Other events, such as the Cold War, were more important because of events they may have prevented, rather than because of their independent significance in and of themselves. World War I was the first mechanized war in which methods of human destruction

accounted for tens of thousands of battlefield casualties in a single engagement, ultimately accounting for more than 10 million dead after four years of war, in addition to untold human suffering among displaced civilians.4 However, as dramatic as it was, World War I never really threatened to change the world beyond the European continent, and despite wartime deprivation among civilians and documented atrocities committed by combatants against civilians (on both sides), it was a war of nation states rather than a war of annihilation of noncombatants. Therefore, regardless of its final outcome, what was at stake, mostly, was the eventual location of borders between the territories on the map of Europe and their corresponding spoils of war for the victors.

World War II, on the other hand, while it involved essentially the same major combatants provoked, at least initially, more by the unfinished business of its predecessor5

4. Ibid

5. Miller & Commager, 2002

than by anything else, transcended all previous wars by virtue of the degree to which the aggressors specifically intended to annihilate civilians worldwide, the extent of their expansionist intentions, and the profound difference its outcome could have represented for human life on Earth for the foreseeable future, lasting even well beyond the present day.

Starting even years before the outbreak of war in 1939, Nazi Germany had already begun instituting a brutal and wide-sweeping policy of exterminating civilians based on their racial heritage rather than their national affiliation. Hitler's many speeches on the subject of the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem" made clear that his specific goal was to murder...

There is virtually no doubt, that had the Allies failed to achieve victory over Nazi Germany, Hitler's armies would have conquered all of Russia in 1945, followed by the invasion and vanquishing of the United Kingdom in 1945 and 1946, followed then by an eventual joint attack with Imperialist Japan on the American continent in the following years.
Given the brutal, unforgiving, and equally racist sentiments of the Nazi's Japanese

ally, the ensuing years would have witnessed the complete destruction of many millions of human lives, perhaps doubling the 50 million who actually perished during World War II. in

all likelihood, Axis victory would have resulted in a world today devoid of all Jews, Slovaks,

Gypsies, black Africans, and homosexuals. Those who remained alive would be living under a dictatorship similar in philosophy to that which characterized Nazi Germany between 1933

and 1945. Therefore, both by virtue of its actual historical effects on the world during its time, as well as the ominous implications of only a relatively slightly changed outcome that could have, quite possibly transpired, World War II was, undoubtedly, the most significant event in all of recorded human history.

WORKS CITED

Miller, D.L., Commager, H.S. (2002) the Story of World War II. New York: Touchstone

Nevins, J., Commager, H.S. (1992) a Pocket History of the United States.

New York: Pocket Books