HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

European Theater

Soviet Winter Offensive

Berlin and Prague offensive on the Eastern Front 1945.

On January 12, the Red Army was ready for its next big offensive. Konev's armies attacked the Germans in southern Poland, expanding out from their Vistula River bridgehead near Sandomierz. January 14, Rokossovsky's armies attacked from the Narew River north of Warsaw. They broke the defenses covering East Prussia. Zhukov's armies in the center attacked from their bridgeheads near Warsaw. The German front was now in shambles.

Zhukov took Warsaw on January 17 and Lódz on the 19th. The same day, his forces reached the German pre-war border. At the end of the first week of the offensive, the Soviets had penetrated 100 miles deep on a front that was 400 miles wide. By February 13, the Soviets took Budapest. The Soviet onslaught finally halted at the end of January, only 40 miles from Berlin, on the Oder river.

Yalta Conference

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta in 1945.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt made arrangements for post-war Europe. They made the following resolutions:

• An April meeting would be held to form the United Nations;
• Poland would have free elections (although they were heavily rigged by the Soviets);
• Soviet nationals were to be repatriated;
• The Soviet Union was to attack Japan within three months of Germany's surrender.

Soviet Spring Offensive

The Red Army (including 78,556 soldiers of the First Polish Army) began its final assault on Berlin on April 16. By this point, the German Army was in full retreat, and Berlin had already been battered due to preliminary air bombings.

By April 24, the three Soviet army groups had completed the encirclement of the city. Hitler had sent the main German forces, which were supposed to defend the city to the south, as he believed that was the region where the Soviets would launch their spring offensive and not in Berlin.

As a final resistance effort, Hitler called for civilians, including teenagers, to fight the oncoming Red Army in the Volkssturm militia. Those forces were augmented by the battered German remnants that had fought the Soviets in Seelow Heights. But even then, the fighting was heavy, with house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat.

The Soviets sustained 305,000 dead; the Germans sustained as many as 325,000, including civilians. Hitler and his staff moved into the Führerbunker, a concrete bunker beneath the Chancellery, where on April 30, 1945, he committed suicide with his bride, Eva Braun.

Western Europe

The endless procession of German prisoners captured with the fall of Aachen marching through the ruined city streets to captivity

The Allies resumed their advance into Germany once the Battle of the Bulge officially ended on January 27, 1945. The final obstacle to the Allies was the river Rhine which was crossed in late March 1945.

Once the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the British fanned out northeast towards Hamburg, crossing the river Elbe and on towards Denmark and the Baltic. The U.S. Ninth Army went south as the northern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement, and the U.S. First Army went north as the southern pincer of the Ruhr encirclement.

On April 4, the encirclement was completed, and the German Army Group B, commanded by Field Marshal Walther Model, was trapped in the Ruhr Pocket, and 300,000 soldiers became POWs. The Ninth and First U.S. armies then turned east and then halted their advance at the Elbe River, where they met up with the Soviet forces in mid-April, letting them take Berlin.

Italy

Allied advances in the winter of 1944-45 up the Italian peninsula had been slow due to the troop re-deployments to France. But by April 9, the British/American 15th Army Group, which was composed of the U.S. Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army, broke through the Gothic Line and attacked the Po Valley, gradually enclosing the main German forces.

Milan was taken by the end of April, and the U.S. Fifth Army continued to move west and linked up with French units while the British Eighth Army advanced towards Trieste and made contact with the Yugoslav partisans.

A few days before the surrender of German troops in Italy, Italian partisans intercepted a party of Fascists trying to make their escape to Switzerland. Hiding underneath a pile of coats was Mussolini. The whole party, including Mussolini's mistress, Clara Petacci, was summarily shot on April 28, 1945. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung up on public display upside down.

Germany Surrenders

Red Army soldiers raising the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany

Admiral Karl Dönitz became leader of the German government after the death of Hitler, but the German war effort quickly disintegrated. German forces in Berlin surrendered the city to the Soviet troops on May 2, 1945.

German forces in Italy surrendered on May 2, 1945, at General Alexander's headquarters, and German forces in northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands surrendered on May 4. The German High Command under Generaloberst Alfred Jodl surrendered unconditionally all remaining German forces on May 7 in Reims, France.

The Western Allies celebrated "V-E Day" on May 8. The Soviet Union celebrated "Victory Day" on May 9. Some remnants of the German Army Group Center continued resistance until May 11 or 12.

Potsdam

The last Allied conference of World War II was held at the suburb of Potsdam, outside Berlin, from July 17 to August 2. The Potsdam Conference saw agreements reached between the Allies on policies for occupied Germany. An ultimatum was issued, calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan.

Pacific Theater

Central and South West Pacific

In January, the U.S. Sixth Army landed on Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. Manila was re-captured by March. U.S. capture of islands such as Iwo Jima in February and Okinawa (April through June) brought the Japanese homeland within easier range of naval and air attack. Amongst dozens of other cities, Tokyo was firebombed, and about 90,000 people died from the initial attack.

The dense living conditions around production centers and the wooden residential constructions contributed to the large loss of life. In addition, the ports and major waterways of Japan were extensively mined by air in Operation Starvation which seriously disrupted the logistics of the island nation.

The last major offensive in the Southwest Pacific Area was the Borneo campaign of mid-1945, which was aimed at further isolating the remaining Japanese forces in Southeast Asia and securing the release of Allied prisoners of war.

South East Asia

In Southeast Asia, from August 1944 to November 1944, the British 14th Army pursued the Japanese to the Chindwin River in Burma after their failed attack on India. The British Commonwealth forces launched a series of offensive operations back into Burma in late 1944 and the first half of 1945.

On May 2, 1945, Rangoon, the capital city of Myanmar (Burma), was taken in Operation Dracula. The planned amphibious assault on the western side of Malaya was canceled after the dropping of the atomic bombs, and Japanese forces in Southeast Asia surrendered soon afterward.

Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rises 18 km (60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter.

The U.S. military and political chiefs had decided to use their new super-weapon to bring the war to a speedy end. The battle for Okinawa had shown that an invasion of the Japanese mainland (planned for November), seen as an Okinawa-type operation on a far larger scale, would result in more casualties than the United States had suffered so far in all theaters since the war began.

On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, dropped a nuclear weapon named "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, destroying the city. After the destruction of Hiroshima, the United States again called upon Japan to surrender. No response was made, and accordingly, on August 9, the B-29 BOCKS CAR, piloted by Maj. Charles Sweeney dropped a second atomic bomb named "Fat Man" on Nagasaki.

Soviet Invasion of Manchuria

On August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, having renounced its nonaggression pact with Japan, attacked the Japanese in Manchuria, fulfilling its Yalta pledge to attack the Japanese within three months after the end of the war in Europe. The attack was made by three Soviet army groups.

In less than two weeks, the Japanese army in Manchuria, consisting of over a million men, had been destroyed by the Soviets. The Red Army moved into North Korea on August 18. Korea was subsequently divided at the 38th parallel into Soviet and U.S. zones.

Japan Surrenders

The American use of atomic weapons against Japan prompted Emperor Hirohito to bypass the existing government and intervene to end the war. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war may have also played a part, but in his radio address to the nation Emperor Hirohito did not mention it as a major reason for his country's surrender.

The Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945 (V-J day), signing the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) anchored in Tokyo Bay. The Japanese troops in China formally surrendered to the Chinese on September 9, 1945. This did not fully end the war, however, as Japan and the Soviet Union never signed a peace agreement. In the last days of the war, the Soviet Union occupied the southern Kuril Islands, an area claimed by the Soviets and still contested by Japan.