Why 2nd world war

The devastation of the Great War as World War I was known at the time had greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In the mids, he secretly began the rearmament of Germany, a violation of the Versailles Treaty. After signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union , Hitler sent troops to occupy Austria in and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany.

The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself. On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact.

On April 9, , Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest. In fact, the Germans broke through the line with their tanks and planes and continued to the rear, rendering it useless.

Hitler now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive advantage of being separated from the Continent by the English Channel. To pave the way for an amphibious invasion dubbed Operation Sea Lion , German planes bombed Britain extensively beginning in September until May , known as the Blitz , including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage.

Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the next German advance until October, when it was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather. With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late included an expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East.

On December 7, , Japanese aircraft attacked the major U. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared war on the United States. After a long string of Japanese victories, the U. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway in June , which proved to be a turning point in the war.

On Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success against Japanese forces in a series of battles from August to February , helping turn the tide further in the Pacific. In mid, Allied naval forces began an aggressive counterattack against Japan, involving a series of amphibious assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the Pacific.

The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, spelled the end for German troops there, and the last of them surrendered on January 31, Soviet troops soon advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler gathered his forces to drive the Americans and British back from Germany in the Battle of the Bulge December January , the last major German offensive of the war.

An intensive aerial bombardment in February preceded the Allied land invasion of Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8, Soviet forces had occupied much of the country. Hitler was already dead, having died by suicide on April 30 in his Berlin bunker.

President Harry S. Post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and France. The once great powers of Japan and Germany looked as though they would never rise again. In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see that their peoples, highly educated and skilled, possessed the capacity to rebuild their shattered societies.

And it may have been easier to build strong economies from scratch than the partially damaged ones of the victors. Two powers, so great that the new term "superpower" had to be coined for them, dominated the world in The United States was both a military power and an economic one; the Soviet Union had only brute force and the intangible attraction of Marxist ideology to keep its own people down and manage its newly acquired empire in the heart of Europe.

The great European empires, which had controlled so much of the world, from Africa to Asia, were on their last legs and soon to disappear in the face of their own weakness and rising nationalist movements. We should not view the war as being responsible for all of this, however; the rise of the US and the Soviet Union and the weakening of the European empires had been happening long before The war acted as an accelerator.

It also accelerated change in other ways: in science and technology, for example. The world got atomic weapons but it also got atomic power. Under the stimulus of war, governments poured resources into developing new medicines and technologies.

Without the war, it would have taken us much longer, if ever, to enjoy the benefits of penicillin, microwaves, computers — the list goes on. In many countries, social change also speeded up.

The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years strengthened the belief in most democracies that governments had an obligation to provide basic care for all citizens. When it was elected in the summer of , for example, the Labour government in Britain moved rapidly to establish the welfare state.

The rights of women also took a huge step forward as their contribution to the war effort, and their share in the suffering, were recognised. In France and Italy, women finally got the vote. If class divisions in Europe and Asia did not disappear, the moral authority and prestige of the ruling classes had been severely undermined by their failure to prevent the war or the crimes that they had condoned before and during it.

Established political orders — fascist, conservative, even democratic — came under challenge as peoples looked for new ideas and leaders. In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root. In China, people turned increasingly from the corrupt and incompetent nationalists to the communists. While many Europeans, wearied by years of war and privation, gave up on politics altogether and faced the future with glum pessimism, others hoped that, at last, the time had come to build a new and better society.

In western Europe, voters turned to social democratic parties such as the Labour party in Britain. In the east, the new communist regimes that were imposed by the triumphant Soviet Union were at first welcomed by many as the agents of change.

The end of the war inevitably also brought a settling of scores. In many parts people took measures into their own hands. Collaborators were beaten, lynched or shot. Women who had fraternised with German soldiers had their heads shaved or worse. Governments sometimes followed suit, setting up special courts for those who had worked with the enemy and purging such bodies as the civil service and the police. The Soviets also tried to exact reparations from Germany and Japan; whole factories were dismantled down to the window frames and were carted off to the Soviet Union, where they frequently rotted away.

Much of the revenge was to gain advantage in the postwar world. In China and eastern Europe the communists used the accusation of collaboration with the Japanese or the Nazis to eliminate their political and class enemies.

The allies instituted an ambitious programme of de-Nazification in Germany, later quietly abandoned as it became clear that German society would be unworkable if all former Nazis were forbidden to work. In Japan, the head of the occupation, General Douglas MacArthur, broke up the zaibatsu , the big conglomerates that were blamed for supporting the Japanese militarists, and introduced a range of reforms, from a new school curriculum to a democratic constitution, that were designed to turn Japan into a peaceable democratic nation.

In both Germany and Japan, the victors set up special tribunals to try those responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the catalogue of horrors that came increasingly to be known as "crimes against humanity".

In Tokyo, leading Japanese generals and politicians, and at Nuremberg, senior Nazis those that had not committed suicide or escaped , stood in the dock before allied judges.

Not a few people then and since wondered if the trials were merely victors' justice, their moral authority undercut by the presence, in Nuremberg, of judges and prosecutors from Stalin's murderous regime, and by the fact that in Tokyo, the emperor, in whose name the crimes had been committed, was shielded from blame.

The trials, inconclusive though they were, formed part of a larger attempt to root out the militaristic and chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to produce the war, and to build a new world order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again.

Well before the war had ended, the allies had started planning for the peace. Among the western powers, the United States, by very much the dominant partner in the alliance, took the lead. In his Four Freedoms speech of January , President Roosevelt talked of a new and more just world, with freedom of speech and expression and of religion, and freedom from want and fear. In the Atlantic charter later that year, he and Churchill sketched out a world order based on such liberal principles as collective security, national self-determination, and free trade among nations.

A host of other allies, some of them represented by governments in exile, signed on. The Soviet Union gave a qualified assent, although its leader Stalin had no intention of following what were to him alien principles.

Roosevelt intended that the American vision should take solid institutional form. The key organisation was the United Nations, designed to be stronger than the League of Nations, which it was replacing, and the economic ones known collectively as the Bretton Woods system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. This time, Roosevelt was determined, the United States should join.

Stalin again gave grudging support. While much of what Roosevelt hoped for did not come about, it was surely a step forward for international relations that such institutions were created and largely accepted and, equally important, that they were underpinned by notions of a common humanity possessing the same universal rights. The idea that there were universal standards to be upheld was present, no matter how imperfectly, in the war crimes trials, and was later reinforced by the establishment of the United Nations itself in , the International Court of Justice in and Universal Declaration of Human Rights of It had already become clear at the top-level conferences of Teheran , Yalta February and Potsdam July-August that there was a gulf in what constituted universal values and goals between the United States and its fellow democracies and the Soviet Union.

Stalin was interested above all in security for his regime and for the Soviet Union, and that to him meant taking territory, from Poland and other neighbours, and establishing a ring of buffer states around Soviet borders. In the longer run, where the western powers saw a democratic and liberal world, he dreamed of a communist one. Less than six months later, in March , Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. France already had a mutual defense treaty with Poland.

The turn away from appeasement brought the Soviet Union to the fore. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had offered military help to Czechoslovakia during the crisis, but had been ignored by all the parties to the Munich Agreement. Now that war threatened, he was courted by both sides, but Hitler made the more attractive offer. Allied with Britain and France, the Soviet Union might well have had to fight, but all Germany asked for was its neutrality.

In the part published the next day, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to go to war against each other. The costs of carrying out World War I, as well as the costs to rebuild Western Europe after years of fighting, resulted in enormous debts on the part of the Western European powers to the United States.

The enormous reparations put on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles also increased the debts. Coupled with ineffective governments in many of these European States notably the Weinmar Republic, pre-Mussolini Italy and Socialist France led to slow reconstruction and poor economic growth. Unable to repay these loans, the economies of the West collapsed, beginning the Great Depression.

After winning the Russo-Japanese War in , Japan quickly became the dominant power in its region. Russia recognized Korea as a Japanese sphere of influence and removed all of its forces from there and Manchuria, the sparsely populated northeastern region of China. In , Japan annexed Korea as its own with little protest or resistance. Still, Japan was a quickly growing country, both population-wise and economically.

It founded the South Manchuria Railway company in Manchuria in , and with that company was able to gain government-like control of the area. By , the Depression had struck a blow to Japan. Instead, the public favored the Japanese army, and soon the civilian government had lost control of its military. Manchuria was vast and thinly populated, and would serve as excellent elbow room for an already overcrowded Japan.

It was also thought that Manchuria was rich in forests, natural resources, and fertile land. The fact that the Japanese believed themselves to be far superior to the Chinese only moved Japan towards conflict faster. Additionally, the warlord of Manchuria went against Japanese expectations and declared his allegiance to a growing Chinese military movement. So, in , the army staged an explosion at a section of railway near Mukden, a city in Manchuria, as a pretext to invade and annex China.

Japan met little resistance, although it did not have support of its own government, and Manchuria was completely occupied by the end of the year. Japan subsequently set up the puppet state of Manchukuo to oversee the newly acquired region. The s saw a weak and politically chaotic China. Warlords of the many provinces of China constantly feuded, and the central government was weak and decentralized, unable to do anything to stop conflict.

Chiang led an expedition to defeat southern and central Chinese warlords and gain the allegiance of northern warlords. He was successful, and he soon focused on what he perceived to be a greater threat than Japan, which was communism. But in , the deposed warlord general of Manchuria kidnapped Chiang and refused to release him until he at least temporarily united with the communists against the Japanese threat.

The Japanese army responded by staging the Battle of Lugou Bridge, which was supposed to provoke open war between China and Japan.

It worked and the Sino-Japanese War began. The beginning of the conflict was marked by the Chinese strategy of giving up land in order to stall the Japanese. It is important to note that the Japanese was not to completely take over China; rather, the Japanese wanted to set up puppet governments in key regions that would protect and advance Japanese interests.

The fall of Nanjing in the early stages of this conflict saw the beginning of Japanese war atrocities. Other war crimes committed included widespread rape, arson, and looting.