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Rape of Nanking
In late 1937 over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people-including both soldiers and civilians in the chinese city of Nanking. The horrific events are known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, as between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted. Nanking, then the capital of Nationalist China, was left in ruins, and it would take decades for the city and its citizens to recover from the savage attacks. -
German Blitzkrieg
A German term for "lightening war" Blitzkrieg is a military tactic designed to create disorganization among enemy forces through the use of mobile forces and locally concentrated fire power.German Forces tried out the blitzkrieg in Poland in 1939 before successfully employing the tactic with invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in 1940 -
Germany's Invasion of Poland
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Polish army was defeated within weeks of invasion. The German invasion of Poland was a primer on how Hitler intended to wage war-what would become the "Blitzkrieg" Strategy. -
Fall Of Paris
It was the German invasion of France and the low countries during the second world war. Within three weeks, a large part of the British force, accompanied by some of the French defenders, is pushed to the English Channel and compelled to abandon the continent at Dunkirk. The Armistice is signed on June 22. Under its terms, two thirds of France is to be occupied by the Germans. The French army is to be disbanded. In addition, France must bear the cost of the German invasion. -
Operation Barbarossa
On June 20, 1942, Adolf Hitler launched his great attact into the Soviet Union. He had amassed the greatest mechanized force yet, and had the best armored vehicles of the time. With blitzkreig tactics,the German Wehrmacht under Generals Manstein and Guderian crushed the Soviet armise and swept through western Russia. Operation Barbarossa ended in the winter, with the German Army split into 3 directions, one pointing at, and nearly taking, Moscow, one pointed at Leningrad, and one sweeping into t -
Pearl Harbor
Just before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The barrage lasted just two hours, but it was devastating: The Japanese managed to destroy nearly 20 American naval vessels including eight enormous battleships, and more than 300 airplanes. More than 2,000 American Soldiers and Sailors died in attack, and another 1,000 were wounded -
Bataan Death March
After the April 9 1942, U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War Two, the approximatley 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. -
Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway was a crucial and decisive naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Between 3 and 7 June 1942, only six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea. Military historian John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare. -
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began after German Troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants, 750 fighters fought the heavily armed and well trained Germans. The Ghetto fighters were ablr to hold out for nearly a month but on May 16, 1943, the revolt ended. The Germans had slowly crushed the resistance. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to camps -
Allied Invasion of Italy
With North Africa secured and Sicily—the stepping stone to Italy—conquered, the Allied forces launched their invasion of Italy on 3 September 1943. It began with British forces skipping across the Strait of Messina to Calabria. -
D-Day (Normandy Invasion)
During World War Two 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. The invasion wa sone of the largest amphibious militly assaults in history and required extensive planning. -
Liberation of the Concentration Camps
Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate concentration camp prisoners in the final stages of the war. On July 23, 1944, they entered the Majdanek camp in Poland, and later overran several other killing cneters. On January 27, 1945, they entered Auschwitz and there found hundreds of sick and exhaustred prisoners. -
Battle of the Bulge
December 16, 1944, the German Army surprises the allies by attacking in the Ardennes mountains of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. It was a major German offensive campaign. The surprise attack caught the allied forces completely off guard. The battle severely depleted Germany's armored forces on the western front, and Germany was largely unable to replace them -
Battle of Iwo Jima
The Battle of Iwo Jima was aq major battle in which the U.S. Marines landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese Imperial Army during World War Two. -
Battle of okinawa
The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed operation iceberg, was a series of battles fought in the Ry ukyu Islands, centered on the the island of Okinawa, and included the largest amphibious assault in the paacific during World War Two. The 82 day-long battle lasted from April 1 until June 22 1945 -
VE Day
Victory in Europe Day, generally known as VE Dsy, VE Day or simply V Day was the public holiday celebrated on may 8,1945, to mark the formal acceptance by the allies of World War Two of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces -
Dropping of thed Atomic Bombs
President Harry S. Truman, warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japanwould result in horrifc American Casualties, ordered that the new weapon b4e used to bring the war to a speedy end. On August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. -
VJ Day
On August 15, 1945, news of the surrender was announced to the world. This sparked spontaneous celebrations over the final ending of World War Two. On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was held in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. At the time, president Truman declared September 2 to be VJ Day -
Japanese Invasion of China
japanese attack on chinaSuno-Japanese War (1973-45) conflict that broke out when China began full-scale resistance to the expansion of Japanese influence in its territory. in an effort to unseat the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese occupied large areas of eastern China in 1937-38. A stalemate then ensued, and japanese forces were diverted to Southeast Asia and to the Pacific theatre of World War Two against the Western powers and their allies beginning in late 1945 ended its occupation of China. -
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.The plan was reconsidered in early 1945, to be implemented in coordination with a Soviet advance.
