The Allies Are Victorious
Germany’s victories slowed considerably during 1942. The United States had entered the war, boosting the Allies’ morale and strength. Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt met at the White House to develop a joint war policy. Stalin had wanted the Allies to open the second front in France. Caught between the two armies, the Africa Korps (German forces in Africa) was finally smashed in May 1943. In the Battle of Stalingrad began on August 23, 1942 which ended in defeat of Germans after long battle.
In January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, Morocco, and decided to attack Italy first.
The conquest of Sicily toppled Mussolini from power. On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III fired the dictator and had him arrested. On September 3, Italy surrendered. But the Germans seized control of northern Italy and put Mussolini back in charge. Finally, the Germans retreated northward, and the victorious Allies entered Rome on June 4, 1944. Fighting in Italy, however, continued until Germany fell in May 1945.
Allied Victory in Europe
By 1943, the Allies began secretly building a force in Great Britain to attack the Germans across the English Channel. By May 1944, the invasion force was ready. To keep Hitler guessing, the Allies set up a huge dummy army with its own headquarters and equipment.
Code-named Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy was the greatest land and sea attack in history. D-Day was June 6, 1944. Soon, the Germans began retreating. On August 25, the Allies marched triumphantly into Paris. By September, they had liberated France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and much of the Netherlands. They then set their sights on Germany.
The Battle of the Bulge
Soviet army was advancing toward Germany from the east. Hitler now faced a war on two fronts. In a desperate gamble, the Führer decided to counterattack in the west. They push into the Allied lines gave the campaign its name—the Battle of the Bulge. Although caught off guard, the Allies eventually pushed the Germans back and won.
After the Battle of the Bulge, the war in Europe neared its end. In late March 1945, three million Allied soldiers approached Berlin from the southwest. Soviet troops approached from the east. On May 7, 1945, General Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich from the German military.
Victory in the Pacific
General MacArthur, who had been forced to surrender the islands in February 1942, waded ashore. Within three days, the Japanese navy had lost disastrously eliminating it as a fighting force in the war. Now, only the Japanese army and the feared kamikaze (Japanese suicide pilots) stood between the Allies and Japan.
They would sink Allied ships by crash-diving into them in their bomb-filled planes. President Truman’s advisers had informed him that an invasion of the Japanese homeland might cost the Allies half a million lives. Truman had to make a decision whether to use a powerful new weapon called the atomic bomb. The top-secret Manhattan Project, headed by General Leslie Groves and chief scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, had developed it.
President Truman then warned the Japanese. The Japanese did not reply. So, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a Japanese city of 365,000 people. Almost 73,000 people died in the attack. Three days later, on August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, a city of 200,000. It killed about 37,500 people. Radiation killed many more.