Editing The World Wars (section)

==The Second World War==
===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable. 

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in. 

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

===American Rearmament=== 
This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

===Mid-War=== 
The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.
 
While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

===The Normandy landings===
{{topquote|So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.|President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day}}

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

===Victory in Europe===
After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. <small>''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.''</small> Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world. 

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders &mdash; and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]] 

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949. 

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.