World War II Time Line     |   home
Nov 11, 1918 - World War One ends with German defeat.   |   Sept 14, 1930 - Germans elect Nazis making them the 2nd largest political party in Germany.   |   Jan 30, 1933 - Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.   |   May 10, 1940 - Nazis invade France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister.   |   June 22, 1941 - Germany attacks Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa begins.   |   Dec 5, 1941 - German attack on Moscow is abandoned.   |   Dec 7, 1941 - Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor   |   Dec 8, 1941 -   States and Britain declare war on Japan.   |   Dec 11, 1941 - Germany declares war on the United States.   |   Feb 2, 1943 - Germans surrender at Stalingrad in the first big defeat of Hitler's armies.   |   May 13, 1943 - German and Italian troops surrender in North Africa   |   July 9/10, 1943 - Allies land in Sicily.   |   June 6, 1944 - D-Day landings.   |   Oct 11, 1944 - U.S. air raids against Okinawa.   |   Dec 16-27, 1944 - Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes.   |   April 30, 1945 - Adolf Hitler commits suicide.   |   May 2, 1945 - German troops in Italy surrender.   |   Aug 6, 1945 - First Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima from a B-29 flown by Col. Paul Tibbets.   |   Aug 9, 1945 - Second atomic bomb dropped, on Nagasaki, Japan.   |   Sept 2, 1945 - Formal Japanese surrender ceremony on board the MISSOURI in Tokyo Bay as 1000 carrier-based planes fly overhead; President Truman declares VJ Day.
June 22, 1941 - Germany attacks Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa begins.
The key to Operation Barbarossa is to conquer the Soviet Union before the fall rains turn the Russian countryside into a sea of mud.  More than 3 million German men faced  nearly 2,900,000 Soviet soldiers.  Many Russians were not deployed effectively due to Stalin’s stripping away many experienced Soviet commanders in the late 1930s. Still, the Red Army enjoyed a two-to-one advantage in tanks, but are no match for the massed armor of the German panzer groups. The Soviets also enjoy a nearly three-to-one advantage in aircraft, but German air strikes knocked out communications and destroyed many Soviet aircraft on the ground. Germany quickly won supremecy in air and on the battlefields.