World War 2 Timeline

On 18 September 1931, an explosion hit a railway near Mukden that Japan controlled. Japan blamed the Chinese for it and struck back. Japan's own army had set off the explosion as an excuse to seize Manchuria. Japan's army then overran all of Manchuria and founded a Japanese-controlled state there, Manchukuo. In Germany, the Great Depression's economic crisis made many people more receptive to Hitler's Nazi Party. On 30 January 1933, President Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.

In Germany, the persecution of Jews began soon after Hitler took power. The Nuremberg Laws banned sexual relations and marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered Europe's Jews in the Holocaust. In China, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, having been seized and held captive, agreed to ally with China's Communists against Japan. On 7 July 1937, Chinese and Japanese troops clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, and the fighting spread into full-scale war. After taking Nanjing, Japanese troops killed huge numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians, and raped many women.

Germany sent troops into Austria on 12 March 1938 and annexed it in the Anschluss. Under the Munich Agreement, Britain accepted Germany's takeover of the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia. British crowds greeted it with jubilation, though Winston Churchill condemned it. Rioters in the Kristallnacht pogrom burned synagogues, attacked Jewish homes and businesses, and killed Jews. Appeasement at Munich did not stop Hitler, who took the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year.

Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939, freeing it to attack Poland without Soviet opposition. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. In response, on 3 September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Under the pact's secret terms, the Soviet army then invaded from the east, and the two powers divided Poland. In 1940, the SS established Auschwitz, a camp in German-occupied Poland, at first for Polish political prisoners. In occupied Warsaw, the Germans confined Jews to a ghetto behind a high brick wall.

German armour pushed through the Ardennes into France, a forest the French had believed no tank could cross. Warships and civilian boats carried British troops and other Allied soldiers away from Dunkirk. France signed an armistice on 22 June 1940, and the north of the country came under German military occupation. Victory for the RAF in the Battle of Britain prevented a German invasion of the island. Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940, promising one another aid if a power not yet at war attacked. Hitler put off the invasion of Britain and began preparing an assault on the Soviet Union.

On 11 March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act allowed the United States to lend or lease war materials to nations it judged essential to its own defense. Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece first; Operation Barbarossa, its assault on the Soviet Union, followed on 22 June 1941 after about five weeks' delay. The Atlantic Charter saw Britain and the United States support each people's right to pick its own government. Starvation killed many in besieged Leningrad, with supplies brought over Lake Ladoga by boat in the summer months and across the ice in winter. At Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv, German SS units, the Einsatzgruppen, shot about 34,000 Kyiv Jews on 29 and 30 September 1941.

Zhukov's Soviet troops launched a major counteroffensive at Moscow on 6 December 1941. A day later, a surprise air raid by Japan on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, pulled the United States into the conflict. On 8 December 1941, at Chelmno in German-occupied Poland, the Nazis began killing Jews with poison gas, the first of their extermination camps. Barbarossa had taken vast territory but its central aim, defeating the Soviet Union, had failed. Washington declared war on Japan the day after Pearl Harbor, whereupon Germany and Italy, allied to Tokyo, declared war on the United States.

Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference to organize the 'Final Solution', the mass killing of the Jews of Europe. Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan for killing the Jews in German-occupied Poland, used three camps: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Japanese forces took Singapore, a major British base, on 15 February 1942 after a week of fighting. The US victory at Midway shifted the Pacific war, and Japan remained on the defensive afterward. At Stalingrad a whole German army was destroyed; on 2 February 1943, the last of its 91,000 surviving troops surrendered to the Soviets. The British Eighth Army's decisive defeat of Rommel at the Second Battle of El Alamein began the end for the Axis in North Africa.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews rose on 19 April 1943 against German deportations. The Allies pushed the Axis from North Africa, winning a base to attack Italy. At Kursk, the Soviet victory marked the Eastern Front's decisive turning point, and the Soviets held the initiative from then on. The invasion of Sicily brought down Benito Mussolini. On 8 September 1943, Italy's surrender to the Allies was announced, and German forces at once took over Rome. At Tehran, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin planned for 1944 an invasion of France, with a Soviet offensive that Stalin agreed to.

In Italy, the Allies' battle for Monte Cassino wrecked the town's historic Benedictine monastery, and their troops marched into Rome on 4 June 1944. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, American, British and Canadian forces landed on the Normandy beaches in France. Partly to aid the Allied invasion of France, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, a vast offensive. It shattered Germany's Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front. Japan's push into India was beaten at Imphal and Kohima, the Burma campaign's turning point.

Between 15 May 1944 and 9 July 1944, Hungary's Jews were deported by the hundreds of thousands to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Miklós Horthy, Hungary's leader, stopped the deportations under foreign pressure and as Germany's war position deteriorated. In Warsaw, the Polish Home Army's uprising failed; neither the Soviets nor the other Allies gave it significant help. The Battle of Leyte Gulf crippled Japan's navy, and the Americans pressed on in the Philippines. Germany struck with the Battle of the Bulge on 16 December 1944, its final major offensive in the west, and the assault failed.

Prisoners from Auschwitz were forced on death marches, and Soviet troops who arrived found the starving ones left behind. At the Yalta Conference, Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan within two or three months after Germany's surrender. As the Red Army neared Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered unconditionally, and the war in Europe came to an end. The Battle of Okinawa, among the bloodiest in the Pacific, brought the Allies a step closer to invading Japan. Japan then rejected the Allies' Potsdam ultimatum, which demanded surrender and threatened to attack if it refused.

On 6 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the first atomic weapon used in war. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August; the next day it invaded Manchuria and a second bomb struck Nagasaki. The bombs killed tens of thousands at once, and many more people died afterwards from radiation. On 15 August Emperor Hirohito made his first national radio broadcast, announcing Japan's surrender. Japan formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri on 2 September, and World War II was over. The United Nations came into being on 24 October 1945, once its Charter was ratified. At Nuremberg, an International Military Tribunal tried the former Nazi leaders for crimes against peace, for war crimes and for crimes against humanity.