WWII
WWII was the most influential and devastating military
conflict in world history with an estimated 70-85 million
casualties, around 3% of the world population in 1940
costing the world over 11 trillion USD in today's money,
this also lead way to crucial scientific discoveries such
as penicillin and blood transfusions and some not so
helpful such as atomic bombs, Technology was also
greatly advanced especially in weaponry, aviation and
radio communication. WWII is officially said to have
started in 1939 following Germanys invasion of Poland
although many believe war should have been declared
many times earlier.
WWII is said to have been caused by many different
occurrences in 1930s Europe, Germany had lost the first
World war to a mainly British opponent and this left their
country Inruins and in debt to many other nations and
had their military power restricted this was known as the
treaty of Versailles. In 1929 the infamous wall street
crash occurred leading to the recall of Us loans to
Germany leading to the economy to crash in Germany
due to high unemployment and widespread poverty, at
this time people were desperate and looking for a quick
fix and they looked over to Italy and saw how their
dictatorship was working and Hitler at the time a
member of the Nazi party rose to the top and managed
to gain total control using propaganda, he blamed what
he called the burden on society, people such as Jews,
the disabled and Gyspys. These people were heavily
discriminated against. Hitler also sneakily broke the
treaty of Versailles and an appeasement was signed
between Germany, France and England in the hope to
keep Hitler happy to prevent a war, when we see all
these factors together we can see the quick sequence of
events to lead to the horrific war that was to follow.
In September of 1938, Adolf Hitler turned his focus
towards the roughly 3 million Germans living in
Czechoslovakiknownon as the Sutnenland and invaded
it reclaiming the land as german land breaking the
Munich Pact. 1 year later in September 1939 Hitler
ordered his army to invade using blitzkrieg tactics by the
Germans from the south and the Russians invaded from
the east, many experts say this was the real start of
WWII, the polish army quickly fell back and surrendered
on the 6th of October, this lead to France who had a pact
with Poland siding against Germany and eventually
Britain and others would assist France and Poland.
Germany continued on their warpath and would break
the french border on the 10 of May 1940 and through
the blitzkrieg tactics made France surrender after 56
days in June of 1940, Germany now had mainland
Europe mostly to themselves as the majority of the
British army would flee back to Britain in the
controversial battle of Dunkirk to regroup.
On the 6th of June 1944, Allied troops launched the
largest naval invasion ever and after huge loss gained a
foothold in northwest France and began the advance
towards the Rhine, this was a huge victory for the Allies
as they were now on the offensive. In 1942 Hitler had
broke his agreement with Stalin and began to advance
east towards Russia in hope of gaining control of
Russias vast supply of oil and huge production
capability, this is a decision he would later regret as the
battle was one of the bloodiest battles of all time with an
estimated 2 million casualties, the German troops were
under-equipped as their equipment was not working due
to low temperatures starving and freezing to death and
outgunned by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops.
Because of this turn of events, Stalin now supported the
allies and began to advance on Germany from the east.
Around this time there was also a fierce battle going on
over the British channel between the RAF and the
Luftwaffe, the German airforce was relentlessly bombing
major cities in England especially London while the
Royal air force was trying to defend the skies, this battle
lead to many technological advances in radar detection
and secrete message decoding.
Until up to 1941 the USA wasn't directly involved with
the war, only helping supply the Allies with weapons. But
in December of 1941 early on a Sunday morning, this all
changed, Japanese bombers launched an air raid on
pearl harbour Hawai sinking 4 battleships and damaging
many others, destroying 200 aircraft and claiming the
lives of 2,335 people. The next day America would
formally declare war against the nazis and japan.