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The North African Campaign began in 1940, when small British forces in Egypt turned back an Italian advance from Libya. This advance was stopped in 1941 when German forces under Erwin Rommel landed in Libya. In addition, in June 1941 the Australian Army and allied forces invaded Syria and Lebanon, capturing Damascus on 17 June. Rommel's Afrika Korps advanced rapidly eastward, laying siege to the vital seaport of Tobruk. The Australian and British troops in the city resisted all until relieved, but a renewed Axis offensive captured the city and drove the Eighth Army back to a line at El Alamein.
The First Battle of El Alamein took place between July 1 and July 27, 1942. German forces had advanced to the last defensible point before Alexandria and the Suez Canal. However they had outrun their supplies, and a British and Commonwealth defense stopped their thrusts. The Second Battle of El Alamein occurred between October 23 and November 3, 1942 after Bernard Montgomery had replaced Claude Auchinleck as commander of the Eighth Army. Commonwealth forces took the offensive and destroyed the Afrika Korps. Rommel was pushed back, and this time did not stop falling back until Tunisia.
To complement this victory, on 8 November, 1942, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. The local forces of Vichy France put up limited resistance before joining the Allied cause. Ultimately German and Italian forces were caught in the pincers of a twin advance from Algeria and Libya. Advancing from both the east and west, the Allies completely pushed the Wehrmacht out of Africa and on May 13, 1943, the remnants of the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. 250,000 prisoners were taken; as many as at Stalingrad.
North Africa was used as the jumping-off point for the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy in 1943.
In contrast to World War I, the Western victors in the Second World War did not demand compensation from the defeated nations. On the contrary, a plan created by U. S. Secretary of State George Marshall, the "European Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan, called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe.
Since the League of Nations had obviously failed to prevent the war, a new international order was constructed. In 1945 the United Nations was founded. Also, in order to prevent such devastating war from occurring again and to establish a lasting peace in Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community was born in 1951 ( Treaty of Paris (1951)), which became the predecessor of the European Union.
The future Warsaw Pact countries did not subscribe to the Marshall Plan. In the Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union's enemies Hungary, Finland and Romania were required to pay war reparations of $300,000,000 each (in 1938 dollars) to the USSR. Italy was required to pay $360,000,000, shared chiefly between Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
In the areas occupied by Western Allied troops, capitalist governments were created, in the areas occupied by Soviet troops, communist governments were created. Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation, with the American, British and French zones grouped as West Germany and the Soviet zone as East Germany. Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation which eventually re-united and became the state of Austria. The Cold War had begun, and soon NATO and the Warsaw Pact would form.
The repatriation, pursuant to the terms of the Yalta Conference, of two million Russian soldiers who had come under the control of advancing American and British forces, resulted for the most part in their deaths.
The massive research and development involved in the Manhattan Project in order to quickly achieve a working nuclear weapon design greatly impacted the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States. In addition, the pressing for numerous calculations for various things like ballistics tables kickstarted the development of electronic computer technology.
In the military sphere, World War II marked the coming of age of airpower, mostly at the expense of warships. While the pendulum continues to swing in this never-ending competition, air powers are now a full partner in any military action. World War II also saw the creation of guided missiles which, like airpower, are now used in virtually every conflict.
The war was the high-water mark for mass armies. While huge armies of low-quality troops would be seen again (during the Korean War and in a number of African conflicts), after this victory the major powers relied upon small highly-trained and well-equipped militaries.
After the war, many high-ranking Germans were prosecuted for war crimes, as well as the mass murder of the Holocaust committed mainly on the area of General Government, in the Nuremberg trials. Similarly Japanese leaders were prosecuted in the Tokyo War Crime Trial. Although the deliberate targeting of civilians was already defined as a war crime and it had been used extensively by both sides, most notably in Poland, Britain, Germany and Japan, those responsible were never tried for it. In other countries, notably in Finland, the Allies demanded the political leadership to be prosecuted in " war-responsibility trials " — i.e. not for crimes of war.
The defeat of Japan, and her occupation by American Forces, led to a westernization of Japan that was surely more far-reaching than would otherwise have occurred. Japan approximated more closely to a Western style democracy and, because of her defeat by the USA, set out to imitate the United States. This huge national effort led to the post-war Japanese economic miracle and Japan's rise to become the world's second largest economy.
The Destruction of Europe and the destruction, via aerial bombing, of a significant proportion of the United Kingdom's cities would also symbolically destroy the aura of invicibility the European nation had in the eyes of their colonies. Coupled with the enormous amount of money it had expended during the war an empire was perceived to be an unnecessarily expensive possession. Thus this would provoke the rapid decolonisation process that would see the empires of the United Kingdom, France and others swept away.
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