Why does ww2 start

The beginning of the conflict was marked by the Chinese strategy of giving up land in order to stall the Japanese. It is important to note that the Japanese was not to completely take over China; rather, the Japanese wanted to set up puppet governments in key regions that would protect and advance Japanese interests.

The fall of Nanjing in the early stages of this conflict saw the beginning of Japanese war atrocities. Other war crimes committed included widespread rape, arson, and looting. These were pacts between Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The Anti-Comintern pact had been a pact that denounced communism and it was initially signed by Japan and Germany. However, later, as German and Italian relations improved, Italy also signed and this was made stronger later by the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in The Japanese forces met little resistance and devastated the harbor.

This attack resulted in 8 battleships either sunk or damaged, 3 light cruisers and 3 destroyers sunk as well as damage to some auxiliaries and aircraft either damaged or destroyed. Japan lost only 29 aircraft and their crews and five midget submarines. The survival of these assets have led many to consider this attack a catastrophic long term strategic blunder for Japan.

The following day, the United States declared war on Japan. Simultaneously to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan also attacked U. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December , even though it was not obliged to do so under the Tripartite Pact of Hitler made the declaration in the hopes that Japan would support him by attacking the Soviet Union.

Japan did not oblige him, and this diplomatic move proved a catastrophic blunder which gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the pretext needed for the United States joining the fight in Europe with full commitment and with no meaningful opposition from Congress. Some historians mark this moment as another major turning point of the war with Hitler provoking a grand alliance of powerful nations, most prominently the UK, the USA and the USSR, who could wage powerful offensives on both East and West simultaneously.

Simultaneous with the dawn raid on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese carried out an invasion of Malaya, landing troops at Kota Bharu on the east coast, supported by land based aircraft from bases in Vietnam and Taiwan.

The British attempted to oppose the landings by dispatching Force Z, comprising the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, with their escorting destroyers, from the naval base in Singapore, but this force was intercepted and destroyed by bombers before even reaching their objective.

The Japanese were even using tanks, which the British had thought would not be able to penetrate the jungles but they were wrong. During a short two week campaign the Japanese crossed the Straits of Johor by amphibious assault and conducted a series of sharp battles, notably the battle of Kent Ridge when the Royal Malay Regiment put up a brave but futile effort to stem the tide.

Singapore fell on 15 February and with its fall, Japan was now able to control the sea approaches from the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits. The natural resources of the Malay peninsula, in particular rubber plantations and tin mines, were now in the hands of the Japanese.

Other Allied possessions, especially in the oil rich East Indies Indonesia were also swiftly captured, and all organised resistance effectively ceased, with attention now shifting to events closer to Midway, the Solomon Islands, the Bismark Sea and New Guinea. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the US military sought to strike back at Japan, and a plan was formulated to bomb Tokyo.

As Tokyo could not be reached by land based bombers, it was decided to use an aircraft carrier to launch the attack close to Japanese waters. Indeed, on the contrary, he was someone who knew that the odds were stacked against his own country — and yet still wanted violent conflict.

Someone prepared to gamble the future lives of millions of his people on the chance that the Germans could win a swift, decisive war. Someone who believed with all his heart in a deeply pessimistic view of the human spirit. If only we had been partners we could have ruled the world together!

Such a partnership was a fantasy, of course. Not only could Britain never have stood by and seen Hitler enslave mainland Europe, but it was obvious by the spring of that the Nazis could not be trusted to keep to any agreement they signed.

So Hitler emerges, surely without question now, as the person most responsible for the war. It is really just a think about how did things get started. Or what happened in the lead up? And to start I am actually going to focus on Asia and the Pacific. Which probably doesn't get enough attention when we look at it from a western point of view But if we go back even to the early s. Japan is becoming more and more militaristic. More and more nationalistic.

In the early s it had already occupied It had already occupied Korea as of It invades Manchuria. So this right over here, this is in And it installs a puppet state, the puppet state of Manchukuo. And when we call something a puppet state, it means that there is a government there.

And they kind of pretend to be in charge. Of course the invasion was preceded by decades of political conflict. The Treaty of Versailles, signed at the end of WW1, placed some very harsh restrictions on Germany, which created a feeling of resentment among the Germans.

Other countries were sympathetic and acted very lenient towards Germany, overlooking other clear violations of the Treaty, such as a union with Austria.