Second World War 1939–1945: Complete Campaign Guide — Europe, Atlantic, Mediterranean & Pacific // Log 031

My own service perspective naturally pulls me toward the ground-level questions of terrain, firepower, logistics and what a campaign asks of the people inside it. For a global war, though, the first discipline is not to let one familiar army, one front or one national memory become the whole story. This guide deliberately keeps the wider theatres visible while the detailed Gallus Field Notes go deeper into the subjects closest to the collection.

The Second World War was a connected set of campaigns fought across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific. The current Gallus collection is understandably heavy on Normandy and British military history, but the campaign itself cannot be explained honestly from one beach or one army.

Between 1939 and 1945 the war involved state conquest, colonial empires, strategic bombing, submarine warfare, mass mobilisation, resistance movements, genocide and fighting on a scale without precedent. Civilian deaths made up an enormous part of the human cost.

1939: Poland

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declared war two days later. The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on 17 September under the secret arrangements of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Poland was defeated as an organised campaign within weeks, but the Polish state did not simply disappear from the Allied war effort. Polish forces continued fighting from abroad, while occupied Poland became the site of brutal German and Soviet repression and later a central geographical space in the Holocaust.

1939–40: the “Phoney War”

On the Western Front there was no immediate repeat of 1914. Britain deployed the British Expeditionary Force to France while both sides prepared.

At sea the war was already active. German U-boats attacked shipping and the Royal Navy enforced blockade and convoy systems. The Atlantic would remain strategically vital throughout the conflict.

April–June 1940: Scandinavia and the fall of France

Germany invaded Denmark and Norway in April. In May German forces attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

The decisive German operational move came through the Ardennes toward the Meuse, cutting behind Allied armies that had moved north into Belgium. British and Allied forces were evacuated from Dunkirk, but France continued fighting until an armistice in June.

The defeat transformed Britain’s position. The British Empire now faced Nazi Germany in western Europe without a major continental ally still in the field.

1940: the Battle of Britain and the invasion threat

For an invasion of Britain to be remotely feasible, Germany needed to neutralise British air power and protect any cross-Channel movement from the Royal Navy and RAF.

The Luftwaffe attacked shipping, airfields, radar and later cities. RAF Fighter Command survived and maintained an effective air defence. Operation Sea Lion was not launched.

The Battle of Britain became one of the war’s defining British stories, but survival also depended on the Navy, radar, ground control, aircraft production, pilots from Britain and many other countries, and the wider economic resources of the empire and Commonwealth.

The home front

Britain mobilised civilian society through rationing, civil defence, evacuation, industrial production and propaganda. The Blitz caused extensive civilian casualties and destruction.

The famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster was designed and mass-printed in 1939 but was barely displayed. Its modern fame is largely a post-war rediscovery. Log 039 separates the 1939 campaign from the modern myth →

Keep Calm and Carry On 1939 T-Shirt →

North Africa and the Mediterranean

Italy entered the war in June 1940. Fighting spread across North Africa, the Mediterranean, East Africa, Greece and the Balkans.

British and Commonwealth forces fought Italian armies in Egypt and Libya before Germany sent the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel. The campaign swung repeatedly across the desert.

At El Alamein in late 1942, the British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery defeated Axis forces. Allied landings in French North Africa during Operation Torch increased the pressure. Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered in May 1943.

22 June 1941: Operation Barbarossa

Germany invaded the Soviet Union despite the 1939 pact. The Eastern Front became the largest and deadliest land theatre of the war.

German forces made enormous advances and captured millions of Soviet personnel, many of whom were deliberately starved or otherwise killed in captivity. German operations were inseparable from racial policy: Einsatzgruppen mass shootings and the wider machinery of the Holocaust expanded behind the front.

The Soviet Union absorbed catastrophic losses but continued fighting. German forces failed to take Moscow in 1941.

The Holocaust

The Second World War cannot be treated solely as a sequence of military campaigns. Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews in a systematic genocide, alongside the persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, political opponents, gay men and other targeted groups.

The war created the conditions for radicalisation, occupation and mass killing, but the Holocaust was driven by Nazi ideology and policy. It must not be hidden inside a generic casualty total.

7 December 1941: Pearl Harbor and global war

Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor while launching offensives across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The United States entered the war. Germany declared war on the United States shortly afterward.

Japanese forces rapidly captured territory including Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. Britain suffered a major defeat at Singapore in February 1942.

1942–43: the strategic balance begins to change

Several campaigns shifted the balance during 1942–43.

• Midway: US naval forces inflicted a major carrier defeat on Japan in June 1942.
• El Alamein and Torch: Axis power in North Africa was progressively broken.
• Stalingrad: the German Sixth Army surrendered in early 1943 after one of the war’s most destructive battles.
• Atlantic: improved Allied escort, intelligence, radar, air coverage and anti-submarine methods reduced the U-boat threat.

No single battle “turned the war” alone. Together they show that Axis expansion had reached limits while Allied industrial and military power was increasing.

Prisoners of war and Stalag Luft III

Millions of service personnel became prisoners during the war under very different conditions. Western Allied aircrew held by Germany were covered by the Geneva Convention framework, though captivity remained harsh and dangerous.

Stalag Luft III near Sagan—now Żagań in Poland—became famous for the mass escape in March 1944. The camp and the escape are now deliberately separated into two Field Notes: Log 037 — the POW camp and captive system, followed by Log 038 — the Great Escape, the Fifty and the investigation.

1943: Sicily and Italy

Allied forces invaded Sicily in July 1943. Mussolini was removed from power, and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September. Germany occupied much of the country and continued fighting.

The Italian campaign became a difficult advance through mountainous terrain and prepared defensive lines. Major battles included Monte Cassino and Anzio. Rome fell in June 1944, shortly before D-Day.

1944: Operation Overlord and D-Day

The western Allies built the cross-Channel invasion through coalition planning, naval and air power, deception, intelligence and immense logistics. Log 032 — Operation Overlord: The Road to D-Day follows that planning system.

On 6 June, five principal landing beaches were used: Utah and Omaha for US forces, Gold and Sword primarily for British forces, and Juno for Canadian forces. Airborne forces operated on both flanks. Log 033 — Five Beaches Complete Field Guide →

Normandy Landings Map T-Shirt →

The Normandy campaign

D-Day established a foothold; it did not liberate France in one day. The Allies then fought for weeks through the bocage, around Caen and toward Saint-Lô.

Operation Cobra broke the US front open in late July. German forces were increasingly trapped as Allied armies advanced, culminating in the fighting around the Falaise pocket. Paris was liberated in August.

The Gallus Normandy sequence now follows the campaign from planning to specific ground actions: Pegasus Bridge, Merville Battery and the US airborne battle behind Utah.

1944–45: toward Germany

Allied armies advanced through France and Belgium. Operation Market Garden in September failed to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem.

Germany launched its last major western offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, creating the Battle of the Bulge. The offensive failed and consumed reserves Germany could not replace.

In the east, the Red Army drove through eastern Europe and toward Berlin. Soviet military success was accompanied by enormous destruction, displacement and political transformation across the territories it occupied.

1945: Germany collapses

Western Allied armies crossed the Rhine while Soviet forces approached Berlin. Hitler killed himself on 30 April.

German surrender was signed at Reims on 7 May and came into effect on 8 May, marked in Britain and much of the West as VE Day. A second ceremony was held in Berlin for the Soviet requirement, which helps explain the different date of commemoration in parts of eastern Europe.

Read Log 005 — VE Day: From Collapse to Surrender →

The war continued in Asia

Japan continued fighting after Germany’s defeat. Allied forces advanced through the Pacific and Burma while strategic bombing devastated Japanese cities.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. The Soviet Union also entered the war against Japan, attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria.

Japan announced acceptance of surrender terms on 15 August; formal surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

What victory cost

Military and civilian deaths ran into tens of millions. The Soviet Union and China suffered especially enormous losses. The Holocaust destroyed communities across Europe. Cities were ruined, populations displaced and empires weakened.

The war ended Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan as wartime regimes, but it also produced a new global order dominated by the United States and Soviet Union, accelerated decolonisation and left Europe divided by the emerging Cold War.

How the Gallus WW2 collection fits

• Political context: Log 030.
• Campaign spine: this guide.
• D-Day and Normandy: Logs 032–036, with linked commander biographies.
• Prisoners of war: Logs 037–038 plus Bushell and von Lindeiner biographies.
• Home front and propaganda: Log 039.
• End of the war in Europe and remembrance: Log 005.

The collection therefore links products to an editorial hierarchy rather than leaving individual designs as isolated historical references.

Sources and further reading

• Imperial War Museums — Second World War
• US Holocaust Memorial Museum — World War II
• National Army Museum — Second World War
• National WWII Museum — research articles
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission

This overview is global by design. Gallus products may concentrate on British and Allied subjects, but I do not treat Normandy, Britain or western Europe as if they were the whole war.