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230-459: In the history of the 20th century , the interwar period (or interbellum ) lasted from 11   November 1918 to 1   September 1939 (20   years, 9   months, 21   days) – from the end of World War I (WWI) to the beginning of World War II (WWII). It was relatively short, yet featured many social, political, military, and economic changes throughout the world. Petroleum-based energy production and associated mechanisation led to

460-779: A League of Nations mandate of the former German Cameroon and a free hand in the Ethiopian Empire from France in return for Italian support against Germany in the Stresa Front . This was refused by French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot , who was not yet sufficiently worried about the prospect of a German resurgence. The failed resolution of the Abyssinia Crisis led to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War , in which Italy annexed Ethiopia to its empire. Italy's stance towards Spain shifted between

690-615: A Marcel wave . The young women who pioneered these trends were called " flappers ". Not all was new: "normalcy" returned to politics in the wake of hyper-emotional wartime passions in the United States, France, and Germany. The leftist revolutions in Finland, Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Spain were defeated by conservatives, but succeeded in Russia, which became the base for Soviet communism and Marxism–Leninism . In Italy,

920-631: A Venetian possession for four hundred years. The matter was taken by Greece to the League of Nations , where Mussolini was convinced by Britain to evacuate Royal Italian Army troops, in return for reparations from Greece. The confrontation led Britain and Italy to resolve the question of Jubaland in 1924, which was merged into Italian Somaliland . During the late 1920s, imperial expansion became an increasingly favoured theme in Mussolini's speeches. Amongst Mussolini's aims were that Italy had to become

1150-475: A 3 mi (4.8 km) radius from point of aim in any case. The United States Army Air Forces adopted a policy of daylight precision bombing for greater accuracy as, for example, during the Schweinfurt raids. That doctrine, based on the erroneous supposition that bombers could adequately defend themselves against air attack, entailed much higher American losses until long-range fighter escorts (e.g.

1380-592: A Belgian fort considered impregnable and guarded by 600 Belgians, to a force of only 88 German paratroopers . The worst of this was that King Leopold III of Belgium surrendered to the Germans on 28 May without warning his allies, exposing the entire flank of the Allied forces to German panzer groups. Following the conquest of the Low Countries, Hitler occupied Denmark and Norway, beginning on 9 April 1940. Norway

1610-601: A base for Operation Downfall , the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands which were only 340 miles away. The battle was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific, with approximately 160,000 casualties on both sides: at least 75,000 Allied and 84,166–117,000 Japanese. Around half of the island's population of 300,000 were killed, committed suicide or went missing. The assaults on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa proved incredibly costly in terms of American lives and president Truman

1840-581: A combined-arms attack which would be developed to a significant degree by Germany , and which contributed much to the success of the Wehrmacht during the first four years (1939–42) of World War II. The Luftwaffe became a major element of the German blitzkrieg . Some leading theorists of strategic air warfare , namely strategic bombing during this period were the Italian Giulio Douhet ,

2070-506: A constitutional monarchy and the former Chinese Emperor Pu Yi was placed on the throne, despite the real power being held by Japan. Despite relations between Japan and China suffering because the occupation of Manchuria, the situation did not turn into all-out war until 7 July 1937, when a dispute between Chinese and Japanese soldiers turned into a battle during the Marco Polo Bridge Incident . This, in turn, led to

2300-633: A dictatorship under the leadership of General Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War . Totalitarian states attempted to achieve total control over their subjects as well as their total loyalty. They held the state above the individual, and were often responsible for some of the worst acts in history, such as the Holocaust Adolf Hitler perpetrated on European Jews , or the Great Purge Stalin perpetrated in

2530-412: A disgust with cultural liberalism . Fascists believed in power, violence, male superiority, and a "natural" hierarchy, often led by dictators such as Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler . Fascism in power meant that liberalism and human rights were discarded, and individual pursuits and values were subordinated to what the party decided was best. The Japanese modelled their industrial economy closely on

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2760-592: A force in Western democracies when the global economy crashed in 1929 in what became known as the Great Depression . Many people saw this as the first stage of the end of the capitalist system and were attracted to Communism as a solution to the economic crisis, especially as the Soviet Union's economic development in the 1930s was strong, unaffected by the capitalist world's crisis. After World War I,

2990-598: A further escalation of the hostilities, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War , one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Japan enjoyed some early major victories, capturing both Shanghai and the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937 and forcing the Chinese central government 's relocation to Chongqing . Following Chinese victories in Changsha and Guangxi in 1939, the war reached somewhat of

3220-425: A high proportion of incendiary devices , to bomb the target region indiscriminately—to kill war workers, destroy materiel , and demoralize the enemy. In high enough concentration, it was capable of producing a firestorm . The high explosives were often delay-action bombs intended to kill or intimidate those fighting the fires caused by incendiaries. At first this required multiple aircraft, often returning to

3450-545: A limit that would be determined by the mandatory power. This led to increasing conflict with the Arab population, who openly revolted in 1936 . As the threat of war with Germany increased during the 1930s, Britain judged the support of Arabs as more important than the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and shifted to a pro-Arab stance, limiting Jewish immigration and in turn triggering a Jewish insurgency . The Dominions (Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and

3680-490: A major role in several countries in Latin America. Fascist parties sprang up, attuned to local right-wing traditions, but also possessing common features that typically included extreme militaristic nationalism, a desire for economic self-containment, threats and aggression toward neighbouring countries, oppression of minorities, a ridicule of democracy while using its techniques to mobilise an angry middle-class base, and

3910-580: A military alliance and an assured flow of oil. In Palestine , Britain was presented with the problem of mediating between the Palestinian Arabs and increasing numbers of Jewish settlers . The Balfour Declaration , which had been incorporated into the terms of the mandate, stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in Palestine, and Jewish immigration allowed up to

4140-472: A military strategy proved to be an effective and efficient way for the British to police their Middle East protectorates in the 1920s. Fewer men were required as compared to ground forces. Pre-war planners, on the whole, vastly overestimated the damage bombers could do, and underestimated the resilience of civilian populations. Jingoistic national pride played a major role: for example, at a time when Germany

4370-464: A new one. This was completed on 1 April 1945 and started instead with the usual euphemism used when referring to strategic bombing: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests....". Many strategic bombing campaigns and individual raids of aerial warfare have been described as "terror bombing" by commentators and historians since

4600-794: A period known as the Phony War ensued during the winter of 1939–1940, which saw only limited military land operation on the Western Front . All of this changed on 10 May 1940, when the Germans launched a massive attack on the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg ), most probably to surmount the Maginot Line of defenses on the Franco-German border. This witnessed the incredible fall of Eben Emael ,

4830-512: A personal campaign of revenge in Yugoslavia and to occupy Greece at the same time. The Greeks would have a bitter revenge of sorts; the attack caused a delay of several crucial weeks of the invasion of the USSR, potentially hampering it. On 22 June 1941, Hitler attacked Stalin with the largest army the world had ever seen . Over three million men and their weapons were put into service against

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5060-525: A plan to divide post-war Europe. Most of the east went to Stalin, who agreed to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, which he never did. The west went to Britain, France, and the U.S. Post-war Germany would be split between the four, as would Berlin. This division of spheres of influence would set up international diplomacy for the Cold War that would dominate the second half of the century. At

5290-491: A raid in the afternoon of June 22, 1916, the pilots used outdated maps and bombed the location of the abandoned railway station, where a circus tent was placed, killing 120 persons, most of them children. The British also stepped up their strategic bombing campaign. In late 1915, the order was given for attacks on German industrial targets, and the 41st Wing was formed from units of the RNAS and Royal Flying Corps . The RNAS took to

5520-504: A result, bomb loads were regularly dropped "blind" using dead-reckoning methods little different from those used by the RAF night bombers. In addition, only the leading bomber in a formation actually utilized the Norden sight, the rest of the formation dropping their bombs only when they saw the lead aircraft's bombload falling away. Since even a very tight bomber formation could cover a vast area,

5750-632: A reward, but failed to get self-government as the government was still kept in control of British hands and feared another rebellion like that of 1857 . The Government of India Act 1919 failed to satisfy demand for self-rule. Mounting tension, particularly in the Punjab region , culminated in the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. Indian nationalism surged and centred in the Congress Party led by Mohandas Gandhi . In Britain, public opinion

5980-414: A sharp reduction in new business starts. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry . Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by about 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few alternative sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as mining and logging suffered

6210-463: A smaller neighbour to match Germany's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia . Italian King Victor Emmanuel III took the Albanian crown , and a fascist government under Shefqet Vërlaci was established. History of the 20th century The 20th century changed the world in unprecedented ways. The World Wars sparked tension between countries and led to the creation of atomic bombs ,

6440-532: A stable state. Albanian society was deeply divided by religion and language, with a border dispute with Greece and an undeveloped, rural economy. In 1939, Italy invaded and annexed Albania as a separate kingdom in personal union with the Italian crown. Italy had long built strong links with the Albanian leadership and considered it firmly within its sphere of influence. Mussolini wanted a spectacular success over

6670-539: A stalemate, with Japan controlling the large cities, but being unable to rule the vast countryside. On 27 September 1940, Japan became cosignatories of the Tripartite Pact , joining a military alliance with Germany and Italy. On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor as a mean of preventing the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned expansion in

6900-611: A strong Germany ready to take on the communist menace to the east. Antisemitism during the Great Depression was widespread as many were content to blame the Jews for causing the economic downturn. Hitler began to put his plan in motion, annexing Austria in the Anschluss , or reunification of Austria to Germany, in 1938. He then negotiated the annexation of the Sudetenland , a German-speaking mountainous area of Czechoslovakia , in

7130-472: A strong challenge to the threat of communism. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a new variant of fascism called Nazism took over Germany and ended the German experiment with democracy. The Nazi Party in Germany was dedicated to the restoration of German honor and prestige, the unification of German-speaking peoples, and the annexation of Central and Eastern Europe as vassal states, with

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7360-411: A young RAF squadron commander (later nicknamed "Bomber" ), reported after a mission in 1924, "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage. They know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured". On an official level, RAF directives stressed: In these attacks, endeavour should be made to spare

7590-654: The Austro-Hungarian Empire 's heir to the throne, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand , by Gavrilo Princip of the organization " Young Bosnia ," Bosnian Serbs' liberation movement. This was similar to how the 9/11 was the inciting incident of the 21st century . Bound by Slavic nationalism to help the small Serbian state, the Russians came to the aid of the Serbs when they were attacked. Interwoven alliances, an increasing arms race, and old hatreds dragged Europe into

7820-522: The Avro Lancaster , and 20,000 lb (9,000 kg) B-29 Superfortress , with some specialized aircraft, such as the 'Special B' Avro Lancaster carrying the 22,000 lb (10,000 kg) Grand Slam . During the first year of the war in Europe, strategic bombing was developed through trial and error. The Luftwaffe had been attacking both civilian and military targets from the first day of

8050-757: The Bolsheviks managed to regain control of Belarus and Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, forming the Soviet Union . In the Near East , Egypt and Iraq gained independence. During the Great Depression , countries in Latin America nationalised many foreign companies (most of which belonged to the United States ) in a bid to strengthen their own economies. The territorial ambitions of

8280-558: The Cold War led to the Space Race and the creation of space-based rockets, and the World Wide Web was created. These advancements have played a significant role in citizens' lives and shaped the 21st century into what it is today. The new beginning of the 20th century marked significant changes. The 1900s saw the decade herald a series of inventions, including the automobile , airplane and radio broadcasting . 1914 saw

8510-703: The Dodecanese Islands , in return for a payment to Turkey , the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, though he failed in an attempt to extract a mandate of a portion of Iraq from Britain. The month following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, Mussolini ordered the invasion of the Greek island of Corfu after the Corfu incident . The Italian press supported the move, noting that Corfu had been

8740-865: The Entente , the Americans came up with the Dawes Plan and Wall Street invested heavily in Germany, which repaid its reparations to nations that, in turn, used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade, prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties . The important stages of interwar diplomacy and international relations included resolutions of wartime issues, such as reparations owed by Germany and boundaries; American involvement in European finances and disarmament projects;

8970-610: The Imperial Japanese Army and supported by other right-wing societies. The IJA's nationalism ended civilian rule in Japan until after 1945. The Army, however, was itself divided into cliques and factions with different strategic viewpoints. One faction viewed the Soviet Union as the main enemy; the other sought to build a mighty empire based in Manchuria and northern China. The Navy, while smaller and less influential,

9200-597: The Imperial Japanese Army Air Service frequently used strategic bombing over Singaporean, Burmese, and Chinese cities such as Shanghai , Guangzhou , Nanjing , Chongqing , Singapore , and Rangoon . However, the Japanese military in most places advanced quickly enough that a strategic bombing campaign was unnecessary, and the Japanese aircraft industry was incapable of producing truly strategic bombers in any event. In those places where it

9430-634: The League of Nations in 1926. Hitler came to power in January 1933, and inaugurated an aggressive power designed to give Germany economic and political domination across central Europe. He did not attempt to recover the lost colonies. Until August 1939, the Nazis denounced Communists and the Soviet Union as the greatest enemy, along with the Jews. Hitler's diplomatic strategy in the 1930s was to make seemingly reasonable demands, threatening war if they were not met. When opponents tried to appease him, he accepted

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9660-563: The Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army adequately, when it could in reality only supply a minute fraction of the needed ammunition and rations . Eventually, the starved 6th Army surrendered, dealing a severe blow to the Germans. In the end, the defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point for the war in the east. Meanwhile, the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941. This disastrous attack forced

9890-531: The May 15 Incident and the military took more power, leading to rapid democratic backsliding . In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army —acting on its own without government approval— seized control of Manchuria , an area in northeastern China that was controlled by the powerful warlord Zhang Xueliang . It created the puppet government of Manchukuo . Britain and France effectively controlled

10120-585: The Munich Conference . The British were eager to avoid war and believed Hitler's assurance to protect the security of the Czech state. Hitler annexed the rest of the Czech state shortly afterwards, indicating that he had ulterior motives. Fascism was not the only form of dictatorship to rise in the post-war period. Almost all of the new democracies in the nations of Eastern Europe collapsed and were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Spain also became

10350-513: The Mustang ) became available. Conditions in the European theatre made it very difficult to achieve the accuracy achieved using the exceptional and top-secret Norden optical bombsight in the clear skies over the desert bombing ranges of Nevada and California. Raids over Europe commonly took place in conditions of very poor visibility, with targets partly or wholly obscured by thick cloud, smokescreens, or smoke from fires started by previous raids. As

10580-621: The National Fascist Party came to power under Benito Mussolini after threatening a March on Rome in 1922. Most independent countries enacted women's suffrage in the interwar era, including Canada in 1917 (though Quebec held out longer), Britain in 1918, and the United States in 1920. There were a few major countries that held out until after the Second World War (such as France, Switzerland, and Portugal). Leslie Hume argues: The women's contribution to

10810-653: The Slavic population to act as slave labor to serve German economic interests. There was also a strong appeal to a mythical racial purity (the idea that Germans were the Herrenvolk or the "master race"), and a vicious antisemitism which promoted the idea of Jews as subhuman ( Untermensch ) and worthy only of extermination. Many people in Western Europe and the United States greeted the rise of Hitler with relief or indifference. They could see nothing wrong with

11040-515: The Soviet Union in the 1930s. This section provides a conversational overview of World War II in Europe. See main article for a fuller discussion. Soon after the events in Czechoslovakia, Britain and France issued assurances of protection to Poland, which seemed to be next on Hitler's list. World War II officially began on 1 September 1939, when Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg , or lightning war, against Poland. Britain and France, much to Hitler's surprise, immediately declared war upon Germany, but

11270-412: The Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Its occupation of Siberia proved unproductive. Japan's wartime diplomacy and limited military action had produced few results, and at the Paris Versailles peace conference at the end of the war, Japan was frustrated in its ambitions. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, its Racial Equality Proposal led to increasing diplomatic isolation. The 1902 alliance with Britain

11500-447: The V-2 , the first rockets used in modern warfare. The V-1 was often intercepted by air pilots, but the V-2 was extremely fast and carried a large payload. However, this advance came too late in the war to have any real effect. The Germans were also on the verge of introducing a number of terrifying new weapons, including advanced jet aircraft, which were too fast for ordinary propeller aircraft, and submarine improvements which would allow

11730-415: The Wehrmacht had encountered serious casualties that it could not replace. Hitler also insisted on a "hold at all costs" policy which forbade relinquishing any ground. He followed a "fight to the last man" policy that was completely ineffective. By the beginning of 1944, Hitler had lost all initiative in the Soviet Union, and was struggling even to hold back the tide turning against him. From 1942 to 1944,

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11960-416: The appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War , the bombing of Guernica by German aviators including the Condor Legion , under Nationalist command, resulted in its near destruction. Casualties were estimated to be between 500 and 1500. Though this figure was relatively small, aerial bombers and their weaponry were continually improving—already suggesting the devastation that

12190-417: The conservative and Catholic elements and the army revolted against the newly elected government of the Second Spanish Republic , and full-scale civil war erupted. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany gave munitions and strong military units to the rebel Nationalist faction , led by General Francisco Franco . The Republican (or "Loyalist") government , was on the defensive, but it received significant help from

12420-494: The law of war , or if within the laws of war are nevertheless a moral crime. According to John Algeo in Fifty Years among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms 1941–1991 , the first recorded usage of "Terror bombing" in a United States publication was in a Reader's Digest article dated June 1941, a finding confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary . Aerial attacks described as terror bombing are often long range strategic bombing raids, although attacks which result in

12650-419: The welfare state . These two politico-economic principles, the belief in government intervention and the welfare state, as opposed to the belief in the free market and private institutions, would define many political battles for the rest of the century. Fascism first appeared in Italy with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in 1922. The ideology was supported by a large proportion of the upper classes as

12880-418: The 'traditional' branches of the regular infantry , horse cavalry , and artillery . In the air, the question of allocating air forces to strategic bombing versus dedicating such forces to frontline close air support was the primary contention, with some arguing that interceptor development was outpacing bombers , and others maintaining that " the bomber will always get through ." In the naval sphere,

13110-458: The 1920s and the 1930s. The Fascist regime in the 1920s held deep antagonism towards Spain due to Miguel Primo de Rivera 's pro-French foreign policy. In 1926, Mussolini began aiding the Catalan separatist movement , which was led by Francesc Macià , against the Spanish government. With the rise of the left-wing Republican government replacing the Spanish monarchy , Spanish monarchists and fascists repeatedly approached Italy for aid in overthrowing

13340-490: The 1920s. Economic disaster led to a distrust in the effectiveness of democracy and its collapse in much of Europe and Latin America, including the Baltic and Balkan countries, Poland, Spain, and Portugal. Powerful expansionary anti-democratic regimes emerged in Italy, Japan, and Germany. Fascism took control of the Kingdom of Italy in 1922; as the Great Depression worsened, Nazism emerged victorious in Germany, fascism spread to many other countries in Europe, and also played

13570-423: The 1930s—in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War —they were ineffective. Commentators observed the failures and some air forces, such as the Luftwaffe , concentrated their efforts upon direct support of the troops. Terror bombing is a term used for aerial attacks planned to weaken or break enemy morale. Use of the term to refer to aerial attacks implies the attacks are criminal according to

13800-402: The Allied campaign against Germany only really succeeded when the Allies began targeting oil refineries and transportation in the last year of the war. At the same time, the strategic bombing of Germany was used as a morale booster for the Allies in the period before the land war resumed in Western Europe in June 1944. In the Asiatic-Pacific Theater , the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service and

14030-399: The Allied forces, already war-weary and stretched thin after two years of war in Europe and North Africa. Japan managed to capture British Burma , New Guinea , the Dutch East Indies , the Solomon Islands , Bali and Timor . In March 1942, days before the surrender of the Philippines, general Douglas MacArthur, who came out of retirement to become commander of United States Army Forces in

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14260-440: The Allied news media did the same. However, at a SHAEF press conference on 16 February 1945, two days after the bombing of Dresden , British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson replied to a question by one of the journalists that the primary target of the bombing had been on communications to prevent the Germans from moving military supplies and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that

14490-441: The Allies suggested Calais as the landing site. By this time, the war was looking ever darker for Germany. On 20 July 1944, a group of conspiring German officers attempted to assassinate Hitler. The bomb they used did injure him, but the second was not used, and a table shielded Hitler in a stroke of luck. The plotters still could have launched a coup, but only the head of occupied Paris acted, arresting SS and Gestapo forces in

14720-402: The Americans into the war. Parts of the German brass advised against declaring war on the US, arguing that since Japan was the aggressor, the Tripartite Pact didn't bind Germany to do so. However, Hitler hoped that Japan would be able to quickly defeat the US and then turn its attention on helping the effort against Russia. Both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States a few days after

14950-427: The Americans set their eyes on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, which was of great strategic importance, being situated halfway between Tokyo and the Mariana Islands . Capturing the island meant not only a better launch station for aerial attacks against mainland Japan, but also the prevention of its use as an early-warning station against air raids. The Japanese were expecting an attack and have been heavily fortifying

15180-410: The Army's aggression in Manchuria, and announced it was withdrawing. On the contrary, the Army completed the conquest of Manchuria, and the civilian cabinet resigned. The political parties were divided on the issue of military expansion. Prime Minister Tsuyoshi tried to negotiate with China but was assassinated in the May 15 Incident in 1932, which ushered in an era of nationalism and militarism led by

15410-404: The Atlantic coast, allowing Marshal Pétain to remain as dictator of an area known as Vichy France . However, members of the escaped French Army formed around General Charles de Gaulle to create the Free French forces, which would continue to battle Hitler in the stead of an independent France. At this moment, Italy, under Benito Mussolini , declared war on the Allies on 10 June, thinking that

15640-416: The Axis military alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1930, the London disarmament conference angered the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces . The Imperial Japanese Navy demanded parity with the United States, Britain and France, but was rejected and the conference kept the 1921 ratios. Japan was required to scrap a capital ship . Extremists assassinated Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in

15870-450: The Belgian city of Liège , killing nine civilians. The second attack was on the night of 24–25 August 1914, when eight bombs were dropped from a German airship onto the Belgian city of Antwerp . The first effective strategic bombing was pioneered by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) in 1914. The mission was to attack the Zeppelin production lines and their sheds at Cologne (Köln) and Düsseldorf . Led by Charles Rumney Samson ,

16100-426: The British and Americans (who started the war with predominantly similarly sized bombers) developed their strategic force based upon much larger four-engined bombers for their strategic campaigns. The payload carried by these planes ranged from 4,000 lb (1,800 kg) for the B-17 Flying Fortress on long-range missions, to 8,000 lb (3,600 kg) for the B-24 Liberator , 14,000 lb (6,400 kg) for

16330-430: The British be cowed into making peace. At first the Luftwaffe raids took place in daylight, but changed to night bombing attacks when losses became unsustainable. The RAF, who had preferred precision bombing, also switched to night bombing, also due to excessive losses. Before the Rotterdam Blitz on 14 May 1940 the British restricted themselves to tactical bombing west of the Rhine and naval installations. The day after

16560-593: The Eastern England towns of Great Yarmouth , Sheringham , King's Lynn , and the surrounding villages. In all, four people were killed and sixteen injured, and monetary damage was estimated at £7,740 (about US$ 36,000 at the time). German airships also bombed on other fronts, for example in January 1915 on Liepāja in Latvia. In 1915 there were 19 more raids, in which 37 tons of bombs were dropped, killing 181 people and injuring 455. Raids continued in 1916. London

16790-715: The Far East at the onset of the war, was forced to flee and narrowly escape to Australia. On 19 February 1942, Japan also launched a devastating aerial attack on the Australian city of Darwin, in what was the first attack by a foreign power on Australian soil. The turning of the tide came in early May, during the Battle of the Coral Sea , which proved the first strategic victory of the Allies against Japanese expansion. This

17020-563: The First World War and Russian Civil War . In advanced economies the prosperity reached middle class households and many in the working class with radio , automobiles , telephones , and electric lighting and appliances . There was unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture. The media began to focus on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars. Major cities built large sports stadiums for

17250-542: The French government. But the hyperinflation caused many prudent savers to lose all the money they had saved. Weimar added new internal enemies every year, as anti-democratic Nazis , Nationalists , and Communists battled each other in the streets. Germany was the first state to establish diplomatic relations with the new Soviet Union . Under the Treaty of Rapallo , Germany accorded the Soviet Union de jure recognition, and

17480-756: The French-dominated Suez Canal Company accept an Italian representative on its board of directors. Italy opposed the French monopoly over the Suez Canal because, under the French-dominated Suez Canal Company, all merchant traffic to the Italian East Africa colony was forced to pay tolls on entering the canal. Albanian Prime Minister and President Ahmet Zogu , who had, in 1928, proclaimed himself King of Albania , failed to create

17710-801: The French-run Suez Canal . Three weeks later, Mussolini told Ciano that he intended for an Italian takeover of Albania. Mussolini professed that Italy would only be able to "breathe easily" if it had acquired a contiguous colonial domain in Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans, and when ten million Italians had settled in them. In 1938, Italy demanded a sphere of influence in the Suez Canal in Egypt , specifically demanding that

17940-534: The German Naval Airship Department. By the end of the war, 51 raids had been undertaken, in which 5,806 bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. These raids caused only minor hampering of wartime production, by later standards. A much greater impact was the diversion of twelve aircraft squadrons, many guns, and over 10,000 men to air defenses. The raids generated a wave of hysteria, partially caused by media. This revealed

18170-655: The Germans prevented any real action being taken. Nevertheless, it was one of the bloodiest battles of the war and the second costliest battle in the history of the American Army . In early February 1945, the three Allied leaders, Franklin Roosevelt , Winston Churchill , and Joseph Stalin , met at newly liberated Yalta in the Crimea in the Soviet Union in the Yalta Conference . Here, they agreed upon

18400-535: The Germans to again fight effectively in the Atlantic. All this came too late to save Hitler. Although a September invasion of The Netherlands failed, the Allies made steady advances. In the winter of 1944, Hitler put everything into one last desperate gamble in the West, known as the Battle of the Bulge , which, despite an initial advance, was a failure, because the introduction of new Allied tanks and low troop numbers among

18630-569: The Imperial Japanese Navy during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in what was to be the largest naval battle of World War II and possibly the largest naval battle of all time . The Allied victory achieved its stated goal of further severing oil supplied to the Japanese army, which was already struggling to fuel the remainder of its naval power. The battle of Leyte Gulf is also notable as the first battle in which Japanese aircraft carried out organized kamikaze attacks. By early 1945,

18860-881: The Irish Free State) were self-governing and gained semi-independence in the World War, while Britain still controlled foreign policy and defence in all except Ireland. The right of the Dominions to set their own foreign policy was recognised in 1923 and formalised by the 1931 Statute of Westminster . The Irish Free State effectively broke all ties with Britain in 1937, leaving the Commonwealth and becoming an independent republic . French census statistics from 1938 show an imperial population with France at over 150 million people, outside of France itself, of 102.8 million people living on 13.5 million square kilometers. Of

19090-657: The Japanese Empire became more feasible, with important battles taking place in Burma , Borneo and China . Continuing to come nearer the main Japanese islands, on 1 April 1945 the US Marines mounted the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater on the island of Okinawa . After a long campaign of island hopping , the Allies were planning to use Kadena Air Base on the large island of Okinawa as

19320-473: The Japanese island of Iwo Jima further enhanced the capabilities that the Americans possessed in their strategic bombing campaign. High-explosive and incendiary bombs were used against Japan to devastating effect, with greater indiscriminate loss of life in the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945 than was caused either by the Dresden mission , or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki . Unlike

19550-608: The League of Nations, which issued the Lytton Report in 1932, saying that Japan had genuine grievances, but it acted illegally in seizing the entire province. Japan quit the League, and Britain and France took no action. US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson announced that the United States would also not recognise Japan's conquest as legitimate. Germany welcomed Japan's actions. The civilian government in Tokyo tried to minimise

19780-457: The League of Nations. Egypt's King Fuad and his son King Farouk and their conservative allies stayed in power with lavish lifestyles thanks to an informal alliance with Britain who would protect them from both secular and Muslim radicalism. Mandatory Iraq , a British mandate since 1920, gained official independence as the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932 when King Faisal agreed to British terms of

20010-612: The Luftwaffe to launch a massive air war against the British isles, which would come to be known as the Battle of Britain . The British at first suffered steady losses, but eventually managed to turn the air war against Germany, taking down 2,698 German planes throughout the summer of 1940 to only 915 Royal Air Force (RAF) losses. The key turning point came when the Germans discontinued successful attacks against British airplane factories and radar command and coordination stations and turned to civilian bombing known as terror bombing using

20240-476: The Mediterranean": The bars of this prison are Corsica , Tunisia , Malta , and Cyprus . The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez . Corsica is a pistol pointed at the heart of Italy; Tunisia at Sicily. Malta and Cyprus constitute a threat to all our positions in the eastern and western Mediterranean. Greece, Turkey, and Egypt have been ready to form a chain with Great Britain and to complete

20470-560: The Nazis expected or were ready for. After establishing the " Rome-Berlin Axis " with Benito Mussolini , and signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan – which was joined by Italy a year later in 1937 – Hitler felt able to take the offensive in foreign policy. On 12 March 1938, German troops marched into Austria, where an attempted Nazi coup had been unsuccessful in 1934. When Austrian-born Hitler entered Vienna , he

20700-550: The Republican forces. The Soviet Union provided armaments but never enough to equip the heterogeneous government militias and the " International Brigades " of outside far-left volunteers. The civil war did not escalate into a larger conflict, but did become a worldwide ideological battleground that pitted all the Communists and many socialists and liberals against Catholics , conservatives and fascists. Worldwide there

20930-589: The Republican government, in which Italy agreed to support them to establish a pro-Italian government in Spain. In July 1936, Francisco Franco of the Nationalist faction in the Spanish Civil War requested Italian support against the ruling Republican faction, and guaranteed that, if Italy supported the Nationalists, "future relations would be more than friendly" and that Italian support "would have permitted

21160-570: The Rhineland, and Germany was not allowed to have a real army, navy, or air force. Reparations were demanded, especially by France, involving shipments of raw materials, as well as annual payments. When Germany defaulted on its reparation payments, French and Belgian troops occupied the heavily industrialised Ruhr district (January 1923). The German government encouraged the population of the Ruhr to passive resistance : shops would not sell goods to

21390-981: The Rotterdam Blitz a new directive was issued to the RAF to attack targets in the Ruhr , including oil plants and other civilian industrial targets which aided the German war effort, such as blast furnaces that at night were self-illuminating. After the Butt Report (released in September 1941) proved the inadequacy of RAF Bomber Command training methods and equipment, the RAF adopted an area-attack strategy, by which it hoped to impede Germany's war production, her powers of resistance (by destroying resources and forcing Germany to divert resources from her front lines to defend her air space), and her morale. The RAF dramatically improved its navigation so that on average its bombs hit closer to target. Accuracy never exceeded

21620-582: The Soviet Union and Japan , leading to multiple clashes along the Soviet and Japanese occupied Manchurian border; fascist diplomacy, including the aggressive moves by Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany; the Spanish Civil War ; Italy's invasion and occupation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the Horn of Africa ; the appeasement of Germany's expansionist moves against the German-speaking nation of Austria ,

21850-436: The Soviet Union and Mexico. Led by Great Britain and France, and including the United States, most countries remained neutral and refused to provide armaments to either side. The powerful fear was that this localised conflict would escalate into a European conflagration that no one wanted. The Spanish Civil War was marked by numerous small battles and sieges, and many atrocities, until the Nationalists won in 1939 by overwhelming

22080-435: The Soviet Union. Stalin had been warned about the attack, both by other countries and by his own intelligence network, but he had refused to believe it. Therefore, the Soviet army was largely unprepared and suffered massive setbacks in the early part of the war, despite Stalin's orders to counterattack the Germans. Throughout 1941, German forces, divided into 3 army groups (Army Group A, Army Group B, and Army Group C), occupied

22310-667: The Soviets, Japanese, Italians, and Germans led to the expansion of their domains. Militarily, the period would see a markedly rapid advance in technology which, alongside lessons learned from WWI, would catalyze new strategic and tactical innovations. While the period would largely see a continuation of the development of the technologies pioneered in WWI, debates emerged as to the most effective use of these advancements. On land, discussions focused on how armoured , mechanized , and motorized forces should be employed, particularly in-relation to

22540-674: The Spanish Civil War. Germany seized Austria , considered to be a German state, in 1938, and took over Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement with Britain and France. Forming a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, Germany invaded Poland after Poland's refusal to cede the Free City of Danzig in September 1939. Britain and France declared war and World War II began – somewhat sooner than

22770-537: The Spanish Nationalists, generally agreed. The strategic bombing conducted in World War II was unlike any before. The campaigns conducted in Europe and Asia could involve aircraft dropping thousands of tons of conventional bombs or a nuclear weapon over a single city. Area bombardment came to prominence during World War II with the use of large numbers of unguided gravity bombs , often with

23000-464: The Spanish and French for control of Morocco. The Spanish had faced unrest off and on from the 1890s, but in 1921, Spanish forces were massacred at the Battle of Annual . El-Krim founded an independent Rif Republic that operated until 1926, but had no international recognition. Eventually, France and Spain agreed to end the revolt. They sent in 200,000 soldiers, forcing el-Krim to surrender in 1926; he

23230-685: The Trenchard school in Great Britain, and General Billy Mitchell in the United States. These theorists thought that aerial bombardment of the enemy's homeland would be an important part of future wars. Not only would such attacks weaken the enemy by destroying important military infrastructure, they would also break the morale of the civilian population, forcing their government to capitulate. Although area bombing theorists acknowledged that measures could be taken to defend against bombers—using fighter planes and anti-aircraft artillery —the maxim of

23460-544: The USAAF's strategic bombing campaign in Europe, with its avowed (if unachievable) objective of precision bombing of strategic targets, the bombing of Japanese cities involved the deliberate targeting of residential zones from the outset. Bomb loads included very high proportions of incendiaries, with the intention of igniting the highly combustible wooden houses common in Japanese cities and thereby generating firestorms. The final development of strategic bombing in World War II

23690-527: The United Kingdom, and General Billy Mitchell in the United States. These theorists were highly influential, both on the military justification for an independent air force (such as the Royal Air Force ) and in influencing political thoughts on a future war as exemplified by Stanley Baldwin 's 1932 comment that the bomber will always get through . One of the aims of war is to demoralize

23920-423: The United States and Britain acted in only a limited manner in the European theater, much to the chagrin of Stalin. They drove out the Germans in Africa, invading Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942. Then, on 10 July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily , in preparation for an advance through Italy, the "soft underbelly" of the Axis, as Winston Churchill called it. On 9 September, the invasion of Italy began. By

24150-613: The United States or Japan, Britain opted not to renew the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and instead signed the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty , in which Britain accepted naval parity with the United States. The issue of the empire's security was a serious concern in Britain, as it was vital to the British pride, its finance, and its trade-oriented economy. India strongly supported the Empire in the First World War. It expected

24380-521: The United States, where excerpts from his book The Command of the Air (1921) were published. These visions of cities laid waste by bombing also gripped the popular imagination and found expression in novels such as Douhet's The War of 19-- (1930) and H. G. Wells 's The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (filmed by Alexander Korda as Things to Come (1936)). Douhet's proposals were hugely influential among air force enthusiasts, arguing as they did that

24610-652: The Yemeni side, were 65 killed or wounded (one RAF pilot was killed and one airman wounded). Between the wars the RAF conducted 26 separate air operations within the Aden Protectorate. The majority were conducted in response to persistent banditry or to restore the Government's authority. Excluding operations against Yemeni forces—which had effectively ceased by 1934—a total of twelve deaths were attributed to air attacks conducted between 1919 and 1939. Bombing as

24840-599: The acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers. Nuclear weapons defined strategic bombing during the Cold War . The age of the massive strategic bombing campaign had come to an end. It was replaced by more devastating attacks using improved targeting and weapons technology. Strategic bombing by the Great Powers also became politically indefensible. The political fallout resulting from

25070-467: The aim of capturing the oil-rich Caucacus and the city of Stalingrad . However, he repeatedly switched his troops to where they were not needed. The offensive bogged down, and the entire 6th Army , considered the best of German troops, was trapped in Stalingrad. Hitler now refused to let 6th Army break out. He insisted that the German army would force its way in. Hermann Göring also assured Hitler that

25300-478: The air raids with a series of night infiltration bombings of ADD airfields near Leningrad . Strategic bombing in Europe never reached the decisive completeness the American campaign against Japan achieved, helped in part by the fragility of Japanese housing , which was particularly vulnerable to firebombing through the use of incendiary devices . The destruction of German infrastructure became apparent, but

25530-539: The area. The next day, following Roosevelt's Infamy Speech , the United States declared war on Japan, marking the official entry of both nations in World War 2. At the same time, Japan also launched attacks on Thailand , the British colonies of Malaya , Singapore , Hong Kong and American military bases in Guam , Wake Island and the Philippines . The next six months were dominated by Japanese victories against

25760-501: The army could find, including fishing boats. Hitler refused to "risk" his panzers on an action at Dunkirk, listening to the advice of Air Minister Hermann Göring and allowing the Luftwaffe , or German Air Force, to handle the job. The irony of this was that the escaped men would form the core of the army that was to invade the beaches of Normandy in 1944. Hitler did not occupy all of France, but about three-quarters, including all of

25990-426: The attack. Throughout the rest of 1942 and 1943, the Soviets began to gain ground against the Germans after some victories like the tank battle of Kursk . By this time, Rommel had been forced to abandon North Africa after a defeat by Montgomery at El Alamein in what was the first decisive victory of the Allies over the Germany army, leading Churchill to declare it " the end of the beginning ". On several fronts,

26220-564: The beginning of 1945, Hitler was on his last strings. The Soviets launched a devastating attack from Poland into Germany and Eastern Europe, intending to take Berlin. The Germans collapsed in the West, allowing the Allies to fan out across Germany. However, the Supreme Allied Commander, American general Dwight D. Eisenhower , refused to strike for Berlin, and instead became obsessed with reports of possible guerrilla activity in southern Germany, which in reality existed mainly in

26450-554: The blame on Chinese dissidents. Japan then used this as pretext to invade northeastern China the next day and turn the region of Manchuria into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo . After the League of Nations commissioned the 1932 Lytton Report , which exposed the Mukden Incident as a Japanese ruse, Japan was left internationally isolated, withdrawing from the League of Nations in March 1933. In 1934 Manchukuo became

26680-521: The bombing air arm was the most important, powerful, and invulnerable part of any military. He envisaged future wars as lasting a matter of a few weeks. While each opposing Army and Navy fought an inglorious holding campaign, the respective Air Forces would dismantle their enemies' country, and if one side did not rapidly surrender, both would be so weak after the first few days that the war would effectively cease. Fighter aircraft would be relegated to spotting patrols but would be essentially powerless to resist

26910-507: The bombing of railways, trains, canals, and roads more harmful to production than attacks on factories themselves, Sir Roy Fedden (in his report on a postwar British scientific intelligence mission) calling it "fatal" and saying it reduced aero-engine production by two thirds (from a maximum output of 5,000 to 7,000 a month). Strategic bombing was a way of taking the war into Europe while Allied ground forces were unable to do so. Between them, Allied air forces claimed to be able to bomb "around

27140-595: The cession of Sudeten territory to the German Reich by Czechoslovakia . Hitler thereupon declared that all of German Reich's territorial claims had been fulfilled. However, hardly six months after the Munich Agreement, in March 1939, Hitler used the smouldering quarrel between Slovaks and Czechs as a pretext for taking over the rest of Czechoslovakia as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . In

27370-534: The city. The German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels , rallied the Nazis and hunted down the conspirators, arresting up to 7000 people in the wake of the plot, according to some estimates. In France, the Allies took Normandy and finally Paris on 25 August. In the east, the Soviets had advanced almost to the former Polish-Soviet border. At this time, Hitler introduced the V-weapons , the V-1 flying bomb and, later,

27600-511: The civilian population , thought to be demoralizing to the enemy, seemed to have the opposite effect. E. B. Strauss surmised, "Observers state that one of the most remarkable effects of the bombing of open towns in Government Spain had been the welding together into a formidable fighting force of groups of political factions who were previously at each other's throats...", a sentiment with which Hitler 's Luftwaffe , supporting

27830-483: The clock". In fact, few targets were ever hit by British and American forces the same day, the strategic isolation of Normandy on D-Day and the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 being exceptions rather than the rule. There were generally no coordinated plans for the around-the-clock bombing of any target. In some cases, single missions have been considered to constitute strategic bombing. The bombing of Peenemünde

28060-610: The completion of the Panama Canal . From 1914 to 1918, the First World War, and its aftermath, caused major changes in the power balance of the world, destroying or transforming some of the most powerful empires. The First World War (or simply WWI), termed "The Great War" by contemporaries, started in 1914 and ended in 1918. The war and by extension the century as a whole was ignited by the Assassination in Sarajevo of

28290-399: The crisis or to alleviate the suffering of many ordinary people. Thus, the idea that the existing system could be reformed by government intervention in the economy, rather than by continuing the laissez-faire approach, became prominent as a solution to the crisis. Democratic governments assumed the responsibility to provide needed services in society, and to alleviate poverty. Thus was born

28520-601: The deaths of civilians may also be described as such, or if the attacks involve fighters strafing they may be labelled "terror attacks". German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other high-ranking officials of Nazi Germany frequently described attacks by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) during their strategic bombing campaigns as Terrorangriffe —terror attacks. The Allied governments usually described their bombing of cities with euphemisms such as area bombing (RAF) or precision bombing (USAAF), and for most of World War II

28750-399: The decision was made to resort to the first use of atomic bombs . On 6 August, the 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay , took off from Tinian and dropped the bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The two bombings killed 129,000–226,000 people, most of them civilians. On 9 August, the Soviet Union also invaded Manchukuo in what was to be

28980-410: The detachment radius) of communications, their indifference to obstacles, and the unlikelihood of casualties to air personnel combine to encourage their use offensively more often than the occasion warrants. In British strikes over Yemen in over a six-month period, sixty tons of bombs were dropped in over 1,200 cumulative flying hours. By August 1928, total losses in ground fighting and air attack, on

29210-593: The devastation of the First World War and the destabilising effects of not just the collapse of the Russian Empire , but the destruction of the German , Austro-Hungarian , and Ottoman Empires , as well. There were numerous new or restored countries in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, some small in size, such as Lithuania and Latvia , and some larger, such as Poland and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes . The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus, when Germany could no longer afford war reparations to Britain, France and other former members of

29440-413: The development of the destroyer and aircraft with a longer patrol range were effective at countering the U-boat threat and by December 1943, the Germans had lost the battle. On 6 June 1944, the Western Allies finally launched the long-awaited assault on "Fortress Europe" so wanted by Stalin. The offensive, codenamed Operation Overlord , began the early morning hours of 6 June. The day, known as D-day ,

29670-483: The disaster in the Low Countries, France, considered at the time to have had the finest army in the world, lasted only four weeks, with Paris being occupied on 14 June. Three days later, Marshal Philippe Pétain surrendered to the Germans. The debacle in France also led to one of the war's greatest mysteries, and Hitler's first great blunder, Dunkirk , where a third of a million trapped British and French soldiers were evacuated by not only British war boats, but every craft

29900-451: The distinctive "bomb" sound created by the German dive-bomber, the Stuka . The switch came after a small British bombing force had attacked Berlin. Hitler was infuriated. However, his decision to switch the attacks' focus allowed the British to rebuild the RAF and eventually force the Germans to indefinitely postpone Sea Lion. The importance of the Battle of Britain is that it marked the first of Hitler's defeats, however its overall impact

30130-400: The dominant power in the Mediterranean that would be able to challenge France or Britain, as well as attain access to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans . Mussolini alleged that Italy required uncontested access to the world's oceans and shipping lanes to ensure its national sovereignty. This was elaborated on in a document he later drew up in 1939 called "The March to the Oceans", and included in

30360-545: The east under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov counterattacked the Germans and drove them from Moscow. Mussolini had launched an offensive in North Africa from Italian-controlled Libya into British-controlled Egypt. However, the British smashed the Italians and were on the verge of taking Libya. Hitler decided to help by sending in a few thousand troops, a Luftwaffe division, and the first-rate general Erwin Rommel . Rommel managed to use his small force to repeatedly smash massively superior British forces and to recapture

30590-438: The end of World War II, but because the term has pejorative connotations, others have denied that such bombing campaigns and raids are examples of "terror bombing". Defensive measures against air raids include: Strategic bombing was used in World War I, though it was not understood in its present form. The first aerial bombing of a city was on 6 August 1914 when the German Army Zeppelin Z VI bombed, with artillery shells,

30820-430: The enemy; facing continual death and destruction may make the prospect of peace or surrender preferable. The proponents of strategic bombing between the world wars, such as General Douhet, expected that direct attacks upon an enemy country's cities by strategic bombers would lead to a rapid collapse of civilian morale so that political pressure to sue for peace would lead to a rapid conclusion. When such attacks were tried in

31050-404: The entire island for over a year. Despite the American troops outnumbering the Japanese to a rate of more than 3 to 1, the USA suffered heavy casualties in the 36 days of fighting, with over 6,800 Marines killed and another 20,000 wounded, leading some historians to question the strategic worth of the action. With Japan struggling to defend the homeland islands, counteroffensives in other parts of

31280-451: The execution of His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II and his family) sparked a wave of communist revolutions across Europe, prompting many to believe that a socialist world revolution could be realized in the near future. However, the European revolutions were defeated, Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, and within a few years, Joseph Stalin displaced Leon Trotsky as the de facto leader of the Soviet Union . The idea of worldwide revolution

31510-502: The expectations and failures of the League of Nations ; the relationships of the new countries to the old; the distrustful relations of the Soviet Union to the capitalist world; peace and disarmament efforts; responses to the Great Depression starting in 1929; the collapse of world trade; the collapse of democratic regimes one by one; the growth of efforts at economic autarky; Japanese aggressiveness toward China , occupying large amounts of Chinese land, as well as border disputes between

31740-428: The fans, in addition to palatial cinemas. The mechanisation of agriculture continued apace, producing an expansion of output that lowered prices, and made many farm workers redundant. Often they moved to nearby industrial towns and cities. The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place after 1929. The timing varied across nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until

31970-436: The first independent strategic bombing force, was created in April 1918. By the end of the war, the force had aircraft that could reach Berlin , but these were never used. Following the war, the concept of strategic bombing developed. Calculations of the number of dead to the weight of bombs would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the interwar years. As bombers became larger, it

32200-447: The first. As Hitler's forces conquered Poland, the Soviet Union , under General Secretary Joseph Stalin , was acting out guarantees of territory under a secret part of a nonaggression pact between the USSR and Germany known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact . This treaty gave Stalin free rein to take the Baltic republics of Estonia , Latvia, and Lithuania , as well as Eastern Poland, all of which would remain in Soviet possession after

32430-399: The following two decades fighting for survival in an environment of severe government spending constraints. In Italy, the airpower prophet General Giulio Douhet asserted the basic principle of strategic bombing was the offensive, and there was no defense against carpet bombing and poison gas attacks. The seeds of Douhet's apocalyptic predictions found fertile soil in France, Germany, and

32660-406: The force of four aircraft inflicted minor damage on the sheds. The raid was repeated a month later with slightly more success. Within a year or so, specialized aircraft and dedicated bomber squadrons were in service on both sides. These were generally used for tactical bombing; the aim was that of directly harming enemy troops, strongpoints, or equipment, usually within a relatively small distance of

32890-410: The foreign soldiers, coal mines would not dig for the foreign troops, trams in which members of the occupation army had taken seat would be left abandoned in the middle of the street. The German government printed vast quantities of paper money, causing hyperinflation , which also damaged the French economy . The passive resistance proved effective, insofar as the occupation became a loss-making deal for

33120-399: The former Austro-Hungarian Empire to accommodate the nationalist aspirations of these groups. An international body called the League of Nations was formed to mediate disputes and prevent future wars, although its effectiveness was severely limited by, among other things, its reluctance and inability to act. The Russian Revolution of 1917 (ending in the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and

33350-463: The front line. Eventually, attention turned to the possibility of causing indirect harm to the enemy by systematically attacking vital rear-area resources. The most well known attacks were those done by Zeppelins over England through the course of the war. The first aerial bombardment of English civilians was on January 19, 1915, when two Zeppelins dropped 24 fifty-kilogram (110-pound) high-explosive bombs and ineffective three-kilogram incendiaries on

33580-459: The gains that were offered, then went to the next target. That aggressive strategy worked as Germany pulled out of the League of Nations , rejected the Versailles Treaty , and began to rearm. Retaking the Territory of the Saar Basin in the aftermath of a plebiscite that favoured returning to Germany, Hitler's Germany remilitarised the Rhineland , formed the Pact of Steel alliance with Mussolini's Italy, and sent massive military aid to Franco in

33810-471: The global economy remained strong through most of the 1920s. The war had provided a stimulus for industry and economic activity in general. There were many warning signs foretelling the Crash of 29 of the global economic system at the end of the decade, that were generally not understood by the political leadership of the time. The responses to the crisis often made the situation worse, as millions of people watched their savings become next to worthless, and

34040-427: The help they delivered to Poland was negligible. Sixteen days later, Poland was attacked from the East by Soviet Union, acting in a secret alliance with Nazi Germany. After only a few weeks, the Polish forces were overwhelmed, and its government fled to exile in London (see Polish government in Exile ). In starting World War II, the Germans had unleashed a new type of warfare, characterized by highly mobile forces and

34270-411: The idea of a steady job with a reasonable income fading away. Many sought answers from alternative ideologies such as communism and fascism. They believed that the capitalist economic system was collapsing and that new ideas were required to meet the crisis. The early responses to the crisis were based on the assumption that the free market would correct itself. This, however, did very little to correct

34500-469: The influence of Rome to prevail over that of Berlin in the future politics of Spain". Italy intervened in the civil war with the intention of occupying the Balearic Islands and creating a client state in Spain. Italy sought the control of the Balearic Islands due to its strategic position—Italy could use the islands as a base to disrupt the lines of communication between France and its North African colonies and between British Gibraltar and Malta . After

34730-405: The interwar period would see a shift away from 'traditional' line- and front-based warfare and towards a significantly more mobile, mechanized, and asymmetric form of combat. Following the Armistice of Compiègne on 11 November 1918 that ended World War I, the years 1918–1924 were marked by turmoil as the Russian Civil War continued to rage on, and Eastern Europe struggled to recover from

34960-434: The issue and a longtime opponent of strategic bombing, Richard Stokes MP , asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March. The controversy stirred up by the Cowan news report reached the highest levels of the British Government when on 28 March 1945 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill , sent a memo by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff in which he started with

35190-413: The last campaign of the war. On 10 August the "sacred decision" was made by Japanese Cabinet to accept the Potsdam terms and on 15 August Emperor Hirohito broadcast to the nation and to the world at large the rescript of surrender, ending the Second World War. The formal Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on 2 September 1945, on the battleship USS Missouri , in Tokyo Bay . The surrender

35420-444: The late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The depression originated in the United States and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of 29 October 1929 (known as Black Tuesday ). Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession . Some economies started to recover by

35650-442: The lead. U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes sponsored the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 in determining how many capital ships each major country was allowed. The new allocations were actually followed and there were no naval races in the 1920s. Britain played a leading role in the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference and the 1930 London Conference that led to the London Naval Treaty , which added cruisers and submarines to

35880-675: The list of ship allocations. However the refusal of Japan, Germany, Italy and the USSR to go along with this led to the meaningless Second London Naval Treaty of 1936. Naval disarmament had collapsed and the issue became rearming for a war against Germany and Japan. The Roaring Twenties highlighted novel and highly visible social and cultural trends and innovations. These trends, made possible by sustained economic prosperity, were most visible in major cities like New York City , Chicago , Paris , Berlin , and London . The Jazz Age began and Art Deco peaked. For women, knee-length skirts and dresses became socially acceptable, as did bobbed hair with

36110-402: The major Chinese cities and industrial areas. A puppet government was set up. In the U.S., government and public opinion—even including those who were isolationist regarding Europe—was resolutely opposed to Japan and gave strong support to China. Meanwhile, the Japanese Army fared badly in large battles with the Soviet Red Army in Mongolia at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in summer 1939. The USSR

36340-544: The mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries both rich and poor . Personal income , tax revenue , profits , and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%. Unemployment in the United States rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Prices fell sharply, especially for mining and agricultural commodities. Business profits fell sharply as well, with

36570-454: The mighty bombers. In support of this theory, he argued for targeting of the civilian population as much as any military target, since a nation's morale was as important a resource as its weapons. Paradoxically, he suggested that this would actually reduce total casualties, since "The time would soon come when to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to

36800-437: The most advanced Western European models. They started with textiles, railways, and shipping, expanding to electricity and machinery. The most serious weakness was a shortage of raw materials. Industry ran short of copper, and coal became a net importer. A deep flaw in the aggressive military strategy was a heavy dependence on imports including 100 per cent of the aluminium, 85 per cent of the iron ore, and especially 79 per cent of

37030-506: The most. The Weimar Republic in Germany gave way to two episodes of political and economic turmoil, the first culminated in the German hyperinflation of 1923 and the failed Beer Hall Putsch of that same year. The second convulsion, brought on by the worldwide depression and Germany's disastrous monetary policies, resulted in the further rise of Nazism . In Asia, Japan became an ever more assertive power, especially with regard to China . Democracy and prosperity largely went together in

37260-413: The new Boeing B-29 bombers. Despite the advances of the Allies, massive fighting was still taking place, both in South-East Asia with the Japanese offensive in India and in the Pacific, with the Battle of the Philippine Sea , where Japan suffered major losses and definitively lost the ability to rely on aircraft carriers . In later October, a combined attack of American and Australian forces took on

37490-562: The oceans. In the Balkans , the Fascist regime claimed Dalmatia and held ambitions over Albania , Slovenia , Croatia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Macedonia , and Greece based on the precedent of previous Roman dominance in these regions. Dalmatia and Slovenia were to be directly annexed into Italy while the remainder of the Balkans was to be transformed into Italian client states. The regime also sought to establish protective patron-client relationships with Austria , Hungary , Romania , and Bulgaria . In both 1932 and 1935, Italy demanded

37720-478: The offensive, earning victories in the New Guinea campaign at Guadalcanal , Milne Bay and Buna-Gona . Over the next two years the Allies slowly captured one island base after another, trying to get closer to Japan itself, where it planned to launch massive strategic air attacks and, only if absolutely necessary, execute a ground invasion. By July 1944, the US recaptured Guam and captured Tinian , which finally put them in attacking range of mainland Japan using

37950-405: The official records of a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism . This text asserted that maritime position determined a nation's independence: countries with free access to the high seas were independent; while those who lacked this, were not. Italy, which only had access to an inland sea without French and British acquiescence, was only a "semi-independent nation", and alleged to be a "prisoner in

38180-525: The oil supplies. It was one thing to go to war with China or Russia, but quite another to be in conflict with the key suppliers, especially the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, of oil and iron. Japan joined the Allies of the First World War to make territorial gains. Together with the British Empire, it divided up Germany's territories scattered in the Pacific and on the Chinese coast ; they did not amount to very much. The other Allies pushed back hard against Japan's efforts to dominate China through

38410-651: The only answers—a later generation would revisit this, as Mutual Assured Destruction . During the interwar period (1919–1939), the use of aerial bombing was developed as part of British foreign policy in its colonies, with Hugh Trenchard as its leading proponent, Sir Charles Portal , Sir Arthur Harris , and Sidney Bufton . The Trenchard School theories were successfully put into action in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq ) where RAF bombers used high-explosive bombs and strafing runs against Arab forces. The techniques of so-called "Air Control" also included target marking and locating, as well as formation flying. Arthur Harris ,

38640-409: The politico-military encirclement of Italy. Thus Greece, Turkey, and Egypt must be considered vital enemies of Italy's expansion ... The aim of Italian policy, which cannot have, and does not have continental objectives of a European territorial nature except Albania, is first of all to break the bars of this prison ... Once the bars are broken, Italian policy can only have one motto—to march to

38870-404: The port city of Tobruk and advance into Egypt . However, Hitler, embroiled in his invasion of the Soviet Union, refused to send Rommel any more troops, causing Rommel to retreat and preventing him from seizing the Middle East , where Axis-friendly regimes had taken root in Iraq and Persia (present-day Iran ). After the winter, Hitler launched a fresh offensive in the spring of 1942, with

39100-423: The primary question was whether battleships would maintain their dominance of the seas or be rendered virtually obsolete by naval aviation . The military deliberations and controversies characteristic of the interwar period would ultimately find resolution via the events of WWII, which served as a foundation for many of the tenets, doctrines , and strategies of modern warfare . Overall, the innovations of WWI and

39330-415: The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. By 25 April the Soviets had besieged Berlin. Hitler remained in the city in a bunker under the Chancellery garden. On 30 April he committed suicide by shooting himself, after a ritual wedding with his longtime mistress Eva Braun . The Germans held out another 7 days under Admiral Doenitz , their new leader, but the Germans surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945, ending

39560-417: The prosperous Roaring Twenties , a time of social and economic mobility for the middle class . Automobiles , electric lighting , radio , and more became common among populations in the first world . The era's indulgences were followed by the Great Depression , an unprecedented worldwide economic downturn that severely damaged many of the world's largest economies. Politically, the era coincided with

39790-476: The raid also helped destroy "what is left of German morale." Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, filed a story about the Dresden raid. The military press censor at SHAEF made a mistake and allowed the Cowan cable to go out starting with "Allied air bosses have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom." There were follow-up newspaper editorials on

40020-431: The region inhabited by ethnic Germans called the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia , the remilitarisation of the League of Nations demilitarised zone of the German Rhineland region, and the last, desperate stages of rearmament as the Second World War increasingly loomed. Disarmament was a very popular public policy. However, the League of Nations played little role in this effort, with the United States and Britain taking

40250-410: The resounding victory are Japanese overconfidence in their own forces, poor planning and the intercepting of Japanese battle plans by the United States. The losses suffered during this Battle of Midway, paired with the campaign of attrition that was taking place in Solomon Islands , left Japan unable to replenish its forces and turned the tides of war against it. By August 1942, the Allied forces were on

40480-429: The rise of communism , starting in Russia with the October Revolution and Russian Civil War , at the end of WWI, and ended with the rise of fascism , particularly in Germany and Italy. China was in the midst of a half-century of instability and the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang the Chinese Communist Party and many warlords. The empires of Britain , France , and others faced challenges as imperialism

40710-482: The same month, he secured the return of Memel from Lithuania to Germany. Chamberlain was forced to acknowledge that his policy of appeasement towards Hitler had failed. In 1922, the leader of the Italian Fascist movement, Benito Mussolini , was appointed Prime Minister of Italy after the March on Rome . Mussolini resolved the question of sovereignty over the Dodecanese at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne , which formalised Italian administration of both Libya and

40940-448: The scatter of bombs was likely to be considerable. Add to these difficulties the disruptive effects of increasingly accurate anti-aircraft fire and head-on attacks by fighter aircraft and the theoretical accuracy of daylight bombing was often hard to achieve. Accuracy, described as "pinpoint", never exceeded the best British average of about a 3 mi (4.8 km) radius from point of aim in any case. Postwar German engineers considered

41170-440: The sentence "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed...." Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal , and the head of Bomber Command, Arthur "Bomber" Harris , among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued

41400-412: The shrinking zone of German control. The Germans offered staunch resistance, but by 4 June 1944, Rome had fallen. The Battle of the Atlantic took place from 1942 to 1944 and was described as "longest, largest, and most complex naval battle in history". The Germans hoped to sever the vital supply lines between Britain and America, sinking many tons of shipping with U-boats , German submarines. However,

41630-471: The skies of Britain, now turned his gaze eastward to the Soviet Union . Despite having signed the non-aggression pact with Stalin, Hitler despised communism and wished to destroy it in the land of its birth. He originally planned to launch the attack in early spring of 1941 to avoid the disastrous Russian winter. However, a pro-allied coup in Yugoslavia and Mussolini's almost utter defeat in his invasion of Greece from occupied Albania prompted Hitler to launch

41860-499: The strategic bombing in a bigger way than the RFC, who were focused on supporting the infantry actions of the Western Front. At first, the RNAS attacked the German submarines in their moorings and then steelworks further in targeting the origin of the submarines themselves. In early 1918 they operated their "round the clock" bombing raid, with lighter bombers attacking the town of Trier by day and large HP O/400s attacking by night. The Independent Force , an expanded bombing group, and

42090-400: The tactic's potential as a weapon that was of use for propagandists on both sides. The late Zeppelin raids were complemented by the Gotha bomber, which was the first heavier-than-air bomber to be used for strategic bombing. The French army on June 15, 1915, attacked the German town of Karlsruhe , killing 29 civilians and wounding 58. Further raids followed until the Armistice in 1918. In

42320-450: The target in waves. Nowadays, a large bomber or missile can be used to the same effect on a small area (an airfield, for example) by releasing a relatively large number of smaller bombs. Strategic bombing campaigns were conducted in Europe and Asia. The Germans and Japanese made use of mostly twin-engined bombers with a payload generally less than 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg), and never produced larger craft to any great extent. By comparison,

42550-414: The term has pejorative connotations, some, including the Allies of World War II , have preferred to use euphemisms such as "will to resist" and "morale bombings". The theoretical distinction between tactical and strategic air warfare was developed between the two world wars. Some leading theorists of strategic air warfare during this period were the Italian Giulio Douhet , the Trenchard school in

42780-434: The territories of the present day Ukraine and Belarus , laid siege to Leningrad (present day Saint Petersburg), and advanced to within 15 miles of Moscow. At this critical moment, the Soviet people stalled the German Wehrmacht to a halt at the gates of Moscow. Stalin had planned to evacuate the city, and had already moved important government functions, but decided to stay and rally the city. Recently arrived troops from

43010-404: The times remained " the bomber will always get through ". These theorists for strategic bombing argued that it would be necessary to develop a fleet of strategic bombers during peacetime, both to deter any potential enemy, and also in the case of a war, to be able to deliver devastating attacks on the enemy industries and cities while suffering from relatively few friendly casualties before victory

43240-406: The toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects; or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered

43470-572: The total population, 64.7 million lived in Africa and 31.2 million lived in Asia; 900,000 lived in the French West Indies or islands in the South Pacific. The largest colonies were French Indochina with 26.8 million (in five separate colonies), French Algeria with 6.6 million, the French protectorate in Morocco , with 5.4 million, and French West Africa with 35.2 million in nine colonies. The total includes 1.9 million Europeans, and 350,000 "assimilated" natives. The Berber independence leader Abd el-Krim (1882–1963) organised armed resistance against

43700-433: The two signatories mutually agreed to cancel all pre-war debts and renounced war claims. In October 1925 the Treaty of Locarno was signed by Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy; it recognised Germany's borders with France and Belgium. Moreover, Britain, Italy, and Belgium undertook to assist France in the case that German troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland. Locarno paved the way for Germany's admission to

43930-517: The unique ability of a modern air force to win wars by unaided strategic bombing. As the speed and altitude of bombers increased in proportion to fighter aircraft, the prevailing strategic understanding became "the bomber will always get through". Although anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft had proved effective in the Great War, it was accepted there was little warring nations could do to prevent massive civilian casualties from strategic bombing . High civilian morale and retaliation in kind were seen as

44160-402: The use of massed aircraft. The German strategy concentrated upon the devotion of the Wehrmacht , or German army, to the use of tank groups, called panzer divisions, and groups of mobile infantry, in concert with relentless attacks from the air. Encirclement was also a major part of the strategy. This change smashed any expectations that the Second World War would be fought in the trenches like

44390-420: The victory by Franco and the Nationalists in the war, Allied intelligence was informed that Italy was pressuring Spain to permit an Italian occupation of the Balearic Islands . After Great Britain signed the Anglo-Italian Easter Accords in 1938, Mussolini and Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano issued demands for concessions in the Mediterranean by France, particularly regarding French Somaliland , Tunisia and

44620-428: The war effort combined with failures of the previous systems' of Government made it more difficult than hitherto to maintain that women were, both by constitution and temperament, unfit to vote. If women could work in munitions factories, it seemed both ungrateful and illogical to deny them a place in the polling booth. But the vote was much more than simply a reward for war work; the point was that women's participation in

44850-451: The war helped to dispel the fears that surrounded women's entry into the public arena. In Europe, according to Derek Aldcroft and Steven Morewood, "Nearly all countries registered some economic progress in the 1920s and most of them managed to regain or surpass their pre-war income and production levels by the end of the decade." The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Greece did especially well, while Eastern Europe did poorly, due to

45080-421: The war in Europe (see V-E Day ). Rivalries that had begun during the war, combined with the sense of strength in the victorious powers, laid the foundations of the Iron Curtain and of the Cold War. The first event that is usually linked to the later Pacific conflict was the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, during which the Japanese military staged the bombing of the South Manchuria Railway and pinned

45310-480: The war nor did they feel they caused the war (see Stab-in-the-back legend ). Germany was never occupied by Allied troops, yet it had to accept a liberal democratic government imposed on it by the victors after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm . Much of the map of Europe was redrawn by the victors based upon the theory that future wars could be prevented if all ethnic groups had their own "homeland". New states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created out of

45540-415: The war was almost over, but he managed only to occupy a few hundred yards of French territory. Throughout the war, the Italians would be more of a burden to the Nazis than a boon, and would later cost them precious time in Greece. Hitler now turned his eyes on Great Britain, which stood alone against him. He ordered his generals to draw up plans for an invasion, code named Operation Sea Lion , and ordered

45770-465: The war, when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. A strategic-bombing campaign was launched by the Germans as a precursor to the invasion of the United Kingdom to force the RAF to engage the Luftwaffe and so be destroyed either on the ground or in the air. That tactic failed, and the RAF began bombing German cities on 11 May 1940. After the Battle of Britain , the Germans launched their night time Blitz hoping to break British morale and to have

46000-418: The war. Stalin also launched an attack on Finland, which he hoped to reduce to little more than a Soviet puppet state, but the Red Army met staunch Finnish resistance in what became known as the Winter War and succeeded in gaining only limited territory from the Finns. This action would later cause the Finns to ally with Germany when its attack on the Soviet Union came in 1941. After the defeat of Poland,

46230-403: The war. The Allies, known initially as "The Triple Entente ", comprised the British Empire, France, and Russia. Germany, Austria-Hungary , Bulgaria , and later the Ottoman Empire , were known as "The Central Powers ". In 1917, Russia ended hostile actions against the Central Powers after the fall of the Tsar. The Bolsheviks negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, although it

46460-431: The war...". As a result of Douhet's proposals, air forces allocated greater resources to their bomber squadrons than to their fighters, and the 'dashing young pilots' promoted in the propaganda of the time were invariably bomber pilots. Royal Air Force leaders, in particular Air Chief Marshal Hugh Trenchard , believed the key to retaining their independence from the senior services was to lay stress on what they saw as

46690-546: The winter of 1943, the southern half of Italy was in Allied hands. The Italians, most of whom did not really support the war, had already turned against Mussolini. In July, he had been stripped of power and taken prisoner, though the Italians feigned continued support of the Axis. On 8 September, the Italians formally surrendered, but most of Italy not in Allied hands was controlled by German troops and those loyal to Mussolini's (Mussolini had been freed by German paratroopers) new Italian Social Republic , which in reality consisted of

46920-449: The women and children as far as possible, and for this purpose, a warning should be given, whenever practicable. It would be wrong even at this stage to think that airpower was simply seen as a tool for rapid retribution. A statement clearly pointed out that the ability of aircraft to inflict punishment could be open to abuse: Their power to cover great distances at high speed, their instant readiness for action, their independence (within

47150-416: Was a decline in pacifism and a growing sense that another world war was imminent, and that it would be worth fighting for. The changing world order that the war had brought about, in particular the growth of the United States and Japan as naval powers, and the rise of independence movements in India and Ireland, caused a major reassessment of British imperial policy. Forced to choose between alignment with

47380-448: Was a huge cost to Russia. In the treaty, Bolshevik Russia ceded the Baltic states to Germany, and its province of Kars Oblast in the South Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire . It also recognized the independence of Ukraine . Although Germany shifted huge forces from the eastern to the western front after signing the treaty, it was unable to stop the Allied advance, especially with the entrance of American troops in 1918. The war itself

47610-517: Was accepted by General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers . Strategic bombing One of the strategies of war is to demoralize the enemy so that peace or surrender becomes preferable to continuing the conflict. Strategic bombing has been used to this end. The phrase "terror bombing" entered the English lexicon towards the end of World War II and many strategic bombing campaigns and individual raids have been described as terror bombing by commentators and historians. Because

47840-440: Was accidentally bombed in May, and in July the Kaiser allowed directed raids against urban centers. There were 23 airship raids in 1916, in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defenses improved. In 1917 and 1918, there were only 11 Zeppelin raids against England, and the final raid occurred on August 5, 1918, which resulted in the death of KK Peter Strasser , commander of

48070-433: Was achieved. In the period between the two world wars, military thinkers from several nations advocated strategic bombing as the logical and obvious way to employ aircraft. Domestic political considerations saw to it that the British worked harder on the concept than most. The British Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service of the Great War had been merged in 1918 to create a separate air force, which spent much of

48300-400: Was also a chance for the combatant nations to show off their military strength and technological ingenuity. The Germans introduced the machine gun, U-boats and deadly gases. The British first used the tank . Both sides had a chance to test out their new aircraft to see if they could be used in warfare. It was widely believed that the war would be short. Unfortunately, since trench warfare

48530-437: Was also factionalised. Large-scale warfare, known as the Second Sino-Japanese War , began in August 1937, with naval and infantry attacks focused on Shanghai , which quickly spread to other major cities. There were numerous large-scale atrocities against Chinese civilians, such as the Nanjing massacre in December 1937, with mass murder and mass rape. By 1939 military lines had stabilised, with Japan in control of almost all of

48760-420: Was divided over the morality of the massacre between those who saw it as having saved India from anarchy and those who viewed it with revulsion. Egypt had been under de facto British control since the 1880s, despite its nominal ownership by the Ottoman Empire . In 1922, the Kingdom of Egypt was granted formal independence , though it continued to be a client state following British guidance. Egypt joined

48990-545: Was exiled in the Pacific until 1947. Morocco was now pacified, and became the base from which Spanish Nationalists would launch their rebellion against the Spanish Republic in 1936. The humiliating peace terms in the Treaty of Versailles provoked bitter indignation throughout Germany, and seriously weakened the new democratic regime. The Treaty stripped Germany of all of its overseas colonies , of Alsace–Lorraine , and of predominantly Polish districts. The Allied armies occupied industrial sectors in western Germany including

49220-400: Was followed one month later by the Battle of Midway , in which the US Navy defeated an attacking Japanese fleet, inflicting devastating damage on the attacking force. The Battle of Midway is widely considered the most important naval battle of the Pacific Campaign and has even been described as "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare" The reasons usually given for

49450-411: Was fully expected that deaths would dramatically increase. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. These early developments of aerial warfare led to two distinct branches in the writings of air warfare theorists: tactical air warfare and strategic air warfare. Tactical air warfare was developed as part of

49680-512: Was greeted by loud cheers. Four weeks later, 99% of Austrians voted in favour of the annexation ( Anschluss ) of their country Austria to the German Reich . After Austria, Hitler turned to Czechoslovakia , where the 3.5 million-strong Sudeten German minority was demanding equal rights and self-government. At the Munich Conference of September 1938, Hitler, the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain , and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier agreed upon

49910-464: Was horrified at the prospect of Operation Downfall, a planned boots-on-the-ground invasion of mainland Japan that was estimated to lead to over a million casualties among American soldiers. Despite a devastating campaign of fire-bombing in Tokyo and dozens of other cities, the Japanese showed no sign of planning to surrender. Following the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, where the Allies threatened "prompt and utter destruction" should Japan not surrender,

50140-625: Was increasingly viewed negatively and independence movements emerged in many colonies ; in Europe, after protracted low-level fighting most of Ireland became independent. The Russian , Ottoman , Austro-Hungarian , and German Empires were dismantled, with the Ottoman territories and German colonies redistributed among the Allies , chiefly Britain and France. The western parts of the Russian Empire, Estonia , Finland , Latvia , Lithuania , and Poland became independent nations in their own right, and Bessarabia (now Moldova and parts of Ukraine ) chose to reunify with Romania . In Russia,

50370-416: Was marked by foul weather. Rommel, who was now in charge of defending France against possible Allied attack, thought the Allies would not attack during the stormy weather, and was on holiday in Germany. Besides this, the Germans were expecting an attack, but at the natural harbor of Calais and not the beaches of Normandy ; They did not know about the Allies' artificial harbours , and false leads planted by

50600-410: Was no longer in the forefront, as Stalin concentrated on " socialism in one country " and embarked on a bold plan of collectivization and industrialization. The majority of socialists and even many communists became disillusioned with Stalin's autocratic rule, his purges and the assassination of his "enemies", as well as the news of famines he imposed on his own people. Communism was strengthened as

50830-421: Was not renewed in 1922 because of heavy pressure on Britain from Canada and the United States. In the 1920s Japanese diplomacy was rooted in a largely liberal democratic political system, and favoured internationalism. By 1930, however, Japan was rapidly reversing itself, rejecting democracy at home, as the Army seized more and more power, and rejecting internationalism and liberalism. By the late 1930s it had joined

51060-446: Was overshadowed by his later blunders in the east. Secondly, it marked the advent of radar as a major weapon in modern air war. With radar, squadrons of fighters could be quickly assembled to respond to incoming bombers attempting to bomb civilian targets. It also allowed the identification of the type and a guess at the number of incoming enemy aircraft, as well as tracking of friendly airplanes. Hitler, taken aback by his defeat over

51290-430: Was required, the smaller Japanese bombers (in comparison to British and American types) did not carry a bombload sufficient to inflict the sort of damage regularly occurring at that point in the war in Europe, or later in Japan. The development of the B-29 gave the United States a bomber with sufficient range to reach the Japanese home islands from the safety of American bases in the Pacific or western China. The capture of

51520-428: Was still disarmed and France was Britain's only European rival, Trenchard boasted, "the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did". At the time, the expectation was any new war would be brief and very brutal. A British Cabinet planning document in 1938 predicted that, if war with Germany broke out, 35% of British homes would be hit by bombs in the first three weeks. This type of expectation would justify

51750-406: Was strategically important because of its sea routes which supplied crucial Swedish ore to the Nazi war machine. Norway held on for a few crucial weeks, but Denmark surrendered after only six hours . Sweden was the only Scandinavian country to successfully maintain its neutrality throughout the war, with occasional breaches of neutrality in favor of both Germany and the Western Allies . With

51980-543: Was such an event, as was the bombing of the Ruhr dams . The Peenemünde mission delayed Nazi Germany's V-2 program enough that it did not become a major factor in the outcome of the war. Soviet Air Forces conducted strategic bombings of Helsinki , the capital of Finland , between 1939 and 1944, with Finland being subjected to a number of bombing campaigns by the USSR in that period. The largest were three raids in February 1944, which have been called The Great Raids Against Helsinki . The Finnish Air Force responded to

52210-453: Was the best form of defense, advances on both sides were very slow and came at a terrible cost to lives. When the war was finally over in 1918, the results would set the stage for the next twenty years. First and foremost, the Germans were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles , forcing them to make exorbitant payments to repair damages caused during the War. Many Germans felt these reparations were unfair because they did not actually "lose"

52440-423: Was the use of nuclear weapons. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States exploded nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 105,000 people and inflicting a psychological shock on the Japanese nation. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan , stating : Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking

52670-442: Was to come in the near future. Yet the theory that " the bomber will always get through " started to appear doubtful, as stated by the U.S.  Attaché in 1937, "The peacetime theory of the complete invulnerability of the modern type of bombardment airplane no longer holds. The increased speeds of both the bombardment and pursuit plane have worked in favor of the pursuit ... The flying fortress died in Spain." Large scale bombing of

52900-422: Was too powerful. Tokyo and Moscow signed a nonaggression treaty in April 1941 , as the militarists turned their attention to the European colonies to the south which had urgently-needed oil fields. To one degree or another, Spain had been unstable politically for centuries, and in 1936–1939 was wracked by one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 20th century. The real importance comes from outside countries. In Spain

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