ABSTRACT
The war that began in September 1939 was a European war, in contrast to the world war that ensued when the Soviet Union, the US and Japan became involved in 1941. Militarily there is an obvious reason for seeing 1941 as a dividing line. In Asia, the China War being waged since 1937 was a separate conflict until it was widened into the Pacific War by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. In Europe Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union marks a turning point in the course of the war. But in a deeper sense the global implications of Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 were there from the beginning. Long before Germany declared war on the US, America was throwing its support behind Britain and actually engaging in warfare in the battle of the Atlantic. Then Nazi-Soviet ‘friendship’, affirmed in August 1939, was nothing but a temporary expedient. Hitler did not abandon his goal of winning living-space in the east and conquering ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.
