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Mussolini and the fascists come to power in Italy
In October of 1922, out of a fear of a communist takeover due to riots and strikes in Northern Italy, Mussolini gathered his Fascist followers and party foot soldiers, nicknamed the 'Black Shirts,' and staged a march on Rome. -
Japanese invasion of Manchuria
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began on September 18, 1931, when the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria immediately following the Mukden Incident. -
Hitler and the Nazis come to power in Germay
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of a coalition government,with Germans who opposed Nazism failing to unite against it, Hitler soon moved to consolidate absolute power. -
Neutrality Acts passed in the U.S.
The Neutrality Acts were laws passed in 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939 to limit U.S. involvement in future wars. They were based on the widespread disillusionment with World War I in the early 1930s and the belief that the United States had been drawn into the war through loans and trade with the Allies. -
Munich Conference
Munich ConferenceThe Munich Conference came as a result of a long series of negotiations. Adolf Hitler had demanded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to talk him out of it. -
Kristallnacht
A massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Reich on the night of November 9, 1938, into the next day, has come to be known as Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass. -
Germany and the USSR sign the Non-Aggression Pact
On August 23, 1939, representatives from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union met and signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which guaranteed that the two countries would not attack each other. -
Germany invades Poland-Beginning of WWII
Invasion of PolandThe German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. -
Battle of the Atlantic
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, running from 1939 to the defeat of Germany in 1945. -
France falls to Germany
The Battle of France, also known as the Fall of France, was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries during the Second World War. Beginning on 10 May 1940, the battle defeated primarily French forces. The German plan for the battle consisted of two main operations. -
Rescue at Dunkirk
The Dunkirk evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 27 May and 4 June 1940, during World War II. -
Formation of the Axis Powers
The Axis Powers also known as the Axis, were the nations that fought in the Second World War against the Allied forces. The Axis powers agreed on their opposition to the Allies, but did not completely coordinate their activity. -
President election of 1940
The United States presidential election of 1940 was fought in the shadow of World War II as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression. -
Congress passes the Lend Lease Act
The Lend-Lease Act was a program under which the United States supplied Free France, the United Kingdom, the Republic of China, and later the USSR and other Allied nations with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. -
Bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
President Franklin Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy." On that day, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory. The bombing killed more than 2,300 Americans. -
Relocation of Japanese Americans to camps
The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country. -
Bataan Death March
After the April 9, 1942, U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II (1939-45), the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. -
Battle of Midway Island
The Battle of Midway was a crucial and decisive naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II. -
Rosie the Riveter campaign encourages women to get a job
Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of the United States, representing the American women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies. -
D-Day Invasion
The Normandy landings (codenamed Operation Neptune) were the landing operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 (termed D-Day) of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. -
Allied Invasion/Victory in the Philippines
The Battle of the Philippines 1944–45, or the Liberation of the Philippines was the American and Filipino campaign to defeat and expel the Imperial Japanese forces occupying the Philippines, during World War II. -
Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was a major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe. -
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference was a meeting of British prime minister Winston Churchill, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt early in February 1945 as World War II was winding down. -
V-E Day
Victory in Europe Day, generally known as V-E Day, VE Day or simply V Day was the public holiday celebrated on 8 May 1945 (7 May in Commonwealth realms) to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. -
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a secret military project created in 1942 to produce the first US nuclear weapon. Fears that Nazi Germany would build and use a nuclear weapon during World War II triggered the start of the Manhattan Project, which was originally based in Manhattan, New York. -
Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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 -
Surrender of Japan
Japanese SurrenderThe surrender of the Empire of Japan was announced by Imperial Japan on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. -
Formation of the United Nations
n 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter. Those delegates deliberated on the basis of proposals worked out by the representatives of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States at Dumbarton Oaks, United States in August-October 1944. -
President Election of 1944
The United States presidential election of 1944 was the 40th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1944.
