Almost six years of bloodshed and brutality tore through Europe, North Africa, Asia and the Pacific, leaving an estimated 45 million people dead - though some estimates put the figures as high as 60 million.

The Second World War broke out early on Friday September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland.

German chancellor Adolf Hitler gives the Nazi salute during the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics 01 August 1936. HO / AFP

Adolf Hitler's invasion of Germany's eastern neighbour followed soon after a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.

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The German attack on Poland saw a 'Blitzkrieg' (Lightning war) attack - saturation bombing from the air combined with ground attack by fast motorised infantry and armoured divisions, destroying vast swathes of the country.

Poland was defeated in barely a month.

After Germany failed to respond to ultimatums to withdraw from Poland, Britain and France declared war.

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On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the East, partitioning the country under a secret clause in the non-aggression pact.

On September 27, after four weeks of bombing, the Polish capital Warsaw surrendered leaving more than 60,000 Polish soldiers dead and an estimated 25,000 civilians.

By the end of the war, six million Poles had been killed.

Between May 30 - June 1, 1940, Dunkirk, a small French sea-port became the focal point of the conflict, after the surrender of the Belgian army on May 28, which until then was holding vital positions to the north of Dunkirk.

Cut off from the main French army, the only alternative to surrender was evacuation by sea.

Some 330,000 exhausted allied troops were evacuated from a seemingly impossible position by an armada of assorted craft, ranging from pleasure steamers to fishing boats, tiny yachts to royal naval destroyers.

Described as a "miracle of deliverance" by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the 1940 evacuation of British troops from the shores of France is considered one of several key events which determined the outcome of World War Two.

In September 1940, the German Luftwaffe employed their Blitzkrieg method once more, bombing London ceaselessly for 57 days and nights in what became known in Britain as the Blitz.

During its most devastating period between September 1940 and May 1941, during which time 50,000 bombs were dropped, at least 43,000 people were killed.

Germany then turned their attention to the eastern front. At dawn on June 22,1941 Germany invaded Russia without warning in an operation known as 'Barbarossa'.

After four years of bitter warfare, the Soviet Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht back from the gates of Moscow to the gates of Berlin - an achievement which cost Russia an estimated 13 million lives.

The conflict took hold in North Africa with Libya's Tobruk becoming a key battleground.

The Siege of Tobruk from April to November 1941, lasted 240 days, killing thousands of Libyans as well as over 3,000 soldiers mostly from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

On December 7, 1941 the war in Europe collided with the conflict in the far east as Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S.'s Pearl Harbour.

The raid crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet; only one of 96 vessels at the Pearl Harbour base escaped serious damage. 2,300 Americans died and 1,200 injured.

Immediately, the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, East Indies, the British dominions and several Latin American nations entered the war against Japan.

Days later, Germany and Italy, together with their satellite nations allied themselves with Japan.

In the far east Singapore suffered a brutal Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and Guadalcanal, located in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, was the scene of six months of severe fighting between Japanese and United States (U.S.) troops, claiming the lives of some 38,000 soldiers.

Five weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, a Japanese land column, on January 15, 1942, moving from Thailand, struck across the frontier into southern Myanmar.

The British forces fought back but they were unable to cope with the superior jungle tactics of the Japanese. Myanmar fell to the Japanese at the end of May.

A harsh snowy winter in Europe brought the German offensive to a halt, giving the Russians a chance to deliver their first counter-strike.

The Battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, was one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare.

About 2 million people were killed in what ended as a decisive victory for the Red Army.

For Russia and Germany, Stalin's city on the Volga was the turning point of the war in the east.

As the German sixth army bled to death on the Volga, the Russians began the long trek westwards which was to end in Berlin.

In April 1943, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a few hundred under-armed Jewish youngsters picked an uneven fight with the Nazi occupiers in a month-long insurrection of Jewish fighters in the city's ghetto, known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Nearly half a million Jews from the ghetto had already been transported to the Nazi's Treblinka death camp.

Around 6,000 of the civilian Jewish population of the ghetto, which the Germans carved out of the occupied Warsaw, died in the fighting and about 50,000 were killed after it ended.

The emptied ghetto was then burned to the ground.

In 1944 Warsaw again turned on its occupiers. The Warsaw Uprising from August 1, 1944 until October 2, 1944 saw the Polish underground Home Army launch a 63 day long attack against the Nazi occupiers.

Initially the Poles took control of most of central Warsaw but were overwhelmed when their pleas to the Soviet army for help went ignored. It is estimated that over 16,000 resistance fighters died as well as over 150,000 civilians.

After the Nazis squashed the rebellion, they systematically razed the Polish capital to the ground, destroying over 85% of the city.

On June 4, 1944, the Allied forces liberated Rome from the Germans, who had occupied the Italian capital since the fall of wartime fascist dictator Benito Mussolini the year before.

The advance from Sicily that started on July 11, 1943, claimed the lives of 40,000.

The triumphant announcement that Rome had finally fallen was soon overshadowed by news of the D-Day landings two days later.

Approximately 160,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel in the initial D-Day assault on June 6, 1944, paving the way for an Allied onslaught which would bring Adolf Hitler's German empire to its knees less than 12 months later.

The initial assault resulted in approximately 6,000 U.S. and 4,300 British and Canadian casualties. German casualties are unknown but are estimated at between 4,000 and 9,000.

The D-Day assault eventually won back control of France from German forces after four years of occupation and was a decisive stage in the liberation of Europe in World War Two.

The liberation of Paris which followed in August 1944, after it had fallen to the German army in June 1940, was a dramatic victory for the city's people, the resistance movement and General Charles de Gaulle.

On February 4 1945, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt the American President, met in the Crimean town of Yalta to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany.

They agreed they would only accept unconditional surrender.

1945 saw a series of bloody battles from the Pacific through to Europe.

Untouched by bombing just months before the end of World War Two, the German city of Dresden was attacked by two waves of British bombers, three hours apart, on the night of February 13, 1945.

The official death toll is said to be at around 25,000.

But many survivors believe the number was higher as bodies were reduced to ashes in the onslaught.

On April 30 1945, as the Soviet troops advanced on Berlin, Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun, retired to their bunker beneath the Chancellery.

Both committed suicide and charred remains, believed to be theirs, were found in a nearby bomb crater.

It was the end of the Third Reich which Hitler claimed would last 1,000 years.

The Nazi's genocide left more than six million dead with the Jews of Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union being the most numerous among the victims.

Throughout Europe, peace was rejoiced, with citizens swarming into the streets to celebrate.

On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe came to an end - a conflict which in little more than five years had brought to the continent death and destruction unparalleled in its history.

The conflict in the Pacific came to dramatic end in August 1945.

During the conflict, on the island of Iwo Jima, more than 30,000 U.S. Marines and 21,000 Japanese were locked in battle - the U.S. emerged victorious and the Japanese suffered crippling losses.

The Japanese resistance became fanatically courageous - suicide pilots, the kami-kaze, sped their planes into Allied targets.

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In the closing days of World War Two, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, carrying 12 crew members, dropped the atomic bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy", on Hiroshima.

The death toll from the blast on August 6, 1945 by the end of the year was estimated at about 140,000, out of the total of 350,000 who lived there at the time.

Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, the United States dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" on Nagasaki.

Crippled by the nuclear attacks, Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, bringing World War Two to an end worldwide.

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On September 2, 1945, a Japanese delegation headed by Foreign Minister Shigemitsu boarded the USS battleship, "Missouri" to sign the surrender document.

As western Europe celebrated victory, much of eastern and central Europe found itself under the Soviet sphere of influence, leading to the establishment of Communist-led regimes, which would last until the turn of the century.

Land borders were redrawn - Germany was de facto divided into two independent states; The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) falling under the influence of the West and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) under Soviet influence.

It was the end of World War Two, but the beginning of a new era in world politics.