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Japan invades China
The Japanese invansion of Manchuria began on Sept 19, 1931, when the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria immediately following the Mukden Incident. The Japanese established a puppet state, called Manchukuo, and their occupation lasted until the end of World War II. -
The Holocaust
Lebensunwertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life” the phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the “racially inferior”, or “sexually deviant”, as well as “enemies of the state” both internal and external. Part of the Nazi policy was to murder civilians, especially Jews. -
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The Holocaust
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Munich Conference
In the late 1938 a crisis developed in Europe. Hitler was a dictator of Germany, had already annexed Austria that year before. Now wanted to also take Czechoslovakia and make it part of Germany. He claimed that the German speaking inhabitants of this land were being mistreated by the Czech government. -
Blitzkreig
During WWII the German army and Hitler adopted a number of strategies in order to seek victory. In the first tow years the German army took control of most of Europe using a common tactic called “Blitzkrieg.” They used this on Poland. The tactic drove the soviet union army back some 600 miles to the gates of Moscow. -
Non-Aggression Pact
According to the non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union and Germany pledged to “refrain from any violence, any aggressive action, and any attack against each other, either individually or together with other states.” The pact was signed by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop. On the day after the pact’s ratification, September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. -
Germany Invades Poland
The German invansion of Poland was a primer on how Hitler intended wage war—what would become the “blitzkrieg” straegy. The German army used extensive bombing early on to destroy the enemy’s air capacity, railroads, communication lines, and munitions dumps, followed by a massive land invansion with overwhelming numbers of troops, tanks, and artillery. The Polish army made serveral severe strategic miscalculations early on. -
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Battle of Britain
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Battle of Britian
The Battle of Britain was a series of conflicts between Germany and Britain in WWII. Having defeated France, Germany wanted to invade Britain, but in order to do this, Germany had to destroy Britain’s RAF (Royal Air Force). They attempted to do this with bombing raids. The Battle of Britain was the first major campaign to be fought entirely by air forces, and was also the largest and most sustained areial bombing campaign to that date. -
Lend-Lease Act
The Lend-Lease Act, approved by Congress in March 1941, gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt virtually unlimited authority to direct material aid such as ammunition, tanks, airplanes, trucks, and food to war effort in Europe without violating America’s offical postion of neutrality. By 1945 the Lend-Lease program had cost $49.1 billion, and over 40 nations had received aid in its name. -
Operation Barbarossa
On this day in 1941, over 3 million German troops invade Russia in three parallel offensives , in what is the powerful invansion force in history. Nineteen panzer divisons, 3,000 tanks, 2,500aircraft, and 7,000 artillery pieces pour across a thousand-mile front as Hitler goes to war on a second front. Germany and Russia had signed a “pact” in 1939, each guaranteeing the other a specific region of infulence without interference from the other, suspicion remained high. -
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. The attack led to the United States’ entry into the World War II. The attack was intended as a preventive acton in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, etc -
Wannsee Conference
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officals of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942. The purpose of the conference called by director of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final soultion to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jew of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and murdered. -
Bataan Death March
US surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. The marchers made the trek in intense heat and were subjectd to harsh treatment by Japanese guards. Thousands perished in what became known as the Bataan Death March. -
Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway in the Pacific Theater of Operations was one of the most important naval battles of World War II. Between 4 and 7 June 1942, only six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the United States Navy under Admirals Chester W. Nimitz, Frank jack Fletcher, and Raymond A. Spruance decisively defeated an attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Japan’s first naval defeat since the Battle of Shimonoseki Straits in 1863. -
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Battle of Midway
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Battle of Stalingrad
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D-Day
The Germans knew that the Allies would attempt an invasion of France to liberate Europe from Germany. The Allied Forces, based in Britain, decided to begin the invasion by landing a huge army at a place called Normandy Beach. Allied planes pounded the Nazi defenders and dropped thousands of paratroopers behind German lines the night before seaborne landings. Local French Resistance forces, alerted to the imminent invasion, engaged in behind-the-lines sabotage and combat against the occupying Ger -
Battle of the Bulge
With the situation on the Western Front rapidly deteriorating in the fall of 1944, Adolf Hitler issued a directive for an offensive designed to stabilize the situation. His ultimate goal was to compel the United States and Britain to sign a separate peace so that Germany could focus its efforts against the Soviets in the East. Going to work, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Army High Command, OKW) developed serveral plans including one that called for a blitzkrieg-style attack. -
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Battle of the Bulge
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Battle of Iwo Jima
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Battle of Okinawa
The Battle of Okinawa was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War of World War II. The 82-day-long battle lasted from early April until mid-June 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of Japanese mainland. -
V-E Day
The eighth of May spelled the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms: In Prague, Germans surrendered to their Soviet antagonists, after the latter had lost more than 8,000 soldiers, and the Germans considerably more; in Copenhagen and Oslo; at Karlshorst, near Belin; in northern Latvia; on the Channel Island of Sark—the German surrender was realized in a final cease-fire. -
The bombing of Hiroshama/Nagasaki
An American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90% 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 bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power. -
V-J Day
Victory over Japan Day in which Japan surrendered, in effect ending World War II and subsequent anniversaries of that event. There was initial suspicion in some quarters that the surrender was a trick; Marines waited two weeks after VJ Day before actually landing. But when American occupiers saw the devastation that bombing had caused and were greeted by deferential Japanese civilians, the knowledge that war was finally over could sink in. -
Warsaw Pact
Nominally the Warsaw Pact was a response to a similar treaty made by the Western Allies in 1949 as well as the re-militarization of West Germany in 1954, both of which posed a potential threat to the Eastern countries. Although it was stressed by all that the Warsaw Treaty was based on total equality of each nation and mutual non-interference in one another’s internal affairs.
