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The Battle of the Bagradas River was fought between a Carthaginian army led by Hamilcar Barca, who was victorious, against a rebel force led by Spendius. The battle occurred in 240 BC and was fought in what is today's northeast Tunisia. At the time, Carthage was fighting a coalition of mutinous soldiers and rebellious African cities in the Mercenary War, which had started late the previous year in the wake of the First Punic War. The rebels were blockading Carthage and besieging the northern ports of Utica and Hippo (modern Bizerte). A Carthaginian army commanded by Hanno had attempted and failed to relieve Utica earlier that year. A second army was assembled in Carthage and entrusted to Hamilcar, who had commanded Carthaginian forces on Sicily for the last six years of the First Punic War. The new Carthaginian army left Carthage and evaded the rebel blockade by crossing the Bagradas River (the modern Medjerda River) at its mouth. Rebel armies commanded by Spendius from both the Utica siege and a camp guarding the only bridge over the lower Bagradas River marched towards the Carthaginians. When they came into sight Hamilcar ordered the Carthaginians to feign a retreat. The rebels broke ranks to chase after the Carthaginians and this impetuous pursuit caused them to fall into confusion. Once the rebels had drawn close, the Carthaginians turned and charged them. The rebels broke and were routed. The Carthaginians pursued, killing or capturing many of the rebels and taking the fortifications guarding the bridge. This victory gave Hamilcar freedom to manoeuvre and the operational initiative. He confronted towns and cities that had gone over to the rebels, bringing them back to Carthaginian allegiance. Spendius confronted Hamilcar again in the mountains of north west Tunisia and Hamilcar was again victorious. Spendius had his Carthaginian prisoners tortured to death. Hamilcar in turn had existing and future prisoners trampled to death by elephants. After two further years of increasingly bitter warfare the rebels were worn down and eventually defeated at the Battle of Leptis Parva. Background The First Punic War was fought between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC, and lasted for 23 years, from 264 to 241 BC. The two powers struggled for supremacy primarily on the Mediterranean island of Sicily and its surrounding waters, and also in North Africa.[1] While the war with Rome was being fought on Sicily, the Carthaginian general Hanno led a series of campaigns that greatly increased the area of Africa controlled by Carthage. He extended its control to Theveste (modern Tébessa, Algeria) 300 kilometres (190 mi) south-west of their capital[2][3] and was rigorous in squeezing taxes out of the newly conquered territory to pay for both the war with Rome and his own campaigns.[3] Half of all agricultural output was taken as war tax, and the tribute due from all towns and cities was doubled. These exactions were harshly enforced, causing extreme hardship in many areas.[4][5] After immense material and human losses on both sides during the First Punic War, the Carthaginians were defeated.[6][7] The Carthaginian Senate ordered the commander of its forces on Sicily, Hamilcar Barca, to negotiate a peace treaty on whatever terms he could. Convinced that the surrender was unnecessary Hamilcar left Sicily in a rage and delegated negotiations to his deputy Gisco.[6][7][8] The Treaty of Lutatius was agreed and brought the First Punic War to an end.[9] Mutiny A group of men dressed in clothes and carrying weapons from the 3rd century BC accompanying a medium-sized elephant Modern recreations of Carthaginian soldiers and a war elephant at the 2012 Arverniales re-enactment The post-war evacuation of the Carthaginian army of 20,000 men from Sicily was left in the hands of Gisco. He split the army into small detachments based on their regions of origin and sent these back to Carthage one at a time. He anticipated they would be promptly paid the several years back pay they were owed and hurried on their way home.[10] The Carthaginian authorities decided instead to wait until all of the troops had arrived and then attempt to negotiate a settlement at a lower rate. They despatched the returning troops to Sicca Veneria (modern El Kef), 180 km (110 mi) away.[11] Freed of their long period of military discipline and with nothing to do, the men grumbled among themselves and refused all attempts by the Carthaginians to pay them less than the full amount due. Frustrated by the Carthaginian negotiators' attempts to haggle, all 20,000 troops marched to Tunis, 16 km (10 mi) from Carthage. Panicking, the Senate agreed to payment in full. The mutinous troops responded by demanding even more. Gisco, who had a good reputation with the army, was brought over from Sicily in late 241 BC and despatched to the camp with enough money to pay most of what was owed. He started to disburse this, with promises that the balance would be paid as soon as it could be raised, when discipline broke down. Several soldiers insisted that no deal with Carthage was acceptable, a riot broke out, men who stayed loyal to Carthage were stoned to death, Gisco and his staff were taken prisoner, and his treasury was seized.[12][13][14] The rebels declared Spendius, an escaped Roman slave who faced death by torture if recaptured, and Mathos, a Berber dissatisfied with Hanno's attitude towards tax-raising from Carthage's African possessions, their generals.[15] The news of a formed, experienced, anti-Carthaginian army in the heart of its territory spread rapidly and many cities and towns rose in rebellion. Provisions, money and reinforcements poured in.[16] Eventually another 70,000 men were recruited according to the ancient historian Polybius, although many would have been tied down in garrisoning their home towns against Carthaginian retribution.[14][17] The pay dispute had become a full-scale revolt. The three years of war that followed are known as the Mercenary War and threatened Carthage's existence as a state.[18][19] Hanno's campaign A map showing the major movements of both sides during the Battle of Utica The Battle of Utica Hanno, as the commander of Carthage's African army, took the field.[20] Most of the Africans in his force remained loyal; they were accustomed to acting against their fellow Africans. His non-African contingent had remained quartered in Carthage when the army of Sicily was expelled, and also remained loyal. The few troops still in Sicily were paid up to date and redeployed with Hanno, and money was raised to hire fresh troops. An unknown number of Carthaginian citizens were incorporated into his army.[21] By the time this force was assembled, the rebels had already blockaded Utica and Hippo (modern Bizerte).[22] In early 240 BC Hanno set off with the army to relieve Utica;[23] he took with him 100 elephants and a siege train.[note 1][25] The Carthaginians stormed the rebels' camp in the Battle of Utica and their elephants routed the besiegers. Their army took over the camp and Hanno entered the city in triumph. However, the battle-hardened veterans of the Sicilian army regathered in the nearby hills and, not being pursued, returned towards Utica. The Carthaginians, accustomed to fighting the militias of the Numidian cities, were still celebrating their victory when the rebels counter-attacked. The Carthaginians fled, with great loss of life, losing their baggage and siege trains. For the rest of the year Hanno skirmished with the rebel force, repeatedly missing opportunities to bring it to battle or to place it at a disadvantage; the military historian Nigel Bagnall writes of Hanno's "incompetence as a field commander".[5][24] The rebels reinforced their siege of Utica to 15,000 men, where Spendius took command and continued to restrict landward access to Carthage from their stronghold at Tunis. They also established a force of 10,000 men in a fortified camp at the only bridge over the lower Bagradas River (the modern Medjerda River).[26] Battle Prelude At some point during 240 BC the Carthaginians raised another army, of approximately 10,000. It included deserters from the rebels, newly hired mercenaries, citizen militia, 2,000 cavalry, and 70 elephants. This was placed under the command of Hamilcar, who had commanded the Carthaginian forces on Sicily for the last six years of the First Punic War.[24][27] This was dangerously small for a sortie against the stronger rebel forces, especially so for a direct assault. The Carthaginians needed to gain the far side of the Bagradas, so they could manoeuvre freely, but lacked the strength to force a crossing against the superior rebel force guarding against this.[28] There was an underwater sandbar across the mouth of the Bagradas.[note 2] This was too deeply submerged to be fordable under normal conditions, but Hamilcar was aware that when the wind blew strongly from the east it held back the flow of the Bagradas sufficiently for the sandbar to be crossable. Apparently the rebels were ignorant of this.[28] With a strong easterly wind blowing, Hamilcar marched his army out of Carthage at night in great secrecy along the north shore of the isthmus towards the mouth of the Bagradas River. His movement was not detected by the rebels and at dawn he crossed the Bagradas River along the sandbar – the army had marched 16 km from Carthage and was now free to manoeuvre in the African countryside.[29] Opposing armies Carthaginian armies were nearly always composed of foreigners; citizens only served in the army if there was a direct threat to the city of Carthage. Roman sources refer to these foreign fighters disparagingly as "mercenaries", but the modern classicist Adrian Goldsworthy describes this as "a gross oversimplification". They served under a variety of arrangements; for example, some were the regular troops of allied cities or kingdoms seconded to Carthage as part of formal arrangements.[30] The majority of these foreigners were from North Africa.[18] Libyans provided close-order infantry equipped with large shields, helmets, short swords and long thrusting spears; as well as close-order shock cavalry carrying spears[note 3] (also known as "heavy cavalry") – both were noted for their discipline and staying power. Numidians provided light cavalry who threw javelins from a distance and avoided close combat, and javelin-armed light infantry skirmishers.[32][33] Both Spain and Gaul provided experienced infantry; unarmoured troops who would charge ferociously, but had a reputation for breaking off if a combat was protracted.[32] Specialist slingers were recruited from the Balearic Islands.[32][34] The close order Libyan infantry and the citizen militia would fight in a tightly packed formation known as a phalanx.[33] Sicilians and Italians had also joined up during the war to fill the ranks.[20] The Carthaginians frequently employed war elephants; North Africa had indigenous African forest elephants at the time.[note 4][36][37] The sources are not clear as to whether they carried towers containing fighting men.[38] The rebel armies would have been of similar composition and equipment to those of Carthage, including many experienced veterans of the army of Sicily, a large proportion more recent recruits. Most of this force was infantry; their cavalry component was smaller and of poorer quality than that of the Carthaginians and lacked elephants entirely.[39]
World War II[b] or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all the world's countries—including all the great powers—participated, with many investing all available economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities in pursuit of total war, blurring the distinction between military and civilian resources. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, with the latter enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in 70 to 85 million deaths, more than half being civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust of European Jews, as well as from massacres, starvation, and disease. Following the Allied powers' victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders. The causes of World War II included unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I and the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan. Key events leading up to the war included Japan's invasion of Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland, prompting the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Germany. Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in which they had agreed on "spheres of influence" in Eastern Europe. In 1940, the Soviets annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania. After the fall of France in June 1940, the war continued mainly between Germany and the British Empire, with fighting in the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Middle East, the aerial Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and naval Battle of the Atlantic. Through a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany took control of much of continental Europe and formed the Axis alliance with Italy, Japan, and other countries. In June 1941, Germany led the European Axis in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front and initially making large territorial gains. Japan aimed to dominate East Asia and the Asia-Pacific, and by 1937 was at war with the Republic of China. In December 1941, Japan attacked American and British territories in Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, including Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which resulted in the US and the UK declaring war against Japan, and the European Axis declaring war on the US. Japan conquered much of coastal China and Southeast Asia, but its advances in the Pacific were halted in mid-1942 after its defeat in the naval Battle of Midway; Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. Key setbacks in 1943—including German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Allied offensives in the Pacific—cost the Axis powers their initiative and forced them into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France at Normandy, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and pushed Germany and its allies westward. At the same time, Japan suffered reversals in mainland Asia, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key islands. The war in Europe concluded with the liberation of German-occupied territories; the invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops; Hitler's suicide; and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Following the refusal of Japan to surrender on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, the US dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August. Faced with an imminent invasion of the Japanese archipelago, the possibility of further atomic bombings, and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its unconditional surrender on 15 August and signed a surrender document on 2 September 1945, marking the end of the war. World War II changed the political alignment and social structure of the world, and it set the foundation of international relations for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. The United Nations was established to foster international cooperation and prevent conflicts, with the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US—becoming the permanent members of its security council. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery and expansion. Start and end dates See also: List of timelines of World War II Timelines of World War II Chronological Prelude (Events (in Asiain Europe) Aftermath 1939194019411942 194319441945 onwards By topic Causes (Diplomacy) Declarations of war BattlesOperations By theatre Battle of Europe air operations Eastern FrontManhattan Project United Kingdom home front Surrender of the Axis armies vte World War II began in Europe on 1 September 1939[1][2] with the German invasion of Poland and the United Kingdom and France's declaration of war on Germany two days later on 3 September 1939. Dates for the beginning of the Pacific War include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937,[3][4] or the earlier Japanese invasion of Manchuria, on 19 September 1931.[5][6] Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who stated that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously, and the two wars became World War II in 1941.[7] Other proposed starting dates for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935.[8] The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939.[9] Others view the Spanish Civil War as the start or prelude to World War II.[10][11] The exact date of the war's end also is not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 15 August 1945 (V-J Day), rather than with the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945, which officially ended the war in Asia. A peace treaty between Japan and the Allies was signed in 1951.[12] A 1990 treaty regarding Germany's future allowed the reunification of East and West Germany to take place and resolved most post–World War II issues.[13] No formal peace treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union was ever signed,[14] although the state of war between the two countries was terminated by the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, which also restored full diplomatic relations between them.[15] History Background Main article: Causes of World War II Aftermath of World War I The League of Nations assembly, held in Geneva, Switzerland (1930) World War I had radically altered the political European map with the defeat of the Central Powers—including Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—and the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies of World War I, such as France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Greece, gained territory, and new nation-states were created out of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires.[16] To prevent a future world war, the League of Nations was established in 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference. The organisation's primary goals were to prevent armed conflict through collective security, military, and naval disarmament, as well as settling international disputes through peaceful negotiations and arbitration.[17] Despite strong pacifist sentiment after World War I,[18] irredentist and revanchist nationalism had emerged in several European states. These sentiments were especially marked in Germany because of the significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, Germany lost around 13 percent of its home territory and all its overseas possessions, while German annexation of other states was prohibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country's armed forces.[19] Germany and Italy The German Empire was dissolved in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and a democratic government, later known as the Weimar Republic, was created. The interwar period saw strife between supporters of the new republic and hardline opponents on both the political right and left. Italy, as an Entente ally, had made some post-war territorial gains; however, Italian nationalists were angered that the promises made by the United Kingdom and France to secure Italian entrance into the war were not fulfilled in the peace settlement. From 1922 to 1925, the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy with a nationalist, totalitarian, and class collaborationist agenda that abolished representative democracy, repressed socialist, left-wing, and liberal forces, and pursued an aggressive expansionist foreign policy aimed at making Italy a world power, promising the creation of a "New Roman Empire".[20] Adolf Hitler at a German Nazi political rally in Nuremberg, August 1933 Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923, eventually became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 when Paul von Hindenburg and the Reichstag appointed him. Following Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Führer of Germany and abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearmament campaign.[21] France, seeking to secure its alliance with Italy, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia, which Italy desired as a colonial possession. The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany, and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, accelerated his rearmament programme, and introduced conscription.[22] European treaties The United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the Stresa Front in April 1935 in order to contain Germany, a key step towards military globalisation; however, that June, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The Soviet Union, concerned by Germany's goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe, drafted a treaty of mutual assistance with France. Before taking effect, though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless.[23] The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August of the same year.[24] Hitler defied the Versailles and Locarno Treaties by remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, encountering little opposition due to the policy of appeasement.[25] In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Rome–Berlin Axis. A month later, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy joined the following year.[26] Asia The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allies[27] and new regional warlords. In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan, which had long sought influence in China[28] as the first step of what its government saw as the country's right to rule Asia, staged the Mukden incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo.[29] China appealed to the League of Nations to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations after being condemned for its incursion into Manchuria. The two nations then fought several battles, in Shanghai, Rehe and Hebei, until the Tanggu Truce was signed in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and Chahar and Suiyuan.[30] After the 1936 Xi'an Incident, the Kuomintang and CCP forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose Japan.[31] Pre-war events Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935) Main article: Second Italo-Ethiopian War Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935 The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was a brief colonial war that began in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war began with the invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia) by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy (Regno d'Italia), which was launched from Italian Somaliland and Eritrea.[32] The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI); in addition it exposed the weakness of the League of Nations as a force to preserve peace. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations, but the League did little when the former clearly violated Article X of the League's Covenant.[33] The United Kingdom and France supported imposing sanctions on Italy for the invasion, but the sanctions were not fully enforced and failed to end the Italian invasion.[34] Italy subsequently dropped its objections to Germany's goal of absorbing Austria.[35] Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) Main article: Spanish Civil War When civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini lent military support to the Nationalist rebels, led by General Francisco Franco. Italy supported the Nationalists to a greater extent than the Nazis: Mussolini sent more than 70,000 ground troops, 6,000 aviation personnel, and 720 aircraft to Spain.[36] The Soviet Union supported the existing government of the Spanish Republic. More than 30,000 foreign volunteers, known as the International Brigades, also fought against the Nationalists. Both Germany and the Soviet Union used this proxy war as an opportunity to test in combat their most advanced weapons and tactics. The Nationalists won the civil war in April 1939; Franco, now dictator, remained officially neutral during World War II but generally favoured the Axis.[37] His greatest collaboration with Germany was the sending of volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front.[38] Japanese invasion of China (1937) Main article: Second Sino-Japanese War Imperial Japanese Army soldiers during the Battle of Shanghai, 1937 In July 1937, Japan captured the former Chinese imperial capital of Peking after instigating the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which culminated in the Japanese campaign to invade all of China.[39] The Soviets quickly signed a non-aggression pact with China to lend materiel support, effectively ending China's prior cooperation with Germany. From September to November, the Japanese attacked Taiyuan, engaged the Kuomintang Army around Xinkou,[40] and fought Communist forces in Pingxingguan.[41][42] Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai, but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. The Japanese continued to push Chinese forces back, capturing the capital Nanking in December 1937. After the fall of Nanking, tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by the Japanese.[43][44] In March 1938, Nationalist Chinese forces won their first major victory at Taierzhuang, but then the city of Xuzhou was taken by the Japanese in May.[45] In June 1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding the Yellow River; this manoeuvre bought time for the Chinese to prepare their defences at Wuhan, but the city was taken by October.[46] Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that Japan had hoped to achieve; instead, the Chinese government relocated inland to Chongqing and continued the war.[47][48] Soviet–Japanese border conflicts Main article: Soviet–Japanese border conflicts In the mid-to-late 1930s, Japanese forces in Manchukuo had sporadic border clashes with the Soviet Union and Mongolia. The Japanese doctrine of Hokushin-ron, which emphasised Japan's expansion northward, was favoured by the Imperial Army during this time. This policy would prove difficult to maintain in light of the Japanese defeat at Khalkin Gol in 1939, the ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War[49] and ally Nazi Germany pursuing neutrality with the Soviets. Japan and the Soviet Union eventually signed a Neutrality Pact in April 1941, and Japan adopted the doctrine of Nanshin-ron, promoted by the Navy, which took its focus southward and eventually led to war with the United States and the Western Allies.[50][51] European occupations and agreements Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured just before signing the Munich Agreement, 29 September 1938 In Europe, Germany and Italy were becoming more aggressive. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, again provoking little response from other European powers.[52] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. Soon the United Kingdom and France followed the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and conceded this territory to Germany in the Munich Agreement, which was made against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands.[53] Soon afterwards, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary, and Poland annexed the Trans-Olza region of Czechoslovakia.[54] Although all of Germany's stated demands had been satisfied by the agreement, privately Hitler was furious that British interference had prevented him from seizing all of Czechoslovakia in one operation. In subsequent speeches Hitler attacked British and Jewish "war-mongers" and in January 1939 secretly ordered a major build-up of the German navy to challenge British naval supremacy. In March 1939, Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state, the Slovak Republic.[55] Hitler also delivered an ultimatum to Lithuania on 20 March 1939, forcing the concession of the Klaipėda Region, formerly the German Memelland.[56] German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939 Greatly alarmed and with Hitler making further demands on the Free City of Danzig, the United Kingdom and France guaranteed their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to the Kingdoms of Romania and Greece.[57] Shortly after the Franco-British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalised their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.[58] Hitler accused the United Kingdom and Poland of trying to "encircle" Germany and renounced the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression.[59] The situation became a crisis in late August as German troops continued to mobilise against the Polish border. On 23 August the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany,[60] after tripartite negotiations for a military alliance between France, the United Kingdom, and Soviet Union had stalled.[61] This pact had a secret protocol that defined German and Soviet "spheres of influence" (western Poland and Lithuania for Germany; eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia for the Soviet Union), and raised the question of continuing Polish independence.[62] The pact neutralised the possibility of Soviet opposition to a campaign against Poland and assured that Germany would not have to face the prospect of a two-front war, as it had in World War I. Immediately afterwards, Hitler ordered the attack to proceed on 26 August, but upon hearing that the United Kingdom had concluded a formal mutual assistance pact with Poland and that Italy would maintain neutrality, he decided to delay it.[63] In response to British requests for direct negotiations to avoid war, Germany made demands on Poland, which served as a pretext to worsen relations.[64] On 29 August, Hitler demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary immediately travel to Berlin to negotiate the handover of Danzig, and to allow a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor in which the German minority would vote on secession.[64] The Poles refused to comply with the German demands, and on the night of 30–31 August in a confrontational meeting with the British ambassador Nevile Henderson, Ribbentrop declared that Germany considered its claims rejected.[65] Course of the war For a chronological guide, see List of timelines of World War II. See also: Diplomatic history of World War II and World War II by country War breaks out in Europe (1939–1940) Main article: European theatre of World War II Soldiers of the Danzig Schutzpolizei tearing down the border crossing into Poland, 1 September 1939 On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland after having staged several false flag border incidents as a pretext to initiate the invasion.[66] The first German attack of the war came against the Polish defences at Westerplatte.[67] The United Kingdom responded with an ultimatum for Germany to cease military operations, and on 3 September, after the ultimatum was ignored, Britain and France declared war on Germany.[68] During the Phoney War period, the alliance provided no direct military support to Poland, outside of a cautious French probe into the Saarland.[69] The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort.[70] Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which would later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic.[71] On 8 September, German troops reached the suburbs of Warsaw. The Polish counter-offensive to the west halted the German advance for several days, but it was outflanked and encircled by the Wehrmacht. Remnants of the Polish army broke through to besieged Warsaw. On 17 September 1939, two days after signing a cease-fire with Japan, the Soviet Union invaded Poland[72] under the supposed pretext that the Polish state had ceased to exist.[73] On 27 September, the Warsaw garrison surrendered to the Germans, and the last large operational unit of the Polish Army surrendered on 6 October. Despite the military defeat, Poland never surrendered; instead, it formed the Polish government-in-exile and a clandestine state apparatus remained in occupied Poland.[74] A significant part of Polish military personnel evacuated to Romania and Latvia; many of them later fought against the Axis in other theatres of the war.[75] Germany annexed western Poland and occupied central Poland; the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland; small shares of Polish territory were transferred to Lithuania and Slovakia. On 6 October, Hitler made a public peace overture to the United Kingdom and France but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. The proposal was rejected[65] and Hitler ordered an immediate offensive against France,[76] which was postponed until the spring of 1940 due to bad weather.[77][78][79] Mannerheim Line and Karelian Isthmus on the last day of the Winter War, 13 March 1940 After the outbreak of war in Poland, Stalin threatened Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with military invasion, forcing the three Baltic countries to sign pacts allowing the creation of Soviet military bases in these countries; in October 1939, significant Soviet military contingents were moved there.[80][81][82] Finland refused to sign a similar pact and rejected ceding part of its territory to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939,[83] and was subsequently expelled from the League of Nations for this crime of aggression.[84] Despite overwhelming numerical superiority, Soviet military success during the Winter War was modest,[85] and the Finno-Soviet war ended in March 1940 with some Finnish concessions of territory.[86] In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the entire territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,[81] as well as the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. In August 1940, Hitler imposed the Second Vienna Award on Romania which led to the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary.[87] In September 1940, Bulgaria demanded Southern Dobruja from Romania with German and Italian support, leading to the Treaty of Craiova.[88] The loss of one-third of Romania's 1939 territory caused a coup against King Carol II, turning Romania into a fascist dictatorship under Marshal Ion Antonescu, with a course set towards the Axis in the hopes of a German guarantee.[89] Meanwhile, German-Soviet political relations and economic co-operation[90][91] gradually stalled,[92][93] and both states began preparations for war.[94] Western Europe (1940–1941) Main article: Western Front (World War II) German advance into Belgium and Northern France, 10 May – 4 June 1940, sweeping past the Maginot Line (shown in dark red) In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to protect shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were attempting to cut off.[95] Denmark capitulated after six hours, and despite Allied support, Norway was conquered within two months.[96] British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was replaced by Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940.[97] On the same day, Germany launched an offensive against France. To circumvent the strong Maginot Line fortifications on the Franco-German border, Germany directed its attack at the neutral nations of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.[98] The Germans carried out a flanking manoeuvre through the Ardennes region,[99] which was mistakenly perceived by the Allies as an impenetrable natural barrier against armoured vehicles.[100][101] By successfully implementing new Blitzkrieg tactics, the Wehrmacht rapidly advanced to the Channel and cut off the Allied forces in Belgium, trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in a cauldron on the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. The United Kingdom was able to evacuate a significant number of Allied troops from the continent by early June, although they had to abandon almost all their equipment.[102] On 10 June, Italy invaded France, declaring war on both France and the United Kingdom.[103] The Germans turned south against the weakened French army, and Paris fell to them on 14 June. Eight days later France signed an armistice with Germany; it was divided into German and Italian occupation zones,[104] and an unoccupied rump state under the Vichy Regime, which, though officially neutral, was generally aligned with Germany. France kept its fleet, which the United Kingdom attacked on 3 July in an attempt to prevent its seizure by Germany.[105] The air Battle of Britain[106] began in early July with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping and harbours.[107] The German campaign for air superiority started in August but its failure to defeat RAF Fighter Command forced the indefinite postponement of the proposed German invasion of Britain. The German strategic bombing offensive intensified with night attacks on London and other cities in the Blitz, but largely ended in May 1941[108] after failing to significantly disrupt the British war effort.[107] Using newly captured French ports, the German Navy enjoyed success against an over-extended Royal Navy, using U-boats against British shipping in the Atlantic.[109] The British Home Fleet scored a significant victory on 27 May 1941 by sinking the German battleship Bismarck.[110] In November 1939, the United States was assisting China and the Western Allies, and had amended the Neutrality Act to allow "cash and carry" purchases by the Allies.[111] In 1940, following the German capture of Paris, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased. In September the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases.[112] Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention in the conflict well into 1941.[113] In December 1940, Roosevelt accused Hitler of planning world conquest and ruled out any negotiations as useless, calling for the United States to become an "arsenal of democracy" and promoting Lend-Lease programmes of military and humanitarian aid to support the British war effort; Lend-Lease was later extended to the other Allies, including the Soviet Union after it was invaded by Germany.[114] The United States started strategic planning to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Germany.[115] At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact formally united Japan, Italy, and Germany as the Axis powers. The Tripartite Pact stipulated that any country—with the exception of the Soviet Union—that attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three.[116] The Axis expanded in November 1940 when Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania joined.[117] Romania and Hungary later made major contributions to the Axis war against the Soviet Union, in Romania's case partially to recapture territory ceded to the Soviet Union.[118] Mediterranean (1940–1941) Main article: Mediterranean and Middle East theatre of World War II In early June 1940, the Italian Regia Aeronautica attacked and besieged Malta, a British possession. From late summer to early autumn, Italy conquered British Somaliland and made an incursion into British-held Egypt. In October, Italy attacked Greece, but the attack was repulsed with heavy Italian casualties; the campaign ended within months with minor territorial changes.[119] To assist Italy and prevent Britain from gaining a foothold, Germany prepared to invade the Balkans, which would threaten Romanian oil fields and strike against British dominance of the Mediterranean.[120] German Panzer III of the Afrika Korps advancing across the North African desert, April 1941 In December 1940, British Empire forces began counter-offensives against Italian forces in Egypt and Italian East Africa.[121] The offensives were successful; by early February 1941, Italy had lost control of eastern Libya, and large numbers of Italian troops had been taken prisoner. The Italian Navy also suffered significant defeats, with the Royal Navy putting three Italian battleships out of commission after a carrier attack at Taranto, and neutralising several more warships at the Battle of Cape Matapan.[122] Italian defeats prompted Germany to deploy an expeditionary force to North Africa; at the end of March 1941, Rommel's Afrika Korps launched an offensive which drove back Commonwealth forces.[123] In less than a month, Axis forces advanced to western Egypt and besieged the port of Tobruk.[124] By late March 1941, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact; however, the Yugoslav government was overthrown two days later by pro-British nationalists. Germany and Italy responded with simultaneous invasions of both Yugoslavia and Greece, commencing on 6 April 1941; both nations were forced to surrender within the month.[125] The airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete at the end of May completed the German conquest of the Balkans.[126] Partisan warfare subsequently broke out against the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, which continued until the end of the war.[127] In the Middle East in May, Commonwealth forces quashed an uprising in Iraq which had been supported by German aircraft from bases within Vichy-controlled Syria.[128] Between June and July, British-led forces invaded and occupied the French possessions of Syria and Lebanon, assisted by the Free French.[129] Axis attack on the Soviet Union (1941) Main article: Eastern Front (World War II) European theatre of World War II animation map, 1939–1945 – Red: Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1941; Green: Soviet Union before 1941; Blue: Axis powers With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations for war. With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany, and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia, the two powers signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941.[130] By contrast, the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, massing forces on the Soviet border.[131] Hitler believed that the United Kingdom's refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later.[132] On 31 July 1940, Hitler decided that the Soviet Union should be eliminated and aimed for the conquest of Ukraine, the Baltic states and Byelorussia.[133] However, other senior German officials like Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to create a Euro-Asian bloc against the British Empire by inviting the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact.[134] In November 1940, negotiations took place to determine if the Soviet Union would join the pact. The Soviets showed some interest but asked for concessions from Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan that Germany considered unacceptable. On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued the directive to prepare for an invasion of the Soviet Union.[135] On 22 June 1941, Germany, supported by Italy and Romania, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, with Germany accusing the Soviets of plotting against them; they were joined shortly by Finland and Hungary.[136] The primary targets of this surprise offensive[137] were the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with the ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line—from the Caspian to the White Seas. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate Communism, generate Lebensraum ("living space")[138] by dispossessing the native population,[139] and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals.[140] Although the Red Army was preparing for strategic counter-offensives before the war,[141] Operation Barbarossa forced the Soviet supreme command to adopt strategic defence. During the summer, the Axis made significant gains into Soviet territory, inflicting immense losses in both personnel and materiel. By mid-August, however, the German Army High Command decided to suspend the offensive of a considerably depleted Army Group Centre, and to divert the 2nd Panzer Group to reinforce troops advancing towards central Ukraine and Leningrad.[142] The Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four Soviet armies, and made possible further advance into Crimea and industrially-developed Eastern Ukraine (the First Battle of Kharkov).[143] Russian civilians leaving destroyed houses after a German bombardment during the siege of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), 10 December 1942 The diversion of three-quarters of the Axis troops and the majority of their air forces from France and the central Mediterranean to the Eastern Front[144] prompted the United Kingdom to reconsider its grand strategy.[145] In July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance against Germany[146] and in August, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly issued the Atlantic Charter, which outlined British and American goals for the post-war world.[147] In late August the British and Soviets invaded neutral Iran to secure the Persian Corridor, Iran's oil fields, and preempt any Axis advances through Iran toward the Baku oil fields or India.[148] By October, Axis powers had achieved operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region, with only the sieges of Leningrad[149] and Sevastopol continuing.[150] A major offensive against Moscow was renewed; after two months of fierce battles in increasingly harsh weather, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, where the exhausted troops[151] were forced to suspend the offensive.[152] Large territorial gains were made by Axis forces, but their campaign had failed to achieve its main objectives: two key cities remained in Soviet hands, the Soviet capability to resist was not broken, and the Soviet Union retained a considerable part of its military potential. The blitzkrieg phase of the war in Europe had ended.[153] By early December, freshly mobilised reserves[154] allowed the Soviets to achieve numerical parity with Axis troops.[155] This, as well as intelligence data which established that a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East would be sufficient to deter any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army,[156] allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on 5 December all along the front and pushed German troops 100–250 kilometres (62–155 mi) west.[157] War breaks out in the Pacific (1941) Main article: Pacific War Japanese soldiers entering Hong Kong, 8 December 1941 Following the Japanese false flag Mukden incident in 1931, the Japanese shelling of the American gunboat USS Panay in 1937, and the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre, Japanese-American relations deteriorated. In 1939, the United States notified Japan that it would not be extending its trade treaty and American public opinion opposing Japanese expansionism led to a series of economic sanctions—the Export Control Acts—which banned U.S. exports of chemicals, minerals and military parts to Japan, and increased economic pressure on the Japanese regime.[114][158][159] During 1939 Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, but was repulsed by late September.[160] Despite several offensives by both sides, by 1940 the war between China and Japan was at a stalemate. To increase pressure on China by blocking supply routes, and to better position Japanese forces in the event of a war with the Western powers, Japan invaded and occupied northern Indochina in September 1940.[161] Chinese nationalist forces launched a large-scale counter-offensive in early 1940. In August, Chinese communists launched an offensive in Central China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures in occupied areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists.[162] Continued antipathy between Chinese communist and nationalist forces culminated in armed clashes in January 1941, effectively ending their co-operation.[163] In March, the Japanese 11th army attacked the headquarters of the Chinese 19th army but was repulsed during Battle of Shanggao.[164] In September, Japan attempted to take the city of Changsha again and clashed with Chinese nationalist forces.[165] German successes in Europe prompted Japan to increase pressure on European governments in Southeast Asia. The Dutch government agreed to provide Japan with oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies, but negotiations for additional access to their resources ended in failure in June 1941.[166] In July 1941 Japan sent troops to southern Indochina, thus threatening British and Dutch possessions in the Far East. The United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western governments reacted to this move with a freeze on Japanese assets and a total oil embargo.[167][168] At the same time, Japan was planning an invasion of the Soviet Far East, intending to take advantage of the German invasion in the west, but abandoned the operation after the sanctions.[169] Since early 1941, the United States and Japan had been engaged in negotiations in an attempt to improve their strained relations and end the war in China. During these negotiations, Japan advanced a number of proposals which were dismissed by the Americans as inadequate.[170] At the same time the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands engaged in secret discussions for the joint defence of their territories, in the event of a Japanese attack against any of them.[171] Roosevelt reinforced the Philippines (an American protectorate scheduled for independence in 1946) and warned Japan that the United States would react to Japanese attacks against any "neighboring countries".[171] The USS Arizona was a total loss in the Japanese surprise air attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Sunday 7 December 1941 Frustrated at the lack of progress and feeling the pinch of the American–British–Dutch sanctions, Japan prepared for war. Emperor Hirohito, after initial hesitation about Japan's chances of victory,[172] began to favour Japan's entry into the war.[173] As a result, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned.[174][175] Hirohito refused the recommendation to appoint Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni in his place, choosing War Minister Hideki Tojo instead.[176] On 3 November, Nagano explained in detail the plan of the attack on Pearl Harbor to the Emperor.[177] On 5 November, Hirohito approved in imperial conference the operations plan for the war.[178] On 20 November, the new government presented an interim proposal as its final offer. It called for the end of American aid to China and for lifting the embargo on the supply of oil and other resources to Japan. In exchange, Japan promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw its forces from southern Indochina.[170] The American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers.[179] That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China, or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force;[180][181] the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.[182] Japan planned to seize European colonies in Asia to create a large defensive perimeter stretching into the Central Pacific. The Japanese would then be free to exploit the resources of Southeast Asia while exhausting the over-stretched Allies by fighting a defensive war.[183][184] To prevent American intervention while securing the perimeter, it was further planned to neutralise the United States Pacific Fleet and the American military presence in the Philippines from the outset.[185] On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Asian time zones), Japan attacked British and American holdings with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific.[186] These included an attack on the American fleets at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, as well as invasions of Guam, Wake Island, Malaya,[186] Thailand, and Hong Kong.[187] These attacks led the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia, and several other states to formally declare war on Japan, whereas the Soviet Union, being heavily involved in large-scale hostilities with European Axis countries, maintained its neutrality agreement with Japan.[188] Germany, followed by the other Axis states, declared war on the United States[189] in solidarity with Japan, citing as justification the American attacks on German war vessels that had been ordered by Roosevelt.[136][190] Axis advance stalls (1942–1943) On 1 January 1942, the Allied Big Four[191]—the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and 22 smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations, thereby affirming the Atlantic Charter[192] and agreeing not to sign a separate peace with the Axis powers.[193] During 1942, Allied officials debated on the appropriate grand strategy to pursue. All agreed that defeating Germany was the primary objective. The Americans favoured a straightforward, large-scale attack on Germany through France. The Soviets demanded a second front. The British argued that military operations should target peripheral areas to wear out German strength, leading to increasing demoralisation, and bolstering resistance forces; Germany itself would be subject to a heavy bombing campaign. An offensive against Germany would then be launched primarily by Allied armour, without using large-scale armies.[194] Eventually, the British persuaded the Americans that a landing in France was infeasible in 1942 and they should instead focus on driving the Axis out of North Africa.[195] At the Casablanca Conference in early 1943, the Allies reiterated the statements issued in the 1942 Declaration and demanded the unconditional surrender of their enemies. The British and Americans agreed to continue to press the initiative in the Mediterranean by invading Sicily to fully secure the Mediterranean supply routes.[196] Although the British argued for further operations in the Balkans to bring Turkey into the war, in May 1943, the Americans extracted a British commitment to limit Allied operations in the Mediterranean to an invasion of the Italian mainland, and to invade France in 1944.[197] Pacific (1942–1943) Map of Japanese military advances through mid-1942 By the end of April 1942, Japan and its ally Thailand had almost conquered Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Rabaul, inflicting severe losses on Allied troops and taking a large number of prisoners.[198] Despite stubborn resistance by Filipino and U.S. forces, the Philippine Commonwealth was eventually captured in May 1942, forcing its government into exile.[199] On 16 April, in Burma, 7,000 British soldiers were encircled by the Japanese 33rd Division during the Battle of Yenangyaung and rescued by the Chinese 38th Division.[200] Japanese forces also achieved naval victories in the South China Sea, Java Sea, and Indian Ocean,[201] and bombed the Allied naval base at Darwin, Australia. In January 1942, the only Allied success against Japan was a Chinese victory at Changsha.[202] These easy victories over the unprepared U.S. and European opponents left Japan overconfident, and overextended.[203] In early May 1942, Japan initiated operations to capture Port Moresby by amphibious assault and thus sever communications and supply lines between the United States and Australia. The planned invasion was thwarted when an Allied task force, centred on two American fleet carriers, fought Japanese naval forces to a draw in the Battle of the Coral Sea.[204] Japan's next plan, motivated by the earlier Doolittle Raid, was to seize Midway Atoll and lure American carriers into battle to be eliminated; as a diversion, Japan would also send forces to occupy the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.[205] In mid-May, Japan started the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in China, with the goal of inflicting retribution on the Chinese who aided the surviving American airmen in the Doolittle Raid by destroying Chinese air bases and fighting against the Chinese 23rd and 32nd Army Groups.[206][207] In early June, Japan put its operations into action, but the Americans had broken Japanese naval codes in late May and were fully aware of the plans and order of battle, and used this knowledge to achieve a decisive victory at Midway over the Imperial Japanese Navy.[208] With its capacity for aggressive action greatly diminished as a result of the Midway battle, Japan attempted to capture Port Moresby by an overland campaign in the Territory of Papua.[209] The Americans planned a counterattack against Japanese positions in the southern Solomon Islands, primarily Guadalcanal, as a first step towards capturing Rabaul, the main Japanese base in Southeast Asia.[210] Both plans started in July, but by mid-September, the Battle for Guadalcanal took priority for the Japanese, and troops in New Guinea were ordered to withdraw from the Port Moresby area to the northern part of the island, where they faced Australian and United States troops in the Battle of Buna–Gona.[211] Guadalcanal soon became a focal point for both sides with heavy commitments of troops and ships in the battle for Guadalcanal. By the start of 1943, the Japanese were defeated on the island and withdrew their troops.[212] In Burma, Commonwealth forces mounted two operations. The first was a disastrous offensive into the Arakan region in late 1942 that forced a retreat back to India by May 1943.[213] The second was the insertion of irregular forces behind Japanese frontlines in February which, by the end of April, had achieved mixed results.[214] Eastern Front (1942–1943) Red Army soldiers on the counterattack during the Battle of Stalingrad, February 1943 Despite considerable losses, in early 1942 Germany and its allies stopped a major Soviet offensive in central and southern Russia, keeping most territorial gains they had achieved during the previous year.[215] In May, the Germans defeated Soviet offensives in the Kerch Peninsula and at Kharkov,[216] and then in June 1942 launched their main summer offensive against southern Russia, to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe, while maintaining positions on the northern and central areas of the front. The Germans split Army Group South into two groups: Army Group A advanced to the lower Don River and struck south-east to the Caucasus, while Army Group B headed towards the Volga River. The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad on the Volga.[217] By mid-November, the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting. The Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad,[218] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.[219] By early February 1943, the German Army had taken tremendous losses; German troops at Stalingrad had been defeated,[220] and the front-line had been pushed back beyond its position before the summer offensive. In mid-February, after the Soviet push had tapered off, the Germans launched another attack on Kharkov, creating a salient in their front line around the Soviet city of Kursk.[221] Western Europe/Atlantic and Mediterranean (1942–1943) American Eighth Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raid on the Focke-Wulf factory in Germany, 9 October 1943 Exploiting poor American naval command decisions, the German navy ravaged Allied shipping off the American Atlantic coast.[222] By November 1941, Commonwealth forces had launched a counter-offensive in North Africa, Operation Crusader, and reclaimed all the gains the Germans and Italians had made.[223] The Germans also launched a North African offensive in January, pushing the British back to positions at the Gazala line by early February,[224] followed by a temporary lull in combat which Germany used to prepare for their upcoming offensives.[225] Concerns that the Japanese might use bases in Vichy-held Madagascar caused the British to invade the island in early May 1942.[226] An Axis offensive in Libya forced an Allied retreat deep inside Egypt until Axis forces were stopped at El Alamein.[227] On the Continent, raids of Allied commandos on strategic targets, culminating in the failed Dieppe Raid,[228] demonstrated the Western Allies' inability to launch an invasion of continental Europe without much better preparation, equipment, and operational security.[229] In August 1942, the Allies succeeded in repelling a second attack against El Alamein[230] and, at a high cost, managed to deliver desperately needed supplies to the besieged Malta.[231] A few months later, the Allies commenced an attack of their own in Egypt, dislodging the Axis forces and beginning a drive west across Libya.[232] This attack was followed up shortly after by Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, which resulted in the region joining the Allies.[233] Hitler responded to the French colony's defection by ordering the occupation of Vichy France;[233] although Vichy forces did not resist this violation of the armistice, they managed to scuttle their fleet to prevent its capture by German forces.[233][234] Axis forces in Africa withdrew into Tunisia, which was conquered by the Allies in May 1943.[233][235] In June 1943, the British and Americans began a strategic bombing campaign against Germany with a goal to disrupt the war economy, reduce morale, and "de-house" the civilian population.[236] The firebombing of Hamburg was among the first attacks in this campaign, inflicting significant casualties and considerable losses on infrastructure of this important industrial centre.[237] Allies gain momentum (1943–1944) U.S. Navy SBD-5 scout plane flying patrol over USS Washington and USS Lexington during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, 1943 After the Guadalcanal campaign, the Allies initiated several operations against Japan in the Pacific. In May 1943, Canadian and U.S. forces were sent to eliminate Japanese forces from the Aleutians.[238] Soon after, the United States, with support from Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islander forces, began major ground, sea and air operations to isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands, and breach the Japanese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.[239] By the end of March 1944, the Allies had completed both of these objectives and had also neutralised the major Japanese base at Truk in the Caroline Islands. In April, the Allies launched an operation to retake Western New Guinea.[240] In the Soviet Union, both the Germans and the Soviets spent the spring and early summer of 1943 preparing for large offensives in central Russia. On 5 July 1943, Germany attacked Soviet forces around the Kursk Bulge. Within a week, German forces had exhausted themselves against the Soviets' well-constructed defences,[241] and for the first time in the war, Hitler cancelled an operation before it had achieved tactical or operational success.[242] This decision was partially affected by the Western Allies' invasion of Sicily launched on 9 July, which, combined with previous Italian failures, resulted in the ousting and arrest of Mussolini later that month.[243] On 12 July 1943, the Soviets launched their own counter-offensives, thereby dispelling any chance of German victory or even stalemate in the east. The Soviet victory at Kursk marked the end of German superiority,[244] giving the Soviet Union the initiative on the Eastern Front.[245][246] The Germans tried to stabilise their eastern front along the hastily fortified Panther–Wotan line, but the Soviets broke through it at Smolensk and the Lower Dnieper Offensive.[247] On 3 September 1943, the Western Allies invaded the Italian mainland, following Italy's armistice with the Allies and the ensuing German occupation of Italy.[248] Germany, with the help of fascists, responded to the armistice by disarming Italian forces that were in many places without superior orders, seizing military control of Italian areas,[249] and creating a series of defensive lines.[250] German special forces then rescued Mussolini, who then soon established a new client state in German-occupied Italy named the Italian Social Republic,[251] causing an Italian civil war. The Western Allies fought through several lines until reaching the main German defensive line in mid-November.[252] Red Army troops in a counter-offensive on German positions at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943 German operations in the Atlantic also suffered. By May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became increasingly effective, the resulting sizeable German submarine losses forced a temporary halt of the German Atlantic naval campaign.[253] In November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and then with Joseph Stalin in Tehran.[254] The former conference determined the post-war return of Japanese territory[255] and the military planning for the Burma campaign,[256] while the latter included agreement that the Western Allies would invade Europe in 1944 and that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat.[257] From November 1943, during the seven-week Battle of Changde, the Chinese awaited allied relief as they forced Japan to fight a costly war of attrition.[258][259][260] In January 1944, the Allies launched a series of attacks in Italy against the line at Monte Cassino and tried to outflank it with landings at Anzio.[261] On 27 January 1944, Soviet troops launched a major offensive that expelled German forces from the Leningrad region, thereby ending the most lethal siege in history.[262] The following Soviet offensive was halted on the pre-war Estonian border by the German Army Group North aided by Estonians hoping to re-establish national independence. This delay slowed subsequent Soviet operations in the Baltic Sea region.[263] By late May 1944, the Soviets had liberated Crimea, largely expelled Axis forces from Ukraine, and made incursions into Romania, which were repulsed by the Axis troops.[264] The Allied offensives in Italy had succeeded and, at the expense of allowing several German divisions to retreat, Rome was captured on 4 June.[265] The Allies had mixed success in mainland Asia. In March 1944, the Japanese launched the first of two invasions, an operation against Allied positions in Assam, India,[266] and soon besieged Commonwealth positions at Imphal and Kohima.[267] In May 1944, British and Indian forces mounted a counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma by July,[267] and Chinese forces that had invaded northern Burma in late 1943 besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina.[268] The second Japanese invasion of China aimed to destroy China's main fighting forces, secure railways between Japanese-held territory and capture Allied airfields.[269] By June, the Japanese had conquered the province of Henan and begun a new attack on Changsha.[270] Allies close in (1944) American troops approaching Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944 On 6 June 1944 (commonly known as D-Day), after three years of Soviet pressure,[271] the Western Allies invaded northern France. After reassigning several Allied divisions from Italy, they also attacked southern France.[272] These landings were successful and led to the defeat of the German Army units in France. Paris was liberated on 25 August by the local resistance assisted by the Free French Forces, both led by General Charles de Gaulle,[273] and the Western Allies continued to push back German forces in western Europe during the latter part of the year. An attempt to advance into northern Germany spearheaded by a major airborne operation in the Netherlands failed.[274] After that, the Western Allies slowly pushed into Germany, but failed to cross the Ruhr river. In Italy, the Allied advance slowed due to the last major German defensive line.[275] On 22 June, the Soviets launched a strategic offensive in Belarus ("Operation Bagration") that nearly destroyed the German Army Group Centre.[276] Soon after that, another Soviet strategic offensive forced German troops from Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. The Soviets formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation to control territory in Poland and combat the Polish Armia Krajowa; the Soviet Red Army remained in the Praga district on the other side of the Vistula and watched passively as the Germans quelled the Warsaw Uprising initiated by the Armia Krajowa.[277] The national uprising in Slovakia was also quelled by the Germans.[278] The Soviet Red Army's strategic offensive in eastern Romania cut off and destroyed the considerable German troops there and triggered a successful coup d'état in Romania and in Bulgaria, followed by those countries' shift to the Allied side.[279] General Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte, 20 October 1944 In September 1944, Soviet troops advanced into Yugoslavia and forced the rapid withdrawal of German Army Groups E and F in Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia to rescue them from being cut off.[280] By this point, the communist-led Partisans under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who had led an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the occupation since 1941, controlled much of the territory of Yugoslavia and engaged in delaying efforts against German forces further south. In northern Serbia, the Soviet Red Army, with limited support from Bulgarian forces, assisted the Partisans in a joint liberation of the capital city of Belgrade on 20 October. A few days later, the Soviets launched a massive assault against German-occupied Hungary that lasted until the fall of Budapest in February 1945.[281] Unlike impressive Soviet victories in the Balkans, bitter Finnish resistance to the Soviet offensive in the Karelian Isthmus denied the Soviets occupation of Finland and led to a Soviet-Finnish armistice on relatively mild conditions,[282] although Finland was forced to fight their former German allies.[283] By the start of July 1944, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the Chindwin River[284] while the Chinese captured Myitkyina. In September 1944, Chinese forces captured Mount Song and reopened the Burma Road.[285] In China, the Japanese had more successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August.[286] Soon after, they invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the end of November[287] and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by mid-December.[288] In the Pacific, U.S. forces continued to push back the Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944, they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands and decisively defeated Japanese forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. These defeats led to the resignation of the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, and provided the United States with air bases to launch intensive heavy bomber attacks on the Japanese home islands. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval forces scored another large victory in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history.[289] Axis collapse and Allied victory (1944–1945) Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin On 16 December 1944, Germany made a last attempt to split the Allies on the Western Front by using most of its remaining reserves to launch a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes and along the French-German border, hoping to encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and prompt a political settlement after capturing their primary supply port at Antwerp. By 16 January 1945, this offensive had been repulsed with no strategic objectives fulfilled.[290] In Italy, the Western Allies remained stalemated at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the Red Army attacked in Poland, pushing from the Vistula to the Oder river in Germany, and overran East Prussia.[291] On 4 February Soviet, British, and U.S. leaders met for the Yalta Conference. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.[292] In February, the Soviets entered Silesia and Pomerania, while the Western Allies entered western Germany and closed to the Rhine river. By March, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine north and south of the Ruhr, encircling the German Army Group B.[293] In early March, in an attempt to protect its last oil reserves in Hungary and retake Budapest, Germany launched its last major offensive against Soviet troops near Lake Balaton. Within two weeks, the offensive had been repulsed, the Soviets advanced to Vienna, and captured the city. In early April, Soviet troops captured Königsberg, while the Western Allies finally pushed forward in Italy and swept across western Germany capturing Hamburg and Nuremberg. American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe river on 25 April, leaving unoccupied pockets in southern Germany and around Berlin. Soviet troops stormed and captured Berlin in late April.[294] In Italy, German forces surrendered on 29 April, while the Italian Social Republic capitulated two days later. On 30 April, the Reichstag was captured, signalling the military defeat of Nazi Germany.[295] Major changes in leadership occurred on both sides during this period. On 12 April, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on 28 April.[296] On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in his headquarters, and was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (as President of the Reich) and Joseph Goebbels (as Chancellor of the Reich); Goebbels also committed suicide on the following day and was replaced by Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, in what would later be known as the Flensburg Government. Total and unconditional surrender in Europe was signed on 7 and 8 May, to be effective by the end of 8 May.[297] German Army Group Centre resisted in Prague until 11 May.[298] On 23 May all remaining members of the German government were arrested by the Allied Forces in Flensburg, while on 5 June all German political and military institutions were transferred under the control of the Allies through the Berlin Declaration.[299] In the Pacific theatre, American forces accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of April 1945. They landed on Luzon in January 1945 and recaptured Manila in March. Fighting continued on Luzon, Mindanao, and other islands of the Philippines until the end of the war.[300] Meanwhile, the United States Army Air Forces launched a massive firebombing campaign of strategic cities in Japan in an effort to destroy Japanese war industry and civilian morale. A devastating bombing raid on Tokyo of 9–10 March was the deadliest conventional bombing raid in history.[301] Japanese foreign affairs minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board USS Missouri, 2 September 1945 In May 1945, Australian troops landed in Borneo, overrunning the oilfields there. British, American, and Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma in March, and the British pushed on to reach Rangoon by 3 May.[302] Chinese forces started a counterattack in the Battle of West Hunan that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945. American naval and amphibious forces also moved towards Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by the end of June.[303] At the same time, a naval blockade by submarines was strangling Japan's economy and drastically reducing its ability to supply overseas forces.[304][305] On 11 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany,[306] and the American, British and Chinese governments reiterated the demand for unconditional surrender of Japan, specifically stating that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction".[307] During this conference, the United Kingdom held its general election, and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister.[308] The call for unconditional surrender was rejected by the Japanese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms.[309] In early August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, declared war on Japan, invaded Japanese-held Manchuria and quickly defeated the Kwantung Army, which was the largest Japanese fighting force.[310] These two events persuaded previously adamant Imperial Army leaders to accept surrender terms.[311] The Red Army also captured the southern part of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. On the night of 9–10 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his decision to accept the terms demanded by the Allies in the Potsdam Declaration.[312] On 15 August, the Emperor communicated this decision to the Japanese people through a speech broadcast on the radio (Gyokuon-hōsō, literally "broadcast in the Emperor's voice").[313] On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed at Tokyo Bay on the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, ending the war.[314] Aftermath Main articles: Aftermath of World War II and Consequences of Nazism Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allied forces prosecuted prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity The Allies established occupation administrations in Austria and Germany, both initially divided between western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, respectively. However, their paths soon diverged. In Germany, the western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union officially ended in 1949, with the respective zones becoming separate countries, West Germany and East Germany.[315] In Austria, however, occupation continued until 1955, when a joint settlement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union permitted the reunification of Austria as a democratic state officially non-aligned with any political bloc (although in practice having better relations with the Western Allies). A denazification program in Germany led to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials and the removal of ex-Nazis from power, although this policy moved towards amnesty and re-integration of ex-Nazis into West German society.[316] Germany lost a quarter of its pre-war (1937) territory. Among the eastern territories, Silesia, Neumark and most of Pomerania were taken over by Poland,[317] and East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, followed by the expulsion to Germany of the nine million Germans from these provinces,[318][319] as well as three million Germans from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. By the 1950s, one-fifth of West Germans were refugees from the east. The Soviet Union also took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon Line,[320] from which 2 million Poles were expelled;[319][321] north-east Romania,[322][323] parts of eastern Finland,[324] and the Baltic states were annexed into the Soviet Union.[325][326] Italy lost its monarchy, colonial empire and some European territories.[327] In an effort to maintain world peace,[328] the Allies formed the United Nations,[329] which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945,[330] and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a common standard for all member nations.[331] The great powers that were the victors of the war—France, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States—became the permanent members of the UN's Security Council.[332] The five permanent members remain so to the present, although there have been two seat changes, between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in 1971, and between the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over.[333] Post-war border changes in Central Europe and creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc Besides Germany, the rest of Europe was also divided into Western and Soviet spheres of influence.[334] Most eastern and central European countries fell into the Soviet sphere, which led to establishment of Communist-led regimes, with full or partial support of the Soviet occupation authorities. As a result, East Germany,[335] Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania[336] became Soviet satellite states. Communist Yugoslavia conducted a fully independent policy, causing tension with the Soviet Union.[337] A Communist uprising in Greece was put down with Anglo-American support and the country remained aligned with the West.[338] Post-war division of the world was formalised by two international military alliances, the United States-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.[339] The long period of political tensions and military competition between them—the Cold War—would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race and number of proxy wars throughout the world.[340] In Asia, the United States led the occupation of Japan and administered Japan's former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.[341] Korea, formerly under Japanese colonial rule, was divided and occupied by the Soviet Union in the North and the United States in the South between 1945 and 1948. Separate republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel in 1948, each claiming to be the legitimate government for all of Korea, which led ultimately to the Korean War.[342] In China, nationalist and communist forces resumed the civil war in June 1946. Communist forces were victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949.[343] In the Middle East, the Arab rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the creation of Israel marked the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict. While European powers attempted to retain some or all of their colonial empires, their losses of prestige and resources during the war rendered this unsuccessful, leading to decolonisation.[344][345] The global economy suffered heavily from the war, although participating nations were affected differently. The United States emerged much richer than any other nation, leading to a baby boom, and by 1950 its gross domestic product per person was much higher than that of any of the other powers, and it dominated the world economy.[346] The Allied occupational authorities pursued a policy of industrial disarmament in Western Germany from 1945 to 1948.[347] Due to international trade interdependencies, this policy led to an economic stagnation in Europe and delayed European recovery from the war for several years.[348][349] At the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, the Allied nations drew up an economic framework for the post-war world. The agreement created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which later became part of the World Bank Group. The Bretton Woods system lasted until 1973.[350] Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany, and was sped up by the liberalisation of European economic policy that the U.S. Marshall Plan economic aid (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused.[351][352] The post-1948 West German recovery has been called the German economic miracle.[353] Italy also experienced an economic boom[354] and the French economy rebounded.[355] By contrast, the United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin,[356] and although receiving a quarter of the total Marshall Plan assistance, more than any other European country,[357] it continued in relative economic decline for decades.[358] The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era,[359] having seized and transferred most of Germany's industrial plants and exacted war reparations from its satellite states.[c][360] Japan recovered much later.[361] China returned to its pre-war industrial production by 1952.[362] Impact Main article: Historiography of World War II Casualties and war crimes Main article: World War II casualties Further information: War crimes in World War II World War II deaths Estimates for the total number of casualties in the war vary, because many deaths went unrecorded.[363] Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians.[364][365][366] The Soviet Union alone lost around 27 million people during the war,[367] including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths.[368] A quarter of the total people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed.[369] Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.[370] An estimated 11[371] to 17 million[372] civilians died as a direct or as an indirect result of Hitler's racist policies, including mass killing of around 6 million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, at least 1.9 million ethnic Poles[373][374] and millions of other Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and other ethnic and minority groups.[375][372] Between 1941 and 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs, along with Roma and Jews, were persecuted and murdered by the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia.[376] Concurrently, Muslims and Croats were persecuted and killed by Serb nationalist Chetniks,[377] with an estimated 50,000–68,000 victims (of which 41,000 were civilians).[378] Also, more than 100,000 Poles were massacred by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volhynia massacres, between 1943 and 1945.[379] At the same time, about 10,000–15,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish Home Army and other Polish units, in reprisal attacks.[380] Bodies of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937 In Asia and the Pacific, the number of people killed by Japanese troops remains contested. According to R.J. Rummel, the Japanese killed between 3 million and more than 10 million people, with the most probable case of almost 6,000,000 people.[381] According to the British historian M. R. D. Foot, civilian deaths are between 10 million and 20 million, whereas Chinese military casualties (killed and wounded) are estimated to be over five million.[382] Other estimates say that up to 30 million people, most of them civilians, were killed.[383][384] The most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanjing Massacre, in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.[385] Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Three Alls policy. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Hebei and Shandong.[386] Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731)[387][388] and in early conflicts against the Soviets.[389] Both the Germans and the Japanese tested such weapons against civilians,[390] and sometimes on prisoners of war.[391] The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers,[392] and the imprisonment or execution of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD secret police, along with mass civilian deportations to Siberia, in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army.[393] Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in Germany.[394][395] The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million,[396] while figures for women raped by German soldiers in the Soviet Union go as far as ten million.[397][398] The mass bombing of cities in Europe and Asia has often been called a war crime, although no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II.[399] The USAAF bombed a total of 67 Japanese cities, killing 393,000 civilians, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroying 65% of built-up areas.[400] Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour Main articles: The Holocaust, Nazi concentration camps, Extermination camp, Forced labour under German rule during World War II, Kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany, Nazi human experimentation, Soviet war crimes § World War II, and Japanese war crimes Schutzstaffel (SS) female camp guards removing prisoners' bodies from lorries and carrying them to a mass grave, inside the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945 Nazi Germany, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, was responsible for murdering about 6 million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust. They also murdered an additional 4 million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah's Witnesses) as part of a program of deliberate extermination, in effect becoming a "genocidal state".[401] Soviet POWs were kept in especially unbearable conditions, and 3.6 million Soviet POWs out of 5.7 million died in Nazi camps during the war.[402][403] In addition to concentration camps, death camps were created in Nazi Germany to exterminate people on an industrial scale. Nazi Germany extensively used forced labourers; about 12 million Europeans from German-occupied countries were abducted and used as a slave work force in German industry, agriculture and war economy.[404] Prisoner identity photograph of a Polish girl taken by the German SS in Auschwitz.[405] Approximately 230,000 children were held prisoner and used in forced labour and Nazi medical experiments The Soviet Gulag became a de facto system of deadly camps during 1942–43, when wartime privation and hunger caused numerous deaths of inmates,[406] including foreign citizens of Poland and other countries occupied in 1939–40 by the Soviet Union, as well as Axis POWs.[407] By the end of the war, most Soviet POWs liberated from Nazi camps and many repatriated civilians were detained in special filtration camps where they were subjected to NKVD evaluation, and 226,127 were sent to the Gulag as real or perceived Nazi collaborators.[408] Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also had high death rates. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners was 27 percent (for American POWs, 37 percent),[409] seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians.[410] While 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only 56.[411] At least five million Chinese civilians from northern China and Manchukuo were enslaved between 1935 and 1941 by the East Asia Development Board, or Kōain, for work in mines and war industries. After 1942, the number reached 10 million.[412] In Java, between 4 and 10 million rōmusha (Japanese: "manual labourers"), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in Southeast Asia, and only 52,000 were repatriated to Java.[413] Occupation Main articles: German-occupied Europe, Resistance during World War II, Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Collaboration with Imperial Japan, and Nazi plunder Polish civilians wearing blindfolds photographed just before being massacred by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, 1940 In Europe, occupation came under two forms. In Western, Northern, and Central Europe (France, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and the annexed portions of Czechoslovakia) Germany established economic policies through which it collected roughly 69.5 billion reichsmarks (27.8 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of the war; this figure does not include the plunder of industrial products, military equipment, raw materials and other goods.[414] Thus, the income from occupied nations was over 40 percent of the income Germany collected from taxation, a figure which increased to nearly 40 percent of total German income as the war went on.[415] Soviet partisans hanged by the German army. The Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 that civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead, twenty percent of the 68 million people in the occupied Soviet Union In the East, the intended gains of Lebensraum were never attained as fluctuating front-lines and Soviet scorched earth policies denied resources to the German invaders.[416] Unlike in the West, the Nazi racial policy encouraged extreme brutality against what it considered to be the "inferior people" of Slavic descent; most German advances were thus followed by mass atrocities and war crimes.[417] The Nazis killed an estimated 2.77 million ethnic Poles during the war in addition to Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.[418][better source needed] Although resistance groups formed in most occupied territories, they did not significantly hamper German operations in either the East[419] or the West[420] until late 1943. In Asia, Japan termed nations under its occupation as being part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, essentially a Japanese hegemony which it claimed was for purposes of liberating colonised peoples.[421] Although Japanese forces were sometimes welcomed as liberators from European domination, Japanese war crimes frequently turned local public opinion against them.[422] During Japan's initial conquest, it captured 4,000,000 barrels (640,000 m3) of oil (~550,000 tonnes) left behind by retreating Allied forces; and by 1943, was able to get production in the Dutch East Indies up to 50 million barrels (7,900,000 m3) of oil (~6.8 million tonnes), 76 percent of its 1940 output rate.[422] Home fronts and production Main articles: Military production during World War II and Home front during World War II Allies to Axis GDP ratio throughout the war In the 1930s Britain and the United States of America together controlled almost 75% of world mineral output—essential for projecting military power.[423] In Europe, before the outbreak of the war, the Allies had significant advantages in both population and economics. In 1938, the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, Poland and the British Dominions) had a 30 percent larger population and a 30 percent higher gross domestic product than the European Axis powers (Germany and Italy); including colonies, the Allies had more than a 5:1 advantage in population and a nearly 2:1 advantage in GDP.[424] In Asia at the same time, China had roughly six times the population of Japan but only an 89 percent higher GDP; this reduces to three times the population and only a 38 percent higher GDP if Japanese colonies are included.[424] The United States produced about two-thirds of all munitions used by the Allies in World War II, including warships, transports, warplanes, artillery, tanks, trucks, and ammunition.[425] Although the Allies' economic and population advantages were largely mitigated during the initial rapid blitzkrieg attacks of Germany and Japan, they became the decisive factor by 1942, after the United States and Soviet Union joined the Allies and the war evolved into one of attrition.[426] While the Allies' ability to out-produce the Axis was partly due to more access to natural resources, other factors, such as Germany and Japan's reluctance to employ women in the labour force,[427] Allied strategic bombing,[428] and Germany's late shift to a war economy[429] contributed significantly. Additionally, neither Germany nor Japan planned to fight a protracted war, and had not equipped themselves to do so.[430] To improve their production, Germany and Japan used millions of slave labourers;[431] Germany enslaved about 12 million people, mostly from Eastern Europe,[404] while Japan used more than 18 million people in Far East Asia.[412][413] Advances in technology and its application Main article: Technology during World War II A V-2 rocket launched from a fixed site in Peenemünde, 21 June 1943 Aircraft were used for reconnaissance, as fighters, bombers, and ground-support, and each role developed considerably. Innovations included airlift (the capability to quickly move limited high-priority supplies, equipment, and personnel);[432] and strategic bombing (the bombing of enemy industrial and population centres to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war).[433] Anti-aircraft weaponry also advanced, including defences such as radar and surface-to-air artillery, in particular the introduction of the proximity fuze. The use of the jet aircraft was pioneered and led to jets becoming standard in air forces worldwide.[434] Advances were made in nearly every aspect of naval warfare, most notably with aircraft carriers and submarines. Although aeronautical warfare had relatively little success at the start of the war, actions at Taranto, Pearl Harbor, and the Coral Sea established the carrier as the dominant capital ship (in place of the battleship).[435][436][437] In the Atlantic, escort carriers became a vital part of Allied convoys, increasing the effective protection radius and helping to close the Mid-Atlantic gap.[438] Carriers were also more economical than battleships due to the relatively low cost of aircraft[439] and because they are not required to be as heavily armoured.[440] Submarines, which had proved to be an effective weapon during the First World War,[441] were expected by all combatants to be important in the second. The British focused development on anti-submarine weaponry and tactics, such as sonar and convoys, while Germany focused on improving its offensive capability, with designs such as the Type VII submarine and wolfpack tactics.[442][better source needed] Gradually, improving Allied technologies such as the Leigh Light, Hedgehog, Squid, and homing torpedoes proved effective against German submarines.[443] Nuclear Gadget being raised to the top of the detonation "shot tower", at Alamogordo Bombing Range; Trinity nuclear test, New Mexico, July 1945 Land warfare changed from the static frontlines of trench warfare of World War I, which had relied on improved artillery that outmatched the speed of both infantry and cavalry, to increased mobility and combined arms. The tank, which had been used predominantly for infantry support in the First World War, had evolved into the primary weapon.[444] In the late 1930s, tank design was considerably more advanced than it had been during World War I,[445] and advances continued throughout the war with increases in speed, armour and firepower.[446][447] At the start of the war, most commanders thought enemy tanks should be met by tanks with superior specifications.[448] This idea was challenged by the poor performance of the relatively light early tank guns against armour, and German doctrine of avoiding tank-versus-tank combat. This, along with Germany's use of combined arms, were among the key elements of their highly successful blitzkrieg tactics across Poland and France.[444] Many means of destroying tanks, including indirect artillery, anti-tank guns (both towed and self-propelled), mines, short-ranged infantry antitank weapons, and other tanks were used.[448] Even with large-scale mechanisation, infantry remained the backbone of all forces,[449] and throughout the war, most infantry were equipped similarly to World War I.[450] The portable machine gun spread, a notable example being the German MG 34, and various submachine guns which were suited to close combat in urban and jungle settings.[450] The assault rifle, a late war development incorporating many features of the rifle and submachine gun, became the standard post-war infantry weapon for most armed forces.[451] Most major belligerents attempted to solve the problems of complexity and security involved in using large codebooks for cryptography by designing ciphering machines, the most well-known being the German Enigma machine.[452] Development of SIGINT (signals intelligence) and cryptanalysis enabled the countering process of decryption. Notable examples were the Allied decryption of Japanese naval codes[453] and British Ultra, a pioneering method for decoding Enigma that benefited from information given to the United Kingdom by the Polish Cipher Bureau, which had been decoding early versions of Enigma before the war.[454] Another component of military intelligence was deception, which the Allies used to great effect in operations such as Mincemeat and Bodyguard.[453][455] Other technological and engineering feats achieved during, or as a result of, the war include the world's first programmable computers (Z3, Colossus, and ENIAC), guided missiles and modern rockets, the Manhattan Project's development of nuclear weapons, operations research, the development of artificial harbours, and oil pipelines under the English Channel.[456] Penicillin was first developed, mass-produced, and used during the war.[457]
For the time machine from Peabody's Improbable History and its namesake, see Wayback Machine (Peabody's Improbable History). For help citing the Wayback Machine in Wikipedia, see Help:Using the Wayback Machine. Wayback Machine Stylized text saying: "INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE". The text is in black, except for "WAYBACK", which is in red. Type of site Archive Founded May 10, 1996; 28 years ago (private) October 24, 2001; 23 years ago (public) Area served Worldwide (except China, India[a], and Bahrain) Owner Internet Archive URL web.archive.org Commercial No Registration Optional Current status Active Written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows users to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.[2] Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 billion web pages by the end of 2009. As of November 2024, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 916 billion web pages and well over 100 petabytes of data.[3][4] History The Internet Archive began archiving cached web pages in 1996. One of the earliest known pages was archived on May 10, 1996, at 2:08 p.m. (UTC).[5] Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in San Francisco, California,[6] in October 2001,[7][8] primarily to address the problem of web content vanishing whenever it gets changed or when a website is shut down.[9] The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three-dimensional index".[10] Kahle and Gilliat created the machine hoping to archive the entire Internet and provide "universal access to all knowledge".[11] The name "Wayback Machine" is a reference to a fictional time-traveling device in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends from the 1960s.[12][13][14] In a segment of the cartoon entitled "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters Mister Peabody and Sherman use the "Wayback Machine" to travel back in time to witness and participate in famous historical events.[15] From 1996 to 2001, the information was kept on digital tape, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers and scientists to tap into the "clunky" database.[16] When the archive reached its fifth anniversary in 2001, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.[17] By the time the Wayback Machine launched, it already contained over 10 billion archived pages.[18] The data is stored on the Internet Archive's large cluster of Linux nodes.[11] It revisits and archives new versions of websites on occasion (see technical details below).[19] Sites can also be captured manually by entering a website's URL into the search box, provided that the website allows the Wayback Machine to "crawl" it and save the data.[20] On October 30, 2020, the Wayback Machine began fact-checking content.[21] As of January 2022, domains of ad servers are disabled from capturing.[22] In May 2021, for Internet Archive's 25th anniversary, the Wayback Machine introduced the "Wayforward Machine" which allows users to "travel to the Internet in 2046, where knowledge is under siege".[23][24] Technical information The Wayback Machine's software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software.[25] The information collected by these "crawlers" does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.[26] Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive.[19] For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by Internet Archive on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, mirrors of Common Crawl.[19] The "Worldwide Web Crawls" have been running since 2010 and capture the global Web.[19][27] In September 2020, the Internet Archive announced a partnership with Cloudflare – an American content delivery network service provider – to automatically index websites served via its "Always Online" services.[28] Documents and resources are stored with time stamp URLs such as 20241219141818. Pages' individual resources such as images and style sheets and scripts, as well as outgoing hyperlinks, are linked to with the time stamp of the currently viewed page, so they are redirected automatically to their individual captures that are the closest in time.[29] The frequency of snapshot captures varies per website.[19] Websites in the "Worldwide Web Crawls" are included in a "crawl list", with the site archived once per crawl.[19] A crawl can take months or even years to complete, depending on size.[19] For example, "Wide Crawl Number 13" started on January 9, 2015, and completed on July 11, 2016.[30] However, there may be multiple crawls ongoing at any one time, and a site might be included in more than one crawl list, so how often a site is crawled varies widely.[19] A "Save Page Now" archiving feature was made available in October 2013,[31] accessible on the lower right of the Wayback Machine's main page.[32] Once a target URL is entered and saved, the web page will become part of the Wayback Machine.[31] Through the Internet address web.archive.org,[33] users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including PDF and data compression file formats. The Wayback Machine creates a permanent local URL of the upload content, that is accessible in the web, even if not listed while searching in the https://archive.org official website.[jargon] Starting in October 2019, users were limited to 15 archival requests and retrievals per minute.[34] Storage capacity and growth As technology has developed over the years, the storage capacity of the Wayback Machine has grown. In 2003, after only two years of public access, the Wayback Machine was growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. The data is stored on PetaBox rack systems custom designed by Internet Archive staff. The first 100TB rack became fully operational in June 2004, although it soon became clear that they would need much more storage than that.[35][36] The Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage in 2009, and hosts a new data centre in a Sun Modular Datacenter on Sun Microsystems' California campus.[37] As of 2009, the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month.[38] A new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and a fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing in 2011, where captures appear in a calendar layout with circles whose width visualizes the number of crawls each day, but no marking of duplicates with asterisks or an advanced search page.[39][40] A top toolbar was added to facilitate navigating between captures. A bar chart visualizes the frequency of captures per month over the years.[41] Features like "Changes", "Summary", and a graphical site map were added subsequently. In March that year, it was said on the Wayback Machine forum that "the Beta of the new Wayback Machine has a more complete and up-to-date index of all crawled materials into 2010, and will continue to be updated regularly. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a little bit of material past 2008, and no further index updates are planned, as it will be phased out this year."[42] Also in 2011, the Internet Archive installed their sixth pair of PetaBox racks which increased the Wayback Machine's storage capacity by 700 terabytes.[43] In January 2013, the company announced a milestone of 240 billion URLs.[44] In October 2013, the company introduced the "Save a Page" feature, which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL, and quickly generates a permanent link unlike the preceding liveweb feature.[45][46] In December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained 435 billion web pages—almost nine petabytes of data, and was growing at about 20 terabytes a week.[18][47][48] In July 2016, the Wayback Machine reportedly contained around 15 petabytes of data.[49] In October 2016, it was announced that the way web pages are counted would be changed, resulting in the decrease of the archived pages counts shown. Embedded objects such as pictures, videos, style sheets, JavaScripts are no longer counted as a "web page", whereas HTML, PDF, and plain text documents remain counted.[50] In September 2018, the Wayback Machine contained over 25 petabytes of data.[51][52] As of December 2020, the Wayback Machine contained over 70 petabytes of data.[53] Wayback Machine growth[54][55] Wayback Machine by year Pages archived 2004 30,000,000,000(0–100B: Light blue) 2005 40,000,000,000 2008 85,000,000,000 2012 150,000,000,000(100B–450B: Yellow) 2013 373,000,000,000 2014 400,000,000,000 2015 452,000,000,000(450B–600B: Orange) 2016 459,000,000,000 2017 279,000,000,000 2018 310,000,000,000 2019 345,000,000,000 2020 405,000,000,000 2021 514,000,000,000 2022 640,000,000,000(600B–: Red) 2024 866,000,000,000 Wayback Machine APIs The Wayback Machine service offers three public APIs, SavePageNow, Availability, and CDX.[56] SavePageNow can be used to archive web pages. Availability API for checking the archive availability status for a web page,[57] checking whether an archive for the web page exists or not. CDX API is for complex querying, filtering, and analysis of captured data.[58][59] Website exclusion policy Historically, the Wayback Machine has respected the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt) in determining if a website would be crawled – or if already crawled, if its archives would be publicly viewable. Website owners had the option to opt out of Wayback Machine through the use of robots.txt. It applied robots.txt rules retroactively; if a site blocked the Internet Archive, any previously archived pages from the domain were immediately rendered unavailable as well. In addition, the Internet Archive stated that "Sometimes, a website owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site. We comply with these requests."[60] In addition, the website says: "The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection."[61][62] On April 17, 2017, reports surfaced of sites that had gone defunct and became parked domains that were using robots.txt to exclude themselves from search engines, resulting in them being inadvertently excluded from the Wayback Machine.[63] Following this, the Internet Archive changed the policy to require an explicit exclusion request to remove sites from the Wayback Machine.[29] The Oakland Archive Policy Wayback's retroactive exclusion policy is based in part upon Recommendations for Managing Removal Requests and Preserving Archival Integrity, known as The Oakland Archive Policy, published by the School of Information Management and Systems at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, which gives a website owner the right to block access to the site's archives.[64] Wayback has complied with this policy to help avoid expensive litigation.[65] The Wayback retroactive exclusion policy began to relax in 2017, when it stopped honoring robots on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages. As of April 2017, Wayback is ignoring robots.txt more broadly, not just for U.S. government websites.[66][67][68][69] Uses From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its archive. As of 2013, scholars had written about 350 articles on the Wayback Machine, mostly from the information technology, library science, and social science fields. Social science scholars have used the Wayback Machine to analyze how the development of websites from the mid-1990s to the present has affected the company's growth.[18] When the Wayback Machine archives a page, it usually includes most of the hyperlinks, keeping those links active when they just as easily could have been broken by the Internet's instability. Researchers in India studied the effectiveness of the Wayback Machine's ability to save hyperlinks in online scholarly publications and found that it saved slightly more than half of them.[70] "Journalists use the Wayback Machine to view dead websites, dated news reports, and changes to website contents. Its content has been used to hold politicians accountable and expose battlefield lies."[71] In 2014, an archived social media page of Igor Girkin, a separatist rebel leader in Ukraine, showed him boasting about his troops having shot down a suspected Ukrainian military airplane before it became known that the plane actually was a civilian Malaysian Airlines jet (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), after which he deleted the post and blamed Ukraine's military for downing the plane.[71][72] In 2017, the March for Science originated from a discussion on Reddit that indicated someone had visited Archive.org and discovered that all references to climate change had been deleted from the White House website. In response, a user commented, "There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington".[73][74][75] The site is used heavily for verification, providing access to references and content creation by Wikipedia editors.[76] When new URLs are added to Wikipedia, the Internet Archive has been archiving them.[76] In September 2020, a partnership was announced with Cloudflare to automatically archive websites served via its "Always Online" service, which will also allow it to direct users to its copy of the site if it cannot reach the original host.[77] Limitations In 2014, there was a six-month lag time between when a website was crawled and when it became available for viewing in the Wayback Machine.[78] As of 2024, the lag time is 3 to 10 hours.[29] The Wayback Machine offers only limited search facilities. Its "Site Search" feature allows users to find a site based on words describing the site, rather than words found on the web pages themselves.[79] The Wayback Machine does not include every web page ever made due to the limitations of its web crawler. The Wayback Machine cannot completely archive web pages that contain interactive features such as Flash platforms and forms written in JavaScript and progressive web applications, because those functions require interaction with the host website. This means that, since approximately July 9, 2013, the Wayback Machine has been unable to display YouTube comments when saving videos' watch pages, as, according to the Archive Team, comments are no longer "loaded within the page itself."[80] The Wayback Machine's web crawler has difficulty extracting anything not coded in HTML or one of its variants, which can often result in broken hyperlinks and missing images. Due to this, the web crawler cannot archive "orphan pages" that are not linked to by other pages.[79][81] The Wayback Machine's crawler only follows a predetermined number of hyperlinks based on a preset depth limit, so it cannot archive every hyperlink on every page.[27] In legal evidence Civil litigation Netbula LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc. In a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc., defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots.txt file on its website that was causing the Wayback Machine to retroactively remove access to previous versions of pages it had archived from Netbula's site, pages that Chordiant believed would support its case.[82] Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbula's website and that they should have subpoenaed Internet Archive for the pages directly.[83] An employee of Internet Archive filed a sworn statement supporting Chordiant's motion, however, stating that it could not produce the web pages by any other means "without considerable burden, expense and disruption to its operations."[82] Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd in the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, rejected Netbula's arguments and ordered them to disable the robots.txt blockage temporarily in order to allow Chordiant to retrieve the archived pages that they sought.[82] Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite In an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No. 02 C 3293, 65 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 673 (N.D. Ill. October 15, 2004), a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, perhaps for the first time. Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network. Prior to the trial proceedings, EchoStar indicated that it intended to offer Wayback Machine snapshots as proof of the past content of Telewizja Polska's website. Telewizja Polska brought a motion in limine to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source, but Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Telewizja Polska's assertion of hearsay and denied TVP's motion in limine to exclude the evidence at trial.[84][85] At the trial, however, District Court Judge Ronald Guzman, the trial judge, overruled Magistrate Keys' findings, and held that neither the affidavit of the Internet Archive employee nor the underlying pages (i.e., the Telewizja Polska website) were admissible as evidence. Judge Guzman reasoned that the employee's affidavit contained both hearsay and inconclusive supporting statements, and the purported web page, printouts were not self-authenticating.[86][87] Patent law Main article: Internet as a source of prior art The United States Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office will accept date stamps from the Internet Archive as evidence of when a given Web page was accessible to the public. These dates are used to determine if a Web page is available as prior art for instance in examining a patent application.[88] Limitations of utility There are technical limitations to archiving a website, and as a consequence, opposing parties in litigation can misuse the results provided by website archives. This problem can be exacerbated by the practice of submitting screenshots of web pages in complaints, answers, or expert witness reports when the underlying links are not exposed and therefore, can contain errors. For example, archives such as the Wayback Machine do not fill out forms and therefore, do not include the contents of non-RESTful e-commerce databases in their archives.[89] Legal status In Europe, the Wayback Machine could be interpreted as violating copyright laws. Only the content creator can decide where their content is published or duplicated so the Archive would have to delete pages from its system upon request of the creator.[90] The exclusion policies for the Wayback Machine may be found in the FAQ section of the site.[91] Some cases have been brought against the Internet Archive specifically for its Wayback Machine archiving efforts. Archived content legal issues Scientology See also: Scientology and the Internet In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites that were critical of Scientology from the Wayback Machine.[92] An error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner".[93] Later, it was clarified that lawyers from the Church of Scientology had demanded the removal and that the site owners did not want their material removed.[94] Healthcare Advocates, Inc. In 2003, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey defended a client from a trademark dispute using the Archive's Wayback Machine. The attorneys were able to demonstrate that the claims made by the plaintiff were invalid, based on the content of their website from several years prior. The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Healthcare Advocates claimed that, since they had installed a robots.txt file on their website, even if after the initial lawsuit was filed, the Archive should have removed all previous copies of the plaintiff website from the Wayback Machine, however, some material continued to be publicly visible on Wayback.[95] The lawsuit was settled out of court after Wayback fixed the problem.[96] Suzanne Shell Activist Suzanne Shell filed suit in December 2005, demanding Internet Archive pay her US$100,000 for archiving her website profane-justice.org between 1999 and 2004.[97][98] Internet Archive filed a declaratory judgment action in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on January 20, 2006, seeking a judicial determination that Internet Archive did not violate Shell's copyright. Shell responded and brought a countersuit against Internet Archive for archiving her site, which she alleges is in violation of her terms of service.[99] On February 13, 2007, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed all counterclaims except breach of contract.[98] The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss the copyright infringement claims that Shell asserted arose out of its copying activities, which would also go forward.[100] On April 25, 2007, Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell jointly announced the settlement of their lawsuit.[97] The Internet Archive said it "...has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms. Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation." Shell said, "I respect the historical value of Internet Archive's goal. I never intended to interfere with that goal nor cause it any harm."[101] Daniel Davydiuk Between 2013 and 2016, a pornographic actor named Daniel Davydiuk tried to remove archived images of himself from the Wayback Machine's archive, first by sending multiple DMCA requests to the archive, and then by appealing to the Federal Court of Canada.[102][103][104] The images were removed from the website in 2017. FlexiSpy In 2018, archives of stalkerware application FlexiSpy's website were removed from the Wayback Machine. The company claimed to have contacted the Internet Archive, presumably to remove the archives of its website.[105] Censorship and other threats Archive.org is blocked in China.[106][107][108] The Internet Archive was blocked in its entirety in Russia in 2015–16, ostensibly for hosting a Jihad outreach video.[71][109][110] Since 2016, the website has been back, available in its entirety, although in 2016 Russian commercial lobbyists were suing the Internet Archive to ban it on copyright grounds.[111] In March 2015, it was published that security researchers became aware of the threat posed by the service's unintentional hosting of malicious binaries from archived sites.[112][113] Alison Macrina, director of the Library Freedom Project, notes that "while librarians deeply value individual privacy, we also strongly oppose censorship".[71] There is at least one case in which an article was removed from the archive shortly after it had been removed from its original website. A Daily Beast reporter had written an article that outed several gay Olympian athletes in 2016 after the reporter had made a fake profile posing as a gay man on a dating app. The Daily Beast removed the article after it was met with widespread furor; not long after, the Internet Archive soon did as well, but emphatically stated that they did so for no other reason than to protect the safety of the outed athletes.[71] Other threats include natural disasters,[114] destruction (both remote and physical),[115] manipulation of the archive's contents, problematic copyright laws,[116] and surveillance of the site's users.[117] Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, suspects that in the long term of multiple generations "next to nothing" will survive in a useful way, stating, "If we have continuity in our technological civilization, I suspect a lot of the bare data will remain findable and searchable. But I suspect almost nothing of the format in which it was delivered will be recognizable" because sites "with deep back-ends of content-management systems like Drupal and Ruby and Django" are harder to archive.[118] In 2016, in an article reflecting on the preservation of human knowledge, The Atlantic has commented that the Internet Archive, which describes itself to be built for the long-term,[119] "is working furiously to capture data before it disappears without any long-term infrastructure to speak of."[120] Wikinews has related news: Data breach and DDOS attacks bring down Wayback Machine In September 2024, the Internet Archive suffered a data breach that exposed 31 million records containing personal information, including email addresses and hashed passwords.[citation needed] On October 9, 2024, the site went down due to a distributed denial-of-service attack.[121][122] On October 14, the site returned online, but it remained in read-only mode until November 4, during which time "Save Page Now" was disabled, replaced with a "Temporarily Unavailable" banner.[123]
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