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Nazis invaded Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium - take control
On 8 April 1940 the British violated Norwegian neutrality by laying ocean mines in the shipping channel Germans were using to bring iron ore from Sweden. Hitler already had plans to occupy Norway. His admirals had persuaded him to take Norway before the British occupied it or its territorial waters, cutting Germany from its major source of iron ore. -
Adolf Hitler becomes the leader of the Nazi party
Hitler joined the party the year it was founded and became its leader in 1921. In 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and his Nazi government soon assumed dictatorial powers. -
Benito Mussolini appointed Prime Minister of Italy
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) rose to power in the wake of World War I as a leading proponent of Fascism. Originally a revolutionary Socialist, he forged the paramilitary Fascist movement in 1919 and became prime minister in 1922. -
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Benito Mussolini appointed Prime Minister of Italy
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) rose to power in the wake of World War I as a leading proponent of Facism. Originally a revolutionary Socialist, he forged the paramilitary Fascist movement in 1919 and became prime minister in 1922. -
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Joseph Stalin sole dictator of the Soviet Union (USSR)
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign. -
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Japan's Army seizes Manchuria, China
The United States Minister to China reported to Secretary of State Stimson, in a telegram dated September 22, his opinion that this was "an aggressive act by Japan", apparently long-planned, and carefully and systematically put into effect. Minister Johnson found no evidence that it was the result of accident or the act of minor and irresponsible officials. He was convinced that the Japanese military operation in Manchuria "must fall within any definition of war" -
Hitler is named Chancellor of Germany
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The supposed one thousand year Reich had started. -
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Neutrality Acts passed by US Congress
On August 31, 1935, Congress passed the first Neutrality Act prohibiting the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” from the United States to foreign nations at war and requiring arms manufacturers in the United States to apply for an export license. -
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Italian Army invaded Ethiopia in Africa
(1935–36), an armed conflict that resulted in Ethiopia’s subjection to Italian rule. Often seen as one of the episodes that prepared the way for World War II, the war demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations when League decisions were not supported by the great powers. -
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Militarist take control of Japan Government
After 1930, the extreme nationalism fostered by the Meiji and Showa Imperial governments combined with traditional Japanese militarism to make life increasingly difficult, and often dangerous, for moderates in the imperial government, the Diet (parliament), and the armed services. -
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Hitler sends troops into Rhineland of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty
In May 1935 France signed a treaty of friendship and mutual support with the USSR. Germany claimed the treaty was hostile to them and Hitler used this as an excuse to send German troops into the Rhineland in March 1936, contrary to the terms of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno. -
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Japan's army pillages Nanjing, China; massacre a quarter of a million people
In late 1937, over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people–including both soldiers and civilians–in the Chinese city of Nanking (or Nanjing). -
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Munich Pact signed giving the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Germany
British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sign the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The agreement averted the outbreak of war but gave Czechoslovakia away to German conquest. -
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Nazis begin rounding up Jews for labor camps
The term łapanka comes from the Polish verb łapać ("to catch") and, used in this context, carried a sardonic connotation from its prior use as the name for the children's game that is known in English as "tag". -
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Nazi-Soviet Pact signed by Hitler and Stalin
On August 23, 1939–shortly before World War II (1939-45) broke out in Europe–enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. -
Nazis invade Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany
The first casualty of that declaration was not German—but the British ocean liner Athenia, which was sunk by a German U-30 submarine that had assumed the liner was armed and belligerent. There were more than 1,100 passengers on board, 112 of whom lost their lives. Of those, 28 were Americans, but President Roosevelt was unfazed by the tragedy, declaring that no one was to “thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.” The United States would remain neutral. -
Battle of Britain begins - Royal Air Force defeats German Air Force to prevent invasion of their island
In the summer and fall of 1940, German and British air forces clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest sustained bombing campaign to that date. A significant turning point of World War II, the Battle of Britain ended when Germany’s Luftwaffe failed to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force despite months of targeting Britain’s air bases, military posts and, ultimately, its civilian population... -
Germany invades France and forces it to surrender
In May 1940, Germany invades the Netherlands, Belgium and France. The Dutch army fights overwhelming German forces. Queen Wilhelmina flees to Britain to avoid capture by the Germans. After the German air force bombs Rotterdam and threatens to do the same to other cities, the Netherlands capitulates. The Germans also defeat the French and Belgian forces. They occupy Belgium and northern France and set up a puppet government in southern France. -
First time Peacetime Draft in US
On this day in 1940, the Burke-Wadsworth Act is passed by Congress, by wide margins in both houses, and the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States is imposed. Selective Service was born. -
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Churchill and FDR issue the Atlantic Charter
The Atlantic Charter was a joint declaration released by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941 following a meeting of the two heads of state in Newfoundland. The Atlantic Charter provided a broad statement of U.S. and British war aims. -
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Japanese invade French Indochina (Viet. Laos, Cambodia)
In 1940, France was swiftly defeated by Nazi Germany, and colonial administration of French Indochina, modern-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, passed to the Vichy French government, a Puppet state of Nazi Germany. The Vichy government ceded control of Hanoi and Saigon in 1940 to Japan, and in 1941, Japan extended its control over the whole of French Indochina. -
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Hitler breaks PAct with Stalin's Russia and invades - USSR which now joins England in fighting the Germans
German–Soviet Union relations date to the aftermath of the First World War. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by Germany ended hostilities between Russia and Germany; it was signed on March 3, 1918.[1] A few months later, the German ambassador to Moscow, Wilhelm von Mirbach, was shot dead by Russian Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in an attempt to incite a new war between Russia and Germany. -
Pearl Harbor in Hawaii attacked by Japanese Naval and Air Forces, US declares war on Japan, Germany and Italy declare war on the Us
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December of nineteen forty-one was one of the most successful surprise attacks in the history of modern warfare. Japanese warships, including several aircraft carriers, crossed the western Pacific to Hawaii without being seen. They launched their planes on a quiet Sunday morning and attacked the huge American naval and air base at Pearl Harbor -
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Philippines fall to Japanese - Bataan Death March
After the April 9, 1942, U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II (1939-45), the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. -
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Japanese Americans interned in isolated camps
The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens. -
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Russians stop Nazi advance at Stalingrad save Moscow
After a series of dramatic Nazi successes during the opening stages of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, foreign observers predicted that Soviet resistance would soon collapse. By October, German troops were poised outside both Leningrad and Moscow. But the Germans were doggedly held off in front of Moscow in late November and early December, and then rolled back by a reinvigorated Red Army in a staggeringly brutal winter counteroffensive. -
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Battle of Midway, turning point of war in the Pacific
The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the Pacific War. Before the Battle of the Coral Sea on 7-8 May 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan had swept aside all of its enemies from the Pacific and Indian oceans. -
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British and US forces defeat German and Italian armies in North africa
The North African Campaign began in June of 1940 and continued for three years, as Axis and Allied forces pushed each other back and forth across the desert. At the beginning of the war, Libya had been an Italian colony for several decades and British forces had been in neighboring Egypt since 1882. -
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Zoot Suit Riots - Los Angeles, CA
Conflict between American servicemen stationed in Southern California and Mexican-American youths -
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Italy surrenders, Mussolini dismissed as Prime Minister
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian pronunciation: [beˈniːto mussoˈliːni];[1] 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician, journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista; PNF), ruling the country as Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943. -
D - Day invasion of France at Normandy by Allies
On this day in 1944, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the go-ahead for the largest amphibious military operation in history: Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, the Allied invasion of northern France. -
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Paris retaken by Allies Forces
After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison, defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris’ landmarks and burn the city to the ground before its liberation. -
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Battle of the Bulge - last offensive of German Forces
The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was the last major German offensive campaign of World War II. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, on the Western Front, towards the end of World War II, in the European theatre. -
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US forces return to recapture the Philippines
US forces will soon have access to five Philippine military bases, some strategically positioned in the disputed South China Sea, as the allies forge ahead with plans to station American troops in the Southeast Asian country for the first time in almost quarter of a century. -
FDR dies, Harry S. Truman becomes President
On this day in 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passes away after four momentous terms in office, leaving Vice President Harry S. Truman in charge of a country still fighting the Second World War and in possession of a weapon of unprecedented and terrifying power. -
V-E Day, war ends in Europe
Victory in Europe Day, generally known as V-E Day, VE Day or simply V Day was the public holiday celebrated on 8 May 1945 to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. It thus marked the end of World War II in Europe. -
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First Atomic Bombs dropped
President Harry S. Truman, warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific American casualties, ordered that the new weapon be used to bring the war to a speedy end. On August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. -
V-J Day, Japan surrenders to Allied Forces
The surrender of Imperial Japan was announced on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. -
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War Crimes Trials held in Nuremburg, Germany; Manila, Philippines and Tokyo, Japan
General Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged in Manila on February 23, 1946. The fate of this officer, a first-class fighting man,affirmed something new in the annals of war. For Yamashita did not die for murder, or for directing other men to do murder in his name. Yamashita lost his life not because he was a bad or evil commander, but simply because he was a commander, and the men he commanded had done unspeakably evil things.
