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Mussolini's Assination
Winston Churchill ordered the assassination of Benito Mussolini as part of a plot to destroy potentially compromising secret letters he had sent the Italian dictator, a leading French historian has suggested. -
Germany Invades Poland
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. -
Lend-Lease Act
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the United States assumed a neutral stance. As Nazi Germany began winning a long string of victories in Europe, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt began seeking ways to aid Great Britain while remaining free of the conflict. Initially constrained by the Neutrality Acts which limited arms sales to "cash and carry" purchases by belligerents, Roosevelt declared large amounts of US weapons and ammunition "surplus" and authorized th -
Stalin Attacks Finland
The war between Russia and Finland, generally referred to as the Winter War, lasted from November 30th 1939 to March 13th, 1940. The Winter War was a direct result of the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact of August 1939. The public face of this treaty was a ten-year period of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. There was a secret side to it however, which stated that Russia would attack Poland in September 1939 and would have more rights to determine its sphere of influence in -
Germany attacks France
Germany invaded France. Initially, British and French commanders had believed that German forces would attack through central Belgium as they had in World War I, and rushed forces to the Franco-Belgian border to meet the German attack. -
Winston Chruchill Become Prime Minister of Britain
On May 10, 1940, Churchill was 65 years old, but he was far from retirement. Instead, on that day, he became Great Britain’s prime minster. The serious threat posed by an aggressive Germany, which seemed intent on conquering Europe. -
Battle of Britain
In the summer and fall of 1940 the Germans and British battled in the skies over the United Kingdom while the German bombers lead the largest bombing campaign to the date. -
Holocaust
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi Ger -
Battle of Stalingrad
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa). The armed forces of Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, quickly advancing deep into Soviet territory. In December, having suffered multiple defeats during the summer and autumn, Soviet forces counter-attacked during the Battle of Moscow and successfully drove the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) from the environs of Moscow. -
Bpmbing of Pearl Harbor
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise air attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. After just two hours of bombing, more than 2,400 Americans were dead, 21 ships* had either been sunk or damaged, and more than 188 U.S. aircraft destroyed. -
Formation of the U.N.
On January 1, 1942, representatives of 26 nations at war with the Axis powers met in Washington to sign the Declaration of the United Nations endorsing the Atlantic Charter, pledging to use their full resources against the Axis and agreeing not to make a separate peace. -
Japanese internment Camps
Japanese Americans had experienced discrimination and prejudice for decades, but nothing could have prepared them for the scale and intensity of the anti-Japanese feelings that swept the Pacific states following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. -
Battle of El Alamein
The Battle of El Alamein, fought in the deserts of North Africa, is seen as one of the decisive victories of World War Two. The Battle of El Alamein was primarily fought between two of the outstanding commanders of World War Two, Montgomery, who succeeded the dismissed Auchinleck, and Rommel. The Allied victory at El Alamein lead to the retreat of the Afrika Korps and the German surrender in North Africa in May 1943. -
Tehran Conference
The Tehran Conference was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in Tehran, Iran, between November 28 and December 1, 1943. -
D-Day
June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.” More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wou -
McArthur's Plan for Japan
Operations in the Philippines commenced on October 20, 1944, when MacArthur oversaw Allied landings on the island of Leyte. Coming ashore, he announced, "People of the Philippines: I have returned." While Admiral William "Bull" Halsey and Allied naval forces fought the Battle of Leyte Gulf (Oct. 23-26), MacArthur found the campaign ashore slow going. Battling heavy monsoons, Allied troops fought on Leyte until the end of the year. In early December, MacArthur directed the invasion of Mindoro. -
yalta Coference
The Yalta Conference took place in a Russian resort town in the Crimea from February 4-11, 1945, during World War Two. At Yalta, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin made important decisions regarding the future progress of the war and the postwar world. -
F.D.R's Death
Franklin D. Roosevelt died in his Warm Springs, Georgia home while his portrait was being painted. -
Hitler's suicide
With the end of World War II imminent and the Russians nearing his underground bunker under the Chancellery building in Berlin, Germany, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler shot himself in the head with his pistol, likely after swallowing cyanide, ending his own life just before 3:30 pm on April 30, 1945. In the same room with Hitler was his new wife, Eva Braun, who ended her life by swallowing a cyanide capsule. After their deaths, SS men carried their bodies up to the Chancellery’s courtyard, covered the -
Potsdam Conference
On 16 July 1945, the "Big Three" leaders met at Potsdam, Germany, near Berlin. In this, the last of the World War II heads of state conferences, President Truman, Soviet Premier Stalin and British Prime Ministers Churchill and Atlee discussed post-war arrangements in Europe, frequently without agreement. Future moves in the war against Japan were also covered. The meeting concluded early in the morning of 2 August. -
Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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Marshall Plan
As the war-torn nations of Europe faced famine and economic crisis in the wake of World War II, the United States proposed to rebuild the continent in the interest of political stability and a healthy world economy. On June 5, 1947, in a commencement address at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall first called for American assistance in restoring the economic infrastructure of Europe. Western Europe responded favorably, and the Truman administration proposed legislation. The -
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem.
