-
German troops march into Austria to annex the German-speaking nation for the Third Reich. -
Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sign the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The agreement averted the outbreak of war but gave Czechoslovakia away to German conquest. -
Germany invaded Poland to regain lost territory and ultimately rule their neighbor to the east. -
At the end of the Battle of France, Nazi Germany took over direct control of the northern half of France -
the successful defense of Great Britain against unremitting and destructive air raids conducted by the German air force -
aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval base -
The Japanese forced 76,000 captured Allied soldiers -
The Battle of Midway dashed Japan's hopes of neutralizing the United States as a naval power -
It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union -
The Anglo-American invasion of French Morocco and Algeria during the North African Campaign of World War II. -
Allied beach landings and land battles from Sicily and southern Italy up the Italian mainland toward Nazi Germany -
Allied forces launched a combined naval, air and land assault on Nazi-occupied France. -
Allied bombing raids on February 13–15, 1945, that almost completely destroyed the German city of Dresden. -
it's believed that all but 200 or so of the 21,000 Japanese forces on the island were killed, as were almost 7,000 Marines. -
Dachau was initially a camp for political prisoners; however, it eventually evolved into a death camp where countless thousands of Jews died from malnutrition, disease and overwork or were executed. -
the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated—the Trinity Test—creating an enormous mushroom cloud some 40,000 feet high and ushering in the Atomic Age. -
the first atomic bomb, codenamed 'Little Boy', was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.