Portugal during World War II
Upon the start of World War II in 1939, the Portuguese Government announced on 1 September that the 600-year-old Anglo-Portuguese Alliance remained intact, but that since the British did not seek Portuguese assistance, Portugal was free to remain neutral in the war and would do so. In an aide-mémoire of 5 September 1939, the British Government confirmed the understanding. As Hitler's occupation swept across Europe, neutral Portugal became one of the Continent's last escape routes. Portugal managed to remain neutral throughout the war despite extraordinary pressures from both sides, notably over the strategically located Azores islands and over the wolfram (tungsten) trade.
List of World War II films
Before the Second World War explicitly began with the Nazi German, then later Soviet (Russian) invasions of Poland in September 1939, Germany had already absorbed Austria in the Anschluß of 1938, then the Czechoslovakian lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Meanwhile, Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union were involved in the Spanish Civil War, (1936-1939), and Italy had conquered Ethiopia (1935-1936) and Albania (1939).
China had been fighting against Japan since the 1931 invasion of their northeastern province of Manchuria in a war that completely opened in 1937, called the Second Sino-Japanese War, until Japan attacked the U.S.A. at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. then the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies colonial possessions also in December 1941.