List of World War II References in Halo

World War II, or abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was an international human conflict that occurred on Earth between 1939 and 1945.

dHistory
World War II was the second global military conflict in human history. It was fought between the Axis powers and the Allies.

The war started in 1939 (this date is somewhat disputed - the Japanese had been fighting the Chinese sporadically since 1931, and an all-out war began in 1937) when Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, invaded Poland. Britain and France had allying pacts with Poland, and so both nations declared war on Nazi Germany. However, in 1940, during a disastrous retreat of the French 9th army from the Ardennes forest region, Army Group A broke into France, and the resulting blitzkrieg offensive quickly overtook the rest of the defenders. The Axis immediately headed Northward to surround Allied forces. The BEF (British expeditionary force) as well as the French army, retreated to a small pocket around Calais and Dunkirk. The slowly shrinking pocket was evacuated by a Royal Navy force of 'Little ships', and around 338,000 men were evacuated.

On June 22, 1941, the largest invasion force in military history, consisting of three German army Groups (South, Centre and North) numbering 3,900,000 men and 3,600 tanks, rolled over Soviet controlled territory and began an offensive toward Moscow in what would become the largest, bloodiest, and most brutal theater of war in all of human history up to that point. Although it outnumbered the Germans significantly, the Russian Red Army was ineptly led, poorly trained and using badly outdated equipment, and as a result suffered incredible losses and was soundly defeated in every major engagent. The Germans made such rapid territorial and strategic gains that many thought the war was effectively over as early as July 3. However, the Russians consistantly arrived in battle with fresh divisions that, according to Germans intelligence, should not even exist. By the winter of 1941, the Germans had reached the suburbs of Moscow but were unable to capture the city in light of their equipment freezing solid.

Meanwhile, in December 1941, a Japanese carrier task force began a huge aerial assault on the US Hawaiin naval base of Pearl Harbor. They sunk or seriously damaged 21 ships, including 8 battleships. Luckily, their main target, the US Pacific fleet, was away on an investigation and was thus spared destruction. The next day, the US Congress approved a declaration of war against the Japanese empire. Honoring the Tripartite act, Hitler then declared war on the US, bringing America into both theaters of the war. The Japanese at the same time began attacking British, French, and Dutch colonies, American territories, and Australia. The Americans suffered heavy losses in the early days of the war, but the tide slowly turned in America's favor in mid-1942 at battles such as Guadalcanal and Midway. The Japanese would never again regain the upper hand.

Late 1942 into early 1943 also saw the turn of the tide in Europe in what is now known as the German "double-disaster." First came the battle of El Aleiman, in which British General Bernard Law Montgomery broke a long string of defeats by launching a long-awaited counter-attack against German positions at El Aleiman, Egypt. Afrika Korps commander Erwin Rommel, heavily outnumbered and at the end of his supply line, turned tail and ran westward, where he ran into fresh American divisions. With no escape route, the majority of the Germans in north Africa surrendered. Only a fraction escaped into Sicily.

The second disaster was the complete obliteration of the German 6th and 4th Panzer armies at Stalingrad, the largest, bloodiest single battle in history. German General Frederick Paulus was tasked with capturing the city in order to open the road to the vast resources of the Caucasus region. Opposing him was Russian General Demitri Chuikov and the 62nd Infantry. Although their trademark "blitzkreig" tactics were rendered useless in the concentrated street fighting, the Germans successfully pushed into the city and at one point possessed over 90% of it. However, they were unable to push the remainder of the defenders out before winter and were, once again, stopped in their tracks by the harsh cold. During the brief lull in the fighting, the Russians executed Operation: Uranus, in which massive pincers, consisting of hundreds of thousands of fresh Russian troops and tanks, surged forward, smashed through the weakly held Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian divisions holding the German northern and southern flanks, and linked up behind German lines, effectively trapping Paulus inside. Without his supply line and with the failure of every one of Hitler's attempts to relieve his forces, Paulus' position in the city became increasingly desperate. In early February, 1943, Paulus became the first German Field Marshal to surrender. Of the 600,000 Germans who went into Stalingrad, only 5,000 would ever see Germany again. This became the first major Russian victory of the war and marked the beginning of the Red Army's long, brutal, 2-and-a-half year drive to Berlin.

Later in 1943, US and British troops began the attack on Italy, who folded quickly, dethroned dictator Benito Mussolini and actually sided with the Allies for a brief period before being easily disarmed by the vastly superior German army. The Germans then took up their defensive positions and would resist the Allied advance on the Peninsula until the end of the war.

In early June 1944, 156,000 American, British Commonwealth, Canadian, Free French, and Polish troops landed on 5 separate beaches (west to east: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword) and dropped into three separate landing zones in Normandy. Although the beachheads and much of the surrounding area fell within the first day, the Americans found themselves bogged down in the thick, labyrinthine hedgegrows of Normandy, and the British and Canadians were simultaneously unable to break through the German lines in and around the city of Caen to the north. However, despite the Germans' ability to hold the line for weeks, the incredible weight of the Allied numbers, might, technology, and complete air supremacy began to take its toll. By mid-July, the German position, suffering both from unstoppable Allied arial and ground offensives and horrifically inept leadership in Berlin, collapsed, giving the Allies a free shot across France, through Paris, and all the way to the Seigfried line which bordered Germany itself. Less than a month later, the Soviets dealt the Germans an even more crippling defeat in Belorussia when virtually all of the German Army Group Centre was obliterated during Operation Bagration, sealing the German's fate in the east. Although the war would continue for almost another year, the back of the once-mighty Wehrmacht had been broken.

In the Pacific, where American forces were 'island hopping' their way to Japan, they had successfully captured the Philippines, as well as New Guinea, Rabaul, the Solomon Islands, the Marianas, and were moving to attack Iwo Jima. The British had also began a large offensive in Burma, and were pushing the Japanese back into China.

Winter of 1944 saw Hitler's last great offensive, in which hundreds of thousands of German troops slammed into American lines in the Ardennes forest and began a massive thrust towards Antwerp in an attempt to cut the Allied position in half. The attack succeeded in achieving surprise but was ultimately too weak to accomplish its goal and it took less than two months for the Americans to push them back. After the battle, the western Allies surged eastward, smashing aside all resistance and laying waste to the German countryside. March of 1945 saw the capture of the mighty Rhine River as well as the fall of the Ruhr, which effectively ended German industrial capabilites as well as all organized resistance in the West. Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower decided agaisnt a march to Berlin, saying it would be foolish to waste so many men on a "prestige objective," especially since the city had been previously promised to the Russians. Instead, the western Allies halted their march on the western bank of the Elbe River to await the final Russian assault.

By April 1945, some 2.5 million Russian troops had captured the Oder and were marching on Berlin. Opposing them were the weak fragments of German Army Group Vistula, a shattered, disorganized shell of a defensive force that was simply a fancy name for a messy pile of exhausted units and tank armies. The initial stages of the battle saw heavy fighting at the Seelow Heights, where 1,000,000 Russian troops under Gregory Zhukov's 1st Belorussian front were held up for 3 days by German General Busse's 9th army, a force of only 100,000 men. Enraged with Zhukov's lack of progress, Stalin ordered 1st Ukrainian front commander Ivan Konev to send some of his tank reserves to dislodge the German defenders. This opening phase of the battle was finished as the shattered remains of Busse's 9th army fell back to the south of Berlin and into the Halbe forest, allowing Zhukov's men to approach and bombard Berlin itself. Meanwhile, the offensives of both Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian front in the north and Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian front in the south were going well as they surged westward and completed the final stages of the encirclement by linking up with one another to the west of Berlin. The German position was growing more and more desperate. Isolated in his fuhrerbunker, HItler ordered the remnants of Busse's 9th army to link up with elements of Walter Wenck's 12th army and assault the Russian lines from the southwest-rear, but after the limited link-up, the two armies simply headed west to surrender to the Americans. After hearing the news that relief would not be coming, Hitler flew into a tearful rage and admitted for the first time that the war was lost. He then gave the remainder of his staff permission to leave the city if they could manage it. He, however, would stay in Berlin until the end, and then kill himself to avoid the humiliation of inevitable defeat. On April 30, a mere 36 hours after marrying his longtime mistress Eva Braun, Hitler appointed Admiral Karl Donitz to be his successor (Himmler and Goering had fallen from his favor after both had attempted to organize a surrender with the West) and then killed himself. Russian troops finalized their capture of the city on May 2. Even after this, however, Chancellor Donitz continued the war to give the remaining German troops time to escape westward to surrender to the Americans and the British, with whom they had a much better chance of survival and humane treatment than they would have with the Russians. Finally, on May 7, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending the war in Europe (the ceremony was repeated the following day fo appease the Soviets, who were not present at the first signing).

In the Pacific, the Americans had managed to take control of Iwo Jima, at a heavy cost. It was one of the few instances where American casualties exceeded the Japanese, 22,000 men were killed or wounded. The Americans would then attack Okinawa, the last island needed for an invasion of Japan. The Japanese Navy, now reduced to a tiny force, launched terrifying but ultimately unsuccessful kamikaze suicide aircraft at the US invasion fleet. The island did not fall for months, but when it did, it gave US forces an exellent launching point for the dreaded upcoming invasion of the home islands.

US generals knew that an invasion of Japan would be a costly enterprise. The defenders would attack with such fanaticism that US casualties were expected to exceed 1,000,000 men and Japanese casualties were expected to be in the tens of millions, with the nation's infrastructure almost totally destroyed. The planned invasion would land millions of Allied soldiers onto the Japanese islands, which would have made it the largest ever attempted naval invasion, dwarfing Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, but it never happened. Two B-29 Superfortresses took off from their bases in the Marianas and dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima on August 6 and three days later on Nagasaki. Simultaneously, the Red Army launched a massive invasion of northern Manchuria, obliterating several large Japanese armies in the span of a few hours. Several days later, the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the battleship, USS ''Missouri. ''

The war formally ended on September 2, 1945, six years and one day after war was declared. By the end, 78,000,000 people had died, most of them civilians.

The United Nations
As a result of the Allied victory (the United States of America, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and others) over the Axis Nations (Nazi Germany, Italy, Japan and others), the United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, 1945, marking the replacement of the defunct League of Nations and the creation of the United Nations. The United Nations Organization was formed with a goal of international peacekeeping by means of collective security.

Types of Ammunition still in use in the Human-Covenant War

 * .30 caliber (7.62x51mm) primarily used for the MA5 Series and the Confetti Maker. This ammunition is also used with the AIE-486H Heavy Machine Gun, M247 General Purpose Machine Gun, and the M247H Heavy Machine Gun.
 * 12.7x99mm. Used in the M41 LAAG
 * 14.5x114mm (SRS99 series)
 * 90mm gun (M808B Main Battle Tank)

Miscellaneous

 * The paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day and during Operation Market Garden inspired the UNSC's ODSTs, although the concept had to be rethought for Zero-G.
 * It may be possible that the concept for the Brute Spike Grenade was inspired by a German hand grenade known as the "the Potato Masher" or more specifically the "Stielhandgranate".

References in Halo

 * Colonel Herzog apparently researched World War II extensively.
 * The war has been analyzed in comparison to the Human-Covenant war.
 * The Maginot Sphere mentioned by the Forerunner in the Terminals is inspired by the Maginot Line, the French defensive fortifications along the Franco-German border stretching from the Ardennes to the Franco-Swiss border before the war.
 * John Forge's family has had a military tradition dating back to this time.
 * In Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversarys first terminal, 343 Guilty Spark found an image of the Normandy invasion.

List of appearances

 * Halo Legends
 * Origins

Related Pages

 * United Nations
 * UN Charter