Digital Media Repository, Military History

Global conflict involving every major power in the world. The Allies originally consisted of Great Britain, France, and China, but totaled fifty nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, by the end of the war. The Axis powers of Germany, Italy, Japan, and (until 1941) the Soviet Union were eventually joined by six other nations. Causes of the war were the rise of imperialist and totalitarian dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War I and a worldwide economic collapse, the Great Depression.

Selected supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in December 1943, Eisenhower coordinated the plan to cross the English Channel in early June 1944 and invade Normandy on the coast of northern France. Called Operation Overlord, the invasion began June 6, 1944 (D-Day), and resulted in capture of the beaches of Normandy. By late 1944 France and Belgium were freed and Allied troops were in Holland and Germany. Heavy Allied bombing hammered the industrial centers of Germany. On December 16–26, 1944, the Nazis tried a last desperate counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge, but it was thwarted, and the Allies swept into Germany. Hitler, trapped in a Berlin bunker between Russians advancing from the east and Americans and British from the west, committed suicide. The German provisional government announced his death on May 1, 1945, and on V-E Day, May 8, Germany's unconditional surrender was celebrated. The Soviet Union then declared war on Japan and occupied Manchuria. Allied planes started bombing Tokyo in February 1945, and while U.S. troops were preparing to invade Japan, President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death April 12, 1945, ordered atomic bombs (fruits of the Manhattan Project) to be dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later, ushering in the nuclear age. Japan surrendered and on V-J Day, August 15, 1945, World War II ended.

Military deaths in the worldwide conflict were predictably massive, totaling in excess of 17 million troops. The number of civilian deaths due to bombing raids, starvation, and disease was even greater. When the Allies liberated the death camps in Germany and Poland, they were horrified to discover the extent of the Holocaust that Germany had conducted during the war. Some 12 million people had been murdered, including 6 million Jews. The Soviet Union suffered the most deaths of any single country —about 20 million military personnel and civilians died. The United States lost more than 405,000 troops.

Source: The Great American History Fact-Finder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. s.v. "World War II."

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The Ball State University Libraries Digital Media Repository contains the collection listed below pertaining to World War II, 1939-1945. To browse all World War II materials in the DMR click here.