World War II
This article deals with World War II as it relates to NationStates. For more general information, please see the Wikipedia article on the subject.
World War II is arguably the period of history most distorted by fractal reality. Some nations did not experience the war as happening at all. Others, experienced the war in a manner very similar to the conventional account, but involving additional nations and minor variations. To others, the war happened before their nation came to exist or in a different reality. Some nations experienced the war in a radically different way. 1 Infinite Loop, for example, experienced a version of World War II where aliens known as the Race invaded during the hostilities. Instead of a war between human powers, the war became one in which all the human nations together struggled against these reptilian aliens.
For most nations which experienced the war at all, it was one of the largest wars in history, pitting the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Marlund, and Adoki) against the Allies (Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, Wakesburg and Syskeyia). Pantocratoria, neutral in the war proper, used the chaos surrounding the war to launch a brief attack against Turkey. While Pantocratoria was victorious in the brief fighting, they gained no territory from the expedition. The Resurgent Dream, while neutral, went to great lengths to establish itself as a refuge for those fleeing the war and the ethnic, religious, and political persecution which accompanied it in many nations, especially with regard to the systematic murder of the Jews carried out by Germany. Menelmacar was neutral in this conflict but was largely prompted to come out of isolation by the war. Among the Menelmacari, realization of the extent of the destruction wrought by the war was coupled with a belief that Menelmacar could have saved millions of lives by becoming involved.
World War II marked the first generally accepted use of tactics which led to wide-spread civilian casualties. While these had not been unknown before, the bombing tactics of the world war, especially the use of the atomic bomb, led to the widespread, although not total, abandonment of the notion that non-combatant deaths were absolutely unacceptable in war. Most Western powers still try to minimize civilian casualties as much as possible, while accepting that some cxivilian deaths are inevitable in any efficient battle plan.
