WORLD WAR II "One day during World War II, there occurred a wholly unexpected turning point in my thinking about life and the world. I was a Marine Corps officer stationed in Italy, 32 years old. There was a saying in the war-time military that life was 'Hurry up and wait.'" At times you had to act in a desperate hurry, and other times you just had to wait. In one of the moments of waiting, I was walking along a hillside when it occurred to me that my life had been turned upside down twice by events in the outside world -- the Great Depression and World War II -- yet I had never studied the economic, political, and social forces that produced such events. As a psychologist, I had confined myself to individual behavior, leaving it to others to worry about the big world. I had concluded that I hadn't been very smart in that neglect, and I wrote home for a couple of books, beginning a course of study that broadened and deepened over the years. In a sense, that day laid out an agenda that changed my life." John Gardner, Journals On December 7, 1941, Japanese airplanes bombed American ships berthed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, prompting the United States to enter World War II. The war was one of the bloodiest and largest in human history, entailing the full mobilization of American society to support battles from the islands of the Pacific to the forests of Europe and the deserts of North Africa. More than 60 million people were killed, including tens of millions of civilians, and more than 405,000 Americans lost their lives in battle. The bombing of Pearl Harbor directly led the United States into the war, but its seeds were planted years before. Fascist dictators had taken power in Italy (Benito Mussolini in 1922) and Germany (Adolf Hitler in 1933), and Japan began to expand its reach when it invaded China in 1937. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in return. Over the next two years, Germany would invade France, begin bombing Britain, and break its alliance with Russia, invading that country as well. The United States aided its ally, Great Britain, through the Lend-Lease Act which provided them with naval ships, and once America entered the war, its troops fought alongside its allies all over the world. When John Gardner entered the Marine Corps in early 1943, the Allied war effort was not going well. Japanese forces had taken the Philippines, while the German army continued its march across the Soviet Union and North Africa. But the next year, the tide began to turn. The Allies beat back the Japanese navy at the Battle of Midway, while the Germans were stopped at Stalingrad and routed in North Africa by Generals George S. Patton of the United States and Bernard Montgomery of Great Britain. From this southern flank, the Allies invaded Italy, landing on Sicily in July of 1943. John Gardner would see action during the Italian campaign. But the Italian invasion was just a precursor to the largest amphibious invasion in history, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied forces suffered heavy losses, but were able to secure the beachhead and begin the march across Europe from the West, while their Russian allies headed to Germany from the East. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered, and the European war was over. After two bloody battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, islands crucial for an invasion of Japan, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Five days later, Japan surrendered to the Pacific commander, General Douglas McArthur. When World War II ended, the world saw unimagined devastation. As Allied troops rolled across Europe, they liberated German concentration camps, seeing for the first time the scale of the Holocaust -- the systematic plan to kill all of Europe's Jews as well as gypsies and mentally handicaped people. Those that survived these horrors joined the millions of people left homeless by the war. The question of refugees was just one of the many issues confronting the victorious Allies. What should they do with the defeated countries? How could they prevent wars like this in the future? How would their own countries adopt to peacetime? They had a whole world to put back together and reshape. It was a time of immense challenge -- and immense opportunity.