The Effects of World War II
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I have chosen the Second World War because it created world alliances formed towards defeating the Nazis, and it created other superpowers in the process, two decades after the First World War. The war devastated many nations, economies, and lives, even though it uplifted other states such as the United States of America, who profited from selling arms as a neutral party (Fussell, 1989). The war that reigned for a little more than six years was between Great Britain and France, who joined forces with the Polish Army because the Nazi Army, led by Adolf Hitler, had invaded their land and killed many people in the process. This is after Hitler was able to acquire the help of the Italians and the Japanese who were allies of the Nazis. In turn, the Nazi’s were able to kill nearly 6 million Jews in their concentration camps, as Hitler believed they were “impure,” in a project now termed as The Holocaust or as he called it, The Final Solution (Taylor, 1996).
The European Powers had not yet recuperated from the effects of World War 1 when the Nazis decided to begin the Second War. The Nazis believed they were imposed very harsh terms by the Treaty of Versailles that was one of the factors that led to the rise of Hitler and his army. He then occupied Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939, whereby when he advanced to Poland in September, Great Britain and France were ready to pay back for the First World War. The Nazi, together with the help of Italy’s army led by the famous Mussolini raided the Netherlands, Poland, and penetrated to France until it was divided into two. After this, they set focus, but after the Royal Air Force defeated them, Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was able to acquire aid in from of troops and finance from the United States (Murray, Millett, 2009).
In mid-1941, the Nazis turned their backs and decided to hit the Soviet Union because they saw the Soviet had profited too much and their Air Support was depleted, this now begun to spur differences in his troops; therefore, they were unable to progress into Germany because of the differences. With the British unable to progress to Japan, the U.S troops were te only option left to fight off the aggressive Japanese. In 1941, the Japanese advanced and attacked the U.S. troops at Pearl Harbor, a naval base located in Hawaii, killing over 2000 soldiers. This led to the United States declaring war on Japan; therefore, Germany and the Axis prompted war to the United States (Murray, Millett, 2009).
By 1943 after the U.S. had defeated the Japanese, the British and Americans defeated the German forces in North Africa that led to the fall of Germany, which was after Mussolini was defeated in July 1943. In June 1944, the Allies defeated the final wave of Hitler’s army after which he sought to drive the British out of Germany, but in February 1945 the final British aerial invasion on Germany, the Nazi’s surrendered in May. At the same time in February, the U.S. had also signed the Quebec Agreement, with the consent of the British, which allowed them to detonate two nuclear bombs on two famous towns of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed over 500000 people. Later they bombed 67 Japanese cities rendering them useless, thus forcing them to surrender in September 1945.
The Second World War became the most fierce warfare in history because it killed more than 80 million people, most of who were civilians numbering over 50 million people. It led to the rise of communism and the global shift to the United States and the USSR as the new superpowers who later faced each other in the Cold War, which lasted for decades threatening to be the largest arms race in history (Cantor, Land, 1985).
References
Cantor, D., & Land, K. C. (1985). Unemployment and crime rates in the post-World War II United States: A theoretical and empirical analysis. American Sociological Review, 317-332.
Fussell, P. (1989). Wartime: understanding and behavior in the Second World War. Oxford University Press, USA.
Murray, W., & Millett, A. R. (2009). A war to be won: Fighting the Second World War. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, A. J. P. (1996). Origin of the Second World War. Simon and Schuster.