At the start of the war in 1939 , the alliance facing Germany and Italy consisted of Poland , France and Great Britain . Soon after, Canada , Australia , New Zealand and the Union of South Africa joined the coalition .

In 1940, after the German attack on France, Belgium , Luxembourg , the Netherlands , Denmark , Norway, and Greece joined the allies .

In 1941 Yugoslavia , the Soviet Union , the United States and China joined .

In 1942, after the declaration of 26 nations united in “the struggle for victory over Hitlerism,” several Latin American states, such as Mexico , Brazil and Colombia , joined the allies .

From then on, the 3 main allied countries were Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Its leaders, Winston Churchill , Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Iósif Stalin participated in the Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945) conferences , in which they designed the joint strategy that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers.

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Main members of the allied bloc

Poland

Since its independence in 1918, after the end of the First World War , Poland maintained bad relations with Germany, which demanded the return of territories ceded to the Poles by the Treaty of Versailles .

Fearing German aggression, the Polish government sought to strengthen its international position through the support of France and Great Britain.

The signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, on August 23, 1939, sealed the fate of Poland, since the agreement contained a secret clause that provided for the division of its territory.

The invasion of Poland on September 1 marked the beginning of World War II . In 36 days German troops occupied western Poland, while the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland.

During the occupation, the Polish government remained in exile and there were Polish units fighting in the Allied armies.

France

The French government, led by Édouard Daladier, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939 , in response to the German invasion of Poland.

After a frustrated French offensive on the Saar, there were no hostilities until May 1940, when the Germans launched a major offensive to the west. After 6 weeks of fighting, the allied forces were defeated and the Germans managed to conquer France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

After the signing of an armistice, Germany occupied northern, eastern, and western France, while Italy seized an area near the Alps. The south was left in the hands of the puppet government of Vichy France, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Meanwhile, General Charles de Gaulle led the government of the so-called Free France in exile.

After the Normandy landings in 1944, the Allies entered Paris and liberated all French territory from German occupation.

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Britain

Like France, the UK government declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, after which several Commonwealth states did the same. With the coming to power of Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940, the United Kingdom became the most tenacious enemy of Nazi Germany .

After the defeat of France, the British fought alone against the Germans in the waters of the Atlantic and the skies of England, against the Germans and Italians in North Africa, and against the Japanese in Southeast Asia.

Beginning in late 1941, the United States and the Soviet Union joined Great Britain in fighting the Axis powers, which they managed to defeat in 1945.

Soviet Union

After the partition of Poland, the Soviet Union attacked Finland and annexed Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania.

Between October and November 1940, German and Soviet leaders held talks to incorporate the Soviet Union into the Axis powers, but these negotiations failed due to the lack of agreements on the distribution of the respective areas of influence of each country. This led Hitler to break his non-aggression pact with the Soviets.

On June 22, 1941, Germany and Italy invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin proclaimed the start of the Great Patriotic War and his union with the Allied side.

Hitler’s plan to reach Moscow in a short time failed and since then the Germans had to fight the war on two simultaneous fronts, the eastern and the western. The fight against the Soviets bled the Germans and was one of the factors leading to their defeat in 1945.

USA

From 1940 , the United States supported the allies with the delivery of weapons, fuel and food. This collaboration and the common will to destroy “the Nazi tyranny” was embodied in the Atlantic Charter, signed on August 14, 1941. However, the United States only entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor , late of that year.

The participation of the United States was decisive for the Allies, because in addition to fighting the Japanese in the waters of the Pacific, its forces participated in the campaigns in North Africa and in the landings in Sicily (1943) and Normandy (1944).

These landings opened new combat fronts and weakened the Germans, who were unable to fight at the same time against the British and the Americans, in France and Italy, and against the Soviets in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The race between the Americans and the Soviets to see who would get to Berlin first was a preview of the stage that would come later: the Cold War .