-
Benito Mussolini
Mussolini was an Italian politician/leader of the National Fascist Party, ruling the country as Prime Minister from 1922 until his ousting in 1943. Since 1939, Mussolini had sought to delay a major war in Europe until at least 1942. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini sided with Germany. Mussolini wanted to be the ruler of the Mediteranean and recreate the Roman Empire. -
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. -
Omar Bradley
Omar Bradley was a United States Army field commander in North Africa and Europe during World War II, and a General of the Army.
From the Normandy landings through the end of the war in Europe, Bradley had command of all U.S. ground forces invading Germany from the west; he ultimately commanded forty-three divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a U.S. field commander. -
The Holocaust
The Holocaust was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. An additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders are included by some historians bringing the total to approximately eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories -
Flying Tigers
The 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. Comprised pilots from the United States Army Air Corps, Navy, and Marine Corps, recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault. The group first saw combat on 20 December 1941, twelve days after Pearl Harbor. It demonstrated innovative tactical victories -
Executive Order 9066
Executive Order 9066 is a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones. Eventually, EO 9066 cleared the way for the deportation of Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans to internment camps. -
Bataan Death March
The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of 60,000–80,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. -
Office of War Information
The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II to consolidate existing government information services and deliver propaganda both at home and abroad. OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other forms of media, the OWI was the connection between the battlefront and civilian communities. -
Battle of Midway
Battle of Midway was a crucial and decisive naval battle in the Pacific Theatre of world War II. Between 4 and 7 June 1942, Military historian John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare. It was Japan's first naval defeat since the Battle of Shimonoseki Straits in 1863. -
Navajo Code Talkers
Code talkers are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime. The term is now usually associated with the United States soldiers during the world wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400–500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. -
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. -
Merchant Marines
Merchant Marines were put on Cargo ships to protect any invasion of ships or fight back in an attack situation, since American ships were being sunked. One of the most costly disasters of the war occurred in the Italian port of Bari, Dec. 2, 1943, during the invasion of Italy. A German air attack sank 17 Allied merchant ships with a loss of more than 1,000 lives. One of the five American ships destroyed that day was the SS John Harvey which carried a secret cargo of 100 tons of mustard gas bombs -
D-Day invasion
D-Day was the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. The largest seaborne invasion in history, the operation began the invasion of German-occupied western Europe, led to the liberation of France from Nazi control, and contributed to an Allied victory in the war. Planning for the operation began in 1943. -
Korematsu v. United States
This case was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship. In a 6–3 decision, the Court sided with the government,[2] ruling that the exclusion order was constitutional. Six of eight Roosevelt appointees sided with Roosevelt. The lone Republican appointee, Owen Roberts, dissented. -
Vernon Baker
Vernon Baker was a United States Army officer who received the Medal of Honor, the highest military award given by the United States Government for his valorous actions during World War II. He was awarded the medal for his actions in 1945 near Viareggio, Italy. Baker was the only living black American World War II veteran of the seven belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor when it was bestowed upon him by President Bill Clinton in 1997. He died in 2010 at the age of 90. -
Harry Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States. As the final running mate of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, Truman succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died after months of declining health. After FDR died Truman was let in on the secret of Project Manhattan. -
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. Hitler was absoulotly crazy, he led Nazi Germnay to the invasion and Poland and demanded a genocide and torture of Jewish people. Hitler would reign over Germany for man years until he commited suicide on April 30 1945 -
Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof, the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in Potsdam, occupied Germany, from 17 July to 2 August 1945. Stalin, Churchill, Truman and Attlee, who participated alongside Churchill while awaiting the outcome of the 1945 general election, and then replaced Churchill as Prime Minister after the Labour Party's defeat of the Conservatives—gathered to decide how to administer punishment to the defeated Nazi Germany -
Atom Bomb
The atom bomb is a nuclear weapon that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. On 6 August 1945, a uranium gun-type fission bomb code-named "Little Boy" was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 3 days later, on 9 August, a plutonium implosion-type fission bomb code-named "Fat Man" was exploded over the Japanese city of Nagasaki -
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
U.S. dropped two atomic bombs in the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They first bomb Hiroshima on August 6 then Nagasaki 3 days later. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in human history. -
George S. Patton
George S. Patton was a United States Army general, who commanded the Seventh United States Army, and later the Third United States Army, in the European Theater of World War II. Patton led U.S. troops into the Mediterranean theater with an invasion of Casablanca during Operation Torch in 1942, where he later established himself as an effective commander through his rapid rehabilitation of the demoralized U.S. II Corps. Patton died following an automobile accident in Europe on December 21, 1945. -
The Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. The first, and best known of these trials, described as "the greatest trial in history" by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges who presided over it. -
Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and the Prime Minister of Japan during most of World War II. As Prime Minister, he was directly responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which initiated war between Japan and the United States, although planning for it had begun before he entered office. After the end of the war, Tojo was arrested, sentenced to death for Japanese war crimes and was hanged on December 23, 1948.
