A. Early Challenges to World Peace
1. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, so the League of Nations voted sanctions, or penalties, against Italy for having violated international law.
2. Western democracies denounced Hitler’s moves but took no real action; instead, they adopted a policy of appeasement, giving in to the demands of an aggressor in order to keep the peace.
3. Finally, widespread pacifism, or opposition to all war, and disgust with the last war pushed governments to seek peace at any price
B. The Spanish Civil War
1. In 1936, Spain plunged into a civil war that started as a local struggle but soon grew into a continental conflict.
2. Francisco Franco led a revolt that touched off a bloody war between people of different political affiliations.
3. By 1939, Franco had triumphed and he created a fascist dictatorship like those of Hitler and Mussolini.
C. German Aggression Continues
1. In the meantime, Hitler pursued his goal of bringing all German-speaking people into the Third Reich.
2. By 1938, Hitler was ready to engineer the Anschluss, or union of Austria and Germany.
3. At the Munich Conference in September 1938, British and French leaders again chose appeasement, caving into Hitler’s demands and persuading Czechoslovakia to surrender.
D. The Plunge Toward War
1. As Winston Churchill predicted, Munich did not bring peace.
2. In August 1939, Hitler stunned the world by announcing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.
3. In September, 1939, a week after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, German forces stormed into Poland.
E. Why War Came
1. Many factors contributed to World War II.
2. Since 1939, people have debated issues such as why the western democracies failed to respond forcefully to the Nazi thread and whether they could have stopped Hitler if they had responded.
3. Many historians today think that Hitler might have been stopped in 1936, before Germany was fully rearmed.
II. The Global Conflict- Axis advance
A. The First Onslaught
1. In September 1939, Nazi forces stormed into Poland, revealing the enormous power of Hitler’s blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.”
2. In April 1940, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg against Norway and Denmark, both of which soon fell.
3. The whirlwind Nazi advance revealed the awesome power of modern warfare, using air forces and fast-moving armored tanks and troop carriers.
B. The Battle of Britain
1. On August 12, 1940, the first wave of German bombers appeared over England’s southern coast and the Battle of Britain began.
2. On September 7, German bombers appeared over London and attacked the city throughout the entire night.
3. The Battle of Britain showed that terror bombing could not defeat determined people.
C. Charging Ahead
1. While the Luftwaffe was blasting Britain, Axis armies were pushing into North Africa and the Balkans.
2. In 1940, Italian forces invaded Greece.
3. Meanwhile, both Bulgaria and Hungary had joined the Axis alliance.
D. Operation Barbarossa
1. In June 1941, Hitler embarked on Operation Barbarossa – the conquest of the Soviet Union.
2. In Operation Barbarossa, Hitler unleashed a new blitzkrieg.
3. The Russians, meanwhile, suffered appalling hardships and supplies had to be rationed.
E. Growing American Involvement
1. President Roosevelt found ways around the Neutrality Acts to provide aid, including warships, to Britain as it stood alone against Hitler.
2. In early 1941, Roosevelt convinced Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act, allowing him to sell or lend materials to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
3. In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly on a warship in the Atlantic to issue the Atlantic Charter, which set goals for the war and the postwar world.
F. Japan Attacks
1. In December 1941, the Allies gained a vital boost when a surprise action by Japan suddenly pitched the United States into the war.
2. That morning, Japanese airplanes struck Pearl Harbor, damaging 19 ships and killing ore than 2,400 people.
3. In the long run, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be as serious a mistake as Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
III. The global conflict- allied successes
A. Occupied Lands
1. While the Germans rampaged across Europe, the Japanese conquered an empire in Asia and the Pacific.
2. The most savage of all Nazi policies was Hitler’s program to kill Jews and others he judged “racially inferior,” such as Slavs, Gypsies, and the mentally ill.
3. Many Germans pretended not to see what was happening, and some were collaborators, helping the Nazis hunt down the Jews or shipping tens of thousands of Jews to their death.
B. The Allied War Effort
1. After the United States entered the war, the Allied leaders met periodically to hammer out their strategy.
2. Like the Axis powers, the Allies were committed to total war.
3. As men joined the military and war industries expanded, millions of women replaced them in essential jobs.
C. Turning Points
1. During 1942 and 1943, the Allies won several victories that would turn the tide of battle.
2. In Egypt, the British under General Bernard Montgomery finally stopped Rommel’s advance during the long, fierce Battle of El Alamein.
3. Victory in North Africa let the allies leap across the Mediterranean into Italy
D. The Red Army Resists
1. Another major turning point in the war occurred in the Soviet Union.
2. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the costliest of the war.
3. After the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lifted the siege of Leningrad and drove the invaders out of the Soviet Union
E. Invasion of France
1. By 1944, the Allies were at last ready to open the long-awaited second front in Europe – the invasion of France.
2. The Allies chose June 6, 1944 to send 176,000 troops across the English Channel and into France.
3. In Paris, French resistance forces rose up against the occupying Germans and France was free within a month.
IV. Toward Victory
A. War in the Pacific
1. A major turning point in the Pacific war occupied just six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
2. After the Battle of Midway, the United States took the offensive.
3. In October 1944, General Douglas MacArthur began to retake the Philippines.
B. The Nazis Defeated
1. After freeing France, the Allies battled toward Germany as they advanced into Belgium in December 1944.
2. By this time, Germany was reeling under the round-the-clock bombing from Allied bombers for two years.
3. By March, the Allies had crossed the Rhine into western Germany.
C. Defeat of Japan
1. To save their homeland, young Japanese became kamikaze pilots, who undertook suicide missions, crashing their planes loaded with explosives into American warships.
2. On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on he midsized city of Hiroshima, Japan, flattening four square miles and instantly killing more than 70,000 people.
3. Just a few days later, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000 people and defeating Japan.
D. Looking Ahead
1. After the surrender, American forces occupied the smoldering ruins of Japan.
2. In Germany, the Allies had divided Hitler’s fallen empire into four zones of occupation – French, British, American, and Russian.
3. In both countries, the Allies faced difficult decisions about the future.
V. From world War to Cold War
A. Aftermath of War
1. While the Allies celebrated victory, the appalling costs of the war began to emerge.
2. During the war, the Allies knew about the Nazi concentration camps but did not know their full extent.
3. By exposing the savagery of the Axis regimes, the Allies further discredited the Nazi, fascist, and militarist ideologies that had led to the war.
B. The United Nations
1. As in 1919, the World War II Allies set up an international organization to secure peace.
2. In April 1945, delegates from 51 nations met in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations.
3. Under the UN Charter, each member nation had one vote in the General Assembly, where members could debate issues.
C. The Crumbling Alliance
1. Amid the rubble of war, a new power structure emerged that would shape events in the postwar world.
2. During the war, the Soviet Union and the nations of the West had cooperated to defeat Nazi Germany.
3. Stalin had two goals in Eastern Europe: to spread communism into the area and to create a buffer zone of friendly governments as a defense against Germany.
D. Containing Communism
1. Like Churchill, President Truman saw communism as an evil force creeping across Europe and threatening countries around the world, including China.
2. In 1945, the world hoped for an end to decades of economic crisis, bloody dictators, and savage war.
3. Meanwhile, the spread of ominous new weapons would more than once raise the specter of global destruction.