Transcript War in the Pacific August 1942, Guadalcanal October 1944, Leyte Gulf

D-Day and Liberation of France
• Plan = take Hitler by
surprise on the Normandy
Peninsula
• Attack begins June 6,
1944
– Largest land-sea-air
operation in history
• July 25, 1944 Gen. Omar
Bradley starts air and
land bombardment, Gen.
George Patton advances
Army
• Aug 25, 1944 – Paris free
from German occupation
The Battle
of the
Bulge
• October 1944
Americans capture
Aachen
– First German town
to be captured
• December 16
Germans attack
Americans
– German’s last ditch
offensive
– Americans receive
a surrender
demand form
Germans
• January 1945
Germans were
pushed back
– From that point on,
Nazis could do little
but retreat
Unconditional
Surrender
• April 25, 1945 SU
stormed Berlin
• April 29 – Hitler
marries Eva
Braun, prepares
statement to
German people
• April 30 – Hitler
shot himself, Eva
swallows poison
– Bodies soaked in
gasoline to burn
• May 8, 1945 = VE day
– First part of war
over
Liberation of Death Camps
• July 1944
– Soviets first come across
death camps
– Majdanek Death Camp,
Poland
• SS work to bury and burn
all evidence of crime
– Soviets find world’s largest
crematorium and a
storehouse containing
800,000 shoes
– “Living corpses” freed
across Europe
War in the Pacific
April 1942, Bataan
Douglas MacArthur and the
Allies held out for four months
against invading Japanese
forces before abandoning the
peninsula.
June 1942, Midway
Chester W. Nimitz and the
Americans turned back the
Japanese invasion force
headed for Hawaii
War in the Pacific
August 1942, Guadalcanal
October 1944, Leyte Gulf
MacArthur and Americans
MacArthur and the Americans
dealt Japan its first defeat on retook the Philippines and dealt
land
a devastating blow to the
Japanese navy.
War in the Pacific
March 1945, Iwo Jima
June 1945, Okinawa
MacArthur and the Allies in a MacArthur and the Allies took
fierce battle took the island
the island from Japan
from the Japanese
War in the Pacific
September 1945, Tokyo Bay
Hirohito, MacArthur – Japan formally surrendered
The Science of War
July 1945, Los Alamos
J. Robert Oppenheimer; the
first atomic bomb was built,
successfully completing the
Manhattan Project
August 1945, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki
Truman; first atomic bombs
were dropped