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Annexation of the Sudetenland
The Sudetenland, which had a predominately German population, was incorporated into Czechoslovakia when that new nation’s frontiers were drawn in 1918–19. The Sudeten and other Germans in Czechoslovakia numbered about 3,000,000 in the interwar period. Because of its German majority, the Sudetenland later became a major source of contention between Germany and Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 participants at the Munich Conference, yielding to Adolf Hitler, transferred it to Germany. -
Japanese Internment camps
The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in concentration camps in the western interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast. -
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, that was the scene of a devastating surprise attack by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. Just before 8 a.m. on that Sunday morning, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes descended on the base, where they managed to destroy or damage nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, and over 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 Americans died in the attack, including civilians, and another 1,000 people were wounded. -
Guadalcanal
The World War II Battle of Guadalcanal was the first major offensive and a decisive victory for the Allies in the Pacific theater. With Japanese troops stationed in this section of the Solomon Islands, U.S. Marines launched a surprise attack in August 1942 and took control of an air base under construction. -
Island Hopping
Island hopping was the strategy used by the US army in the Pacific theatre against Japan to capture and liberate small islands, leading up to Japan. -
Battle of Midway
Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States defeated Japan in one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II. Thanks in part to major advances in code-breaking, the United States was able to preempt and counter Japan’s planned ambush of its few remaining aircraft carriers, inflicting permanent damage on the Japanese Navy. An important turning point in the Pacific campaign, the victory allowed the United States and its allies to move into an offensive position. -
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a brutal military campaign between Russian forces and those of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers during World War II. The battle is infamous as one of the largest, longest and bloodiest engagements in modern warfare: From August 1942 through February 1943, more than two million troops fought in close quarters – and nearly two million people were killed or injured in the fighting, including tens of thousands of Russian civilians. -
The Philippines
The Guadalcanal Campaign, also known as the Battle of Guadalcanal and codenamed Operation Watchtower by American forces, was a military campaign fought between August 7, 1942, and February 9, 1943, on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theater of World War II. -
D-day
During World War II (1939-1945), 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. Codenamed Operation Overlord, the battle began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, when some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. -
Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference, (February 4–11, 1945), major World War II conference of the three chief Allied leaders, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, which met at Yalta in Crimea to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany. -
Death of Hitler
Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, burrowed away in a refurbished air-raid shelter, consumes a cyanide capsule, then shoots himself with a pistol, on this day in 1945, as his “1,000-year” Reich collapses above him. -
Fall of Berlin
The final chapter in the destruction of Hitler's Third Reich began on April 16, 1945, when Stalin unleashed the brutal power of 20 armies, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft with the objective of crushing German resistance and capturing Berlin. -
Hiroshima
On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber known as the Enola Gay dropped the first ever atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. -
Los Alamos
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, Los Alamos scientists detonated a plutonium bomb at a test site located on the U.S. Air Force base at Alamogordo, New Mexico, some 120 miles south of Albuquerque. Oppenheimer chose the name “Trinity” for the test site, inspired by the poetry of John Donne. The test had been scheduled for 4 a.m., but when the time came it was raining, and the appointed hour was pushed back to 5:30. -
Potsdam Conference
Potsdam Conference, (July 17–August 2, 1945), Allied conference of World War II held at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. The chief participants were U.S. President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (or Clement Attlee, who became prime minister during the conference), and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The conferees discussed the substance and procedures of the peace settlements in Europe but did not attempt to write peace treaties. -
