World War IIModern World History

The “Lightning War”• Germany and the USSR

signed a nonagression pact (the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact)– Secret agreement to divide

Poland, Eastern Europe• Blitzkrieg: lightning war

– Fast-moving airplanes and tanks first, followed by massive infantry forces

• Soviets take Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia– Finland resists and defeats

USSR• The “Phony War”

– Seven months of no fighting along the Maginot Line

A German Panzer Tank used in Blitzkrieg

The Battle for France and Great Britain• Germany squeezed through the

Maginot Line by going to France through Arden forest in NE France and Luxembourg

• Allied (French & British) forces were pinned at Dunkirk, where 338,000 troops were rescued to Great Britain (May 26-June4)

• France surrenders to Germany on June 22, 1940– N. France taken completely by

Germany– S. France puppet government

(called Vichy France)• Battle of Britain: summer of 1940-

May 1941– Airfields, Air Raids, London bombed,

but Allies win

German plane over London, 1940

The Eastern Front and the Mediterranean• Italy attacks Libya in

September 1940, pushing 60 miles into Egypt

• Germany comes to aid Italy, back and forth between Axis and Allies… Axis ultimately win key city of Tobruk

• Germany took the Balkan countries (Yugoslavia, Greece, etc. by April 1941) while preparing for an invasion of the USSR

• June 22, 1941 Hitler unleashes Operation Barbarossa upon the USSR– Germans advance to outskirts

of Moscow, but fresh Siberian divisions and Russian winter cost Germans 500,000 people

Soldiers in the Battle for Moscow

Where’s the United States?• Congress passed a series of

Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937, but President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded congress to the Allies to buy American arms (Lend-Lease Act)

• The Atlantic Charter was signed in August on 1941, which stood to uphold free trade and self-determination of people

• September 4th: German U-boat fires on an American ship, and the US was involved in an undeclared naval war with Germany

Churchill and Roosevelt at the signing of the Atlantic Charter

A day of Infamy• The US had sent aid to China

in their fight against Japan, and had cut off oil to the island

• Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned a simultaneous attack on US held targets in Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Guam) and the Pacific (Hawaii)

• December 7th, 1941: Japan successfully surprise attacks the USA at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii– 2400 Americans killed, 1000

wounded, 18 ships sunk or damaged

• Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy”

USS Arizona sinking during the attack on Pearl Harbor

The Pacific Theater• Japan quickly attacked Guam, Wake

Island, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies with great success

• The Battle of Midway– The US knew 150 Japanese ships

were heading towards Midway (broken Japan’s code)

– American planes attacked Japanese ships while Japanese planes attacked Midway Island, defeating the Japanese

– Japan lost 332 planes, all four aircraft carriers and one support ship

• Battle of Guadalcanal– Battle was to stop the Japanese from

building a huge air base on the island– 19,000 US Marines landed on the

island, fighting 6 months on land and at sea

– Result was another Allied victory

US Soldiers at Guadalcanal

The Holocaust• Germans believed they

were the “master race”• By 1933, persecution of

Jews was a government policy, and citizenship, jobs and property were taken away in 1935

• Germany tried to emigrate Jewish people, but eventually other countries refused to take them in

• Hitler ordered all Jews to move to certain cities in Poland in to overcrowded ghettos

Prisoners walking over a bridge to the Lodz Ghetto

Hitler’s “Final Solution”• Hitler decided to eliminate all

groups “subhuman” that he thought would threaten his “racial purity”

• Hitler’s SS at first went out as killing squads, but eventually all Jews were taken to slave-labor or concentration camps

• The Nazis built gas chambers, which could kill up to 6000 people in one day

• Weaker people (women, children, elderly) were chosen first to die, while the stronger lived a little while longer

• Fewer than 4 million European Jews survived the Holocaust

Dead bodies at a Nazi Concentration Camp

The Tide Turns for the Allies• Once the US was officially involved,

Roosevelt and Churchill decided to first attack Germany in North Africa, which angered Stalin

• British General Bernard Montgomery and Dwight Eisenhower led successful campaigns against Rommel, and crushed the Axis powers

• The Battle of Stalingrad saw bitter fighting between the Soviets and Germans, with the USSR eventually winning, and Germany losing 240,000 troops

• The Allies then attacked and captured Sicily, Italy, which toppled Mussolini from power and gave the Allies a foothold in EuropeStreet fighting in

Stalingrad

Life on Allied Home Fronts• Like WWI, people at home

made great sacrifices to help their country’s war effort– By 1944 18 million US workers,

mostly women, were working in war industries

– Rationing and Propaganda were used to help the war effort

• Japanese American Internment– Over 31,000 Americans of

Japanese descent and Nisei descent were imprisoned by the US government because they were considered to be a threat American Propaganda

during World War II

Allied Victory in Europe• D-Day Invasion June 6,

1944– Code-named Operation

Overlord, it was the largest land and sea attack in history

– The attack was victorious, and by September the Allies had liberated France, Belgium, Luxembourg and most of the Netherlands

• Battle of the Bulge– The Germans pushed

through Allied lines, but the Allies eventually pushed them back

• German Surrender– Accepted May 7th, 1945 by

Dwight Eisenhower

Allied Troops landing on the beach at Normandy

Victory in the Pacific• The Japanese retreat

– Allied victories at the Battles of Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima and Okinawa

– Battle of Okinawa: US dead 12,500, Japan 110,000

• The Atomic Bombs– Dropped August 6th and 9th

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, killing 73,000 and 37,500 people

• Japanese surrender– September 2nd, 1945 on the

USS Missouri Picture of the Atomic Bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan