Important Battles of World War II
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage

As this is a general American history web site designed to assist in the teaching of survey courses in American history at the high school and undergraduate college level, it is not our intention to provide detailed discussions of the battles listed below. Instead we offer the basic information about the battles and their significance for the overall progress of World War II for the United States and its allies. Links to sites offering more detail are included with the discussion of each battle described.

In addition, we should point out that many important if not crucial battles were fought all over the world before the Americans entered the war on December 8, 1941, or in which Americans were not involved. A few examples would include:

• The Battle of Britain, the air war over the English Channel and the British Isles, about which Churchill said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
• The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942-43, in which the Germans lost an army of 600,000—“The Forsaken Army”—at least partially because of Hitler's refusal to let his generals pull back.
• The Battle of the Atlantic, the Royal Navy against German submarines and surface vessels, of which the sinking of the Bismarck was a high point.
• The Battle of France, 1940, when the Germans went around the Maginot line and defeated France in a matter of weeks.
• The British Army with her Australian and Indian divisions in South and Southeast Asia, and the fighting in China that went on until 1945.

The Pacific Theater

Map of the Pacific Theater

Pearl Harbor

The Day of Infamy

Coral Sea and Midway

The great turning points in the Pacific

Guadalcanal

First ground offensive action by the U.S. in World War II

The Central Pacific Drive: Nimitz and Halsey

• Solomons (Bougainville)
• Gilberts (Makin and Tarawa)
• Marshalls (Kwajalein)
• Marianas (Saipan, Tinian Guam and Peleliu)

The Southwest Pacific drive: MacArthur

The Drive though New Guinea to the Philippines
MacArthur returns in triumph

Philippine Sea

The “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” the battle that reduced the Imperial Japanese Navy to a shell of its former powerful self.

Iwo Jima, February 1945

Scene of the famous flag raising on Mount Suribachi, where “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Okinawa

The Last Stepping Stone to Japan proper

The European Theater

European theater overview map

North Africa

First test of the Americans in the European Theater

Sicily & Italy

Attacking the “soft underbelly” of the Axis

Normandy: D-Day, June 6. 1944

Operation Overlord is the beginning of the end for Hitler's Germany.

The Battle of the Bulge