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Pearl Harbor
The fighting lasted only 90 minutes and was very one-sided, but this was undoubtedly a major battle – six aircraft carriers with more than 400 planes attacked the main American naval base. Crippling the enemy battleship fleet allowed Japan to overrun south-east Asia without interference. But the Day of Infamy threw a cautious American public whole-heartedly behind war with Japan and Germany although early preoccupation with Pacific defence delayed the sending of American forces to Europe. -
Midway
This one really could have gone either way, although the outcome was not entirely ‘miraculous’. The Midway victory allowed the Americans to take the strategic initiative in the South Pacific. It would be a year and a half before an American offensive directly across the Central Pacific began, but the Japanese had not had time to fortify their island defence line. -
Operation ‘Torch’
The Allied landing in Morocco were an easy battle Vichy French troops were the original opponent, and they quickly changed sides. But ‘Torch’ was the first successful strategic offensive, and American troops crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Victory in Tunisia, the invasion of Sicily and the Italian surrender followed. But ‘Torch’ and the Mediterranean strategy, urged by the British and accepted by Roosevelt, meant ultimately that there would be no cross Channel landing in 1943. -
Stalingrad
The three-month battle is often seen to be the war’s turning point. After Stalingrad the Wehrmacht would make no further advances in the USSR. The mid-November 1942 mobile operation to cut off the city demonstrated for the first time the skill of the rebuilt Red Army. The capitulation of the Sixth Army in the Stalingrad pocket on 31 January was the first major German surrender. Both the German leadership and the population of occupied Europe realised the significance. -
Briansk-Orel Belgorod-Kharkov
The Battle of Kursk (July 1943) is commonly regarded as one of the three great Soviet victories, and the first achieved in the summer (unlike Moscow and Stalingrad).
Hitler’s offensive against the Kursk salient (Operation ‘Citadel’) was indeed halted, but it had had only limited objectives, and the Soviets suffered higher losses. More significant were the counter-offensives that followed ‘Citadel’: north of Kursk (Briansk/Orel – Operation ‘Kutuzov’) -
Normandy
To many people in the UK, D-Day (6 June) and the following six weeks of fighting in Normandy is the most obvious ‘significant battle’: it allowed the rapid liberation of western Europe.
After D-Day Hitler chose to mount a stubborn defence of the Normandy region, and when the main American breakout came, in late July, the burned-out defending forces had no option but to beat a rapid retreat to the German border.
