The
Second World War was arguably the most significant period of the 20th
century. It brought about major leaps in technology and laid the
groundwork that permitted post-war social changes including the end of
European colonialism, the civil rights movement in the United States,
and the modern women’s rights movement, as well as the programs for
exploring outer space. The primary combatants were the Axis nations
(Nazi Germany, Facist Italy,
Imperial Japan and their smaller allies) and the Allied nations, led by
Britain (and its Commonwealth nations), the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics and the United States of America. The Allies were the victors.
Two superpowers, the USA and USSR, emerged from World War II to begin a
Cold War with each other that would define much of the rest of the
century.
Canada produced more trucks than Germany, Italy and Japan COMBINED.
For every aircraft shot down in battle, another aircraft was lost due to a accident.
The British were able to create artificial moonlight during night-time battles.
More Russians died in the siege of one city (Leningrad) than the entire armies of the US and Britain COMBINED.
When the US declared war on Japan in 1941, there were a total of 1,000 nurses in the Army Corps. By the end of the war there were a total of 60,000 – less than 1% of these nurses were black.
In 1939, Finland was attacked by the USSR, a nation with 41 times the population of Finland. During the war the USSR suffered well over half a million casualties (Kruchev stated at one point his estimate was nearly 1 million casualties) compared to Finland’s 70,000 casualties. This represents the most lop-sided casualties of any large scale conflict in history.
In 1941, the military of the United States was smaller than the Romanian military.
When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, they invaded across a 2,400km front.
In 1941 , the German military lost more soldiers to frostbite than they did the Soviet Army.
More V2 rockets fell on Belgium than did the United Kingdom.
A battalion of Japanese Americans liberated the Dachau prisoner camp. Initially American soldiers in the camp feared that soldiers from the Empire of Japan were there to kill them. The soldiers quickly realized they were mistaken when the soldiers spoke English and started passing out cigarettes.
