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Japanese invasion of Manchuria
Japan modernized between 1868 and World War One. It emerged as a modern industrial economy with giant companies - zaibatsus - that assumed great importance as trading enterprises. Japan's expansion was marked by wars of expansion defeats China over Korea in 1894-5 and Russia over Manchuria in 1904-5. The latter war sees the Japanese navy sink Russia's at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The Japanese navy had led Japan into the ranks of modern industrialized powers -
Hitler made Chancellor of Germany
January 30th 1933 marked the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic, with Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor. Hitler’s elevation to the chancellorship was hardly the glorious ascension to power he had dreamed of back in 1923 -
the munich pact
Hitler continued to make inflammatory speeches demanding that Germans in Czechoslovakia be reunited with their homeland, war seemed imminent -
Kristallnacht
The name refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938, throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. -
invasion of poland
Adolf Hitler's first major foreign policy initiatives after coming to power was to sign a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934. -
dunkirk
Dunkirk, and the evacuation associated with the troops trapped on Dunkirk, by Winston Churchill. As the Wehrmacht swept through western Europe in the spring of 1940, using Blitzkrieg, both the French and British armies could not stop the onslaught. -
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The Japanese were tired of negotiations with the United States. They wanted to continue their expansion within Asia but the United States had placed an extremely restrictive embargo on Japan in the hopes of curbing Japan's aggression -
bataan death march
The Battle of Bataan ended on April 9, 1942, when U.S. General Edward P. King surrendered to Japanese General Masaharu Homma. At that point 75,000 soldiers became Prisoners of War: about 12,000 Americans and 63,000 Filipinos. What followed was one of the worst atrocities in modern wartime history—the Bataan Death March. -
battle of midway
The Battle of Midway is considered by many to be the most important naval battle of the Pacific Campaign during World War 2. -
D-Day
June 6, 1944 – The D in D-Day stands for “day” since the final invasion date was unknown and weather dependent Allied Forces 156,000 Allied troops from The United States, The United Kingdom, Canada,Free France and Norway -
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 -
V J Day
In the summer of 1945, what most Americans on duty in the Pacific dreaded was the upcoming invasion of Japan. The atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki canceled that operation when the Japanese quickly surrendered. There was initial suspicion in some quarters that the surrender was a trick; Marines waited two weeks after VJ Day before actually landing -
Yalta Conference
It had already been decided that Germany would be divided into occupied zones administered by U.S., British, French, and Soviet forces. The conferees accepted the principle that the Allies had no duty toward the Germans except to provide minimum subsistence, declared that the German military industry would be abolished or confiscated, and agreed that major war criminals would be tried before an international court, which subsequently presided at Nürnberg -
The bombing of Hiroshima
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces dropped the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by the detonation of the "Fat Man" bomb over Nagasaki, Japan. In his 1999 book Downfall, historian Richard Frank analyzed the many widely varying estimates of casualties caused by the bombings -
V E Day
Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) was on May 8th 1945. VE Day officially announced the end of World War Two in Europe
