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. With the returning armies came graphic descriptions of the violence and fear of massive unemployment.

The seeds of the Pacific War were planted in 1853. In that year, feudal Japan came to an end. Fifty two years later, she would stand in front of the world as a major power. The transition from feudalism to a modern government would be a time of massive social, political, and technological evolution. This evolution would forever alter the way the world thought about Japan, and started to dig the chasms over which the Pacific War would start.

Italy was a unique blend of old and new at the start of World War II. Her ancient capital of Rome had been the center of the largest Empire antiquity had ever seen, but she had unified her ancestral lands in a great civil war just fifty years before Benito Mussolini was asked to form a government.

Europe was in chaos after the First World War. Some 20 million were dead. Large parts of France and Germany were completely destroyed, including France’s major source of coal and much of their farmland. The Total War that consumed so many lives had also consumed the combatants’ thirst for war.

France suffered in World War I more than any other Western combatant. Most of the fighting on the Western Front took place on her soil, and she lost millions of men in trench warfare.

At Versailles in 1919 she was determined to never allow German aggression to threaten her again. She hoped that the combination of demilitarization, reparation, and occupation would force the Germans to abandon any hopes of invading France again.

The nations of Europe and North America were wary of another war after the millions of dead of the Great War. Each nation entered the 1920’s with different problems and goals. Few people though tthe world would fight an even bloodier war just 21 short years later.

Internet Links

Causes of World War II

Video provided by

Japan faces critical food and housing shortages after the war. Fall 1945. Movie

The world in August 1939 was a world that held its breath. Fighting had ended in Spain, and the war in China had stagnated. But few people believed war would be avoided.

Early in the war Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, faced with grievous losses in the great encirclements of 1941, was agitating for a second front in continental Europe. The war in North Africa was not enough.

After the initial terror of the Polish campaign, everyone expected heavy combat, like the summer of 1914. The British Expeditionary Force landed in France, British children were sent to Canada or the countryside; At various times, neutral Belgium and Holland braced for invasion.