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In the year of 1919, after World War I, the countries Britain, France, and the United States, started to become more powerful.
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How the war was ignited
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In June 1919, the Allies ordered representatives of the new
German Republic to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The German delegates
were horrified. The treaty forced Germany to assume full
blame for the war. The treaty also imposed huge reparations that
would burden an already damaged German economy and limited
the size of Germany’s military. -
There were new technologies, which helped create a connection to people, as well as a mass culture.
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During this time, many middle-class Americans, were enjoying refrigerators, radios, as well as buying cars.
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In 1922, there was a March on Rome. Tens of thousands of Fascists protested to the capital of Rome. Fear of a civil war, the king ask Benito Mussolini, organizer of the Fascists party, to form a government as prime minister.
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In 1923, Adolf Hitler publishes his memoir and propaganda "Mein Kampf". In this book, he predicts a European War which would include the "extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."
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In the year 1926, Britain had a general strike occur. This lasted for nine days, and included three million workers. The strike was due to the deep debt, and the low wages, as well as the unemployment level (11.3%).
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In the autumn of 1929, the financial panic set in and the stock prices crashed. This started the Great Depression, not just in the United States, but also around the world.
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In 1929, Mussolini received support from the pope.
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Germany secretly violates the terms in the Versailles.
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In 1932, policies established by Stalin, led to a famine, which caused millions to starve.
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Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933.
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In 1934, Stalin launched the Great Purge. Within this purge as well as others, many of the brightest and most talented people were victims of these purges.
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In 1934, Hitler establish himself as führer (supreme leader).
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In the year of 1935, the Nazis pass the Nuremberg Laws, laws that made Jews not able to get German citizenship as well as put them in restrictions. During this, the Nazis also rewrote books and disciplined the German youth. Hitler encouraged limitations to women's rights as well as "pure-blooded" Aryan women to dear children.
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In the year of 1938, Hitler sent troops in order to occupy Austria.
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In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself.
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On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II.
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On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact.
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During the six months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of action on the part of Germany and the Allies in the west led to talk in the news media of a “phony war.”
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German planes bombed Britain extensively throughout the summer of 1940, including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage.
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The Royal Air Force (RAF) eventually defeated the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler postponed his plans to invade.
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How the West had War
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How the Pacific had War
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The war is off...
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On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest.
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On May 10, German forces swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war
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With France on the verge of collapse, Benito Mussolini of Italy put his Pact of Steel with Hitler into action, and Italy declared war against France and Britain on June 10.
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On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights later. France was subsequently divided into two zones, one under German military occupation and the other under Petain’s government, installed at Vichy.
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Prime Minister Winston Churchill began receiving crucial aid from the U.S. under the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in early 1941.
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By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April.
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Traitor...!
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On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa.
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On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, taking the Americans completely by surprise and claiming the lives of more than 2,300 troops.
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On December 8 Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared war on the United States.
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After a long string of Japanese victories, the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway in June 1942, which proved to be a turning point in the war.
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On World War II’s Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest combat of the war.
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In mid-1943, Allied naval forces began an aggressive counterattack against Japan, involving a series of amphibious assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the Pacific.
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An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s government fell in July 1943.
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How the Allies made victory
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The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, spelled the end for German troops there, and the last of them surrendered on January 31, 1943.
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On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allied began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his army into Western Europe, ensuring Germany’s defeat in the east.
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Soviet troops soon advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler gathered his forces to drive the Americans and British back from Germany in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945), the last major German offensive of the war.
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At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman (who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany.
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Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of Japan led Truman to authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon–the atomic bomb–on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August.
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Hitler was already dead, having committed suicide on April 30 in his Berlin bunker.
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An intensive aerial bombardment in February 1945 preceded the Allied land invasion of Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8, Soviet forces had occupied much of the country.
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On August 10, the Japanese government issued a statement declaring they would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
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On September 2, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
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World War II proved to be the most devastating international conflict in history, taking the lives of some 35 to 60 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. Millions more were injured, and still more lost their homes and property. The legacy of the war would include the spread of communism from the Soviet Union into eastern Europe as well as its eventual triumph in China.
