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Japanese invasion of China
was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from 1937 to 1941. -
German Blitzkrieg
The tactical meaning of blitzkrieg involves a coordinated military effort by tanks, mobilized infantry, artillery and aircraft, to create an overwhelming local superiority in combat power, to overwhelm an enemy and break through its lines -
Germany invades Poland
On this day in 1939, German forces bombard Poland on land and from the air, as Adolf Hitler seeks to regain lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. World War II had begun. -
Fall of Paris
In the Second World War, the Battle of France, also known as the Fall of France, was the successful German invasion of France and the Low Countries, beginning on 10 May 1940, defeating primarily French forces. -
Oporation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa (German: Fall Barbarossa) was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, commencing on 22 June 1941. -
Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was 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 (December 8 in Japan). The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II. -
Wannsee Conference
The "Wannsee Conference" was a high-level meeting of Nazi officials that took place in Berlin on January 20, 1942, to discuss the "Final Solution" of the Jewish Question. -
Battle of Midway
Midway Island, Battle of definition. A naval and air battle fought in World War II in which planes from American aircraft carriers blunted the Japanese naval threat in the Pacific Ocean after Pearl Harbor. -
Battle of Stalingard
The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest battles in history, with combined military and civilian casualties of nearly 2 million. -
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. -
Allied invasion of Italy
The Allied invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, was a major World War II campaign, in which the Allies took Sicily from the Axis Powers (Italy and Nazi Germany). It was a large scale amphibious and airborne operation, followed by six weeks of land combat -
D-Day
the day June 6, 1944 in World War II on which Allied forces invaded northern France by means of beach landings in Normandy. -
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. -
Battle of the Bulge
it was a major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe. -
Liberation of concentration camps
In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. -
Battle of Iwo Jima
It was a major battle in which the United States Armed Forces landed and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. -
Battle of Okinawa
The battle of Okinawa, also known as Operation Iceberg, took place in April-June 1945. It was the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific theater of World War II. It also resulted in the largest casualties with over 100,000 Japanese casualties and 50,000 casualties for the Allies. -
VE Day
marking the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. -
Dropping of the atomic bombs
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 -
VJ Day
the day (August 15) in 1945 on which Japan ceased fighting in World War II, or the day (September 2) when Japan formally surrendered.
