World War II

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

Leading to the War
Due to the poorly written terms of the "Treaty of Versailles" of 1918, the Central powers of the First World War were severely downgraded. The European nation of Germany lost its new western territories to France, and with the new country of Chezkoslovakia, modifications to Poland's borders significantly shrunk the size of Germany while the treaty demanded that Germany fund the vast majority of the restoration efforts of those directly damaged by the conflict. Other powers like the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were split up, with the German-speaking Austrians not allowed to merge with Germany. Whilst Bosnia and Serbia were removed from Hungarian and Russian control. This, and further events, left Germany without the permission of a Navy, an economy in utter dismemberment, and only allowed a small, volunteer army of only ten thousand.

In light of this, one particularly charismatic and ambitious Austrian corporal, a young Adolf Hitler (formally Adolf Hicklugrubber), would eventually join the "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei Partei" (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) as member number #55. After being imprisoned at the Munich Beer Hall incident, he wrote a bestseller autobiography entitled "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) as he served out his term, which included his visions of what he'd do if he brought the world under German control.

On the morning of September 19, 1931 Japan, using the confusion brought about by the Mukden Incident, Japan secretly and illegally increased their troop garrison overnight by railroad, allowing them easy access to the Chinese. Invading China officially began the Second Sino-Japanese War. Millions of Chinese Civilians would be killed, culminating in the Nanking Massacre. Tensions increased across the globe as Axis leaders such as Adolf Hitler, who by 1936, was absolute leader of an aggressive and re-militarized Germany, and Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, demanded more concessions from their European neighbors. Hitler defiantly reoccupied the Rhineland, at the time still a demilitarized zone under the Versailles Treaty, and annexed the formerly German part of Czechoslovakia. Italian Facsist leader Benito Mussolini invaded the Kingdom of Abyssinia in 1936. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, an event known as the Anschluss. He immediately began harassing Poland with demands to return German lands conceded in the Versailles Treaty such as the city of Danzig. When Poland refused, Hitler reacted.

First Years of War: Dark Time 1939-1941
On September 1st, 1939, the German Army and Air Force (Luftwaffe) stormed across the border of 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.

Technically, the Polish Vistula River would have provided the best defense against Germany, but there was a drought, and the river became so low that it could be crossed and forded at almost every point.

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 westward. The Soviets attempted to invade Finland during the winter between 1939-1940, but were driven back by the Finns claiming only a shred of land. 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 heavily forested Ardennes region. They successfully surrounded and defeated the combined British and French forces, despite being outnumbered and out-gunned. France fell within weeks. British forces managed to escape across the English Channel through the port of Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. France, despite having superior-quality tanks, and outnumbering the Germans in every respect, had fallen far more quickly than even the most pessimistic estimates. 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, were ill-equipped and badly led. The bulk of experienced Soviet officers had been executed during Stalin`s Great Purges of the 1930s. 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 than the previous soldiers. 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. Soon after, Mussolini was saved at a ski resort hotel in the Italian Alps by Germans who had stormed the hotel without having to fire a single shot. He was murdered by Partisans shortly afterward. Back at the Mediterranean, 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 way 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 westward, 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.

Operation Overlord and the Liberation of France
Since 1943, British and American aircraft had been relentlessly pounding Germany with hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives. They gradually battered down the Luftwaffe to nothing, while most of its planes were engaged against the USSR in the east. On June 6th, 1944, Operation Overlord began. Over thirteen thousand British,American, and Canadian troops landed on invasion beaches in the French region of Normandy--Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, 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 a 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.

The "Meat Grinder" and Supply Problems
In September of 1944, the Western Allies launched an ambitious operation to seize control of the Netherlands and cross the river Rhine at the city of Arnhem. The offensive, codenamed Operation Market Garden, was an unmitigated disaster. A combination of poor Allied intelligence, battlefield politics and the presence of two crack German panzer divisions at Arnhem meant that the operation was doomed to failure. A second disaster for the Allies occurred during the fighting in the Hürtgenwald outside the city of Aachen. The forest was dubbed "the meatgrinder" by Allied troops. A third problem faced by Allied troops was the lack of supplies as the port of Antwerp could not be used until late November due to the presence of German Troops in the Scheldt Estuary.

The Battle of the Bulge
As the winter of 1944-45 approached, the fighting on the Western Front quieted down. One stretch of the line, (the Ardennes region that Germany had attacked through in 1941) was known as the Ghost Front due to the non-activity in that area. However, Hitler was not satisfied. He planned for one final, daring gamble in the Western Theater of Operations. He proposed a bold attack on Allied lines 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 (Watch on the Rhine), 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. The Sixth SS Panzer Army, under Sepp Dietrich, the Fifth Panzer Army commanded by Hasso von Manteuffel and the Seventh Army,led by Erich Brandenberger smashed through the weakened divisions of the U.S. 1st Army. In the first week of the campaign thirty thousand Allied troops had been captured and German tanks were in sight of the Meuse River. 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 town of Bastogne, a critical communications centre and important crossroads was encircled but it was defended heroically by the 101st Airborne Division, who were from then on known as the "Battered Bastards of Bastonge". The attack was utterly destroyed despite its initial successes. German troops retreated back into Germany. The attack had cost Germany its last precious Panzer and fuel reserves that could have been used to defend Germany against the Allied forces. It probably sped up the war by a few months. The Bulge, while remembered by the Americans as the the largest battle in which they participated, was strategically unimportant, and a disaster for the Third Reich. Even as Hitler's last reserves were being destroyed in the Ardennes, the Red Army was gearing up for the largest and most powerful offensive of the war.

On to Berlin
In January of 1945, the USSR began the Vistula-Oder offensive. Soviet forces broke out of bridgeheads around Warsaw, the Polish capital, encircling and capturing the city. The Red Army's pre-assault artillery barrage smashed Germany's frontline positions because Hitler refused to allow his troops to withdraw back of the line in order to avoid the Red Army's artillery. By sheer force of numbers as well as a crude adaptation of Germany's blitzkrieg tactics, the Soviet forces outpaced their supply columns and overwhelmed Army Group Vistula, the main German military force in the Eastern Theater of Operations. Army Group Vistula's ragged remnants limped back to the last natural barrier between six million Soviet soldiers and Berlin, the Oder River. Weeks later, the Red Army opened their final assault on Berlin. Hitler did not repeat his earlier mistake, and the depth of the German positions halted the Russian offensive for nearly a week. Thousands of soldiers died on the banks of the Oder as the Red Army furiously attempted to smash down all German resistance. With force of numbers the Red Army managed to crush the German line and then drove quickly for Berlin. After three weeks of heavy street-to-street fighting, culminating in Hitler's suicide, Red Army troops captured Berlin. Organized German resistance fell apart, with Russian and American troops meeting in tears on the Elbe River in central Germany by the 25th of April. Many of the top-ranking Nazis killed themselves rather than face retribution. The European war ended on May 7th, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of the German provisional government at Flensburg by Großadmiral Karl Donitz.

The Holocaust and other Nazi Crimes
Beginning in the early 1930s when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, he had enacted a series of laws stripping certain minority groups of their rights, especially Jews, but also blacks, homosexuals, Slavs, Romanian Gypsies, non-Germans and "traitor Germans" who were within the hated minority groups. This was the beginning of the Nazi "Final Solution" as Hitler called it. This escalated to the Krystallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, where Jewish businesses, homes, and temples across Germany were looted and destroyed by rioters. As Germany conquered new territory in Eastern Europe, special units called Einsatzgruppen were deployed behind German lines to murder Jews and other undesirables in mass shootings. This soon developed into a systematic extermination. Camps were built, to which Jews would be shipped. They would be pressed into tiny barracks before being slaughtered in gas chambers. This was the final stage of the genocide. It is estimated that 9-11 million people were killed in the Holocaust, of which approximately 6 million were Jewish. German crimes were not limited to the Holocaust, however. Due to deliberate policies of annihilation in Russia, nearly 30 million Russian civilians died, and around 3.5 million Russians died in German POW camps.

Germany devoted significant logistical and manpower to the genocide and other efforts. Ironically, this devotion of resources to "purifying" Germany and the Reich contributed to and sped up Germany's eventual defeat in the war.

The Holocaust would remain the largest genocide in human history until the alien species of the Covenant murdered tens of billions, if not a hundred billion, in the most massive instance of genocide ever seen in the galaxy during the Human-Covenant War.

National allies
Aside from the main 3 Allies and 3 Axis, each side had many further allies.

The creation of the "Declaration by United Nations," in 1942 brought previously neutral nations into the war.

Allied Powers
 * China
 * Poland
 * Australia
 * France
 * French Overseas territories
 * Free France (free from occupation)
 * New Zealand
 * United Kingdom
 * Indian Empire
 * Crown Colonies
 * Nepal
 * South Africa
 * Canada
 * Norway
 * Belgium
 * Belgian Congo
 * Luxembourg
 * Netherlands
 * Duch East Indies
 * other colonies
 * Czechoslovakia
 * Greece
 * Kingdom of Yugoslavia
 * Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
 * Tannu Tuva
 * Mongolia
 * Panama
 * Unites States of America
 * American Samoa
 * Guam
 * Commonwealth of the Philippines
 * Puerto Rico
 * U.S. Virgin Islands
 * other unincorporated territories
 * Costa Rica
 * Dominican Republic
 * El Salvador
 * Haiti
 * Honduras
 * Nicaragua
 * Republic of China (at war with Japan since 1937)
 * Guatemala
 * Cuba
 * Mexico
 * Brazil
 * Ethiopia (formerly occupied by Italy)
 * Iraq
 * Bolivia
 * Colombia
 * Iran
 * Democratic Federal Yugoslavia
 * Liberia
 * Peru
 * Romania(formerly Axis)
 * Bulgaria (formerly Axis)
 * San Marino
 * Albania (formerly occupied by Italy)
 * Bahawalpur
 * Ecuador
 * Paraguay
 * Uruguay
 * Venezuela
 * Turkey
 * Lebanon
 * Saudi Arabia
 * Argentina
 * Chile

Axis Powers
 * Greater German Reich
 * Italy
 * Empire of Japan
 * Hungary
 * Romania
 * Bulgaria
 * Yugoslavia
 * Thailand
 * Finland (co-belligerent)
 * Kingdom of Irag (co-belligerent)
 * Manchukuo (Japanese "puppet state")
 * Mengjiang (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Wang Jingwei Government (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Burma (Japanese "puppet state", taken from UK)
 * Philippines (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Provisional Government of Free India (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Empire of Vietnam (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Kingdom of Cambodia (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Laos (Japanese "Puppet state")
 * Independent State of Croatia (Italian "Puppet state)
 * Hellenic State (Italian "puppet state", partial annexed Greece)
 * Montenegro (Italian "puppet state")
 * Principality of Pindus and the Voivodship of Macedonia (Italian "puppet state")
 * Slovak Republic (German "puppet state", former Czechoslovakia)
 * Albanian Kingdom (German "puppet state")
 * Hungary (German "puppet state")
 * French State (collaborator)
 * Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (former Czechoslovakia)
 * General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories (autononimous)
 * Serbia (autononimous)
 * Argentina(autinonimous)

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 with a goal of international peacekeeping by means of collective security.

Calibers still in use in the Covenant-UNSC war

 * .30 caliber (confetti maker)
 * .50 caliber (M41 LAAG)
 * 7.62mm Ammunition. (MA5B AR, MA5C AR, M808B Scorpion MBT Coaxial machine gun)
 * 90mm gun (M808B Scorpion)

References in Halo

 * Colonel Herzog apparently researched World War II extensively.
 * The war has been analyzed in comparison to the Human-Covenant War.
 * The Maginot Sphere mentioned by the Forerunner in the Terminals is inspired by the Maginot Line, the French defensive fortifications along the German border before the war.
 * On the UNSC Frigate Gettysburg they showed holographic displays of WWII.

Related Articles

 * United Nations
 * UN Charter