Transcript Ch_ 29 World War II _2011_

World War II
A. The War of Movement
1. Introduction of motorized weapons promoted
offensive attacks:
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Germany’s blitzkrieg (“lightening war”)
American & Japanese use of aircraft carriers
created “theaters” of battles
“total war” effort
civilians thought of as “legitimate” targets
B. War in Europe
1. Sept. 1st, 1939: Germany invades Poland
2. Sitzkreig (“sit down war”): lull in war (1939–40)
3. Hitler went on an offensive in March:
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invaded all of Europe
controlled Spain to Russia by end of June…
Operation Barbarossa
C. Britain & Russia
1. Hitler lost “Battle of Britain” (1940): due to
British Royal Air Force
2. 1941: Hitler launched invasion of Soviet Union
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winter weather (1941–42)
Nazis defeated at Stalingrad (1943)
The Bombing of Britain
Summer 1940: German Luftwaffe hit London with Blitzkreig
90% of Stalingrad destroyed
D. War in North Africa
1. Italian offensive in British Somaliland
& Egypt
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assisted by Germans (Erwin Rommel)
defeated by British at Al Alamein
The “Desert Fox”
E. Japanese Expansion
1. 1941: France allowed Japan to occupy Indochina
2. Economic embargo against Japanese by U.S. &
Britain
3. Attack on Pearl Harbor:
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Japan attacked naval base on December 7th, 1941
…“a day that will live in infamy”
F. The U.S. Joins the War
1. U.S., Britain, & U.S.S.R. form the Allied forces
2. By June 1942: U.S. destroyed 4 of Japan’s 6 largest
aircraft carriers
The “Big Three”
Joseph Stalin, F.D.R., & Winston Churchill
G. End of the War
1.
By 1943: Soviet Red Army
pushed back Germans
2.
June 1944: Operation
Overlord (“D-Day”)
invasion by U.S.
3.
German & Japanese
defeated in 1945
The Yalta Conference
February 1945: Allied powers met at Yalta on the
Crimean Peninsula to discuss final military strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Execution_of_Mussolini_(1945).ogg
H. The Atomic Bomb
1. Atomic bombings of
Hiroshima & Nagasaki in
August 1945…
II. The
Character
of
Warfare
A. A Different War
1. WW II:
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50-70 million dead
vast numbers of refugees
bombing of entire cities
unprecedented scale of human suffering
B. War of Science
Seen in:
– use of synthetic rubber & radar
– cryptanalysis
– antibiotics
– aircraft & missiles
– U.S. gov’t. physicists produce A-bomb
C. The Holocaust
1. Nazi killings of civilians as part
of Hitler’s “Final Solution”:
– calculated policy of
extermination
– German Jews deprived of rights
(Nuremberg Laws)
– forced into Jewish “ghettoes”
(starvation & disease)
The Jewish
Ghetto
“Night of the Broken Glass” (1938)
D. Concentration Camps
1. Early 1942: Nazis applied modern industrial
methods to slaughter Jews (i.e.: Auschwitz)
2. The Holocaust:
– claimed about 6 million Jewish lives
– Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, disabled
Deportations
Mobile Killing Squads
Main Gate of Auschwitz
Terezín
Liberation!