PHOTOGRAPHS: COLLECTIONS. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. It was the start of a conflict that would erupt over every continent, see the deaths of tens of millions of people, much of central Europe destroyed, the development of jets, ballistic missiles and computers as well as the atomic bomb. The year 1942 saw the eruption of war in the Far East as Japanese forces continued the offensive across Asia and the Pacific which had begun with the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. There would be fighting in the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and New Guinea among other places. Suddenly finding itself at war, the US would start to build up its forces in the Pacific and Europe, while fighting continued in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. The Second World War was now a truly global conflict. The fourth in a series covering the Second World War in the air year by year.