Events of 1941

With continental Europe under Nazi control, and Britain safe - for the time being - the war took on a more global dimension. Following the defeat of Mussolini's armies in Greece and Tobruk, German forces arrived in North Africa in February, and invaded Greece and Yugoslavia in April.
While the bombing of British and German cities continued, and the gas chambers at Auschwitz were put to use, Hitler invaded Russia . Operation Barbarossa, as the invasion was called, began on 22 June. The initial advance was swift, with the fall of Sebastopol at the end of October, and Moscow coming under attack at the end of the year.
The bitter Russian winter, however, like the one that Napoleon had experienced a century and a half earlier, crippled the Germans. The Soviets counterattacked in December and the Eastern Front stagnated until the spring.
Winter in the Pacific, of course, presented no such problems. The Japanese, tired of American trade embargoes, mounted a surprise attack on the US Navy base of Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, on 7 December.
This ensured that global conflict commenced, with Germany declaring war on the US, a few days later. Within a week of Pearl Harbor, Japan had invaded the Philippines, Burma and Hong Kong. The Pacific war was on.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/ww2_summary_04.shtml

Events of 1942

The first Americans arrived in England in January - 'Over paid, over sexed and over here' as the gripe went - and in North Africa Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps began their counter-offensive, capturing Tobruk in June.
The Blitz intensified in both England and Germany, with the first thousand-bomber air raid on Cologne, and German bombing of British cathedral cities.
In the Pacific, the Japanese continued their expansion into Borneo, Java and Sumatra. The 'unassailable' British fortress of Singapore fell rapidly in February, with around 25,000 prisoners taken, many of whom would die in Japanese camps in the years to follow.
But June saw the peak of Japanese expansion. The Battle of Midway, in which US sea-based aircraft destroyed four Japanese carriers and a cruiser, marked the turning point in the Pacific War.
The second half of the year also saw a reversal of German fortunes. British forces under Montgomery gained the initiative in North Africa at El Alamein, and Russian forces counterattacked at Stalingrad. The news of mass murders of Jewish people by the Nazis reached the Allies, and the US pledged to avenge these crimes.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/ww2_summary_05.shtml

Events of 1940 (World War II)

Rationing was introduced in Britain early in the New Year, but little happened in western Europe until the spring. The 'winter war' between Russia and Finland concluded in March, and in the following month Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.
Denmark surrendered immediately, but the Norwegians fought on - with British and French assistance - surrendering in June only once events in France meant that they were fighting alone.
On 10 May - the same day that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of the UK - Germany invaded France, Belgium and Holland, and western Europe encountered the Blitzkrieg - or 'lightning war'.
Germany's combination of fast armoured tanks on land, and superiority in the air, made a unified attacking force that was both innovative and effective. Despite greater numbers of air and army personnel - and the presence of the British Expeditionary Force - the Low Countries and France proved no match for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Holland and Belgium fell by the end of May; Paris was taken two weeks later.
British troops retreated from the invaders in haste, and some 226,000 British and 110,000 French troops were rescued from the channel port of Dunkirk only by a ragged fleet, using craft that ranged from pleasure boats to Navy destroyers.
In France an armistice was signed with Germany, with the puppet French Vichy government - under a hero of World War One, Marshall Pétain - in control in the 'unoccupied' part of southern and eastern France, and Germany in control in the rest of the country.
Charles de Gaulle, as the leader of the Free French, fled to England (much to Churchill's chagrin) to continue the fight against Hitler . But it looked as if that fight might not last too long. Having conquered France, Hitler turned his attention to Britain, and began preparations for an invasion. For this to be successful, however, he needed air superiority, and he charged the Luftwaffe with destroying British air power and coastal defences.
The Battle of Britain, lasting from July to September, was the first to be fought solely in the air. Germany lacked planes but had many pilots. In Britain, the situation was reversed, but - crucially - it also had radar. This, combined with the German decision to switch the attacks from airfields and factories to the major cities, enabled the RAF to squeak a narrow victory, maintain air superiority and ensure the - ultimately indefinite - postponement of the German invasion plans.
The 'Blitz' of Britain's cities lasted throughout the war, saw the bombing of Buckingham Palace and the near-destruction of Coventry, and claimed some 40,000 civilian lives.

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Events of 1939 (World War II)

Three years of mounting international tension - encompassing the Spanish Civil War, the Anschluss (union) of Germany and Austria, Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland and the invasion of Czechoslovakia - culminated in the German invasion of Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. While the USA proclaimed neutrality, it continued to supply Britain with essential supplies, and the critical Battle of the Atlantic between German U-Boats and British naval convoys commenced.
Western Europe was eerily quiet during this 'phoney war'. Preparations for war continued in earnest, but there were few signs of conflict, and civilians who had been evacuated from London in the first months drifted back into the city. Gas masks were distributed, and everybody waited for the proper war to begin.
In eastern Europe and Scandinavia, however, there was nothing phoney about the war. With the Ribbentrop Pact signed between the Soviet Union and Germany in late August, Russia followed Germany into Poland in September. That country was carved up between the two invaders before the end of the year, and Russia continued this aggression by going on to invade Finland.

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New agenda (World War I)

The British put forward 'democratic' war aims, offering the idea of some sort of self-determination for the nationalities within the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, attempting to appeal to the German people over the heads of the Imperial government. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, went much further. In his 14 points of January 1918, Wilson announced a liberal internationalist agenda that was revolutionary in its implications.

Based on the encouragement of democracy and nationalism, accompanied by liberal capitalism, Wilson's timing was perfect. The old European empires were under strain, and would soon collapse. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia only weeks before the 14 Points speech, and Marxist-Leninism was to prove a powerful, similarly universalist, rival to liberal democracy for the rest of the 20th century.
Far from being fought over trivial issues, World War One must be seen in the context of an attempt by an aggressive, militarist state to establish hegemony over Europe, extinguishing democracy as a by-product. To argue that the world of 1919 was worse than that of 1914 is to miss the point. A world in which Imperial Germany had won World War One would have been even worse.http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/origins_05.shtml

Ideological struggle (World War I)

We are not used to seeing World War One as an ideological struggle, a battle between democracy and autocracy. Yet that is in many respects exactly what it was. The original coalition of course contained Tsarist Russia, but Britain and France had a shared democratic heritage. In 1917, the defeat of Russia and adherence of the USA to the coalition polarised the conflict to one between a group of states committed to liberal and democratic values, and a militarist autocracy. The coalition was imperfectly democratic. Both Britain and France had large colonial empires whose people did not have access to democratic forms of government, and both sought to extend their empires at the expense of their enemies. In Britain, universal male suffrage, along with the vote for some, but not all, adult women, was only introduced at the end of the war. All states behaved in some ways that were at odds with liberal democratic principles, persecuting pacifists for example.
Yet there was a qualitative difference between the democratic powers and Germany. For one thing, 'remobilisation' of the French and British peoples by playing the democratic card helped rally support for the war in 1917-18 whilst, in Germany, support for the regime crumbled. Britain and France came to be led by Lloyd George and Clemenceau, popularist democratic leaders, while Germany was ruled by a military dictatorship that sidelined the constitutional leader, the Kaiser. An Allied victory led to the maintenance and even extension of liberal democracy in Europe. A German victory would have snuffed it out. When the German army appeared to be on the verge of victory in spring 1918, the Kaiser crowed that this was the vindication of monarchy and autocracy over democracy.
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Compromise peace (World War I)

On the surface, it is strange that despite the military deadlock, the belligerents did not reach a compromise peace. However, since Germany's aims were fundamentally incompatible with those of the Allies, and almost to the end both sides believed that the war was winnable, it is not surprising that the struggle went on. Despite some sporadic attempts to find common ground, it was not until autumn 1918 that Germany, clearly defeated, staged a deathbed conversion to the idea of a compromise peace.
France's immediate aim was to expel German troops from its territory. In the longer term, many desired the return of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany after the war of 1870-71, and the crushing of German power in some form, thus enhancing French security for the future. Britain went to war because it saw a German victory as a threat to its security. For centuries, Britain had fought to maintain the balance of power in Europe, to ensure that no state became overmighty. The Kaiser's Germany followed Napoleon's France, and preceded Hitler, as a threat to stability. In particular, Britain was highly sensitive about Belgium. In the hands of an enemy, Belgian ports offered a major threat to the British naval supremacy and hence the security of the British Isles. Britain had no real option but to go to war in 1914. If France had been defeated, Britain would have been faced with the nightmare that since the days of Elizabeth I it had fought to avoid: the continent dominated by a single, aggressive state.
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