Shots Heard Round the World

In the year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, separate regional wars in Europe and Asia became a world war that engulfed hundreds of millions of people in conflicts spanning the globe. The year witnessed the Axis alliance at the height of its power, as well as significant Allied victories that would pave the way for the liberation of captive peoples within three blood-drenched years. This was also the year when the Nazis operationalized the Final Solution, condemning millions to be murdered in death camps in Poland and in less structured ways elsewhere. Before 1942, the United States was an economic behemoth but militarily weak; by the end of the year, America had taken huge strides toward becoming a superpower in every sense of the term, with Ford Motor Company alone outproducing the entire nation of Italy. In 1942, Peter Fritzsche, professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a noted authority on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Third Reich, surveys the changes wrought by this formative year in World War II.

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