New Zealand
The military history of New Zealand during World War II began when New Zealand entered the Second World War by declaring war on Nazi Germany with Great Britain.
The state of war with Germany was officially held to have existed since 9:30 pm on 3 September 1939 (local time), simultaneous with that of Britain, but in fact New Zealand’s declaration of war was not made until confirmation had been received from Britain that their ultimatum to Germany had expired.
When Neville Chamberlain broadcast Britain’s declaration of war, a group of New Zealand politicians (led by Peter Fraser as Prime Minister Michael Savage was terminally ill) listened to the shortwave radio in Carl Berendsen‘s room in the Parliament Buildings.
Because of static on the radio they were initially not certain what Chamberlain had said until a coded telegraph message was received from London.
This message did not arrive until just before midnight as the messenger boy with the telegram in London took shelter because of a (false) air-raid warning.
The Cabinet acted after hearing the Admiralty’s notification to the fleet that war had broken out.
The next day Cabinet approved nearly 30 war regulations as laid down in the War Book, and after completing the formalities with the Executive Council the Governor-General, Lord Galway, issued the Proclamation of War, backdated to 9.30 pm on 3 September.
Diplomatically, New Zealand had expressed vocal opposition to fascism in Europe and also to the appeasement of Fascist dictatorships, and national sentiment for a strong show of force met with general support.
Economic and defensive considerations also motivated the New Zealand involvement—reliance on Britain meant that threats to Britain became threats to New Zealand too in terms of economic and defensive ties.
There was also a strong sentimental link between the former British colony and the United Kingdom, with many seeing Britain as the “mother country” or “Home”.
The New Zealand Prime Minister of the time Michael Joseph Savage summed this up at the outbreak of war with a broadcast on 5 September (largely written by the Solicitor-General Henry Cornish) that became a popular cry in New Zealand during the war:
It is with gratitude in the past, and with confidence in the future, that we range ourselves without fear beside Britain, where she goes, we go! Where she stands, we stand!
New Zealand provided personnel for service in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and in the Royal Navy and was prepared to have New Zealanders serving under British command.
Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) pilots, many trained in the Empire Air Training Scheme, were sent to Europe but, unlike the other Dominions, New Zealand did not insist on its aircrews serving with RNZAF squadrons, so speeding up the rate at which they entered service.
The Long Range Desert Group was formed in North Africa in 1940 with New Zealand and Rhodesian as well as British volunteers, but included no Australians for the same reason.
The New Zealand government placed the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy at the Admiralty‘s disposal and made available to the RAF 30 new Wellington medium bombers waiting in the United Kingdom for shipping to New Zealand. The New Zealand Army contributed the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF).
Australia
Australia entered World War II on 3 September 1939, following the government’s acceptance of the United Kingdom‘s declaration of war on Nazi Germany.
Australia later entered into a state of war with other members of the Axis powers, including the Kingdom of Italy on 11 June 1940, and the Empire of Japan on 9 December 1941.
By the end of the war, almost a million Australians had served in the armed forces, whose military units fought primarily in the European theatre, North African campaign, and the South West Pacific theatre.
In addition, Australia came under direct attack for the first time in its post-colonial history. Its casualties from enemy action during the war were 27,073 killed and 23,477 wounded.
Australian Army units were gradually withdrawn from the Mediterranean and Europe following the outbreak of war with Japan.
However, Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy units and personnel continued to take part in the war against Germany and Italy.
From 1942 until early 1944, Australian forces played a key role in the Pacific War, making up the majority of Allied strength throughout much of the fighting in the South West Pacific theatre.
While the military was largely relegated to subsidiary fronts from mid-1944, it continued offensive operations against the Japanese until the war ended.
World War II contributed to major changes in the nation’s economy, military and foreign policy.
The war accelerated the process of industrialisation, led to the development of a larger peacetime military and began the process with which Australia shifted the focus of its foreign policy from Britain to the United States.
The final effects of the war also contributed to the development of a more diverse and cosmopolitan Australian society.
Canada
When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in August 1914, Canada was a Dominion of the British Empire with full control over only domestic affairs, thus automatically joining the First World War.
After the war, the Canadian government wanted to avoid a repeat of the Conscription Crisis of 1917, which had divided the country and French and English Canadians. Stating that “Parliament will decide,” in 1922 Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King avoided participating in the Chanak Crisis as the Parliament of Canada was not in session.
The 1931 Statute of Westminster gave Canada autonomy in foreign policy.
When Britain entered World War II in September 1939, some experts suggested that Canada was still bound by Britain’s declaration of war because it had been made in the name of their common monarch, but Prime Minister King again said that “Parliament will decide.”[10][11]:2
In 1936 King had told Parliament, “Our country is being drawn into international situations to a degree that I myself think is alarming.”[11]:2 Both the government and the public remained reluctant to participate in a European war, in part because of the Conscription Crisis of 1917. Both King and Opposition Leader Robert James Manion stated their opposition to conscripting troops for overseas service in March 1939. Nonetheless, King had not changed his view of 1923 that Canada would participate in a war by the Empire whether or not the United States did. By August 1939 his cabinet, including French Canadians, was united for war in a way that it probably would not have been during the Munich Crisis, although both cabinet members and the country based their support in part on expecting that Canada’s participation would be “limited.”[11]:5–8
It had been clear that Canada would elect to participate in the war before the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Four days after the United Kingdom declared war on 3 September 1939, Parliament was called in special session and both King and Manion stated their support for Canada following Britain, but did not declare war immediately, partly to show that Canada was joining out of her own initiative and was not obligated to go to war.
Unlike 1914 when war came as a surprise, the government had prepared various measures for price controls, rationing, and censorship, and the War Measures Act of 1914 was re-invoked.
After two days of debate, the House of Commons approved an Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne on 9 September 1939 giving authority to declare war to King’s government. A small group of Quebec legislators attempted to amend the bill, and CCF party leader J. S. Woodsworth stated that some of his party opposed it. Woodsworth was the only Member of Parliament to vote against the bill and it thus passed by near-acclamation.
The Senate also passed the bill that day.
The Cabinet drafted a proclamation of war that night, which Governor-General Lord Tweedsmuir signed on 10 September.
King George VI approved Canada’s declaration of war with Germany on Sept. 10.
Canada later also declared war on Italy (11 June 1940), Japan (7 December 1941), and other Axis powers, enshrining the principle that the Statute of Westminster conferred these sovereign powers to Canada.
China
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan.
In China, the war is known as the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (simplified Chinese: 中国抗日战爭; traditional Chinese: 中國抗日戰爭; pinyin: Zhōngguó Kàngrì Zhànzhēng), or as the oriental theatre of the World Anti-Fascist War, the latter term originating from Mao Zedong’s wartime alliance with Stalin.
The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Theater of the Second World War.
The beginning of the war is conventionally dated to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident 7 July 1937, when a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops in Peking escalated into a full-scale invasion. This full-scale war between the Chinese and the Empire of Japan is often regarded as the beginning of World War II in Asia.
In 2017 the Ministry of Education in the People’s Republic of China decreed that the term “eight-year war” in all textbooks should be replaced by “fourteen-year war”, with a revised starting date of 18 September 1931 provided by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
According to historian Rana Mitter, historians in China are unhappy with the blanket revision, and (despite sustained tensions) the Republic of China did not consider itself to be continuously at war with Japan over these six years.
China fought Japan with aid from the Soviet Union and the United States. After the Japanese attacks on Malaya and Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war merged with other conflicts which are generally categorized under those conflicts of World War II as a major sector known as the China Burma India Theater. Some scholars consider the European War and the Pacific War to be entirely separate, albeit concurrent, wars. Other scholars consider the start of the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to have been the beginning of World War II.
The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century.[35] It accounted for the majority of civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War, with between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians and over 4 million Chinese and Japanese military personnel missing or dying from war-related violence, famine, and other causes. The war has been called “the Asian holocaust.”
The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy to expand its influence politically and militarily in order to secure access to raw material reserves, food, and labor.
The period after World War I brought about increasing stress on the Japanese polity. Leftists sought universal suffrage and greater rights for workers.
Increasing textile production from Chinese mills was adversely affecting Japanese production and the Great Depression brought about a large slowdown in exports.
All of this contributed to militant nationalism, culminating in the rise to power of a militarist faction. This faction was led at its height by the Hideki Tojo cabinet of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association under edict from Emperor Hirohito.
In 1931, the Mukden Incident helped spark the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The Chinese were defeated and Japan created a new puppet state, Manchukuo; many historians cite 1931 as the beginning of the war.
This view has been adopted by the PRC government. From 1931 to 1937, China and Japan continued to skirmish in small, localized engagements, so-called “incidents”.
Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Japanese scored major victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937, which resulted in the Rape of Nanjing.
After failing to stop the Japanese in the Battle of Wuhan, the Chinese central government was relocated to Chongqing (Chungking) in the Chinese interior.
With the strong material support through the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1937, the Nationalist Army of China and the Chinese Air Force were able to continue putting up strong resistance against the Japanese offensive.
By 1939, after Chinese victories in Changsha and Guangxi, and with Japan’s lines of communications stretched deep into the Chinese interior, the war reached a stalemate. While the Japanese were also unable to defeat the Chinese communist forces in Shaanxi, who waged a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the invaders, they ultimately succeeded in the year-long Battle of South Guangxi to occupy Nanning, which cut off the last sea access to the wartime capital of Chongqing.
While Japan ruled the large cities, they lacked sufficient manpower to control China’s vast countryside.
In November 1939, Chinese nationalist forces launched a large scale winter offensive, while in August 1940, Chinese communist forces launched a counteroffensive in central China.
The United States supported China through a series of increasing boycotts against Japan, culminating with cutting off steel and petrol exports into Japan by June 1941.
Additionally, American mercenaries such as the Flying Tigers provided extra support to China directly.
In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and declared war on the United States.
The United States declared war in turn and increased its flow of aid to China – with the Lend-Lease act, the United States gave China a total of $1.6 billion ($18.4 billion adjusted for inflation).
With Burma cut off it airlifted material over the Himalayas.
In 1944, Japan launched Operation Ichi-Go, the invasion of Henan and Changsha.
However, this failed to bring about the surrender of Chinese forces. In 1945, the Chinese Expeditionary Force resumed its advance in Burma and completed the Ledo Road linking India to China.
At the same time, China launched large counteroffensives in South China and retook West Hunan and Guangxi. Japan formally surrendered on 2 September 1945.
China regained all territories lost to Japan.
United States of America
The military history of the United States in World War II covers the war against the Axis Powers, starting with the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
During the first two years of World War II, the United States had maintained formal neutrality as a made official in the Quarantine Speech delivered by US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1937, while supplying Britain, the Soviet Union, and China with war material through the Lend-Lease Act which was signed into law on 11 March 1941, as well as deploying the US military to replace the British forces stationed in Iceland.
Following the “Greer incident” Roosevelt publicly confirmed the “shoot on sight” order on 11 September 1941, effectively declaring naval war on Germany and Italy in the Battle of the Atlantic.
In the Pacific Theater, there was unofficial early US combat activity such as the Flying Tigers.
During the war, some 16,112,566 Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405,399 killed and 671,278 wounded
There were also 130,201 American prisoners of war, of whom 116,129 returned home after the war.
Key civilian advisors to President Roosevelt included Secretary of War Henry L.
Stimson, who mobilized the nation’s industries and induction centers to supply the Army, commanded by General George Marshall and the Army Air Forces under General Hap Arnold.
The Navy, led by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Admiral Ernest King, proved more autonomous. Overall priorities were set by Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired by William Leahy.
The highest priority was the defeat of Germany in Europe, but first, the war against Japan in the Pacific was more urgent after the sinking of the main battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Admiral King put Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, based in Hawaii, in charge of the Pacific War against Japan. The Imperial Japanese Navy had the advantage, taking the Philippines as well as British and Dutch possessions, and threatening Australia but in June 1942, its main carriers were sunk during the Battle of Midway, and the Americans seized the initiative.
The Pacific War became one of island hopping, so as to move air bases closer and closer to Japan. The Army, based in Australia under General Douglas MacArthur, steadily advanced across New Guinea to the Philippines, with plans to invade the Japanese home islands in late 1945.
With its merchant fleet sunk by American submarines, Japan ran short of aviation gasoline and fuel oil, as the US Navy in June 1944 captured islands within bombing range of the Japanese home islands. Strategic bombing directed by General Curtis Lemay destroyed all the major Japanese cities, as the US captured Okinawa after heavy losses in spring 1945.
With the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and an invasion of the home islands imminent, Japan surrendered.
The war in Europe involved aid to Britain, her allies, and the Soviet Union, with the US supplying munitions until it could ready an invasion force. US forces were first tested to a limited degree in the North African Campaign and then employed more significantly with British Forces in Italy in 1943–45, where US forces, representing about a third of the Allied forces deployed, bogged down after Italy surrendered and the Germans took over.
Finally, the main invasion of France took place in June 1944, under General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Meanwhile, the US Army Air Forces and the British Royal Air Force engaged in the area bombardment of German cities and systematically targeted German transportation links and synthetic oil plants, as it knocked out what was left of the Luftwaffe post Battle of Britain in 1944.
Being invaded from all sides, it became clear that Germany would lose the war. Berlin fell to the Soviets in May 1945, and with Adolf Hitler dead, the Germans surrendered.
The military effort was strongly supported by civilians on the home front, who provided the military personnel, the munitions, the money, and the morale to fight the war to victory. World War II cost the United States an estimated $341 billion in 1945 dollars – equivalent to 74% of America’s GDP and expenditures during the war. In 2015 dollars, the war cost over $4.5 trillion.
Poland
The history of Poland from 1939 to 1945 encompasses primarily the period from the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to the end of World War II.
Following the German–Soviet non-aggression pact, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 and by the Soviet Union on 17 September. The campaigns ended in early October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland. After the Axis attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941,
the entirety of Poland was occupied by Germany, which proceeded to advance its racial and genocidal policies across Poland.
Under the two occupations, Polish citizens suffered enormous human and material losses.
According to the Institute of National Remembrance estimates, about 5.6 million Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation and about 150,000 died as a result of the Soviet occupation.
The Jews were singled out by the Germans for a quick and total annihilation and about 90 percent of Polish Jews (close to three million people) were murdered as part of the Holocaust.
Jews, Poles, Romani people and prisoners of many other ethnicities were killed masse at Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibór.
Ethnic Poles were subjected to both Nazi German and Soviet persecution. The Germans killed an estimated two million ethnic Poles.
They had future plans to turn the remaining majority of Poles into slave labor and annihilate those perceived as “undesirable” as part of the wider Generalplan Ost.
Ethnic cleansing and massacres of Poles and to a lesser extent Ukrainians were perpetrated in western Ukraine (prewar Polish Kresy) from 1943. The Poles were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists.
In September 1939, the Polish government officials sought refuge in Romania, but their subsequent internment there prevented the intended continuation abroad as the government of Poland.
General Władysław Sikorski, a former prime minister, arrived in France, where a replacement Polish Government-in-Exile was soon formed.
After the fall of France, the government was evacuated to Britain. The Polish armed forces had been reconstituted and fought alongside the Western Allies in France, Britain and elsewhere.
Resistance movement began organizing in Poland in 1939, soon after the invasions.
Its largest military component was a part of the Polish Underground State network of organizations and activities and became known as the Home Army.
The whole clandestine structure was formally directed by the Government-in-Exile through its delegation resident in Poland.
There were also peasant, right-wing, leftist, Jewish and Soviet partisan organizations.
Among the failed anti-German uprisings were the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising.
The aim of the Warsaw Uprising was to prevent domination of Poland by the Soviet Union.
In order to cooperate with the Soviet Union, after Operation Barbarossa an important war ally of the West, Sikorski negotiated
in Moscow with Joseph Stalin and they agreed to form a Polish army in the Soviet Union, intended to fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Soviets.
The “Anders’ Army” was instead taken to the Middle East and then to Italy.
Further efforts to continue the Polish-Soviet cooperation had failed because of disagreements over the borders, the discovery of the Katyn massacre of Polish POWs perpetrated by the Soviets, and the death of General Sikorski.
Afterwards, in a process seen by many Poles as a Western betrayal, the Polish Government-in-Exile gradually ceased being a recognized partner in the Allied coalition.
Stalin pursued a strategy of facilitating the formation of a Polish government independent of (and in opposition to) the exile government in London by empowering the Polish communists.
Among Polish communist organizations established during the war were the Polish Workers’ Party in occupied Poland and the Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow.
A new Polish army was formed in the Soviet Union to fight together with the Soviets.
At the same time Stalin worked on co-opting the Western Allies (the United States led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United Kingdom led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill), who, in terms of practical implementations, conformed to Stalin’s views on Poland’s borders and future government.
The fate of Poland had been determined in a series of negotiations that included the conferences in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam.
In 1944, the Polish Government-in-Exile approved and the underground in Poland undertook unilateral political and military actions aimed at establishing an independent Polish authority, but the efforts were thwarted by the Soviets.
The Polish communists founded the State National Council in 1943/44 in occupied Warsaw and the Polish Committee of National Liberation in July 1944 in Lublin, after the arrival of the Soviet army. The Soviet Union kept the eastern half of prewar Poland,
granting Poland instead the greater southern portion of the eliminated German East Prussia and shifting the country west to the Oder–Neisse line, at the expense of Germany.
Greece
The military history of Greece during World War II began on 28 October 1940, when the Italian Army invaded from Albania, beginning the Greco-Italian War.
The Greek Army was able to halt the invasion temporarily and was able to push the Italians back into Albania.
The Greek successes forced Nazi Germany to intervene.
The Germans invaded Greece and Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, and overran both countries within a month, despite British aid to Greece in the form of an expeditionary corps.
The conquest of Greece was completed in May with the capture of Crete from the air, although the Fallschirmjäger (German paratroopers) suffered such extensive casualties in this operation that the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German High Command) abandoned large-scale airborne operations for the remainder of the war.
The German diversion of resources in the Balkans is also considered by some historians to have delayed the launch of the invasion of the Soviet Union by a critical month, which proved disastrous when the German Army failed to take Moscow.
Greece itself was occupied and divided between Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria, while the King and the government fled into exile in Egypt.
First attempts at armed resistance in summer 1941 were crushed by the Axis powers, but the Resistance movement began again in 1942 and grew enormously in 1943 and 1944, liberating large parts of the country’s mountainous interior and tying down considerable Axis forces.
However, political tensions between the Resistance groups resulted in the outbreak of a civil conflict among them in late 1943, which continued until the spring of 1944. The exiled Greek government also formed armed forces of its own, which served and fought alongside the British in the Middle East, North Africa, and Italy.
The contribution of the Greek Navy and merchant marine, in particular, was of special importance to the Allied cause
Mainland Greece was liberated in October 1944 with the German withdrawal in the face of the advancing Red Army, while German garrisons continued to hold out in the Aegean Islands until after the war’s end.
The country was devastated by war and occupation, and its economy and infrastructure lay in ruins.
Greece suffered more than 400,000 casualties during the occupation, and the country’s Jewish community was almost completely exterminated in the Holocaust.
By 1946, however, a civil war erupted between the foreign-sponsored conservative government and leftist guerrillas, which would last until 1949.
Brazil
The Brazilian Expeditionary Force (Portuguese: Força Expedicionária Brasileira, FEB) consisted of about 25,900 men arranged by the army and air force to fight alongside the Allied forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of World War II. This air–land force consisted of (replacements included) a complete infantry division, a liaison flight, and a fighter squadron.
It fought in Italy from September 1944 to May 1945, while the Brazilian Navy as well as the Air Force also acted in the Battle of the Atlantic from the middle of 1942 until the end of the war.
During the almost eight months of its campaign, fighting at the Gothic Line and in the 1945 final offensive, the FEB took 20,573 Axis prisoners, consisting of two generals, 892 officers, and 19,679 other ranks.
Brazil was the only independent South American country to send ground troops to fight overseas during the Second World War, losing 948 men killed in action across all three services
Belgium
Despite being neutral at the start of World War II, Belgium and its colonial possessions found themselves at war after the country was invaded by German forces on 10 May 1940.
After 18 days of fighting in which Belgian forces were pushed back into a small pocket in the north-east of the country, the Belgian military surrendered to the Germans, beginning an occupation that would endure until 1944.
The surrender of 28 May was ordered by King Leopold III without the consultation of his government and sparked a political crisis after the war.
Despite the capitulation, many Belgians managed to escape to the United Kingdom where they formed a government and army-in-exile on the Allied side.
The Belgian Congo remained loyal to the Belgian government in London and contributed significant material and human resources to the Allied cause.
Many Belgians were involved in both armed and passive resistance to German forces, although some chose to collaborate with the German forces.
Support from far right political factions and sections of the Belgian population allowed the German army to recruit two divisions of the Waffen-SS from Belgium and also facilitated the Nazi persecution of Belgian Jews in which nearly 25,000 were killed.
Most of the country was liberated by the Allies between September and October 1944, though areas to the far east of the country remained occupied until early 1945.
In total, approximately 88,000 Belgians died during the conflict, a figure representing 1.05 percent of the country’s pre-war population, and around 8 percent of the country’s GDP was destroyed.