The Second World War

Germany invades Poland in September 1939 and Japan attacks across the Pacific in 1941; the war ends in 1945 with 70 to 85 million dead, the majority of them civilians. It is fought with strategic bombing of cities, industrialised occupation, siege and starvation. It ends European global dominance, leaves the United States and Soviet Union as the only powers of consequence, and produces the United Nations, decolonisation and the nuclear age.