World War II by country

• 1. Introduction

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  World War II by country is a subject that forces a reckoning with scale. The war drew in almost every nation on earth, and estimates of the dead range from 40 million to 90 million people, a span so wide it reflects the sheer difficulty of counting catastrophe. Most countries began as neutral observers. Few remained that way.

  Two great alliances faced each other. The Axis powers were anchored by Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the Kingdom of Italy. The Allied "Big Four" were the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. But arrayed around those poles were dozens of smaller nations, each making a calculation about survival, loyalty, trade, ideology, or opportunity.

  What drove a landlocked South American country to supply tin to Allied war industries while sending no soldiers abroad? What pushed a tiny Caribbean island navy to rescue more than 200 U-boat survivors from the sea? How did a Salvadoran diplomat, working with a Jewish-Hungarian businessman, generate false passports that saved up to 40,000 lives? The answers lie country by country, in choices made under extraordinary pressure.

• 2. The Neutral Calculation

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  Afghanistan's Prime Minister Mohammad Hashim Khan held his country out of the war entirely, a feat that required navigating competing pressures from every direction. In 1940, the Afghan legation in Berlin made a specific enquiry: if Germany won, would it cede the ethnic Pashtun lands between the Durand Line and the Indus River to Afghanistan? The king and his minister wanted that territory. Germany gave no useful answer, and after the Axis defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, whatever plans Amanullah Khan, the former king working as a reported Nazi agent in Berlin, had for regaining his throne with Axis help went cold and were never executed.

  Argentina carried a tradition of European neutrality that stretched back through the 19th century, defended by every major political party. Part of the logic was economic: Argentina was one of the world's leading exporters of foodstuffs and agricultural products, particularly to the United Kingdom. Even a government sympathetic to the Allies could not easily abandon a stance that protected its export markets. American pressure intensified after Pearl Harbor, and a 1943 military coup whose plotters were accused of Axis sympathies made relations worse. Argentina broke relations with the Axis on the 26th of January 1944 and declared war on the 27th of March 1945. More than 4,000 Argentine volunteers had already been fighting on the Allied side.

  Chile also declared neutrality at the outbreak of war, partly because of close trading ties with Germany. A Nazi-backed coup attempt in September 1938 had already turned much of the Chilean public against the German community within the country. After the ship Toltén was sunk by a Nazi submarine off the coast of New Jersey, Chile broke relations with Axis countries on the 20th of January 1943. Chileans reinforced naval presence around Easter Island, fearing Japanese territorial ambitions across Polynesia, and bolstered defenses at the harbors of Antofagasta, Coquimbo, Valparaíso, and Talcahuano. Chile became the last country in South America to declare war, doing so against Japan on the 13th of April 1945.

• 3. Occupied and Contested

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  Belgium declared neutrality in 1936 and hoped that would protect it. Germany launched its attack in May 1940, and Belgian forces held for 18 days in the Battle of Belgium before King Leopold III and the army surrendered on the 28th of May 1940. Around 25,000 Jews and Romani were deported during the Holocaust in Belgium, most passing through the Mechelen transit camp, and nearly all died in the Nazi death camps. Hundreds of thousands of Belgians were put to work in Germany under a forced labour programme. Belgian Congo's uranium mines supplied the material used in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Burma, separated from British India in 1937, was considered a backwater by British planners and left lightly defended. Japan began raiding in December 1941 and launched a full invasion in January 1942, holding most of the country by April. Many Burmese initially welcomed the Japanese as a path to expelling British rule. Japan had already trained the Thirty Comrades, who formed the core of the Burma Independence Army, and declared Burma independent as the State of Burma on the 1st of August 1943 under a puppet government led by Ba Maw. Disillusionment set in when it became clear the Japanese had no intention of granting real independence. Aung San and other nationalist leaders formed the Anti-Fascist Organisation in August 1944 and reached out to the British. Under Japanese occupation, between 170,000 and 250,000 civilians died.

  Denmark fell in hours. Germany invaded without a declaration of war on the 9th of April 1940 as part of Operation Weserübung. The Danish government remained in office in Copenhagen until the 29th of August 1943, when it resigned rather than accept further German demands. SS-general Werner Best then managed civil affairs under military occupation. On the 4th of May 1945, German forces in Denmark surrendered to the British, except on the island of Bornholm, where the local German commander refused to yield to the Soviets. Two towns were bombed before the garrison capitulated. Bornholm remained under Soviet control until 1946.

• 4. Africa and the Long Fronts

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  Anglo-Egyptian Sudan entered the war in 1939 and faced Italian forces in 1940 along its long border with Italian East Africa. Italian troops captured the railway junction at Kassala and raided as far north as Port Sudan. Units of the Sudan Defence Force were combined with the Indian 1st Horse to form Gazelle Force, which drove the Italians back out of Sudanese territory in January 1941. The SDF also contributed to the invasion of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and supported Free French and Long Range Desert Group operations along the northern Sudanese border with Libya.

  Ethiopia had been under Italian occupation since 1936, and Emperor Haile Selassie was in exile in England when the wider war began. The Arbegnoch resistance movement had been fighting Italian forces since Addis Ababa fell in May 1936, and a state of paranoia had taken hold among Italian troops as supply and communication lines were constantly harassed. Britain's declaration of war on Italy reinvigorated the Patriot movement. Haile Selassie was transported to Sudan to work alongside Major Orde Wingate, and the liberation campaign drew Ethiopian, Eritrean, British, Sudanese, Kenyan, Rhodesian, South African, Indian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Free French forces. On the 5th of May 1941, exactly five years after he had fled his capital, Haile Selassie was restored to his throne. That victory was, by the account of those who tracked such things, the first Allied victory of the Second World War.

  Algeria was under Vichy control after the Fall of France. Operation Torch on the 8th of November 1942 began the Allied offensive that swept through Morocco and Algeria and established the liberation of northern Africa. Algerian troops, both Muslim and European, served with the French Army throughout the war and distinguished themselves in the French Expeditionary Corps under General Juin during the Italian campaign of 1943 and in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France in 1944.

• 5. Small Nations, Large Stakes

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  Cuba's wartime story begins with a moment of infamy. In 1940, President Federico Laredo Brú denied entry to 900 Jewish refugees who arrived in Havana aboard the German ocean liner MS St. Louis. The United States and Canada also refused them, and the passengers returned to Europe, where many were eventually murdered in the Holocaust. Cuba then joined the war on the 8th of December 1941, declaring war on Japan, and followed three days later with declarations against Germany and Italy. The Cuban navy escorted hundreds of Allied ships through hostile Caribbean waters, flew thousands of hours on patrol and convoy duty, and pulled more than 200 survivors of German U-boat attacks from the sea. Six Cuban merchant ships were sunk in the process, at a cost of around eighty sailors' lives. On the 15th of May 1943, a squadron of Cuban submarine chasers sank a German submarine near Cayo Blanquizal.

  Costa Rica was the first country in the Americas to declare war on Japan, doing so on the 8th of December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, out of solidarity with the United States. Left-wing President Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia had a small army of only 500 men. Rather than deploy them, his administration seized the property of and interned citizens from Germany, Italy, and Spain, the last group viewed as sympathetic to Franco's fascism.

  Bhutan was under British suzerainty but maintained near-total isolation from the outside world during the reign of Jigme Wangchuck. When war broke out, the king sent the government of India a gift of 100,000 rupees as a gesture of friendship while staying formally outside the conflict. Bolivia declared war on Germany on the 7th of April 1943, immediately after which President Enrique Peñaranda was overthrown in a coup. The new ruler, Gualberto Villarroel, had fascist and anti-Semitic leanings, but foreign pressure kept him at peace. Bolivia contributed by supplying the Allies with tin from its mines, with no capacity to send troops or aircraft overseas.

• 6. Rescue and Resistance

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  José Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran army colonel serving as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva. Working with György Mandl, a Jewish-Hungarian businessman, Castellanos issued false documents of Salvadoran nationality to people of Jewish origin facing Nazi persecution. Together they helped save up to 40,000 Jews and Central Europeans. The judge José Gustavo Guerrero, a Salvadoran who had served as presiding judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague, was a key collaborator. When German forces tried to seize the Peace Palace on the 17th of May 1940, Guerrero, the only judge who had stayed, faced down a German general with the words: "The Court and its staff are inviolable. Only on my body can they enter the palace." Guerrero was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Castellanos consulted him when designing the false-documents operation, and Guerrero is credited with helping write the text of the identity papers used to save thousands of lives.

  In Belgium, Groupe G ran a sustained sabotage campaign against the railroad network while other Belgian Resistance units sheltered Jewish people from deportation and helped downed Allied airmen escape the country. The Belgian government had fled to London under Hubert Pierlot, and the Free Belgian Forces continued fighting under Victor van Strydonck de Burkel, eventually participating in the D-Day campaign, the Italian campaign, the landings on Walcheren Island, and the Battle of the Atlantic.

  In Slovakia, 75,000 Jews out of 80,000 in the country were deported to German death camps. The Slovak National Uprising began in August 1944 but was suppressed by German forces by late October. Partisans continued fighting in the mountains until the war's end, when the Red Army arrived in April 1945 and ousted the government of Jozef Tiso, restoring the Czechoslovak state.

• 7. The Pacific Rim Countries

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  Australia announced it was at war with Germany on the 3rd of September 1939, with Prime Minister Robert Menzies declaring that the British declaration legally bound Australia. More than one million Australians served during the war, out of a total population of around seven million. Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin in February 1942 and continued smaller raids through 1942-43. Australian militia troops fought the Kokoda Track campaign in mid-1942, and the New Guinea campaign occupied most of the Australian armed forces until 1945. Disease and starvation claimed more Japanese lives in New Guinea than combat did. Allied forces besieged enemy garrisons and cut them off from food and medical supplies. The campaign resulted in heavy Japanese losses.

  Canada declared war on Germany on the 10th of September 1939. Over the course of the war, 1.1 million Canadians served in the Army, Navy, and Air Force; more than 45,000 died and another 54,000 were wounded. The financial cost totalled $21,786,077,519.13 between the 1939 and 1950 fiscal years. By the end of the war, Canada held the world's fourth largest air force and third largest navy. The Canadian Merchant Navy completed more than 25,000 Atlantic crossings. One Canadian corps fought in Italy while another landed at Juno Beach on the 6th of June 1944 in Normandy. The 1st Canadian Army ended the war on German soil commanding five Canadian divisions plus allied formations.

  China had been fighting Japan intermittently since the 1931 Mukden incident, and the Marco Polo Bridge incident on the 7th of July 1937 brought the two countries to full-scale war. The Chinese Nationalist army grew from 2.6 million soldiers at the start of the war to 5.7 million by its end, excluding Communist soldiers. More than 1.5 million Japanese military personnel were tied down in China with casualties estimated between 1.1 and 1.9 million. The Chinese Nationalist army suffered some 3.2 million casualties, and 17 million civilians died. After the war, China gained one of the permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, though the Nationalist government was defeated by the Communists in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan.

• 8. The Caribbean Theater

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  The Caribbean became a critical strategic corridor that neither side could ignore. More than 50 percent of all supplies sent to Europe and Africa from the United States passed through Caribbean ports or Gulf of Mexico shipping lanes. One year after the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States Caribbean Defense Command had grown to 119,000 personnel, half of them stationed in Panama to protect the canal.

  Germany's Kriegsmarine recognized the opportunity. In 1942, German U-boats operating in the Caribbean sank 336 ships, at least half of which were oil tankers. The islands of Aruba and Curaçao, which held refineries processing Venezuelan petroleum, were placed under British protection and subjected to German attacks in Operation Neuland before being transferred to the United States in 1942. Meanwhile, Martinique and Guadeloupe came under Vichy French control. American and British pressure ensured that several French ships, including the aircraft carrier Béarn, remained interned at Martinique and out of German reach. Those islands, along with French Guiana, switched to Free France in 1943.

  Bahrain's Sheikh declared war on Germany on the 10th of September 1939. On the 19th of October 1940, four Italian planes bombed Bahrain in an attempt to destroy oil refineries supplying the Allies. The raid caused minimal damage but prompted the Allies to increase defensive measures around the island. Brazilian forces contributed directly to the Atlantic battle: when German submarine U-507 sank seven Brazilian merchant ships, President Getúlio Vargas declared war on Germany and Italy. Brazil later sent a complete infantry division of about 25,000 troops, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, to Italy in July 1944, where they fought through the breakdown of the Gothic Line and the final Allied offensive on that front.