Italy invades Egypt from colonial Libya

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, claiming fabricated border incidents as pretext. The invasion combined conventional warfare with terror against civilians and plans for racial conquest....

When Britain declared war on Germany, Viceroy Linlithgow announced that India was at war without consulting elected Indian representatives. Indian soldiers, workers, taxpayers, and resources would...

German forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway to secure strategic sea routes and access to Swedish iron ore. Occupation brought collaboration, resistance, and coercion into northern Europe. This...

Mussolini declared war on Britain and France as Italy’s fascist regime sought territorial expansion in Europe and Africa. Italy’s existing colonies in Libya, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and...

British forces attacked French warships anchored at Mers-el-Kébir near Oran, Algeria, after France’s armistice with Germany. More than a thousand French sailors were killed. The port’s North African...

Germany and its allies invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, opening occupation regimes that relied on local collaborators and faced armed resistance. Yugoslav partisans and Greek resistance networks...

Ethiopian resistance fighters, known as Arbegnoch, and Allied troops entered Addis Ababa on 5 May, ending the Italian occupation of the capital. Haile Selassie returned after years in exile....

Operation Barbarossa began as a war of annihilation, not simply a military campaign. German plans tied conquest to racial hierarchy, mass starvation, enslavement, and the murder of Jews and Soviet...

Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, invoking peoples’ right to choose their government. Churchill insisted it did not apply to Britain’s empire, while anticolonial leaders read its...

Japanese forces attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. The attack took place in Hawai‘i, a U.S. territory whose Native Hawaiian sovereignty had...