WWIIWWII

PRETESTPRETEST

1. The term_____________ refers to a political philosophy that values the nation or race more than the individual.

2. In the 1930’s, England and France tried to prevent war by following a policy of?

3. The three leaders of the Allied powers during World War II

were?

4. The three Axis powers were?

5. The three leaders of the Axis powers were?

6. Allied victories in which two battles marked a turning point in the war against Japan?

7. What battle took place during Operation Overlord?

8. Anti-Semitism refers to a hatred of or discrimination of who?

9. Which two Japanese cities did America drop atomic bombs

on?

10. Which American leader made the decision to use the atomic bomb?

PRETEST COMPLETEDPRETEST COMPLETED

1. FASCISM

2. APPEASEMENT

3. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, WINSTON CHURCHILL, and JOSEF STALIN

4. GERMANY, ITALY, and JAPAN

5. ADOLF HITLER, BENITO MUSSOLINI, and EMPEROR HIROHITO

6. MIDWAY ISLAND and GUADACANAL

7. INVASION OF NORMANDY (D-DAY)

8. JEWS

9. HIROSHIMO and NAGASAKI

10.PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN

World War IIWorld War II

I. Prelude to War

II. The Military Struggle

III. Americans on the Battle Front

IV. Dropping the Atomic Bomb

Section 1PRELUDE TO WAR

ITALY

• Benito Mussolini was an Italian schoolteacher, journalist, and political activist who had been wounded in World War I.

• In 1919 Mussolini banded together with a group of war veterans to found the revolutionary Fascist party.

• The term Fascism refers to a political philosophy that values the nation or the race above the individual.

• During World War II, Italy, Germany, and Japan all were ruled by fascist governments that wielded absolute power.

• In 1925, calling himself Il Duce (“the leader”), Mussolini declared a dictatorship in Italy.

• Mussolini and the Fascists attempted to promote Italian power and pursued an aggressive foreign policy.

• Under his direction, Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and by the next year, it dominated that East African nation.

• At the same time, Adolf Hitler, a poorly educated Austrian who supported himself as a painter, rose to power in Germany.

• In 1920 Hitler’s political group became known as the National Socialist German Worker’s party, or Nazi party.

• In January 1933, the Nazi party was the largest group in the Reichstag (the German Parliament), and Hitler was named chancellor.

• The next month Hitler suspended civil liberties and an act of parliament gave him dictatorial powers in the new government know as the Third Reich.

• Hitler was now Der Fuhrer (“the leader”).• Hitler appealed to a form of prejudice call anti-Semitism, or a hatred of

Jews.• Like Mussolini, Hitler saw foreign policy as a way to bolster national pride

and in 1936 he marched troops into the Rhineland – a section of western Germany from which the Treaty of Versailles had excluded German forces since the end of World War I.

• In that same year Hitler formed an alliance with Mussolini and Italy and Germany became known as the Axis Powers.

GERMANY

• Early in 1938 Hitler annexed Austria

• Later that year he demanded possession of the Sudetenland, a section of Czechoslovakia inhabited by an ethnic German population

• England and France, reluctant to become involved in another conflict after the devastation of World War I, adopted a policy known as appeasement.

• Appeasement means to “keep the peace by giving in to someone’s demands.”

• England and France’s strategy of appeasement did not work as Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia later that year.

• Then, in September 1939, after signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Poland.

• Two days later, England and France decided they would appease Hitler no longer.

• Angry and frustrated over his steady encroachment on the European continent, they finally declared war on Germany.

GERMANY

JAPAN

• In Asia in the 1930’s, Japan was every bit as eager as Germany and Italy to establish itself as a world power.

• Military leaders who dominated the government resented their dependence on the United States and other nations for resources such as iron, coal and petroleum.

• To make Japan self-sufficient, its leaders were determined to incorporate part of the Asian mainland into their nation.

• In 1931 Japan attacked Manchuria, a region in northern China rich in minerals.

• In 1937 Japan seized Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing and other Chinese cities.

• In 1940 the island nation signed an alliance with Germany and Italy, known as the Tripartite Pact.

• Secure in that alliance, the Japanese invaded southern Indochina – ruled by France – in the middle of 1941.

ALLIES

• Many Americans wanted to follow a policy of isolationism, believing that American interests could be best served by staying out of the quarrels of other nations.

• Congress responded to isolationist sentiments in the 1930s by passing a series of three neutrality acts.

• In 1940 President Roosevelt moved to help Great Britain directly and agreed to help the British prime minister Winston Churchill by trading fifty old American ships (to help convoy supplies) to the British in return for sites on which to build eight naval and air bases.

• In 1941 Roosevelt helped push the Lend-Lease Act through congress.

• Lend-Lease Act: the United States would provide war supplies to Britain and worry about payment later.

• With that commitment, the United States became, in FDR’s words, “the greatest arsenal of democracy.”

PEARL HARBOR

• As the war in Europe unfolded, tensions between the United States and Japan increased.

• In 1940 the United States stopped selling airplanes to Japan.• By mid-1940, the United States had stopped selling other crucial items,

such as scrap metal and oil, to Japan.• After Japan’s attack on Indochina, it froze all Japanese financial assets in

the United States.• Hoping to knock out the United States Pacific Fleet before an all-out

military conflict could begin, Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

• The attack destroyed five battleships, three cruisers, and several smaller vessels, while wiping out almost 200 airplanes.

• The President told the Congress and the American people that December 7, 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy.”

• The United States quickly declared war on Japan and Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, retaliated by declaring war on the United States.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto

Roosevelt and Churchill

Attack on Pearl Harbor

SECTION 2The MILITARY STRUGGLE

• The situation was desperate in Europe and North Africa by the time the US entered the war.

• The German blitzkrieg (“lighting war”)- a series of sudden military attacks by land and air – had extended Germany’s control across Europe.

• Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1942 and drove deep into Soviet territory.

• In North Africa, a German army led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the “Desert Fox” fro his shrewd tactics, was equally successful.

• Conditions for the Allies in the Pacific were not much better,• Japan had destroyed most the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, secured

much of China and taken the islands of Wake, Guam, the Dutch East Indies and the British controlled colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore.

• In the spring of 1942, Japanese forces defeated Filipino and American troops in the Philippines and drove General Douglas MacArthur from the islands.

• After the defeat on March 10, 1942, MacArthur promised the Filipino and American soldiers, “I shall return”.

• The situation for the Allies began to improve by the end of 1942.

• The Soviet had stopped the German advance at Stalingrad.

• The British were using radar to defeat the German submarines and their wolf pack tactics.

• The Americans and British in North Africa went on the offensive during Operation Torch in November 1942.

• The combined Anglo-American operation was under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

• The Allied forces landed in Morocco and Algeria and moved west into Tunisia where they encountered Rommel’s Afrika Corp.

• In May 1943, the Axis forces in that region surrendered.

• In July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily and mainland Italy.

• After the Allied invasion, the disgruntled Italian population overthrew Mussolini and surrendered.

• The German troops in Italy dug in and prepared to defend mainland Europe.

• It took the Allies almost a full year to liberate Rome.

EUROPE

• At about the same time, battles over two small but highly strategic islands in the Pacific shifted the balance of power between the Allies and Japan.

• Japanese Admiral Yamamoto decided to attack Midway Island, near Hawaii on June 4, 1942.

• The Americans, having deciphered the Japanese military code, were ready for the attack and forces under the control of Admiral Chester Nimitz were ready and waiting.

• By sheer luck the Americans managed to win this battle and inflicted heavy casualties on the Japanese.

• The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers to the Americans one.

• This marked the last offensive operation in the war for the Japanese.

• The Allies took the offensive and secured the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon islands in February 1943 (after 6 months of intense fighting).

• The last two major battles in the Pacific war fought on the small islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

• The Japanese defended them fiercely, and both sides suffered heavy casualties before the Allies prevailed.

PACIFIC

EUROPE

• Toward the end of 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin met together for the first time in Tehran, Iran.

• They agreed that an invasion across the English channel should come next.• Operation Overlord would be the name of the Anglo-American landings in

France.• D-Day began before the dawn of June 6, 1944, it was the largest

amphibious landing in history.• More than 150,000 Allied soldiers came ashore along 60 miles of the

Normandy coast in northern France.• Bitter fighting followed as the Allies pushed toward Paris and then towards

Germany itself.• The Germans launched a counterattack in Belgium and Luxembourg in

December 1944, called the Battle of the Bulge because it caused a large bulge in the Allied lines.

• The counterattacked failed after one month and the road to Germany was clear.

• The Allies pushed from the west and the Soviets pushed from the east.

Meeting at YaltaD-Day

German Panzer tank during Battle of the Bulge

German soldiers during Battle of the Bulge

HOLOCAUST

• As the Allies moved toward final victory they discovered the horrors of what Hitler called the “Final Solution” – his effort to exterminate all Jews and other people he considered enemies of the Aryan state.

• The Nazis had engaged in a systematic campaign to liquidate the entire Jewish population of Europe through the use of extermination camps and forced labor camps.

• In these camps, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in what we now call the holocaust from the Greek term for “total destruction by fire”.

• They also murdered another 5 million Slavs, Gypsies, and other people they considered undesirable- political enemies, homosexuals, and the physically and mentally disabled.

• In liberating the concentration camps, American troops found the gaunt survivors who somehow escaped death in the gas chambers and crematoriums.

HOLOCAUST

• American officer Dick Winters from Pennsylvania recorded the following impression when he first saw a Nazi concentration camp:

The memory of the starved, dazed men, who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fences, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing these people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, “Now I know why I am here!”

THE END OF THE WAR IN EUROPE

• In early 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met again, this time in Yalta, a city in the Soviet Union near the Black Sea.

• There they decided to split Germany into peacekeeping zones and to reorganize the government of Poland.

• On April 10, 1945, as Soviet troops took the Reich Chancellory, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin.

• On May 8, Germany’s unconditional surrender took effect, and the European war came to an end but Japan still had to be defeated.

• By the end of 1944, American bombers were relentlessly dropping hundreds of tons of explosives on Japanese cities.

• In one final meeting of the Allied leaders (Harry S. Truman was President now after Roosevelt’s death), the Ally leaders warned Japanese to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.”

• Around the same time, a meeting of delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to plan for an international organization to keep peace.

• That conference created and approved the charter of the United Nations.

SECTION 3AMERICANS ON THE BATTLE FRONT

• American soldiers called themselves GIs, after the “Government Issue” stamp on all shoes, clothes, guns, and other equipment provided by the military.

• The miserable conditions of the American soldier on the front were described in the newspaper columns of Ernie Pyle (a war correspondent).

The front-line soldier has lived like an animal for months and is a veteran of the cruel fierce world of death. Everything has been abnormal and unstable in his life for months. He has been filthy dirty, has eaten if and when, has slept on the hard ground without cover. His clothes have been greasy, he has lived in a constant haze of dust, pestered by flies and the heat, moving constantly, deprived of all the things that once meant stability. Things such as walls, chairs, floors, windows, faucets, shelves, Coca-Colas and the greatly important little matter of knowing that you’ll go to bed tonight in the same place you got up in the morning.

WOMEN in the ARMED FORCES

• Not all soldiers were men.

• By the war’s end, over 300,000 American women had served in the military (except in combat).

• Oveta Culp Hobby, director of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC – later shortened to WAC, Women’s Army Corp), told potential recruits, “This is your war.”

• Women worked as typists, clerks, tower and radio operators, parachute riggers, and mechanics.

• The Navy had a similar organization, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).

• One quarter of all WAVES served in naval aviation.

• Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPS) ferried planes around the country, and they towed targets for antiaircraft gunnery practice missions as well.

EQUALITY in the ARMED FORCES

• Although the military discriminated against African Americans, their participation as soldiers helped to win the war.

• African Americans were only allowed to join the Army or Navy, and only in the Navy’s messman’s branch.

• It wasn’t until 1945, and a shortage of personal, that the Army desegregated their units.

• The Marines allowed African Americans to enlist in 1945.

• The military, like the Red Cross, separated the blood plasma donated by African Americans.

• Nearly 350,000 Mexican Americans served in the military, most in the Army.

• 25,000 Native Americans served in the military.

• Some Navahos worked as code talkers in the marines, using their unique language as a means of transmitting messages by radio and phone.

Section 4DROPPING the ATOMIC BOMB

• A letter written by physicist Albert Einstein in August 1939 helped set in motion the process of developing the atomic bomb.

• Roosevelt established an Advisor Committee on Uranium to look into this matter.

• After the United States entered the war, the venture was reorganized and became known as the Manhattan Project.

• The Manhattan Project developed into one of the greatest engineering enterprises of all time involving the building of thirty-seven installations, employing 120,000 people and costing $2 billion.

• The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945 in the desert of New Mexico.

• As he watched the first blast, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had spearheaded the entire project, remembered the words of a Hindu holy book: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

THE DECISION to DROP the BOMB

• Once the bomb was ready, American policymakers had to decide if and when to use it.

• With Germany’s surrender, the planning shifted to using it on Japan.

• The estimated cost of the invasion of mainland Japan in American lives was as high as one million.

• American officials debated many different courses of action that could be taken to end the war in the Pacific in the Interim Committee, a group that included both government leaders and scientists.

• Harry S. Truman, President for barely four months, would have had a difficult time arguing against using the weapon that had consumed so many resources over the past five years.

• Truman agreed to use the bomb and based his decision on two main factors.

• One was the fact that invading Japan would result in high casualty figures.

• Second was the bitterness Americans felt toward the Japanese in the first place.

The BOMBS in JAPAN

• On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped “Little Boy”, a uranium bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

• It killed 70,000 people immediately or soon thereafter and injured 70,000 more.

• August 9, 1945, another plane dropped “Fat Man”, a plutonium bomb, on the city of Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people and injuring another 40,000.

• On August 14, 1945, Japanese leaders accepted American terms and the island nation formally surrendered on September 2, 1945, bringing the long and destructive war to a final end.

Japanese SurrenderGermans Surrender

President Harry S. Truman

and

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

America Celebrates the end of the War