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Japanese invasion of China
Japan occupied Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchuko. The League of Nations condemned Japan's actions, leading to Japan's withdrawal from that organization. In 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge incident launched the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japan captured Shanghai in the Battle of Shanghai and Nanking in the Nanking Massacre, in which 300,000 Chinese were killed. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor this war became integrated into the WWII. 20 million Chinese were killed. -
Rape of Nanjing
In late 1937, over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people–including both soldiers and civilians–in the Chinese city of Nanking (or Nanjing). The horrific events are known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, as between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted. Nanking, then the capital of Nationalist China, was left in ruins, and it would take decades for the city and citizens to recover from the savage attacks. -
Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact
Hitler and Stalin signed a non-agression pact, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. Secret protocols of the treaty defined the territorial spheres of influence Germany and Russia would have after a successful invasion of Poland. According to the agreement, Russia would have control over Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, while Germany would gain control over Lithuania and Danzig. Poland would be partitioned into three major areas. -
German invasion of Poland
One of Adolf Hitler's first major foreign policy initiatives after coming to power was to sign a nonaggression pact with Poland.This move was not popular with many Germans who supported Hitler.They resented the fact that Poland had received the former German provinces of West Prussia, Poznan, and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. However, Hitler sought the nonaggression pact in order to neutralize the possibility of a French-Polish military alliance against Germany -
German Blitzkrieg
Conventional wisdom traces blitzkrieg, “lightning war,” to the development in Germany between 1918 and 1939 of a body of doctrine using mobility to prevent repetition of the attritional deadlock of World War I. Soldiers such as Hans von Seeckt and Heinz Guderian allegedly perceived more clearly than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe the military potential of the internal-combustion engine combined with modern communications technology. It was first used in the Invasion of Poland. -
Fall of Paris
On June 14, 1940, Parisians awoke to the sound of a German-accented voice announcing via loudspeakers that a curfew was being imposed for 8 p.m. that evening-as German troops enter and occupy Paris. By the time German tanks rolled into Paris, 2 million Parisians had already fled, with good reason. In short order, the German Gestapo went to work: arrests, interrogations, and spying were the order of the day, as a gigantic swastika flew beneath the Arc de Triomphe. -
Operation Barbarossa
Germany invaded its erstwhile ally the Soviet Union in World War II in an assault code named Operation Barbarossa. Up to that point, Adolf Hitler‘s Nazi German army enjoyed a string of almost unbroken military successes, but the failure of German troops to defeat Soviet forces signaled a crucial turning point in the war. -
Pearl Harbor
The Japanese attacked the United States without warning. The attack lasted 110 minutes, from 7:55 a.m. until 9:45 a.m. A total of 2,335 U.S. servicemen were killed and 1,143 were wounded. Sixty-eight civilians were also killed and 35 were wounded. The Japanese lost 65 men, with an additional soldier being captured. -
Wannsee Conference
Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons. "Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west," Heydrich stated. The minutes of that meeting have been preserved but edited by Heydrich substituting the coded language Nazis used when referring to jews -
Bataan Death March
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. The marchers made the trek in intense heat and were subjected to harsh treatment by Japanese guards. Thousands perished in what became known as the Bataan Death March. -
Kasserine Pass
Kasserine Pass became the focal point in the North African campaign. The Axis powers planned to use the Kasserine Pass to prevent General Dwight Eisenhower from concentrating his forces against Tunis. The Battle of Kasserine Pass was Erwin Rommel's last great achievement in North Africa. Fighting around the Kasserine Pass began in December 1942. -
Operation Gomorrah
Operation Gomorrah was an aerial bombing campaign that occurred in the European Theater of Operations during World War II. .Operation Gomorrah destroyed a significant percentage of the city of Hamburg, leaving over 1 million residents homeless and killing 40,000-50,000 civilians. In the immediate wake of the raids, over two-thirds of Hamburg's population fled the city. The raids severely shook Nazi leadership, leading Hitler to be concerned that similar raids on force Germany out of the war. -
Allied invasion of Italy
In the final push to defeat the Axis powers of Italy and Germany during World War II (1939-45), the U.S. and Great Britain, the leading Allied powers, planned to invade Italy. Beyond their goal of crushing Italian Axis forces, the Allies wanted to draw German troops away from the main Allied advance through Nazi-occupied northern Europe to Berlin, Germany. The Allied advance through Italy produced some of the most bitter, costly fighting of the war, much of it in treacherous mountain terrain. -
D Day
On June 6, 1944, more than 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline, to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which, “we will accept nothing less than full victory.” More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end, the Allies gained a foot-hold in Continental Europe. The cost in lives on D-Day was high. -
Battle of the Bulge
With the onset of winter, the German army launched a counteroffensive that was intended to cut through the Allied forces in a manner that would turn the tide of the war in Hitler's favor. The battle that ensued is known historically as The Battle of the Bulge. The courage and fortitude of the American Soldier was tested against great adversity. Nevertheless, the quality of his response ultimately meant the victory of freedom over tyranny. -
Battle of Iwo Jima
The capture of Iwo Jima was part of a three-point plan the Americans had for winning the war in the Far East. By 1944, America and her allies in the Pacific War had the ascendancy. In the west, the Japanese were being turned back in Burma and island hopping had isolated Japanese forces in the eastern sector. -
Battle of Okinawa
The capture of Okinawa was part of a three-point plan the Americans had for winning the war in the Far East. Okinawa was to prove a bloody battle even by the standards of the war in the Far East but it was to be one of the major battles of WW2. Alongside, the territorial re-conquest of land in the Far East, the Americans wished to destroy what was left of Japan’s merchant fleet and use airstrips in the region to launch bombing raids on Japan’s industrial heartland. -
VE day
the Western Allies—whose chief commanders in the field were Omar N. Bradley and Bernard Law Montgomery—crossed the Rhine after having smashed through the strongly fortified Siegfried Line and overran West Germany. German collapse came after the meeting (Apr. 25) of the Western and Russian armies at Torgau in Saxony, and after Hitler's death amid the ruins of Berlin, which was falling to the Russians under marshals Zhukov and Konev. -
Bombing of Hirishima & Nagasaki
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; 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. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15. -
VJ Day
It was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II. Since then, both August 14 and August 15 have been known as “Victory over Japan Day,” or simply “V-J Day.” The term has also been used for September 2, 1945, when Japan’s formal surrender took place aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
