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Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and accusations of war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace. In 1939, the armies of Japan and the Soviet Union clashed in the area of the Khalkin Gol river in Manchuria. This battle lasted four months and resulted in a significant defeat for the Japanese. -
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. In 1931, the Mukden Incident helped spark the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The Chinese were defeated and Japan created a new puppet state, Manchukuo; many historians cite 1931 as the beginning of the war. -
Rape of Nanjing
The Japanese Imperial Army began its seizure of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. Japanese troops killed remnant Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war, murdered Chinese civilians, raped Chinese women, and destroyed or stole Chinese property . -
Anschluss
The Anschluss was the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. After the First World War, both Austria-Hungary and the German Empire were abolished, and many hoped that the Republic of German Austria would be unified with the German Republic into a Greater Germany that would include all Germans. -
Germany annexes the Sudetenland
The Sudetenland was a province in northern Czechoslovakia, bordering Germany. Germany wanted to expand its territory to include the Sudetenland and gain control of key military defences in the area. Once it had control of these defences, invading the rest of Czechoslovakia would be considerably easier. -
Invasion of Poland
By the 27 September 1939, just 26 days after invasion, Poland surrendered to the Nazis. Following the surrender, the Nazis and the Soviets divided Poland between them, as had been secretly agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The western area of Poland was annexed into the Greater German Reich. -
Genocide
Genocide is a term used to describe violence against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group with the intent to destroy the entire group.Raphael Lemkin came up with the term to describe Nazi crimes against European Jews during World War II. -
Kamikaze
Kamikaze, any of the Japanese pilots who in World War II made deliberate suicidal crashes into enemy targets, usually ships. The term also denotes the aircraft used in such attacks. The practice was most prevalent from theBattle of Leyte Gulf, October 1944, to the end of the war. -
Soviet Union Invasion of Finland
Finland believed the Soviet Union wanted to expand into its territory and the Soviet Union feared Finland would allow itself to be used as a base from which enemies could attack. A faked border incident gave the Soviet Union the excuse to invade on 30 November 1939. -
Dunkirk
In May and June of 1940, Dunkirk was the scene of a major turning point in history. During World War II, the famous Operation Dynamo succeeded in evacuating more than 338,000 soldiers to England, in only nine days. -
Pearl Harbor
The Japanese intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. -
Battle of the Coral Sea
The Battle of the Coral Sea provided the first opportunity for the US Navy to challenge the Japanese Navy with roughly equivalent forces. In the interwar period the US Navy had trained for long range strikes by carrier-based aircraft and this battle was the proving ground for this capability. -
Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway became one of the most important American naval victories of World War II. Code-breakers were able to decipher Japanese naval code, allowing American leaders to anticipate Japanese maneuvers. The U.S. Navy was then able to launch a surprise attack on the larger Japanese fleet in the area. -
Battle of Alamein
The Battle of Alamein marked the beginning of the end for the Axis in World War II. The Axis were handedly defeated in Egypt. -
Tunisia Campaign
The campaign for Tunisia, by drawing massive Axis forces into a new theater at a time of crisis on the Eastern Front, provided important relief to the Soviet Union. The diversion of effort would make it impossible for the Germans to send a substantial army to the relief of Stalingrad.