The Second
World War

Sheet 02 · Command · the four who decided it

The men at the table

Four men held the initiative: two dictators, a prime minister and a president. Three of them were allies of convenience who distrusted each other almost as much as they distrusted the enemy. None of them was simple, and the two on the winning side do not survive scrutiny unblemished.

The alliance was never comfortable

Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged roughly 1,700 wartime messages and built the closest partnership of the war. Stalin sat outside that intimacy, pressing for years for a second front in France while the Red Army absorbed the bulk of the German army alone — a delay he never forgave. Roosevelt believed personal rapport could manage "Uncle Joe"; Churchill was consistently more wary, and in October 1944 cut a private "percentages agreement" with Stalin dividing influence in the Balkans.

They met all three together only twice: Tehran (28 Nov – 1 Dec 1943), where the invasion of France was finally locked in, and Yalta (4–11 Feb 1945), where they carved up postwar Europe. By Potsdam that July, Roosevelt was dead, Truman had replaced him, and Churchill was voted out mid-conference.

And the rest of the command

The war was not run by four men alone.

Sheet 03 · European theatre · 1939–1945

The high-water mark
and the long way back

Germany won almost everything it attempted for two years, then lost the war in the place it chose to attack. Step the map through the years: the tide turns in 1942, and it turns in the east.

Sheet 04 · The Eastern Front · the war's real centre of gravity

Where the war was
actually decided

This is the single most misunderstood fact about the Second World War. In the English-speaking world it is remembered as D-Day, the Blitz and the Pacific. In reality the German army was destroyed principally by the Soviet Union, at a cost the west never approached.

Operation Barbarossa opened on 22 June 1941 with some 3.5 million troops — the largest invasion in history. Stalin had dismissed repeated intelligence warnings, and the opening encirclements cost the Red Army millions of prisoners. German troops came within sight of Moscow and besieged Leningrad for nearly 900 days.

Then it broke. At Stalingrad (17 July 1942 – 2 Feb 1943) the German Sixth Army was surrounded and annihilated in the bloodiest battle of the war. At Kursk (July–August 1943), the largest tank battle ever fought, Germany's last strategic offensive in the east failed and never resumed. Operation Bagration in summer 1944 then destroyed the German centre so completely that the Red Army reached Poland.

The arithmetic nobody quotes

Roughly four out of every five German military deaths occurred on the Eastern Front. For most of the war, the great majority of German divisions were committed there, not in France or Italy. The Soviet Union lost somewhere between 24 and 27 million people — more than every other Allied nation combined, many times over.

None of this diminishes what the Western Allies did; the bombing campaign, the Atlantic convoys, Lend-Lease and the second front all mattered enormously. But an account of this war that gives the Eastern Front a paragraph has the proportions of the thing badly wrong.

Sheet 05 · Pacific & Asia · 1937–1945

The ocean war

Japan's plan was to seize the resources of Southeast Asia fast enough to force a negotiated peace before American industry could respond. It very nearly worked, and then it failed completely — for exactly the reason Admiral Yamamoto, who planned Pearl Harbor while opposing the war, had predicted.

Three things usually left out

China absorbed the Japanese army for eight years. The war there began in 1937 and never stopped. It tied down the bulk of Japan's ground forces for the entire conflict and cost China somewhere between 15 and 20 million lives — figures with the widest error bars of any theatre.

Burma and India were a major front. At Imphal and Kohima (March–July 1944) — sometimes called the Stalingrad of the East — a Japanese invasion of India was destroyed, most of an 85,000-strong army killed or lost to starvation and disease in the retreat. Over 2.5 million Indians volunteered for the Allied armies, the largest volunteer force in history.

The Soviet Union entered the Pacific war. On 8–9 August 1945, between the two atomic bombs, 1.5 million Soviet troops invaded Japanese-held Manchuria and destroyed the Kwantung Army within days. It removed Japan's last hope of a peace mediated through Moscow, and historians still argue about how much it weighed against the bombs in the decision to surrender.

Sheet 06 · The other theatres · desert, sea and air

Four more wars
inside the war

Sheet 07 · The cost · the distribution of the dead

Where the dead are

This is the chart that reorders everything you thought you knew. Two countries — the Soviet Union and China — account for more than half of all deaths in the war. The United States and the United Kingdom, whose accounts dominate the popular memory, are near the bottom of it.

Proportionally, it was worse than the chart looks

Absolute numbers favour large countries. Measured against pre-war population, the war fell hardest on places most accounts barely mention.

Two figures worth sitting with

Germany captured around 5.7 million Soviet soldiers. Between three and 3.3 million of them died in captivity — starved, worked to death, or shot. That single figure is seven or eight times the total American death toll for the entire war. British and American prisoners of the Germans died at a rate of about 3.6%.

And the war that Europe dates from 1939 had been running in China since 1937, killing somewhere between 12 and 22 million people before Pearl Harbor brought America in.

Sheet 09 · Matériel · the industrial war

The war of factories

The Axis was out-produced on a scale that is difficult to convey. By 1944 the United States alone was making around two-thirds of all Allied military equipment. But the honest version of this story is not simply "the Allies had more."

For much of the war Germany controlled an industrial empire with greater raw potential than Britain and the USSR combined. What it failed at was mobilising that potential — a chaotic overlap of competing agencies, late and incomplete conversion to a war economy, and no equivalent of the standardised mass production the Americans and Soviets achieved. The historian Richard Overy's argument is precisely this: Allied victory in production was a triumph of organisation, not just of resources.

These totals genuinely disagree between sources, sometimes by tens of thousands, depending on whether tank destroyers, trainers, gliders and lend-leased vehicles are counted. Treat any single confident number for wartime production — including on this page — with caution. The ratios are what hold: the Allies built roughly twice the aircraft of the Axis, four to six times the armour, and, across all classes of vessel, something close to thirty times the ships.

Lend-Lease

American aid to the Allies ran to roughly $50 billion — about 17% of total US war spending, and something like $690 billion in today's money. Britain and the Commonwealth took 63%, the Soviet Union 22%.

Its effect on the Eastern Front is genuinely debated. The Red Army's own tank and aircraft output already exceeded Germany's before large deliveries arrived, so most Western historians — Glantz, Overy, Harrison — judge that it was not decisive to Soviet survival. What it transformed was Soviet mobility: over 427,000 trucks, 1,911 locomotives, and the majority of Soviet high-octane aviation fuel. Glantz's estimate is that without it, Stalin would have needed twelve to eighteen months longer — but would still have won.

What the war invented

Radar. Codebreaking at industrial scale — Bletchley Park's work against Enigma, and the American breaking of Japanese naval codes that made the victory at Midway possible. The proximity fuze. Penicillin in mass production. Jet aircraft. Ballistic missiles, in the V-2. The aircraft carrier displacing the battleship as the decisive naval weapon. And, at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb.

Sheet 10 · Home fronts · the war on civilians

A war without
a front line

Around 55 million of the dead were civilians. This was the first major war in which that was true, and it was true by design: cities were legitimate targets, food was a weapon, and whole populations were deported.

Bombing

Germany's Blitz on Britain killed around 43,500 civilians between September 1940 and May 1941, and the V-weapons that followed from June 1944 killed nearly 9,000 more in London alone. The single deadliest rocket strike of the war hit a cinema in Antwerp on 16 December 1944, killing 567 people.

The Allied campaign against Germany and Japan was far larger. Hamburg (July 1943) killed between 37,000 and 46,000 — and its single firestorm night killed more people than the whole eight-month London Blitz. Dresden (February 1945) killed 22,700 to 25,000 — a figure established by the city's own historians' commission in 2010, and one worth stating precisely because Nazi propaganda claimed 500,000 and the far right still repeats it.

The deadliest single air raid of the war was neither of the atomic bombs. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, American incendiaries burned out central Tokyo and killed somewhere between 80,000 and 110,000 people in a few hours — most commonly put at about 100,000. It is the deadliest air raid in history.

Whether area bombing of cities was militarily justified remains genuinely unresolved. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 — the Allies' own audit — found that precision attacks on oil and transport substantially degraded Germany's ability to fight, but was notably less impressed by the effect of bombing city centres. The philosopher A. C. Grayling has called the area campaign a moral crime; others hold that the judgement is easier to make now than it was in 1943. Both positions are held by serious people.

Hunger as a weapon

More people died of war-induced starvation than in the fighting in several theatres. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed between two and three million people in British India — and a 2019 climate study found it was the only major South Asian famine on record not attributable to drought or crop failure. It was a policy famine: rice exports continued, boats were removed from coastal Bengal against a feared Japanese invasion, and the War Cabinet repeatedly declined to divert shipping. No serious historian disputes that British wartime decisions worsened it; the live argument is how much personal responsibility Churchill bears, and most historians reject the label of genocide while accepting substantial policy culpability.

The Greek famine of 1941–42 killed up to 300,000 in Athens alone. The Java famine of 1944–45 killed around 2.4 million. The siege of Leningrad starved perhaps a million people over nearly 900 days.

Who actually fought

The Indian Army grew from under 200,000 men in 1939 to over 2.5 million volunteers by August 1945, and fought in North Africa, Italy and Burma. West and East African divisions — the Royal West African Frontier Force, the King's African Rifles — fought the Burma campaign. Māori, First Nations and Japanese-American units served with distinction. The Caribbean Regiment, some 4,000 volunteers, was sent to Italy and Egypt but kept out of front-line combat, which tells you something in itself. Their contribution is routinely missing from the popular story, and in many cases so were their pensions.

Women entered industry in numbers that permanently changed what work was thought possible: by 1943 Britain had conscripted unmarried women into war work, and Soviet women flew combat aircraft, served as snipers and made up a substantial fraction of the Red Army's medical and support services.

And in the United States, Executive Order 9066 of 19 February 1942 forced roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans — about two-thirds of them US citizens — into camps without charge or individual hearing. The Supreme Court upheld it in Korematsu in 1944. Congress apologised and paid reparations in 1988.

Sheet 11 · The end · April – September 1945

How it ended

Within five months, Roosevelt was dead, Hitler was dead, Mussolini was dead, Germany had surrendered, and two cities had been destroyed by single bombs.

12 April 1945 — Roosevelt dies of a cerebral haemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, having never told his vice-president that the atomic bomb existed. Truman is briefed days later.

28 April — Mussolini is caught by partisans near Lake Como and shot; his body is hung up in Milan. 30 April — with Soviet troops streets away, Hitler shoots himself in the bunker beneath Berlin, a day after marrying Eva Braun. 8 May — Germany surrenders unconditionally. Europe's war is over.

Japan's was not. The invasion of the home islands was projected to cost casualties on the scale of Okinawa, where over 12,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Japanese troops had died in 82 days, along with somewhere between 40,000 and 150,000 Okinawan civilians.

The bomb

The Manhattan Project had cost about $2 billion and employed nearly 130,000 people. The first device was detonated in the New Mexico desert at 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945, while Truman was at Potsdam.

Hiroshima, 6 August — roughly 80,000 killed immediately, around 140,000 dead by the end of the year. Nagasaki, 9 August — about 40,000 immediately, roughly 74,000 by year's end. Precise counts are impossible; people continued dying of radiation illness for decades, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists treats an exact reckoning as unknowable.

Between the two bombs, on 8–9 August, 1.5 million Soviet troops invaded Manchuria and destroyed the Kwantung Army within days. Japan had been hoping for a peace mediated through Moscow; that hope was gone. Historians still argue over the relative weight of the bombs, the Soviet entry and the naval blockade in the decision to surrender — it is not a settled question, and anyone who tells you it is has a position to sell.

15 August — Hirohito broadcasts to his people, most of whom have never heard his voice. 2 September — the Instrument of Surrender is signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The war is over, six years and a day after it began.

Sheet 12 · Aftermath · the world it made

What the war left

Somewhere between 70 and 85 million people were dead — about three percent of everyone alive. As many as 55 million in Europe alone had been driven from their homes, and a million were still unresettled years later.

The reckoning

At Nuremberg, from November 1945, twenty-four leading Nazis were tried by an international tribunal: twelve were sentenced to death, three to life, four to prison terms, three acquitted. Göring took cyanide the night before he was to hang. Twelve further American-run trials tried 177 more. At Tokyo, from April 1946, twenty-five Japanese leaders were convicted; seven, including Tojo, were hanged. The tribunals established that following orders is not a defence — an idea that had not previously existed in law.

The institutions

The United Nations Charter was signed by fifty nations at San Francisco on 26 June 1945. At Bretton Woods the previous July, forty-four countries had created the IMF and what became the World Bank. From 1948 the Marshall Plan put $13.3 billion — perhaps $88 billion today — into sixteen Western European economies. Almost every institution that governs the modern world economy was built in the eighteen months around the end of this war.

The new division

Germany was split into four occupation zones and then, in 1949, into two countries. The alliance that won the war dissolved almost immediately into the next confrontation: Stalin installed compliant governments across Eastern Europe against the free elections promised at Yalta, and on 5 March 1946 Churchill told an audience in Fulton, Missouri that an iron curtain had descended across the continent. The USSR tested its first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949, years earlier than Western intelligence expected.

The empires

The war broke the European empires, both financially and in prestige. Japan's conquests had shown that European rule in Asia was not permanent. India and Pakistan became independent on 15 August 1947. Indonesia declared independence days after Japan's surrender and fought the Dutch for four years to keep it. Vietnam declared independence on 2 September 1945, beginning a war that would run, in one form or another, for thirty years.

Sheet 13 · Corrections · what well-read people still get wrong

Ten things
the popular story misses