From Poland to Tokyo Bay: The Course of the War

1Start at the end

The photograph shows a scene on the deck of an American battleship in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. Japanese officials in top hats and army officers in uniform stand silently before rows of Allied officers. Six years earlier, few people would have predicted this ending. In 1939 to 1941 the Axis seemed unstoppable. This lesson follows how the balance turned.

Figure 1. The main turning points, coloured by theatre of war.

2Phase 1, 1939 to 1941: Axis victories

Blitzkrieg crushed Poland in weeks, while the Soviet Union, under its pact with Germany, occupied eastern Poland. In spring 1940 Germany took Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and France surrendered in June; Italy entered the war on Germany's side. Britain, alone in the west, survived the Battle of Britain in the air. In June 1941 Hitler broke his pact and invaded the Soviet Union, and in December Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and swept across south-east Asia.

3Phase 2, 1942 to 1943: the tide turns

Three battles in a few months changed the war: Midway (June 1942), where Japan lost four aircraft carriers; El Alamein (October to November 1942), which drove the Axis back across North Africa; and Stalingrad, where a German army surrendered in February 1943. The Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, landed in Sicily (July 1943) and knocked Italy out of the war.

4Phase 3, 1944 to 1945: Allied victory

On D-Day (6 June 1944) Allied armies landed in Normandy, while the Red Army advanced from the east. Soviet troops reached Berlin in April 1945; Hitler took his own life on 30 April and Germany surrendered on 8 May. In the Pacific, American forces captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August), and the Soviet Union attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, Japan announced its surrender on 15 August and signed it on 2 September 1945.

5Africa in the war

African soldiers fought in North and East Africa, in Burma and in Europe. In 1941 British, Commonwealth, Ethiopian and Belgian Congolese forces (the Force Publique) defeated the Italians in East Africa, and Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa. Germany occupied Belgium in May 1940, but the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi stayed on the Allied side: the Congo supplied copper, rubber and the uranium used in the first atomic bombs.