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The empire of japans Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria on September 18th, 1931, immediately following the Mukden Incident. -
Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945. -
The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China -
The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of between 60,000 and 80,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war from Saysain Point. -
On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany and recently incorporated territories. -
Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact., known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The countries agreed that they would not attack each other and secretly divided the countries that lay between them. -
The invasion of Poland was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. -
In May 1940, Germany advanced into France, trapping Allied troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. Under air and ground cover from British and French forces, troops were slowly and methodically evacuated from the beach using every serviceable naval and civilian vessel that could be found. -
Paris fell to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940, one month after the German Wehrmacht stormed into France. Eight days later, France signed an armistice with the Germans, and a puppet French state was set up with its capital at Vichy. -
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. -
On September 16, 1940, the United States instituted the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the draft. This was the first peacetime draft in United States' history. -
Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies. -
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. -
In the Bataan Death March, about 75,000 Filipino and American troops on the Bataan Peninsula on the Philippine island of Luzon were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. -
The Battle of Midway was a major naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that took place on 4–7 June 1942, six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. -
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II where Nazi Germany and its allies unsuccessfully fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad -
The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord. -
The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. -
The Battle of Iwo Jima was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps and United States Navy landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army. -
The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg, was a major battle of the Pacific War fought on the island of Okinawa by United States Army and United States Marine Corps forces against the Imperial Japanese Army. -
As Soviet forces near his command bunker in central Berlin on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler commits suicide. Berlin falls to the Soviets within days. -
On Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, Germany unconditionally surrendered its military forces to the Allies, including the United States. -
The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. -
Victory over Japan Day is the day on which Imperial Japan surrendered in World War II, in effect bringing the war to an end. -
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II.