what happened in world war 2?

Answer 1

Lotsa bangs.

Lotsa dead people.

Uncle Sam dropped in late, and, assisting his allies, was part of the winning team.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

The allies won, including USA, France, England and I don't know who else. The other guys lost, including Japan, Germany and I think Italy.

Answer 4

well first the axis powers started taking over the world!
then a few months later germany surrendered.later every belief was defeated except communism because the soviet union was par tof the allies so we couldn't destroy that belief.

Answer 5

Germany, Japan & Italy got a whuppin by Uncle Sam..

Answer 6

German Lost..
PS they started it & Hitler wanted to be A King Of The World...

Answer 7

A whole lotta people got slaughtered.

Answer 8

not enough space to give you a detailed run down, do some research yourself, or ask me somthing specific

Answer 9

Date September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945
Location Europe, Pacific, South-East Asia, Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa
Result Allied victory. Creation of the United Nations. Emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers. Creation of First World and Second World spheres of influence in Europe leading to the Cold War.
Casus
belli Territorial ambitions of the Axis powers.

Combatants
Allied powers Axis powers
Commanders
Allied Leaders of World War II Axis Leaders of World War II
Casualties
Military dead:
17,000,000
Civilian dead:
33,000,000
Total dead:
50,000,000 Military dead:
8,000,000
Civilian dead:
4,000,000
Total dead
12,000,000
Campaigns and theatres of World War II
Europe
Poland – Phony War – Denmark & Norway – France & Benelux – Britain – Eastern Front – Continuation War – Western Front (1944–45)
Asian and Pacific
China – Pacific Ocean – South-East Asia – South West Pacific – Japan – Manchuria

Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa
Mediterranean Sea – East Africa – North Africa – West Africa – Balkans (1939-41) – Middle East – Yugoslavia – Madagascar – Italy

Other
Atlantic – Strategic bombing – North America – Arctic – Antarctica – Caribbean – Australia

Contemporary wars
Chinese Civil – Soviet-Japanese Border – Winter – French-Thai – Anglo-Iraqi – Greek Civil – Sino-Japanese – Lapland – Ecuadorian-Peruvian
The immediate causes of World War II are generally held to be the German invasion of Poland, as well as the Japanese attacks on China, the United States, and the British and Dutch colonies. All of the attacks resulted from the leadership of authoritarian ruling elites in Germany and Japan. World War II began after these acts of aggression were met with an official declaration of war or armed resistance.


Cause of war in Europe
Germany and France had been struggling for dominance in Continental Europe for fifty years, and fought two previous wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and World War I. Meanwhile the power of the Soviet Union threatened to eclipse them both as industrialization spread to this massive country. World War I had been a preemptive war by Germany against the precursor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire,[1] but it ended in catastrophe for the Germans, with millions dead, the loss of some peripheral territory, and economic hardships.


Molotov signs the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in Moscow. Behind him are Shaposhnikov, Ribbentrop, and Stalin.In the six years preceding World War II, Adolf Hitler, leading the Nazi Party, took power in Germany and eliminated its democratic government, the Weimar Republic. As stated in Mein Kampf, an autobiographical book outlining his plans for the future, Hitler's goal was to invade and conquer lands around Germany, and to make them German. He railed against Communists and ethnic minorities, such as Jews. After taking power, he prepared Germany for another war with large political rallies and speeches.

During the late 1930s Hitler abrogated the Treaty of Versailles, which had brought peace after WWI. He remilitarized the Rhineland, and increased the size of the German army, navy, and air force.

The British and French governments followed a policy of appeasement in order to avoid a new European war, out of concern for perceived war-weariness of their populations due to the huge death tolls of the first World War. This policy culminated in the Munich Agreement in 1938, in which the seemingly inevitable outbreak of the war was averted when the United Kingdom and France agreed to Germany's annexation and immediate occupation of the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia. In exchange for this, Hitler gave his word that Germany would make no further territorial claims in Europe.[2][3] Chamberlain declared that the agreement represented "peace for our time." In March 1939, Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, effectively killing any notions of appeasement.

The failure of the Munich Agreement showed that negotiations with Hitler could not be trusted, as his aspirations for dominance in Europe went beyond anything that the United Kingdom and France would tolerate. Poland and France pledged on May 19, 1939 to provide each other with military assistance in the event either was attacked. The British had already offered support to Poland in March.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Pact included a secret protocol that would divide Central Europe into German and Soviet areas of interest, including a provision to partition Poland. Each country agreed to allow the other a free hand in its area of influence, including military occupation. The deal provided for sales of oil and food from the Soviets to Germany, thus reducing the danger of a British blockade such as the one that had nearly starved Germany in World War I. Hitler was then ready to go to war with Poland and, if necessary, with the United Kingdom and France. He claimed there were German grievances relating to the issues of the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but he planned to conquer all Polish territory to incorporate it into the German Reich. The signing of a new alliance between the United Kingdom and Poland on August 25 did not significantly alter his plans.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, causing France and the United Kingdom to declare war. The United Kingdom brought with it the huge British Empire, and most members of the British Commonwealth joined the war soon after.


Cause of war in Asia

Hideki Tojo of Imperial Japan.Imperial Japan in the 1930s was largely ruled by a militarist clique of Army and Navy leaders intending to make Japan a great colonial power. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937 to bolster its meager stock of natural resources, to relieve Japan from population pressures and to extend its colonial realm to a wider area. The United States and the United Kingdom reacted by making loans to China, providing covert military assistance, pilots and fighter aircraft to the Chinese Kuomintang and instituting progressively broad natural resource embargoes against Japan. The embargoes could have ultimately forced Japan to give up its newly conquered possessions in China or find new sources of oil and other resources.

Japan was faced with the choice of withdrawing from China, negotiating some compromise, developing new sources of supply, buying what they needed somewhere else, or going to war to conquer the territories that contained oil, bauxite and other resources in the Dutch East Indies, Malay and the Philippines. Japan's leaders believed that the French, Dutch, Soviet and British governments were preoccupied with the war in Europe, and that the United States could not be war-ready for years and would compromise before waging full-scale war. Japan thus proceeded with its plans for the war in the Pacific, and invaded and conquered nations and colonial possessions throughout Asia and the Pacific.[4]

For propaganda purposes, Japan's leaders stated that the goal of its military campaigns was to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This, they claimed, would be a co-operative league of Asian nations, freed by Japan from European imperialist domination, and liberated to achieve autonomy and self-determination. In practice, occupied countries and peoples were completely subordinate to Japanese authority.

The direct cause of the United States' entry into the war with Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941.


Military Chronology
Main article: Timeline of World War II

WW II Europe. Red countries are Allied or Allied-controlled, Blue denotes Axis or Axis controlled countries, and the Soviet Union is colored Green prior to joining the Allies in 1941
War in Europe
Main article: European Theatre of World War II
On September 1, 1939, Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, invaded Poland according to a secret agreement with the Soviet Union.

On September 3 at 11:15 GMT, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, followed six hours later by France, responded by declaring war on Germany, initiating a widespread naval war. South Africa (September 6) and Canada (September 10) followed suit.

The Soviet Union joined the invasion of Poland on September 17.

Germany rapidly overran Poland, then Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. Italian and later German troops attacked British forces in North Africa. By summer of 1941, Germany had conquered France and most of Western Europe,
but it failed to subdue the United Kingdom thanks to the resistance of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.

Adolf Hitler then turned on the Soviet Union, launching a surprise attack (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) on June 22, 1941. Despite enormous gains, the invasion stalled on the outskirts of Moscow in late 1941, as the winter weather made further advances difficult. The Germans initiated another major offensive the following summer, but the attack bogged down in vicious urban fighting in Stalingrad. The Soviets later launched a massive encircling counterattack to force the surrender of the German Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), decisively defeated the Axis at the Battle of Kursk, and broke the Siege of Leningrad. The Red Army then pursued the retreating Wehrmacht to Berlin, and won the street-by-street Battle of Berlin, as Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945.

Meanwhile, the Western Allies successfully defended North Africa (1940–43), invaded Italy (1943), and then liberated France (1944), following amphibious landings in Normandy. After repulsing a German counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge that December, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine River to link up with their Soviet counterparts at the Elbe River in central Germany.

During the war in Europe, some 6 million Jews, along with another 5 to 6 million people — Roma (Gypsies), Slavs, Communists, homosexuals, the disabled and several other groups — were murdered by Germany in a state-sponsored genocide that came to be known as The Holocaust.


Territory of the Empire of Japan at its peak.
War in Asia and the Pacific
Main article: Pacific War
The Empire of Japan invaded China on July 7, 1937. Australia and then the United States, in 1940, responded with embargoes on iron exports to Japan. On September 27, 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. After fruitless negotiations with the United States concerning withdrawal from China, excluding Manchukuo, Japan attacked Vichy French-controlled Indochina on July 24, 1941. This caused the United States, United Kingdom and Netherlands to block Japan's access to oil, such as that in the Dutch East Indies and British colonies in Borneo.

Japan launched nearly simultaneous surprise attacks against the major U. S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, on Thailand and on the British territories of Malaya and Hong Kong. Though it was significant to the US Navy, most Americans had never heard of Pearl Harbor. The attacks occurred on December 7, 1941 in western international time zones and on December 8 in the east. Later on December 8, Japan attacked The Philippines, which was politically controlled by the United States at the time and quickly fell to Japanese forces. On December 11, Germany and Italy also declared war on the United States. Japanese forces commenced assaults on British and Dutch territory in Borneo on December 15. From their major prewar base at Truk in the South Pacific, Japanese forces began to attack and occupy neighboring Allied territories.

Japan's campaign in China lasted from 1937 to the end of the war, during which the Republic of China faced 80% of Japanese troops and relieved the Soviet Union under Stalin from fighting a two-front war. In the war against Japan, China lost more than 3 million soldiers and more than 17 million civilians. Many others were tortured, forced into slavery or raped, which resulted in charges of Japanese war crimes.

Japan won victory after victory in South East Asia and the Pacific, including the capture of 130,000 Allied prisoners in Malaya and at the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942. Much of Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, the Australian Territory of New Guinea, and the British Solomon Islands also fell to Japanese forces.

The Japanese advance was checked at the Battle of the Coral Sea and their invasion fleet turned away from New Guinea after Allied naval forces clashed in the first battle in which the opposing fleets never made visual contact. A month later a Japanese invasion fleet was decisively defeated at the Battle of Midway in which they lost four fleet aircraft carriers attempting to engage U.S. Navy forces (the U.S. Navy lost one carrier). On land they were defeated at the Battle of Milne Bay and finally withdrew from Battle of Guadalcanal as the Allies took the initiative in the Solomon Islands and began an "Island Hopping" campaign to push back Japanese holdings in the Pacific. U.S. and Australian forces then isolated Japan's major base at Rabaul before advancing from one island to another in the Central Pacific invading some and isolating others. The Japanese were defeated in a series of great naval battles, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 in which the Allies further advanced towards the Japanese homeland by invading the Marianas and then the Philippines, setting up bases from which Japan could be bombed by strategic bombers like the B-29. 1945 saw invasions of key islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the meantime, Allied submarines gradually cut off the supply of oil and other raw materials to Japan.

In the last year of the war US air forces conducted a strategic firebombing campaign against the Japanese homeland. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on August 9 another was dropped on Nagasaki. On the same day the Soviets joined the Pacific campaign in Manchuria, quickly defeating the Japanese Kwantung Army there. Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945.


Aftermath
About 62 million people, or 2.5% of the world population, died in the war, though estimates vary widely (see World War II casualties). Large swaths of Europe and Asia were devastated and took years to recover. The war had political, sociological and economic repercussions that persist to this day.


Casualties, civilian impact, and atrocities
Main articles : World War II casualties, The Holocaust, Concentration camp, Gulag, Japanese war crimes, Comfort women, Nanking massacre, Japanese American internment and War crimes during World War II


Major deportation routes to Nazi extermination camps during The Holocaust, Aktion T-4 and alike.Some 63 million people, or 3% of the world population, died in the war (though estimates vary): about 24 million soldiers and 38 million civilians. This total includes the estimated 9 million lives lost in the Holocaust. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 80% were on the Allied side and 20% on the Axis side.[5]

Allied forces suffered approximately 17 million military deaths, of which about 11 million were Soviet and 3 million Chinese. Axis forces suffered about 8 million, of which more than 5 million were German. In total, of the military deaths in World War II, approximately 44% were Soviet soldiers, 22% were German, 12% were Chinese, 8% were Japanese, 9% were soldiers of other Allied forces, and 5% were other Axis country soldiers. Some modern estimates double the number of Chinese casualties originally stated.[5] Of the civilian deaths, approximately 90% were Allied (nearly a third of all civilians killed were Soviet citizens, and more than 15% of all civilians killed in the war died in German extermination camps) and 10% were Axis.[5]

Many civilians died as a result of disease, starvation, massacres, genocide—in particular, the Holocaust—and aerial bombing. One estimate is that 12 million civilians died in Holocaust camps, 1.5 million by bombs, 7 million in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other causes.[6] Allied civilian deaths totaled roughly 38 million, including 11.7 million in the Soviet Union, 7 million in China and 5.2 million from Poland. There were around 3 million civilian deaths on the Axis side, including 2 million in Germany and 0.6 million in Japan. The Holocaust refers to the organized state-sponsored murder of 6 million Jews, 1.8-1.9 million non-Jewish Poles, 200,000–800,000 Roma people, 200,000–300,000 people with disabilities, and other groups carried out by the Nazis during the war. The Soviet Union suffered by far the largest death toll of any nation in the war, over 23 million.


Mistreated, starved prisoners in the Ebensee concentration camp, Austria.In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag, or labor camps, led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war (POW) and even Soviet citizens themselves who had been supporters of the Nazis or were thought to be the ones. Japanese POW camps also had high death rates; many were used as labour camps, and starvation conditions among the mainly U.S., British, Australian and other Commonwealth prisoners were little better than many German concentration camps. Sixty percent (1,238,000 ref. Krivosheev) of Soviet POWs died during the war. Vadim Erlikman puts it at 2.6 million Soviet POWs that died in German Captivity.[7] Richard Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POW and out of those 57% died or were killed.[8] Furthermore, 150,000 Japanese-Americans were interned by the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as nearly 11,000 German and Italian residents of the U.S.

Despite the international treaties and a resolution adopted by the League of Nations on 14 May 1938 condemning the use of toxic gas by Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently used chemical weapons. Because of fears of retaliation, however, those weapons were never used against Westerners but only against other Asians judged "inferior" by the imperial propaganda. According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, the authorization for the use of chemical weapons was given by specific orders (rinsanmei) issued by Hirohito himself. For example, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions during the invasion of Wuhan, from August to October 1938.


A survivor of German aerial bombardment, Siege of Warsaw.The bacteriological weapons were experimented on human beings by many units incorporated in the Japanese army, such as the infamous Unit 731, integrated by Imperial decree in the Kwantung army in 1936. Those weapons were mainly used in China and, according to some Japanese veterans, against Mongolians and Russian soldiers in 1939 during the Nomonhan incident.[9]

According to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyochi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kôa-in for slave labor in Manchukuo and north China.[10] According to Mitsuyoshi Himeta, at least 2.7 million died during the Sankō Sakusen operation implemented in Heipei and Shantung by General Yasuji Okamura.

From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel were prosecuted for war crimes. Top German officials were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region.


Resistance and collaboration
Main articles: Resistance during World War II and Collaboration during World War II

Members of the Dutch Eindhoven Resistance with troops of the U.S. 101st Airborne in front of the Eindhoven cathedral during Operation Market Garden in September 1944.Resistance during World War II occurred in every occupied country by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation, disinformation, and propaganda to outright warfare.

Among the most notable resistance movements were the Polish Home Army, the French Maquis, the Yugoslav Partisans, the Greek resistance force, and the Italian Resistance in the German-occupied Northern Italy after 1943. Germany itself also had an anti-Nazi movement. The Communist resistance was among the fiercest, since they were already organised and militant even before the war and they were ideologically opposed to the Nazis.

Before D-Day, there were some operations performed by the French Resistance to help with the forthcoming invasion. Communications lines were cut; trains were derailed; roads, water towers, and ammunition depots were destroyed; and some German garrisons were attacked.

There were also resistance movements fighting against the Allied invaders. The German resistance petered out within a few years, while in the Baltic states resistance operations against the occupation continued into the 1960s.


Home fronts

During the war, women worked in factories throughout much of the West and East.Main article: Home front during World War II
"Home front" is the name given to the activities of the civilians of the nations at war. All the main countries reorganized their homefronts to produce munitions and soldiers, with 40–60% of GDP being devoted to the war effort. Women were drafted in the Soviet Union and Britain. Shortages were everywhere, and severe food shortages caused malnutrition and even starvation, such as in the Netherlands and in Leningrad. New workers were recruited, especially housewives, the unemployed, students, and retired people. Skilled jobs were re-engineered and simplified ("de-skilling") so that unskilled workers could handle them. Every major nation imposed censorship on the media as well as a propaganda program designed to boost the war effort and stifle negative rumors. Every major country imposed a system of rationing and price controls. Black markets flourished in areas controlled by Germany. Germany brought in millions of prisoners of war, slave laborers, and forced workers to staff its munitions factories. Many were killed in the bombing raids, the rest became refugees as the war ended.


Technology

German Enigma machine for encryption.Main articles: Technology during World War II and Technological escalation during World War II
Weapons and technology improved rapidly during World War II and some of these played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the war. Many major technologies were used for the first time, including nuclear weapons, radar, proximity fuses, jet engines, ballistic missiles, and data-processing analog devices (primitive computers). Every year, the piston engines were improved. Enormous advances were made in aircraft, submarine, and tank designs, such that models coming into use at the beginning of the war were long obsolete by its end. One entirely new kind of ship was the amphibious landing craft.

Industrial production played a role in the Allied victory. The Allies more effectively mobilized their economies and drew from a larger economic base. The peak year of munitions production was 1944, with the Allies out-producing the Axis by a ratio of 3 to 1. (Germany produced 19% and Japan 7% of the world's munitions; the U.S. produced 47%, Britain and Canada 14%, and the Soviets 11%).[11]

The Allies used low-cost mass production techniques, using standardized models. Japan and Germany continued to rely on expensive hand-crafted methods. Japan thus produced hundreds of airplane designs and did not reach mass-production efficiency; the new models were only slightly better than the original 1940 planes, while the Allies rapidly advanced in technology.[12] Germany thus spent heavily on high-tech weaponry, including the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, advanced submarines, jet engines, and heavy tanks that proved strategically of minor value. The combination of better logistics and mass production proved crucial in the victory. "The Allies did not depend on simple numbers for victory but on the quality of their technology and the fighting effectiveness of their forces... In both Germany and Japan less emphasis was placed upon the non-combat areas of war: procurement, logistics, military services," concludes historian Richard Overy.[13]

Delivery of weapons to the battlefront was a matter of logistics. The Allies again did a much better job in moving munitions from factories to the front lines. A large fraction of the German tanks after June 1944 never reached the battlefield, and those that did often ran short of fuel. Japan in particular was notably inefficient in its logistics system.[14]

Many new medical and surgical techniques were employed as well as new drugs like sulfa and penicillin, not to mention serious advances in biological warfare and nerve gases. The Japanese control of the quinine supply forced the Australians to invent new anti-malarial drugs. The saline bath was invented to treat burns. More prompt application of sulfa drugs saved countless lives. New local anesthetics were introduced making possible surgery close to the front lines. The Americans discovered that only 20% of wounds were cause by machine-gun or rifle bullets (compared to 35% in World War I). Most came from high explosive shells and fragments, which besides the direct wound caused shock from their blast effects. Most deaths came from shock and blood loss, which were countered by a major innovation, blood transfusions.[15]

Cryptography played an important part in the war, as the United States had broken the Japanese naval codes and knew the Japanese plan of attack at Midway. British and Polish codebreakers deciphered several German codes, giving the Allies an advantage in the European theater as well.

The massive research and development demands of the war accelerated the growth of the scientific communities in Allied states, while German and Japanese laboratories were disbanded; many German engineers and scientists continued their weapons research after the war in the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries. Read below for more information on technology in the war.

See also: Military production during World War II and List of World War II military equipment




Military Intelligence
Both Allied and German intelligence failed to effectively conduct human intelligence gathering, except for prisoner interrogation. The reason is that it is very difficult to train agents to be fluent in the language and culture of the enemy. For example, all German agents parachuted onto British soil were quickly caught by the British authorities, and most were turned. Also, German intelligence turned many English agents on the European continent; virtually no English agent operated in German territory.[citation needed]

Technical intelligence gathering was much more effective, mainly on the Allied side.[citation needed] The most important cryptologic systems of both Germany and Japan, Enigma and JN-25 respectively, were analysed and were broken by Polish, British and American cryptologists. This gave the Allied war effort a distinctive edge: Allied commanders knew what their Axis opponents were planning. The defeat of the German Afrika Korps and the elimination of a large number of German submarines is attributed to the Allied success in reading communications deemed "secure" by the German High Command. The naval intelligence situation in the Pacific was very similar: American naval intelligence often knew about Japanese plans well in advance and could dispatch their warships accordingly. The commander of the US pacific fleet (Admiral Nimitz)later stated that communications intelligence was as valuable "as an additional fleet" in the Pacific theater.

The success of communications intelligence during World War II seems to be a major reason for the UKUSA group of countries to fund large SIGINT organizations like NSA and GCHQ, which are in operation up to the present day.

However, it is notable that Germany had some success in breaking the American M-209 cryptomachine, but this device was mainly used for tactical communications. Unfortunately, very few facts about German SIGINT during WW2 is known. See this German story.[citation needed]


Aftermath

Germany's territorial losses 1919–1945.Main articles: Aftermath of World War II and Effects of World War II
The war concluded with the surrender and occupation of Germany and Japan. It left behind millions of displaced persons and prisoners of war, and resulted in many new international boundaries. The economies of Europe, China and Japan were largely destroyed as a result of the war. In 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall devised the "European Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan. Effective from 1948 to 1952, it allocated 13 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Western Europe. To prevent (or at least minimize) future conflicts, the allied nations, led by the United States, formed the United Nations in San Francisco, California in 1945. One of the first actions of the United Nations was the creation of the State of Israel, partly in response to the Holocaust.


Aftermath of World War II in Europe
Main articles: Marshall Plan, Eastern bloc, Iron Curtain, Expulsion of Germans after World War II, Allied Occupation Zones in Germany, Morgenthau plan, and Oder-Neisse line

German occupation zones in 1946 after territorial annexations in the East. The Saarland (in the French zone) is shown with stripes because it was removed from Germany by France in 1947 as a protectorate, and was not incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany until 1957.The end of the war hastened the independence of many British crown colonies (such as India) and Dutch territories (such as Indonesia) and the formation of new nations and alliances throughout Asia and Africa. The Philippines were granted their independence in 1946 as previously promised by the United States. Poland's boundaries were re-drawn to include portions of pre-war Germany, including East Prussia and Upper Silesia, while ceding most of the areas taken by the Soviet Union in the Molotov-Ribbentrop partition of 1939, effectively moving Poland to the west. Germany was split into four zones of occupation, and the three zones under the Western Allies was reconstituted as a constitutional democracy. The Soviet Union's influence increased as they established hegemony over most of eastern Europe, and incorporated parts of Finland and Poland into their new boundaries. Europe was informally split into Western and Soviet spheres of influence, which heightened existing tensions between the two camps and helped establish the Cold War.

Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation, coordinated by the Allied Control Council. The American, British, and French zones joined in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. In Germany, economic suppression and denazification took place. Millions of Germans and Poles were expelled from their homelands as a result of the territorial annexations in Eastern Europe agreed upon at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. In the West, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, and the Saar area was separated from Germany. Austria was divided into four zones of occupation, which were united in 1955 to become the Republic of Austria. The Soviet Union occupied much of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In all the USSR-occupied countries, with the exception of Austria, the Soviet Union helped Communist regimes to power. It also annexed the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.


Aftermath of World War II in Asia
Main articles: Occupied Japan, Division of Korea, and Chinese Civil War
In Asia, Japan was occupied by the U.S, aided by Commonwealth troops, until the peace treaty took effect in 1952. The Japanese Empire's government was dismantled under General Douglas MacArthur and replaced by a constitutional monarchy with the emperor as a figurehead. The defeat of Japan also led to the establishment of the Far Eastern commission which set out policies for Japan to fulfill under the terms of surrender. In accordance with the Yalta Conference agreements, the Soviet Union occupied and subsequently annexed Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. Japanese occupation of Korea also ended, but the peninsula was divided between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along 38th parallel. The U.S.-backed South Korea would fight the communist North Korea in the Korean War, with Korea remain divided.

World War II was a pivotal point in China's history. Before the war against Japan, China had suffered nearly a century of humiliation at the hands of various imperialist powers and was relegated to a semi-colonial status. However, the war greatly enhanced China's international status. Not only was the central government under Chiang Kai-shek able to abrogate most of the unequal treaties China had signed in the past century, the Republic of China also became a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member in the Security Council. China also reclaimed Manchuria and Taiwan. Nevertheless, eight years of war greatly taxed the central government, and many of its nation-building measures adopted since it came to power in 1928 were disrupted by the war. Communist activities also expanded greatly in occupied areas, making post-war administration of these areas difficult. Vast war damages and hyperinflation thereafter demoralized the populace, along with the continuation of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Partly because of the severe blow his army and government had suffered during the war against Japan, the Kuomintang, along with state apparatus of the Republic of China, retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and in its place the Chinese communists established the People's Republic of China on the mainland.