Europe in an Age of Total War: World War II,1939–45 587December 7, 1941. The attack crippled the U.S. Pacific
Fleet, destroying 19 warships and 150 naval aircraft and
causing three thousand American casualties. Denounc-
ing “a date which will live in infamy,” the United States
declared war on Japan. As the Japanese had made si-
multaneous attacks upon British forces in Asia (notably
in Hong Kong and Malaya), the British also declared
war. Germany and Italy then declared war on the
United States, linking the Asian and European wars
into World War II.
In the six months following Pearl Harbor, the
Japanese won important victories across Southeast Asia.
They invaded the Philippines in late December 1941,
drove General MacArthur to retreat, and won control
of the islands in March 1942, taking a large army cap-
tive on the peninsula of Bataan. Another Japanese army
drove the British out of Hong Kong in December 1941,
and a third successfully invaded Burma in January 1942,
cutting off British forces, which retreated to the strong-
hold of Singapore, but the Japanese took that city after
a two-week siege in February 1942. Sixty thousand
British prisoners of war fell to the Japanese. Allied
armies were beaten in Indonesia in March 1942, and by
spring the Japanese Empire stretched from the gates of
India almost to the international dateline, from Korea
almost to Australia.
The turning point of the war in Asia came in a se-
ries of air-sea battles in the Pacific in 1942. In the battle
of the Coral Sea (May 1942), the first naval battle ever
fought between ships so distant that they could not see
each other, the United States stopped the Japanese ad-
vance and probably saved Australia and New Zealand.
In the battle of Midway (May-June 1942)—named for
the U.S.-held Midway Islands, northwest of Hawaii
and at the approximate midpoint of the Pacific—a U.S.
fleet under Admiral Chester Nimitz fought one of the
largest naval engagements in history, inflicting heavy
losses on the Japanese and forcing Admiral Yamamoto
to retreat. By the summer of 1942, the war in the Pa-
cific had become a succession of island-hopping—
amphibious invasions slowly driving toward Japan. Af-
ter victories by British armies in Burma and Australian
armies in New Guinea, Allied forces under Admiral
Lord Louis Mountbatten slowly defeated the Japanese
armies of Southeast Asia. The United States dislodged
the Japanese from Guadalcanal (in the Solomon Is-
lands) in early 1943 and began the reconquest of the
Philippines. Bloody fighting followed on many islands,
especially in the Marshall Islands and Guam in 1944
and on Okinawa in 1945, but an invasion of Japan also
awaited.
Allied Victory in Europe, 1942–45
The turning point of the war in Europe also came in- British armies in North Africa under the command
of Field Marshal Montgomery stopped the advance of
the Afrika Korps in the battle of El Alamein. While the
German army regrouped, an Anglo-American army of
100,000 men, under the command of General Dwight
D. Eisenhower, landed in French North Africa in No-
vember 1942—less than a year after Hitler had declared
war on the United States. This amphibious operation re-
quired 850 ships and was at that time the largest such
landing in history. Caught between the armies of Eisen-
hower and Montgomery, the Axis armies in North
Africa suffered a series of defeats, and the last Axis
troops in North Africa surrendered in May 1943.
Even before the victory in Africa, Roosevelt and
Churchill had met at the Casablanca Conference of
January 1943 and decided that the next stage of the war
in Europe would be the invasion of Italy, “the soft
under-belly of Europe” in Churchill’s words. The Allies
began bombing raids over Sicily and combined British,
Canadian, and American armies, commanded by Eisen-
hower, invaded in July. Palermo fell in two weeks and
the Allies began bombing Naples, but before they
could cross to the Italian peninsula, Mussolini was de-
posed in a sudden coup, ending twenty-one years of
Fascist rule in Italy and dissolving the Fascist Party. As
the British and American armies made their first land-
ings near Naples, Italy unconditionally surrendered in
September 1943. German armies still occupied Milan,
Rome, and Naples, and the Italian campaign therefore
became a slow battle up the peninsula in 1943–45,
speeded by a landing behind German lines at Anzio in
early 1944. Rome did not fall until June 1944. As the
German army began to pull out of Italy, Mussolini was
captured by Italian anti-Fascists while attempting to es-
cape to Switzerland and was shot without a trial.
While the victories in North Africa and Italy were
important steps in the defeat of the Axis, the decisive
theater of the war was the eastern front. The German
invasion of Russia had been stopped by the winter of
1941–42 and the determined defense of Moscow led by
General Georgi Zhukov. Zhukov was the son of illiter-
ate peasants and had a gruff and unsophisticated style,
but he was one of the first commanders to master tank
warfare. He so distinguished himself in saving Moscow
that Stalin sent him to Leningrad, where he ordered
that the city be defended street by street and that offi-
cers who retreated be shot. German assaults (which
cost them 200,000 soldiers) and bombardment failed to