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Japanese invasion of China
AS JAPANESE troops advanced on the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937, Zhou Fohai, a senior official in the Chinese government, wrote in his diary of the panic and fear consuming the city. He anticipated the destruction and its implications for his nation: “China will have no more history,” he wrote. -
Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact
Soviet's First Secretary Joseph Stalin had already in April opened for negotiations and improved relations with Germany by replacing the Jewish Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov with Molotov.
The Jewish and pro-Western Litvinov was not suited to lead the Soviet Union towards agreement with Nazi-Germany, widely perceived as an advocate of an alliance with the Western democracies against the Fascist powers, as he was. By then, Stalin possibly approved instead of Molotov's program to to provoke a war -
Germany's invasion of Poland
At 4:45 a.m., some 1.5 million German troops invade Poland all along its 1,750-mile border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler claimed the massive invasion was a defensive action, but Britain and France were not convinced. On September 3, they declared war on Germany, initiating World War II. -
German Blitzkrieg
Seldom in the history of military thought have such elaborate interpretive structures been built on a more limited foundation. The term blitzkrieg was in fact never used in the title of a German military manual or handbook. Nor is it to be widely found in the memoirs or correspondence of German generals. The word was used in the Wehrmacht during World War II but was commonly considered to be of foreign origin. Guderian wrote in Panzer Leader that “our enemies coined the word.” -
Fall of Paris
In early 1940 France was gearing up for a defense against the German invasion they knew was coming. Germany has been allowed to push the restrictions placed on them after World War I by an arms build up, re-militarizing the Rhine, and dominating both Austria and Czechoslovakia. This gives them both an advantage and a sense of superiority because of the lack of opposition. By this time, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands have already fallen to the Germans in northern Europe and an assault agains -
Operation Barbarossa
In Barbarossa’s opening month, German armies bit deep into Soviet territory; panzer armies encircled large Soviet forces at Minsk and Smolensk, while armored spearheads reached two-thirds of the distance to Moscow and Leningrad. But already German logistics were unraveling, while a series of Soviet counterattacks stalled the advance. In September the Germans got enough supplies forward to renew their drives; the results were the encirclement battles of Kiev in September and Bryansk-Vyazma in Oct -
Pearl Harbor
Regardless of your age, or your interest in World War II, a visit to Pearl Harbor Hawaii is an extremely emotional experience. There are many war memorials across America, but there's something truly different here. At 7:55 on the sunny morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, 183 Japanese warplanes swooped out of a cloudless sky and demolished the US Pacific fleet docked at Pearl Harbor. It was this single catastrophic event, not the invasion of Poland -
Battle of Midday
Battle of Midway - Summary: In May 1942, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sought to draw the US Pacific Fleet into a battle where he could overwhelm and destroy it. To accomplish this he planned an invasion of Midway Island which would provide a base for attacking Hawaii. Using decrypted Japanese radio intercepts, Admiral Chester Nimitz was able to counter this offensive. On June 4, 1942, US aircraft flying from USS Enterprise, USS Hornet, and USS Yorktown attacked and sunk four Japanese carrie -
Wannsee Conference
On January, 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons. -
Battle of Stalingrad
The Russians hailed it a “contemporary Cannae,” and the Germans condemned it as a Rattenkrieg (Rat War). Both descriptions were fitting. In the Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet forces surrounded and crushed an entire German army under General Friedrich Paulus, emulating Hannibal’s encirclement and destruction of a Roman army under Aemilius Paulus in 216 B.C. For both sides, Stalingrad became a desperate ordeal of rodentlike scurrying from hole to hole. -
Operation Gomorrah
Britain had suffered the deaths of 167 civilians as a result of German bombing raids in July. Now the tables were going to turn. The evening of July 24 saw British aircraft drop 2,300 tons of incendiary bombs on Hamburg in just a few hours. The explosive power was the equivalent of what German bombers had dropped on London in their five most destructive raids. More than 1,500 German civilians were killed in that first British raid. -
D-Day (Normandy Invasion)
D-Day - A Second Front: In 1942, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt issued a statement that the western allies would work as quickly as possible to open a second front to relieve pressure on the Soviets. Though united in this goal, issues soon arose with the British who favored a thrust north from the Mediterranean, through Italy and into southern Germany. Against this, the Americans advocated a cross-Channel assault which would move through Western Europe along the shortest route to Germa -
Operation Thunderclap
Operation Thunderclap was the code for a cancelled operation planned in August 1944 but shelved and never implemented. The plan envisaged a massive attack on Berlin in the belief that would cause 220,000 casualties with 110,000 killed, many of them key German personnel, which would shatter German morale. However, it was later decided that the plan was unlikely to work.[1] -
Battle of Iow Jima
The United States conducted initial carrier air raids against the island in June, 1944. Before the U.S. invaded, the island would be hit with more shelling than used against any Pacific island during the war. B-24 heavy bombers were used flying out of the Marianas for the majority of the bombardments. Prior to the USMC landing on the beaches, navy planners only authorized 3 days of naval bombardment of the island instead of the 10 days requested by the marines. Bad weather would additionally imp -
Battle of Okinawa
The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg,[11] was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War during World War II.[12][13] The 82-day-long battle lasted from early April until mid-June 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, a large island only 340 mi (550 km) away from mainland Japan, as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of Japanese mainland -
VE Day
Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) was on May 8th 1945. VE Day officially announced the end of World War Two in Europe. On Monday May 7th at 02.41. German General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender document that formally ended war in Europe. Winston Churchill was informed of this event at 07.00. While no public announcements had been made, large crowds gathered outside of Buckingham Palace and shouted: “We want the King”. The Home Office issued a circular (before any official announcement) inst -
Liberation of concentration camps
hese concentration and slave-labour camps, located throughout the Reich, were different from the extermination camps. Although the concentration camps were also places of appalling suffering and death, the authorities 'merely' incarcerated the inmates - political and religious prisoners, criminals, resistance activists, deserters, shirkers, and internees - at these sites, rather than exterminating them. -
Dropping of the atomic bombs
The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Though the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited the Cold War. -
VJ Day
In the summer of 1945, what most Americans on duty in the Pacific dreaded was the upcoming invasion of Japan. The atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki canceled that operation when the Japanese quickly surrendered. There was initial suspicion in some quarters that the surrender was a trick; Marines waited two weeks after VJ Day before actually landing. But when American occupiers saw the devastation that bombing had caused and were greeted by deferential Japanese civilians, the knowledge t -
Battle of the Bulge
Battle of the Bulge - Background: With the situation on the Western Front rapidly deteriorating in the fall of 1944, Adolf Hitler issued a directive for an offensive designed to stabilize the situation. His ultimate goal was to compel the United States and Britain to sign a separate peace so that Germany could focus its efforts against the Soviets in the East. Going to work, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Army High Command, OKW) developed several plans including one that called for a blitzkrieg-sty