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Civilian casualties include deaths caused by strategic bombing, Holocaust victims, German war crimes, Japanese war crimes, population transfers in the Soviet Union, Allied war crimes, and deaths due to war-related famine and disease.
May 15, 2024 · World War II, the deadliest and most destructive war in human history, claimed between 40 and 50 million lives, displaced tens of millions of people, and cost more than $1 trillion to prosecute.
May 26, 2024 · This included at least 8-10 million military deaths and 14-17 million civilian deaths. Much of these losses came at the hands of the Nazi occupation, which employed mass killings, forced labor, and deliberate starvation to break the Soviet population.
- Leading Up to World War II
- Outbreak of World War II
- World War II in The West
- Hitler vs. Stalin: Operation Barbarossa
- World War II in The Pacific
- Toward Allied Victory in World War II
- World War II Ends
- African American Servicemen Fight Two Wars
- World War II Casualties and Legacy
The devastation of the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) had greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In particular, political and economic instability in Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty, fueled t...
In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler...
On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest. On May 10, German forces swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war. Three days later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Meuse River and struck French forces at Sedan, located at the northern en...
By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April. Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans was a precursor for his real objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast territory would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed. The other half of Hitler’s strategy...
With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late 1941 included an expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East. On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in ...
In North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and Germans by 1943. An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s government fell in July 1943, though Allied fighting against the Germans in Italy would continue until 1945. On the Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the ...
At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman(who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany. Post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, the...
World War II exposed a glaring paradox within the United States Armed Forces. Although more than 1 million African Americans served in the war to defeat Nazism and fascism, they did so in segregated units. The same discriminatory Jim Crowpolicies that were rampant in American society were reinforced by the U.S. military. Black servicemen rarely saw...
World War II proved to be the deadliest international conflict in history, taking the lives of 60 to 80 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Civilians made up an estimated 50-55 million deaths from the war, while military comprised 21 to 25 million of those lost during the war. Millions m...
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Battle casualties of World War II. The article summarizes casualties in different theatres of World War II in Europe and North Africa. Only the military losses and civilian losses directly associated with hostilities are included into the article.
2 days ago · FILE - American soldiers and supplies arrive on the shore of the French coast of German-occupied Normandy during the Allied D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 in World War II. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Of those, 73,000 were from the United States, 83,000 from Britain and Canada.
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The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and Japan’s formal surrender on September 2 ended the war. An estimated 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people died during World War II, including about 6,000,000 Jewish men, women, and children who died in the Holocaust.
