What was the point of World War 2?

Answer 1

It may be arguable that war has no point at all. War is a violent extension of politics. But war has causes, political factors which ultimately lead one nation to use deadly force against another. This seems to be part of the human condition and no one has yet found a solution for it.

Very broadly, Hitler in Germany wanted to expand the borders of Germany to provide more living space (Lebensraum) for Germans. On the other side of the world, the Japanese wanted to expand their borders to include all of southeast Asia to gain unlimited access to Natural Resources not found in resource-poor Japan. Both the Germans and the Japanese had very high opinions of themselves at the time and had convinced themselves that they had every right to take over their neighbor's lands and property by force.

It went, of course, much deeper than that and there are so many reasons and causes that cannot be discussed at length in a forum such as this, but it should be added that in Europe, Hitler and the Nazis promised the German People revenge against the French for the humiliating Treaty of Versailles which ended World War 1. That treaty forced the Germans to accept all the blame for starting the war, and to pay all the expenses of the war, which was unfair because, looked at dispassionately, all the belligerents had some responsibility for starting the Great War.

After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 he immediately began to secretly rebuild the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht). By 1935 he felt strong enough to openly abrogate the Treaty of Versailles and announce to the world that he was rearming. The world did nothing to stop him. In 1936 German troops reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland. The world stood by, paralyzed. By 1938 Hitler felt strong enough to annex Austria. The world stood by. Then he wanted the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia. By this time the world was afraid of Hitler, and the world let him have the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. By 1939, Hitler felt strong enough to initiate an armed attack on Poland which precipitated World War 2. The rest of the world, which had stood shaking in its boots while Hitler bluffed his way to bloodless victory after bloodless victory, had finally had enough, but by 1939 Germany really was as strong as the world had long feared, and it took six long, bloody years to defeat them, and we almost lost!

On the other side of the world, the Japanese were mad at the Europeans in general and the Americans in particular for what they saw as Caucasians meddling in Asian, essentially Japanese, affairs. America and Japan had actually been pretty good friends at one point. We helped broker the peace after the Japanese humiliated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, and Japan stood with the Allies against the Central Powers in World War 1. But after World War 1 relations between especially Japan and the U.S. began to deteriorate as the U.S. increasingly saw what the Japanese were doing in Korea and Manchuria as naked aggression. Japanese treatment of the Chinese and Koreans was bestial, and the U.S. began cutting off aid to the Japanese, culminating in an oil embargo in August of 1941 which is probably what triggered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

These are just a few highlights of the causes of World War 2, but was there a point? Once the war had started the point was to stop it. We (the Free World) really did have to stop the armed aggression of the Axis powers, but in 20/20 hindsight (as usual) it's now possible to see how the war could have been prevented in the first place.

Answer 2

The allies (USA, England, Good guys) were being oppressed by the Axis (Nazis, Russia, bad guys)