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World War 2 Begins
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland under the false pretext that the Poles had carried out a series of sabotage operations against German targets.[58] Two days later, on 3 September, after a British ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations was ignored, France and the United Kingdom, followed by the fully independent Dominions[59] of the British Commonwealth[60]—Australia (3 September), Canada (10 September), New Zealand (3 September), and South Africa (6 September)—declared war -
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World War 2
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Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor, also known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor,[9] the Hawaii Operation or Operation AI by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters,[10][11] and Operation Z during planning,[12] was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, in the United States Territory of Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II. -
D-Day
During World War II (1939-1945), the Battle of Normandy, which lasted from June 1944 to August 1944, resulted in the Allied liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control. Codenamed Operation Overlord, the battle began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, when some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. -
Hitler Dies
Adolf Hitler killed himself by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin.[a][b][c] His wife Eva (née Braun) committed suicide with him by taking cyanide.[d] That afternoon, in accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit, doused in petrol, and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker.[1] Records in the Soviet archives show that their burnt remains were recovered and interred in successi -
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in
