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Hitler Invades Poland
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, and Britain, France, and Canada, declared war on Germany on September 3. The Soviet Union joined the war on Germany's side on September 17, with the Soviet Invasion of Poland from the east. The last organized Polish resistance was defeated on Oct. 6. The German Invasion of Poland marks the beginning of World War Two in Europe -
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World War II
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Rationing starts in UK
Food rationing became a necessity in Britain at the start of world war 2 because Germany tried to cut off the food being shipped there. Before the war, Britain imported 55 million tons of food, a month after the war had started this figure had dropped to 12 million. To help the rationing, the government dispensed rationing books that every household got. -
Invasion of Belgium, Holland, and France
this invasion as known as 'Blitzkrieg' which means lightning war. Blitzkrieg was based on speed, co-ordination and movement. It was designed to hit hard and move on quickly. Its aim was to create panic amongst the civilian population. -
Winston Chuchill becomes Prime Minister of the UK
Winston Churchill was prime minister of Britain (England, Scotland, Wales and British controlled Northen Ireland) from May 1940-July 1945. When France collapsed in May-June 1940 Churchill, who had only recently become prime minister refused to consider making peace with Germany. -
Evacuation of Dunkirk
On June 4, 1940, the German army seized the French port of Dunkirk, ending the evacuation that had begun nine days earlier and had saved 338,000 Allied troops. -
Italy enters the war
On June 10th 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. Mussolini had the immediate war aim of expanding the Italian colonies in North Africa by taking land from the British and French colonies. -
Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain was the German air force's attempt to gain air superiority over the RAF from July to September 1940. Their ultimate failure was one of the turning points of World War Two and prevented Germany from invading Britain. -
Germany Invades Russia
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The general goals were to gain more land for Germany, and to control the oil fields of Azerbaijan. -
Pearl Harbor
A Surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. -
The Holocaust
Was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, throughout Nazi-occupied territory. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds died. Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men -
Battle of Singapore
The Battle of Singapore was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of the Second World War when the Empire of Japan invaded the Allied stronghold of Singapore. It ended with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, and the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. About 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the Malayan Campaign. -
Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway is thought of as the most important naval battle of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. The United States Navy decisively defeated an Imperial Japanese Navy attack against Midway Atoll, inflicting irreparable damage on the Japanese fleet -
Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. It is among the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with the higher estimates of combined casualties amounting to nearly two million. -
Desert War
took place in North Africa. It included campaigns fought in the Libyan and Egyptian deserts. The campaign was fought between the Allies and Axis powers, many of whom had interests in Africa dating from the period of colonialism and the Scramble for Africa. The Allied war effort was dominated by the British Commonwealth and exiles from German-occupied Europe. British Commonwealth forces delivered a decisive defeat to the Axis forces and pushed them back to Tunisia. -
D-Day
The Normandy landings, codenamed Operation Neptune, were the landing operations of the Allied invasion of Normandy, in Operation Overlord, during World War II. The landings were conducted in two phases: an airborne assault landing of 24,000 British, American, Canadian and Free French airborne troops shortly after midnight, and an amphibious landing of Allied infantry and armoured divisions on the coast of France starting at 6:30 AM. The result was a decisive allied victory -
Auschwitz liberated by Soviet troops
The Auschwitz main camp, the Birkenau death camp and the Monowitz labor camp were liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union in the First Army of the Ukrainian Front, under the command of Marshal Koniev, on January 27, 1945. -
Battle of Iwo Jima
A major battle in which the United States fought for and captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Empire of Japan. The U.S. invasion, charged with the mission of capturing the three airfields on Iwo Jima, resulted in some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific Campaign of World War II. -
Hitler Commits Suicide
Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin. His wife Eva, committed suicide with him by ingesting cyanide -
Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the Allies of World War II conducted two atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date. Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, followed by the Fat Man over Nagasaki on 9 August. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. -
World War II ends
japan formally surrenders in a short ceromony where they sign the Japanese instrument of surrender. This brought the hostiles of the war to an end.
