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Spanish Civil War began
In the Spanish Civil War there were two sides, the left and the right. The left side consisted loyalists and republicans while the right consisted of nationalists and fascists. The leader of the rights side was Francisco Franco aka "El Caudillo". -
Wolf Pack Tactics
The Wolf Pack was made by Karl Donitz and was to have a devastating impact on the shipping. The Wolf Pack tactic was devised to defeat the convoy system. The idea was to form a pack of U-Boats, and to delay an attack until all boats were in a position to conduct a massed orginized attack. During World War II, the Wolf Pack tactic still could not be implemented due to an insufficient number of boats and the lack of powerful radio transmitters. -
Rape of Nanking
In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. After finally defeating the Chinese at Shanghai in November, 50,000 Japanese soldiers then marched on toward Nanking. Unlike the troops at Shanghai, Chinese soldiers at Nanking were poorly led and loosely organized. -
Munich Agreement
The Munich Agreement was a settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. Hitler and his generals were drawing up a plan for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union also had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and it indicated willingness to cooperate with France and Great Britain if they decided to come to Czechoslovakia’s defense. -
Non-Aggression Pact
Representatives from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union met and signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which guaranteed that the two countries would not attack each other. By signing this pact, Germany had protected itself from having to fight a two-front war in the soon-to-begin World War II. The Soviet Union was awarded land, including parts of Poland and the Baltic States. The pact was broken when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union less than two years later, on June 22, 1941. -
Battle of the Atlantic
The Battle of the Atlantic was referred to as the 2nd Battle of Britain. The mission of the U-Boat war was to cut the trade and supply lines between the U.S. and Canada. The Germans were trying to deprive the British of food, weapons, and other valuble supplies. The Germans sunk 3.7 million tons of shipping and 500 ships. -
The Blitz
The Blitz was Nazi Germany's sustained bombing against the British in World War II. The raids killed 43,000 civilians and it lasted for 8 months. In September alone the Luftwaffe dropped 5,300 tons of high explosives on the capital in just 24 days. Londeners took caution and moved down to the Tube stations in their thousands and eventually had to reside there. -
Atlantic Wall
The Atlantic Wall was a massive coastal defensive structure that stretched from Norway to the Spanish boarder. It was a distance of 1,670 miles and it formed the main part of Hitler's "Fortress Europe". The wall was built to repulse an Allied attack on Nazi-occupied Europe. The building started in 1942 and ended in 1944. -
Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle in World War II in which Nazi Germany fought the Soviet Union for the control of the city Stalingrad. This stopped the German advance into the Soviet War and marked the turning of the tide of war in favor of the allies. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest battles in history, with combined military and civilians casualities of 2 million. -
D-Day
D-Day, also known as Operation Overlord, was the Allies way to reassert themselves in Europe by invading Normandy. They wanted to gain a foothold in France by pushing the Germans back off the Atlantic Wall. It took 2 years to plan Operation Overlord and the mass amount of Naval and Airforce troops made this the biggest invasion ever. Over 300,000 troops defended the Atlantic Wall.
