By the beginning of 1943, the tide of battle had begun to
turn against the Axis. On July 10, the Allies crossed the
Mediterranean and carried the war to Italy. After taking
Sicily, Allied troops began the invasion of mainland Italy
in September. Following the ouster and arrest of Benito
Mussolini, a new Italian government offered to surrender
to Allied forces. But the Germans, in a daring raid, liberated
Mussolini and set him up as the head of a puppet
German state in northern Italy while German troops occupied
much of Italy. The new defensive lines established
by the Germans in the hills south of Rome were so effective
that the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula was
slow and marked by heavy casualties. Rome finally fell on
June 4, 1944. By that time, the Italian war had assumed a
secondary role as the Allies opened their long-awaited
second front in western Europe.
Since the autumn of 1943, under considerable pressure
from Stalin, the Allies had been planning a cross-channel
invasion of France from Britain. Under the direction of
U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 –1969), five
assault divisions landed on the Normandy beaches on
June 6, 1944, in history’s greatest naval invasion. An
initially indecisive German response enabled the Allied
forces to establish a beachhead. Within three months,
they had landed two million men and a half-million vehicles
that pushed inland and broke through the German
defensive lines.
After the breakout, Allied troops moved south and
east, liberating Paris by the end of August. By March
1945, they had crossed the Rhine and advanced farther
into Germany. In late April, they finally linked up with
Soviet units at the Elbe River. The Soviets had come a
long way since the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. In the
summer of 1943, Hitler gambled on taking the offensive
by making use of newly developed “Tiger” tanks. At the
Battle of Kursk ( July 5–12), the greatest tank battle of
World War II, the Soviets soundly defeated the German
forces. Soviet forces now supplied with their own “T-34”
heavy tanks, began a relentless advance westward. The
Soviets reoccupied the Ukraine by the end of 1943, lifted
the siege of Leningrad, and moved into the Baltic states
by the beginning of 1944. Advancing along a northern
front, Soviet troops occupied Warsaw in January 1945
and entered Berlin in April. Meanwhile, Soviet troops
along a southern front swept through Hungary, Romania,
and Bulgaria.
In January 1945, Hitler moved into a bunker 55 feet
under Berlin to direct the final stages of the war. He committed
suicide on April 30, two days after Mussolini was
shot by partisan Italian forces. On May 7, German commanders
surrendered. The war in Europe was over.
The war in Asia continued, although with a significant
change in approach. Allied war planners had initially
hoped to focus their main effort on an advance through
China with the aid of Chinese Nationalist forces trained
and equipped by the United States. But Roosevelt became
disappointed with Chiang Kai-shek’s failure to take
the offensive against Japanese forces in China and eventually
approved a new strategy to strike toward the Japanese
home islands directly across the Pacific. This islandhopping
approach took an increasing toll on enemy
resources, especially at sea and in the air.
As Allied forces drew inexorably closer to the main
Japanese islands in the summer of 1945, President Harry
Truman, who had succeeded to the presidency on the
death of Franklin Roosevelt in April, had an excruciatingly
difficult decision to make. Should he use atomic
weapons (at the time, only two bombs were available, and
their effectiveness had not been demonstrated) to bring
the war to an end without the necessity of an Allied invasion
of the Japanese homeland? The invasion of the
island of Okinawa in April had resulted in thousands of
casualties on both sides, with many Japanese troops committing
suicide rather than surrendering to enemy forces.
After an intensive debate, Truman approved use of
America’s new superweapon. The first bomb was dropped
on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. Truman then
called on Japan to surrender or expect a “rain of ruin from
the air.” When the Japanese did not respond, a second
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered unconditionally
on August 14. World War II, in which seventeen
million combatants died in battle and perhaps
eighteen million civilians perished as well (some estimate
total losses at fifty million), was finally over.
World History
