World War II

World War II, or abbreviated as WWII, was an international conflict that occurred on Earth between 1939 and 1945.

Background
In early 1931, Japan invaded China, officially beginning the war. Thousands of Chinese Civilians were killed. Tensions increased across the globe as Adolf Hitler, absolute leader of a militaristic and re-militarized Germany, demanded more concessions from his neighbors. He reoccupied the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone under the Versailles Treaty, and annexed Czechoslovakia. In 1938, he annexed Austria. He immediately began harassing Poland with demands to return German lands conceded in the Versailles Treaty. When Poland refused, Hitler reacted.

First Years of War: Dark Time 1939-1941
On September 1st, 1939, the German Army and Air Force stormed across the border with Poland, igniting the war in Europe. They outnumbered the Polish Army, and had a significant technological edge. They coordinated use of tanks and infantry, using aircraft as a kind of flying artillery to provide fire support for their ground formations. The Poles couldn't resist the offensive, and when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, Poland's fate was sealed. The Soviet and German forces split Poland along the Bug River, and Germany turned its attention eastward. In the spring of 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Neither nation could contend with Germany's advanced tactics. In May of the same year, German forces attacked France. Allied commanders had placed the majority of their formations in The Netherlands and Belgium, anticipating a German offensive which would wheel around the Maginot Line through the plains in those countries. Germany surprised them again, attacking through the forested Ardennes region. They successfully surrounded and defeated the combined British and French forces, despite being outnumbered and out-gunned. France fell within weeks, and British forces were forced across the English Channel in a disastrous retreat. France, despite having superior quality tanks, and outnumbering the Germans in every respect, had fallen far more quickly than even the most pessimistic had anticipated. Germany's Blitzkrieg tactics proved a complete success. Germany turned eastwards, gobbling up the Balkans and Crete. In North Africa, the Afrikakorps controlled by Erwin Rommel were bringing the British army stationed there to its knees. Hitler had a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union to the east. Things looked bleak for the allies. However, there was one glimmer of hope--Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe (Airforce) had failed to gain air superiority over the skies of Britain, preventing a sea-borne German invasion of that nation. The British success was largely due to the invention and use of radar, the first time radar was used in a conflict. Then Hitler made his most important strategic blunder. On June 22nd, 1941, he sent approximately 3 million men in nearly 200 divisions across the border with the Soviet Union, beginning Operation Barbarossa, and opening the Eastern Front. The Wermacht--German Army--advanced up to 50 miles per day in some cases. Soviet forces, while they greatly outnumbered the German forces, had nothing like the coordination of those forces. They were ill-equipped, and millions of prisoners were taken in the first few months of war. The Soviets kept fighting, knowing that they had advantages in the sheer size of their nation and its army. Soviet tanks outnumbered German tanks nearly 3 to 1, but superior German tactics meant that German tank forces almost always had local superiority. German forces penetrated nearly to Moscow within a few months, but when October arrived, so too did the legendary Russian winter. It froze engines, weapons, and men. Still, German forces advanced towards the Russian capital. Marshal Georgi Zhukov engineered a massive counterattack in December of that year, as German attacks stalled due to the weather and stiffening Soviet resistance. The Germans fell back in the face of the counterattack, and the Soviet troops went on the offensive. This was short-lived, however, and as the spring of 1942 arrived, German forces managed to stabilize the front. However, another development had occurred: The United States had been brought into the war by a surprise attack by Japan on the US military base at Pearl Harbor.

Middle Years: 1941-1944. Hope Is Rekindled
In the summer of 1942, the Wermacht resumed its offensive in the USSR, this time centered on the city of Stalingrad and the oilfields of the Caucuses region. German troops and tanks smashed through the Ukraine and made their way towards the city. Russian troops were forced to fall back in the face of the enemy offensive. Meanwhile, to the west, British and American planes began bombing targets in continental Europe. Later in 1942, the Anglo-Americans began Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. They quickly defeated French colonial troops in Algeria. German troops in Tunisia proved more resilient, however. Rommel's troops had been defeated in Egypt to the east by Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army, and now the Axis forces in Africa were caught between two forces. Despite minor setbacks, the Allies defeated the Axis troops in Tunisia and they were forced to retreat to the island of Sicily. American and British troops followed up with an invasion of Sicily, whose defenders were quickly retreated to the Italian mainland. The Allies followed, and Italy capitulated unconditionally, betraying Germany. Germany responded by occupying the nation. They fought hard for every inch of the peninsula. This diverted valuable forces from the Eastern Front, where fighting had solidified around Stalingrad. In Stalingrad, German forces pressed inexorably forward, battering down the Soviet defenses. The city was entirely reduced to rubble, with deadly house-to-house fighting. In December of 1942, however, Soviet forces managed to cut off the flanks of the German army smashing through the city. The Germans in the city were cut off, and despite several efforts to rescue them, stayed that way. The Soviet union took the strategic offensive even as they whittled the trapped German Sixth Army to nothing. The Germans never recovered from the losses they sustained at Stalingrad. They lost roughly 800,000 soldiers in the city, to the Soviets' 700,000. The Third Reich would not regain the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war.

Soviet forces fought their to the city of Kursk, where they were halted by the spring thaw. Having taken the city with a salient into German lines, they hunkered down until the mud dried up. Both sides built up their forces for the battle until September of 1943, when a massive German attack was opened. In the largest tank battle in history, both sides sustained roughly equal losses. Germany's tank forces were greatly outnumbered, however, and could not sustain the casualties they took. The Wermacht retreated eastwards, and would continue to do so for the remainder of the war. After the battles at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, the Wermacht's aura of invincibility was gone. Everyone now knew they could be beaten.

Massive Soviet offensives regained all the Soviet territory that had been taken by mid-1944. The Soviet troops' offensives carried them all the way to the Vistula River in Poland. the Wermacht had been driven back behind its starting point for the Eastern Front.

The Endgame: 1944-1945
Since 1943, Anglo-American aircraft had been relentlessly pounding Germany with hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives. They gradually battered down the Luftwaffe to nothing, as most of its planes were engaged against the USSR in the east. On June 6th, 1944, Operation Overlord began. Anglo-American forces landed on invasion beaches in the French region of Normandy--Utah, Omaha, Juno, Gold, and Sword were the names of the beachheads. In the Battle of Normandy, the allied forces broke free of the beachheads and proceeded into a deadly melee with German forces in the Norman hedgerows. The battle ended in decisive Allied victory with the capture of the city of Falaise, closing what was known as the Falaise Gap and enclosing several tens of thousands of German troops. The remainder of the German troops occupying France pulled back to defend Germany.

As the winter of 1944-45 approached, the fighting on the western front quieted down. One stretch of front (the Ardennes region that Germany had attacked through in 1941) was known as the Ghost Front. However, Hitler was not satisfied. He planned one final gamble for the western front. He proposed a bold attack involving some hundreds of tanks and assault guns as well as 250,000 infantry. The counterattack, known to the Germans as Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein, and to the Americans as The Battle of the Bulge, would be designed to cut off British forces in Holland and retake the port of Antwerp, the Allies' principle supply bastion. Hitler's troops achieved complete surprise. However, the attack depended on bad weather to ground allied planes in order to succeed. After several days of cloud cover, the bad weather faltered and the Allied air forces could be brought into play. The attack was utterly destroyed despite its initial successes. German troops retreated back into Germany. The attack had cost Germany hundreds of tanks that could have been used against the USSR, and probably sped up the war by a few weeks.

In January of 1945, the USSR began its second to last assault, the Vistula-Oder offensive. Soviet forces broke out of bridgeheads around Warsaw, the Polish capital, encircling and capturing the city. By sheer force of numbers as well as a crude adaptation of Germany's blitzkrieg tactics, the Soviet forces outpaced their supply columns and overwhelmingly crushed German resistance. A few weeks later, they unraveled their final assault on Berlin, Germany's capital city. After three weeks of heavy street-to-street fighting, culminating in Hitler committing suicide by shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Red Army troops dramatically raising a Soviet flag over Germany's capitol building, the Reichstag. Organized German resistance fell apart, with Russian and American troops meeting in tears on the Elbe River in central Germany. The European war ended on May 7th, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of the German provisional government.

Pacific Theater
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, they attacked many US outposts in the Pacific. The Japanese had the strategic initiative until they attacked Midway Island in the central Pacific in 1942. The US forces decisively beat the Japanese there, sinking four aircraft carriers. After Midway, the Americans advanced from island to island, crushing Japanese resistance. Japanese troops fought fanatically, literally to the last man in many cases. This did not save them from being defeated, however. The war was within the United States' grasp with the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa Islands, only a few hundred miles from the Japanese Islands. American planes firebombed and largely destroyed most large Japanese cities, and in August 1945, the second atomic bomb ever created was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing 70,000 people and beginning the Atomic Age. A second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki a few days later. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945. The war was, at long last, over.

Afterwards, the USSR and the USA became the world's only remaining superpowers. The USSR announced a successful atomic bomb test in 1948, beginning the Cold War. However, the war's most important consequence was the creation of the United Nations to prevent further world war.

The United Nations
As a result of the Allied victory over the Axis Nations, the United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, 1945, marking the replacement of the defunct League of Nations and the creation of the United Nations. The United Nations was formed to prevent a Third World War.

References in Halo

 * Colonel Herzog apparently researched World War II extensively.
 * The war has been analyzed in comparison to the Human-Covenant War.

Related Articles

 * United Nations
 * UN Charter