There is a great deal of information on the web. In such matters as "what happened in World War II?" (in contrast to current events) you can hope it is mostly accurate. Studs Terkel wrote a book called "The Good War", about World War II. It qualified for that status because the US achieved complete victory over evil foes. I suppose that's one reason I focus on it rather than later conflicts. Militarily, it was also the last war between more or less symmetrical forces. Since then it's been almost entirely a large, rich nation against insurgents or a much weaker foe.
A few things I think I've learned -- at least strong possibilities to consider.
1. The German invasion of France in 1940 was rapidly successful. But commentators now suggest this was not a predestined outcome due to a fool-proof superior German strategy. Some commentators have said that the Germans got insanely lucky. Hitler, in launching the invasion, did not expect quick victory, but a war that would cost millions of German lives. It was not a planned Blitzkrieg invasion, they say, but rather the success of the invasion in the way it unfolded led the Germans to think such a strategy might work elsewhere too. One French problem that might have been hard to foresee, for instance, was that they had committed their troops in a forward position, but could not bring them back effectively when required because the roads were clogged with civilians fleeing the Germans.
2. The German invasion of the USSR did not come close to defeating them. While the Germans made large territorial gains in 1941, they did so at enormous cost to their own forces. The Soviet military (and the economy to support it) was much larger than the Germans had thought, and that was what ultimately made the difference.
3. There were several assassination attempts against Hitler, and he seemed quite lucky in dodging all of them. There was a speculation that if the Army had succeeded in killing him in the best known of these (the briefcase that got moved), the coup by the professional army would have quickly failed. Nazi forces would very soon have regained control of the country. Goring would be the supreme leader. However, it is possible that Goring would have understood the hopelessness of the German position much sooner than Hitler did, and for instance surrendered a year earlier, saving a great deal of destruction.
4. Now, to Japan. The story I had always heard was that Emperor Hirohito was merely a puppet, and all power lay with the cabinet. The latest is that this was normally true, but when it came time to decide whether to surrender around August 10th, 1945, the cabinet was evenly split, 3 to 3, and in that environment he did cast the deciding vote in favor of surrender. There was not some large peace faction. The Japanese decision was not determined primarily by the atomic bombs. It was far more influenced by the Soviet entry into the war and their potential to quickly invade and occupy Japan's holdings on the Asian mainland and the northern island of Hokkaido. Their defenses were geared to combat a US invasion from the south, not a Soviet invasion from the west.
5. Japan was not a force of pure evil leading up to 1941. Seeking to be a great power, they invaded China and increased their holdings there gradually. The French had previously done that in Indochina, the British in India and Malaysia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the US in the Philippines. While the Japanese occupation of China was brutal, so was the US occupation of the Philippines. I am still looking for references on how the atrocities compared across these various colonial conquests.
The impetus for war came with the Japanese occupation of Indochina. The French gave permission for this -- the Vichy government, a puppet state of Germany, which was Japan's ally. The US and other western powers didn't demanded that they withdraw, and the US immediately froze all Japanese assets in the US and imposed an oil embargo, cutting off 80% of Japan's oil supply and a great of its other trade. That was a huge disruption to Japan's economy. A US ultimatum demanded Japan's withdrawal from not just Indochina but from all of China. There was some evidence that the US was trying to goad the Japanese into war, so the US could enter the war to help Germany and also deal with Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor served that purpose quite nicely.
Pearl Harbor was a strategic miscalculation by a great power. The US economy was roughly five times the size of Japan's in 1941, and when the US responded with all-out war to that attack, their fate was sealed. But none of that really adds up to Japanese evil.
A grave moral question hovers over the extensive bombing of German and Japanese cities by the US and Britain. They knew they were killing large numbers of civilians with many of their attacks, even if a few military targets were included. If we're thinking about "evil", that US policy must be weighed against Japanese atrocities in China, for instance.
Along with information, another lesson of the internet age is that any of it might be false. I welcome corrections to any of what I have written.
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