Americans

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.

With the fall of Poland, thousands of POWs were taken by the German Army, and millions more before the war was over. The question of what to do with those POWs would lead to some of the worst atrocities of the war.

The Fall of Paris on August 25, 1944 ended the Normandy campaign, but the Allies were still dependent on the port of Cherbourg for supplies. This caused a reevaluation of the “broad front” strategy that Eisenhower followed, advancing everywhere, rather than Montgomery’s advocacy for narrow thrusts through weak points in the German lines.

When the Japanese occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians in Alaska in June 1942, the Allies had to remove them before they could attack the Kuriles. The Aleutians would be the only land battles in North America during World War II.

World War I had seen some air raids over England and Germany, but the technology was not yet available to wreak total havoc on the civilian population. The very idea of targeting a civilian population in a time of war was anathema to most of the world’s leaders.