The Second World War

It is easy, knowing how it ended, to forget how close the Axis came. Through 1940 and 1941, the momentum ran almost entirely one way. Britain survived the summer and autumn of 1940 in the Battle of Britain, the first campaign fought entirely in the air, when Royal Air Force fighters denied the Luftwaffe the control it needed to invade. That was a genuine reprieve. But survival was not the same as strength, and Britain spent the following two years absorbing losses across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Then, in June 1941, Hitler made the decision that defined the war. Operation Barbarossa sent more than three million Axis troops across the Soviet border in the largest land invasion in history, breaking the pact of 1939. The early gains were staggering — vast encirclements, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, German spearheads within sight of Moscow by December. Behind the front, the invasion unleashed the machinery of mass murder that would become the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of six million Jews alongside millions of others.

Historians argue about which battle turned the war, and the honest answer is that no single one did. Instead, within roughly twelve months spanning 1942 and early 1943, the tide broke in all three main theatres at once, and the pattern that followed never reversed. The turning was global because the war had become global.

In the Pacific, the reversal came first and came suddenly. At Midway in June 1942, American carriers, aided by broken Japanese codes, sank four of Japan's fleet carriers in a single day. Japan never replaced them, and the initiative in the Pacific passed to the United States, which began the long, bloody campaign of island-hopping toward the Japanese home islands. A navy that had run wild for six months was now on the defensive for the rest of the war.

The war did not simply end; it delivered a settlement, and the shape of that settlement mattered as much as the fighting. Even before the shooting stopped, the victors were designing the world that would follow. At Bretton Woods in 1944 they built the financial architecture of the postwar economy. At meetings in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sketched the political map — and in doing so drew the line that would run through Europe for the next forty years.

The most consequential fact of 1945 was where the armies stopped. The Red Army held Eastern Europe; the western Allies held the West. Germany was divided, Berlin quartered, and a continent that had been fought over was frozen into two blocs. The alliance that had defeated Hitler dissolved almost immediately into the Cold War, because the two powers left standing had incompatible visions of the order they had jointly won. The war against fascism produced, as its direct inheritance, a standoff between capitalism and communism.

Seen whole, the war resolves into a pattern beneath its vastness. It began as separate conflicts in China, in Ethiopia, in Poland, and fused into one when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Japan struck the United States. It nearly went the other way in 1941, when the Axis had moved first and moved fast. And it turned, decisively and almost simultaneously, across three continents in the twelve months around Stalingrad, Midway and El Alamein, after which the sheer weight of Allied resources made the ending only a matter of time and blood.