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Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler re-armed the German military and invaded the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland(part of Czechoslovakia).

Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler re-armed the German military and invaded the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland(part of Czechoslovakia).

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During the 1930s, the ( )impacted not just the United States but the entire world. Hit particularly hard was ( ), which was already struggling to make its reparations payments from World War 1.

Great Depression

Germany

In response to the economic crisis ( ) dictators came to power in key world nations; they emphasized an aggressive form of nationalism and argued that territorial expansion would solve economic problems. Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and Hideki Tojo in Japan.

fascist

When Japan invaded ( ) in 1932 and the ( ) refused to intervene, Hitler began to violate the T Versaillesreaty of in an effort to restore German pride.

China

Leauge of nations

Treaty of versailles

The Allied nations (France and Britain), wary of entering into a new war with Germany, pursued a policy of appeasement: allowing Hitler to take territory in exchange for his promise he would stop.

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Secretly, Hitler signed a Nonaggression Pact with Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, which laid out plans for another territorial expansion: Poland.

4

In 1938 Italy, Japan, and Germany signed a formal military alliance which solidified them as the ().

Axis powers

In September, 1939 Germany invaded Poland - Britain and France declared war. The Germans used a tactic they called blitzkrieg("lightning war"): using tanks and mechanized warfare to overwhelm an enemy. Poland surrendered within 3 weeks.

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Hitler then turned West to attack the Allies. Throughout 1940 the German army invaded and conquered Denmark, Norway , France, and pushed the British back across the sea to fight on alone.

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The United States initially tried to remain neutral in the conflict, confident that its position across the sea would prevent any direct aggression against it.

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However, FDR did take steps to prepare the nation for the possibility of war. He expanded the Pan-American Protection Zone, allowing the U.S. navy to escort supply convoys to Europe, instituted a military draft, and pushed the Lend-Lease Act through Congress: a law which supplied the British with war materials for the fight against Germany.

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Britain's position became better when in June, 1941 Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa. However, the British were still in desperate need of more help.

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The United States was roused to action on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese Empire attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and destroyed the majority of America's Pacific Fleet. Over 2,000 Americans died in the attack, but the Japanese were unable to destroy America's aircraft carriers which left American naval power intact.

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America declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany then declared war on the United States. The Philippines were conquered by Japan as they tried to reach Australia, and 80,000 U.S. soldiers were taken prisoner. These soldiers were taken on the Bataan Death March to 4 Japanese prison camps.

a

Despite the Japanese aggression, American military planners chose to focus on fighting ( ) first - fearing that Hitler was the greater threat to world peace.

Germany

The remnants of the Great Depression came to an end in the United States as it entered the war. Factories that had been dormant for years were retooled to produce tanks, planes, and weaponry. The ( ) was created to centralize American war production.

Office of War Mobilization

The U.S. military planned three invasions to fight back against the Nazis. Operation Torch: the invasion of North Africa. Operation Avalanche: the invasion of Italy to overthrow Mussolini. Operation Overlord: the main assault to retake France and Western Europe.

a

When the newly trained American army invaded North Africa in 1943, American forces suffered a devastating defeat at the ( ) in Tunisia, but they learned valuable lessons. From there, American and British forces converged on Hitler's North Afrika Corps. and forced their surrender.

Battle of Kasserine Pass

Launched later in 1943, the invasion of Italy went smoother for the American and British troops. Italian troops surrendered quickly and overthrew ( ). Hitler rushed in German troops to halt the American advance.

Mussolini

Allied planes began a ( ) campaign against German industrial centers to reduce their ability to wage war.

carpet bombing

At the same time, technological advancements like ( ) and ( ) allowed the Allies to defeat Hitler's submarine fleet in the Atlantic. All that remained was Hitler's land-based army.

radar

sonar

June 6, 1944 often called ( ) was the beginning of the campaign to retake mainland Europe. American, British, and Canadian troops landed in Normandy, France against fierce German resistance. At the cost of some 300,000 lives the Allies retook Paris, France one month later.

D-Day

Hitler was retreating on all fronts by late 1944. In the winter of 1945 he launched one final counterattack against American forces in the Ardennes Forest, Belgium. The ( ) succeeded in driving American lines back, but eventually the Germans were overwhelmed by U.S. manpower and supplies.

Battle of the Bulge

On ( ) American and Soviet forces met for the first time and effectively surrounded the remaining German troops defending Berlin.

Elbe Day

F.D.R, Churchill, and Stalin met at the ( ) in 1945 to talk about the post-war world. They agreed that Germany and Japan must surrender unconditionally, that war criminals must be brought to justice, and that they would divide up Germany after the war.

Yalta Conference

The ( ) was fought solely by Soviet forces while American and British troops provided support and reinforcements if necessary. Hitler committed suicide during the battle and turned over leadership to German Naval Commander Karl Donitz. Donitz agreed to unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945.

Battle of Berlin

One of the darkest chapters of WWII, the ( ) was the systematic extermination of over 6,000,000 European Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups that Hitler deemed undesirable.

Nazi Holocaust

The ( ), originally laid out by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, called for the eradication of the Jewish race because of an alleged conspiracy that they sought to control the world economy.

Final Solution

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis set up ( ) like Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland, where most of the European Jews resided. The ( ) was the first to discover these camps in late 1944.

death camps

Soviet Union

In Germany, ( ) like Dachau and Buchenwald were set up as labor camps to provide assistance to the German military. These camps were later liberated by American and British soldiers in 1945.

concentration camps

Following the end of the war, the ( ) were conducted to try and bring those responsible for the Holocaust to justice. While some did escape to South America, most were caught and punished.

Nuremberg Trials

To provide reparations to the Jewish people, the ( ) created the state of ( )in the middle east as a new homeland for the remaining Jews of Europe.

United Nations

Israel

At home, the war was producing drastic changes. Women went to work in industrial war factories, spurred on by propaganda campaigns featuring ( ): the symbol of the new working woman.

Rosie the Riveter

African-Americans began to fight for increasing equality because of their military service, eventually leading to the ( ) of the military in 1948 by President Truman.

desegregation

( ) was at 0 % as American war factories turned out weapons of war at a rate its enemies could never hope to match. Among these were the Sherman tank, Hellcat fighter plane, and Browning .50 caliber machine gun.

Unemployment

The ( ) was created to maintain support for the war at home, just as it had during WWI. From newspapers ad campaigns to movie theater reals, the propaganda of the OWI was visible until the last days of the war.

Office of War Information

Not all wartime changes were positive - some 100,00 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forced into ( ) to prevent the possibility of them betraying the nation. The U.S. government went on to apologize for this in the 1980s.

internment camps

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military adopted a ( ) strategy against Japan in the Pacific. The Japanese had conquered China, French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, and were making a play for Australia.

defensive

In April, 1942 the remains of the U.S. pacific fleet intercepted them at the ( ). While it was a draw on paper, it was an American victory in that Japan did not get to attack Australia.

Battle of the Coral Sea

Later that month, the Japanese tried to claim new American territory. In the ( ), the Americans decisively won and turned Japan back for the first time in the war. This is considered a major turning point in the Pacific.

Battle of Midway

In August, 1942 American marines began the first land invasion of Japanese territory at ( ) in the Solomon Islands. For 6 months the Japanese resisted until they were forced off in December.

Guadalcanal

1943 was quiet in the Pacific, with relatively few major battles. In 1944, American military planners launched a new offensive based on a strategy called ( ): bypassing hardened Japanese positions and focusing on small pacific islands from which to bomb Japan.

Island hopping

The U.S. navy and marines captured multiple small island chains. The Gilbert Islands, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Guam, and the Marianas were all taken in 1944. After capturing Saipan in the Marianas, U.S. bombers began a ( ) campaign against major Japanese cities.

fire-bombing

To protect the U.S. bombers flying to Japan, the marines invaded ( ): a small island close enough to Japan for fighter escorts to protect them. Roughly half of all soldiers involved became casualties.

Iwo Jima

The first invasion of a Japanese home island came in April, 1945 at ( ). American marines faced the fiercest resistance of the war as the Japanese turned to more desperate tactics. Kamikaze pilots and suicide banzai charges became common.

Okinawa

Facing casualties of over 1,000,000 if the U.S. invaded mainland Japan, President ( ) chose to end the war by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Harry Truman

The atomic bombs were created by a top-secret government program known as the ( ); it was led by the physicist ( ).

Manhattan project

Robert Oppenheimer

"( )" and "Fat Man" were dropped on Japan in late August, 1945. Truman argued that their use on civilian populations was necessary in order to save American lives.

"Little Boy"

Japan surrendered unconditionally after the bombings and brought WWII to a close. It was placed under the military rule of ( ) for 5 years, adopted a democratic constitution, and based its political/economic systems on those of the United States.

Douglas MacArthur

In Germany the American, British, and French sectors were merged into a new country known as ( ), while the Soviet sector became communist East Germany. It too was given a new government based on the American system.

West Germany

With 60,000,000 dead the world governments sought to prevent another global cataclysm. They signed the Atlantic Charter which created the ( ): a new organization dedicated to world peace and the promotion of human rights.

United nations

The United States emerged from World War II as a global ( ) it's economy was the strongest in the world, it was the only nation with nuclear capability, and it played a leading role in the creation of a new international order.

superpower