In mid he captured the key seaport of Tobruk. But when he resumed his advance, he was met with massive defensive positions prepared by the meticulous British general Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein. Over 12 days he failed to break through the British lines and was forced into a headlong retreat across the desert. To complete the rout, the allies landed an expeditionary force further west, in Morocco and Algeria.
A quarter of a million German and Italian troops surrendered in May Rommel had already returned to Germany on sick leave. But it was not to be. By the time of Montgomery's victory, it had become clear that the Germans' attempt to compensate for their lower levels of arms production by stopping American supplies and munitions from reaching Britain across the Atlantic had also failed. In the course of , a determined construction campaign increased the number of U-boats active in the Atlantic and the Arctic from just over 20 to more than ; in November alone they sank , tonnes of allied shipping, aided by the Germans' ability to decipher British radio traffic while keeping their own secret.
But from December , the British could decode German ciphers once more and steer their convoys away from the waiting wolf-packs of U-boats. Small aircraft carriers began to accompany allied convoys, using spotter planes to locate the German submarines, which had to spend most of their time on the surface in order to move with any reasonable speed and locate the enemy's ships.
By May the allies were building more ship tonnage than the Germans were sinking, while one U-boat was being sunk by allied warships and planes on average every day. The battle of the Atlantic was over. The most dramatic and most significant reversal of German fortunes came, however, on the eastern front.
The sheer scale of the conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army dwarfed anything seen anywhere else during the second world war. From 22 June , the day of the German invasion, there was never a point at which less than two-thirds of the German armed forces were engaged on the eastern front. Deaths on the eastern front numbered more than in all the other theatres of war put together, including the Pacific.
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But it did not. On the contrary, Stalin's patriotic appeals to his people helped rally them to fight in the "great patriotic war", spurred on by horror at the murderous brutality of the German occupation.
Timeline of World War II (1945–1991)
More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately left to die of starvation and disease in makeshift camps. Civilians were drafted into forced labour, villages were burned to the ground, towns reduced to rubble. More than one million people died in the siege of Leningrad; but it did not fall.
Soviet reserves of manpower and resources were seemingly inexhaustible. In a vast effort, major arms and munitions factories had been dismantled and transported to safety east of the Urals. Here they began to pour out increasing quantities of military hardware, including the terrifying "Stalin organ", the Katyusha rocket-launcher.
Already in December , Japan's entry into the war, and its consequent preoccupation with campaigns in the Pacific, allowed Stalin to move large quantities of men and equipment to the west, where they brought the German advance to a halt before Moscow.
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Unprepared for a winter war, poorly clad, and exhausted from months of rapid advance and bitter fighting, the German forces had to abandon the idea of taking the Russian capital. A whole string of generals succumbed to heart attacks or nervous exhaustion, and were replaced; Hitler himself took over as commander-in-chief of the army. Hitler had already weakened the thrust towards Moscow by diverting forces to take the grainfields of the Ukraine and push on to the Crimea. For much of , this tactic seemed to be succeeding.
German forces took the Crimea and advanced towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. Here again, acquiring new supplies of fuel to replenish Germany's dwindling stocks was the imperative. But Soviet generals had begun to learn how to co-ordinate tanks, infantry and air power and to avoid encirclement by tactical withdrawals.
The German forces were already dangerously short of reserves and supplies when they reached the city of Stalingrad on the river Volga, in August Three months later, they had still not taken the city. Stalingrad became the object of a titanic struggle between the Germans and the Soviets, less because of its strategic importance than because of its name.
Short of fuel and ammunition, the Germans under General Paulus were unable to break out. Next page Forces and resources of the European combatants, Learn More in these related Britannica articles: War once again broke out over nationality conflicts in east-central Europe, provoked in part by a German drive for continental hegemony, and it expanded, once again, into a global conflict whose battle zones touched the waters or heartlands of almost every…. They imported many of the ideals of the European avant-garde, particularly the….
The coming of the Cold War, — The settlement after World War II , therefore, was a peace without treaties, and the Cold War magnified, distorted, or otherwise played upon the other historical trends given impetus by the world wars of the 20th century: Asian nationalism, decolonization, the seeming culmination of the year-old Chinese Revolution, the….
After World War II the German populations were largely expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland, making the distribution of German-speaking people more nearly coincidental with the boundaries of the German state, although Austria and German-speaking Switzerland still remained outside. Diplomatic history influence on science fiction In science fiction: Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.
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World War II
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World War II | Facts, Summary, Combatants, & Causes | theranchhands.com
Diplomacy Declarations of war Engagements Operations. Eastern Front Manhattan Project. Archived from the original on Archived from the original on 1 October Retrieved 7 May Ziemke Footnotes to chapter 23, Further referenced to: Retrieved 15 May Axis and Axis-aligned leaders.