World War II

Twenty years after World War I, World War II erupted as a far more brutal and deadly global conflict, fought from 1939 to 1945 by two opposing alliances: the Axis powers, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the Allies, including Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. It became the largest and deadliest struggle in human history, causing 40 to 70 million deaths. The conflict grew out of developments before 1939, including Adolf Hitler's rise to power through German resentment over the Treaty of Versailles, his annexation and invasion of neighboring states during the 1930s, and the systematic persecution and eventual extermination of Jewish people and others in the Holocaust, while western powers pursued appeasement. In Asia, aggressive militarists in Japan invaded China in 1937 and sought to conquer and rule Asia. The United States remained officially neutral at first, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt aided Great Britain with munitions as Germany overran much of Western Europe and German submarines attacked American ships by September 1941. American entry into the war came after Japan, cut off from U.S. supplies after joining Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact and refusing to withdraw from China, attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, destroying much of the American fleet and killing approximately three thousand Americans. The U.S. declared war on Japan the next day, and Italy and Germany declared war on the U.S. three days later. American forces fought in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Pacific and played a decisive role in the Allied victory by 1945. The war helped transform the United States into a superpower, strengthened its economy, and left the United States and Soviet Union as rival superpowers whose distrust led to the Cold War, including proxy wars such as Korea and Vietnam and a nuclear arms race after the United States first used atomic weapons on Japan. Even after the Cold War ended in 1991, the dread of the nuclear age remained.

Gonzales, Louisiana · United States