Ww2 Study Guide 2015

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

General Dwight Eisenhower (US), General Bernard Montgomery (GB) against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (G)

Hitler and the Nazi dogma looked at the human race like a pyramid with the German race, the Aryan race, on top. In the Nazi point of view the Slavs and other "races" who make up the East European population were considered non-Aryan or "sub-human". Croats, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians were all considered sub-human and their lives and land were deemed dispensable in the name of Hitler's view of increasing Germany’s living space.

The League of Nations, which was known for its inaction, did nothing to prevent Italy from attacking Ethiopia. One of the major problems for the League of Nations prior to World War II was its inaction to prevent aggression of any kind. The only action the League of Nations took was an oil boycott of Italy, which many countries disobeyed.

By August 1936 the rebels held most of the north while the government controlled the south and the coast. Both sides appealed for foreign aid but fatally for the Spanish Republic, the French and the British decided on a policy of non-intervention. The Germans and the Italians helped the Nationalists while the USSR sent aid to the Republicans. German transport planes helped ferry Franco’s army from Morocco to Spain, the first example of direct foreign involvement.

Japan no longer had enough resources to properly defend itself or to provide food and medicine for its people. The U.S. began waves of aerial bombings in March and May. On August 6th the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and then August 9th on Nagasaki. The Japanese government had sought to surrender earlier but would not agree to the Allied ultimatum, the Potsdam Declaration, of an unconditional surrender. Six days after the detonation over Nagasaki, on August 15, Japan announced its surrender to the Allied Powers, signing the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, officially ending the Pacific War and therefore World War II.

Appeasement was a policy adopted by Britain during the 1930s. This policy developed from the growing belief that some countries, especially Germany, had been unfairly treated in the peace settlement of 1918-1919. When they began to demand aggressively that some terms in the Versailles treaty be scrapped, some people argued that this was only right. If their grievances could be settled by negotiation, it would avoid the need for the aggression. Once they were "appeased" in this way, they would act in the same way as others in foreign affairs. This policy was used in the 1930s to try to prevent both Italy and Germany from going to war.

Following the defeat of the Axis Powers in North Africa, there was disagreement between the Allies as to what the next step should be. Winston Churchill in particular wanted to invade Italy, which in November 1942 he called "the soft underbelly of the Axis". Popular support in Italy for the war was declining, and he believed an invasion would remove Italy, and thus the influence of Axis forces in the Mediterranean Sea, opening it to the Allies.

The stemming of the last phase of the great German offensive was partly due to the effects of the Russian winter, whose subzero temperatures were the most severe in several decades. In October and November a wave of frostbite cases had decimated the ill-clad German troops, for whom provisions of winter clothing had not been made, while the icy cold paralyzed the Germans’ mechanized transport, tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The Soviets, by contrast, were well clad and tended to fight more effectively in winter than did the Germans.

Mexico submitted its protest to the League of Nations in Geneva on March 19, 1938. The League of Nations records show that no other country acted. On June 11, 1938, Chile expressed its regret that Austria had disappeared as a member of the League of Nations and the representative of the Spanish Republican government at the League accused Nazi Germany on the same day, stating that “they have devoured Austria; they are trying to reduce Spain to ashes; they menace the very existence of Czechoslovakia.” The League did nothing.

Gathering in Munich on September 29, Chamberlain, Hitler, and Mussolini were joined by French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. Talks progressed through the day and into the night with a Czechoslovak delegation forced to wait outside. In the negotiations, Mussolini presented a plan which called for the Sudetenland to be ceded to Germany in exchange for guarantees that it would mark the end of German territorial expansion. Though presented by the Italian leader, the plan had been produced by the German government. Desiring to avoid war, Chamberlain and Daladier were willing to agree to this "Italian plan." Though initially unwilling, the Czechoslovaks were forced to submit.

When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan the day after the attack, the answer was a resounding YES. Americans that had been deeply divided over how much aid to give the Allies were now united in a common purpose: make the Japanese pay for their attack and rid the world of Nazism and Fascism.

Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful invasion of German-occupied France during World War II. The operation commenced on 6 June 1944 commonly known as D-Day.

Island-Hopping, was a military strategy employed by the Allies in the Pacific War against Japan during WWII. The idea was to bypass heavily fortified Japanese positions and instead concentrate limited Allied resources on strategically important islands that were not well defended but capable of supporting the drive to the main islands of Japan.

Appeasement in a political context is a diplomatic policy of making political or material concessions to an enemy power in order to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany between 1937-39.

The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan during WWII to systematically exterminate the Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe through genocide. This policy was formulated at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was concluded only a few days before the beginning of WWII and divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. By doing so Stalin hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and to gain time to build up the Soviet military.

In every country they occupied, with the exception of Denmark and Bulgaria, the Nazis found many locals who were willing to cooperate fully in the murder of the Jews. This was particularly true in Eastern Europe, where there was a long standing tradition of virulent anti-Semitism.

While communism is a system based around a theory of economic equality and advocates for a classless society, fascism is a nationalistic, top-down system with rigid class roles that is ruled by an all-powerful dictator. Fascism believes in private property while communism believes in sharing everything. One of the aims of the Axis (fascist) Powers was to combat the spread of communism.

Germany invaded Norway for several reasons: strategically; most importantly to secure ice-free harbors from which its naval forces could seek to control the North Atlantic and to secure the availability of iron ore from mines in Sweden.

The Battle of Britain was the German air force's attempt to gain air superiority over the RAF (Royal Air Force) from July to September 1940. Their ultimate failure was one of the turning points of World War Two and prevented Germany from invading Britain.

Hideki Tojo was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, the leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and the 40th Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II, from October 17, 1941 to July 22, 1944.

Marked by constant close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as the single largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the Germans make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II–the German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses.

The Congress passed the Lend Lease Act in early 1941. It not only empowered President Roosevelt to transfer defense materials, services, and information to any foreign government whose defense he deemed vital to that of the United States, but also left to his discretion what he should ask in return. An enormous grant of power, it gave Roosevelt virtually a free hand. Congress appropriated funds generously, amounting to almost $13 billion by November 1941. Other countries besides Britain began receiving lend-lease aid by this time, including China and the Soviet Union.

The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals (trials), held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany.

The Battle of Midway is often cited as a critical turning point in World War II. The Battle of Midway, in which an outnumbered American fleet defeated the powerful Japanese Imperial Navy, brought an end to the Japanese invasion in the Pacific. The United States gained an advantage early on, when its intelligence service cracked the Japanese naval code and intercepted orders from Japanese Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku to his fleet concerning an attack on American forces. Having divined that the Japanese planned to descend upon the U.S. air base at Midway, the Americans made immediate preparations for a preemptive strike on a Japanese carrier, which took place on June 3, 1942.

The Japanese had no way of knowing for certain which, if indeed, any, of the ships of the US fleet would be in Pearl Harbor when their attack arrived. The Japanese hoped to find American aircraft carriers in the Harbor, but did not. The US had only three aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and only another three in the Atlantic. The Japanese had more carriers than the US and all of theirs were in the Pacific. One of the US carriers was undergoing extensive refitting on the West Coast of the US and would be unavailable for months, leaving only two ready to fight. If the Japanese had been lucky enough to catch either of these in Pearl Harbor, or both, the course of the war would have been drastically altered. These carriers were the ships that allowed the US Navy to turn back the Japanese in May 1942 at the Coral Sea, and the ships, which made possible the crushing American victory at Midway in June of 1942, which was the turning point of the Pacific War. If either or both of the American carriers were lost at Pearl Harbor those battles could not have had the results they did, and the ultimate result was that it probably would have taken at least another year or two to finally defeat Japan. The failure to find the American carriers in Pearl Harbor is probably the main blemish on what was a bold, daring and flawlessly executed plan by the Japanese.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland – the start of WWII in Europe.

Victory in Europe Day!

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – the start of WWII in the Pacific.

D-Day. 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.

Kristallnacht was a nationwide, state-sponsored pogrom (a spree of violence directed against Jews) conducted throughout Germany and Austria (which had been annexed by Germany in March 1938) from the evening and night of November 9 through the following afternoon. It was presented by the Nazi regime as a spontaneous public outburst provoked by the assassination of a minor German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan.

The reason it was used was to hopefully reach the Japanese people, who were willing to fight to the last man for the emperor, as women and children armed themselves with bamboo sticks to fight off invading Americans. The reason for dropping the bomb was because Truman wanted to avoid the incredible loss of life if the Allied powers invaded Japan, which MIGHT have exceeded one million judging from American losses during the island-hopping campaign at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The bomb was a way around anyone (on the Allied side that is) from having to die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland, dropping the first two atomic bombs to make Japan realize that their entire country could easily be completely destroyed IF they did not provide unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers, avoiding even bigger losses of human life vs. the approx. 210,000 Japanese that lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Following Japan's formal surrender in September 1945, there was much speculation about whether the Emperor would be punished as a war criminal. Hirohito himself frequently expressed his willingness to abdicate as a token of his responsibility for the war. But the American authorities, including Gen. Douglas MacArthur, decided that it would better serve the goals of domestic stability and internal reform of Japan to let him remain as ruler. The Emperor would once and for all give up any claims to being a sacred monarch by issuing a radio speech that denied his divinity as a descendant of the sun-goddess.

A German term for “lightning war,” blitzkrieg is a military tactic designed to create disorganization among enemy forces through the use of mobile forces and locally concentrated firepower.

The Nuremberg Defense refers to the legal strategy employed by many of the defendants at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Many of those defendants claimed that they were not guilty of the charges against them as they were "only following orders."