WW2 (1 set 1939 ano – 2 set 1945 ano)

Descrição:

Germany conquered much of Europe, while Japan took much of Southeast Asia. Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union were brought together in an attempt to halt fascism.

With their use of planes, tanks, and trucks, Germany overran Poland in four weeks in a blitzkrieg-lightning war. Germany occupied Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands; invaded France; and split the Franco-British forces. British forces were trapped at Dunkirk until they were able to be evacuated through a heroic array of efforts. France was taken by the Nazis. Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria were with the Axis Powers. The USSR, Spain, and Sweden were neutral.

Germany sought to gain control of Britain in the air. In the Battle of Britain in mid-1940, up to a thousand planes a day continuously bombed British airfields and key factories. In September, British cities were bombed to cripple morale. Winston Churchill led a determined Great Britain against the Germans. By October Britain was beating Germany three to one.
In mid-1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR. By October, most of Ukraine was conquered, Leningrad was surrounded, and Moscow was besieged. A severe winter drew them back, but the German empire now stretched from eastern Europe to the English channel.

Hitler’s New Order was based on National Socialism-racial imperialism. All were subject to harsh policies dedicated to ethnic cleansing and the plunder of resources for the Nazis. Germans believed Nordic peoples were related to Aryans, and received preferential treatment. Puppet governments were established in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, where Nazis found some willing collaborators. Germany ruled northern France. In the nominally independent southeast, World War I general Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain formed the Vichy regime that adopted much of the National Socialist ideology.

Occupied nations paid the costs of the war. Nazi administrators stole goods and money from local Jews, set currency exchanges at favorable rates, and forced occupied peoples to accept worthless wartime scrip. Germany was able to maintain high living standards and morale. Germany gained control of Jewish populations, allowing mass murder to take place.

In the east, Nazis set out to build a vast colonial empire where Jews would be exterminated and Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be enslaved and forced to die out. German peasants would occupy abandoned lands. Poland was thus incorporated into Germany or placed under administration. Himmler’s elite SS corps implemented a program of destruction and annihilation. They destroyed cities and factories, stole crops and animals, and subjected peoples to starvation and mass murder.

Small resistance groups fought back, but some, namely Communists and socialists, fought each other as well. After the Nazis closed all Polish universities and outlawed national newspapers, the Poles maintained an underground press and passed intelligence. Resistance groups in France, Italy, Greece, Russia, and the Netherlands took similar actions. In response, Nazis tortured captured resistance members and executed hostages. They murdered the male population of Lidice, Czechoslovakia and Oradour, France and leveled entire towns.

The Nazis’ greatest abomination was the condemnation of all European Jews and other peoples considered racially inferior to extreme racial persecution and annihilation in the Holocaust. They issued a euthanasia campaign in which about 70,000 people with disabilities, mostly Germans, were forced into special hospitals, barracks, and camps where they were murdered. Polish Jews were forced into ghettos where they lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions without real work or adequate sustenance. Over 500,000 died. German armies, accompanied by military death squads known as Special Task Forces and other military units, moved into the Soviet Union towns systematically wiping out target populations. About 2 million were murdered.

As a “final solution of the Jewish population”, Germans implemented the mass murder of all Jews in Europe. They set up an extensive network of concentration camps, factory complexes, and railroad transport lines to imprison and murder Jews and other “undesirables” and exploit their labor before they died. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, over 1 million were murdered in gas chambers. The killing continued even when it was clear that Germany would lose the war.

A small amount of Jewish resistance found success. Some masqueraded as Christians, fled to join anti-Nazi partisans, or organized underground resistance groups in ghettos and concentration camps.

By 1945, Nazis had killed about 6 million Jews and 5 million other Europeans. Historians debate whether participation in this genocide was due to anti-semitism, peer pressure, desire to advance in the ranks, the need to prove one’s strength, etc.

In response to political divisions and economic crisis, a Fascist government took control of Japan in the 30s. It was highly nationalistic and militaristic, deeply committed to imperial expansion, and believed Asian races were superior. In 1931, Japanese armies invaded and occupied Manchuria and later China in 1937. Seeking to cement ties with the Fascists regimes of Europe, it entered into a formal alliance with Italy and Germany in 1940. They occupied southern portions of Indochina in 1941.

Their goal was the “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”- to free Asia from Western imperialists and maintain a vast empire. They tapped currents of nationalist sentiment to gain public support. However, real power was in the hands of the Japanese. They exhibited great cruelty toward civilian populations and prisoners of war and exploited local peoples. They set a powerful example for national liberation groups in Asia.

Japan’s expansion created a sharp response from Roosevelt, and many Japanese leaders believed war was inevitable. On December 7, 1941, they launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The act brought in a vengeful and angry America into the war.

Americans pushed back Japan from Australia and engaged in naval warfare. Americans and Australians opened an island-hopping campaign that forced Japan out of its conquered territories. Both sides committed brutal atrocities.

Meanwhile, Great Britain, the U.S., and the USSR formed the Grand Alliance. They bickered on several elements and distrusted their ideologies, but were brought together to stop the Axis powers. They planned to mount an all-out attack on Japan after Hitler was defeated. They concentrated on immediate military needs, not postwar settlements. They adopted the principle of unconditional surrender, which cemented the alliance, meant that Soviets and Anglo-Americans would have to invade and occupy Germany, and portended that Japan would fight to the bitter end.

The U.S. used its industrial base to wage global war and in 1943, outproduced the rest of the world combined. Britain was an impregnable force waiting to strike. The Soviet Union’s military strength was eventually so great it might have been able to defeat Germany alone. Broad-based Russian nationalism, rather than a narrow communist ideology, became a powerful unifying force.

This combined might was able to force Nazi armies back. At the Second Battle of El Alamein, the British defeated Germans and Italians and halted their invasion into North Africa. Churchill called the battle the “hinge of fate” that opened the door to Allied victory.

Anglo-Americans took Morocco and Algeria, which was under the Vichy government. Fearful of invasion across the Mediterranean, German forces occupied Vichy France, and the government practically ceased to exist.

After clearing North Africa of Axis powers, the U.S. and Britain invaded Sicily in the summer of 1943, and the Italian government accepted unconditional surrender. Nazi armies then seized northern and central Italy, and German paratroopers rescued Mussolini and placed him at the head of a puppet government. The Allies continued to move up Italy.

New antisubmarine technologies allowed the Allies to fend off German submarines that previously hampered the British war effort. Germany’s air force had never fully recovered from the Battle of Britain, and the U.S. and Britain mounted massive bombing raids on German cities to cripple industrial production and break morale. By the end of the war, hardly any German city remained untouched.

In 1941, Germans were forced back from Moscow and Leningrad by Soviet counterattacks. They tried again in 1942, but eventually failed. In the Battle of Stalingrad in November 1942, the Soviets surrounded and systematically destroyed the German Sixth Army of 300,000 men. By January, only 123,000 were left to surrender. For the first time, German public opinion turned against the war. The Soviets took the offensive and pushed Germans back along the eastern front.

The war continued for almost two years. Nazi minister of Armaments Albert Speer led the German war industry and put millions of prisoners and slave laborers to work. Between early 1942 and mid-1944, war production tripled. German resistance to Hitler also failed, and an assassination attempt only increased repression.

On June 6, 1944, American and British forces under General Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normany in history’s greatest naval invasion. In a hundred days, over 2 million men and almost half a million vehicles broke through the German lines and pushed inland. They moved cautiously and entered Germany in March 1945. By spring of 1945, the Allies had forced Germans out of Italy. In April, Mussolini was captured by Communist partisans and executed.

The Soviets, who had been advancing since July 1943, reached Warsaw by August 1944. The Polish underground Home Army ordered an uprising, which was a tragic miscalculation. The Red Army refused to enter the city, thus allowing Germans to destroy the Polish insurgents. The Soviets continued their advance after the Home Army surrendered, and after 150,000 to 200,000 Poles had died. In January 1945, the Red Army crossed into Germany and met American forces on the Elbe River in April. As Soviet forces fought towards Berlin, Hitler committed suicide, and on May 8 the remaining German commanders capitulated.

The war in the Pacific also neared its end. Despite U.S. victories, Japanese forces continued to fight back. American commanders believed an invasion of Japan would be too costly, and the Japanese were determined to fight for a hopeless cause. After much discussion in the U.S. government, American planes dropped recently-developed atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. It resulted in unprecedented human destruction. On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. The war, which had killed over 50 million soldiers and civilians, was over.

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