

The Allied victory once again reshaped the world map. Imperial Japan also added some notorious chapters to the war with war crimes such as the Rape of Nanjing, the actions of Unit 731, the abuse of comfort women, and employing kamikaze suicide strikes. The war happened concurrently with the Holocaust, which was Nazi Germany's attempt to murder various ethnic, sexual, and ideological minorities, most significantly Europe's Jews. Among the latter were nations such as France, the British Empire, Poland, the Low Countries, and eventually the United States. Standing against them were the Allied Powers, which sought to stop the Axis. The Axis Powers were composed of the fascists and their allies, and they sought to carve themselves new empires and destroy communism. Meanwhile the nation that had done most of the allies' dying in the First World War, Russia, had become the communist Soviet Union.īefore and during the war, most nations of the world aligned with one or the other of the war's two massive military alliances. The democracies of Western Europe, haunted by the recent memory of World War One, were largely unwilling to stand up to the aggressive fascist leaders. The relative lack of historical success in imperialism led nations like Italy and Japan to start biting chunks out of their neighbors, while Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany to begin crushing minorities. For one reason or another, multiple nations had fallen to fascism, an ideology which itself made war highly likely due to its irredentist nature.

This massive fuckup had a multitude of causes. The war left about 85 million people dead, 45 million of whom were civilians, and was also the first and (hopefully so far) only conflict which saw the use of nuclear weapons. It also could arguably have begun with the conflicts between Japan and China in 1937 or as far back as 1931. WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, the Great Patriotic War (in Russia), or just "The Sequel" was a titanic global conflict that began in 1939 and lasted until 1945. I saw instead men suffering and wishing they were somewhere else. “ ”In the magazines war seemed romantic and exciting, full of heroics and vitality.
