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On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg names Adolf Hitler, leader or führer of the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party), as chancellor of Germany. -
The invasion of Poland was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic, and the Soviet Union; which marked the beginning of World War II. -
in response to Hitler's invasion of Poland, Britain and France, both allies of the overrun nation declare war on Germany. -
The Dunkirk evacuation, code named Operation Dynamo and also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, or just Dunkirk, was the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied soldiers during the Second World War from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between 26 May and 4 June 1940. -
one month after the German Wehrmacht stormed into France. Eight days later, France signed an armistice with the Germans, and a puppet French state was set up with its capital at Vichy. -
this act set up a system that would allow the United States to lend or lease war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." -
Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was code-named Operation Barbarossa, on June 22, 1941, deliberately breaking the nonaggression pact that the two countries had signed two years before. The invasion was the largest German military operation of World War II -
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 8:00 a.m. on Sunday. -
the United States Congress declared war on the Empire of Japan in response to its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent declaration of war the prior day. -
The attack on Pearl Harbor also launched a rash of fear about national security, especially on the West Coast. In February 1942, just two months later, President Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, issued Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans -
Japan hoped to defeat the US Pacific Fleet and use Midway as a base to attack Pearl Harbor, securing dominance in the region and then forcing a negotiated peace. -
The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Code named Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history. -
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Roosevelt, a frequent presence in Georgia, was visiting his Warm Springs retreat when he died on April 12, 1945. A special funeral train carried the president's casket from Warm Springs to Washington D.C., including a stop in Atlanta -
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known as Victory in Europe Day or V-E Day - celebrations erupted around the world to mark the end of World War II in Europe. The war had been raging for almost five years when U.S. and Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. -
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an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. -
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Japanese representatives signed the official Instrument of Surrender, prepared by the War Department and approved by President Harry