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China

Japan's full-scale invasion in July 1937 opened the Second World War in Asia two years before Europe. That December, the massacre at Nanking killed as many as 300,000 civilians. The war that began here would tie down over half the Japanese army for eight years and cost perhaps fourteen million Chinese lives — a theater the West forgot almost as soon as it ended.

Poland

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 with 1.5 million troops in the first full demonstration of blitzkrieg warfare, and the Soviet Union invaded from the east two weeks later under the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Britain and France declared war on 3 September, but Poland was partitioned within five weeks. The occupation that followed would kill nearly one fifth of the Polish population.

North Atlantic

The longest campaign of the war ran from its first day to its last, as German U-boats tried to sever the convoy lifeline between North America and Britain. More than 30,000 Allied merchant seamen died, along with roughly three of every four German submariners who put to sea. Victory in mid-1943 — won by codebreaking, escort carriers, and long-range aircraft — made everything that followed possible.

Dunkirk, France

With the British Expeditionary Force and French First Army encircled against the Channel coast, Operation Dynamo evacuated over 338,000 Allied soldiers between 26 May and 4 June 1940 — carried by destroyers and a famous fleet of around 850 civilian little ships. Nearly all heavy equipment was abandoned on the beaches, but the rescued men formed the nucleus of every British army that fought for the rest of the war.

Southern England

Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the Luftwaffe tried to destroy RAF Fighter Command as the prelude to invasion, in the first battle fought entirely in the air. Churchill's Few turned back an air force that had never been beaten, and the night Blitz on British cities that followed killed over 40,000 civilians. It was Germany's first defeat of the war, and it kept Britain fighting.

North Africa

From 1940 to 1943 the desert war swung back and forth across Libya and Egypt as Rommel's Afrika Korps duelled the British Eighth Army over supply lines and oil. The British victory at El Alamein in late 1942 and the Anglo-American Torch landings caught the Axis in a vice, ending with the surrender of over 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia in May 1943 — the US Army's first hard schooling against the Wehrmacht.

Soviet Union

On 22 June 1941 nearly four million Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front — the largest invasion in human history. German spearheads reached the gates of Moscow by December before being thrown back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Eastern Front it opened would consume roughly eight of every ten German soldiers killed in the war.

Leningrad, USSR

For 872 days German and Finnish armies sealed off Russia's second city, intending to starve it out of existence. Around a million civilians died, most of hunger in the catastrophic winter of 1941-42, supplied only by the Road of Life across frozen Lake Ladoga. The city never fell — the longest and deadliest siege in modern history.

Across occupied Europe

The Nazi regime systematically murdered six million Jews, alongside Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, and political enemies. What began with persecution and ghettoisation escalated to industrialised killing at purpose-built extermination camps. Its literature — diaries, survivor memoirs, and testimony — forms some of the most important writing of the twentieth century.

Oahu, Hawaii

On the morning of 7 December 1941, 353 Japanese carrier aircraft struck the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in two waves, killing 2,403 Americans and sinking or damaging eight battleships — though the American aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped. The United States declared war the next day, and Hitler declared war on America four days later, turning two regional wars into a single global one.

Luzon, Philippines

Japan's conquest of the Philippines ended in April 1942 with the surrender of some 76,000 starving American and Filipino troops on Bataan — the largest capitulation in American history. The Death March that followed killed thousands on the road to the camps, and the prisoners' three-year ordeal became the war's defining atrocity story for the American public.

Midway Atoll

Between 4 and 7 June 1942, American codebreakers allowed the outnumbered US Pacific Fleet to ambush the Japanese carrier force, sinking all four fleet carriers of the strike force in exchange for the USS Yorktown. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan had lost the core of its naval air power and never regained the strategic initiative.

Solomon Islands

The first major Allied ground offensive of the Pacific War began in August 1942 and ran for six months of attritional jungle fighting, starvation, and seven major naval battles in waters that earned the name Ironbottom Sound. By February 1943 Japan had been forced onto the defensive for good — at the cost of more American sailors dead at sea than Marines on the island.

Burma & India

Fought across some of the worst terrain on earth, the war in Burma ran from Japan's 1942 conquest — the longest retreat in British history — to Slim's Fourteenth Army destroying two Japanese armies at Imphal, Kohima, and the Irrawaddy. It remains the Forgotten War: monsoon, jungle, disease, and a multinational army of British, Indian, African, American, and Chinese troops.

Stalingrad, USSR

From August 1942 to February 1943 the fight for Stalingrad consumed nearly two million casualties in house-to-house combat the Germans called Rattenkrieg — rat war. The Soviet encirclement of November 1942 trapped the entire German Sixth Army; roughly 91,000 starving survivors surrendered in February, of whom only a few thousand ever returned home. It was the turning point of the war in Europe.

Kursk salient, USSR

In July 1943 Germany threw its rebuilt panzer arm at the Kursk salient in Operation Citadel — the largest armored battle ever fought, involving some 8,000 tanks and assault guns. The Soviets knew it was coming and bled the offensive white in days. It was the last German strategic offensive in the East; from Kursk to Berlin the Red Army never stopped advancing.

Sicily & Italy

The invasion of Sicily in July 1943 knocked Mussolini from power within weeks, but the campaign that followed became one of the war's cruellest slogs — Salerno, the Gustav Line, Monte Cassino, Anzio — as Allied armies ground up the mountainous peninsula against skilful German defence until the final days of the war.

Normandy, France

On 6 June 1944 some 156,000 Allied troops landed across five Normandy beaches, delivered by nearly 7,000 vessels in the largest amphibious operation ever mounted. The brutal weeks of fighting that followed in the bocage broke the German front in the West; Paris was liberated by the end of August.

Netherlands

In September 1944, 35,000 Allied airborne troops dropped into the Netherlands to seize a corridor of bridges toward the Rhine and end the war by Christmas. The plan failed at the final bridge at Arnhem — a bridge too far — where the British 1st Airborne Division was effectively destroyed, losing nearly 8,000 of its 10,000 men.

Ardennes, Belgium

On 16 December 1944 Germany threw 200,000 men through the snow-bound Ardennes in a final gamble to split the Allied armies and retake Antwerp. The surprise was total, the defence of Bastogne became legend, and the month-long battle that followed was the largest in US Army history, costing some 19,000 American dead.

Philippines

Fought between 23 and 26 October 1944 across four separate engagements, Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle in history and saw the first organised kamikaze attacks. The Imperial Japanese Navy committed nearly its entire remaining strength and was finished as a fighting force.

Iwo Jima, Japan

Thirty-six days of fighting for eight square miles of volcanic rock, beginning 19 February 1945. The flag-raising on Mount Suribachi on day five became the most famous photograph of the war, but the battle ground on for five more weeks — nearly 7,000 Marines died, and of roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders, almost none surrendered.

Dresden, Germany

Over the nights of 13-15 February 1945, RAF and USAAF bombers created a firestorm that destroyed the historic centre of Dresden and killed around 25,000 people. The raid has been debated ever since as a symbol of the moral cost of area bombing — witnessed firsthand by a young American POW named Kurt Vonnegut.

Okinawa, Japan

The last great battle of the war, from April to June 1945, was also the bloodiest of the Pacific: some 12,500 Americans dead, over 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and as many as 150,000 Okinawan civilians caught in between, while kamikazes savaged the fleet offshore. Its casualty rates shaped the American decision to use the atomic bomb rather than invade Japan.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

On 6 and 9 August 1945 atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing well over 150,000 people by the end of the year — the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan announced its surrender on 15 August, ending the Second World War.

Berlin, Germany

From 16 April 1945, 2.5 million Soviet troops fought their way into the capital of the Third Reich street by street. Hitler killed himself in his bunker on 30 April; the city garrison capitulated on 2 May; and the war in Europe ended six days later. Roughly 80,000 Soviet soldiers died taking the city.