The Second World War was the child of the first; in fact, the connection between the two is so intimate that many observers see the two wars as one, creating what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "the thirty-one year war that began in 1914 and ended in 1945." Certainly the social, political, and economic upheavals following the 1918 armistice and the Treaty of Versailles provided the seeds of despair, disintegration, and, in Germany at least, humiliation and the desire for vengeance. All of these conditions played into the hands of the nascent Nazi Party and its charismatic leader Adolf Hitler, who added to this brew a hierarchical racist theory that posited the Aryans as the master race and the Jews as the degraded, virtually subhuman race whose very existence constituted a dangerous threat to Aryan purity. Coming to power in 1933, Hitler transformed Germany from a crippled, dissension-riddled republic into a powerful, menacing fascist state, willing and able to wreak vengeance on its old enemies.

Beginning in 1936 with the occupation of the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany, then moving to the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, Hitler not only extended his power but also tested the resolve of the western Allies. With each uncontested step, he became more firmly convinced of the Allies' fundamental weakness, underscored finally by the Munich Pact of 1939, in which the French and British prime ministers, Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, caved into his demands in exchange for his empty promise to help ensure "peace in our time," as Chamberlain was to proclaim on his return from Munich. Within six months, Germany had browbeaten the Czechoslovakian government into requesting status as a "protectorate" of Germany. As Hitler paraded in triumph through Prague, the Allies declared that any further act of aggression on Germany's part would result in war. Hitler's response was to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, giving the Soviets control over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and a substantial slice of Poland in exchange for their support for a German attack on Poland.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and France immediately declared war, a declaration that did little to deter the German army, which swept over the ill-equipped Poles in less than a month. During the "phony war," the period from September 1939 to April 1940, the Allies hastily rearmed, and the Axis nations (Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania) prepared for a spring offensive. It began with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940. A month later the Germans initiated their Blitzkrieg--"lightning war"--bypassing the Maginot Line, the concrete bunkers placed across the French-German border, and invading the neutral countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, finally crashing into France through the Ardennes forest.

On June 22, 1940, France surrendered. In the interim, more than 300,000 British and French troops had been trapped near the port city of Dunkirk. A hastily arranged evacuation prevented the capture of most of these troops, preserving them for the next phase of the war, the Battle of Britain. The battle of Britain was an air war, intended by the Germans as a prelude to an invasion. Despite the relentless bombardment of British military targets and major cities, the Germans were unable to overcome the skill of the Royal Air Force pilots, the superiority of the spitfire fighter planes, and the new technological innovation, radar.

By 1941, the war had spread to the Balkans and North Africa. Italy had invaded Greece but was beaten back by fierce Greek resistance, forcing the Germans to come to the aid of their Italian allies. Benito Mussolini's army proved equally ineffective in North Africa, needing to be rescued again, this time by the German Afrikan Korps, led by the brilliant strategist Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

In June 1941, Hitler made a catastrophic decision to open up a new front by invading the Soviet Union. At first, the unprepared Soviet army, seriously weakened by Joseph Stalin's purge of the general command, retreated in the face of a three-pronged German onslaught. Only a heroic defense on the outskirts of Moscow prevented the collapse of the Soviet government. When, after a winter stalemate, the fighting resumed in the spring of 1942, the Germans redirected their main efforts to capturing the city of Stalingrad, in a seven-month battle that resulted in the loss of an entire German army and marked the beginning of the turning of the tide.

Another momentous and mistaken decision was made in December of 1941 when Japan, Germany's Asian ally, unleashed a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, dramatically expanding the conflict into a true "world war." Japanese dive bombers and torpedo boats succeeded in sinking 19 American naval vessels, killing more than 2,400 American service people and civilians. America declared war on December 8, and three days later Germany declared war against the United States. The Japanese followed up the attack with invasions of Malaya (now Malaysia), Burma (now Myanmar), and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), all of which, including the island fortress of Singapore, rapidly fell to the invaders. Similar success attended the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, in which the last American outposts, the Bataan peninsula and the small island of Corregidor, fell in April and May 1942.

By June of 1942, the Japanese had experienced astonishing success on land and at sea, Victory seemed to be within their grasp. But overconfidence led them to carelessness in their handling of coded plans for an attack on the American fleet off the Midway islands. The battle that ensued proved to be the turning point of the Pacific war. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers and from that point on were forced to fight a defensive war. On the strength of this victory, American troops began a series of attacks on Japanese-held islands, some of which became the scenes of particularly fierce battles, eventually won by the Americans.

In 1944, General Douglas MacArthur, the commanding general of the United States forces, fulfilling a vow to "return," launched an attack on Leyte Island in the Philippines. At the same time, the naval battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest battle in the history of naval warfare, took place, with the Americans securing a narrow but decisive victory.

In 1943, following the British victory the previous year over Rommel's forces at El Alamein and with joint British and American forces in Tunisia, the Allies now opened up a new front by invading Sicily in July and mainland Italy in September. The Italian Campaign proved to be long, arduous, and relatively ineffective. What was required was a wholesale assault on Western Europe, designed ultimately to catch the German armies in a pincer movement between the Russians in the East and the British and American forces in the West. Such an assault occurred on June 6, 1944, with the D day Normandy Invasion in northern France. Despite fierce resistance, the ensuing campaign, combined with the relentless and overwhelming Soviet army's offensive in the East, eventually brought Germany to its knees. The Nazi defeat was finally signaled by the suicide of Hitler in April 1945 and the formal end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945.

Four months later the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. The devastation caused the Japanese government, previously committed to fight to the bitter end, to sue for peace.

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