The Axis Powers were an alliance of fascist nations that signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or the Japan after 27 September 1940. The Axis fought against the Allied Powers during World War II (1939-1945), and were occupied after the war's end. The leading members were Germany, Italy, and Japan, led by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo, respectively.
History[]
Allies in green, Axis in blue, neutral in gray
Upon its formation in 1933, Nazi Germany breached the Treaty of Versailles to which it was bound after the end of World War I and its Chancellor Adolf Hitler began to mobilize the Wehrmacht army. Hitler led the invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 and Nazi Germany annexed all of its lost territory during World War I, becoming a strong power. In 1939, the United Kingdom, France, and Poland formed a defensive alliance against Germany, creating the Allied Powers. Germany had an ally in the puppet state of Slovakia, and in 1939 they invaded Poland from the west and south, with assistance from the Soviet Union, who decided to back Hitler in the division of Poland between them. Poland was conquered in October 1939 after only one month of fighting, and the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.
In early 1940, Germany prepared an invasion of France through the Netherlands and Belgium in a plan similar to the Schlieffen Plan of World War I, and they conquered the Netherlands and Belgium early in the year. The Dutch Resistance and Belgian Resistance joined the Allied Powers, but they were powerless to stop the German advance. Noting Germany's strength, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hideki Tojo of Japan decided to form alliances with Germany. Italy allied with Germany in May 1940 and the two countries conquered France; Japan allied with Germany in September. The "Axis Powers" of the Tripartite Pact now stretched through Germany's lands in central and western Europe, Italy's holdings in South Europe, the Balkans, and Africa, and Japan's empire in the Japanese Home Islands, the Pacific Islands, China, and Southeast Asia. Hungary, under Admiral Miklos Horthy, also joined the Axis Powers.
For the rest of 1940, the Axis added more lands to their empire. The Germans conquered Denmark and Norway at the same time as the fall of France, and they took over France for themselves. Southern France was turned into a part of Vichy France, a puppet regime under Philippe Petain that became a member of the Axis Powers. The Italians took over some parts of Africa from the British and seized parts of Southern France from the French government, although their gains in Africa were lost to the British by the end of the year. Japan's army and navy were very successful, taking over swathes of land on the Chinese coastline and conquering Siam and French Indochina. Siam joined the Axis Powers, in addition to Japan's puppet government of Manchukuo.
1941 saw the largest increase of belligerents on both sides until 1945. Germany occupied Romania to support the Fascist Iron Guard and Romania joined the Axis, as did Bulgaria, which was under immense pressure from Germany and Italy. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia also entered an alliance with the Germans, but after three days a pro-Allied coup took power. Germany therefore had to invade Yugoslavia and conquer it, keeping it under German and Italian occupation. Albania was added to Italy's control with German aid, and Mussolini took revenge on his defeat in an earlier war with Greece by invading Greece alongside Germany. The Metaxas Line was breached in the north and the rest of the country swiftly fell, despite the efforts of British, Australian, and New Zealander forces there.
With the Balkans under German and Italian control, Germany attempted to bully Turkey into joining the Allied Powers. However, the Turks refused to join the war, as did Germany's 1930s ally of Spain (although the dictator Francisco Franco sent the Division Azul force of 47,000 Spanish Fascist troops to fight alongside German troops in the east in 1941). In June 1941, with no enemies left on mainland Europe, Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union, his former allies. Under Heinz Guderian, millions of German troops overran millions of Soviet troops, who were inexperienced, poorly-armed and poorly-led, and clueless about the German intervention in the war. The Germans took over all of eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Ukraine by December, when they launched Operation Typhoon to capture Moscow. However, General Georgi Zhukov and his Soviet forces defeated the Germans despite heavy losses; the Germans were poorly-dressed for winter. As in Napoleon's invasion, the German forces were forced to retreat from Moscow. Nevertheless, their forces captured the Crimean port of Sevastopol and were able to lay siege to the Caucasus and the Baltic city of Leningrad.
As Italy began to lose the war in North Africa and East Africa, Germany sent the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel to assist the Italians. The Italians in Somalia and Ethiopia were crushed by the British after little resistance, but the ones in North Africa were still holding on. Rodolfo Graziani's Italian troops were replaced by Rommel's Afrika Korps, who fought a seesaw series of battles with Claude Auchinleck's British forces in the Western Desert Campaign. Rommel was able to reconquer Italian lands lost to the British and besiege Tobruk, which fell in the summer of 1942. The British and Germans fought along the Libyan desert and the border with Anglo-Egypt Sudan until 1942.
Vichy France lost a war in the Middle East with the British and Free French at the same time. Their holdings in Syria and Lebanon were captured by Allied forces, and pro-Axis Iraq was occupied by the Allied forces after a short Anglo-Iraqi War. At the same time, resistance movements, not only French, rose up in German-occupied territories. Belgian and Dutch resistance forces fought against the Germans in their homelands, Yugoslav partisans under Josef Broz Tito began an insurrection in the Balkans that tied down several German and Italian armies, and Soviet partisans continually harassed German supply lines. The result of these ambushes were ulcers in the German ranks, but the Germans were mostly unaffected by the attacks as they continued to gain ground against the Soviets.
In December 1941, the war turned around when Japan launched a surprise attack against the United States, United Kingdom, and their allies in the Pacific. The Japanese issued an ultimatum in 1940 that demanded that the British shut down the Burma Road, or else they would invade. The Burma Road sent supplies to the Chinese that fought the Japanese in China, so the British were intervening in the Japanese war effort against them. The USA also placed an oil embargo on the Japanese because of the gains that Japan made in the last few years, and their Flying Tigers air force volunteers fought the Japanese over China alongside Chinese pilots. Some US pilots had even fought against the Germans in the air Battle of Britain in 1940. The 7 December 1941 battle of Pearl Harbor left a few ships of the US fleet destroyed, but many were raised from the depths and repaired; the Japanese also failed to destroy the US carrier fleet or the oil storage on the island of Oahu. On the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded the islands of Wake, Guam, Tinian, and other US possessions in the Pacific and occupied some British islands such as New Britain and New Ireland as well. They also occupied all of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and took over control of Burma from the British, all by the start of 1942. At that point, the Americans and British faced the world's largest air and naval power in another war. Italy and Germany also declared war on the Americans, as they were bound to do so by the Tripartite Pact. This move was the one that ended the war for the Axis Powers, as it would be Americans that led the way in the conquest of Italy, France, and Germany.
The Germans and Japanese continued their successes in 1942, with the Germans overrunning Tobruk in June and the Japanese taking over additional lands in Asia. However, the Japanese navy was defeated at the Battle of the Coral Sea and their navy was destroyed at the Battle of Midway, both by US ships. The Americans were forced out of the Philippines earlier that year by the Japanese, but this victory gave hope to the Americans. Admiral Chester Nimitz and Raymond Spruance began to build up the US Navy for amphibious operations against Japanese-held islands. 1942 saw them take over the Solomon Islands as well as make progress in the campaign in New Guinea alongside the Australians. The Japanese forces were gradually forced back in the "island-hopping" campaigns of the Americans, where they took over the weaker islands and isolated the strong ones. This strategy destroyed the Japanese war power in the Pacific Islands as the Americans took control of their territories and some prewar Japanese territories taken from the German Empire in World War I. Germany also suffered defeats on the Eastern Front, and at the Battle of Stalingrad their pushes into the Volgograd region of southern Russia turned into the encirclement and wiping out of the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus. The Russians began to push the Germans back in the Ukraine, although the Axis Powers continued their successes in Crimea.
Germany and Italy were halted in their offensive in North Africa at the First Battle of El Alamein (Mersa Matruh) and in October they were soundly defeated at the Second Battle of El Alamein, with British General Bernard Montgomery taking command of British and Allied forces in the area and pushing the Germans back into Libya. The British began an advance towards Tunisia as American troops landed in Morocco and Algeria that same year in November. Together, the British and Americans pushed on Tunisia from opposite directions. In May 1943, despite a brief American defeat at the Battle of Kasserine Pass at the hands of Rommel, the last German and Italian troops in Tunisia surrendered at Cape Bon to the generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley of the USA. In July 1943, the US 7th Army and British 8th Army under Patton and Montgomery both invaded southern Italy's island of Sicily in Operation Husky, facing low-grade Italian divisions on the western half of the island and two German divisions on the eastern half. Montgomery dashed Patton's hopes of a pincer attack by making him land at Gela to cover his flank, but Patton later advanced on Palermo to force an Italian surrender on the island. In September, he succeeded, and Italy was forced to sign an armistice with the Allies. Italian troops in Italy, the Balkans, and southern France were disarmed by the Germans as Mussolini was dismissed from power. Italy became a member of the Allied Powers, but it remained under German control. Soon after, German paratroopers rescued Mussolini from a hotel prison in the Apennine Mountains and installed him as the leader of the Salo Republic in northern Italy. The Allies made amphibious landings at Salerno and Taranto late in 1943, and although the battle of Salerno was a tough victory, they were able to advance "up the Boot of Italy" and secure Naples by the end of the year.
Also in 1943, the Japanese were pushed out of their strongholds of Makin and Tarawa, among others. Guadalcanal's termination was in February 1943 after a year of combat between the Americans and Japanese. America also began to bomb Japanese islands and even their homeland. American naval victories such as the Battle of Santa Cruz and the Battle of Bismarck Sea lowered Japan's naval power and capabilities, although the Imperial Japanese Navy was still a power.
By January 1944, the Axis Powers had lost much of their lands. Italy was out of the war and North Africa was fully under British control. Vichy France, who had surrendered control of their north African lands and made peace with the Allies under Francois Darlan, was now occupied by German forces. The Soviets won the crucial Battle of Kursk and pushed the German line back after a great tank battle, and the Germans had been pushed back to Naples in Italy.
The Allies continued their offensive up Italy and had taken over the crucial German defenses of Anzio and Monte Cassino by May 1944, and they captured Rome in June. The Soviet general Konstanin Rokosovssky in Ukraine planned an all-out offensive against German, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front, codenamed "Operation Bagration". They recaptured the Crimea and most of Ukraine and liberated Belarus, and destroyed Army Group Centre. The Soviets invaded the Balkans in August and King Michael I of Romania ordered all Romanian troops to stand down to Soviet forces when engaged. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu's earlier policy of having Romanian and German generals sharing command of German and Romanian forces failed, as the Romanian generals were poor in leadership and their troops poor in combat. Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb the Romanian capital of Ploesti in revenge for the Romanian surrender, and Romania joined the Allied Powers. Romania and Bulgaria were both overrun by Soviet forces, and both became members of the Allies. Bulgarian troops linked up with Yugoslav partisans in the Balkans and aided in offensives that liberated much of the lands from German forces. By December 1944, the Soviets were planning to liberate Belgrade from the Nazis and push into Hungary and Germany; their advance up north had stalled at the gates of Warsaw, having liberated Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and almost all of eastern Poland.
In June 1944, at the same time as Operation Bagration, the Allies began their invasion of Europe. Operation Overlord was the name given to their invasion of Normandy in northern France, not too far from the English coast. Overall command of Allied forces going into Europe was given to Omar Bradley, while Dwight D. Eisenhower was given command of the Allied Powers of World War II in their campaigns and their internal affairs. Also involved in the invasion was the British general Montgomery, who left Sicily to take part in the planning of the invasion. The British, American, Belgian, French, Greek, Polish, Dutch, Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, and other Allied forces preparing for the invasion were assembled on the English Coast, and they began their landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944, D-Day. The Allies landed at Gold, Juno, Sword, Utah, and Omaha beaches and pushed inwards, defeating German forces at the beaches. With their beachheads established, the Allies planned Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy. British, Canadian, and Polish forces broke out of their beachheads in June and besieged Caen, where they fought a fierce battle with the German forces, involving infantry as well as tanks. On 18 July 1944, the Americans began the breakout from their sectors, codenamed Operation Cobra. They secured the city of St. Lo to the southwest and began to push up the Cotetin Peninsula, liberating Cherbourg. The Americans began to push on Paris from the southwest as British, Canadian, and Polish forces pushed from the northeast. The German-occupied territory in the middle came to be known as the "Falaise Gap". The encircled 350,000 German troops of Army Group B and the German 7th Army, under Gunther von Kluge and Paul Hausser, respectively, were forced to attempt breakouts from the Allies as they liberated many French towns and cities. The Allies encircled them fully with their capture of Chambois on 18 August 1944, and on 20 August the last German troops began their final counteroffensive to break through Chambois and escape. The remnants of Army Group B, under the command of Walther Model since Kluge's suicide on 17 August, were already decimated at Hill 262 by the Poles and the offensives by the British and Canadians around Caen and Falaise. Their last forces were heavily defeated at the battle of Chambois, with all of their remaining armor and vehicles destroyed and their infantry surrendering. 10,000 Germans were killed and 50,000 captured, and the few survivors were forced to retreat. Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944 and the Allies advanced north to Belgium and west to the Saarland and the German fortresses in Metz and Alsace-Lorraine.
The Japanese also faced problems in 1944, as the Americans captured the islands of Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, and Peleliu, among others. The Americans also invaded the Philippines, with General Douglas MacArthur fulfilling his 1942 promise to one day return. After the American victory at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Americans made landfall in the Philippines and proceeded to take over most of the islands.
By January 1945, the Axis Powers had dropped to only a few nations, and nations as far and wide as Chile and Bolivia had entered the Allied Powers. The Soviets had pushed to Warsaw and Romania and Bulgaria, whose forces were aiding the Yugoslavs in fighting the Germans in the Balkans. The Western Allies repulsed a German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945 and liberated much of Belgium and the Netherlands from the Germans, while their armies reached the Senio River in northern Italy after liberating Rome, Ravenna, and other major cities in the center of the peninsula. German forces were mobilizing in Germany, including the Volkssturm, a militia of people from 13 to 60 that were given Panzerfaust anti-tank guns and sent to fight the Allies.
In January the Soviets captured Warsaw and began an offensive across Poland and into Germany and Austria, while the Americans struggled to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine River. In March 1945, the Americans secured a bridge over Remagen and advanced into Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Soviets made a push on Berlin as the Allies held back, not wanting a fight with the Soviets. Nevertheless, Patton's 3rd Army pushed into Czechoslovakia and Alexander Patch's US 7th Army pushed into Austria, capturing Salzburg and stopping short of Graz. The Soviets also stopped short of there, leaving a gap in between the armies. In April 1945 the Soviets attacked Berlin in their millions and by 3 May all resistance had been subdued, and Hitler committed suicide. Karl Donitz, a Kriegsmarine admiral, became the head of a new government at Flensburg and from 3 May to 12 May further combat continued. The gap between American and Soviet forces left the Independent State of Croatia, parts of Austria, and Saxony unliberated and still in German hands.
On 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers. Fighting continued until the Nazis in Prague gave in on 12 May 1945, and all of the European Axis powers surrendered. The Japanese continued resistance, but after the Americans captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa from them and dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August (following intense firebombing of Japan), Japan was forced to surrender on 3 September 1945. The war was over, and most of the Axis countries were occupied by Allied troops.