World War 2 timeline: the war in 30 moments, 1939 to 1945

The Second World War runs from Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 to Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945. It turns in three places: the Battle of Britain in 1940, the run from Midway to Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943, and the D-Day landings of June 1944.

The World War II coloring book follows the same road across 60+ scenes, from the road to war and the fall of France to the Eastern Front, the Pacific, D-Day and victory, with a caption giving the date and context on every page.

World War 2 began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland after years of rearmament and land grabs that Britain and France had tried to appease. Britain and France declared war two days later. On September 17 the Soviet Union, bound to Germany by a secret pact, invaded Poland from the east.

The road ran through Munich. In September 1938, Britain and France let Hitler take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in return for a promise of peace; six months later he took the rest of the country.

Poland fought for five weeks. Then came the Phoney War, months in which the Western Allies and Germany faced each other with almost no fighting in the West.

France fell in six weeks because German armored divisions went through the Ardennes forest, which the Allies thought too difficult for tanks, and cut the Allied armies in two. More than 338,000 Allied soldiers escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk, and France signed an armistice on June 22, 1940.

On May 10, the day the attack began, Winston Churchill became prime minister. By June 14 German troops marched down the Champs-Élysées.

Britain then fought alone. Through the summer, RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes fought the Luftwaffe over southern England in the Battle of Britain, and from September 7 bombers struck London night after night in the Blitz, as families slept in Underground stations.

The fall of France and the Battle of Britain are chapters of their own in the World War II coloring book.

In 1941 the war became a world war twice over. On June 22 more than three million Axis soldiers invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest front in history. On December 7 Japanese carriers struck Pearl Harbor, and within days the United States was at war with both Japan and Germany.

In the east, German armies reached the outskirts of Moscow before winter stopped them. Leningrad was encircled in September and held out for 872 days, while hundreds of thousands of its people starved.

Pearl Harbor sank or damaged eight battleships but missed the American carriers, which were at sea. On December 11 Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing American industry against him in Europe too.

The tide began to turn in the second half of 1942. At Midway in June, US dive bombers sank four Japanese carriers in a single battle. In August the Marines landed on Guadalcanal. In November the British won at El Alamein and the Allies landed in North Africa, while the Red Army prepared to encircle Stalingrad.

The year also brought the worst news. At the Wannsee Conference in January, Nazi officials coordinated the murder of Europe’s Jews, a genocide already under way that would kill six million people.

At Stalingrad, German and Soviet soldiers fought street by street from late August. In November the Red Army closed a ring around the German Sixth Army. The Pacific and the Eastern Front each have their own chapter in the coloring book.

In 1943 the Allies went on the attack for good. The German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2. The German offensive at Kursk in July, the largest tank battle in history, failed. The Allies landed in Sicily on July 10, and Italy’s armistice was announced on September 8.

After Kursk, the Red Army never again lost the initiative in the east. Germany fought the rest of the war in retreat there.

Italy changed sides, but German troops occupied the country and the fighting up the peninsula lasted until 1945. In the Atlantic, Allied escorts and long-range aircraft finally turned the battle against the U-boats in May.

D-Day opened the second front in the West that Stalin had demanded for years. On June 6, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops landed on five Normandy beaches, code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. By late August Paris was free, and Germany faced armies closing in from east and west at once.

Weeks after D-Day, the Soviet summer offensive destroyed a whole German army group in Belarus. In the Pacific, Leyte Gulf in October became the largest naval battle in history.

In December Hitler gambled on one last attack through the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge surprised the Americans but failed by January. In the World War II book, the D-Day chapter runs from the beaches to the liberation of Paris.

The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, a week after Soviet soldiers raised their flag over the Reichstag in Berlin and Hitler killed himself. The war in the Pacific went on until August, when atomic bombs struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union attacked Manchuria. Japan signed its surrender on September 2.

In January Soviet troops reached Auschwitz and found about seven thousand prisoners still alive. In February the Marines landed on Iwo Jima, where the flag-raising photograph was taken on Mount Suribachi.

The surrender ceremony took place aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. It is the last scene of the World War II coloring book, as it is the last line of this timeline.

Take one year a week for seven weeks, from 1939 to 1945. Read the moments for that year, color one or two scenes from the matching chapter, and read the caption aloud if you share it with someone. In two months you will know the shape of the war for good.

If you color with someone who lived through the war or served after it, a scene a week is also a conversation a week. Our gifts for veterans guide has more ideas in the same spirit.

Start one war earlier with our WW1 timeline, or carry the story into the jet age with fighter jet generations explained. For paper and printer settings, see how to print a coloring book PDF.

Thirty moments hold the shape of the Second World War. Sixty scenes let you live inside it, from the beaches of Dunkirk to the deck of the Missouri.

Buying for a military history fan? See our gifts for military history buffs, and pair the war with the one before it or the jets after it.