The World War II Multimedia Database

Introduction

The Ultra Secret

Wonder Weapons

Radar

Total War

Introduction

More than any other war in human history, the Second World War was a war of advancing technology. Incredible advances changed the very nature of the warfare forever.

Unlike the United States Army, the German Wehrmacht had a long standing professional officer corps that had experience going back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. While many American career officers had seen action in World War I, the vast majority of Americans entered combat for the first time.

The Red Army Offensive in the spring of 1944 reached Warsaw by the late summer. Poland had suffered for five years under Nazi occupation, and the Government-in-Exile in London kept the focus of the Polish cause.

Wake Island has the distinction of being the only time defenders were able to prevent a landing during World War II. The marines and naval personnel on Wake, a refueling station for the Pan American Clipper, would become heroes to the American public starved for good news as the Japanese advanced across the Pacific.

The Soviet Union had fought with Japan over the Manchurian border. An uneasy truce had existed since September 1939, when, in 1941, both nations realized that the coming war in Europe would mean that they would have to protect their interests elsewhere. Still, both nations had significant forces in Northern China in case the other attacked.

The President of the United States had a strategic dilemma throughout the start of World War II. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was secretly aiding the British in their war against Nazi Germany. He did not want war with Japan, because it would prevent the full weight of the United States military and industry from being brought to bear on Germany.

As Japan was opened by the Admiral Matthew C. Perry in 1854, the United States was a nation of contradictions. As Perry's black ships were landing in Edo Bay, his nation was growing bitterly divided over the issue of state's rights versus national interests. Japan seemed very far off, especially to a nation that was centered on the Atlantic.

During the Washington Conference of 1920, the Americans took a hard look at their Navy. They had a Navy second only to the British, and like the Royal Navy, they had to protect interests in two oceans. Yet voluntarily they gave up building several ships and scrapped others.

The United Kingdom had already been fighting the Germans for over two years when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Dominion garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere.

After World War I, Great Britain was marked by the death of a million of her young men, more than she was to lose in World War II. Her leaders, many old men overdue for retirement whose replacements were dead in Flanders field, were gripped by the memory of their war dead. The true horror of trench warfare had been kept from the British public, but not to the same extent that the German public was.