7.13 World War II: Military

The U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union formed the core of the Allies. Their leaders (Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin) agreed to focus first on defeating Germany, the stronger enemy, while holding the line against Japan. At the Casablanca Conference (1943), FDR and Churchill demanded the Axis powers' unconditional surrender.

The Soviet Union did most of the fighting against Germany's army, at enormous cost, and Stalin pressed the Western Allies to open a second front in France. Delays in that second front fed Soviet distrust that carried into the Cold War.

• North Africa (Operation Torch, November 1942): American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria and, by May 1943, had driven Axis forces out of Africa.
• Italy (1943): the Allies invaded Sicily in July and the Italian mainland in September. Mussolini fell, but German forces fought on in Italy until 1945.
• Air war: American and British bombers attacked German factories and cities.
• D-Day (June 6, 1944): under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in France in the largest seaborne invasion in history, opening the second front. Paris was liberated in August.
• Battle of the Bulge (December 1944–January 1945): Germany's last major offensive in the West failed.
• Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 (V-E Day). Allied troops liberating concentration camps revealed the full horror of the Holocaust, the Nazi murder of about 6 million Jews and millions of others. The U.S. had done little early on to rescue Jewish refugees; it created the War Refugee Board only in 1944.

Japan expanded rapidly after Pearl Harbor, taking the Philippines and much of Southeast Asia. The Battle of Midway (June 1942), where U.S. carriers sank four Japanese carriers, was the turning point. The U.S. then went on the offensive at Guadalcanal (August 1942–February 1943).

Island hopping meant capturing selected islands to build air bases while bypassing other heavily defended ones, moving steadily closer to Japan. Fighting was ferocious at Leyte Gulf (1944), Iwo Jima and Okinawa (both 1945); Okinawa alone cost more than 12,000 American lives and far more Japanese and Okinawan lives.

The secret Manhattan Project, started because of fears that Germany would build an atomic bomb first, tested the first bomb in New Mexico in July 1945. President Harry Truman, who took office when FDR died in April 1945, approved its use. The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8. Japan announced its surrender on August 15 and signed formally on September 2, 1945. The two bombs killed well over 100,000 people by the end of 1945.

The decision is debated. Supporters argue it ended the war quickly and avoided an invasion of Japan that could have cost huge numbers of American and Japanese lives. Critics argue Japan was close to surrender, that Soviet entry into the war might have forced surrender, that demonstrating the bomb on an unpopulated area was possible, or that U.S. leaders also wanted to impress the Soviet Union. Others raise the moral problem of deliberately targeting cities full of civilians. Present both sides fairly when you write about it.