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Japan's Invasion of China
The invasion started in July 1937 when the Japanese claimed that they were fired at by Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. Using this as an excuse, the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China using the conquered Manchuria as a launching base for their troops. Within 5 months, one million Chinese were under Japanese control. -
Germany invades Poland
Known as the beginning of World War II, German forces bombard Poland on land and from the air as Adolf Hitler seeks to regain lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. Great Britain would respond with bombing raids over Germany three days later. -
The Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain was the German air force's attempt to gain air superiority over the British Royal Air Force from July to September 1940. Germany's failure was one of the turning points of World War Two and prevented Germany from invading Britain. -
Tripartite Pact
The Tripartite Pact was the pact signed by the Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, in Berlin. The Pact provided for mutual assistance should any of the Axis countries suffer attack by any nation not already involved in the war. This act was aimed at the United States, who was neutral at the time, in order to cause them to think twice before entering the war. -
Lend-Lease Act
The Lend-Lease Act was created for the means of providing U.S. military aid to foreign nations during World War II. It allowed the president to transfer arms or any other defense materials for which Congress appropriated money to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” -
German Blitzkrieg on Soviet Union
Blitzkriegs were a military tactic by the Germans also known at "lightning war." The German forces launched the same series of short attacks on the Soviets, and although they succeeded in oushing the Soviets back into Moscow, the Germans were defeated in te Battle of Stalingrad. -
Leningrad Blockade
After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, a German army surrounded the city of Leningrad in an extended siege beginning that September. In subsequent months, the city sought to establish supply lines from the Soviet interior and evacuate its citizens, often using a hazardous “ice and water road” across Lake Ladoga. A successful land corridor was created in January 1943, and the Red Army finally managed to drive off the Germans the following year. -
Bombing of Pearl Harbor
This was the trigger for the American entrance into World War II. Hundreds of Japanses fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in near Honolulu, Hawaii. More than 2,000 American soldiers were killed and another 1,000 were injured. The next day, Presdient Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan, who then, joined by Germany, resiprocated the action and declared war on the U.S. -
Wannsee Conference
The conference was made up of several officials from various Nazi ministries and organizations at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. The point was to discuss what they would do with the Jews. Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation to the island of Madagascar. Reinhard Heydrich proposed simply transporting Jews from every corner Europe to concentration camps in Poland and working them to death. Anyone who survived would be killed by "gas vans." -
Battle of Midway
Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States defeated Japan in one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II. Thanks in part to major advances in code breaking, the United States was able to preempt and counter Japan’s planned ambush of its few remaining aircraft carriers, inflicting permanent damage on the Japanese Navy. An important turning point in the Pacific campaign, the victory allowed the United States and its allies to move into an offensive position. -
D-Day
On this day, 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion was one of the largest military assaults in history and required extensive planning. Prior to D-Day, the Allies conducted a large-scale deception campaign designed to mislead the Germans about the intended invasion target. By late August 1944, all of northern France had been liberated. -
Yalta Conference
The February 1945 Yalta Conference was the second wartime meeting of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the conference, the three leaders agreed to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender and began plans for a post-war world. -
Iwo Jima/Okinawa
The Battle of Iwo Jima was fought between the Japanese army and the United States Marine Corps. The battle, known to the USMC as "Operation Detachment," lasted until March 26, 1945 when the last Japanese soldiers were captured or killed. -
Hitler’s suicide
Because of Germany's imminent downfall, Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, burrowed away in a refurbished air-raid shelter, consumed a cyanide capsule, then shot himself with a pistol as his “1,000-year” Reich collapses above him. The bodies of Hitler and Eva were cremated in the chancellery garden by the bunker survivors and reportedly later recovered in part by Russian troops. A German court finally officially declared Hitler dead, but not until 1956. -
VE Day
Victory in Europe Day, generally known as VE Day or simply V Day was the public holiday to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. -
Postdam Conference
The Postdam Conference was the last WWII meeting held by the Big Three: Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchhill, and Joseph Stalin. The leaders arrived at various agreements on the German economy, punishment for war criminals, as well as land boundaries and reparations. The Big Three also issued a declaration demanding unconditional surrender from Japan. -
Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In the August of 1945 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 announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II. -
VJ Day
On this 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 “Victoryover Japan Day,” or simply “V-J Day.” -
Formation of the U.N.
The name "United Nations", coined by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was first used in the Declaration by United Nations of January 1, 1942 when representatives of 26 nations pledged their Governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers. The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, when the Charter had been ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and by a majority of of other signatories. -
The Truman Doctrine
President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Europe, in which the United States gave $17 billion in economic support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II. -
NATO
In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps formalized the political division of the European continent that had taken place since World War II. This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War. -
Mao Zedong &People’s Republic of China
Naming himself head of state, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong officially proclaims the existence of the People’s Republic of China. The loss of China, the largest nation in Asia, to communism was a severe blow to the United States, which was still reeling from the Soviet Union’s detonation of a nuclear device one month earlier. -
Korean War
The Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. -
Stalin’s death; Khrushchev
After the death of Stalin, there was a huge hole in Soviet leadership. The Soviet government announced that Nikita Khrushchev had been selected as one of five men named to the new office of Secretariat of the Communist Party. Khrushchev’s selection was a crucial first step in his rise to power in the Soviet Union. -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The members signed a treaty establishing the pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The divisive war ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973 and the unification of Vietnam under Communist control two years later. -
Sputnik
The Soviet Union begins the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets was the beginning of the “space race.” -
Bay of Pigs
This was a plan devised by President John F. Kennedy so that he could show the Russians, Chinses, and even skeptical Americans how serious he was about winning the Cold War. He trained and equipped a guerilla army of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. The Cuban exiles used American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields. The Cubans somehow knew about the attack and moved out of haarm's way. Later, the Cubans overpowered the exiles. -
Berlin Wall
The Communist government of the East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete “a wall between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens could cross the border. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary. -
Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Appointed in 1985, Gorbachev's domestic reforms and nuclear disarmament deals helped end the Cold War but ultimately led to the dramatic downfall of communism in Europe. -
Soviet Union falls
On Christmas day,the once-mighty Soviet Union had fell, largely due to the great number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. However, Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and resigned from his job on December 25.
