World War II

This conflict was fought between two groups of powers, the Allied and the Axis powers.

The Allied powers consisted of Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, the United States and Yugoslavia.

The Axis powers consisted of Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan and Romania.

The Allied powers won this conflict.

This war was the world's largest and most bloody formal armed conflict to date (as of 2026.) Over 50 million persons lost their lives. But these losses were not limited to, or even most generally among, direct combatants.

The Germans formed "concentration camps" where they interned Jews, communists and anyone else they didn't find acceptable. Final estimates of deaths in the Nazi concentration camps hover around six million people. They were worked to death, outright murdered, starved, tortured and used as living experiments by Nazi "scientists."

The Japanese acted similarly, publicly characterizing their opponents as being animals and treating them accordingly. Concentration camps were created by the Japanese as well, and the horrors experienced in them were made legendary by the relatively few survivors. Japanese wartime actions in China were as cruel and inhuman as any the Germans ever imagined; investigation of the "Rape of Nanking" is a must for those interested in the ethics (or lack of them) of the Japanese armed forces during WWII.

The Americans, not to be outdone, decisively finished the war by the mass killing of 230,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians (150,000 people and 80,000 people respectively) with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. The general consensus is that many American lives were saved by these two attacks, as the war would almost certainly have dragged on for quite some time otherwise. The issue here is that Japanese civilian lives were exchanged for the lives of American soldiers. That raises many questions about the "appropriate" conduct of war.

General Sequence of Events:

• 1938: Germany "annexes" Austria
• 1939: Germany invades Poland
• 1940: Japan joins the Axis powers (allies with Germany)
• 1940: Italy conquers British Somaliland
• begins war in Africa
• 1940: Germany invades Denmark
• 1940: Germany invades Norway
• 1940: Germany invades France
• 1940: Germany invades Belgium
• 1940: Germany invades Holland
• 1941: Japan attacks US at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7th
• 1941: Japan invades Hong Kong
• 1941: Japan invades Burma
• 1941: Japan invades the Philippines
• 1941: Germany reinforces the Italians in Africa
• 1941: Germany invades Yugoslavia
• 1941: Germany invades Greece
• 1941: Germany invades Russia
• 1942: Japan invades Borneo
• 1942: Japan invades Java
• 1942: Japan invades Sumatra
• 1942: Japan captures Singapore
• 1942: Germany begins mass slaughter of Jews at Auschwitz
• 1942: US begins "Manhattan Project" to develop nuclear weapons
• 1943: German defeat at Stalingrad is first major setback for the Nazis
• 1943: German and Italian forces in Africa surrender to the Allied forces
• 1943: Italy surrenders to allies, Germany subsequently invades Italy
• 1944: D-Day
• the US invades German-occupied Europe in force (June 6th)
• 1944: Paris is recaptured in August
• 1944: Guam is freed by the Americans
• 1945: Russians liberate the Auschwitz concentration camp
• 1945: Germany overrun by US and Russian forces, fights to the last, surrenders May 7th)
• 1945: US drops a nuclear weapon on Japan at Hiroshima (Aug 6th
• 15 KT)
• 1945: US drops 2nd nuclear weapon on Japan at Nagasaki (Aug 9th
• 21 KT)
• 1945: Japan surrenders (Aug 14th)

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