back 

Allies close in

Assault landing at Omaha Beach in Normandy in June, 1944, the Western Allies invaded northern France and in August, after reassigning several Allied divisions in Italy, then invaded southern France;  by the 25th of August the Allies had liberated Paris.  During the latter part of the year, the Western Allies continued to push back German forces in western Europe, and in Italy ran into the last major defensive line.

On the Germans eastern front, the Soviets launched a series of powerful offensives. Starting in early June the Soviets launched massive assaults against Finland, Belarus, Ukraine and Eastern Poland, Romania, and Hungary.  These operations resulted in great successes, with Bulgaria, Romania and Finland signing armistices with the Soviet Union, and prompted Polish resistance forces to initiate several uprisings in Poland, though the largest of these, in Warsaw, was conducted without Soviet assistance and put down by German forces.

By the start of July, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the Chindwin River while the Chinese captured Myitkyina.  In China, the Japanese were having greater successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August.  Soon after, they further invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the end of November and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by the middle of December.

In the Pacific, American forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. In the middle of June, 1944, they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands, scoring a decisive victory against Japanese forces in the Philippine Sea within a few days. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval forces scored another large victory against the Japanese in the Leyte Gulf.

Axis collapse, Allied victory

On  December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a large offensive in the Ardennes against the Western Allies. Starting in mid-January of 1945, the Soviets launched major offensives pushing from the Vistula to the Oder and against East Prussia.  By the start of February, the Western Allies had defeated the German offensive and the Soviets had progressed up to the Oder river in Germany.

In the Asia-Pacific region, American forces meanwhile had captured Leyte by the end of 1944 and invaded Luzon in January.   Japanese forces in Burma, meanwhile, were forced to withdraw to the southern part of the country.

On February 4th, the leaders of the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union met in Yalta and came to agreement regarding the Soviet Union entering the war against Japan and the occupation of post-war Germany.

Soon after the Yalta Conference, Western Allied forces crossed the Ruhr river in Germany while the Soviets invaded Pomerania. In late March, the Western Allies then crossed the Rhine river and quickly encircled a large number of German divisions. By mid-April Soviet forces were able to attack Berlin itself and near the end of the month, Mussolini's remnant fascist government was overthrown by Allied Italian partisans.

Nuclear explosion at NagasakiIn Asia, American forces made series of invasions, starting at Iwo Jima in February and then going on to Mindanao and Okinawa in March and April.  At this time, the Japanese overthrew the Vichy government in Indochina, creating the short lived Empire of Vietnam.

During this period there were several changes in leadership. On April 12th, American President Roosevelt died, succeeded by Harry Truman. On the 28th, Mussolini, having been captured by the Italian partisans, was executed.  Two days later, with the Soviets fast approaching, Hitler committed suicide, designating naval commander Karl Dönitz as the new head of state.

On April 29th, German forces in Italy surrendered to the Allies. Soon after, on May 8th, the Allies accepted Germany's surrender, essentially ending the war in Europe. Sporadic fighting continued for a few days though, notably in Prague.

In late July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany, and confirmed agreements of Germany occupation and reconstruction as well as the terms of Japanese surrender; it was specifically stated in the latter that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction".  During the conference, the United Kingdom held its general election and Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee.

In early August, after Japan's refusal to the terms of Potsdam, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the short period between the bombings, the Soviets fulfilled their part of the agreements at Yalta and invaded Japanese-held Manchuria. On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, thus bringing the war to an end.

Aftermath

Allied occupation zones in Germany 1946;

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Soviet Union each occupied a zone in Germany as well as in the capital Berlin. These zones became the blueprint of the later division into West Germany and East Germany during the Cold War.  The end of the war hastened the independence of many British crown colonies (such as India) and Dutch territories (such as Indonesia) and the formation of new nations and alliances throughout Asia and Africa. The Philippines were granted their independence in 1946 as previously promised by the United States.   France attempted and failed to regain control of its colonies in Indochina.

Poland's boundaries were re-drawn to include portions of pre-war Germany, including East Prussia and Upper Silesia, while ceding most of the areas taken by the Soviet Union in the Molotov-Ribbentrop partition of 1939, effectively moving Poland to the west. Germany was split into four zones of occupation, and the three zones under the Western Allies were reconstituted as a constitutional democracy. The Soviet Union's influence increased as they, with the tacit approval of the West, established hegemony over most of eastern Europe and incorporated parts of Finland and Poland into their new boundaries. This appeasement of Stalin by the West became known as the Western betrayal among the Soviet-dominated countries. Europe was informally split into Western and Soviet spheres of influence, which heightened existing tensions between the two camps and helped establish the Cold War.

To prevent (or at least minimize) future conflicts, the allied nations, led by the United States, formed the United Nations in San Francisco, California in 1945.  One of the first actions of the United Nations was the creation of the State of Israel, partly in response to the Holocaust.

In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall devised the "European Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan. Effective from 1948 to 1952, it allocated 13 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Western Europe. Of Germany’s four zones of occupation, coordinated by the Allied Control Council, the American, British, and French zones joined in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. In Germany, economic suppression and denazification took place for several years. Millions of Germans and Poles were expelled from their homelands as a result of the territorial annexations in Eastern Europe agreed upon at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Mainstream estimates of German casualties from this process range one–two million. In the West, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, and the Saar area was separated from Germany and put in economic union with France. Austria was divided into four zones of occupation, which were united in 1955 to become the Republic of Austria. The Soviet Union occupied much of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In all the USSR-occupied countries, with the exception of Austria, the Soviet Union helped Communist regimes to power. It also annexed the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

In Asia, Japan was occupied by the U.S, aided by Commonwealth troops, until the peace treaty took effect in 1952. The Japanese Empire's government was dismantled under General Douglas MacArthur and replaced by a constitutional monarchy with the emperor as a figurehead. The defeat of Japan also led to the establishment of the Far Eastern commission, which set out policies for Japan to fulfill under the terms of surrender. In accordance with the Yalta Conference agreements, the Soviet Union occupied and subsequently annexed Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. Japanese occupation of Korea also ended, but the peninsula was divided between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along 38th parallel.  The U.S.-backed South Korea would fight the communist North Korea in the Korean War, with Korea remaining divided.

World War II was a pivotal point in China's history.  Before the war against Japan, China had suffered nearly a century of intervention at the hands of various imperialist powers and was relegated to a semi-colonial status. However, the war greatly enhanced China's international status. The central government under Chiang Kai-shek was able to abrogate most of the unequal treaties China had signed in the past century, and China became a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council. China also reclaimed Manchuria and Taiwan. Nevertheless, eight years of war greatly taxed the central government, and many of its nation-building measures adopted since it came to power in 1928 were disrupted by the war. Communist activities also expanded greatly in occupied areas, making post-war administration of these areas difficult. Vast war damages and hyperinflation thereafter demoralized the populace, along with the continuation of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Partly because of the severe blow his army and government had suffered during the war against Japan, the Kuomintang, along with state apparatus of the Republic of China, retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and in its place the Chinese communists established the People's Republic of China on the mainland.

Casualties, civilian impact, and atrocities

Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, but most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians.  Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, genocide. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties.   Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85% were on the Allied side (mostly Soviet and Chinese) and 15% on the Axis side. One estimate is that 12 million civilians died in Holocaust camps, 1.5 million by bombs, 7 million in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other causes.   Figures on the amount of total casualties vary to a wide extent because the majority of deaths were not documented.

From 9 to 11 million of these civilian casualties, including around six million Jews, were systematically killed in the Holocaust.   Likewise, Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 civilians, mostly Chinese during the war.  NEXT