The rain had stopped by midnight, and somewhere above the clouds the first transport planes were already droning toward the French coast. Below them, thousands of men sat in darkness, gripping rifles they had cleaned a hundred times, trying not to think about what waited at the bottom of the drop. By dawn, the sea was full of ships. The Atlantic Wall was supposed to stop them.
Hitler had spent years building it, a chain of bunkers and guns stretching along the coast, and he was certain the Allies would come at Calais, where the crossing was shortest. The Allies wanted him to think exactly that. They filled the southeast of England with fake tanks made of rubber, wooden aircraft, phantom divisions broadcasting radio traffic that never meant anything. The Germans watched those decoys and kept their best divisions waiting near Calais while the real army loaded onto landing craft further west.
On the night of June 5, 1944, paratroopers fell out of the sky behind the German lines. Their job was to knock out gun batteries, seize bridges, and secure the roads inland. Then the bombers came, and then the ships emerged from the mist. At 5:30 that morning, the naval guns opened up and ten thousand tons of steel began falling on the beaches of Normandy.
Americans, British, Canadians, and 177 Frenchmen waded through the surf toward the shore. Men who had crossed an ocean to fight for a continent that wasn’t theirs. The first waves died in the water. Omaha Beach was the worst of it.
A German sergeant named Heinrich Severloh held his machine gun on the Americans from a bunker above the dunes, firing until the barrel glowed. At one point he saw a young soldier climbing the slope a few dozen meters away, raised his rifle, and shot him dead. He would never forget that face. The beaches were taken by noon everywhere except Omaha.
By nightfall, they had it too. The Allies had expected 25,000 casualties. In the end, they counted about 10,000. The GIs pushed inland, handing out cigarettes and chewing gum to villagers who came out to cheer them.
The liberation of Western Europe had begun. In the East, the Red Army was already moving. On June 22, exactly three years after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin launched his counter-offensive in Belarus. Operation Bagration was a hammer blow.
In five days, the Wehrmacht was swept aside. The Red Army rolled through the Baltic States and Poland, and Stalin understood what he was really winning. He wasn’t just beating Germany. He was carving out an empire.
When Minsk fell, he made the Germans pay a public price. On July 17, 57,000 captured German soldiers were marched through Moscow while the crowds watched in silence. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Americans were grinding their way toward Japan, island by island. On Saipan, the Japanese soldiers and civilians fought to the last bullet in caves and tunnels.
Four thousand civilians, including women and children, threw themselves off the cliffs rather than surrender. The GIs were stunned by the choice they saw before them. This was the enemy they would have to defeat. With the Pacific turning against them, the Japanese army in China launched a massive land campaign called Operation Ichigo.
They crushed Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, who lost huge numbers of men. But the communists under Mao Zedong, spared the worst of the fighting in the south, quietly moved into the territories the nationalists had lost, handing out help to starving peasants and winning their loyalty. In less than ten years, Mao would defeat Chiang completely and drive him into exile on Taiwan. A second China was born, one that owed obedience to communism.
A new model was taking shape, Maoist, popular, and rural. In Germany, the war was collapsing inward. The generals could see the end and wanted to negotiate an honorable peace, but Hitler would never allow it. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed an attaché case containing a bomb under Hitler’s conference table in East Prussia.
He slipped out. Five minutes later, the room exploded. Somehow, Hitler survived with only a few burns. His paranoia turned to purges.
The plotters were arrested, summarily tried, and executed. The German people remained loyal to their Führer, certain he would save them. A few weeks later, the Red Army reached the Vistula River on the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish resistance had been waiting for this moment.
They rose up against the Germans, hoping to free their capital before the Soviets could take it. Stalin, posted on the other side of the river, stopped his advance and watched. He gave the insurgents nothing. No supplies, no artillery support, no air cover.
The Germans crushed the uprising, razed Warsaw, and either killed or deported the survivors. When it was over, the Red Army crossed the river and took the ruins for themselves. In France, the Allies were moving faster than anyone expected. On August 15, a second invasion landed on the beaches of the Riviera.
Two-thirds of these troops were French, many of them riflemen from the colonies, West and North Africans taking their first steps on the mainland. They helped liberate their own country. Now Paris had to free itself. That was de Gaulle’s condition.
He knew a nation that hadn’t liberated its own capital would have no voice at the postwar table. On August 19, Parisians rose up. Most of the fighters were communist resistance members, and if they drove out the Germans on their own, they might well take political power in France. So de Gaulle pressed the Allies to send General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division into Paris first.
He needed to be the face of liberation. Days earlier, a young resistance fighter named Madeleine Riffaud had shot a German officer twice in the head on the banks of the Seine. She was condemned to death and waiting in her cell when the uprising began. The prison doors opened on August 19, the same day the capital rose.
On August 26, de Gaulle paraded down the Champs-Élysées through screaming crowds. He had won the crazy gamble he had made with his appeal from London in 1940. He convinced the Allies, who had long distrusted him, to recognize him as the leader of France. Gaullists and communists formed a national government that introduced universal female suffrage and social welfare.
The Third Reich was dying. Allied bombers struck German cities without pause. The Soviets took Romania and Bulgaria in three weeks. In Yugoslavia, the partisans drove out the Germans.
In Greece, British troops marched in as liberators. But Hitler stayed convinced he could turn it all around. He put his faith in new weapons, a jet fighter and the V1 and V2 rockets crashing into London. They were engineering wonders, but they could only feed the illusion that victory was still possible.
Halfway around the world, the Japanese had their own version of the same delusion. As the American navy pushed into the Philippines, Japan unleashed a new weapon of desperation. Young pilots, many of them barely trained, were sent to fly their planes directly into American ships. Some believed they were dying for the emperor.
Most simply gave in to pressure from their officers. On October 25, 1944, a 23-year-old pilot named Yukio Seki flew his Zero, loaded with bombs, straight into the deck of the USS St. Lo. American sailors watched in horror.
The psychological damage was worse than the physical. The kamikazes sank or disabled dozens of ships. In time, the U. S.
Navy rebuilt its composure, adapted, and crushed the Japanese Imperial Navy for good. But the fight accelerated toward a terrible conclusion. American planners were staring at the math of invading Japan itself. They estimated losses in the hundreds of thousands.
Democracies, they kept repeating, could not throw away their soldiers’ lives so casually. The Manhattan Project, begun two years earlier, was still racing to produce a weapon that might end the war before the invasion became necessary. But nothing could guarantee it would be ready in time. In January 1945, the Red Army became the first Allied force to set foot on German soil.
One German soldier was facing three Russians, and the Russians were hardened, efficient, and brutal. Their advance was marked by destruction and fear. German civilians fled before them, especially the women, tens of thousands of whom were raped. The Soviet troops had been forged in a war of unimaginable violence, and they repaid it in kind.
Hitler retreated into the bunker under the Chancellery in Berlin, increasingly detached from reality. His propaganda minister, Goebbels, emptied factories and ordered children to fight. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were drafted, given rifles, and sent to die. Hitler gave the order to hold every line at all costs and to destroy any infrastructure that might help the enemy.
He clung to one last hope, that the alliance between the Americans and the Soviets would fracture before the end. He was wrong. In February 1945, the Big Three met at Yalta in Crimea. Roosevelt, sick and within two months of death, wanted peace between Moscow and Washington above all else.
Stalin pressed his advantage. He demanded guarantees over Eastern Europe, which he was already seizing. Churchill protested, but Roosevelt gave way. Stalin agreed to join the United Nations.
The USSR would let America have its sphere of influence in Asia. The two giants were already dividing the world, and neither of them would trust the other for the next fifty years. They did agree on one thing. Germany had to be forced to face its defeat.
Two days after Yalta, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people died. By then, the Allies had largely suspended their moral qualms. Europe was being leveled, and from the ruins would rise a continent dependent on Washington and Moscow.
The Red Army pushed toward Berlin, venting its fury through rape, looting, and murder. Stalin drove his generals forward, paranoid that the Americans would take the prize first. In Italy, Mussolini was captured by partisans and executed along with his mistress. Their bodies were hung in a Milan square and abused by the crowd.
Across Europe, collaborators were hunted down, lynched, or publicly shamed in waves of vigilante justice. On April 21, the first Soviet divisions entered Berlin. Göring tried to claim command. Himmler secretly offered to surrender to the West.
Hitler disavowed them both and stayed in his bunker. On April 30, he bit into a cyanide capsule and shot himself in the temple. Eva Braun died beside him. The Goebbels family followed, after poisoning their six children.
Hundreds of German civilians, women, old men, whole families, chose suicide over witnessing the fall of the Reich. Berlin fell. Soldiers raised the red flag over the Reichstag. On May 8, Germany surrendered.
Roosevelt had died a month earlier and never saw the victory. But two million New Yorkers poured into Times Square to celebrate. In London, people danced and burned Hitler effigies. In Paris, a parade marched down the Champs-Élysées.
Then the camps were opened. The soldiers who liberated them saw the mass graves, the gas chambers, the ovens, the piles of bodies that the Nazis hadn’t had time to process. A new legal term had to be invented to name the crime. Crimes against humanity.
That summer, the war had one more act left. Truman, now president, faced the same brutal question in the Pacific. The Japanese had refused to surrender, and the invasion of Japan promised a bloodbath. In New Mexico, the atomic bomb had become real.
On July 26, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, warning Japan of prompt and utter destruction. Tokyo’s delayed response was read as refusal. On August 6, 1945, a teacher named Ogura Toyofumi looked up and saw a white flash tear across the sky. The bomber Enola Gay had just released its payload.
As the shockwave shook the plane on its way out, the co-pilot Robert Lewis wrote in his log: “My god, what have we done? ” In a fraction of a second, Hiroshima ceased to exist. Seventy thousand people died that day. Tens of thousands more died in the following weeks and years.
Three days later, a second bomb erased Nagasaki. Stalin heard the news and was furious. The Americans had released the weapon to end the war without needing the Soviets in Asia, and to make clear who now stood at the center of the world. Furious and afraid of losing ground, Stalin ordered his troops into Manchuria that same night.
Japan, surrounded and broken, surrendered. On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the end. The war was over, but the price was staggering. Across the world, people poured into the streets to celebrate.
Alfred Eisenstaedt, a photographer in Times Square, captured a sailor kissing a young nurse on the day the news broke. The photo became a symbol of everything the world hoped for. A generation devastated by war now turned toward peace, marriage, and children. The baby boom built the world we live in.
The memory of those years still trembles under the surface. The tremors continue to be felt today. And always, always, peace remains fragile.
