Chapter 20: World War II and the Early Cold War

Significant Individuals

Neville Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister who (along with Edouard Daladier of France) sought to appease Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference of 1938. Driven by Pacifism (opposition to war brought by the horror of World War I) Britain and France agreed to let Germany have the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise to expand no further. Chamberlain called this Peace in Our Time. In reality, Peace in our time, destroyed Collective Security, angered Stalin, betrayed the Czechs and encouraged Hitler to think the West was afraid to fight. It was appeasement at its worst.

Winston Churchill was the leader of Great Britain during World War II. His famous quote during the dark days of the Battle of Britain was, “Churchill's speeches were a great inspiration to the embattled British. His first speech as Prime Minister was the famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech. He followed that closely with two other equally famous ones, given just before the Battle of Britain. One included the immortal line, "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." The other included the equally famous "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' "  

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the top allied commander in Europe. He was in charge of opened the main allied (D-day) attack in Normandy on the French coast on June 6, 1944. His forces overcame stubborn German resistance and swept across France toward Germany in a steady, bloody but victorious push. 

Francisco Franco began the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when he led a military uprising against the democratically elected, left-leaning (pro-communist) government. Mussolini and Hitler helped him and Stalin helped the government or republican forces. Britain and France failed to help the republican forces which embittered Stalin. More than 600,000 people would be killed before Franco wins in 1939. Franco never joins the Axis and remains neutral in WWII. He died in 1976. 

Adolf Hitler was dictator of Germany. After World War I he became leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler promised a new order that would lead Germany to greatness. Stressing radical doctrines, particularly anti-Semitism and anti-communism, he legally won the chancellorship of Germany. But once in power, Hitler established himself as an absolute dictator within months. In 1939, he disregarded the appeasement policy signed at Munich and led Germany into war by invading Poland. He committed suicide as Soviet troops invaded Berlin in 1945.

Reinhard Heydrich was a major leader in the Nazi SS who was assassinated by the Czech Resistance Movement; in retaliation, the Nazis destroyed the entire village of Lidice. All 179 men and older boys in the village were shot; the women were taken to concentration camps where they died and the children were dispersed throughout Germany to be raised as Nazis.

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was the fascist dictator who seized control of the Italian government in 1922 and established a one-party dictatorship. He allied himself with business and landlord interests and the military and crushed labor unions, prohibited strikes, and silenced all political opposition. He rose to power when he vowed to overcome the economic chaos produced by the depression and promised to bring glory to Italy through the acquisition of territories it had been denied after the Great War. He was deposed during the war, rescued by Hitler and killed by Italian partisans at the end of the war.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the charismatic American president who had won an unprecedented third term as president in 1940. Roosevelt saw early on the danger posed by German and Japanese aggression.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) succeeded Lenin in the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. It is argued that he came to power through a series of purges to eliminate possible challenges to his leadership. Stalin replaced NEP with the First Five-Year Plan which stressed industrial over agricultural production. The agricultural component of the First Five-Year Plan was collectivization whereby millions of peasants moved from traditional lands to collective farms

General Hideki Tojo was the Japanese war minister who convinced the Japanese cabinet that war with the United States was the only solution to the embargo placed on Japan by America because of Japanese aggression in the Pacific.

Harry Truman became President of the United States when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April, 1945. President Truman made some of the most important (and controversial) decisions of the war and post war years. He authorized the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the end of World War II and he authored the Truman Doctrine designed to contain post World War II communism.

Ideas, Events, Etc

Appeasement was the policy of Neville Chamberlain to prevent war. At the Munich Conference in 1938, he and Eduard Daladier of France formulated a policy under which they would concede the lands already occupied by Nazi Germany if Hitler would promise to cease his expansion of territorial claims. The result was the Hitler became convinced that the Western nations would never fight.

The Atlantic Charter was drawn up by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in August of 1941. The Charter established a vision for a post-World War II world, despite the fact the United States had not yet entered the war.

The Bataan Death March in which American and Filipino soldiers were brutally moved across the Philippines under horrific conditions where the majority died or were murdered by the Japanese was perhaps the infamous and well-known of all Japanese military atrocities during World War II.

The Battle of the Atlantic was the battle between the German and the British for control of the sea lanes around Great Britain. The Germans and British both used unrestricted submarine warfare.

The Battle of the Bulge was launched by the Germans just before Christmas 1944 in a desperate gamble to catch the American and British armies by surprise. In this great winter offensive (the first since the days of Frederick the Great) the Germans almost won until General George Patton’s Third Army rallied the American forces and (aided by allied air power) pushed the Germans back across the Rhine and all but finished the German army by mid January, 1945.

The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first successful American opposition to the Japanese since Pearl Harbor and the first naval battle in history to be fought entirely by aircraft launched by aircraft carriers – and the first battle in history in which opposing forces never sighted each other.

The Battle of El Alamein in Egypt in November 1942 was a British victory over the Afrika Korps which was the beginning of the end for Erwin Rommel and his African campaign.

The Battle of Kursk took place in July of 1943 and was the largest tank battle of the war, which ended in a massive Soviet counter-offensive that threw the exhausted German forces back. After Kursk the Germans were on the defensive for the rest of the war.

The First Battle of the Philippine Sea took place in June 1944 when Americans aircraft carriers destroyed the Japanese naval air arm. So overwhelming was American air power that the battle was compared to a massacre known as the Marianas Turkey Shoot.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf took place between October 23rd and October 26th, 1944, and accompanied the American invasion of the Philippines. It was arguably the largest naval battle in history and ended in a tremendous American victory – in effect destroying the remainder of the Japanese navy.

Battle of Midway was the turning point in the Pacific War during which an inferior American force sank four of Japan’s first line aircraft carriers and put Japan on the defensive.

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the titanic struggle between the Germans and the Russians. When Germany launched its spring offensive in Russia in 1942, Hitler’s generals wanted to break through and take Moscow but Hitler chose to attack in the south towards the Caucasus to secure its rich oil fields. By August the Germans had reached the city of Stalingrad and in a horrific battle took 90% of the city by November. Then winter set in. The German generals wanted to pull back and regroup. In an enormous blunder, Hitler refused to retreat. The Russians then besieged the Germans and in February 1943 over a million German soldiers surrendered. Although the Germans were far from defeated, the tide had turned

Blitzkrieg or Lightening War were German tactics which coordinated air power with fast moving tanks (panzers) and mobile infantry to strike hard at an enemy and rely on speed and surprise to prevent the enemy from implementing any coherent defense..

COMECON or the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance offered increased trade within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as an alternative to the Marshall Plan.

Comfort Women were women forced to serve Japanese soldiers as servants and enslaved prostitutes. Eighty percent came from Korea, but Chinese, Manchurian and Philippine women were also conscripted. They were forced to service up to twenty men a night and assigned menial chores by day. At the end of the war the Japanese massacred large numbers of these unfortunate women to cover up their crimes. Even worse Comfort women who survived were often shunned by their families because of the old “Double Standard.”

Einsatzgruppen were German death squads who killed a million and a half Jews in open air shootings. (They also killed thousands of communists and Poles).

The Final Solution was the attempted eradication or systematic murder of every Jew living in Europe. At the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, fifteen Nazi leaders gathered to form plans to implement the Final Solution. The goal was to round up Jews and deport them to forced labor and ultimate extermination camps in Eastern Poland.

The Firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 was a British reprisal bombing which had little or not military value, literally destroyed the entire center of the city and incinerated about 135,000 civilians.

"Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was a Japanese propaganda effort to Asia but conceal their territorial and economic agenda.

Hanaoka was a small town in Japan where Chinese laborers were brought to do war work. Eight hundred of the Chinese tried to escape and the townspeople joined the police and military in hunting them down. At least fifty were tortured to death, beaten as they hung by their thumbs from the ceiling of the town hall.

The Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored persecution and genocide of the Jews, Gypsies (or Roma), Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other “undesirables”.

Kamikaze were Japanese pilots who volunteered to fly planes with just enough fuel to reach an Allied ship and dive-bomb into it. In the two month battle for Okinawa, the Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of ships and killing more than five thousand U.S. soldiers.

Iron Curtain was a term coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the countries of Eastern Europe which were forcibly dominated by the Soviet Union.

Island Hopping was the principal American strategy in the Pacific during World War II. The object was to isolate Japanese outposts and move to striking distance of the Philippines and Japan.

Lebensraum is the German word of living space. Hitler’s pursuit of lebensraum was given as justification of German expansion into the Soviet Union.

The Lend-Lease Program was the creative compromise of President Roosevelt in 1941 when the United States maintained its neutrality by "lending" military support to the British, the Soviets, and the Chinese in their struggle with Axis powers.

Liberty Ships were simply made but effective transports which were built faster than the Germans could destroy them. Liberty ships were just one way American industrial might helped win the war. 

The Marshall Plan was named after U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall. This policy proposed to rebuild European economies through cooperation and capitalism, forestalling communist or Soviet influence in the devastated nations of Europe. Proposed in 1947 and funded in 1948, the Marshall plan provided more than 13 billion dollars to reconstruct Western Europe.

May Fourth Movement was a 1919 series of grass roots demonstrations in most urban areas of China demanding and end to foreign imperialism (especially Japanese encroachments) and restoration of national unity.

The Miracle of Dunkirk rescued a third of a million men from the beaches of Dunkirk. Had the British failed, the war might have ended in 1940.

The Mukden Incident took place on September 18, 1931 when Japanese troops used explosives to blow up a few feet of rail on the South Manchuria Railway. They accused the Chinese of attacking their railroad and these false accusations became the pretext for war between Japanese and Chinese troops.

NATO is an acronym for The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 by the United States as a regional military alliance against Soviet aggression.

The Nuremburg Trials prosecuted twenty top Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity and lasted for ten months. This and subsequent trials not only exposed the inhuman evil of Nazi aggression and genocide – and brought many murderers to justice, but also demonstrated that such activities had now become areas for international remediation and prosecution.

Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion in history. In the spring of 1941 Hitler betrayed his “ally” Stalin and three German army groups of over three million men, advanced rapidly into the Soviet Union, destroying almost the entire western Soviet army in huge battles of encirclement. England made common cause and began to send supplies to help Russia. Eventually, with English and American aid and suffering terrible casualties, the Russians stopped the Germans at Stalingrad and began to push the Germans back toward Germany.

Operation Sea Lion was the name for the German invasion of Great Britain in 1940. The first step necessary was for the Luftwaffe or German Air Force to secure control of the air over Britain by defeating the Royal Air Force. The war between the two air forces became known as the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe initially targeted military targets but in September, after a British air raid on Berlin, Hitler switched from military targets to civilian centers as the Luftwaffe turned to terror bombing London and other cities. This tactic was called the Blitz. Hitler’s tactical mistake gave the hard pressed Royal Air Force time to regroup so that Germans failed to defeat it, and Operation Sea Lion was postponed and eventually cancelled.

Operation Magic was an American code breaking system which allowed them to read Japanese naval codes. Magic played a major role in the American victory at Midway.

Pacifism is the opposition to all war and for many French and British politicians of the 1930s. For politicians like Chamberlain and Daladier, pacifism was a reaction to the horrors of the bloodbath of World War I.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was the place where the Japanese attacked the American Fleet on December 7, 1941 and America entered the war.

The Phony War described the six months between the fall of Poland the German invasion of the West during which both sides rested and prepared for the next campaign.

Rape of Nanjing was the unprecedented Japanese reign of terror upon the civilians of Nanjing. Japanese soldiers, inflamed by war passion and a sense of racial superiority, raped seven thousand women, murdered hundreds of thousands of unarmed people and burned one-third of the homes. Some four hundred thousand Chinese lost their lives.

The Truman Doctrine was announced on March 12, 1947, in a speech given by President Truman and laid out new ground rules for the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine redefined the U. S. perception of a world as divided between free and enslaved peoples. Truman argued that the United States had a moral responsibility to intervene and "contain" the spread of communism. This policy of "containment" would serve as the foundation of American foreign policy for the next five decades.

The United Nations is a supra-national organization dedicated to keeping world peace and security and promoting friendly relations among the world’s nations. It offered an alternative for global reconstruction that was independent of the Cold War.

V1 and V2 flying bombs were German “wonder weapons.” The V1 was a like a primitive cruise missile of today that flew with a single jet engine which was programmed to stop flying over Dutch and British populated centers. The British knew it was falling when they heard its jet engine stop. The British nicknamed them Buzz Bombs. The V2 was a true sub-orbital missile that not only delivered much more explosive force, but also almost impossible to shoot down. Both of these weapons were vengeance weapons to try to destroy the morale of the British people.

Vichy France was a pro-Nazi puppet government in the unoccupied part of France.

The Warsaw Pact was formed by the Soviet Union as a response to NATO admitting West Germany and allowing it to rearm in 1955. The Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance of seven communist European nations and a countermeasure to NATO. 

The Warsaw Uprising took place in the spring of 1943, when around sixty thousand Jews rose up and seriously threatened the German control of the Warsaw ghetto.  It took the Germans three weeks of fighting to crush the uprising. In all almost six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II