Dec. 7, 2020, marks the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a catastrophic surprise attack by Japan on a U.S. naval base on Oahu that killed 2,403 U.S. personnel. In honor of that somber anniversary, Stacker compiled facts about that attack along with 19 other major events that occurred from the time German aggression began to the final devastating phase of World War II.
The second World War has been chronicled, mythologized, and revered in film, television, theater, and other forms of storytelling for generations. But zooming in on individual stories, lives, and battles can sometimes obscure the utterly overwhelming nature of the war: An astounding 60 million people around the world are estimated to have lost their lives in the conflict. The total number of casualties counts 15 million soldiers and 45 million civilians. This may be a low estimate, as estimates place the number of dead in the conflict at 50 million in China alone.
It is widely accepted that Germany started World War II in its effort to conquer Europe, invading France in the west and Poland and the Soviet Union in the east. Led by Adolf Hitler’s murderous Nazi regime, the Germans welcomed Italy and Japan into the Axis fold to fight the Allies, whose major members grew from just the United Kingdom and France at the war’s outset to include the United States and the Soviet Union.
While the Germans quickly overran France and installed a collaborationist government, a major French resistance sprung up and actively worked to undermine the Nazis in France and abroad, providing intelligence to the Allies as spies sabotaged German supply and communication lines within France.
No accounting of World War II would be complete without inclusion of the Nazis' brutal concentration camps, where Hitler turned his genocidal fantasies of creating a so-called German “master race” by killing millions of Jews, gypsies, and other persecuted groups into a reality.
By the time Europe’s second world war in a half-century came to a close in 1945, the victorious powers committed to a new world organization that aimed to ensure there would never be a third. The United Nations was born from this commitment, along with the popularization of the idea that crimes against humanity and genocide must never be tolerated, however shakily these ideals have been upheld.
Related: 100 years of military history
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December 05, 2020 at 10:00PM
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A timeline of WWII, one of the most devastating conflicts in world history - KeysNews.com
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