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World War II was the most costly war - in lives and money - the world has ever known; spreading death and destruction to an extent never before experienced and leaving more than 60 million men, women and children dead in its wake. In the end, Europe and Asia were realigned and America was transformed into a superpower that would influence world events for generations to come.
WW II officially began September 3,1939, when Great Britain, France, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa declared war on Germany. The stage began to be set, however, with Japan’s invasion of China in the early 1930’s; Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936; coupled with Germany “annexing” Austria in 1938. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939 actually ignited the worldwide conflict.
Following the fall of France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Luxembourg...London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow and other cities in the British Isles were bombed by the Nazis. They then swept through Greece and Yugoslavia and captured Kiev, Russia.
Though the U.S. military draft had begun in 1940, and the USA was aiding the allies through “Lease-Lend, etc,” Japan’s attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, finally forced the United States to declare war on Japan December 8th and its axis partners Germany, Italy, et al, on December 11, 1941.
F rom there, four years of vicious battle with give-and-take victories in places like Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, El Alamein, Tobruk, Guadalcanal, Midway, Stalingrad, Sicily, Anzio, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Aachen, the Battle of the Bulge, the Coral Sea and Normandy; the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally brought Germany and Japan to their knees. The war was officially over in Europe with the surrender of Germany in May 1945, and in the Pacific on September 2,1945, when Japan capitulated.
The war cost America more than 290,000 military troops and merchant marines and $231 billion tax dollars, including $20 billion for the two bombs that ended the war. But, Hitler was dead and Japanese aggression had been crushed - the concentration camps of Europe and the POW camps of Asia had been emptied. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers finally returned home. On this day we are once again reminded of all the sacrifices the individuals in the U.S. Armed Forces - together with the civilians on the home front - made to enable the final victory over the axis power to be possible.