The causes and effects of World War II Term Paper

The causes and effects of World War II - Term Paper Example Though many countries got involved in the war, the superpowers present then spearheaded the war. This led to the creation of the Allies forces on one side and the Axis forces on the other. The Allies group got made up of the United States of America, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China and France. The Axis group, on the other hand, got made up of Germany, Japan and Italy (Torrin 32). Statistics claim that this war had the largest number of military personnel directly involved in the war, with over 100 million people serving in active combat out in the war front. In a bid to prove their supremacy and superiority over other powers, many nations involved in the war gave it their all in as far as their industrial, innovative, scientific and more importantly, economic abilities got concerned. This would later prove to be a lousy choice for many countries that had to build their countries from scratch after the war ended (Hamilton 77). This war became defined by an arms race which invol ves the use of sophisticated weapons and relatively new technologies of combat. Nuclear weapons became largely used by the feuding states and this led to the demise of more than 75 million people. This could explain why the Second World War gets viewed as the most brutal of combats in history (Senker 85). The occurrence of the war could almost be viewed as spontaneous. Though the world had been volatile since 1918 when the First World War ended, no one had the slightest idea that a war of such magnitude was going to erupt. This war, which dates back seventy three years ago, begun on the 1st of September, 1939 by the unexpected German invasion of Polish territory with no warning whatsoever. Within the next two days, that is, by the third day of September, Great Britain begun feuding with Germany (Vandome 61). A week hardly went by before the war became a bare knuckle fight, involving nations that included Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The battle ground involved in this war was far reaching. From the Normandy Hedgerows to the Stalingrad streets, from the Pacific Islands to the wild jungle of Burma, from the dusty Libyan deserts to the Norwegian Ice Mountains, war was evident. The Germany raised their mighty hand against the Polish people. Italians fought against the Americans, and the Japanese rose against the Australians. The dynamics of this war got complicated. Historians say that this war got finally decided by the nuclear weapons race that later took center stage between these world powers (Senker 132). World War II had many different causes. One of the causes of World War II was the instability and the economic depression that affected many of the European and world super powers. The economic depression was a substantial causative factor of the war especially around 1929. It led to a state of disarray in Germany leading to massive unemployment and lack of income. The US refrained from lending money to Germany for reparations and began to demand their money back. America then went into isolation in a bid to protect its own economy and to avoid involvement in another European war that promised to be costly to its taxpayers. As a result, economic crisis griped the world and distrust began forming again (McBrewster 66). The German economy, which was a world leader, suffered severely. The economic meltdown created the perfect opportunity for the rise of dictators like Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who were all prominent and revered in as far as the war gets concerned. The depression led a large number of the unemployed population to support these dictatorships as they got rewarded with adequate food supplies and a means of livelihood. In Germany especially, the depression that caused