The World Wars

The World Wars is this atlas's umbrella entity for the two twentieth-century world wars, held under the same convention this atlas uses for the Crusades: a collective heading over primary, distinct member conflicts, not a single phased war in its own right. The First World War (1914 to 1918) has its own dedicated, day-precision treatment at World War I; a matching dedicated entity for the Second World War (1939 to 1945) is owed as successor content and is not yet minted on this atlas. Mainstream historiography treats the two wars as distinct: they were separated by two decades of formal peace, fought under different alliance systems, and driven by different immediate causes, the July Crisis of 1914 against Nazi Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland. A real minority historiographic thesis reads 1914 to 1945 as one continuous conflict, tracing to Winston Churchill's January 1945 description of "one story of a 30 years war" and Charles de Gaulle's 1946 "second Thirty Years War" speech, and developed at greatest length in Enzo Traverso's Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (2017), which reads the period as a single sequence in which interstate war gave way to a war of annihilation. That reading is carried on this page as attributed commentary, not as this atlas's own account of the two wars: historians including Jay Winter reject it, pointing to the Bolshevik Revolution's new ideological conflicts, the unprecedented scale of Nazi extermination policy, and the radical change in military technology between the two wars as differences a single continuous-war framing cannot absorb. Together the two wars killed tens of millions of people, discredited the European colonial empires, elevated the United States and the Soviet Union to superpower status, and led directly to the founding of the United Nations and the beginning of the Cold War.