jan 1, 1930 - Start Page

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World War II was a “total war,” fought on four continents by hundreds of millions of people and massive national armies. Though a late arrival to the conflict, the United States played a critical role in defeating the Axis powers. Here, African American pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama, prepare for a training flight.


World War II began as separate conflicts on opposite sides of the globe. Japan invaded China in 1937, and in 1939, after years of unchecked aggression, Nazi Germany unleashed its “blitzkrieg” (lightning war) against Poland, leading to British and French declarations of war in response. The two wars merged into one and drew in more and more nations. Battles were fought everywhere, from Australia to the arctic circle. Beneath the warring lay a fundamental truth: authoritarian fascism was challenging liberal democracy for dominance around the globe. The fighting ended in August 1945, after American warplanes dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the years between, massive and technologically advanced forces collided in the fields of France, the forests and steppes of Russia, the river valleys of China, the volcanic islands of the Pacific, and the deserts of North Africa — slaughtering combatants and noncombatants alike in horrific numbers.

The war killed an incalculable number of people, estimated between 50 and 80 million, and wounded or displaced hundreds of millions more. At the war’s end, economies and infrastructure across Europe and East Asia lay in ruins. Every industrialized nation in Europe, North America, and Asia participated in the war, as well as dozens of less-developed countries and small colonies. World War II proved the defining event of the twentieth century, leaving behind a new and volatile international order.

Long before the war’s outcome was clear, and even before the United States entered hostilities in December 1941, President Roosevelt identified its ideological significance. “Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents,” FDR told the nation in his January 1941 State of the Union address. Both Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill saw the fight to protect “democratic existence” from fascism as a “good war,” as it would be remembered by many. When the grim reality of the Jewish Holocaust came to light, U.S. participation in the war seemed even more just. But the war against the authoritarian regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan was undeniably also a war to preserve British, French, and Dutch colonies in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. By 1945, democracy in the industrialized world had been preserved, and a new alliance between Western Europe and the United States had taken hold. The future of colonialism, however, remained unresolved.

On the U.S. domestic front, World War II ended the Great Depression and accelerated social and political changes already underway. Racial politics and gender roles shifted in response to wartime migration and labor shortages. The pace of urbanization increased as millions of Americans uprooted themselves and moved hundreds or thousands of miles to join the military or to take a home front job. The massive war effort required an unprecedented expansion of the federal government, which became effectively permanent with the dawning of the Cold War. Though the United States fought for fewer than four years, the repercussions of World War II lasted for generations.



The rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan led to the outbreak of a second world war in 1939. Initially, the American public opposed involvement in the war. But by 1940, President Roosevelt was mobilizing support for a military buildup and preparing the nation to fight. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States fully into the conflict. War mobilization dramatically expanded the federal government and finally ended the Great Depression. It also boosted geographical and social mobility, as women, rural whites, and southern blacks found employment in new defense plants across the country. Even as the war brought Americans closer together, inequalities like the internment of Japanese American citizens marred the idealism that defined the war effort.

In 1942, Germany and Japan seemed to be on the verge of victory. But a string of critical victories led to the Allies taking the offensive for good in 1943. With the Soviets pushing the exhausted German army back and France liberated, the Nazis looked defeated by the end of 1944. Allied victory was all but certain, and Germany surrendered in May 1945. The tide of war had turned in large part on the unprecedented industrial might of America. The federal policies that drove the war effort — the expanded income tax, a huge military establishment, and multibillion-dollar budgets, to name but a few — would become permanent fixtures in American life.

The greatest expression of America’s power was the development of a nuclear weapon. After atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan finally surrendered. The United States emerged from the war with an undamaged homeland, sole possession of atomic weapons, and a new standing in international politics and alliances. That new global role would be complicated by a lasting legacy of the war: friction with the Soviet Union, which sowed the seeds of the four-decade-long Cold War.

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