Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. Especially in the Atlantic Ocean, where German U-boats lurked beneath the surface, the most common way to get to Europe was in a convoy of about fifty or sixty similar ships, all protected by a screen of destroyers and maybe one cruiser. That last period in the United States often offered the opportunity for a few days of liberty. In fact, the almost total collapse of the proud French army in May 1940 remains one of the most incredible events in all of military history. At about the same time, in a dramatic BBC radio address from London on June 18, 1940, General Charles de Gaulle called upon his French countrymen to resist their German conquerors. In this respect, the United States proved to be exceptionally fruitful. Admiral Yamamoto had every reason to be proud. 49 W. 45th Street, 2nd Floor NYC, NY 10036, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. President Franklin D. Roosevelt followed the news of fighting in Europe with obvious concern. In many respects, the United States was the big winner in World War II. The worst incidents took place in Detroit in 1943, when Belle Isle became a site of racial warfare. In June, the United States Navy won its greatest victory ever in the Battle of Midway, in which an outnumbered American carrier force inflicted devastating losses on the then superior Japanese fleet. This event marked an unprecedented amount of terms for a president. When London refused to capitulate or to do the sensible thing, the Fuhrer unleashed the Luftwaffe on the English homeland, expecting that its heavy blows would bring Churchill to his senses. Despite his great victory, he thought the Japanese had simply awakened a sleeping giant. Within a matter of weeks the Soviet Union, which had recently signed a non-aggression treaty with Hitler, attacked Poland from the east. The German army was another matter. The Bath Iron Works in Maine produced more destroyers than all of Japan, while the Kaiser shipyards in California proved able to build an entire Victory ship, from beginning to end, in a mere seventy-two hours. Thus, the Rising Sun had to take the third and militarily worst optiona direct strike against the United Statesthe one country with the natural resources, the population size, and the industrial capacity to crush Japan. They agreed that. In desperation, they created an elite force of suicide pilots, called kamakazees, who took off with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. The US invaded and overtook the island of Iwo Jima. This was another conference between the three allied leaders. To mask war preparations, Japan sent another envoy to Washington with new peace proposals. So, the Tokyo government would have to seize the resources it needed, which meant certain war with the West. Army planners led by, The long awaited second front finally came on. Thus, this was a peacetime draft. The United States had great military potential, but in December of 1941 it was still more potential than reality. Soon, however, opportunities in shipyards and aircraft factories opened up. Instead, they were bludgeoned by enormous forces coordinated by the Big ThreeRoosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. FDR was of course aware of these cross-currents. The Marine Corps expanded from one division to five, while the Navy put more than a thousand ships to sea. He knew his countrymen did not want to be involved, and indeed he ran for an unprecedented third term in the White House with the slogan, He kept us out of war. Isolationist sentiment was powerful, and no less a personage than Charles Lindbergh led an America First movement that aimed to avoid all foreign entanglements. The end came quickly with a massive Russian offensive began and swept towards Berlin and the Americans and British came from the west. In 1941, however, Hitler made a colossal blunder. Fortunately, his hunch proved to be correct. Germany fought the Soviet Union for the city Stalingrad in this battle. This event was significant because it caused the US to declare war on Japan, and then on Germany afterward. Few Americans had ever been to Japan, and fewer still cared about it one way or the other. While many women remained at home with their children, and others worked in volunteer activities, the growth in female employment between 1942 and 1945 was staggering. Why would the Anglo-Saxons not be content with their vast holdings in Asia, on the other side of the world? His plan was to first cripple the American fleet and then to force a gigantic naval battle somewhere in the vast Pacific. Within a month, Polish resistance collapsed, and Warsaw fell. It was just a matter of time before the Rising Sun was crushed by American air and naval superiority. Yamamoto expected the Japanese army and navy to run wild for six months, but then, he feared, the United States would gather its enormous human and material resources and hurl them against the admirals island nation. Only an enormous sacrifice by many nations could bring it down.

Alone among major world capitals, Washington emerged from the war more confident than ever, and its airplanes, fleets, and armies, not to mention its atomic weapons, gave it military superiority over any potential opponent. Since 1939, the US had spent $2 billion to develop and atomic bomb based on the fission of radioactive uranium and plutonium. A staggering 27 million USSR citizens died in what for them will always be the Great Patriotic War.. And he also knew that if Germany ever controlled all of Europe, its power would be colossal. Such a Japanese strike against the Soviets would have divided Soviet resources and probably resulted in a victory for Hitler over the USSR. Referring to December 7 as a day which will live in infamy, he asked for a Declaration of War against the Empire of Japan, which was approved without debate and almost without dissent. But those were minor issues compared to the admirals greatest worry. By the end of the day, Eisenhower had won his beachhead. This was the first use of an atomic bomb. Even so, by 1943 Washington had resorted to a draft of all able-bodied males between eighteen and forty. Its great cities, like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, were never occupied by enemy armies or laid waste by falling bombs. But Japan needed oil and rubber quickly, and those resources were not easily available to the north. Because trains across the country were jammed and overloaded, there was no chance for a trip home. The decision would now be up to. When his soldiers crossed the USSR frontier on June 22, the Nazis leaders new opponent became Joseph Stalin, a dictator as ruthless and cunning as himself, and the head of both the largest country and the largest army on earth. By every military measure, Japans early morning attack on the great fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a success. Early in the morning of May 10, 1940, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg or lightning war against France, whose army had previously been considered the finest in the world. The songs of the timeTill We Meet Again and Ill Be Seeing You, in All the Old Familiar Places, among othersreflected the feelings of loneliness that were felt in every town and by almost every family.

The Army was the largest of all the services, and its basic training facilities at Fort Benning, Georgia (infantry); Fort Bragg, North Carolina (airborne): Fort Sill, Oklahoma (artillery); and Fort Hood, Texas (armor), became small cities in their own right. As it happened, his message never had to be released. For the Soviet Union, the carnage was even worse. This battle was the most decisive of all the battles in the Asian theater. Thereafter, Hitlers legions were rarely able to attack. On September 2, 1945, on the deck of the great battleship, the USS Missouri, representatives of the Japanese government signed the formal instrument of surrender. More than a thousand sailors died on the USS Arizona alone, and they represented less than half of the Navy losses that day. Eisenhower took a chance that the weather would break and allow the landings to go forward. After all, he reasoned, Germany sought lebensraum or growing space in the east and had no intention of dismantling the British Empire. The death of FDR gave Harry Truman the presidency at a time when the US was still fighting WWII. His publications include Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1987), Empire City: New York through the Centuries (2002), and The Encyclopedia of New York City (2nd ed., 2010). So it fell to an obscure Kansan to take charge of the greatest invasion in history.

Members of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, they would be the first invaders to land anywhere in Nazi-occupied France, and Ike knew that hundreds of them, maybe more, would be killed the next day. This was the last major German offensive in WWII. Following the Battle of Bataan, the many remaining thousands of soldiers had to march for 65 miles to prison camps. They decided from the outset that Germany posed a greater danger and thus gave priority to the European theater. It was more powerful than the previous bombing of Hiroshima, and Japan surrendered as a result. In such a circumstance, General Eisenhower reported that his soldiers and sailors had done everything he or anyone else could have expected, and that his withdrawal from the beachhead was his fault alone. Hitler committed suicide on April 30. This battle prevented the Axis powers from advancing further into Egypt. When he heard of the Pearl Harbor disaster, he actually breathed a sigh of relief, noting in his wartime diary: So we have won after all.. So the commanding general walked informally among the young men, many of them only teenagers, chatting about their hometowns, working his way through the throng, recognizing the perils they would all soon be facing. It was no use.

Its factories and steel mills, farms and subdivisions, and stores and schools were unscathed by the conflict. They felt protected by great oceans on both sides of the North American continent. Meanwhile, the Americans who had landed in Morocco and Algeria trapped thousands of Nazi soldiers who could not escape across the Mediterranean Sea. Even in the Army, they served in segregated units under mostly white officers. Fortunately for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy was able to extricate his trapped soldiers from the port of Dunkirk. Meanwhile, Italy, not satisfied with its conquest of Ethiopia in 19351936, turned its attention toward Greece. Truman was the US president and Clement Attlee had just been elected the new British prime minister. By 1944, assembly lines in southern California, Seattle, and Long Island were producing almost 100,000 aircraft, a total greater than the combined output of Germany, Japan, and the British Empire. But at the end of June 1940, essentially all of western Europe was under the control of Berlin. These panzer formations were to smash holes in the enemy line and then break out into the rear, creating havoc on the roads and, supported by Luftwaffe dive bombers, preventing the Allies from plugging the gaps. The good news, however, was that after the Battle of Midway, the Japanese were no longer able to undertake offensive operations. By contrast, Field Marshal Rommel, the commander of the Atlantic Wall, who no doubt saw the same predictions, decided that the weather would be so awful that he could safely go back to Germany to visit his wife and son. Statistics for trucks, jeeps, landing ships, artillery pieces, and self-propelled guns were almost as dramatic. By every measure, the United States led the world in 1945, and it was about to begin two generations of prosperity unmatched in history. The temperature in the firestorm reached 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. The next step was to board a troopship. Also in 1940, the President took the momentous step of federalizing the National Guard of all the states. But in which direction would the Japanese move? There agreement at Yalta would prove the most historic of the three meetings. Kenneth T. Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences and director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University. By this time, the Western world was fully alert to the menace of the fanatically ambitious and confident Fuhrer. All resistance ceased within the week. Hitler expected Great Britain, his only remaining foe, to recognize the superiority of German arms and to remove itself from active involvement in Europe. There was no oxygen to breathe; whatever was flammable burst spontaneously into flame, By April, the armies had surrounded Berlin. The war with Japan was still active, however. Japanese leaders felt that they were being unfairly held back by the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, which together controlled most of the natural resources, especially oil, to the south of Japan, in places now known as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. There is no one date that can be said to mark the beginning of the greatest of global conflicts. This inspired the 22nd amendment, which prevented granting this many terms to a single president. Upon the breakdown of negotiations with the Japanese, officials in Washington immediately sent warning messages to American bases in the Pacific, but they failed to arrive in time. But as radios across the land sent out the news of a sneak attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor, a gigantic nation, a sleeping giant as Admiral Yamamoto called it, was roused to fury. With the Red Army smashing into East Prussia from the east, the British and American heavy bombers raining destruction from the skies on German cities, and Allied armored columns crossing the Rhine River and encircling trapped Wehrmacht divisions, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Scientists, many of them refugees from Europe, worked to perfect this this deadly new weapon at the University of Chicago; Weather on the morning of August 6 dictated the choice of, Two days later with no response, the US dropped a second bomb on. In July 1937, the Japanese moved again, this time directly against the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. In the fall of 1942, the British Eighth Army counterattacked against the Afrika Korps and soon sent Rommel scurrying home to Germany. American tanks raced across the countryside and liberated Paris by the end of August. Prejudice against Asians on the West Coast had been a theme of American history for generations before World War II, but the Pearl Harbor attack meant that Japanese Americans, many of whom had been citizens of the United States since birth, were suspected of being enemy agents. In January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on the grand strategy to win the war, including to invade Sicily and Italy and to, The first wartime Big Three conference brought together Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill at Teheran, Iran in 1943. France sued for peace in June, and Hitlers victorious troops marched past the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. US relations with Japan were becoming increasingly strained as a result of Japans invasion of China and ambitions to extend its conquests to Southeast Asia. Generally regarded as the finest fighting force in the war, it had superbly trained and battle-hardened soldiers, sophisticated weapons, and brilliant tactical leaders, such as von Manstein, Rommel, and Heinz Guderian. Second, Yamamoto had not thought to order his pilots to blow up the giant oil tanks and fuel storage facilities that dotted the area around Pearl Harbor. This was a meeting to discuss strategy between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. His mission was to assault the Nazi Atlantic Wall, a network of artillery, beach hazards, and pillboxes that were designed to slaughter anyone foolish enough to come out of the water. Moreover, many ethnic Americans were not anxious to help the British. In 1931, the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, a northern province of China. Perhaps the most incredible numbers were put up at sea. There, among the bright lights, nightclubs, and stage-door canteens of the largest city in the world, they drank and laughed and at least pretended to be confident and happy. These were a series of trials held by the Allied powers regarding the laws of war, and war crimes. Indeed, those years of deprivation, fear, and longing would always be as central to their lives as they were to the century in which they lived. By September, American Marines were clawing back on Guadalcanal, and beginning an island-hopping campaign that required them to fight their way across the Pacific. On the other side of the interventionist divide, Jewish Americans were more aware of Hitlers intense anti-Semitism and of the new regulations and laws that limited Jewish access to the professions in Germany. Relative to Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, its battle deaths were relatively few in number. Their mission was to crash their aircraft into the ships of the United States Navy. In Washington State and in Kansas, Boeing built the great four-engine, strategic bomber fleets that destroyed entire cities. Within months, new orders for munitions, uniforms, and combat vehicles absorbed the remaining unemployed workers from the Great Depression. The next day, a Monday, President Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress. Whether they sailed on converted transatlantic liners like the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary or ordinary transports, quarters were tight, pleasures were few, and danger was constant. Meanwhile, in 1936, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler moved aggressively into the Rhineland, previously a demilitarized zone, and in 1938, he incorporated Czechoslovakia and Austria into the Third Reich. And in the case of a protracted war against the American republic, Japans most famous officer realized that the cause was almost hopeless. But the American nation could make up such human and material losses. Meanwhile, the prisoners and the wounded, making their way back to wives, sweethearts, parents, and children, often after an absence of many years, would carry the cost of the conflict with them for the rest of their lives. This was significant because it would become the sole method by which the US supported its allies in the war effort. Americans were horrified to learn about Japanese war crimes of mass rape and murder of civilians in places like. And the Army, directed by Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, began to grow to a size more appropriate to a great power. Conditions were scarcely better at home. Suffice it to say here that General Eisenhower did four things that will distinguish him forever. He ordered all men, toddlers all the way to old men to fight or be shot on the spot. But no one in America who had lived as an adult through the Great Depression and the years of total mobilization and total war that followed it would claim that the experience had been easy or had been achieved without enormous sacrifice and cost. Mercifully, the Allied navies gained superiority over the Nazi submarines before most American soldiers crossed the ocean, and only 8,000 men were lost out of four million who made the journey aboard the defenseless cargo vessels. Three weeks later on the desk of the battleship Missouri with General MacArthur receiving their surrender. This event is significant because France would later become the site of the D-day invasion, and allied forces would have to work through France in order to get to Germany. The first was to aid Nazi Germany and to attack to the north against the Russian Far East from Japanese bases in Manchuria. Ike had been only a lieutenant colonel when the war began in 1939.

They had no help, and were barely able to stop Germany, but they eventually did. After taking back Midway, the US conducted amphibious , In early 1942, the Japanese conquered the, The defeat of Japan was now only a matter of time. Why not just divide the world? Surprisingly, on December 10, Germany declared war on the United States even though Hitlers treaty with Japan was a defensive arrangement that did not require him to act, because Japan had been the aggressor. Fortunately for the Japanese, in Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, they had the perfect leader. This event was significant because in this battle, Britain stood alone. Copyright The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 2009-2019. On August 14, 1945, Truman announced over the radio that the war was over.

In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. By 1945, the United States Navy was larger and more powerful than the navies of all other countries put together. All eight American battleships were disabled or sent to the bottom, as were dozens of smaller vessels. Marshall had wanted the job for himself, but President Roosevelt said he would not be comfortable if his right-hand man were not nearby in Washington. Finally, as the thousands of ships of the main invasion force pushed away from piers and began to cross the English Channel for the short voyage to Normandy, General Eisenhower read a personal message to the troops who were about to go ashore: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. Outside Detroit, the Chrysler Tank Arsenal produced the tanks and armored vehicles that would become the spearheads of General George S. Pattons Third Army. Moreover, the United States had allowed its armed forces to wither in the 1920s and 1930, so that when World War II broke out in Europe, its army of 190,000 men ranked about eighteenth in the global rankings, about on a par with Rumania and Bulgaria. The Big Three met again in February 1945 at the Yalta Conference. In fact, blacks were not allowed in the Marine Corps and were inducted as sailors only to serve as cooks. In 1943, a combined Anglo-American force invaded Sicily and then Italy, ultimately knocking that country out of the war. But his good judgment, hard work, and devotion to duty were recognized early on by Marshall, who quickly promoted the affable staff officer over dozens of senior generals. This event is significant because it marked the beginning of WWII. This was a significant event because, although Europe was at war, the US had not yet joined the war. And in perhaps the most devastating battle of all time, at Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943, the proud German Sixth Army, conquerors of France, was systematically annihilated by a vengeful Red Army. Hitler refused to call for a retreat or surrender. They held the position that America should not join the war. It involved all six major continents, all three of the great oceans on the planet, scores of countries, and billions of people. And Japan expanded its military operations in China. This was the plan within Operation Overlord that was used to gain a foothold into Europe. This would eventually allow for the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending WWII.