Allow the player to set the starting year. Here are the key conflicts in the war each year:
1939: The Fuse is Lit
The Second World War officially ignited in September 1939 when Nazi Germany launched a devastating blitzkrieg invasion of Poland from the west, prompting France and the United Kingdom to declare war. Simultaneously, under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, effectively partitioning the nation before launching the Winter War against a fiercely resistant Finland in November. On the Pacific front, the Second Sino-Japanese War raged on as Japan's Imperial forces tightened their grip on eastern China, occupying major coastal hubs, while intense border clashes between Soviet and Japanese forces at Khalkhin Gol concluded with a ceasefire that temporarily stabilized the Asian theater.
1940: The Western Front Collapses
The year 1940 saw the dramatic collapse of Western Europe as German forces swiftly conquered Denmark and Norway in the spring, followed by a massive, lightning invasion of France and the Low Countries that bypassed the Maginot Line and forced the chaotic Allied evacuation at Dunkirk. By summer, France was divided into a German occupation zone and the collaborationist Vichy regime, leaving Great Britain to stand largely alone against relentless Luftwaffe bombings during the Battle of Britain, while Italy entered the fray by launching campaigns in East Africa and pushing into Egypt from Libya. In the Pacific, Japan capitalized on European vulnerability by pressuring Vichy authorities into allowing Japanese military occupation of northern French Indochina, further isolating Chinese forces and drawing sharp diplomatic protests and economic warnings from the United States.
1941: Global Escalation
The conflict transformed into an unprecedented global war in 1941, marked first by the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, followed in June by Operation Barbarossa—a colossal Axis invasion of the Soviet Union that drove hundreds of miles into Russian territory to threaten Moscow before freezing solid in the winter mud. The war erupted across the entire Pacific theater on December 7, when Japan launched a surprise aerial assault on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, immediately followed by rapid, coordinated invasions of British Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island. This massive expansion of the Axis front instantly brought the economic and industrial might of the United States into the war on the Allied side, permanently altering the global balance of power.
1942: The High-Water Mark of the Axis
By mid-1942, the Axis powers reached the absolute peak of their territorial expansion, with German forces launching a massive summer offensive toward the oil-rich Caucasus and pushing deep into the symbolic industrial city of Stalingrad, while Field Marshal Rommel’s forces advanced perilously close to the Suez Canal in Egypt. In the Pacific, Japan completed its swift conquest of the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and the Philippines, threatening the borders of British India and Australia. However, the latter half of the year marked the critical turning point of the entire war; the U.S. Navy dealt a devastating blow to the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway and launched a grueling, successful counter-offensive at Guadalcanal, while British forces broke Rommel's line at El Alamein and Soviet forces successfully trapped an entire German army at Stalingrad.
1943: The Tide Turns
The year 1943 was defined by the Allies seizing the strategic initiative on all fronts, beginning with the final surrender of Axis forces at Stalingrad and followed by the massive tank battle at Kursk, which shattered Germany’s offensive capabilities in the East and began a permanent Soviet westward push. In the Mediterranean, the Allies cleared North Africa of Axis troops, successfully invaded Sicily, and landed on the Italian mainland, triggering the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and prompting Germany to rapidly occupy northern and central Italy to stall the Allied advance. Across the Pacific, the Allies initiated a highly coordinated "island-hopping" campaign, grinding down Japanese air and naval power through brutal jungle warfare in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, while securing vital footholds in the Gilbert Islands to pierce Japan's outer defensive perimeter.
1944: Shrinking Empires
The Allied pincer tightly closed around Germany and Japan in 1944, commencing on the Western Front with the monumental D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, which led to the liberation of Paris by August, though the rapid Allied advance was later fiercely contested during the surprise German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a massive offensive that utterly destroyed Germany's Army Group Centre, swept through the Baltic states, and advanced to the Vistula River just outside Warsaw. Meanwhile, the Pacific theater saw the near-total destruction of Japanese naval aviation at the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the subsequent liberation of Guam and Saipan, culminating in General MacArthur's landings in the Philippines and the historic Battle of Leyte Gulf, which effectively crippled the Imperial Japanese Navy as a cohesive fighting force.
1945: Collapse and Resolution
The final months of the war in 1945 witnessed the catastrophic collapse of the Axis powers as Allied armies squeezed Germany from both sides, with Western forces crossing the Rhine and Soviet forces storming Berlin, culminating in Adolf Hitler’s suicide and Germany's unconditional surrender in May. In the Pacific, American forces captured the heavily fortified islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa at an immense human cost, placing the Japanese mainland within range of sustained B-29 bomber raids and setting the stage for an imminent invasion. The war came to a swift and devastating conclusion in August following the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, coupled with a massive Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, which forced Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, and brought World War II to a close.