World War Two

World War Two, also known as World War II or the Second World War, was a war fought from 1939 to 1945 in Europe and, during much of the 1930s and 1940s, in Asia.

The accepted view is that the war began in earnest on 1939-09-01 with the raid of Poland by Nazi Germany, and concluded on 1945-09-02 with the official surrender of the last Axis force, Japan. However, in Europe, the war had concluded earlier with the unconditional surrender of Germany on 1945-05-08.

Journalistic Coverage

One interesting study documents how the strategic bombing of Germany was documented in popular American journals.

Significant Events

Each theater, the European and the Pacific, was marked by an occurrence that stood out from the many battles and tragedies of the War. In Europe, Hitler's Germany was intent on murdering every Jew in Europe. Six million perished amidst unspeakable brutalization. The defeat of Nazi Germany, however, led to an international movement to provide the displaced Jews with a homeland, and in 1948 the State of Israel was created in the Levant. Hitler's strategy backfired; instead of eradicating the Jews, his demonic policies led to the first Jewish state since Biblical times and a guarantee that the Jewish people would survive.

Other ethnic groups suffered mightily from the Aryan view of self-supremacy. Twenty million Russians, largely civilians, died in World War II. The Germans also murdered homosexuals, gypsies, clerics, and others considered inferior to the now-disgraced German people.

In the Pacific theater, the decision not to invade Japan led to the United States unleashing of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, after Japan remained steadfast in its refusal to surrender, Nagasaki. The atomic age began when the Japanese refused to recognize the inevitable.

Notably, many of the physicists who developed the atomic bomb were Jews, including Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the project.