1. The Road To War
1.1. The Rise of Militarism in Japan
1.1.1. In 1920, Japan helped form the League of Nations.
1.1.2. Japanese leaders began to believe that expansion through conquest would solve Japan’s economic problems.
1.1.3. Radical nationalists called for more aggressive military action abroad to acquire territory and raw materials. When Japan’s prime minister tried to stop such plans, a group of naval officers killed him in 1932.
1.2. Militarists Expand Japan’s Empire
1.2.1. In 1931, Japan’s army seized the region called Manchuria.
1.2.2. When the League of Nations pressured Japan to return Manchuria to China, Japan refused and withdrew from the League.
1.2.3. By 1939, Japanese forces controlled most of northern and eastern China. By 1941, Japan had added French Indochina to its Asian empire to go with Formosa (now called Taiwan), Korea, large areas of China, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and several small Pacific islands.
1.3. Testing the League of Nations
1.3.1. The League failed to respond effectively to Japan’s challenge.
1.3.2. Germany pulled out of the League of Nations in 1933.
1.3.3. Germany and Italy were called the Axis Powers.
1.4. Britain and France Appease Hitler
1.4.1. Hitler continued his campaign of expansion. Great Britain and France did little to stop him.
1.4.2. Hitler issued an ultimatum to the Austrian chancellor: he could hand over power to the Austrian Nazis or face an invasion. He handed over power to the Nazis.
1.4.3. Hitler claimed that he wanted to bring all ethnically German areas in eastern Europe back into the German Reich. Just six months later, however, Hitler revealed that he wanted more than to bring all ethnic Germans into the German Reich
1.5. U.S. Neutrality
1.5.1. Like Great Britain and France, the United States did little to thwart Japanese, German, and Italian aggression.
1.5.2. The League asked the United States, a major oil supplier, if it would join the embargo. President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused.
1.5.3. Congress passed additional neutrality acts in 1936 and 1937.
2. The Return of War, 1939 - 1941
2.1. Germany Reduces the Soviet Threat
2.1.1. Hitler intended to eventually conquer the Soviet Union, which had vast farmlands and other resources that could fulfill Germany’s quest for Lebensraum, or “living space.”
2.1.2. Hitler needed the Soviet Union to remain neutral if Britain and France went to war.
2.1.3. The Nazis and Communists despised and distrusted each other. So the world was shocked when Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression treaty in August 1939.
2.2. The War Begins
2.2.1. On September 1, 1939, Hitler announced that Germany was annexing Danzig. As he spoke, German forces were invading Poland. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany.
2.2.2. By early October, all of Poland was under German or Soviet control.
2.2.3. On June 22, France surrendered to Germany. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany occupied three fifths of the country.
2.3. The Battle of Britain
2.3.1. The fall of France left Great Britain to face Hitler alone. Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, vowed to continue the fight.
2.3.2. German planes flew thousands of air raids over Great Britain in the summer and fall of 1940. They bombed ports, airfields, radar stations, and industrial centers.
2.3.3. In September 1940, Britain launched its first bombing raid on Berlin. After that, Hitler shifted his targets to British cities.
2.4. The United States Prepares for War
2.4.1. So in November 1939, Congress passed another Neutrality Act through Congress that repealed the arms embargo. However, the new law included a “cash-and-carry” provision. Nations had to pay cash for materials and carry them away in their own ships.
2.4.2. After the fall of France, the United States finally began to prepare for war. Defense spending soared, as did the size of the army. In September 1940, Congress enacted the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history.
2.4.3. In June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin by attacking the Soviet Union.
2.5. The United States Enters the War
2.5.1. In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, making Japan a member of the Axis Powers. The three nations agreed to provide mutual support in the event that any one of them was attacked by a country not yet in the war.
2.5.2. The United States reacted strongly to Japan’s actions in Indochina. In August 1941, it froze Japanese assets in the United States and banned the export of American oil and other vital resources to Japan.
2.5.3. On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft carriers approached Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific Fleet was anchored at Pearl Harbor. From these carriers, more than 300 bombers and fighter planes launched an attack on Pearl Harbor. In just over two hours, the Japanese damaged or destroyed 18 American warships and about 300 military aircraft. More than 2,400 Americans were killed and some 1,200 wounded.
3. The War in Europe 1942-1945
3.1. Nazi invade the Soviet Union and North Africa
3.1.1. The Axis controlled much of Europe and North Africa at the start of 1942.
3.1.2. Great Britain had saved itself but the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, using Blitzkrieg tactics to overcome Soviet troops massed at the border.
3.1.3. In 1941, Hitler sent the Afrika Korps, a tank-based army division commanded by Erwin Rommel, to bolster the Italian army struggling against the British in North Africa. By June 1942, Rommel’s force had taken much of the region and driven deep into Egypt.
3.2. Nazi begin to persecute the Jews
3.2.1. The Germans treated Russians, Poles, and other Slavs with special contempt, partly because Hitler claimed that Slavs were subhuman. The Nazis worked them to death and killed large numbers of them outright.
3.2.2. As German rule expanded, more Jews came under Nazi control and the “Jewish question” grew more critical to the Nazis. In some places, the Nazis forced Jews into overcrowded ghettos, small sections of cities that could be walled off and guarded. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in these ghettos died from starvation and disease. In just two of the hundreds of ghettos, more than 112,000 died between 1941 and 1942 alone.
3.2.3. Eventually, Hitler decided on what the Nazis called the “final solution”—a plan to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe and North Africa. The slaughter began in the Soviet Union, shortly after the invasion in 1941. Mobile killing squads rounded up and murdered more than a million Soviet Jews. In early 1942, the Nazis built the first of six death camps in Poland.
3.3. The Allies Debate War Strategies
3.3.1. Roosevelt and Churchill met in Washington in December 1941, Their goal was to figure out how to win the war in Europe.
3.3.2. Invading occupied France was a possibility, because the French people would support such an invasion. Also, nearby Britain could serve as a staging area for the massing of troops and resources before the assault. But the German army had a strong presence in France that would make such an invasion extremely difficult.
3.3.3. Great Britain’s choice of strategy was clear. Already caught up in the battle for North Africa, Churchill wanted the Allies to strike there first. In contrast, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted an invasion of France to take pressure off his army. The USSR, now one of the Allies, greatly needed help. Roosevelt eventually was convinced to support the British plan. In June 1942, he made the decision to invade North Africa in the fall.
3.4. Allied Gains in North Africa and Italy
3.4.1. In November 1942, Allied forces made sea landings in Morocco and Algeria. Led by American General Dwight D. Eisenhower
3.4.2. American soldiers did their first fighting of the war in a series of battles in the winter of 1942–1943 in Tunisia. They helped the combined Allied armies launch a final offensive in May 1943. Axis resistance collapsed in North Africa, leaving about 250,000 German and Italian soldiers in the hands of the Allies.
3.4.3. The Fascist Grand Council met on July 24 and voted to restore the king and parliament to power. Mussolini resigned the next day. Italy soon surrendered to the Allies. In October it declared war on Germany.
3.5. The Battle of Stalingrad
3.5.1. In June 1942, Axis troops began to push farther into Soviet territory. Hitler split his forces so they could seize the rest of the Caucasus and also take Stalingrad, a large city on the Volga River.
3.5.2. November, the Soviet Red Army began a counterattack, sending its troops forward against the Nazi assault. In a few days, the Soviets had encircled the German troops. Hitler insisted that his soldiers fight to the death, which most of them did.
3.5.3. In January 1943, the remains of Hitler’s army, starving and frozen in the bitter Russian winter, surrendered. The Battle of Stalingrad cost Germany more than 200,000 troops, while more than a million Soviet soldiers died. However, the Soviet victory forced the Germans to retreat, giving up all they had gained since June 1942.
3.6. Allied Bombing Campaigns
3.6.1. August 1944, American planes dropped more than a thousand bombs on an oil-production facility in Poland. Five miles to the west stood Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp. Jewish organizations and others urged the United States to bomb Auschwitz. If the gas chambers or nearby rail lines were destroyed, they said, thousands of lives could be saved.
3.6.2. American military officials denied these appeals. They said they could not afford to divert resources from military targets. Their main goal was to hasten the end of the war.
3.6.3. Hitler’s losses in the Soviet Union left Germany with only one major source of oil—Romania. The Romanian oil fields became a prime target of Allied bombing. However, the Allies’ main target in their air campaign was Germany.
3.7. The Allies Liberate France
3.7.1. Allies focused most of their resources in 1944 on an invasion of France. General Eisenhower directed the effort. To prepare for the invasion he gathered more than 1.5 million troops in southern England. Troops would cross the English Channel by ship to Normandy, in northern France.
3.7.2. D-Day—the day the invasion began—came on June 6, 1944. Over the next few weeks the rest of the Allies’ huge army followed them into France.
3.7.3. In July, an American army under General Omar Bradley and a British army under General Bernard Montgomery began a rapid sweep across France. In August, the Allies liberated Paris. In September, the first American troops crossed the French border into Germany.
3.8. The Horror of the Holocaust
3.8.1. Allied forces invading Germany from France stumbled upon concentration camps. These camps, though not as grim as the death camps of Poland, shocked the soldiers.
3.8.2. In 1944, a Polish Jew coined the term genocide to refer to the systematic killing of a racial, political, or cultural group. The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, or one-third of the world’s Jewish population. An existing word that means “sacrifice by fire”— holocaust—was capitalized to give a name to this terrible slaughter.
3.8.3. Red Army chased a retreating German force out of the Soviet Union and into Poland. The Nazis frantically tried to hide evidence of their concentration camps in Poland.
3.9. The War in Europe Ends
3.9.1. When the Allies crossed from France into Germany, they met fierce resistance. By December 1944, their offensive had stalled. Hitler made plans to burst through the Allied lines in the wooded Ardennes region of Belgium
3.9.2. April 1945, the Red Army had fought its way through Poland and into Germany, to the outskirts of Berlin.
3.9.3. On April 30, with advancing Soviet soldiers just half a mile from his Berlin bunker, Hitler killed himself. German forces quickly began surrendering. On May 8—Victory in Europe Day or V-E Day—the war in Europe officially ended.
4. The War in Asia
4.1. The pacific war begins
4.1.1. To boost morale, President Roosevelt asked for a strike on the Japanese home islands. Military strategists came up with a plan to fly B-25 bombers off an aircraft carrier.
4.1.2. On April 18, 1942, 16 bombers took off from the U.S. carrier Hornet, which had sailed to within 650 miles of Japan, to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
4.1.3. The Japanese were moving into position to isolate Australia, a key ally. To stop them, the United States sent two aircraft carriers, several cruisers, and a few destroyers
4.2. The allies stop japanease expansion
4.2.1. Because they had fewer ships, planes, and soldiers than the Japanese, a defensive strategy made sense. U.S. naval forces would try to contain the Japanese by stopping their expansion in the Central and South Pacific.
4.2.2. American forces achieved this goal at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The Americans intercepted a Japanese message telling of plans for a major offensive.
4.3. The Allies turn the tide
4.3.1. They followed a strategy of capturing Japanese-held islands using them as stepping-stones. Each captured island became a base for attacks on other islands
4.3.2. The Allied offensive began August 1942, when 11,000 U.S. Marines invaded Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands northeast of Australia.
4.3.3. Despite the success of leapfrogging, many of the island invasions came at a terrible cost. Thousands of soldiers died in the jungles of Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, and Saipan.
4.4. The Allies push toward Japan
4.4.1. The Allied push through the Pacific steadily shrank the defensive perimeter the Japanese had established around Japan. That perimeter disappeared after the Allies captured the key islands
4.4.2. Three months of Allied bombardment before the February 1945 invasion did little to soften these defenses.
4.4.3. More than 1,200 American and British ships, including 40 aircraft carriers, supported a force of 182,000 American troops
4.5. Developing the first nuclear weapon
4.5.1. American scientists had been working on another option. In 1939, German-born Jewish American scientist Albert Einstein had written to President Roosevelt explaining that scientists might be able to turn uranium into a new form of energy.
4.5.2. Three years after Einstein sent his letter, the U.S. government established a top-secret program to develop an atomic weapon.
4.6. The US decides to drop the bomb
4.6.1. Truman now had to decide whether to drop an atomic bomb on Japan or to launch an invasion.
4.6.2. Truman faced a stubborn enemy. American B-29s were already destroying Japan with conventional bombs, including firebombs.
4.6.3. Some U.S. strategists believed only the shock of the still secret A-bomb would end the Japanese resistance. Others opposed it, insisting that the current bombing campaign would soon bring surrender.
4.7. 2 a-bombs end war in pacific
4.7.1. On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a city of 300,000 people.
4.7.2. Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb, wiping out the city of Nagasaki and instantly killing some 40,000 people. As many as 250,000 Japanese may have died from the two bombs, either directly or as the result of burns, radiation poisoning, or cancer.
4.8. The Cost of ww2
4.8.1. Millions worldwide celebrated V-J Day, which marked the end of the Second World War. But they also mourned the loss of life.
4.8.2. More than 20 million Europeans were made homeless by the fighting.
4.9. War Crimes Trials and Restructuring
4.9.1. In November 1945, the Allies put 22 Nazi leaders on trial in the German city of Nuremberg.
4.9.2. In October 1946, a separate court in Tokyo put 28 Japanese war criminals on trial. All were found guilty. Sixteen received life sentences.
4.9.3. The Allies also set out to restructure Germany and Japan after the war. Germany was divided into four military occupation zones, one each for the United States, the USSR, France, and Britain. Berlin, which lay entirely within the Soviet zone, also was divided in four parts—one for each occupying power.