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Japanese invasion of China
Was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from July 7, 1937 to September 9, 1945. It is usually said to have began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 in which a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a battle. -
German Blitzkrieg
In the first phase of World War II in Europe, Germany sought to avoid a long war. Germany's strategy was to defeat its opponents in a series of short campaigns. Germany quickly overran much of Europe and was victorious for more than two years by relying on a new military tactic called the "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war). -
Germany's invasion of Poland (1939)
The German invasion of Poland was a primer on how Hitler intended to wage war–what would become the “blitzkrieg” strategy. -
Operation Barbarossa (1941)
Adolf Hitler launched his armies eastward in a massive invasion of the Soviet Union: three great army groups with over three million German soldiers, 150 divisions, and three thousand tanks smashed across the frontier into Soviet territory. -
Pearl Harbor
Hundreds of Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The barrage lasted just two hours, but it was devastating: The Japanese managed to destroy nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight enormous battleships, and more than 300 airplanes. More than 2,000 Americans soldiers and sailors died in the attack, and another 1,000 were wounded. -
Operation Gomorrah (1943)
Britain had suffered the deaths of 167 civilians as a result of German bombing raids in July. Now the tables were going to turn. -
D-Day (Normandy Invasion - 1944)
Although the term D-Day is used routinely as military lingo for the day an operation or event will take place, for many it is also synonymous with June 6, 1944, the day the Allied powers crossed the English Channel and landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, beginning the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi control during World War II. -
Battle of the Bulge
On this day, the Germans launch the last major offensive of the war, Operation Mist, also known as the Ardennes Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge, an attempt to push the Allied front line west from northern France to northwestern Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge, so-called because the Germans created a “bulge” around the area of the Dearness forest in pushing through the American defensive line, was the largest fought on the Western front. -
Operation Thunderclap (1945)
On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. -
Battle of Iwo Jima
Was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps landed on and eventually captured the island of Two Jami -
VE Day
A Public Holiday . -
VJ Day (1945)
Public Holiday -
Battle of Okinawa (1945)
On April 1, 1945, the 10th Army, under Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, launched the invasion of Okinawa, a strategic Pacific island located midway between Japan and Formosa -
Dropping of the atomic bombs (1945)
On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. -
Wannsee Conference (1942)
Herman Goering, writing under instructions from Hitler, had ordered Reinhardt Heinrich, SS general and Heinrich Himmler’s number-two man, to submit “as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative, material, and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.
