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World War 2

  • Mussolini & the Fascists come to power in Italy

    Mussolini & the Fascists come to power in Italy
    Fascists take over ItalyThe first successful Fascist takeover was in Italy under Benito Mussolini.Even without the Blackshirts' antics, Italy needed law and order, and many people, especially the middle class who feared the Communists, looked to the Fascists as the answer to Italy's problems. In October 1922, they made their move.
  • Japanese invasion of Manchuria

    Japanese invasion of Manchuria
    The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began on September 18, 1931, when the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria immediately following the Mukden Incident. The Japanese established a puppet state called Manchukuo, and their occupation lasted until the end of World War II.
  • Hitler and the Nazis come to power in Germany

    Hitler and the Nazis come to power in Germany
    The worldwide economic depression had hit the country especially hard, and millions of people were out of work. Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding speaker who attracted a wide following of Germans desperate for change. He promised the disenchanted a better life and a new and glorious Germany.
  • Neultrality Acts passed in the U.S.

    Neultrality Acts passed in the U.S.
    After a fierce debate in Congress, in November of 1939, a final Neutrality Act passed. This Act lifted the arms embargo and put all trade with belligerent nations under the terms of “cash-and-carry.” The ban on loans remained in effect, and American ships were barred from transporting goods to belligerent ports.
  • Munich Conference

    Munich Conference
    The Munich Conference came as a result of a long series of negotiations. Adolf Hitler had demanded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia; British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to talk him out of it.
  • Kristallnacht

    Kristallnacht
    A massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Reich on the night of November 9, 1938, into the next day, has come to be known as Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass.
  • Germany and the USSR sign the Non-Aggression

    Germany and the USSR sign the Non-Aggression
    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.
  • Germany invades Poland

    Germany invades Poland
    On this day in 1939, German forces bombard Poland on land and from the air, as Adolf Hitler seeks to regain lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. World War II had begun.
  • BAttle of the Atlantic

    BAttle of the Atlantic
    The Battle of the Atlantic, which lasted from September 1939 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, was the war’s longest continuous military campaign. During six years of naval warfare, German U-boats and warships – and later Italian submarines
  • France falls to Germany

    France falls to Germany
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOu2clFZhmA) May 1940, Europe had been at war for nine months. Yet Britain and France, despite having declared war on Germany in September 1939 following Hitler’s attack on Poland, had seen little real fighting.
  • Rescue at Dunkirk

    Rescue at Dunkirk
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53zjkw9I2xE) It was a fateful decision that would ultimately transform a military defeat into a moral victory. As German forces continued their advance into France, General Viscount Gort, Commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, could see that the German invaders were getting the upper hand.
  • Formation of the Axis Powers

    Formation of the Axis Powers
    Finally, on September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, which became known as the Axis alliance. Even before the Tripartite Pact, two of the three Axis powers had initiated conflicts that would become theaters of war in World War II.
  • Presidential Election of 1940

    Presidential Election of 1940
    United States, American presidential election held on Nov. 5, 1940, in which Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Wendell L. Willkie. By becoming the first president to win a third term, Roosevelt broke the two-term precedent established by the country’s first president, George Washington.
  • Congress passes the Lend Lease Act

    Congress passes the Lend Lease Act
    Proposed in late 1940 and passed in March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act was the principal means for providing U.S. military aid to foreign nations during World War II.
  • Bombing of Pearl HArbor

    Bombing of Pearl HArbor
    President Franklin Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. On that day, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory. The bombing killed more than 2,300 Americans.
  • Formation of the United Nations

    Formation of the United Nations
    The United Nations was born of perceived necessity, as a means of better arbitrating international conflict and negotiating peace than was provided for by the old League of Nations.
  • Relocation of Japenese Americans to camps

    Relocation of Japenese Americans to camps
    Two months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ordering all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast.
  • Bataan Death March

    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 the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. The marchers made the trek in intense heat and were subjected to harsh treatment by Japanese guards.
  • Battle of Midway Island

    Battle of Midway Island
    Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States defeated Japan in one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II.
  • Roise the Riveter Campaign encourages women to get a job

    Roise the Riveter Campaign encourages women to get a job
    American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during World War II, 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
  • D-Day Invasion

    D-Day Invasion
    During World War II (1939-1945), the Battle of Normandy, which lasted from June 1944 to August 1944, resulted in the Allied liberation
  • Allied Invasion/ Victory in the Phillipines

    Allied Invasion/ Victory in the Phillipines
    At the start of WW2, the Philippine Islands were United States territory as per the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The archipelago was home to 19 million people, and was at a strategic location between Japan and the South Pacific. Because of the importance, the retired Army General Douglas MacArthur, currently serving as a Field Marshal in the Filipino military.
  • President Elecction of 1944

    President Elecction of 1944
    The United States presidential election of 1944 took place while the United States was preoccupied with fighting World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) had been in office longer than any other president, but remained popular. Unlike 1940, there was little doubt that Roosevelt would run for another term as the Democratic candidate.
  • Battle of the Buldge

    Battle of the Buldge
    The Battle of the Bulge was a major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe.
  • Yalta Conference

    Yalta Conference
    The Yalta Conference was a meeting of British prime minister Winston Churchill, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt early in February 1945 as World War II was winding down.
  • V-E Day

    V-E Day
    Victory in Europe Day, generally known as V-E 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.
  • Manhattan Project

    Manhattan Project
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMWZp1ZEZ18) The Manhattan Project was a secret military project created in 1942 to produce the first US nuclear weapon. Fears that Nazi Germany would build and use a nuclear weapon during World War II triggered the start of the Manhattan Project, which was originally based in Manhattan, New York.
  • Bombing of Hiroshima and HAGASAKI

    Bombing of Hiroshima and HAGASAKI
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pxk4zy_SQw) The United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom as laid down in the Quebec Agreement, dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, during the final stage of World War II. Wikipedia
    Start date: August 6, 1945.
  • Surrender of Japan

    Surrender of Japan
    The surrender of the Empire of Japan was announced by Imperial Japan 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 was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent.