Nazi Germany launches the invasion of the Soviet Union

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...

Italian forces crossed from Libya into Egypt, then a British-controlled strategic corridor, in an effort to advance toward the Suez Canal. The campaign turned North African territory and its...

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....

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...

Within hours of Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked British Malaya and Hong Kong, the U.S. Philippines, and other sites across the Pacific. Its rhetoric of Asian liberation from Western colonialism won...

British colonial Hong Kong surrendered to Japan on Christmas Day after a short, brutal campaign. Japanese occupation brought executions, imprisonment, forced labor, shortages, and currency controls....

At Wannsee, senior Nazi officials coordinated how state ministries would assist the already developing genocide of Europe’s Jews. The meeting did not initiate the Holocaust or make the first...