the-french-artist/wikipedia_20220301.simple_sentence_split huggingface dataset:
| caption     = (Clockwise from the top)
| date        = ()
| place       = Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, China, Indian Ocean, North and South Atlantic Ocean
| casus       = Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (28 June) followed by Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Kingdom of Serbia (28 July) and Russian mobilisation against Austria-Hungary (29 July).
| territory   = * Formation of new countries in Europe and the Middle East
Transfer of German colonies and territories, regions of the former Ottoman Empire, regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Soviet Union territories to other countries
| result      = Allied victory
Central Powers victory on the Eastern Front is made worthless by defeat on the Western Front
All empires in mainland Europe collapse (including Germany, Russia, Turkey and Austria-Hungary)
Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War – the Russian Empire becomes the Soviet Union
Widespread unrest and revolutions throughout Europe and Asia
Creation of the League of Nations (more...)
| combatant1  = Allied Powers:
| combatant2  = Central Powers:
| commander1  =
| commander2  = | strength1   = Total: 42,959,850| strength2   = Total: 25,248,321| casualties1 =
further details...Military deaths by country| casualties2 =
further details...Military deaths by country}}World War I (WWI or WW1), also called the First World War, began on July 28, 1914 and lasted until November 11, 1918.
It was a global war and lasted exactly 4 years, 3 months and 2 weeks.
Most of the fighting was in Europe, but soldiers from many other countries took part, and it changed the colonial empires of the European powers.
Before World War II began in 1939, World War I was called the Great War, or the World War.
Another names are the  Imperialist War and the  Four years War'.
There were 135 countries that took part in World War I, and nearly 10 million people died while fighting.
Before the war, European countries had formed alliances to protect themselves.
However, that made them divide themselves into two groups.
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated on 28 June 1914, Austria-Hungary blamed  Serbia and declared war on it.
Russia then declared war on Austria-Hungary, which set off a chain of events in which members both groups of countries declared war on each other.
The two sides were the Allied Powers (mainly Russia, France and the British Empire) and the Central Powers (mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire).
There was fighting in many different areas (fronts).
The French and the British fought the Germans on the Western Front in France and Belgium.
Germany had tried to defeat France quickly but was stopped in the First Battle of the Marne.
Most of the fighting was then trench warfare.
The Russians fought the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on the Eastern Front in Central and Eastern Europe.
Fighting was there not trench warfare but mobile warfare.
The other main areas of fighting were in the Middle East, in the Gallipoli region of the Ottoman Empire and between Italy and Austria-Hungary.
Fighting also took place in Africa and China and at sea and in the air.
World War I was the first major war in which tanks, airplanes and submarines (or U-boats) were important weapons.
In 1917, the Russian Revolutions led to Russia leaving the war in March 1918.
Also in 1917, the United States entered the war, but it took a year for most of the army to arrive.
From the Russian departure to the American arrival, the Germans launched a huge attack in March 1918 to try to win the war, but it failed.
In August to November 1918, the Allied Powers won a large victory against the Germans during the Hundred Days Offensive.
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire then agreed to stop fighting.
The German government collapsed, and a new government was forced to agree to stop the fighting on 11 November.
The war was ended by the signing of many different treaties, the most important being the Treaty of Versailles.
It also led to the creation of the League of Nations, which was meant to prevent wars.
People were shocked by the size of the war, how many people it killed and how much damage it caused.
They hoped it would be the war "to end all wars".
Instead, it led to another, larger world war 21 years later.
By 1914, trouble was on the rise in Europe, and many countries feared invasion from others.
For example, Germany was becoming increasingly powerful, and British Empire saw that as a threat.
Countries formed alliances to protect themselves, but that divided them into two groups.
Germany and Austria-Hungary had been allies since 1879 and formed the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882.
France and Russia became allies in 1894 and later formed the Triple Entente with Britain.
In 1908, Austria-Hungary had taken over Bosnia, a region next to Serbia.
Some of those who lived in Bosnia were Serbs and wanted to be part of Serbia.
The Black Hand was an organization that agreed with the idea and sent men to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria while he was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.
All of them failed to kill him with grenades while he passed through a large crowd.
However, one of them, a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, shot him and his pregnant wife with a pistol.
Germany supported Austria-Hungary and promised full support in case of war.
Austria-Hungary sent the very harsh July Ultimatum to Serbia and threatened war unless Serbia agreed to all of its terms.
Many historians think that Austria-Hungary already wanted a war with Serbia.
Serbia agreed to most of the conditions, but Austria-Hungary still declared war on Serbia, which quickly led to a full-scale war.
The countries had allies that became involved in the war in a matter of days.
Russia joined the war to help Serbia because both both Serbs and Russians are Slavs.
Since Russia is so large, it had to move soldiers closer to the war, but Germany feared that Russia's soldiers would attack Germany as well.
Russia feared Germany, which was becoming stronger.
Germany declared war on Russia and began to carry out its plan to fight a war in Europe.
Germany is in the middle of Europe and so could not attack to the east towards Russia without weakening itself in the west towards France.
Germany's plan was the quick defeat of France in the west before Russia was ready to fight; then, Germany would move its armies to the east to face Russia.
Germany could not quickly invade France directly because France had put so many of forts on the border.
That made Germany invade the neighboring country of Belgium to invade France through the undefended French-Belgian border.
Britain then joined the war and said that it was to protect Belgium.
However, some historians think that even if Germany had stayed out of Belgium, the British would have still joined the war to help France.
Soon, most of Europe became involved.
The Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
It is not clear why the Ottomans entered the war, but they had become friendly to Germany.
Italy had allied with German and Austria-Hungary but refused to help them since those countries had not been attacked first.
Italy noted that Austria-Hungary had attacked Serbia first.
Also, Italy had long disliked Austria-Hungary and wanted to take part of its land.
It later joined the war for the Allies because they had promised land across the Adriatic Sea.
Germany against Russia
Germany was afraid that because Austria-Hungary had attacked Serbia, Russia would attack Austria-Hungary to help Serbia.
That made Germany feel that it had to help Austria-Hungary by attacking Russia first.
The problem was that Russia was allied to France, and the Germans thought that the French might attack them to help Russia.
That made Germany decided that it could win the war by quickly attacking France first.
The Germans could mobilize first since they had a list of all men who had to join the army, where they had to go, and the times of every train that would carry them to where they had to go.
France was slower in doing the same thing.
The Germans thought that if they attacked France first, they could knock it out of the war before Russia could attack them.
Russia had a large army, but Germany mistakenly thought that it would take six weeks to mobilize and a long time before they could attack the Central Powers.
However, the Russian Army mobilized in ten days and drove deep into Austria-Hungary.
In the east, the Russians attacked the Germans.
The Russians pushed back the Germans, but the Germans then defeated the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg.
United Kingdom against Germany
The United Kingdom quickly joined the war and said that it was to protect Belgian neutrality.
Germany passed through Belgium to reach Paris before Russia could mobilize and open up a second front.
On August 4, 1914, the British declared war against Germany in support of Belgium.
The British Empire was larger than any other empire and ruled over a quarter of the world.
If Germany won in France, it might take British and French colonies and become the most powerful and the largest empire in the world.
Britain was also worried about Germany's growing military power.
Germany was developing its large army into one of the most powerful in the world.
The British Army was quite small, but the Royal Navy was the largest and the best in the world, which in the 19th century was enough to keep other naval powers from attacking Britain.
Germany was a land power, and Britain was a sea power.
However, Germany was building a large navy, which was seen as a threat to Britain.
Germany's generals had decided that the best way to defeat France was to go through Belgium using a plan called the Schlieffen Plan by German Army Chief of Staff Alfred Von Schlieffen.
The Germans could then attack the French army at the north side and the south side at the same time.
The German Army went into Belgium on August 4.
The same day,  the British declared war on German.
The British had said in 1839 that they would not let Belgium to be invaded, and they kept their promise.
When the Germans got to the Belgian city of Liège, the Belgians fought very hard to stop them from coming into the city.
The Germans finally pushed the Belgians out of the city, but it had taken longer than the German generals had planned.
The Germans then attacked the north side of the French army.
The French and the British moved men up to fight the Germans because the Belgians had fought so long at Liège.
However, the Germans pushed the French back at the frontiers, and the British held the Germans back at Mons, but they also fell back to join up with the retreating French Army until they were stopped at the river Marne.
This was the First Battle of the Marne or "Miracle of the Marne".
The British government might have decided differently if anyone had foreseen how long the war would last and what the terrible costs would be.
Most people thought that the war would be short.
They thought the armies would move around quickly to attack each other and one would defeat the other without too many people getting killed.
They thought the war would be about brave soldiers and did not understand how war had changed.
Only a few people, such as Lord Kitchener said that the war would last long.
The Ottomans joined the war because they were secretly allied to Germany, and two Ottoman warships, manned by German Navy personnel, bombarded Russian towns.
Britain fought against the Ottomans only for supporting Germany and had no other problem with them.
However, by fighting them in the Mesopotamia region in what is now Iraq, in the Arabian Peninsula and in other places, Britain defeated them with the help from the British Indian Army.
After the war ended, Britain got some Ottoman areas and added them to the British Empire.
Greece went into the war because its leader supported the Allied cause.
Greece and Serbia had become independent, but many Greeks still lived in lands that had once been Greek but were now Ottoman.
Having recently won the Balkan Wars, the Greeks wanted especially to control other land to the north that was under Bulgarian and Ottoman rule and so they declared war.
The Ottomans killed most of the Greek Army as they tried to regain parts of the Ottoman Empire.
Another war started when the Greeks bombed a train.
The Ottomans swept the Greeks back into their own territory.
From then on, the Greeks never again declared war, but the Ottomans had one of the largest armies in the world.
Bulgaria against Serbia and Greece
Bulgaria, like Greece and Serbia, had been part of the Ottoman Empire but later became independent.
Bulgaria claimed a lot of Ottoman land.
The Serbians and the Greeks felt cheated because they felt that the land belonged to them and took back the land.
That angered Bulgaria and led to it becoming an Ottoman ally.
Bulgaria declared war on Serbia and Greece but lost the war.
Trench warfare killed many soldiers.
New weapons, such as machine guns, and long-range artillery had an increased rate of fire that cut down huge numbers of soldiers during mass charges, a tactic left over from older warfare.
The men on both sides took spades and dug holes because they did not want to be killed.
The holes joined up into trenches until the lines of trenches went all the way from Switzerland to the North Sea.
In front of the trenches was barbed wire to cut anyone who tried to climb over it and land mines to blow up anyone who tried to cross.
Late in the war, poison gas also was an important weapon.
The new machine guns, artillery, trenches, and mines made it very difficult to attack.
The generals had fought many wars without them and so they ordered their armies to attack in the old style of marching in rows, which allowed the enemy to shoot them down easily.
At the 1916 Battle of the Somme, 60,000 British men died in a single day, one of the bloodiest days in the history of the British army.
Late in the war, the British and French invented tanks and used them to attack entrenched Germans, but they could not make enough of them to make a big difference.
The Germans invented special Sturmabteilung tactics to infiltrate enemy positions, but they also were too little, too late.
The British used whistles to communicate to other soldiers and so before they shelled the German trenches, they would sound the whistle.
However, the Germans caught on to this tactic and so after the shelling, when the British soldiers came to finish off the German soldiers, the Germans were ready with their machine guns because they knew that the British were coming.
Airplanes were first used extensively in World War I. They were first used for reconnaissance, and pictures of enemy land were taken to help direct artillery.
Generals, who are military leaders, were using airplanes as an important part of their attack plans at the end of the war.
World War I showed that airplanes could be important war weapons.
Airplanes in World War I were made of wood and canvas, a type of rough cloth.
They did not last long and could not fly very fast at the beginning of the war.
They could only fly up to 116 kilometers per hour, or 72 miles per hour.
At the end of the war, they could fly up to , which was less than today.
Guns were put on planes for the first time during the war.
Pilots, people who fly the plane, used the guns to shoot enemy planes.
One pilot used metal sheets, pieces of metal, to armor his airplane.
Other pilots began using metal sheets too.
Pilots also made their airplanes better with machine guns, guns that shoot bullets much faster.
That made fighting harder and more dangerous between airplanes.
Pilots had to wear certain clothes when flying an airplane in World War I because they flew high,, where the air is cold.
The pilot's clothes kept them warm and protected them from the wind and cold.
Pilots wore a leather coat to protect their bodies and a padded helmet and goggles, which are large glasses with special lenses, to protect their head and face.
They wore a scarf around their neck to keep the wind from blowing against their neck when they turned their head.
United States against Germany
The German leaders decided to use submarines, called U-boats, from the German word Unterseeboot'' (meaning "underwater boat").
The U-boats attacked passenger ships such as RMS Lusitania carrying civilians to the United Kingdom.
They did not follow the laws of war because the British could easily destroy them otherwise.
America was selling weapons to Germany's enemies but not to Germany and so was not neutral since the US had taken sides during the conflict.
Many American and British noncombatants were killed by the submarines although they were not fighting.
Germany also wrote a secret telegram note to Mexico in code that suggest that both countries work together to attack the United States.
This note is called the Zimmerman Telegram because it was sent by Arthur Zimmerman.
It offered Mexico land in the Southwestern United States that the United States had taken in the Mexican-American War.
British spies found out about the note and told the United States.
The Americans became angry, and many decided that their country should enter the war against Germany.
The Zimmermann Telegram and the sinking of American ships by German U-boats made the United States on April 6, 1917 declare war against Germany and join the Allies.
Russian Revolutions
The defeat of Russia on the Eastern Front caused unrest there, which led to the Russian Revolutions.
They made Russia fight both Germany and the Bolsheviks at the same time.
That meant Russia want to end the war against Germany.
That made Russia want to pay many German marks to make stop the fighting between it and Germany so that it could focus on fighting the Bolsheviks.
First Russian Revolution
In 1917, there was a revolution in Russia.
Tsar Nicholas II had to give up power and let the people have power.
At first, it was thought that Russia would fight harder now that he was gone.
However, the Russians did not want to fight anymore because there was too little food, appropriate armaments or adequate roads to supply its army.
The war had been putting burdens on the Russians, and many of them were poor and hungry.
They began to hate their new government because it would not stop the war.
Second Russian Revolution
Another revolution happened in Russia in which he Mensheviks lost to the Bolsheviks.
The leader of the Bolsheviks was Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), a communist who followed the ideas of Karl Marx.
The new government asked the Germans for peace and signed a Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers in March 1918 at the city of Brest-Litovsk.
The Germans and Russians stopped fighting.
Russia gave Germany land in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea, including the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Also, Finland gained its independence by the treaty.
After the war, the Germans had to agree to the Treaty of Versailles, which stated that Germany had to pay approximately $31.5 billion in reparations and had to take full responsibility for the war.
Also, the countries of the world were to come together to make an international organization to stop future wars: the League of Nations.
The United States Senate did not agree with the League even though it was the idea of United States president Woodrow Wilson.
Although Wilson tried to tell the American people to agree to join the Leage, the United States never joined it.
Problems with the treaty in Germany, where it was hated, later led to World War II.
World War 1 Letters  The Internet's Collection of World War One Mail.
World War 1 Atlas  A day-by-day map of World War I
A  history of World War I in pictures, audio, and video
The Heritage of the Great War, Netherlands
World War I -Citizendium
Wars involving Portugal
World War II (WWII or WW2) was a global war involving fighting in most of the world and most countries.
The war started in 1939 with Nazi Germany invading Poland, so most countries fought from 1939 to 1945.
However, Japan invaded China in 1937, so some started fighting in 1937.
Most of the world's countries, including all of the great powers, fought as part of two military alliances: the Allies and the Axis Powers.
It was the largest and deadliest conflict in all of history.
It involved more countries, cost more money, involved more people, and killed more people than any other war in history.
Between 50 to 85 million people died, most of whom were civilians.
The war included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, starvation, disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons against civilians in history.
The two sides were the Allies (at first China, France and the United Kingdom, joined by the Soviet Union, United States and others) and the Axis (Germany, Italy and Japan).
The war in Asia began when Japan invaded China on July 7, 1937.
The war began in Europe when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
France and the United Kingdom reacted by declaring war on Germany.
By 1941, much of Europe was under German control, including France.
Only the British remained fighting against the Axis in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic.
Germany gave up plans to invade Britain after losing an airplane battle.
In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the largest area of war in history.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and invaded British and French colonies in Asia, and the two wars became one.
The Japanese victories were stopped in 1942, and that same year, the Soviets won the huge Battle of Stalingrad.
Then, the Allies started to win in all areas.
The Axis were forced back into the Soviet Union, lost North Africa, and, starting in 1943, were forced to defend Italy.
In 1944, the Allies invaded France, and they came into Germany itself from the west while the Soviets came in from the east.
Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945.
Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945, and the war had ended with an Allied victory.
After the war, the United Nations was set up to develop support between countries and to prevent future wars.
The Cold War by the major winners soon started, but they did not fight each other in an actual war.
The decolonization of Asia and Africa (where many places controlled by European countries were given their independence) happened as well since Europe had been weakened by the war.
Economic recovery and political integration (the process of uniting countries) were among other results of the war.
Allies and Axis
The Axis Powers at the start of the war were Germany, Italy, and Japan.
There were many meetings to create an alliance between those countries.
Finland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Thailand joined the Axis later.
As the war continued, some Axis countries like Italy changed sides to join the Allies instead.
The Allied Powers were the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire, France, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, and China, the last of which had been fighting a civil war.
In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, which made the Soviets join the Allies.
In December 1941 came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor against the United States, which then also joined the Allies.
World War I had greatly changed the way of diplomacy and politics in Asia, Europe, and Africa with the defeat of the Central Powers.
The empires that had sided with the Central Powers were destroyed.
Even the Russian Empire, which did not side with the Central Powers, stopped being an empire, because it transformed into the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short) after the Russian Civil War.
The war also changed the borders in Eastern Europe, with many new countries were born.
The war led to strong irredentism and revanchism, which were especially strong in Germany since it had been forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
The Germans also had 13% of their homeland area and all of their colonies taken away, and they had to pay back a very large sum of money to the Allies.
The size of their army and navy was also limited, and its air force was banned.
In Italy, nationalists were unhappy with the outcome of the war since they thought that their country should have gained far more territory from the past agreement with the Allies.
The fascist movement in the 1920s brought Mussolini to the leadership of the country.
He promised to make Italy a great power by adding to its colonial empire.
After the Kuomintang (KMT), the governing party of China, unified the country in the 1920s, the Chinese Civil War between it and the Communist Party of China began.
In 1931, Japan used the Mukden Incident as a excuse to take Manchuria and set up a puppet state, Manchukuo, and the League of Nations failed to do anything to stop it.
The Tanggu Truce, a ceasefire, was signed in 1933.
In 1936, the Kuomintang and the communists agreed to stop fighting against each other and to fight Japan instead.
In 1937, Japan started the Second Sino-Japanese War to take the rest of China.
After the  end of the German Empire, the democratic Weimar Republic was set up.
There were disagreements among Germans that involved many political ideologies, ranging from nationalism to communism.
The fascist movement in Germany rose because of the Great Depression.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, became the German chancellor in 1933.
After the Reichstag fire, Hitler created a totalitarian state in which there was only one party by law.
Hitler wanted to change the world order and quickly rebuilt the army, navy, and air force, especially after Saarland voted to return to Germany in 1935.
In March 1936, Hitler sent the army to Rhineland.
The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936.
The war ended in 1939 with the Nationalist victory because of  support by Italy and Germany.
In March 1938, Germany sent its army into Austria, known as the Anschluss, which had little reaction from European countries since nearly all Austrians wanted to be part of Germany, Soon, Western Europe agreed to give Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia that was mostly German, to Germany if Hitler promised to stop taking land.
However, the rest of the country had been forced to surrender or be invaded by March 1939.
The Allies now tried to stop him by promising to help Poland if it was attacked.
Just before the war, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a peace agreement that openly stated that they would not attack each other for ten years.
Secretly, they also agreed to divide Eastern Europe between them.
Course of the war
War breaks out
World War II began in Europe on September 1, 1939, as Germany invaded Poland.
On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
They did not do much to help Poland but sent only a small French attack on Germany from the west.
The Soviet Union soon invaded eastern Poland, on September 17.
Finally, all of Poland was divided.
Germany then signed an agreement to work together with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union forced the Baltic countries to allow it to keep Soviet soldiers in their countries.
Finland did not accept the Soviet call and so it was attacked in November 1939.
With peace, the world war broke out.
France and Britain thought that the Soviet Union might enter the war for Germany and the Soviets were expelled from the League of Nations.
After Poland was defeated, the "Phoney War" began in Western Europe.
British soldiers were sent to the Continent, but there were no large battles fought between the two sides.
Then, in April 1940, Germany decided to attack Norway and Denmark so that it would be safer to transport iron ore from Sweden.
The British and the French sent an army to disrupt the German occupation, but had to leave when Germany invaded France.
Neville Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill as British prime minister in May 1940 because of the invasion.
Axis early victories
On 10 May, Germany invaded France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg and quickly defeated them by using tactics of massive force.
The British were forced to leave mainland Europe at Dunkirk.
On June 10, Italy invaded France and declared war on itand the United Kingdom.
Soon, France was divided into occupation zones.
Some were directly controlled by Germany and Italy, and the other was the zone of unoccupied Vichy France.
By June 1940, the Soviet Union moved its soldiers into the Baltic states and took them, followed by Bessarabia in Romania.
Although there had been some collaboration between the Soviet Union and Germany earlier, that event made it serious.
Later, when both countries could not agree to work more closely together, relationships between them became worse to the point of war.
Germany began an air battle over Britain to prepare for a landing on the island, but the plan was finally cancelled in September.
The German Navy destroyed many British ships transporting goods in the Atlantic.
Italy had begun its operation in the Mediterranean.
The United States remained neutral but started to help the Allies.
By helping to protect British ships in the Atlantic, the United States found itself fighting German ships by October 1941 but was not officially at war.
In September 1940, Italy began to invade British-held Egypt.
In October, Italy invaded Greece, but that resulted in only an Italian retreat to Italian-occupied Albania.
Again, in early 1941, an Italian army was pushed from Egypt to Libya in Africa, but Germany soon helped Italy.
Under Erwin Rommel's command, by the end of April 1941, the British was pushed back to Egypt again.
Germany also successfully invaded Greece, Yugoslavia and Crete by May.
Despite the victories, Hitler decided to cancel the bombing of Britain after 11 May.
Meanwhile, Japan's progress in China was still not much, although the nationalist and communist Chinese began fighting each other again.
Japan was planning to take over European colonies in Asia while they were weak, and the Soviet Union could feel a danger from Germany and so a non-aggression pact between the Soviets and the Japanese was signed in April 1941.
However, Germany kept preparing an attack on the Soviet Union by moving its soldiers close to the Soviet border.
War becomes global
On June 22, 1941, the European Axis countries attacked the Soviet Union.
This opened a new Eastern Front (World War II).
During the summer, the Axis quickly captured Ukraine and the Baltic regions, which caused huge damage to the Soviets.
Britain and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance in July.
Although there was great progress in the last two months when winter arrived, the tired German army was forced to delay its attack just outside Moscow.
That showed that the Axis had failed its main targets, and the Soviet army was still not weakened.
This marked the end of the blitzkrieg stage of the war.
By December, the Soviet Red Army facing the Axis army had received more soldiers from the east since it no longer feared the Japanese.
The Soviets began a counterattack and pushed the German army to the west.
The Axis lost a lot of soldiers but still had most of the land that it already controlled.
By November 1941, the British counterattacked the Axis in North Africa and got all the land back that it had lost.
However, the Axis pushed the Allies back again until it was stopped at El Alamein.
In Asia, German successes encouraged Japan to call for oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies.
Many Western countries reacted to the occupation of French Indochina by banning oil trading with Japan.
Plans to take over European colonies in Asia to create a great defensive area in the Pacific were made by Japan to give it more resources.
However, before any future invasion, Japan first had to destroy the American Pacific Fleet in the Pacific Ocean.
On December 7, 1941, it attacked Pearl Harbor as well as many harbors in several South East Asian countries.
That event led the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and the  Western Allies to declare war on Japan, but the Soviet Union remained neutral.
Most of the Axis nations reacted by declaring war on the United States.
By April 1942, many southeast Asian countries (Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Singapore) had almost fallen to the Japanese.
In May 1942, the Philippines fell.
The Japanese Navy had many quick victories, but in June 1942, Japan was defeated at Midway.
Japan could no longer take land because a large part of its navy was destroyed during the Battle of Midway.
Allies advance
Japan then began its plan to take over Papua New Guinea again, and the United States planned to attack the Solomon Islands.
The fight at Guadalcanal  began in September 1942 and involved many troops and ships from both sides.
It ended with a Japanese defeat in early 1943.
On the Eastern Front, the Axis defeated Soviet attacks during summer and began its own main offensive to southern Russia along Don and Volga Rivers in June 1942 to try to take over oil fields in Caucasus, which were critical to the Axis for fuelling their war effort, and as well as a great steppe.
Stalingrad (now Volgograd) was in the path of the Axis army, and the Soviets decided to defend the city.
By November, the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad, but the Soviets surrounded the Germans in the winter After heavy losses, the German army was forced to surrender the city in February 1943.
Even though the front was pushed back farther than it was before the summer attacks, the German Army still had become dangerous to an area around Kursk.
Hitler devoted almost two thirds of his armies to The Battle of Stalingrad, which was the largest and deadliest battle at the time.
In August 1942, because of the Allied defense at El Alamein, the Axis army failed to take the town.
A new Allied offensive drove the Axis west across Libya a few months later, just after the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa forced it to join the Allies.
That led to Axis defeat during the North African Campaign in May 1943.
In the Soviet Union, on July 4, 1943, Germany started an attack around Kursk.
Many German soldiers were lost because of the Soviets' well-created defenses.
Hitler cancelled the attack before it had any clear outcome.
The Soviets then started their own counterattack, which was one of the turning points of the war.
The Soviets, instead of the Germans, then became the attacking force on the Eastern Front.
On July 9, 1943, affected by the earlier Soviet victories, the Western Allies landed on Sicily, which resulted in the arrest of Mussolini in the same month.
In September 1943, the Allies invaded mainland Italy, following the Italian armistice with the Allies.
Germany then took control of Italy, disarmed its army, and built up many defensive lines to slow the Allied invasion down.
German special forces then rescued Mussolini, then soon created the German-occupied puppet state of the Italian Social Republic.
In late 1943, Japan conquered some islands in India and began an invasion of the mainland of India.
The British Indian Army and other forces expelled it in early 1944.
In early 1944, the Soviet army drove off the German army from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and ended the longest and deadliest siege in history.
After that, the Soviets began a large counterattack.
By May, the Soviets had retaken Crimea.
With the attacks in Italy from September 1943, the Allies succeeded in capturing Rome on June 4, 1944 and made the German forces fall back.
War ends in Europe
On D-Day, on June 6, 1944, the Allies began the invasion of Normandy, France.
The codename for the invasion was Operation Overlord.
The successful invasion led to the defeat of the German forces in France.
Paris was freed in August 1944, and the Allies continued eastward while the German front collapsed.
Operation Market Garden was the combined aerial invasion of the Netherlands and was launched on September 17, 1944.
The purpose was to seize a series of bridges that included a bridge in Arnhem, which spanned the Rhine River.
The airborne invasion was called Market.
The ground invasion, named Garden, reached the Rhine but could not take the bridge.
On June 22, the Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front codenamed Operation Bagration, destroyed almost all of the German Army Group Centre.
Soon, the Germans were forced to retreat and to defend Ukraine and Poland.
The arriving Soviet troops caused uprisings against the German government in Eastern European countries, but they failed to succeed unless they were helped by the Soviets.
Another Soviet offensive forced Romania and Bulgaria to join the Allies.
Communist Serbian partisans under Josip Broz Tito retook Belgrade with some help from Bulgaria and the Soviet Union.
By early 1945, the Soviets had attacked many German-occupied countries: Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
The Soviets made Finland switch to the Allies.
On December 16, 1944, the Germans tried one last time to take the Western Front by attacking the Allies in Ardennes, Belgium, in a battle is known as the Battle of the Bulge.
It was the last major German attack of the war, and the Germans were not successful in their attack.
By March 1945, the Soviets had moved quickly from Vistula River in Poland to East Prussia and Vienna, and the Western Allies had crossed the Rhine.
In Italy, the Allies pushed forward while the Soviets attacked Berlin.
The Western Allies eventually met up with the Soviets at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, two days after Mussolini had been killed.
In his will, Hitler appointed his navy commander, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, to be his successor.
Donitz surrendered to the allies and opposed Hitler for wanting Germany to continue fighting.
German forces in Italy surrendered on April 29, 1945.
Germany surrendered to the Western Allies on May 7, 1945, known as V-E Day, and was forced to surrender to the Soviets on May 8, 1945.
The final battle in Europe ended in Italy, on May 11, 1945.
War ends in Pacific
In the Pacific, American forces arrived in the Philippines on June 1944.
By April 1945, American and Philippine forces had cleared many of the Japanese forces, but fighting continued in some parts of the Philippines until the end of the war.
British and Chinese forces had advanced in Northern Burma and captured Rangoon by May 3, 1945.
American forces had taken Iwo Jima by March and Okinawa by June 1945.
Many Japanese cities were destroyed by Allied bombings, and Japanese imports were cut off by American submarines.
The Allies wanted Japan to surrender without conditions, but Japan refused to do so.
The United States dropped two atomic bombs over Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945).
On August 8, 1945, the Soviets entered the war against Japan and invaded Manchuria and quickly defeated the primary Imperial Japanese Army there.
On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies.
The surrender documents were formally signed on board the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, which ended the war.
The Allies managed to occupy Austria and Germany.
Germany was divided into two.
The Soviets controlled the east, and the Western Allies controlled the west.
The Allies began denazification, removing Nazi ideas from public life in Germany, and most high-ranking Nazis were captured and brought to a special court.
Germany lost a quarter of the land that it had in 1937, mostly to Poland and the Soviet Union.
The Soviets also took some parts of Poland and Finland as well as the three Baltic countries.
The United Nations was formed on October 24, 1945 to keep peace between countries in the world.
However, the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had worsened during the war and, soon after it, each power quickly built up their power over the controlled area.
In Western Europe and West Germany, it was the United States, while in East Germany and Eastern Europe, it was the Soviet Union, which turned many countries into communist states.
The Cold War led to the formation of the American-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
In Asia, Japan was put under American occupation.
In 1948, Korea was divided into North Korea and South Korea, each claiming to be the legal representative of the Koreans, which led to the Korean War in 1950.
The civil war in China continued from 1946 and resulted in the KMT retreating to Taiwan in 1949 after the communists had won the mainland.
In the Middle East, the Arabs' disagreed with the United Nations plan to create Israel, which marked the beginning of conflicts between the Arabs and Israel.
After the war, decolonization took place in many European colonies.
Bad economies and people wanting to rule themselves were the main reasons.
In most cases, that happened peacefully, except in some countries, such as Indochina and Algeria.
In many regions, European withdrawal caused divisions among the people who had different ethnic groups or religions.
Economic recovery was different in many parts of the world, but in general, it was quite positive.
The United States became richer than any other country and, by 1950, it had taken over as the world's economy.
It also decided on the Marshall Plan (1948–1951) to help European countries.
The German, Italian, and French economies recovered.
However, the British economy was badly harmed and continued to worsen for more than ten years.
The Soviet economy grew very fast after the war was over.
That also happened with the Japanese economy, which became one of the largest economies in the 1980s.
China returned to the same production level as before the war by 1952.
Death and war crimes
There is no exact total number of deaths because many of them were unrecorded.
Many studies said that more than 60 million people died in the war, mostly civilians.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people, almost half of the recorded number of deaths, which means that 25% of the Soviets were killed or wounded in the war.
About 85% of the total deaths were on the Allies, and the other 15% were on the Axis.
Mostly, people died because they were sick, hungry to death, bombed, or the wrong ethnicity.
The Nazis selectyed many groups of people to be kille in what is known as known as The Holocaust.
They killed Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, and other groups.
Around 11 million to 17 million civilians died.
Around 7.5 million people were killed in China by the Japanese.
The most well-known Japanese crime is the Nanking Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.
There were reports that the Germans and Japanese tested biological weapons against civilians and against prisoners-of-war.
Although many Axis war crimes were brought to the first international court, no Allied war crimes were.
Concentration camps and slave work
Other than the Holocaust, about 12 million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, were forced to work for the German economy.
German concentration camps and Soviet gulags caused many deaths.
Both sides treated prisoners-of-war badly.
That was the case even for Soviet soldiers who survived and returned home.
Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also caused many deaths.
The death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1%, seven times that of prisoners under Germans and Italians.
More than 10 million Chinese civilians were made slaves and had to work in mines and war factories.
Between 4 and 10 million people were forced to work in Java.
Between 1942 and 1945, US Presiden Franklin Roosevelt signed an order that made Japanese Americans go to internment camps since he feared them helping an invasion.
Some Germans and Italians were included as well.
The Allies agreed that the Soviet Union could use prisoners-of-war and civilians for forced labor.
Hungarians were forced to work for the Soviet Union until 1955.
Home fronts and production
Before the war in Europe, the Allies had a larger population and economy than the Axis.
If colonies were included, the GDP of the Allies would be twice that of the Axis.
In Asia, however, China had a GDP only 38% higher than Japan if colonies were counted.
The Allied economy and population compared with the Axis lessened with the early Axis victories.
However, that was no longer the case after the United States and the Soviet Union joined the Allies in 1941.
The Allies had a higher production level than the Axis because of more natural resources.
Also, Germany and Japan did not plan for a long war and even had no ability to do so.
Both tried to improve their economies by using slave laborers.
As men went off to fight, women took over many of the jobs that they left behind.
At factories, women were employed to make bombs, guns, aircraft, and other equipment.
In Britain, thousands of women were sent to work on farms as part of the Land Army.
Others formed the Women's Royal Naval Service to help with building and repairing ships.
Even Princess Elizabeth, who later became Queen Elizabeth II, worked as a mechanic to aid the war effort.
By 1945, some weapons were being made almost entirely by women.
In the beginning, women were rarely used in the labor forces in Germany and Japan.
However, Allied bombings and the German change to a war economy made women take a greater part.
In Britain, women also worked in gathering intelligence at Bletchley Park and other places.
The mass evacuation of children also had a major impact on the lives of mothers during the war years.
Germany had two different ideas of how it would occupy countries.
In Western, Northern, and Central Europe, Germany set economic policies that would make it rich.
During the war, the policies brought as much as 40% of total German income.
In the east, the war against the Soviet Union meant Germany could not use the land to gain resources.
The Nazis used their racial policy and murdered a lot of people they thought non-human.
The Resistance, the group of people secretly fighting Germany, could not harm the Germany much until 1943.
In Asia, Japan claimed to free colonized Asian countries from European colonial powers.
Although it was welcomed at first in many territories, its cruel actions soon turned people against it.
During the occupation, Japan used 4 million barrels of oil that had been left behind by the Allies.
By 1943, Japan produced up to 50 million barrels of oil in the Dutch East Indies, was 76% of its 1940 rate.
Developments in technology
The war brought new methods for future wars.
The air forces improved greatly in fields such as air transport, strategic bombing to use bombs to destroy industry and morale, radar, and weapons for destroying aircraft.
Jet aircraft were developed and were used worldwide in air forces.
At sea, the war focused on using aircraft carriers and submarines.
Aircraft carriers soon replaced battleships, mainly for being cheaper.
Submarines, a deadly weapon since World War I, also played an important part in the war.
The British improved weapons for destroying submarines, such as sonar, while the Germans improved submarine tactics.
The style of war on the land had changed from World War I to be more moveable.
Tanks, which had been used to support infantry, changed to being primary weapons.
The tank was improved in speed, armour and firepower during the war.
At the start of the war, most commanders thought that using better tanks was the best way to fight enemy tanks.
However, early tanks could harm armour onlya little.
The German idea to avoid letting tanks fight each other meant tanks facing tanks rarely happened.
That was a successful tactic in Poland and France.
Ways to destroy tanks also improved.
Vehicles became more used in the war, infantry remained the main part of the army, and most were equipped like in World War I.
Submachine guns became widely used, especially in cities and jungles.
The assault rifle, a German development combining features of the rifle and submachine gun, became the main weapon for most armies after the war.
Other developments included better encryption for secret messages, such as the German Enigma.
Another feature of military intelligence was the use of deception, especially by the Allies.
Others include the first programmable computers, modern missiles and rockets, and the atomic bombs.
Military losses
Most authorities now agree that of the 30 million Soviets who bore arms, there were 13.6 million military deaths.
*Total of which 7,800,000 were battlefield deaths
**Including Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, etc.
Civilian losses
Deaths among civilians during this war, many of which resulted from famine and internal purges, such as in China and the Soviet Union, were colossal but less well documented than those by the fighting forces.