Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg
Germany invades Poland
German soldiers comb the Westerplatte after it was surrendered to German units from the Schleswig-Holstein landing crew, Sept. 7, 1939.
England & France declare war on Germany
Prime Minister Chamberlain went on the radio to announce to the British people that a state of war existed between their country and Germany. World War II had begun.
The King's Speech
Britain's King George VI broadcasts to the British nation on the first evening of the war.
Jewish are rounded up into ghettos
Men of the Lublin ghetto, behind boys, wear arm bands earmarking them as Jews, shown during the German occupation of Poland. They are doffing their hats to the German officer who stood beside the photographer.
Hitler’s conversation with Josef Hell, 1922
If I am ever really in power, the destruction of the Jews will be my first and most important job. As soon as I have power, I shall have gallows after gallows erected, for example, in Munich on the Marienplatz-as many of them as traffic allows.
London Children Evacuated
Schoolchildren board a special train at a London station as they are evacuated to the west country to escape the Nazi bombing, June 13, 1940. All the children wear identity labels and carry their gas masks.
Operation Pied Piper
The government of the time described the evacuation as “The biggest exodus since Moses”
1.9 million children gathered at rail stations in early September not knowing where they were going nor if they would be split from brothers and sisters who had gathered with them.
British troops go to war
British troops cheerfully board their train for the first st age of their trip to the western front, somewhere in England.
British Expeditionary Force in France by May 1940
Germany invades France using Blitzkrieg
A German armoured tank crosses the Aisne River in France , June 21, 1940.
The Battle of France
German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off & surround the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium.
During the fighting, the British Expeditionary Force & many French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo.
Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister
Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, right, photographed with members of his newly constructed War Cabinet, in Downing Street, London.
Dunkirk
Hundreds of thousands of British and French troops who had fled advancing German forces massed on the beach of Dunkirk, awaiting ships to carry them to England.
Evacuation of Dunkirkt
The Battle of Britain
A Nazi Heinkel 111 bomber flies over London during the Battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940 during World War II. The Thames River runs through the center. The Tower Bridge is visible near the planes left wingtip.
The London Blitz begins
Londons Leicester Square Area was severely damaged during a German Air Raid on Oct. 31, 1940. The Leicester Square Cinema is on the left the raid damage was announced by the British.
Blitz statistics
German Invasion of the Soviet Union
Two German soldiers are seen in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, at an unknown location along the frontlines.
Operation Barbarossa
Allies take Tobruk in North Africa
A British soldier looks at damaged ships in the harbour at the vital Mediterranean port and Allied enclave of Tobruk, Libya, in September 1941
Siege of Tobruk
The siege started on 11 April 1941, when Tobruk was attacked by an Italian–German force under Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, and continued for 240 days up to 27 November 1941, when it was relieved by the Allied 8th Army during Operation Crusader.
Japan attacks Pearl Harbour
The battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The ship sank with more than 80 percent of its 1,500-man crew, including Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd.
Attack on Pearl Harbour
Pacific war
A Japanese Zero, its pilot suicide bent, tries to maneuver so as to crash on the deck of a U.S. warship somewhere in the Pacific, May 2, 1945. The effort was unsuccessful and the plane fell into the sea alongside the ship.
The Pacific War casualties
Auschwitz becomes the largest of the death camps
Entry to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, with snow covered railtracks leading to the camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was the largest camp where people were terminated during the fascist regime rule of dictator Adolf Hitler.
Prisoners of Auschwitz
The Battle of Stalingrad
German troops passing through a wrecked generating station in the factory district of Stalingrad on Dec. 28, 1942, where such fierce fighting has been raging for the past few months. The new Russian offensive has relieved the pressure, and surrounded a large number of German troops.
A turning point in the war
The Battle of Stalingrad is considered by many historians to have been the turning point in World War Two in Europe.
The battle at Stalingrad bled the German army dry in Russia and after this defeat, the Germany Army was in full retreat.
Bernard Montgomery became Britains General
Winston Churchill was desperate for a victory as he believed that morale was being sapped in Britain. Churchill, despite his status, faced the prospect of a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons if there was no forthcoming victory anywhere. Churchill grasped the bull by the horns and dismissed Auchinleck, replacing him with Bernard Montgomery.
The men in the Allied forces respected ‘Monty’. Montgomery put a great deal of on organisation and morale. He spoke to his troops and attempted to restore confidence in them. But above all else, he knew that he needed to hold El Alamein any way possible.
Battle of El Alamein
The Battle of El Alamein, fought in the deserts of North Africa, is seen as one of the decisive victories of World War Two. The Battle of El Alamein was primarily fought between two of the outstanding commanders of World War II, Montgomery and Rommel.
The Allied victory at El Alamein lead to the retreat of the Afrika Korps and the German surrender in North Africa in May 1943.
El Alamein casualties
The Second Battle of Monte Cassino
American fliers bombed the monastery to dislodge Germans who had used it as an artillery observation post. In the background is the town of Cassino, for whose possession American and German troops are locked in bitter combat.
The Battle of Monte Cassino was one of the most important battles of World War Two.
By the end of the Battle of Monte Cassino, the monastery had been destroyed but the hill had been captured leaving the route open to Rome.
Soviet offensive gathers pace in Eastern Europe
Red Army soldiers dislodge German forces from a village, at an unknown location somewhere along the German-Russian frontline, in December 1944.
Operation Bagration
In four weeks, it inflicted greater losses on the German army than the Wehrmacht had suffered in five months at Stalingrad.
With more than 2.3 million men, six times the artillery and twice the number of tanks that launched the Battle of the Bulge, it was the largest Allied operation of World War II
The Normandy Invasion
While under attack of heavy machine gun fire from the German coastal defense forces, these American soldiers wade ashore off the ramp of a U.S. Coast Guard landing craft, during the Allied landing operations at the Normandy.
D-Day invasion fleet
Paris is liberated
Crowds of Parisians celebrating the entry of allied troops into Paris scatter for cover as a sniper fires into them from a building on the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, on August 28, 1944. Although the Germans surrendered the city, bands of snipers still remain.
Battle of the Bulge
German infantrymen pass burning captured American vehicles during the drive into Allied lines on the Western Front in the Battle of the Bulge.
Hitler sends a quarter of a million troops across an 85-mile stretch of the Allied front. In deadly cold winter weather, German troops advance some 50 miles into the Allied lines, creating a deadly "bulge" pushing into Allied defenses.
Battle of the Bulge casualties
Nazi concentration camps are liberated
Soviet forces were the first to overrun a major Nazi concentration camp, Lublin/Majdanek, near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, where they discovered some 7,000 prisoners, including young children, who had not been evacuated by the SS.
This April 16, 1945 photo shows inmates of the German KZ Buchenwald inside their barrack, a few days after U.S troops liberated this concentration camp near Weimar. The young man seventh from left in the middle row bunk is Elie Wiesel, who would later become an author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Russia reach Berlin
A Soviet soldier places his nation's flag over the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, after the Germans surrendered, ending World War II.
Hitler commits suicide
Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot in his Führerbunker in Berlin. His wife Eva (née Braun), committed suicide with him by ingesting cyanide.
That afternoon, in accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit, doused in petrol and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker.
Germany surrender, VE day is declared
V-J Day, Japan Surrender
A giant column of dark smoke rises more than 20,000 feet into the air, after the second atomic bomb ever used in warfare explodes over the Japanese port and town of Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945.
Dropped by the U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 plane "Bockscar," the bomb killed more than 70,000 people instantly, with ten thousands dying later from effects of the radioactive fallout.
August 15 is the official V-J Day for the UK while the official US commemoration is September 2nd. The name, V-J Day, had been selected by the Allies after they named V-E Day for the victory in Europe.
