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Benito Mussolini's fascist government in Italy
By 1921, Mussolini had established the Fascist Party. Fascism stressed nationalism and placed the interests of the state above those of individuals. To strengthen the nation, Fascists argued, power must rest with a single strong leader and a small group of devoted party members. -
Mein Kampf
In his book Mein Kampf [My Struggle], Hitler set forth the basic beliefs of Nazism that became the plan of action for the Nazi Party. Nazism, the German brand of fascism, was based on extreme nationalism. Hitler, who had been born in Austria, dreamed of uniting all German-speaking people in a great German empire. -
Japanese invasion of Manchuria
Ignoring the protests of more moderate Japanese officials, the militarists launched a surprise attack and seized control of the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. Within several months, Japanese troops controlled the entire province, a large region about twice the size of Texas, that was rich in natural resources. -
Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany
The Great Depression helped the Nazis come to power. Because of war debts and dependence on American loans and investments, Germany’s economy was hit hard. By 1932, some 6 million Germans were unemployed. Many men who were out of work joined Hitler’s private army, the storm troopers. The German people were desperate and turned to Hitler as their last hope. By mid 1932, the Nazis had become the strongest political party in Germany. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed prime minister. -
Storm troopers
By 1932, some 6 million Germans were unemployed. Many men who were out of work joined Hitler’s private army, the storm troopers (or Brown Shirts). The German people were desperate and turned to Hitler as their last hope. -
Third Reich
Hitler quickly dismantled Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic. In its place he established the Third Reich, or Third German Empire. According to Hitler, the Third Reich would be a “Thousand-Year Reich”—it would last for a thousand years. -
Hitler's military build-up in Germany
In 1935, he began a military buildup in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. -
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia
By the fall of 1935, tens of thousands of Italian soldiers stood ready to advance on Ethiopia. The League of Nations reacted with brave talk of “collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression.”
When the invasion began, however, the League’s response was an ineffective economic boycott—little more than a slap on Italy’s wrist. -
Hitler invades the Rhineland
Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, a German region bordering France and Belgium that was demilitarized as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. -
Francisco Franco
In 1936, a group of
Spanish army officers led by General Francisco Franco,
rebelled against the Spanish republic. Revolts broke out all
over Spain, and the Spanish Civil War began. -
Rome-Berlin Axis
The Western democracies remained neutral. Although the Soviet Union sent equipment and advisers, Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco’s forces with troops, weapons, tanks, and fighter planes. The war forged a close relationship between the German and Italian dictators, who signed a formal alliance known as the Rome-Berlin Axis. -
Hitler's Anschluss
The majority of Austria’s 6 million people were Germans who favored unification with Germany. On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria unopposed. A day later, Germany announced that its Anschluss, or “union,” with Austria was complete. The United States and the rest of the world did nothing. -
Munich Agreement
Just when war seemed inevitable, Hitler invited French premier Édouard Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to meet with him in Munich. When they arrived, the führer declared that the annexation of the Sudetenland would be his “last territorial demand.” In their eagerness to avoid war, Daladier and Chamberlain chose to believe him. On September 30, 1938, they signed the Munich Agreement, which turned the Sudetenland over to Germany without a single shot being fired. -
Joseph Stalin's totalitarian government in the Soviet Union
By 1939, Stalin had firmly established a totalitarian government that tried to exert complete control over its citizens. In a totalitarian state, individuals have no rights, and the government suppresses all opposition. -
Phony war
On the Siegfried Line a few miles away German troops stared back. The blitzkrieg had given way to what the Germans called the sitzkrieg, and what some newspapers referred to as the phony war. After occupying eastern Poland, Stalin began annexing the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Late in 1939, Stalin sent his Soviet army into Finland. After three months of fighting, the outnumbered Finns surrendered. -
Nonaggression pact
As tensions rose over Poland, Stalin surprised everyone by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Once bitter enemies, on August 23, 1939 fascist Germany and communist Russia now committed never to attack each other. -
Blitzkrieg
German tanks raced across the Polish countryside, spreading terror and confusion. This invasion was the first test of Germany’s newest military strategy, the blitzkrieg, or lightning war. Blitzkrieg made use of advances in military technology—such as fast tanks and more powerful aircraft—to take the enemy by surprise and then quickly crush all opposition with overwhelming force. -
Britain and France declare war on Germany
On September 3, two days following the terror in Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. -
Battle of the Atlantic
The German aim in the Battle of the Atlantic was to prevent food and war materials from reaching Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
Britain depended on supplies from the sea. The 3,000-milelong shipping lanes from North America were her lifeline. Hitler knew that if he cut that lifeline, Britain would be starved into submission. It looked as though Hitler might succeed in his mission. In the first four months of 1942, the Germans sank 87 ships off the Atlantic shore. -
Hitler's invasion of the Netherlands
Hitler turned against the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which were overrun by the end of May. The phony war had ended. -
Germany and Italy's invasion of France
In less than a week, a makeshift fleet of fishing trawlers, tugboats, river barges, pleasure craft—more than 800 vessels in all—ferried about 330,000 British, French, and Belgian troops to safety across the Channel.A few days later, Italy entered the war on the side of Germany and invaded France from the south as the Germans closed in on Paris from the north. -
Marshal Philippe Petain
On June 22, 1940, at Compiègne, as William Shirer and the rest of the world watched, Hitler handed French officers his terms of surrender. Germans would occupy the northern part of France, and a Nazi-controlled puppet government, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, would be set up at Vichy, in southern France. -
Hitler's invasion of Denmark and Norway
on April 9, 1940, Hitler launched a surprise invasion of Denmark and Norway in order “to protect [those countries’] freedom and independence.” But in truth, Hitler planned to build bases along the coasts to strike at Great Britain. -
The Battle of Britain
The Luftwaffe began making bombing runs over Britain. Its goal was to gain total control of the skies by destroying Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). Hitler had 2,600 planes at his disposal. On a single day—August 15—approximately 2,000 German planes ranged over Britain. Every night for two solid months, bombers pounded London. The Battle of Britain raged on through the summer and fall. German planes pounded British targets. -
Lend-Lease Act
By late 1940, however, Britain had no more cash to spend in the arsenal of democracy. Roosevelt tried to help by suggesting a new plan that he called a lend-lease policy. Under this plan, the president would lend or lease arms and other supplies to “any country whose defense was vital to the United States. ”Isolationists argued bitterly against the plan, but most Americans favored it, and Congress passed the Lend Lease Act in March 1941. -
Office of Price Administration
The Office of Price Administration fought inflation by freezing prices on most goods. Congress also raised income tax rates and extended the tax to millions of people who had never paid it before. The higher taxes reduced consumer demand on scarce goods by leaving workers with less to spend. In addition, the government encouraged Americans to use their extra cash to buy war bonds. As a result of these measures, inflation remained below 30 percent for the entire period of World War II. -
Pearl Harbor attack
Early morning, 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 planes were barely disturbed by U.S. antiaircraft guns and blasted target after target. In less than two hours, they had killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178 more. The raid had sunk or damaged 21 ships, more than 300 aircraft were severely damaged or destroyed. -
Internment
Early in 1942, the War Department called for the mass evacuation of all Japanese Americans from Hawaii. General Delos Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, resisted the order because 37 percent 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 % of Hawaii’s Japanese-American population. -
Manhattan Project
The most significant achievement of the OSRD, however, was the secret development of a new weapon, the atomic bomb. The committee reported that it would take from three to five years to build an atomic bomb. For shorten that time, the OSRD set up an intensive program in 1942 to develop a bomb as quickly as possible.
Because much of the early research was performed at Columbia University in Manhattan, the Manhattan Project became the code name for research work that extended across the country. -
War Production Board
Besides controlling inflation, the government needed to ensure that the armed forces and war industries received the resources they needed to win the war. The War Production Board (WPB) assumed that responsibility.The WPB decided which companies would convert from peacetime to wartime production and allocated raw materials to key industries. -
U.S. convoy system
The Allies organized their cargo ships into convoys. They 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. -
Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps
The military’s work force needs were so great that Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall pushed for the formation of a Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC).Despite opposition from some members of Congress who scorned the bill as “the silliest piece of legislation” they had ever seen, the bill establishing the WAAC became law on May 15, 1942. In July 1943, after thousands of women had enlisted, the U.S. Army dropped the “auxiliary” status, and granted WACs full U.S. Army benefits. -
Battle of Stalingrad
The Germans had been fighting in the Soviet Union since June 1941. The German army confidently approached Stalingrad in August 1942. By the end of September, they controlled nine-tenths of the city. The Soviets saw the cold as an opportunity to roll fresh tanks across the frozen landscape and begin a massive counterattack. The German commander surrendered on January 31, 1943. Two days later, his starving troops also surrendered. -
Operation Torch
Operation Torch, an invasion of Axis-controlled North Africa, commanded by American General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In November 1942, some 107,000 Allied troops, the great majority of them Americans, landed in Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers in North Africa. -
Unconditional surrender
From there they sped eastward, chasing the Afrika Korps led by General Erwin Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox. After months of heavy fighting, the last of the Afrika Korps surrendered in May 1943. British general Harold Alexander sent a message to Churchill, reporting that “All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North Africanshores.” -
Bloody Anzio
Hitler was determined to stop the Allies in Italy rather than fight on German soil. One of the hardest battles the Allies encountered in Europe was fought less than 40 miles from Rome. This battle, “Bloody Anzio,” lasted four months—until the end of May 1944—and left about 25,000 Allied and 30,000 Axis casualties. -
D-Day
The Allied invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, was originally set for June 5, but bad weather forced a delay. Banking on a forecast for clearing skies, Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for D-Day—June 6, 1944, the first day of the invasion. Shortly after midnight, three divisions parachuted down behind German lines. They were followed in the early morning hours by thousands upon thousands of seaborne soldiers—the largest land-sea-air operation in army history. -
The Battle of the Bulge
On December 16 1944, eight German tank divisions broke through weak American defenses along an 80-mile front. Hitler hoped that a victory would split American and British forces and break up Allied supply lines. Tanks drove 60 miles into Allied territory, creating a bulge in the lines that gave this desperate last ditch offensive its name, the Battle of the Bulge. The battle raged for a month. When it was over, the Germans had been pushed back, and little seemed to have changed. -
Korematsu v. United States
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.” -
Harry S. Truman
President Roosevelt did not live to see V-E Day. On April 12, 1945, while posing for a portrait in Warm Springs, Georgia, the president
had a stroke and died. That night, Vice President Harry S. Truman
became the nation’s 33rd president. -
Death of Hitler
On April 29, Hetler married Eva Braun, his longtime companion.
The same day, he wrote out his last address to the German people.
In it he blamed the Jews for starting the war and his generalsfor losing it.
“I die with a happy heart aware of the immeasurable deeds of our soldiers at the front.
I myself and my wife choose to die in order to escape the disgrace of. . . capitulation,” he said.
The next day Hitler shot himself while his new wife swallowed poison. -
V - E Day
A week later, General Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. On May 8, 1945, the Allies celebrated V-E Day—Victory in Europe Day. The war in Europe was finally over.
