World War II

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What were the main war aims of the World War II participants?

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The main war aims during World War II varied by participant. The Allies, including Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union, primarily aimed to defend against Axis aggression and restore pre-war territorial boundaries. Britain sought to prevent a German invasion, the U.S. aimed to secure its interests, and the Soviet Union wanted to repel the Nazi invasion and establish a buffer zone. The Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, pursued territorial expansion to gain resources and establish dominance.

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The war aims were different for each of the participants. Even nations allied with each other had different reasons for fighting in the war.

Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union fought on the side of the Allied Powers. Britain's goal was to avoid invasion and to break the German stranglehold on Europe; it had been a longstanding British foreign policy not to allow any European country gain too much power.

The United States's goal was to avoid future encirclement by both Germany and Japan that would either affect national security or trade. The United States's initial strategy was to supply the Allies with money and supplies, but after Japan's attacks on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the United States became a full combatant in this war.

The Soviet Union's goal was also survival; out of the three major Allies, its fight against Germany was the most acute, as...

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it was invaded. The Soviet Union also desired to create its own sphere of influence after the war by creating puppet-states in Eastern Europe and weakening Germany in order to avoid a future war. While Britain and the United States talked of returning vanquished nations's leadership to the people who lived there, the Soviet Union saw the aftermath of this war as a way to claim some of the territory owned by the old Russian Empire.

Germany, Italy, and Japan fought on the Axis side. Germany sought to redress the losses of the Versailles Treaty and permanently subjugate France. It also sought to annex eastern territory in order to secure Germany industry and agriculture for the future. Hitler also spoke of repatriating German-speaking people back to the mother country; this was his stated goal in the annexation of Czechoslovakia, even though many ethnic groups who lived there did not want to be German citizens. As the war dragged on, Hitler used it as an excuse to wipe out Bolshevism and Jews, as he thought the two were interconnected and dangerous.

Italy sought to redress its losses from Versailles as well, as the nation was promised a great deal to join the Allied Powers in WWI but received little in the end. Mussolini promised to rebuild the old Roman Empire and to make Italy a prosperous nation through conquest.

Japan sought to become the major player in Asia by ousting Western imperialists from their colonial holdings. Japan also sought to use Chinese resources and labor in order to add to its own supplies. Japan sought to create an empire which would gain the respect of the Western powers, most notably the United States. Japan felt snubbed by the lack of a racial equality clause in Wilson's Fourteen Points and its treatment as a lesser power at the Washington Naval Conference. These slights allowed warlords in the Japanese government to take control over moderates and put the country on the road to war.

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Great Britain wanted to protect itself from a German invasion. The Germans had overrun Western Europe and it seemed only a matter of time before Britain followed suit. The United States, under President Roosevelt, was willing to assist Great Britain as a successful German invasion would’ve given Hitler a strategically vital foothold in Western Europe, allowing him to threaten the United States and its interests directly.

The Germans, like their Axis allies, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, wanted to use the war as an opportunity to expand territory. It had long been Hitler’s ambition to create a racial empire in Eastern Europe, mainly at the expense of the Soviet Union. Hitler believed that the German people needed lebensraum, or living space, in which to grow and expand, and that such land should be forcibly taken from what they regarded as racially inferior Slavs, who’d either be killed or turned into slaves for their new Nazi overlords.

The Soviet Union’s main war aim was to defeat the Nazi invasion, launched in 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. As the war progressed, however, and as it became clear that the Germans would lose, the Soviets saw an opportunity to use their presence in Eastern Europe as a means to create a defensive buffer against any future invasion, so the Soviet Union’s war aims were both defensive and offensive.

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Generally speaking, the war aims of the Axis countries were quite similar to one another and the war aims of all the Allied countries were similar to one another.  Therefore, I will discuss the Axis and Allies, respectively, as if each were one country.

The Axis countries wanted to gain more land.  All of the countries of the Axis felt that they deserved and needed more territory so that they could have more space to live in and so they could have more resources to use to enrich themselves.  They felt that they deserved empires like those held by the Allied powers.  It was generally for this reason that they started the war.

The Allied powers were really just trying to prevent the Axis from winning.  The Allies did not aim to take any territory for themselves.  Instead, they were simply fighting to defend themselves and to push the Axis powers back to where all they had was their home countries.

For the Axis, then, this was an aggressive war meant to take territory.  For the Allies, it was a defensive war meant to restore the status quo as it had been before the Axis countries started trying to expand in the 1930s.

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