Jewish fighters begin the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

British-led forces began an offensive near El Alamein in Egypt, stopping Axis plans to reach the Suez Canal. The battle’s logistics depended on colonial and Commonwealth troops, port labor, and...

U.S. and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria under Operation Torch. The campaign unfolded in territories controlled by Vichy France and under French colonial rule. Moroccan and Algerian...

The Red Army launched Operation Uranus, encircling German and allied forces around Stalingrad. Soviet victory drew on the labor, sacrifice, and mobilization of a multiethnic state whose peoples had...

The Allied declaration of 17 December condemned Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews and promised punishment. It acknowledged reports of systematic killing but did not produce an immediate...

The last German troops in Stalingrad surrendered after months of siege, street fighting, hunger, and extreme cold. Soviet victory turned the eastern front but came at enormous cost to soldiers and...

Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered to Allied armies, ending the North African campaign. More than 230,000 Axis troops were captured. The campaign had been fought across colonized North Africa, where...

British, American, and Canadian forces began Operation Husky, invading Sicily. The campaign weakened Mussolini’s government and opened the route to mainland Italy. Sicilians experienced bombing,...

New Viceroy Archibald Wavell visited Calcutta as famine devastated Bengal. War priorities, colonial procurement and shipping policies, inflation, crop disruption, and unequal access to food...

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Tehran to coordinate the defeat of Nazi Germany and discuss the postwar order. Their negotiations focused on great-power strategy and borders. Colonized...

The Normandy landings opened a major western front against Nazi Germany. Allied forces included soldiers from occupied and colonized societies, while French resistance networks supported the campaign....