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World War II Begins. Germany invades Poland, inciting Poland’s allies Britain and France to declare war on Germany. September 17, 1939. Soviet Union Invades Poland. Working in concert with...
- Clash Near The Marco Polo Bridge, Close to Beijing, 7 July 1937
- The German Invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939
- Germans Launch Offensive in The West, 10 May 1940
- The Battle of Britain, 25 July, 1940
- The Blitz, 29 December 1940
- Operation Barbarossa: The German Invasion of Russia, June 1941
- Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941
- The Fall of Singapore, 15 February 1942
- Midway, 4 June 1942
- Alamein, 25 October 1942
The triggering of the full-scale war with China that lasted until 1945 began with an obscure clash involving a Japanese unit on night manoeuvres near the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing on the night of 7–8 July 1937. The Japanese felt the nation’s honour had been challenged and sent fresh forces to the region. Hardliners in the Japanese army...
The Second World War began at dawn on Friday 1 September 1939, when Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. The Poles fought bravely, but they were heavily outnumbered in both men and machines, and especially in the air. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, but gave no real assistance to Poland. Two weeks later, Sta...
The German unwillingness to limit their war to the conquest of Poland and to launch meaningful peace talks meant that the Second World War broadened out. Hitler was eager to profit from the ability Poland’s defeat offered for Germany to fight on only one front and argued that Germany enjoyed a window of opportunity thanks to being more prepared for...
After France’s surrender in June 1940, Churchill told the British people, “Hitler knows that he will have to break usin this island or lose the war”. To mount a successful invasion, the Germans had to gain air superiority. The first phase of the battle began on 10 July with Luftwaffeattacks on shipping in the Channel. 1. Your guide to the Battle of...
The Blitz– an abbreviation of the word Blitzkrieg (lightning war) – was the name given to the German air attacks on Britain between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. London was bombed by accident on the night of 24 August 1940, and the following night Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. This prompted the Germans to shift their main effort from a...
Since the 1920s, Hitler had seen Russia, with its immense natural resources, as the principal target for conquest and expansion. It would provide, he believed, the necessary ‘Lebensraum’, or living space, for the German people. And by conquering Russia, Hitler would also destroy the “Jewish pestilential creed of Bolshevism”. His non-aggression pact...
After Japan’s occupation of French Indo-China in July 1941, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, followed by Britain and the Netherlands, ordered the freezing of Japanese assets. Many Japanese now believed that there was no alternative between economic ruin and going to war with the United States and the European colonial powers. In October 1941, a h...
The Japanese began their invasion of Malaya on 8 December 1941, and very soon the British and empire defenders were in full retreat. Told previously that the Japanese were no match for European troops, morale among the defending forces slumped as General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces moved swiftly southwards towards Singapore. The sinking of the Brit...
For six months after Pearl Harbor, just as Admiral Yamamoto predicted, Japanese forces carried all before them, capturing Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. In May 1942, in an attempt to consolidate their grip on their new conquests, the Japanese sought to eliminate the United States as a strategic Pacific power. This wou...
The North African campaign began in September 1940, and for the next two years the fighting was marked by a succession of Allied and Axis advances and retreats. In the summer of 1942, the Axis forces under ‘Desert Fox’ field marshal, Erwin Rommel, looked poised to take Cairo and advance on the Suez Canal. The British Middle East commander General C...
Mar 30, 2011 · Timeline. 1939. Hitler invades Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later. 1940. Rationing starts in the UK. German 'Blitzkrieg' overwhelms Belgium, Holland...
- Jennifer Rosenberg
- 1939. Sept. 1 may be the official start of World War II, but it didn't start in a vacuum. Europe and Asia had been tense for years prior to 1939 because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China, the German annexation of Austria, and the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in concentration camps.
- 1940. The first full year of the war saw Germany invading its European neighbors: Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and Romania, and the bombing of Britain lasted for months.
- 1941. The year 1941 was one of escalation around the world. Italy may have been defeated in Greece, but that didn't mean that Germany wouldn't take the country.
- 1942. U.S. troops first arrived in Britain in January 1942. Also that year, Japan captured Singapore, which was Britain's last location in the Pacific, as well as islands such as Borneo and Sumatra.
Sep 29, 2021 · This WW2 timeline details the main events of the Second World War and the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war. WW2 Timeline Contents. 1931. 1935. 1936. 1937. 1938. 1939. 1940. 1941. 1942. 1943. 1944. 1945. WW2 Timeline – 1931. 1931 (18th September) Pacific. Japan invaded Manchuria.
May 5, 2021 · With Adolf Hitler leading a German invasion of Poland in 1939, World War II was launched, a deadly global conflict waged across Europe and the Pacific until 1945. Bloody battles raged between...
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The timelines below present the major events of each year of World War II, from the German invasion of Poland in 1939 to the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940, and on through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, followed by Montgomery’s famous victory at El Alamein in 1942, and onto the Allied landings at Salerno in Italy in 1943, the ...
