Second World War

The Battle of Britain was a major air campaign, fought over the skies of southern England from 10 July to 31 October 1940.

From September 1940, Hitler instructed the Luftwaffe to begin bombing British cities. Over next 9 months, over 43,500 civilians were killed in the Blitz.

When Britain went to war on 3 September 1939 there was none of the 'flag-waving patriotism' of August 1914. The British people were now resigned to the fact that Hitler had to be stopped by force. 

In May 1940, Germany unleashed Blitzkrieg on Western Europe when it invaded France and the Low Countries.

In May 1940, the Allies teetered on the edge of catastrophe. The German invasion of France had pushed the British Expeditionary Force, with French and Belgian troops, back to the French port of Dunkirk - destruction awaited if a rescue operation was not mounted from across the Channel. 

Over the course of the war, the strategic bombing campaign developed from a limited force into a weapon of immense destructive power, with hundreds of cities subjected to air attack alongside military targets. How had the bombing campaign escalated? Was strategic bombing effective? Did it actually weaken Germany’s war industries and break the German people’s morale? 

On 6 June 1944, Allied forces launched Operation Overlord and began the fight to liberate north-west Europe from German occupation. 

Operation Market Garden is one of the most controversial episodes of the Second World War, featuring daring assaults, strategic blunders and heroic defences. A battle which would come so close to success, before falling at the final hurdle. In this episode of IWM Stories, curator Sean Rehling examines why Operation Market Garden failed.

On 16 December 1944 the Germans launched a massive attack on Allied forces in the area around the Ardennes forest in Belgium and Luxembourg during the Second World War. They achieved complete surprise and pushed westwards through the middle of the American line, creating the 'bulge' that gave the battle its name. 

In 1941, Britain was an imperial power with colonies across south and south-east Asia. In December 1941, Japan attacked British territories in Hong Kong, Malaya (now Malaysia), Singapore and Burma (now also known as Myanmar).

On the 15th of February 1942, Lt General Arthur Percival signed the largest surrender in British history at Singapore. The city was supposed to be a fortress, but his force of 85,000 men had been defeated by just 35,000 Japanese troops. So how did the Japanese defeat a numerically superior force? Why wasn’t Singapore an impregnable fortress? And could the British have held out?

In December 1941 Japan, already at war with China, attacked British, Dutch and American territories in Asia and the Pacific. By June 1942, Japanese conquests encompassed a vast area of south-east Asia and the western Pacific. 

On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise air attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Japanese forces also overran Allied possessions in south-east Asia and The Philippines. Japan hoped for a short war, seeking to quickly weaken US naval strength and capture strategically vital oil supplies. But what happened next?

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought an end to the Second World War, but at a terrible cost to the Japanese civilian population, and signalling the dawn of the nuclear age. What had led to the fateful decision to deploy these new weapons of mass destruction?

Remember the events of 1945 and explore the personal experiences of those who witnessed the end of the Second World War.