<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" width="40px" /> In this lesson, you will…
Big Question: What critical moments in World War II changed the world?
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You may be wondering why we discuss the end of the Second World War with Unit 9 instead of the World Wars Unit. In order to understand the Cold War, we must first understand how the twilight of World War II was foundational for the new conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.
In the closing years of the war, new technologies and a degradation of the trust between the US and USSR set the stage for the post-war world.
With its large territory, Hitler believed that an invasion of the Soviet Union would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa.
The Nazi advance was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather.
The Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest combat of World War II.
Nazi forces surrounded the city as they rained bombs in devastating air raids. But the Soviets refused to abandon the city.
Soviet Commander Gregory Zhukov later wrote:
It was clear to me that the battle for Stalingrad was of the greatest military and political significance. If Stalingrad fell, the enemy command would be able to cut off the south of the country from the center. We could lose the Volga — the important water artery, along which a large amount of goods flowed from the Caucasus.
Soviet and Nazi armies fought building by building, street by street in Stalingrad.
The bitter winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, saw a Nazi surrendered in January 1943 as their advance was halted.
From the journal of a Soviet soldier:
I had been imagining what war was like - everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it turned out to be really like that, only more terrible.
Around the same time in North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and Germans by 1943. It was a trial run for a full-scale invasion of mainland Europe.
On 6 June 1944, the Allies began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France. This was known as Operation Overlord.
The invasion was successful and the Allies joined the Soviet Union’s push to Berlin and Hitler’s defeat.
The Battle of the Bulge occurred in the heavily forested region between Belgium and Luxembourg. The last German offensive of the war, the Battle of the Bugle resulted in the defeat of the German army in Europe.
With defeat imminent as Allied forces raced to Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed his wife, Eva Braun, before turning his pistol on himself on 30 April 1945.