A global industrial war, 1939-1945, that killed tens of millions and remade borders, law and nuclear politics.
Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.
World War II opened in Europe when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, after a decade of Japanese war in China that many historians date from the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge clash. The Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan faced a widening Allied coalition led by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States and China.
Scholarly tallies of the dead cluster around 70-85 million, a majority civilians, with the Soviet Union and China bearing the largest national losses. The conflict fused industrial total war, the Holocaust and other genocides, strategic bombing, and the first combat use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Surrender ceremonies in May and September 1945 did not restore the 1930s map. Occupation, the United Nations Charter, partitioned Germany and Korea, and a bipolar nuclear order followed. Anglophone memory still treats the war as the century's defining just-war story, even as scholarship stresses imperial continuities and the China theatre.
Deep introduction
The Second World War was not one campaign but overlapping wars in Europe, Asia, Africa and at sea, bound by alliance diplomacy and factory output.
Japan's war in China and Italy's wars in Africa preceded the European general war. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Japan's strike on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 fused those wars into a single global contest.
Lend-Lease, the Atlantic Charter and later the United Nations Declaration (1 January 1942) turned a set of bilateral fights into a coalition with shared -- if unequal -- aims.
Detroit, the Urals, the Ruhr, Osaka and the Midlands became as decisive as any river crossing. Shipping, oil, aluminium and ball bearings set the tempo of offensives.
Codebreaking at Bletchley Park and Station HYPO, radar, and the B-29 and V-2 programmes show how laboratories entered the order of battle without turning this page into a weapons manual.
Nazi rule in Europe organised plunder, slave labour and the Holocaust: about six million Jews murdered, alongside millions of other targeted civilians. Japanese occupation in China and Southeast Asia produced mass death through massacre, famine and forced labour.
Resistance, collaboration and civil war inside occupied countries mean "the home front" was often a second front.
Yalta and Potsdam framed occupation zones, while the Tokyo and Nuremberg tribunals tried a new language of crimes against peace and humanity. The 1945 UN Charter promised collective security that the Cold War immediately strained.
Korea was divided at the 38th parallel; China's civil war resumed; Eastern Europe entered Soviet hegemony. The map of 1946 was a new system, not a repaired 1938.
A dated history of the 1939-1945 global war: theatres, coalitions, turning points and the 1945 settlement.
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02Alliances, services and war economies that fought the Second World War -- not a live order of battle.
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03How the 1939-1945 war unfolded across Europe, Asia, Africa and the oceans.
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04Documented casualty ranges, famine, cities and the economic burden of 1939-1945.
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05Commanders, statesmen and the arguments historians still run about 1939-1945.
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06Borders, law, nuclear politics and memory after 1945.
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07Theatres, museums, film and rituals that keep 1939-1945 visible.
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