WWII

Pearl Harbor attack.

Dec 7, 1941

a Japanese dive-bomber swooped low over Pearl Harbor—the largest U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The bomber was followed by
more than 180 Japanese warplanes launched from six aircraft carriers. the Japanese had killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178 more. The surprise raid had sunk or damaged 21 ships, including 8 battleships—nearly the whole U.S. Pacific fleet. More than 300 aircraft were severely damaged or destroyed.

Battle of Stalingrad

1942

the bitter cold had stopped them in
their tracks outside the Soviet cities of Moscow and Leningrad. When spring
came, the German army confidently approached Stalingrad in August 1942. The Luftwaffe—the German air force—prepared the way with nightly bombing raids over the city. Nearly every wooden building in Stalingrad. For weeks the Germans pressed in on Stalingrad, conquering it house by
house in brutal hand-to-hand combat, they controlled
nine-tenths of the city—or what was left of it.

Internment

1942

Early in 1942, the War Department called for the mass evacuation o
all Japanese Americans from Hawaii. General Delos Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, resisted the order because 37% of the people in Hawaii were
Japanese Americans. To remove them would have destroyed the islands economy
and hindered U.S. military operations there however, he was eventually forced
to order the internment, or confinement, of 1,444 Japanese Americans, 1 percent of Hawaii’s Japanese-American population.

Battle of the Atlantic

1942

The German
aim in the Battle of the Atlantic was to prevent food and war materials from
reaching Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Unprotected American ships proved to be
easy targets for the Germans. In the first four
months of 1942, the
Germans sank 87 ships
off the Atlantic shore.
Seven months into the
year, German wolf packs
had destroyed a total of
681 Allied ships in the
Atlantic. The Allies responded by organizing their cargo ships into convoys, ships traveling together for protection

Operation Torch

1942

Operation Torch was the name given to the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. ... In 1942, the British did not feel strong enough to attack Germany via France but the victory at El Alamein in November 1942 was a great stimulus to the Allies to attack the Axis forces in North Africa.

U.S Convoy system

1943

were groups of ships traveling together for mutual protection, as they had done
in the First World War. The convoys were escorted across the Atlantic by destroyers equipped with sonar for detecting submarines underwater. They were also
accompanied by airplanes that used radar to spot U-boats on the ocean’s surface.
With this improved tracking, the Allies were able to find and destroy German Uboats faster than the Germans could build them.
losses had “reached an unbearable height.”

Korematsu v. United States

1944

No specific charges were ever filed against Japanese Americans, and no evidence of subversion was ever found. Faced with expulsion, terrified families were
forced to sell their homes, businesses, and all their belongings for less than their
true value. In 1944, the Supreme Court decided, in
Korematsu v. United States, that the government’s policy of evacuating Japanese
Americans to camps was justified on the basis of “military necessity.”