Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria, and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler’s new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history.
Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up to more than a decade of Japanese aggression.
Fascist Italy, by the outbreak of World War II in Europe, had already been remaking the map of the Mediterranean region in imitation of ancient Rome. Strongman Benito Mussolini had annexed what is now Ethiopia, Albania, and most of Libya. He promised Italians that the Mediterranean would soon be mare nostrum, “our sea.”