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The invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign, Polish Campaign, and Polish Defensive War of 1939, was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic, and the Soviet Union, which marked the beginning of World War II. -
The Battle of Britain was a military campaign of the Second World War, in which the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy defended the United Kingdom against large-scale attacks by Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe. It was the first major military campaign fought entirely by air forces. -
The Empire of Japan launched a surprise military strike on the United States Pacific Fleet at its naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. At the time, the U.S. was a neutral country in World War II. -
The Battle of Midway was a major naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that took place on 4–7 June 1942, six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea -
Operation Torch was an Allied invasion of French North Africa during World War II. Torch was a compromise operation that met the British objective of securing victory in North Africa while allowing American armed forces the opportunity to begin their fight against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on a limited scale. -
The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit (MFAA) was a program established by the Allies in 1943 to help protect cultural property in war areas -
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II, beginning when Nazi Germany and its Axis allies attacked and became locked in a protracted struggle with the Soviet Union for control over the Soviet city of Stalingrad in southern Russia. -
The Battle of Kursk, also called the Battle of the Kursk Salient, was a major World War II Eastern Front battle between the forces of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union near Kursk in southwestern Russia during the summer of 1943, resulting in a Soviet victory -
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces launched Operation Overlord (also known as Operation Neptune), the largest amphibious invasion in history, targeting a 50-mile stretch of Nazi-occupied Normandy, France -
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during the Second World War, taking place from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. -
The Battle of Iwo Jima was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps and United States Navy landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. -
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, at age 63 from a massive cerebral hemorrhage while in Warm Springs, Georgia. Only months into his fourth term, the sudden stroke occurred while he was posing for a portrait -
Adolf Hitler died by suicide on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker, using a combination of cyanide poisoning and a gunshot to the head, shortly after marrying Eva Braun. As Soviet troops closed in, he and Braun took their lives, and their bodies were then burned in the Reich Chancellery garden, according to his final wishes to avoid capture -
The Battle of Okinawa (April 1–June 22, 1945), code-named Operation Iceberg, was the largest, last, and one of the bloodiest, amphibious battles of WWII in the Pacific -
This undertaking was preceded by a conventional bombing and firebombing campaign that devastated 64 Japanese cities, including an operation on Tokyo -
On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, during World War II.