World War II was a global military conflict that, in terms of lives lost and material destruction, was the most devastating war in human history. It began in 1939 as a European conflict between Germany and an Anglo-French coalition but eventually included most of the nations of the world. It ended in 1945, leaving a world dominated by the U.S. and the USSR.
The United States initially remained neutral, only entering the war in late 1941, after the Japanese bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States fought a two theater war: against the Japanese in the Pacific and against the other Axis Powers (Germany and Italy) in Europe and North Africa. Although the Axis Powers were initially successful, conquering most of Europe and huge areas of the Pacific and East Asia, ultimately they were defeated largely by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, with Germany surrendering to the Allies in May 1945. Japan surrendered in September 1945, after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
More than any previous war, World War II was a total war, involving the commitment of nations’ entire human and economic resources, the blurring of the distinction between combatant and noncombatant, and the expansion of the battlefield to include all of the enemy’s territory. The most important determinants of its outcome were industrial capacity and personnel.
The war was fought with unprecedented ferocity, especially against civilians, who constituted the majority of the war deaths. The Germans marked entire peoples (Jews, Gypsies) for extermination in death camps and carried out reprisals against civilians for partisan attacks. Both sides bombed civilian targets in cities. The Red Army engaged in the mass looting of captured German cities.
The postwar shape of Europe and East Asia was largely determined by the decisions made at the last conference of the Allied wartime leaders: Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. It took place in February 1945 at Yalta in the Crimea. There the Allies planned the final defeat and occupation of Germany, the trial of war criminals, agreed to the founding of the United Nations, and provided for Soviet help against Japan.
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