Day had huge symbolic significance and commands the fascination of posterity, the fighting that followed was much bloodier: for instance, while D Company of the British Ox & Bucks Regiment triumphantly seized “Pegasus bridge” across the Caen Canal early on 6 June for the loss of only two killed and fourteen wounded, next day it suffered sixty c

The pattern of the Pacific war was set, wherein the critical naval actions were fought between rival fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the United States would soon employ these more effectively and in much larger numbers than any other nation in the w

More than 2 million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government.

Fighter Command lost a total of 544 men—about one in five of all British pilots who flew in the battle—while 801 Bomber Command airmen were killed and a further 200 taken prisoner; but the Luftwaffe lost a disastrous 2,698 highly skilled airmen.

Hitler intended the Second World War to start on 26 August, only three days after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed. On the twenty-fifth, however, while ordering mobilisation to continue, he postponed the invasion of Poland: he was shocked to discover both that Mussolini was unwilling immediately to fight beside him, and that diplomatic communication

Italy lost over 300,000 military dead, and around a quarter of a million civilians. More than 5 million Poles died, 110,000 in combat, most of the remainder in German concentration camps, though the Russians could also claim a substantial tally of Polish victims. France lost 567,000 people, including 267,000 civilians. Thirty thousand British troop

An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict.

Stalin probably intended to fight his menacing neighbour at some moment of his choosing. If Germany had become engaged in a protracted attritional struggle against the French and British on the Western Front in 1940, as Moscow hoped, the Russians might have fallen upon Hitler’s rear, in return for major territorial concessions from the Allies.

Between 22 June 1941 and 31 January 1942, Germany suffered almost a million casualties, more than a quarter of all the soldiers originally committed to Barbarossa.