World War ll
The instability created in Europe by the First World War set the stage for another international conflict. World War 2, which broke out two decades later, proved to be even more devastating. Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war. It was the deadliest war in all of human history with around 70 million people killed.
Causes of WW2:
Economic Global Depression:
Starting in Germany after WW1 due to high reparations and other punishments against Germany as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, unemployment skyrocketed, and Germans were starving, homeless, and became desperate for help from anywhere.
Anti- Semitism:
Hatred of, or prejudice against the Jews. Jewish people became a group to blame, or a scapegoat, for the problems Germany, and other parts of Europe, were experiencing after WW1.
Imperialism:
Germany wants land back and to make money off of colonies and Japan needs more natural resources. Both Germany and Japan, especially, tried to take over weaker areas for natural resources, taxes, and power. Germany's goal was to conquer Europe, Japan's goal was to conquer Asia and Italy's goal was to conquer Africa.
Bad Feelings about the Treaty of Versailles:
Germany bore the brunt of the punishments for WW1, even though it didn't cause it. The German people began to form ad unite around nationalist and fascist organizations, including the Nazi Party, looking to reunite a stronger Germany.
German Invasion Of Poland- 9/1/1939
Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, rearmed the nation and signed strategic treaties with Italy and Japan to further his ambitions of world domination. Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War 11. World War 11 was fought between the Axis Powers- Germany, Italy, Japan- and the Allied Powers- Great Britain, France, Soviet Union (communist Russia), China, United States. It started in Europe, but spread throughout the world as most countries in the world were involved in some way. Much of the fighting took place in Europe and in Southeast Asia (Pacific).
Axis Powers and Leaders
The major Axis Powers were Germany, Italy and Japan
The alliance began to form in 1936. First on October 15, 1936, Germany and Italy signed a friendship treaty that formed the Rome-German Axis. It was after this treaty that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini used the term "Axis" to refer to their alliance. Shortly after this, on November 25, 1936, Japan and Germany both signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was a treaty against communism. An even stronger alliance was signed between Germany and Italy on May 22, 1939 called the Pact of Steel. This treaty would later be called the Tripartite Pact when Japan signed it on September 27, 1940. Now the three main Axis Powers were allies in the war.
Germany
Adolf Hitler
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Italy
Benito Mussolini
Japan
Emperor Hirohito
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Fuhrer in 1934. He was a ruthless dictator who hated Jewish people. He wanted to purge Germany of all weak people and also wanted to take control of all of Europe.
Mussolini was supreme dictator of Italy. He founded the concept of a fascist government where there is one leader and one party that has total power. He was an inspiration to Adolf Hitler.
Hirohito reigned as Emperor of Japan from 1926 until 1989. He remained Emperor after the war. The first time his subjects heard his voice was when he announced Japan's surrender on the radio.
Allied Powers and Leaders
The major Allied Powers were Great Britain, France, Russia, China, and the United States
The Allies formed mostly as a defense against the attacks of the Axis Powers. The original members of the Allies included Great Britain, France, and Poland. When Germany invaded Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, defending their ally. At the start of World War ll, Russia and Germany were friends; however, on June 22nd, 1941 Hitler, the leader of Germany, ordered a surprise attack on Russia. Therefore, Russia then became an enemy of the Axis Powers and joined the Allies. The United States on the other hand hoped to remain neutral during World War 2. However, the US was attacked by surprise at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. This attack united the country against the Axis Powers and turned the tide of World War ll in favor of the Allies. China was invaded by Japan in 1937 and became a member of the Allies after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Great Britain
Winston Churchill
Prime Minister of Great Britain during most of WW2, Winston Churchill was a great leader. His country was the last country fighting against the Germans in Europe. He is also known for his famous speeches to his people when the Germans were bombing them during the Battle of Britain.
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France
Charles de Gaulle
Leader of the Free French, de Gaulle led the French resistance movement against Germany.
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Russia
Josef Stalin
Stalin's title was General Secretary of the Communist Party and he led Russia through terrible and devastating battles with Germany. Millions and millions of people died. After winning the war, he set up the Eastern Bloc of Soviet, led by communist states.
China
Chiang Kai-shek
Leader of the Republic of China, he allied with the Chinese Communist Party to fight the Japanese. After the war, he fled from the communists to Taiwan.
United States
Franklin D. Roosevelt
One of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States, President Rooseve
The Attack on Pearl Harbor
December 7th, 1941
Pearl Harbor, located in Hawaii on the island of Oahu, was US territory during the time of World War 11. WW2 had been raging in Europe and Asia for two years, yet the United States still had not entered the war. The Empire of Japan was trying to take over much of Asia and was worried about the US Navy in Hawaii. They decided to strike in order to prevent the United States from attacking them. The attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7th, 1941 and came as a complete surprise. Hundreds of Japanese fighter planes and bombers flew to Pearl Harbor and attacked. The bombers dropped bombs and torpedoes on the war ships, while the fighter planes attacked the US fighter planes on the ground so they could not take off and fight back. There were two waves of attacks and by the end of the second wave, a number of US ships were destroyed. It was the longest assault in history as the Japanese traveled hundreds of miles to reach Pearl Harbor. The Japanese thought that if they took out the war ships in Pearl Harbor, then the United States Navy would be cripples and would never attack. However, they were mistaken and the attack on Pearl Harbor had just the opposite result. It was this attack that forced the United States to enter World War 11 as they declared war the next day. The citizens of the United States were in shock. They had tried to avoid the war with 76% of US people demanding neutrality before the attack, but they could not ignore this attack. With the US taking action on December 8th, 1941 by declaring war on Japan, three days later Japan's allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States. The US was now a major part of WW2.
US Presidents During WW2
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s took its tool in different ways in Europe, America, and Asia. In Europe, political power shifted to totalitarian and imperialist governments in several countries, including Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Asia, a resource-starved Japan began to expand aggressively, invading China and maneuvering to control a sphere of influence in the Pacific. The United States on the other hand, chose to withdraw from world affairs and concentrate on its own economic problems. During the Great Depression, Americans were in favor of isolationism, believing that problems at home could only be exacerbated by engagement in international affairs. Thus, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's engagement in foreign affairs was limited, even as the gathering storm of Japanese and German military aggression dimmed global prospects for peace. Even after war broke out in Europe following Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Roosevelt, reflecting national sentiment, maintained US neutrality. Indirectly, however, Roosevelt supported the British and the Allies in their fight against Nazi Germany. In 1942, Roosevelt made a speech declaring that the United States would serve as an "arsenal of democracy" for the Allies by supplying them with American-made weapons and equipment through the Lend-Lease program. True to his word, after the US declared war on Japan, due to their attack on Pearl Harbor, and joined the war, Roosevelt built a close partnership with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and later with Soviet Union premier Josef Stalin. The US did become the arsenal of democracy, supplying $50 billion in desperately needed weapons and equipment to the British, Soviets, and other Allies Forces during the war. Leading the US in war, Roosevelt's advocacy of American ideals and institutions gave eloquent expression to the tenets of liberal democracy for which the nation fought, and included stirring public statements of the importance of America's founding principles of representative government, religious freedom, toleration, individual liberty, free speech, and capitalism. In his Four Freedoms speech, Roosevelt cast the was as a fight for four universal human freedoms-freedom of speech, religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt's expressions of the core values of a free and open security inspired many in the US and around the world. In addition, he did not always live up to those principles as he succumbed to fear and racism when he issued Executive Order 9066, which interned 112,000 Japanese Americans during the war.
Harry Truman
President Roosevelt died shortly after being elected for his fourth term and Truman became President. World War 11 was still raging at the time, bu things were looking up for the Allies. Just a few months later the Germans surrendered but President Truman had to deal with the Japanese. The Japanese had all but been defeated in World War 11, except they were refusing to surrender. An invasion of Japan would likely cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. At the same time the United States had just developed a destructive new weapon, the atomic bomb. In an effort to save the lives of US soldiers, he decided to use the bomb. The United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 and a few days later they dropped another on Nagasaki. The devastation of these cities was unlike anything ever seen and shortly after, the Japanese surrendered.
Quick Facts:
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He led the nation through the Second World War
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He built a powerful wartime coalition with Britain and the Soviet Union
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He led the nation to victory against Nazi Germany
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His wartime efforts prepared the path for his successor, Harry Truman, to win the war against Japan four months after his death
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He was elected to the presidency four times, serving March 1933 until his death in office in April 1945
Map of Japanese American Internment Camps
Executive Order 9066
Interned: Japanese Americans
After the Pearl Harbor attack, public fear and ager quickly turned on people of Japanese ancestry. These emotions stemmed, inpart, from long-standing racial prejudices and rumors and accusations that predated December 7th. President Roosevelt and many of his military advisors had long worried about the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Roosevelt came under increasing pressure by military and political advisors to address the nation's fears of further Japanese attack or sabotage, particularly on the West Coast, where naval ports, commercial shipping and agriculture were most vulnerable. On February 19th, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt creates and signs Executive Order 9066, initiating a controversial World War 11 policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the forced removal and relocation of resident "enemy aliens" from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. Although the order did not identify any particular group, it was designed to remove-and eventually used to incarcerate- Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent. Included in the off-limits military areas reerred to in the order were ill-defined areas around West Coast cities, ports, and industrial and agricultural regions.
The jail at the Tule Lake Segregation Camp, located in Newell, California, where Japanese-Americans were held as prisoners during World War 11.
Prisoners, Japanese Americans, passing a letter to a civilian through a wire fence at an internment camp for Spanish refugees.
Children were sent off to school each day, and the adults had set jobs for them to do. Many camps had their own newspapers, governing councils, and different departments.
While 9066 also affected Italian and German Americans, the largest number if detainees were by far Japanese Americans. On the West Coast, long-standing racism against Japanese Americans, motivated in part by jealously over their commercial success, erupted after Pearl Harbor into furious demands to remove them en masse to Relocation Centers for the duration of the war. Japanese immigrants and their descendants, regardless of American citizenship status or length of residence, were systematically rounded up and and placed in prison camps. Evacuees, as they were sometimes called, could only take as many possessions as they could carry and were forcibly placed in crude, cramped quarters. Many lost businesses, farms, and loved ones as a result of their removal from their homes. In total over 120,000 Japanese people were sent to live in internment camps and over half of the people evacuated were nisei, or second generation Japanese. Japanese internment camps were established through Executive Order 9066. Typically the camps included some form of barracks with communal eating areas. Several families were housed together. Each Relocation Center, which had 10 camps, was its own "town" and included schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock. Each prison camp "town" was completely surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, and armed soldiers with machine guns. Search lights would follow them to ensure no one escaped and they had to deal with horrible conditions in bathrooms as well as no running water. Life in these camps were horrible and greatly impacted those interned.
The trauma of family incarceration does not only affect and stay with the young. As therapists to many Japanese-Americans client who were interned, they have seen how trauma manifests decades later as depression, strained family relationships, and a lifelong sense of undeserved guilt and fear of authority. There were also physical consequences as well, even 50 years after the end of WW2. Doctors have found that former internees of all ages had 2.1 times the rate of cardiovascular disease and premature death compared with non-interned peers.
Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the U.S> Army Air Corps (AAC). They were also the first African American military pilots in American military service to deploy to a combat theater overseas, and to engage in combat, and to shoot down enemy aircraft. There were 992 Tuskegee Airman pilots trained at Tuskegee, including single-engine fighter planes, twin-engine bomber pilots and liaison and service pilots, but the number of Tuskegee Airman, counting ground personnel such as aircraft mechanics and logistical personnel, was more than 14,000. Trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, they flew more than 15,000 individual sorties in Europe and North Africa during World War 11. They had destroyed or damaged 36 German planes in the air and 237 on the ground, as well as nearly 1,000 rail cars and transports vehicles and a German destroyer. In all, 66 Tuskegee-trained aviators were killed in action during World War 11, while another 32 were captured as POWs after being shot down. Nevertheless, their impressive performance earned them more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, and helped encourage the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces.
Navajo Codetalkers
In 1942, 29 Navajo men joined the US Marines and developed an unbreakable code that would be used across the Pacific during World War 11. They were the Navajo Code Talkers. The Navajo Code Talkers participated in all assaults the U.S. Marines led in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945 and conveyed messages by telephone and radio in their native language, a code that was never broken by the Japanese. The Navajo Code Talkers were so successful during the war because they provided a fast, secure and error-free line of communication b telephone and radio during World War 11 in the Pacific. The initial 29 recruits developed an unbreakable code, and they were successfully trained to transmit the code under intense conditions.
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during WW2, and she became perhaps the most iconic image of working women. American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during the war, as widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force. Between 1940 and 1945, the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home. Women during World War 11 may have been working in an aircraft factory shooting bolts called rivets into war planes to hold them together, while other women make everything from weapons to submarines. However, women weren't just working in factories, they were also helping to keep the country running. About 13 million women had jobs fixing cars, fighting fires, doing construction, and keeping the nation's farms running. New opportunities popped up for female journalists, doctors, lawyers, chemists, and engineers and for the first time in American history, all four branches of the military creates special units for women. They also would take important jobs, operating Telegraph's and translating and flying new airplanes to military bases. While women during WW2 worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers. More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, making up 65 percent of the industry's total workforce. The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as illustrated by the U.S. government's Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign. Women played an important role during WW2. Ones who worked were able to feel the thrill of Independence, and they felt the pride and satisfaction of learning a trade. Twenty years later, they will help fuel the women's liberation movement when women fight to be treated equally in society.
Nisei Soldiers
Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans, volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army during World War 11. More than 33,000, in spite of the forced internment and rampant wartime prejudice chose to do so. Of those, 19,000 served in the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Military Intelligence Service, where they proved their loyalty to America and became some of the most decorated units in World War 11. They played a major part in the war against Japan as they interrogated Japanese prisoners, translated captured Japanese documents, and even saw combat alongside regular troops. The Nisei troops in the Pacific often gave heroic efforts, but they were never treated as heros. Fighting both the Japanese military and racial prejudice, their work was kept secret from U.S. citizens as well as the Japanese. In the end, it should have been rewarded , for in some cases, the Nisei troops single-handedly turned the tide of battle.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany's deliberate, organized, State-sponsored persecution and machine like murder of approximately 6 million European Jews and at least 5 million prisoners of war between 1933 and 1945. To the anti-semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years o Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler's "final solution" -now known as the Holocaust- came to fruition under the cover of World War 11, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland. Jews and others were targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons and more than one million of those who perished were children. While Jews were the primary victims, this genocide occurred in the context of Nazi persecution and murder of other grounds for their perceived racial or biological inferiority: Rome; people with disabilities; some of the Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), and Black people. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, or behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witness, men who were accused of "homosexuality," and people whom the regime identified as "asocials" and "professional criminals."
The Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan
Pros
Cons
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs on Japan ended the Second World War sooner
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs meant that no invasion of Japan was needed
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs stopped the Soviet Union from making gains from fighting Japan
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs was the only thing that would have persuaded the Japanese government to surrender
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs made a Third World War highly unlikely
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs made the US a world power and showed that they would not revert to isolation after the war ended
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Dropping the Atomic Bombs meant that the knowledge existed for nuclear weapons to be proliferated or multiplied
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The bomb demolished two cities and its populations, leaving the land forever unusable and left with radiated waste
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A minor nuclear power could use their weapons especially ones who believed that they coul dno tdefend their countries effectively with conventional weapons only or if they felt that using nuclear power/weapons was the only way to defeat their enemies
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Caused tensions to rise between America and Japan and caused the world to fear the power of the atomic bomb
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It is not just countries that could develop, obtain, or use nuclear weapons as some defense experts have feared that terrorist organizations could build, buy, or steal nuclear weapons
World Superpowers after WW2
After the end of WW2 and the demise of Nazi Germany, the world was dominated by two major superpowers which were the United States and the Soviet Union also called USSR. They both had opposite ideological models.
The United States
Leader: President Harry S. Truman Type of Government: Democracy Type of Economic System: Capitalism
The industrial base of the US expanded during WW2 while the industrial base of Europe had been destroyed. At the end of the war the United States had the world's most powerful navy replacing England, had a large standing army, and for a time was only nuclear power. The United States wanted to "impose" western democracy on the rest of the world as it did in Japan, South Korea and Western Germany. They were also committed to blocking the spread of Communism.
The Soviet Union
Leader: Josef Stalin Type of Government: Dictatorship Type of Economic System: Communism
The Soviet Union expanded its armies during World War 2 and after the war, they occupied all of Eastern Europe and Manchuria. The Soviet Union became an empire siphoning much of the wealth of the Soviet Eastern black of nations, and used this wealth to build a powerful military including nuclear capability. The USSR was committed to spreading communist rule over the entire world. Efforts were made to export communism by coup srevolutions and invasions and the Korean War of 1950-1952, was an effort to expand communistic rule, which was opposed by the U.S.