Our history would not come to an end” ( The Second World War, p. So we had won after all! … How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. “Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. By the end of World War II, more than half of all industrial production in the world occurred in the U.S.īritish Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized how critical the U.S. economy to outproduce Germany, Italy and Japan combined. President Roosevelt was able to unleash the power of the U.S. In fact, the United States’ entry into the war doomed both Germany and Japan. recovered, Japan would be too entrenched to be driven out. He believed that doing so would give Japan free rein in Asia for a time, and that once the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt cut off strategic supplies, Japan, under new Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, decided to launch a surprise attack on the U.S. In Asia, Japan was able to take over coastal China and French Indochina (modern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) before the United States decided that it had seen enough. However, the Russian winter and Stalin’s willingness to throw wave after wave of soldiers at the German army slowed and eventually stopped their advance. At first it appeared his blitzkrieg tactics would doom Russia to an ignominious defeat. Once he had taken out or weakened the Western powers, he turned to Russia. In Europe Hitler won a stunning victory against France in a matter of weeks and then tried to tame Great Britain by bombing it incessantly. Thus, in the opening stages of the war they made staggering gains. Germany, Italy and Japan were well prepared for a limited war against weaker nations. The result was an Asia dominated by Japanese militarism. In 1904-5 Japan defeated Russia, one of the great European powers, in a war that shocked the world.īy the 1930s, Japan had come to believe that it was the only Asian nation powerful enough to drive out Western imperialist nations like the U.S. This propelled Japan to modernize its military and economy. Japan had been growing as a world power since the United States forced it to open its doors to trade in 1853. ![]() In Japan the racial nationalism was more subtle. Mussolini desired to resurrect the old Roman Empire and conquer territories that had once been controlled by ancient Rome.īoth Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s Fascism put the state at the center of the life of the nation, glorified authoritarianism, tried to harness industries to serve the needs of the state, and withdrew personal freedoms. Hitler had an ally in Italy’s Benito Mussolini. In particular, Hitler coveted Russia, with its vast territory and natural resources. ![]() Therefore, he believed they should dominate and needed more space. He believed that the Germanic or Aryan race was superior to all others. Hitler applied the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest to the different races. In Europe Adolf Hitler’s brand of grievance politics and charisma was the driving force for his push for more lebensraum or living space. In both Europe and Asia, the aggressor nations were driven by a desire to expand their territory and control or eliminate peoples they considered to be weak or inferior. The war in Asia began two years earlier, on July 7, 1937, when Japan invaded China. 1, 1939, when the German army invaded Poland. And history gives no assurance that another war-an even more destructive one-will not come. History is the story of war, and though each war has unique roots and causes, they all are evidence of man’s inability to govern himself. This concluded the greatest cataclysm the world has ever seen, with estimates as high as 100 million dead.Īs bad as World War II was, are we now forgetting the horrors and the lessons of history? Will there be another world war? 2, 1945, on the USS Missouri, Japan signed an unconditional surrender, formally ending World War II.
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