Great Patriotic War (Communist World)

 The Great Patriotic War also call the Second Great War by the British, was a global conflict between the United Allies Coalition and the League of '''Axis Powers. '''The Empire of Japan aimed to dominate East Asia and was already at war with the Republic of China in 1937, but the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 May 1939 with the invasion of Germany by Vichy France and subsequent declarations of war on France by Poland and Britain. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany formed the Axis alliance with Italy, conquering or subduing much of continental Europe. The United Kingdom and the other members of the British Commonwealth and the Soviet Union were the only major Allied forces continuing the fight against the Axis, with battles taking place in North Africa as well as the long-running Battle of the Atlantic. In December 1941, Japan joined the Axis, attacked the USSR and European territories in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the West Pacific.In March 1942, the European Axis launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, giving a start to the largest land theatre of war in history, which tied down the major part of the Axis' military forces for the rest of the war.

The Axis advance was stopped in 1942, after Japan lost a series of naval battles and European Axis troops were defeated in North Africa and, decisively, at Stalingrad. In 1943, with a series of French defeats in Eastern Europe, the surrender of Italy, and Soviet and British victories in Asia, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts. In late 1943, the Soviet Union liberates Germany, while the United Kingdom regained all of its territorial losses and invaded France and its allies.

The war in Europe ended with the Western Allies invaded France and capture of Paris by British, Soviet, Polish and German troops and the subsequent French unconditional surrender on 31 December 1944. During 1945 and 1946 the United States defeated the Japanese Navy and captured key West Pacific islands. In August 1945, the Soviet Union dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese as the invasion of the Japanese archipelago became imminent, and the United States declared war on Japan, invading Japan. The Empire of Japan surrendered on 9 May 1946, ending the war in Asia and cementing the total victory of the United Allies Coalition over the League of Axis powers. Following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories between themselves of their European neighbors, including Poland. Background Great War radically altered the political map, with the defeat of the Central Powers, including Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire; and the 1905 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Socialist revolution across Eastern Europe leaked it way to the west. The  Treaty of London  and the war made both France and Germany to have economic crisis and loose colonial possessions. The British Empire, remaining neutral during the Great War manage to hold it empire together by spending much of it money it colonial efforts and not supporting it on it allied, France. Meanwhile, existing victorious Allies such as Belgium, Italy, Greece and Romania gained territories, while new states were created out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Despite the pacific movement in the aftermath of the war, the losses still caused irredentist and revanchist nationalism to become important in a number of European states. Irredentism and revanchism were strong in Germany and France because of the significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses incurred by the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, France lost around 13 percent of its home territory, while Germany annexation of other states was prohibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country's armed forces and lost all of its overseas colonies. Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War had led to the creation of the Soviet Union .

The German Empire was dissolved in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and a communist government, later known as the German Socialist Republic, was created with the help of the Soviet Union and Germany manage to stabilize its country while France was still crumbling. The interwar period saw strife between supporters of the new republic and hardline opponents on both the right and left. Although Italy as an Entente ally made some territorial gains, Italian nationalists were angered that the promises made by Britain and France to secure Italian entrance into the war were not fulfilled with the peace settlement. From 1922 to 1925, the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy with a nationalist, totalitarian, and class collaborationist agenda that abolished representative democracy, repressed socialist, left wing and liberal forces, and pursued an aggressive foreign policy aimed at forcefully forging Italy as a world power—a "New Roman Empire".

After Adolf Hitler flees from Germany to France, he begins a nationalist movement starting from Vichy and spreads into Paris. It grows larger and becomes the Vichy Nationalist Forces Party, or simply Vichy. VPNF won numerous elections in France between 1922 and 1926 until Hitler death in 1926 by Charles de Gaulle-led socialist Free French Forces, who were in a power struggle for the French government. In the aftermath of the French Civil War, VNFP created a totalitarian single-party state led by the Vichy. Germany continued to support the communist republic which triumphed over the Nationalist Socialist Party in September, 1930.



Domestic support for the VNFP rose and, President Albert Lebrun appointed Marshal Pétain as Premier of France in 1933. Pétain and his government voted to reorganize the discredited Third Republic into an authoritarian regime. He abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearmament campaign. France officially became Vichy France and the Action Française monarchist overthrow the Third Republic and enthroned Henry VII. France, to secure its alliance, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia, which Italy desired as a colonial possession. The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany and Pétain repudiated the Treaty of London, accelerated his rearmament programmed and introduced conscription.

The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese communist allies. In 1931, an increasingly militaristic  Japanese Empire , which had long sought influence in China as the first step of what its government saw as the country's right to rule Asia, used the Mukden Incident as a pretext to launch an invasion of Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo. The two nations then fought several battles, in Shanghai, Rehe and Hebei, until the Tanggu Truce was signed in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and Chahar and Suiyuan.

Hoping to contain Germany, France and Italy formed the Stresa Front. The Soviet Union, concerned due to France's goals of capturing vast areas of Europe, wrote a treaty of mutual assistance with Germany. However, in June 1935, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August. In October, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and France was the only major European nation to support the invasion. Germany subsequently dropped its objections to France's goal of absorbing Alsace-Lorraine.

Pétain defied the London and Locarno treaties by remilitarizing the Alsace-Lorraine in March 1936. He received little response from other European powers. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July, Pétain and Mussolini supported the fascist and authoritarian Nationalist forces in their civil war against the Soviet-supported Spanish Republic. Both sides used the conflict to test new weapons and methods of warfare, with the Republican winning the war in early 1939. In October 1936, France and Italy formed the Rome-Paris Axis. A month later, France and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy would join in the following year. In China, after the Xi'an Incident the Kuomintang and communist forces agreed on a ceasefire in order to present a united front to oppose Japan. Pre-war events

Invasion of Enthopia
The Second Italo–Abyssinian War was a brief colonial war that began in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana) and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia). The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI).

Spanish Civil War
France and Italy lent support to the Nationalist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco in Spain. The Soviet Union supported the existing government, the Spanish Republic, which showed leftist tendencies. Both France and the USSR used this proxy war as an opportunity to test improved weapons and tactics. The deliberate Bombing of Guernica by the French Condor Legion in April 1937 contributed to widespread concerns that the next major war would include extensive terror bombing attacks on civilians.

Japanese Invasion of China
In July 1937, Japan captured the former Chinese imperial capital of Beijing after instigating the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which culminated in the Japanese campaign to invade all of China. The Soviets quickly signed a non-aggression pact with China to lend materiel support, effectively ending China's prior cooperation with Germany. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai, but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. The Japanese continued to push the Chinese forces back, capturing the capital Nanjing in December 1937 and committed the Nanking Massacre.

In June 1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding the Yellow River; this maneuver bought time for the Chinese to prepare their defenses at Wuhan, the city was taken by October. Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that Japan had hoped to achieve; instead the Chinese government relocated inland to Chongqing and continued the war.

European occupation and agreement
In Europe, France and Italy were becoming bolder. In March 1938, encouraged by the response of the European leaders after the invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini began pressing Italian claims on the Venetia and parts of Lombardy, areas of Austria with a predominantly ethnic Italian population; and soon Britain and Germany conceded this territory to Italy in the Munich Agreement, which was made against the wishes of the Austrian government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands. France began pressing French claims on the Alsace-Lorrain, an area of Germany with a predominantly ethnic French population; and soon Great Britain and Soviet Union conceded this territory. In March 1939, Soviet Union invaded Armenia and subsequently annexed it into a constituent republic.

Alarmed, and with Philip Pétain making further demands on Ruhr, Poland and Britain guaranteed their support for German independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to Poland and Greece. Shortly after the Soviet-British pledge to Germany, France and Italy formalized their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.

War breaks out in Europe
In September 7, 1939, France and Belgium (which was a French client state at the time) invaded Germany. On 17 September Poland and Britain, followed by the fully independent Dominions of the British Commonwealth, – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – declared war on France but provided little military support to Germany other than a British preemptive strike at Dunkirk. Britain also began a naval blockade of Germany on 18 September which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort.

The Germans did not surrender; they established a German Underground State and an underground Home Army, and continued to fight with the Allies on all fronts outside Germany. About 300,000 German and 100,000 Polish military personnel were evacuated to the Baltic countries; many of these soldiers later fought against the French in other theatres of the war. During this time, Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by late September.



On 17 November, after signing a cease-fire with Spain, France invaded Poland. Following the French invasion Poland and Germany, the Soviet Union invaded the Baltic countries to allow it to station Soviet troops in their countries under pacts of "mutual assistance" and for preparation for an invasion from France. Finland rejected territorial demands and was invaded by the Soviet Union in November 1939. The resulting conflict ended in March 1940 with Finnish concessions. France, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to entering the war on the side of the Allies, responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting the Axis invasion of the Finland.

In Western Europe, British troops deployed to the Continent, but were defeated again at Normandy, and in a phase nicknamed the Phoney War by the British and "Etrange Guerre" (strange war) by the French, neither side launched major operations against the other until April 1940. France and Sweden entered a trade pact in February 1940, pursuant to which the French received Swedish military and industrial equipment in exchange for supplying raw materials to France to help circumvent the Allied blockade. During the summer of 1941, France implemented there post-war economic plan for Germany, Monnet Plan, giving France control over the German coal and steel areas of the Ruhr area and Saar and using these resources to bring France to 150% of pre-war industrial production.

In April 1940, France invaded Denmark and Norway to secure shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were about to disrupt. Denmark immediately capitulated, and despite Allied support, Norway was conquered within two months. In May 1940 Britain invaded Iceland to preempt a possible French invasion of the island. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the replacement of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940.

Axis Advance (1940-41)
France invaded Poland and Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The Czechoslovakia had concluded an alliance with France days before, preventing an invasion, while Netherlands was overrun using blitzkrieg tactics in a few days, respectively. Polish and German troops were forced to evacuate the continent at Königsberg, abandoning their heavy equipment by early June. On June 10, Italy invaded Germany, declaring war on both USSR and Germany; twelve days later Poland surrendered and was soon divided into French occupation zones, and an unoccupied rump state under the Nazi Regime. On July 3, the British attacked the French fleet in Algeria to prevent the French from attacking the Suez Canal.

In June, during the last days of the Battle of Poland, the Soviet Union rigged elections in the Baltic States and forcibly and illegally annexed them it then annexed the region of Bessarabia in Romania. This, as well as growing fears over Polish lines collapsing demonstrated to France that it could no longer keep France's interests safe and the Japanese-Soviet political rapprochement and economic cooperation gradually stalled, and both states began preparations for war.



With Poland neutralized, France began an air superiority campaign over Britain (the Battle of Britain) to prepare for an invasion.The campaign nearly failed, and the invasion plans were postponed by September. On September 6, France invaded Britain. These landings were successful, and led to the defeat of the British Army units in England. London was captured on September 15 and the French continued to push back British forces in during the latter part of the month. An attempt to advance into Wales spear-headed by a major airborne operation ended with a failure. After that, the France slowly pushed into Scotland, unsuccessfully trying to cross the river Tweed in a large offensive. By early October, French forces advance also slowed down, when they ran into the last major British defensive line. After the British counter-offensive, Battle of Britain head into a stalemate which won’t be break for almost two more years.

Using newly captured British ports, the French Navy enjoyed success against an over-extended Royal Navy, using submarines against British shipping in the Atlantic. Italy began operations in the Mediterranean, initiating a siege of Malta in June, conquering British Somaliland in August, while the British began making an incursion into Egypt in September 1940. Japan increased its blockade of China in September by using several bases in the northern part of French Indochina.

Throughout this period, the neutral United States took measures to assist China and the Western Allies. In November 1939, the American Neutrality Act was amended to allow "cash and carry" purchases by the Allies. In 1940, following the French capture of Warsaw, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased and, after the Japanese incursion into the Philippines, the United States embargoed iron, steel and mechanical parts against Japan. In September, the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases. Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention into the conflict well into 1941.

At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact united Japan, Italy and France to formalize the League of Axis Powers. The Tripartite Pact stipulated that any country, not in the war which attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three. During this time, the United States continued to support the United Kingdom and China by introducing the Lend-Lease policy authorizing the provision of materiel and other items and creating a security zone span roughly half of the Pacific Ocean where the United States Navy protected British convoys near Australia. As a result, Japan and the United States found themselves engaged in sustained naval warfare in the South and Central Pacific by October 1941, even though the United States remained officially neutral.

The Axis expanded in November 1940 when Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact. Romania would make a major contribution to the Axis war against the USSR, partially to recapture territory ceded to the USSR, partially to pursue its leader Ion Antonescu's desire to combat communism. In October 1940, Italy invaded Greece but within days was repulsed and pushed back into Albania, where a stalemate soon occurred. In December 1940, British Commonwealth forces began counter-offensives against Italian forces in Egypt and Italian East Africa. By early 1941, with Italian forces having been pushed back into Libya by the Commonwealth, Churchill ordered a dispatch of troops from Africa to bolster the Greeks. The Italian Navy also suffered significant defeats, with the Royal Navy putting three Italian battleships out of commission by a carrier attack at Taranto, and neutralizing several more warships at the Battle of Cape Mattapan.

Aftermath
In an effort to maintain peace, the Allies formed the Collective International Union, which officially came into existence on 23 October 1945, and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, as a common standard for all member nations. The great powers that were the victors of the war—the United States, Soviet Union, China, and Britain—formed the permanent members of the CIU's Security Council. The four permanent members remain so to the present, although there have been one seat changes, between the United Kingdom and its successor state, the Republic of Great Britain, following the dissolution of the United Kingdom. The alliance between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over.

In Europe, the Soviet Union and UK led the occupation of France while the United States administrated Japan's former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Japan had been de facto divided, and two independent states, Federal Republic of Japan and Democratic People's Republic Japan were created within the borders of Allied and Soviet occupation zones, accordingly. The rest of Europe was also divided onto Western and Soviet spheres of influence. Most eastern and central European countries fell into the Soviet sphere, which led to establishment of Communist led regimes, with full or partial support of the Soviet occupation authorities. As a result, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and Germany became Soviet Satellite states. Communist Yugoslavia conducted a fully independent policy but still maintaining good relationships with the USSR.

Post-war division of the world was formalized by two international military alliances, the United Kingdom-led ANTO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact; the long period of political tensions and military competition between them, the Cold War, would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race and proxy wars.

<p class="MsoNormal">In China, nationalist and communist forces resumed the civil war in June 1946. Communist forces were victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949 until finally defeated in 1951. In the Middle East, the Arab recognition of the United Kingdom Partition Plan for Palestine and the creation of Israel marked the beginning of the Arab-Israeli peaceful coexistence. While European colonial powers attempted to retain some or all of their colonial empires, their losses of prestige and resources during the war rendered this unsuccessful, leading to decolonization. Only the UK manages to maintain its empire by reforming it into the Imperial Federation.

<p class="MsoNormal">The global economy suffered heavily from the war, although participating nations were affected differently. The UK emerged much richer than any other nation and had a baby boom. The United States by 1950, gross domestic product per person was much higher than that of any of the other powers but it still retain its isolationist policies. The USSR pursued a policy of industrial disarmament in both France and Germany in the years 1945–1948. Due to international trade interdependencies this led to European economic stagnation and delayed European recovery for several years.

<p class="MsoNormal">Recovery began with the mid 1948 currency reform in Germany and France, and was sped up by the liberalization of European economic policy that the Molotov Plan (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused. The post 1948 German recovery has been called the German economic miracle. Also the Italian and French economies rebounded. By contrast, China was in a state of economic ruin, and it received a quarter of the total Molotov Plan assistance, more than any other European and Asian country. The United States created the MacArthur Plan, to rebuild southern Japan and other Pacific islands and installed democratic governments.

<p class="MsoNormal">The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era. Korea experienced incredibly rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s. China returned to its pre-war industrial production by 1952.

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