The evacuation of 338,000 men from a French beach by warships and little ships (1940)
Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk, 26 May to 4 June 1940
History · The 20th century
The Second World War
1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945
Global conflict — the Allies against the Axis
The deadliest conflict in history, fought between the Allies and the Axis powers from Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 to Japan's formal surrender on 2 September 1945. Germany overran Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France by June 1940, failed to win air superiority over Britain, and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor that December brought in the United States. The tide turned in 1942–43 at Midway, El Alamein and Stalingrad; the Allies landed in Italy in 1943 and in Normandy in June 1944. Germany surrendered on 7–8 May 1945 and Japan after the atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war in August. Between 70 and 85 million people died, most of them civilians, and the war produced the United Nations, the division of Europe and the nuclear age.
How to spot them
- ▸Began with an invasion of Poland and the British and French declarations two days later
- ▸The Blitzkrieg, the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France in six weeks
- ▸A turning point in the winter of 1942–43 on the Volga
- ▸Surrender signed on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay
- ▸The conflict that produced the United Nations, the Iron Curtain and the nuclear age
What happened
The speech offering nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat (1940)
Churchill to the House of Commons on 13 May 1940, three days after becoming prime minister
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few (1940)
Churchill on RAF Fighter Command, 20 August 1940, during the Battle of Britain
A surprise attack on a Hawaiian naval base on a Sunday morning (1941)
Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, described by Roosevelt as a date which will live in infamy
A five-month siege on the Volga ending with a field marshal's surrender (1942–43)
Stalingrad; Friedrich Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943 with the remains of the Sixth Army
Four Japanese carriers sunk in a single day near a mid-Pacific atoll (1942)
The Battle of Midway, 4–7 June 1942, after American codebreakers read the Japanese plan
The signing on a battleship in Tokyo Bay that ended the fighting (1945)
The Japanese Instrument of Surrender, aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945
Quick-fire facts
- •The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, with its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, cleared the way for the invasion of Poland
- •Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939
- •The Battle of Britain was fought from July to October 1940; the Blitz on British cities continued into May 1941
- •Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941 and was the largest invasion in history
- •The Grand Alliance leaders met at Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July–August 1945)
- •Bletchley Park's breaking of the Enigma cipher, and the Ultra intelligence it produced, was kept secret until the 1970s
- •Germany surrendered at Reims on 7 May and Berlin on 8 May 1945; VE Day is 8 May, and 9 May in Russia
- •The Soviet Union suffered by far the heaviest losses, around 27 million dead
- •No single treaty ended the war: Germany signed an unconditional surrender, Japan the Instrument of Surrender; the Treaty of San Francisco settled peace with Japan in 1951 and the Two Plus Four Treaty settled Germany only in 1990
- •The United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco in June 1945, before the fighting in the Pacific had ended
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Imperial War Museums — Second World War
- Antony Beevor — The Second World War
- Andrew Roberts — The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War