet in the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23-26, 1944), the largest naval engagement in history. American forces subsequently landed on Luzon (January 9, 1945), and Manila was liberated on March 3.

While MacArthur's forces secured the Philippines and began preparations for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, Nimitz' forces cleared key islands necessary for forward airbases for the strategic bombing of Japan. The U.S. Army Air Forces had begun the strategic bombing of Japan from bases in China in 1944 but transferred operations to the Marianas Islands after they were secured in November 1944. To secure an additional forward base, primarily for the recovery of bombers damaged over Japan, the island of Iwo Jima was invaded on February 19, 1945, and fell to American forces after 36 days of terrible fighting . On April 1, 1945, U.S. forces invaded Okinawa, where the battle raged until June 22, again with heavy losses, including several ships to Japanese kamikaze attacks, which became common over the American fleet off Okinawa.

Elsewhere Nationalist Chinese forces continued to oppose Japanese advances in China, and British Commonwealth, Nationalist Chinese, and a small contingent of American ground troops fought in Burma to prevent a Japanese invasion of India. The Dutch and other Allied forces were overwhelmed in the East Indies in early 1942, and the retaking of the East Indies was largely delegated to British Commonwealth forces who also bore the brunt of the defense of New Guinea.

By the summer of 1945, Allied forces had retaken most of the areas earlier conquered by the Japanese and were closing in on the Japanese homeland, which had already been effectively isolated by Allied airpower. Facing the possibility of terrible casualties on both sides in a massive amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands, U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorized the use of America's newest and most powerful weapon, the atomic bomb. The U.S. B-29” Enola Gay” dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Japanese military leaders still hesitated to surrender, but the Japanese Emperor Hirohito prevailed upon them, and Japanese authorities surrendered on to the Allies unconditionally on August 14. Formal surrender ceremonies presided over by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, attended by many of the Allied commanders who had surrendered at the beginning of the war and had been prisoners of the Japanese, were held aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, thus ending the Second World War. Japan, like Germany, was subsequently occupied by Allied forces, and her leaders were put on trial for war crimes, although the Emperor was spared and left in place as a figurehead.

The commitment of resources and the destruction brought about by the Second World War far exceeded anything seen before or since as did the scope and magnitude of the war itself. The human toll of the Second World War was frightful. As many as 50 million military personnel and civilians were killed, some 14 million in the Soviet Union alone. Military casualties were heavy on both sides. The Germans lost 3.25 million combatants dead and another 7.25 million wounded; the Italians 149, 496 dead and 66, 716 wounded; and the Japanese 1.27 million dead and 140, 000 wounded. Allied casualties were equally heavy. The Soviet Union lost at least 6.2 million killed and over 14 million wounded. Nationalist China lost 1.33 million killed and 1.76 million wounded, and Great Britain lost 357, 116 killed and 369, 267 wounded not counting Commonwealth forces. U.S. military casualties totaled 291, 557 battle deaths, 113, 842 deaths from other causes, and 670, 846 wounded. The civilian death toll included over 6 million Jews and other “undesirables” murdered by the Nazis in the death camps and during the campaigns in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The outcome of the war shaped the remaining half of the twentieth century and continues to have an important impact well into the twenty-first century. Although the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan were defeated, the war left many unresolved political, social, and economic problems in its wake and brought the Western democracies into direct confrontation with their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, thereby initiating a period of nearly half a century of skirmishing and nervous watchfulness as two blocs, each armed with nuclear weapons, faced each other probing for any sign of weakness.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

(click to enlarge)
Ecstatic crowds in London celebrating the end of the European phase of World War II, May 8, 1945. (credit: Picture Post — Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

(1939 – 45) International conflict principally between the Axis Powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — and the Allied Powers — France, Britain, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China. Political and economic instability in Germany, combined with bitterness over its defeat in World War I and the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rise to power. In the mid-1930s Hitler began secretly to rearm Germany, in violation of the treaty. He signed alliances with Italy and Japan to oppose the Soviet Union and intervened in the Spanish Civil War in the name of anticommunism. Capitalizing on the reluctance of other European powers to oppose him by force, he sent troops to occupy Austria in 1938 (see Anschluss) and to annex Czechoslovakia in 1939. After signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Two days later France and Britain declared war on Germany. Poland's defeat was followed by a period of military inactivity on the Western Front (see Phony War). At sea Germany conducted a damaging submarine campaign by U-boat against merchant shipping bound for Britain. By early 1940 the Soviet Union had divided Poland with Germany, occupied the Baltic states, and subdued Finland in the Russo-Finnish War. In April 1940 Germany overwhelmed Denmark and began its conquest of Norway. In May German forces swept through The Netherlands and Belgium on their blitzkrieg invasion of France, forcing it to capitulate in June and establish the Vichy France regime. Germany then launched massive bombing raids on Britain in preparation for a cross-Channel invasion, but, after losing the Battle of Britain, Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely. By early 1941 Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German troops quickly overran Yugoslavia and Greece in April. In June Hitler abandoned his pact with the Soviet Union and launched a massive surprise invasion of Russia, reaching the outskirts of Moscow before Soviet counterattacks and winter weather halted the advance. In East Asia Japan expanded its war with China and seized European colonial holdings. In December 1941 Japan attacked U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines. The U.S. declared war on Japan, and the war became truly global when the other Axis Powers declared war on the U.S. Japan quickly invaded and occupied most of Southeast Asia, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, and many Pacific islands. After the crucial U.S. naval victory at the Battle of Midway (1942), U.S. forces began to advance up the chains of islands toward Japan. In the North Africa Campaigns the British and Americans defeated Italian and German forces by 1943. The Allies then invaded Sicily and Italy, forcing the overthrow of the fascist government in July 1943, though fighting against the Germans continued in Italy until 1945. In the Soviet Union the Battle of Stalingrad (1943) marked the end of the German advance, and Soviet reinforcements in great numbers gradually pushed the German armies back. The massive Allied invasion of western Europe began with the Normandy Campaign in western France (1944), and the Allies' steady advance ended in the occupation of Germany in 1945. After Soviet troops pushed German forces out of the Soviet Union, they advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania and had occupied the eastern third of Germany by the time the surrender of Germany was signed on May 8, 1945. In the Pacific an Allied invasion of the Philippines (1944) was followed by the successful Battle of Leyte Gulf and the costly Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa (1945). Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and Japan's formal surrender on September 2 ended the war. Estimates of total military and civilian casualties varied from 35 million to 60 million killed, including about 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Millions more civilians were wounded and made homeless throughout Europe and East Asia. See also Anti-Comintern Pact; Atlantic Charter; Battles of El Alamein, the Atlantic, the Bulge, Guadalcanal, and the Philippine Sea; Casablanca, Potsdam, Tehran, and Yalta conferences; Dunkirk Evacuation; lend-lease; Munich agreement; Nürnberg Trials; Siege of Leningrad; Sino-Japanese Wars; Omar Bradley, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Bernard Law Montgomery, Benito Mussolini, George Patton, Erwin Rommel, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Yamamoto Isoroku, Georgy K. Zhukov.

For more information on World War II, visit Britannica.com.

In the aftermath of World War I, the United States attempted to disengage itself from European affairs. The U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations, and in the 1920s American involvement in European diplomatic life was limited to economic affairs. Moreover, the United States dramatically reduced the size of its military in the postwar years, a measure widely supported by a public increasingly opposed to war. Events in Europe and Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s, however, made it impossible for the United States to maintain a position of neutrality in global affairs.

Rise of the Nazi Party and German Aggression

After its defeat and disarmament in World War I, Germany fell into a deep economic decline that ultimately led to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party during the 1930s. The Nazis rearmed the nation, reentered the Rhineland (1936), forced a union with Austria (1938), seized Czechoslovakia under false promises (1938), made a nonaggression pact with Russia to protect its eastern frontier (1939), and then overran Poland (September 1939), bringing France and Great Britain into the war as a consequence of their pledge to maintain Polish independence. In May 1940 a power thrust swept German troops forward through France, drove British forces back across the English Channel, and compelled France to surrender. An attack on England, aimed to deny use of Britain as a springboard for reconquest of the Continent, failed in the air and did not materialize on land. Open breach of the nonaggression treaty was followed by a German invasion of Russia in June 1941.

Prior to America's formal entry into war, the United States assisted France and Britain by shipping tanks and weapons. The United States turned over naval destroyers to Britain to hold down the submarine menace and itself patrolled large areas of the Atlantic Ocean against the German U-boats, with which U.S. ships were involved in prewar shooting incidents. The United States also took over rights and responsibilities at defense bases on British possessions bordering the Atlantic.

In 1940 the U.S. course was mapped by rapidly passing events. The German invasions of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France triggered American actions. In his Chicago speech of 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised to quarantine aggressors. In his Charlottesville, Virginia, speech on 10 June 1940, he went further. He not only indicted Germany's new partner, Italy, but also issued a public promise of help to "the opponents of force." In June also he assured himself of bipartisan political support by appointing the Republicans Frank Knox and Henry L. Stimson to head the Navy and War Departments, respectively.

The Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 instituted peacetime conscription for the first time in U.S. history, registering sixteen million men in a month. In August 1941 Roosevelt and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, met at Argentia, Newfoundland, to formulate war aims; with their staffs they delved into overall strategy and war planning. For the first time in U.S. history the country was militarily allied before a formal declaration of war. At this meeting the Atlantic Charter was established. In September 1941 the draft act was extended beyond its previous limit of one year—even though by the slim margin of a single vote in Congress—and the full training, reorganization, and augmentation of U.S. forces began.

Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

During the Nazi buildup in Germany, Japan had been fortifying Pacific islands in secret violation of treaties, encroaching on China in Manchuria and Tientsin in 1931 and in Shanghai in 1932, starting open war at Peking in 1937, and thereafter, as Germany's ally, planning further conquests.

The United States opposed this Japanese expansion diplomatically by every means short of war, and military staff planning began as early as 1938 for the possibility of a two-ocean war. American policymakers determined that the nation's security depended on the survival of the British Commonwealth in Europe and the establishment in the Pacific of a U.S. Navy defense line that must run from Alaska through Hawaii to Panama.

On 7 December 1941, a sneak attack by Japanese carrier-based planes surprised and severely crippled the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, dooming American forces in the Philippines. Japan was now free to expand into Southeast Asia and the East Indies, toward Australia. On 8 December, Congress declared war on Japan, and on 11 December it responded to war declarations from Italy and Germany—allied to Japan by treaties—by similar declarations put through in a single day of legislative action in committees and on the floor of both houses of Congress.

Before the month of December was out, Churchill was again in Washington, bringing with him military and naval experts for what has been called the Arcadia conference. Within weeks Washington had created the Combined Chiefs of Staff, an international military, naval, and air body that was used throughout the war to settle strategy, establish unified command in the separate theaters of war, and issue strategic instructions to theater commanders.

Organization, Preparation, and Strategy

Almost immediately after the declaration of war, under the first War Powers Act, the United States began a reorganization and expansion of the army and the navy, including the National Guard already in federal service. Increasing numbers of reservists were called to active duty, not as units but as individuals, to fill gaps in existing units, to staff the training centers, and to serve as officers in new units being formed. Additional divisions were created and put into training, bearing the numbers of World War I divisions in most cases, but with scarcely any relation to them in locality or in personnel of previously existing reserve divisions. New activities were created for psychological warfare and for civil affairs and military government in territories to be liberated or captured. The air force also underwent a great expansion, in personnel, in units, and in planes. Notable was the creation and shipment to England of high-level, precision daylight bombing units, which worked with the British to rain tons of bombs on enemy centers. Later they assisted the invasions and major attacks. Disrupting German factories and rail lines and weakening the entire German economy, the bombing campaign was extremely important in Hitler's downfall. The armed forces of the United States, in general, expanded their strength and put to use a host of details in tactics and in equipment that had been merely experimental in the preceding years. From new planes to new rifles, from motorization to emergency rations, from field radio telephones to long-range radar, progress was widespread.

In addition to new concepts of operation and new and improved mechanized matériel, there was an all-out popular war effort, a greater national unity, a greater systematization of production, and, especially, a more intense emphasis on technology, far surpassing the efforts of World War I. The U.S. effort would truly be, as Churchill predicted after the fall of France in 1940, "the new world with all its power and might" stepping forth to "the rescue and liberation of the old."

In an unprecedented burst of wartime legislative activity, Congress passed the Emergency Price Control Act and established the War Production Board, the National War Labor Board, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Economic Stabilization. Critical items such as food, coffee, sugar, meat, butter, and canned goods were rationed for civilians, as were heating fuels and gasoline. Rent control was established. Two-thirds of the planes of civilian airlines were taken over by the air force. Travel was subject to priorities for war purposes. There was also voluntary censorship of newspapers, under general guidance from Washington.

There was special development and production of escort vessels for the navy and of landing craft—small and large—for beach invasions. There was a program of plane construction for the air force on a huge scale and programs for the development of high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber. Local draft boards had been given great leeway in drawing up their own standards of exemption and deferment from service and at first had favored agriculture over industry; soon controls were established according to national needs. By 1945 the United States had engaged more than sixteen million men under arms and improved its economy.

The grand strategy, from the beginning, was to defeat Germany while containing Japan, a strategy maintained and followed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The strategy was closely coordinated by Roosevelt and Churchill—except on one occasion when, in the early summer of 1942, Admiral Ernest J. King (chief of naval operations) and General George C. Marshall (army chief of staff) responded to the news that there would be no attempt to create a beachhead in Europe that year by suggesting a shift of U.S. power to the Pacific. Roosevelt promptly overruled them.

Campaign in the Pacific

Almost immediately after the strike at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and overran American garrisons on Guam and Wake Island in late December. They soon captured Manila and then conquered the U.S. forces on the Bataan peninsula by April 1942, along with the last U.S. stronghold on Corregidor on 6 May. Japan then feinted into the North Pacific, easily seizing Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, which it held until March 1943.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur had been pulled out of the Philippines before the fall of Corregidor and sent to Australia to assume responsibility for protecting that continent against Japanese invasion, increasingly imminent since Singapore and Java had been taken. With great skill, MacArthur used American and Australian forces to check Japanese inroads in New Guinea at Port Moresby. He also used land and sea forces to push back the Japanese and take the villages of Buna and Sanananda, although not until January 1943. To block a hostile thrust against MacArthur's communications through New Zealand, marine and infantry divisions landed in the Solomon Islands, where they took Guadalcanal by February 1943 after bitter, touch-and-go land, sea, and air fighting.

Almost concurrently, the navy, with marine and army troops, was attacking selected Japanese bases in the Pacific, moving steadily westward and successfully hitting the Marshall Islands at Eniwetok and Kwajalein, the Gilberts at Makin and Tarawa, and—turning north—the Marianas at Guam and Saipan in June and July 1944. To assist the army's move on the Philippines, the navy and the marines also struck westward at the Palau Islands in September 1944 and had them in hand within a month. American control of the approaches to the Philippines was now assured. Two years earlier, in the Coral Sea and also in the open spaces near Midway, in May and June 1942, respectively, the U.S. Navy had severely crippled the Japanese fleet. MacArthur's forces returned in October 1944 to the Philippines on the island of Leyte. Their initial success was endangered by a final, major Japanese naval effort near Leyte, which was countered by a U.S. naval thrust that wiped much of the Japanese fleet. U.S. forces seized Manila and Corregidor in February 1945, thus bringing to a successful conclusion the Bataan-Corregidor Campaign.

American land and sea forces were now in position to drive north directly toward Japan itself. Marines had landed on Iwo Jima on 19 February and invaded Okinawa on 1 April, both within good flying distance of the main enemy islands. The Japanese navy and air force were so depleted that in July 1945 the U.S. fleet was steaming off the coast of Japan and bombarding almost with impunity. Between 10 July and 15 August 1945, forces under Adm. William F. Halsey destroyed or damaged 2,084 enemy planes, sank or damaged 148 Japanese combat ships, and sank or damaged 1,598 merchant vessels, in addition to administering heavy blows at industrial targets and war industries.

Until the island hopping brought swift successes in 1944, it had been expected that the United States would need the China mainland as a base for an attack on Japan. The sea and land successes in the central and western Pacific, however, allowed the United States, by the spring of 1945, to prepare for an attack on Japan without using

China as a base. This situation was the result of three major factors: (1) the new naval technique of employing the fleet as a set of floating air bases, as well as for holding the sea lanes open; (2) the augmentation and improvement of U.S. submarine service to a point where they were fatal to Japanese shipping, sinking more than two hundred enemy combat vessels and more than eleven hundred merchant ships, thus seriously disrupting the desperately needed supply of Japanese troops on the many islands; and (3) MacArthur's leapfrogging tactics, letting many advanced Japanese bases simply die on the vine. Not to be overlooked was MacArthur's personal energy and persuasive skill.

Campaigns in Africa and Italy

Pressures, notably from Russian leaders, began building early in the war for an invasion of the European mainland on a second front. Because of insufficient buildup in England for a major attack across the English Channel in 1942—even for a small preliminary beachhead—U.S. troops were moved, some from Britain with the British and some directly from the United States, to invade northwest Africa from Casablanca to Oran and Algiers in November 1942. After the long coastal strip had been seized and the temporarily resisting French brought to the side of the Allies, British and American forces under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed east. The Germans were reinforced and concentrated. Sharp and costly fighting by air, army, and armor attacks and counterattacks, notably in February 1943 at the Kasserine Pass, ended with the Allied conquest of Tunisia and a great German surrender at Tunis, Bizerte, and Cape Bon. Meanwhile, at the Casablanca Conference in late January, Roosevelt and Churchill called for the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers. It would be a war to the finish, not a negotiated, temporary peace.

The next step was an invasion of Sicily, using large-scale parachute drops and perfected beach-landing skills, as a step toward eliminating Italy from the war. In September, Italy proper was invaded, the British crossing the Strait of Messina and the Americans landing at Salerno near Naples. Five days later, Italy surrendered, but the Germans occupied Rome and took control of the Italian government. After a long check midway up the "boot" of Italy on a line through Cassino, a dangerous landing was made at Anzio. Fierce German counterattacks there were stopped, and a following breakthrough carried U.S. forces past Rome, which fell on 4 June 1944. In July the Allied forces pushed through to the line of Florence and the

Arno River, the British on the east and the Americans on the west. Thereafter, although some British and American advances were made and a final offensive in April 1945 sent American troops to the Po Valley, Italy ceased to be the scene of major strategic efforts; the theater was drained to support the Normandy invasion, in southern France.

Invasion At Normandy and the Liberation of France

For the principal invasion of France, an inter-Allied planning staff had been created in March 1943 in London. In May the first tentative attack date was set, for early May of the following year, in what was called Operation Over-lord. The buildup of units and supplies proceeded steadily for nearly a year, aided by improved successes against German submarines targeting seagoing convoys. Finally, after several weeks of delays, on 6 June 1944—popularly known as D Day—the greatest amphibious invasion in history was launched across the English Channel, involving more than 5,300 ships and landing craft. It was a huge, carefully and intricately coordinated land, sea, and air action, with a precisely scheduled flow of