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General Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on January 26, 1880. After graduating from West Point in 1903, he fought in World War I, and in World War II was the commander of Allied forces in the Pacific. When he criticized President Harry Truman's handling of the Korean War, he was relieved of his command. MacArthur died on April 5, 1964, and was buried in Norfolk, Virginia. -
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt directed organization of the Nation's manpower and resources for global war.
He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. -
Benito Mussolini
In March 1919, Mussolini formed the Fascist Party, galvanising the support of many unemployed war veterans.
He organised them into armed squads known as Black Shirts, who terrorised their political opponents. -
Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo was Prime Minister of Japan when the attack on Pearl Harbour took place plunging the Far East into a war which was to end with the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1945.
For his part in leading Japan into World War Two, Tojo was executed as a war criminal. -
Harry S. Truman
As President, Truman made some of the most crucial decisions in history. Soon after V-E Day, the war against Japan had reached its final stage.
An urgent plea to Japan to surrender was rejected. Truman, after consultations with his advisers, ordered atomic bombs dropped on cities devoted to war work.
Two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese surrender quickly followed. -
Dwight D. Eisenhower
He commanded the Allied Forces landing in North Africa in November 1942; on D-Day, 1944, he was Supreme Commander of the troops invading France. -
Joseph McCarthy
When the United States entered the Second Word War McCarthy resigned as a circuit judge and joined the U.S. Marines.
On his first day in the Senate, McCarthy called a press conference where he proposed a solution to a coal-strike that was taking place at the time. McCarthy called for John L. Lewis and the striking miners to be drafted into the Army.
If the men still refused to mine the coal, McCarthy suggested they should be court-martialed for insubordination and shot. -
Bolsheviks
Members of a wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which, led by Lenin, seized control of the government in Russia (October 1917) and became the dominant political power. -
Adolf Hitler
Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 began World War Two.
In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor of a coalition government.
He quickly took dictatorial powers and began to institute anti-Jewish laws. -
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties -
Downtown Los Alamos
Los Alamos is best, and most widely known for being the place of the development of the world’s first atomic bombs. Los Alamos Laboratory was known as Project Y, and was conceived during the early part of World War 2. Whereas the term Manhattan Project came from the fact that the company developing the atom bombs was the Manhattan Engineering District of the War Department. -
Mutually Assured Destruction
Mutual assured destruction, or mutually assured destruction (MAD), is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would effectively result in the complete, utter and irrevocable annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. -
Pearl Harbor
Photograph from a Japanese plane of Battleship Row at the beginning of the attack. The explosion in the center is a torpedo strike on the USS Oklahoma. Two attacking Japanese planes can be seen: one over the USS Neosho and one over the Naval Yard.
The Pearl Harbor attack was intended to neutralize the U.S. Naval Fleet so Japan could safely take military action on Southeast Asia. But they obviously had done the biggest mistake they could possibly make, whereas they woke up a sleeping giant in do -
Japanese American Internment
Japanese americans were put into camps after the attacks on pearl harbor and to protect against espionage and sabotage to national defense materials. -
United Nations
The name "United Nations", coined by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt was first used in the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942, during the Second World War, when representatives of 26 nations pledged their Governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers.
The forerunner of the United Nations was the League of Nations, an organization conceived in similar circumstances during the first World War, and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles " -
Manhattan Project
On August 2, 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify uranium-235, which could be used to build an atomic bomb. It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known then only as "The Manhattan Project." Simply put, the Manhattan Project was committed to expediting research that would produce a v -
Atomic Bomb
Who: J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist brought into the Atomic bomb project to calculate the success of the the new endeavor that would become ultimate destruction for the axis powers. Albert Einstein played the role of publicizer in the Manhattan project after refugee scientists came forward to him with the fear of Nazi’s developing nuclear weapons first. The Atomic bomb was a gamble to win the war in the long run with the risk of losing the war in the short term. The two A-bomb -
Iron Curtain
The military, political, and ideological barrier established between the Soviet bloc and western Europe from 1945 to 1990. -
Hiroshima Nagasaki
These are the bombings of Hiroshima (left), and Nagasaki (right) during World War 2. Hiroshima was the first to be bombed and let it be known, that the Japanese were fairly warned with threats of “prompt and utter destruction” of the Japanese lands. These threats being ignored, the U.S. continued with their plans and bombed these both places. These two places are the only times a country has ever used nuclear weaponry in war to date. The first bomb was named “Little Boy”, and the second was name -
Cold War
It was tensions between the United States and the USSR there wasn’t really any direct military hostilities between them but they were arming themselves for a nuclear war against each other if either side decided to bomb the other. -
Loyalty Board
Whereas each employee of the Government of the United States is endowed with a measure of trusteeship over the democratic processes which are the heart and sinew of the United States; andWhereas it is of vital importance that persons employed in the Federal service be of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States; and
Whereas, although the loyalty of by far the overwhelming majority of all Government employees is beyond question, the presence within the Government service of any -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
the air lift was to send goods and supplies to berlin who were being blocked by the communist forces: -
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April 4, 1949, which sought to create a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and eastern Europe after World War II.
Its original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. -
. Domino Theory
A theory that if one nation comes under Communist control, then neighboring nations will also come under Communist control. -
Korean War
Korea was split into two countries the north being communist and the south being democratic. The korean war started in 1950 when the north decided to invade the south and try to unite all of korea under one big communist regime. -
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Julius was arrested in July 1950, and Ethel in August of that same year, on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage.
Specifically, they were accused of heading a spy ring that passed top-secret information concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
The Rosenbergs vigorously protested their innocence, but after a brief trial in March 1951 they were convicted.
On April 5, 1951, a judge sentenced them to death. -
Army-McCarthy Hearings
A series of hearings held by the United States Subcommittee on Investigations between April 1954 and June 1954. The hearings were held for the purpose of investigating conflicting accusations between the US Army and Senator Joseph Mccarthy The Army accused chief committee counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to G. David schine a former McCarthy aide and a friend of Cohn's. McCarthy counter-charged that this accusation was made in bad faith and in retaliation for -
Alger Hiss
In 1934, Hiss's services were loaned out to the Nye Committee of the U.S. Senate, which was investigating profiteering by the munitions industry.
During this time, New Deal legislation was constantly under attack by conservatives, and, as a lawyer, Hiss became a point man whose specialty was defending the constitutionality of the new reforms.
In 1939, Hiss became assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department's Political Adviser in Charge of Far Eastern Affairs. -
Nikita Khrushchev
In relations with the West, Khrushchev's period in office was marked by a series of crises - the shooting down of an American U2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, most significantly, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. -
Sputnik
was the first artificial satellite launched by the Soviets and the United States was surprised by how technically advanced the Soviets were who they considered to be inferior. -
Nasa
During the late 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of ensuring American leadership in technology.
A major step forward came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958, a cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth.
A full-scale crisis resulted on October 4, 1957 when -
Military-Industrial Complex
a country's military establishment and the industries that produce arms and other military equipment; "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex"--Dwight David Eisenhower -
The Berlin Wall
was constructed on August 13, 1961 throughout West Berlin and completely cut off East Germany and East Berlin. The wall was supposedly erected to protect the Eastern Bloc’s population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent “the will of the people” from creating a socialist state in Eastern Germany. Basically, the wall served for the purpose to prevent massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War 2 period.
