Japan opens a regional offensive across Southeast Asia

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...

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...

After a rapid campaign down the Malay Peninsula, British-led forces surrendered Singapore. The defeat shattered the myth of European military superiority and intensified Japanese occupation across the...

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military exclusion zones that enabled the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. More than 120,000 people of Japanese...

Dutch forces in Java surrendered to Japan, ending Dutch colonial rule there and beginning a harsh occupation. Japanese authorities mobilized Indonesian labor, extracted rice and other resources, and...