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We will have two ten-minute breaks: at 7:30 - 7:40; and, at 9:00 pm - 9:10 pm. I will take roll after the second break before you are dismissed at 10 pm.
A Letter Home
Propaganda Posters
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-teachers/lesson-plans/
World War II
Rosie the Riveter was an image crafted by advertising executives contracted by the federal government to showcase the involvement of women in war work. She has remained one of the iconic images of World War II.
“Just as World War II transformed the world, it also transformed the United States’ role in world affairs.”
If the New Deal could not end the Great Depression, a world war would. Beginning in the early 1930s, tensions were fierce between China and Japan, eventually leading to full-scale war by 1937. By the late 1930s, talk of war was becoming more urgent throughout Europe as well. The financial uncertainty of the worldwide depression had created political vulnerabilities that assisted the rise of militant, expansion-minded dictators in Japan, Italy, and Germany. Americans watched all these situations nervously, uncertain how Asian and European affairs might affect them. Little did they know that, in the end, the Second World War would transform America even more than the New Deal.
The Story behind Rosie the Riveter, 3:50
In order to promote women to work during WWII, the United States government commissioned the work of "ROSIE THE RIVETER".
https://youtu.be/B3461S5YtKM
23-1 Causes of War
There were multiple causes of the Second World War, but the Great Depression was perhaps the most significant.
23-1a Provocations
The stock market collapse between 1929 and 1932 ended American investment in Europe and caused economic slowdowns there. Without American dollars, European countries faced industrial decline, unemployment, and widespread homelessness for workers. The depression had spread around the world.
These problems increased political tensions. In France and Spain, fighting broke out between Communists and Nationalists over which group had the best plan to manage the disrupted economy. But the crash had a devastating effect on Germany, whose reparation payments for World War I were largely financed by American lenders. When American businesses were forced to withdraw investments in Germany, German production fell by half between 1929 and 1933. In 1933, with the economy in a shambles and chaos raging throughout German politics and in German streets, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party ascended to power and ruthlessly consolidated its control of the state. Hitler then began a massive armament campaign that put millions of Germans to work on public works projects and in factories. In some ways, it was a militant and extreme version of the New Deal. The depression there was over by 1936, providing dramatic proof that the deficit spending advocated by John Maynard Keynes would work. A similar program for reform emerged in Italy under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.
World War II: How Did It Start? 3:08
https://youtu.be/PCXSuaOozDE
23-1b Reactions
Many Americans hoped the United States would avoid armed conflict in both Asia and Europe. Congress passed a series of neutrality acts between 1935 and 1937 that placed arms embargoes on all belligerent powers. Roosevelt signed these measures, but, leery of the offensive actions of Germany, Italy, and Japan, in 1937 he called for the world community to “quarantine” these states. Eventually, he would come to regret signing the neutrality acts at all.
23-2 American Foreign Policy Before the War
Americans at first tried to stay out of the war, but this became less feasible as Hitler’s aggression continued.
23-2a 1930s Isolation
In the United States, the Great Depression had provoked a strong drift toward isolationism. The trend was already manifested in the American rejection of the League of Nations following World War I, but during the depression many Americans remained preoccupied by domestic affairs. (For more on the reasons why many Americans resisted involvement in European affairs, see “The reasons why …” box below.)
Latin America
Concerning foreign policy, FDR was initially of the same mindset as his predecessor, Herbert Hoover. He was not a strict isolationist, but he was not eager to engage too deeply in foreign affairs. Indeed, rather than help the troubled European economy in the 1930s, American policymakers focused their efforts on improving relations with nations closer to home, particularly in Central and South America. At his 1933 inauguration, FDR announced that the United States would pursue a “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America, thus renouncing military intervention in Latin American affairs, and during the next few years he signed treaties with various Central and South American nations. Their goal was to maintain political stability without using military means.
Hitler's Early Victories
23-2a Blitzkrieg and Doubt
Blitzkrieg Tactic 2:17
https://youtu.be/gUjrnlMAtQ4
The Battle of Britain
Battle of Britain - The final battle 5:09
Largely orchestral scene from the 1969 movie 'Battle of Britain' which depicts the RAF doing battle in the skies with the German Luftwaffe in the closing stages of the battle - of which the Germans tasted defeat, causing Hitler to postpone his invasion plans for Britain.
https://youtu.be/gTv_4DPQUnQ
US History - World War I vs. World War II Foreign Policy, 4:55
https://youtu.be/-HuSSTbmTLo
23-2b From Isolation to Intervention
American public sentiment still fell considerably short of favoring direct intervention, but the idea that the United States should grant some form of aid had been growing since Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Many Americans foresaw dangers for the United States should Germany conquer Britain. With control of Europe, Germany might become unbeatable. American Jews were especially active in advocating a more aggressive stance against Hitler, but in an America controlled by a white, Anglo-Saxon elite, and with American antisemitism still socially acceptable and growing, the urgings of American Jews did not carry enough weight to power a full-scale intervention.
In late 1940, Roosevelt approved the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. He also announced that the United States was giving the British fifty renovated naval destroyers, referring to the United States as “the arsenal of democracy.” Roosevelt’s moves prompted criticism from the left and the right, but it was conservatives like William Randolph Hearst and Montana senator Burton Wheeler who formed an opposing organization, called the “America First Committee.” Aviator Charles Lindbergh became the group’s most notable spokesman (for more on Lindbergh, see “The reasons why …” box on page 410).
Opinion polls found that most Americans supported providing aid to Britain. American politicians responded. In the fall of 1940, Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented third term of office, repeatedly declared that the United States would not enter the war, but he warned that dangerous waters lay ahead. What he proposed instead was “aid short of war.”
Isolationism WWII, 4:45
AP US video project. Works Cited: http://libcom.org/files/images/histor...
https://youtu.be/E7Ca24FgtOo
23-2c Aid Short of War
Roosevelt handily won the election of 1940 and soon began articulating a plan for American involvement in the war.
The Four Freedoms
America had to take a stand, Roosevelt declared, in order to create a world based on what he dubbed the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This was Roosevelt’s clearest statement yet that the United States would take a powerful role in creating a new order in world affairs. In almost every way, these four freedoms were directly opposed to what the Nazis were doing in conquering Europe. If Roosevelt had his way, the war would be fought on ideological grounds.
Roosevelt then pressured Congress, in March 1941, to pass the Lend-Lease Act, empowering the president to lend weapons and supplies to nations fighting the Germans or the Japanese. These measures became even more urgent with a series of victories in late 1940 and early 1941 for the German, Italian, and Japanese powers. In fact, Germany, planning an attack on Russia and searching for a Pacific partner, had begun to make overtures to Japan to form an alliance. Japan, still stalemated with China, thought the resources won from the toppling of the British Empire (if Germany had won) would help Japan control the Pacific. Along with Italy, the nations came together in the Tripartite Pact; they were known as “the Axis Powers.”
23-2d Conflict in the Pacific
Events in Asia would tilt the nation toward formally declaring war. The Japanese conquest of China violated the American belief that China should be kept free from foreign domination and thus open to American trade. But Japan did not stop there. In July 1941, Japanese forces occupied the French colony of Indochina, which included Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Alarmed by the aggressive nature of these invasions, the United States perceived a Japanese plan to control all of Asia. It retaliated by cutting off all trade with Japan.
This was a grave threat to the Japanese. Without raw materials from the United States, the Japanese economy would slow down. The United States had therefore given Japan a difficult choice: either withdraw from Indochina and China or seek resources elsewhere. Japanese planners chose to look elsewhere. They invaded British and Dutch possessions in the East Indies. But they felt that the U.S. presence in the Far East was limiting their capacity to expand into other territories. In their view, the United States had to be forcibly expelled from Asia.
Japanese Empire, 1:21
https://youtu.be/4Dk0nA5JCZE
23-3 The War
In December 1941, the German-Japanese Axis seemed all-powerful. On all fronts, the Allies were losing. In the Pacific, the Japanese had mauled the Americans at Pearl Harbor and scored rapid victories in the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. By mid-1942, Japan’s quest for control of a unified Asia was almost complete. Meanwhile, German and Italian forces occupied much of North Africa and most of Europe except Britain. Despite his nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler’s armies were nearing Moscow as well. They had also begun the process of murdering all of Europe’s Jews and political radicals in an effort to remake Europe in Germany’s Aryan image; the Holocaust was under way.
Pearl Harbor attack scene HD, 2:48
https://youtu.be/bxIsVYdB0lA
The best part of the movie "Pearl Harbor", 3:43
This scene is where the President Roosevelt (John Voight) is meeting with his defense cabinet to discuss plans for retaliation for the attack by the Japanese military at Pearl Harbor.
https://youtu.be/PFhY6IaUJ40
23-3a The Alliance
Although most Americans viewed Japan as the main aggressor, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Germany posed the greater threat. For the time being, however, neither the United States nor Britain was strong enough to mount an attack. For many months, the Soviet Union was the only force battling the Axis on the European continent.
To help the Soviets, the United States and Britain sent $11 billion in trucks, food, and other supplies. The Soviets were grateful, but Stalin wanted a permanent alliance. The question was, on what terms? Stalin would not accept the Atlantic Charter because of its insistence on democratic elections, which might threaten his creation of a communist empire. Stalin also wanted to reclaim Poland from Germany, which was forbidden by the charter’s commitment to national determination. Stalin had decided he would never agree to any European settlement that would let armies sweep eastward, unimpeded, toward Moscow. He wanted to ensure Soviet security from western Europe.
In May 1942, the Soviet Red Army struggled alone against Germany. Roosevelt, fearing the Soviets might make a separate peace with Germany, suggested that, after the war, the four major allies (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China) exert their military power to ensure international peace. Stalin enthusiastically agreed to this four policemen approach, believing it was Roosevelt’s way of promising that governments friendly to Soviet interests would be installed in central Europe. Roosevelt probably envisioned only a general Soviet role in guaranteeing security. Thus, even as the United States entered the war, Roosevelt’s vision of the postwar world was on a collision course with that of the Soviet leader, a course that would lead to the Cold War. For the time being, though, a remarkable alliance had been forged, one that brought together the largest capitalist nation in the world (the United States), the largest communist nation, which was still committed to the goal of world revolution (the Soviet Union), and the largest colonial power that was struggling to keep its vast global empire closed to American trade (Great Britain).
The Allies of World War II HD, 5:44
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War (1939--1945). The Allies promoted the alliance as seeking to stop wars of aggression being waged by the Western and Eastern powers associated with the Axis. The anti-German coalition at the start of the war (1 September 1939) consisted of France, Poland and the United Kingdom, soon to be joined by the British Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa). After 1941, the leaders of the British Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America known as the "Big Three", held leadership of the Allied powers.China, at that time, was also a major Ally. Other Allies included Belgium, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Greece, India (as part of the British Empire), Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Yugoslavia.
https://youtu.be/SENwzx8pPJU
23-3b The Pacific Theater,1941–1942
Although the Allies agreed to make Germany rather than Japan their first goal, the United States had a larger presence in the Pacific than in Europe. Thus, American troops fought their first battles of the war in the Pacific. American forces suffered many defeats in those early months. In the Philippines, the Wake Islands, and near Australia, Allied troops lost repeatedly. Sensing an opportunity to eject the American presence from the Pacific once and for all, the Japanese now sought possession of Hawai’i. By taking Hawai’i, they hoped to end the American threat in the Pacific before the United States had fully mobilized for war.
Good news came in May 1942, when Americans finally slowed the Japanese advance at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Then in June, a Japanese plan to deal a knockout punch to American forces backfired at Midway Island, when the Japanese suffered a decisive defeat. After Midway, Japan had reached the limit of its expansion in the Pacific. It was no longer an offensive threat pushing toward the American West Coast. It had reached the limits of its expansionary capacities. But what would it take to beat it back entirely? As it turned out, quite a lot.
World War II in the Pacific: Every Day, 5:05
See the changing front lines of World War II in the Pacific Theater every single day from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Japan. WW2 in Europe Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVEy... WW2 in Europe and the Pacific Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e_AZ... DETAILED KEY: Maroon: Axis Power members, their dependencies/colonies, and annexed lands. Burgundy: Areas militarily occupied by the Axis Powers. Red: Axis puppet states. Pink: Axis gains during that day. Brown: Surrendered axis Governments (not armies) Blue: Allied powers and areas occupied by the allies. Light blue: Allied gains for that day. Grey-blue: Allied powers not at war with Japan. Dark Lime Green: China before joining the allies.
https://youtu.be/6_1rzp2YVxQ
23-3c The European Theater, 1942–1943
In the early months of 1942, the Axis Powers reached the limit of their expansion in Europe too. In the west, German U-boats had sunk more than four hundred American ships in the Atlantic and were handily in control of almost all of western Europe. In the south, German troops moved from Libya to Egypt, African land that they sought in order to shut down the Allies’ last unfettered supply routes and win sole access to Middle Eastern oil. In the east, the Germans launched a summer counteroffensive in southern Russia and the Caucasus Mountains, taking Stalingrad on September 13. By the middle of 1942, the Germans had buttressed their hold on western Europe on all sides. Only Britain remained unoccupied.
World War II in Europe: Every Day, 7:00
WW2 in the Pacific Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_1rz... WW2 in Europe & The Pacific Every Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e_AZ3... This video shows the changing front lines of the European Theater of World War II every day from the German invasion of Poland to the surrender of Germany. DETAILED KEY: Maroon: Axis Power members, their dependencies/colonies, and annexed lands. Burgundy: Areas militarily occupied by the Axis Powers. Red: Axis puppet states. Pink: Axis gains during that day. Blue: Allied powers and areas occupied by the allies. Light blue: Allied gains for that day. Purple colors (left to right): Finland, occupied by Finland, and Finnish gains that day. Dark Green: The USSR before it joined the allies and annexed lands. Green: Areas militarily occupied by the USSR before it joined the allies. Light Green: Soviet gains for that day. Music and speech credits are at the end of the video.
https://youtu.be/WOVEy1tC7nk
23-3d 1944: Victory in View
In early 1944, with the spirit of cooperation between the major Allies stronger than ever, Allied forces attacked German and Japanese troops on a number of fronts. But all eyes were on the planned Allied landing in northern France, which Hitler was anticipating.
Normandy
Hitler didn’t know where the attack was going to come from, though, and if the Allies failed to secure a foothold in France, Hitler would be able to rush troops back to Russia and possibly hold off the advancing Soviets, perhaps securing his empire. But on June 6, 1944, an amphibious American, Canadian, and British assault on a 60-mile stretch of Normandy, France, supervised by American general Dwight Eisenhower, established a landing zone. After D-Day (a military euphemism for “designation day,” also in this case known as Operation Overlord), 1 million Allied troops poured into France and struck eastward, taking Caen and St. Lô en routeo securing Paris on August 25.
Moving swiftly, more than 2 million American, British, and other Allied troops entered France by September 5, and German defenses crumbled. By September 11, 1944, all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg had been liberated, and the next day Allied troops entered Germany (see Map 23.1). On the eastern front, Soviet troops invaded the Baltic states and East Prussia in the north and the Balkans and Hungary in the south. In the Pacific, American troops landed on Mindoro Island in the Philippines on December 15, and in a series of naval battles, destroyed most of Japan’s remaining sea power (see Map 23.2 on page 419). By late 1944, with Allied troops moving on all fronts toward Berlin and Tokyo, the defeat of the Axis was assured.
D day June 6, 1944 Normandy landings, 3:16
MUSIC = Epic Soul Factory - Sigma
https://youtu.be/XkvOZPRBz9U
23-4 The American Home Front
World War II was a remarkably destructive war, laying waste to much of Europe. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to overstate its destruction. The war killed off almost an entire generation—more than 23 million Soviets alone and about 62 million total. The war displaced millions more. Buildings—churches, castles, monasteries—that had stood for a thousand years or more were obliterated. Hitler’s soldiers had annihilated nearly all of European Jewry—roughly 6 million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps. About half of the Jews killed were from Poland; the rest came from almost every other European nation, including France, Germany, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Greece, and Italy.
The United States suffered too, but on a very different scale. Roughly 400,000 Americans died, and millions were injured. However, as unsettling and uncomfortable as it might seem to do so, the Second World War can be seen as an energizing event in American history rather than a destructive one. Very little American land or property was destroyed; the economy recovered from the Great Depression; and groups that were long excluded from full participation in American life slowly gained a measure of inclusion. This is not to say that World War II was a “good war”: soldiers died, many suffered, and discrimination persisted. But it is true that the war had a transformative effect on the American home front.
Stories of the American Homefront: WWII, 3:34
Interview with Betty Koch conducted and produced by Marissa Bristor. In this interview with Betty Koch she discusses her experiences during World War Two as a member of the home front, the food rationings and its effects on the women at home.
https://youtu.be/rZo4LJARkX4
23-4a The War Economy
The economy showed the most remarkable improvement. Wartime mobilization boosted production, increased demand for labor, and rescued the national economy from the depression. And it did all this without the extreme measures advocated by some experts. For instance, there was no draft for labor, which would have ensured that all industries operated at maximum capacity.
Impact of World War II on the U.S. Economy and Workforce | World War II Stories, 1:45
America’s involvement in World War II had a significant impact on the economy and workforce of the United States. The United States was still recovering from the impact of the Great Depression and the unemployment rate was hovering around 25%. Our involvement in the war soon changed that rate. American factories were retooled to produce goods to support the war effort and almost overnight the unemployment rate dropped to around 10%. Women went to work to fill jobs that were traditionally held by men. This segment of Iowa Public Television's Iowa’s WWII Stories includes historical footage and profiles how a civilian from Ankeny, Iowa supported the war effort.
https://youtu.be/e8JM0ohyJuo
23-4b Opportunities
The sudden demand for labor, fueled by the notion that the United States was fighting a cadre of brutal racist dictators, led to increased opportunities for women and minorities. These groups were now offered high-paying jobs that had never before been available to them. At the same time, certain forms of discrimination continued. The record is mixed, but the changes provoked by the war prompted social changes that resonated long after 1945.
Women
As millions of men enlisted in the armed services, U.S. industries needed more workers to replace them. American women filled this vacuum. By 1945, female employment outside the home had increased by more than 50 percent, to 20 million. In the process, women entered into fields that were not typically thought of as women’s work, including industrial jobs in defense factories.
Women and Minorities in WW2 - The Reckoning, 2:06
https://youtu.be/IkE3hU4l2i0
23-4c Demographic Shifts
Perhaps as important as the new opportunities for women, minorities, and returning soldiers, the upheavals of the war included dramatic shifts in the nation’s population. About 15 million Americans moved during the war, mainly for jobs in the new centers of the defense industry. This was one of the largest internal migrations in the nation’s history.
23-4d Leisure in Wartime
The war also affected the way Americans had fun. The period’s limitations (long work hours, few men present, rationing of goods) generated a new kind of resourcefulness. After the departure of many male athletes for the armed services, for example, women’s baseball leagues filled the void. The Rockford Peaches, Kenosha Comets, Racine Belles, and South Bend Blue Sox drew hundreds of thousands of fans to women’s baseball games across the Midwest. In 1948, the women’s league reached a peak of ten teams and nearly 1 million in attendance, impressive in light of the small size of the cities that hosted the teams.
In music, jazz captured the energy of the era and embodied the push toward racial integration. Jazz, especially the styles practiced by the big swing bands, was America’s favorite music in the 1940s. Millions of Americans found respite from the war while listening to the radio and dancing in nightclubs. Swing music popularized jazz for white audiences, encouraging greater racial integration and symbolizing the promise of a more democratic society.
There's No Crying in Baseball - A League of Their Own (5/8) Movie CLIP (1992) HD, 2:18
The All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943, when most of the men of baseball-playing age were far away in Europe and Asia fighting World War II. The league flourished until after World War II, when, with the men's return, the league was consigned to oblivion. Director Penny Marshall and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel re-create the wartime era when women's baseball looked to stand a good chance of sweeping the country. The story begins as a candy-bar tycoon enlists agents to scour the country to find women who could play ball. In the backwoods of Oregon, two sisters -- Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) -- are discovered. Dottie can hit and catch, while Kit can throw a mean fastball. The girls come to Chicago to try out for the team with other prospects that include their soon-to-be-teammates Mae Mordabito (Madonna), Doris Murphy (Rosie O'Donnell), and Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanagh). The team's owner, Walter Harvey (Gary Marshall) needs someone to coach his team and he picks one-time home-run champion Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), who is now a broken-down alcoholic. After a few weeks of training, as Dugan sobers up, the team begins to show some promise. By the end of the season, the team has improved to the point where they are competing in the World Series (which is no big deal, since there are only four teams in the league).
https://youtu.be/6M8szlSa-8o
Wartime Dancing (WWII), 3:25
https://youtu.be/xS5oCLXrQLs
p. 615, "The ferocious bombing of Dresden from February 13 to 15, 1945, created a firestorm that may have killed as many as a hundred thousand inhabitants and refugees. . . . Germany suffered enormously from the Allied bombing raids. Millions of buildings were destroyed, and possibly half a million civilians died."
0:03 / 4:58
Dresden Bombing With Footage of Allied Aerial Assault on Pforzheim and Cologne Germany
Dramatic WW2 footage of the bombing of Dresden, Germany on February 13 & 15, 1945 with additional footage of the raids on Pforzheim and Cologne in late February and early March. Often referred to as, "the unknown Dresden", the raid on Pforzheim (pre-war population of 79,000) destroyed over 80% of the buildings in the city and killed approximately 17,000 people.
Sorry about the distorted audio on this one.
About the "Scarecrow" Bombs
I am by no means an expert on things such as this, but from what I have been able to find out, these bombs did not exist. The consensus seems to be that these explosions were the result of a malfunctioning bomb fuse that caused the bomb to detonate and destroy the aircraft in midair. Other theories are that the explosions were a result of a flak hit to the bomb bay of the plane or from a Luftwaffe night fighter with Schräge Musik upward firing autocannons shooting down the bomber. However, neither of these are present in the video (at the 4:24 mark) when the Lancaster is shown being destroyed during the footage of the daylight raid. Additionally, no German records have surfaced of such a weapon having been developed.
Public domain footage from Staff Film Reports No. 46 produced by the US Army Signal Corps' Army Pictorial Service.
Thanks for watching and please like, comment, share and Subscribe! Also please feel free to use YouTube's embed feature to put any of my videos on your blogs, forums, articles, & websites, etc.
https://youtu.be/06_9WEZcvUg
In the Pacific, Japan did not capitulate when the Germans did. The naval war had largely ended by late 1944 with a resounding Allied victory, but the prospect of a drawn-out invasion of Japan in order to get them to surrender loomed. Japanese forces, given orders to fight to the death, hoped to hold off the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. It took a month for American forces to eliminate Japanese resistance on the island of Iwo Jima. This victory at Iwo Jima came at a cost of 6,800 American lives—more Marines than in any other battle in the Pacific—and about 21,000 of the 22,000 Japanese who had been on the island. American troops encountered the same fierce resistance on the island of Okinawa, where it took American troops three months to claim victory, at the cost of 140,000 civilians, 66,000 Japanese soldiers, and 12,000 American soldiers. American forces learned in these two battles that attaining Japan’s unconditional surrender would be a long, exhausting ordeal.
23-5 A World Remade, 1945
Meanwhile, the war continued on its many fronts. By late 1944, the war was nearing its end.
23-5a Germany’s Last Stand
Recognizing a tight spot when they saw one, on December 16, 1944, German forces launched a desperate counteroffensive in Belgium, forcing thinly spread Allied troops to retreat for 50 miles. The Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle of the western front, ended when the Germans failed to capture the Allied stronghold of Bastogne, Belgium. Although the battle stymied Allied progress in the west in January 1945, it diverted badly needed resources from the rest of Germany, leaving the country virtually undefended from other sides. Thus, in January, the Soviets made rapid progress toward Berlin from the east.
23-5b Final Moves
Before the postwar world could be arranged, however, the Axis had to be defeated. Beginning their final offensive on February 8, 1945, Allied troops crossed the Rhine River and rapidly dominated the German heartland. Throughout mid-February, the British and American air forces conducted an intense firebombing campaign over the beautiful German city of Dresden, creating a cocktail of bombs that blew roofs off buildings. In a typical campaign, the Allies then dropped “matchstick bombs” to ignite building frames and followed these with high explosives onto main avenues into town, which prevented rescue missions. Within days, the city was destroyed and approximately 30,000 Germans were killed. The controversial goal of the mission was to sap the German will to fight and to ensure that German troops could not move east to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviets, meanwhile, entered Berlin on April 24. Knowing the end was near, Hitler committed suicide on April 30 and all German forces surrendered on May 8, known as “Victory in Europe Day,” or V-E Day.
Battle of Iwo Jima - Fierce Fighting Footage [Full Resolution], 4:38
Battle of Iwo Jima - Fierce Fighting Footage [Full Resolution]Iwo Jima is an island some 650miles south of Tokyo. It is part of the Japanese Volcano Islands. On 19th February 1945, Iwo Jima became the setting of a major battle where the United States fought the Japanese to reclaim the island back from Japan. It was just one of the bloody battles during the Pacific War.
https://youtu.be/8rfsRNeiing
Asian Holocaust - Asia-Pacific theatre of war, World War II, 1:07
This short clip highlights the human scale of the tragedy in the Second World War Asia-Pacific theatre. Between 1931-1945, Japanese Imperial Forces invaded and occupied parts of China, Manchukuo, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), New Guinea, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), British Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Borneo, American-occupied Philippines. This clip is part of a project on www.asianholocaust.org to gather resources and information to commemorate the Asian and Allied victims of this epic conflict.
https://youtu.be/6NOeiauGlhk
23-5c Defeat of Japan
In 1945, Japan was only lightly defended against American attack; huge firebombings of Japanese cities went unanswered. But American planners estimated that an invasion of the Japanese home islands, scheduled for November 1945 and March 1946, would cost 50,000 American casualties in its first phases alone. The battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa demonstrated the extent to which Japanese soldiers would fight to avoid full capitulation. At the same moment, Truman was slowly coming to accept that he had the power to use the atomic bomb to end the war. Truman chose to use the massive new bomb on the city of Hiroshima after the Japanese government failed to respond to an Allied ultimatum to surrender or face “utter devastation.” On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped the bomb, destroying Hiroshima and ultimately causing death or injury to 160.000 people. After a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki on August 9 (killing between 60,000 and 80,000 people), the Japanese government surrendered on the condition that the Japanese emperor be allowed to keep his throne. The Allies accepted. The hostilities of World War II were over, but at a tremendous cost, both human and moral.
Truman himself said he never lost sleep over the decision to use nuclear bombs, but others were more conflicted. Perhaps most disturbed by the moral dimensions of nuclear weaponry was Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project. Upon seeing the first nuclear bomb test in the deserts of the American Southwest, Oppenheimer was appalled at the magnitude of the blast. Aware that the bomb had the capacity to kill thousands in an instant, Oppenheimer simply said, “I am become death.” Others argue that the Second World War had already ushered in mass death and, indeed, a changed morality. Not only had the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, but the conventional bombing of Dresden had already extended well beyond military targets to civilian ones, killing 30,000 Germans in a matter of days. In the Pacific, the battle over the island of Okinawa had killed 140,000 civilians, 66,000 Japanese soldiers, and 12,000 American soldiers. In light of these numbers, some argue that dropping a nuclear bomb simply expedited an end to a tragic war.
Now that the European theater war is over, and considering the context of the controversial bombing of Dresden, how can the Americans end war in the Asian theater? In short, if you had a devastating weapon of war, should you use it?
President Harry S. Truman reads prepared speech after dropping of atomic bomb on ...HD Stock Footage, 3:41
https://youtu.be/e3Ib4wTq0jY
Chapter 23 World War II
- 1939
- Germany invades Poland and annexes Danzig; Britain and France give Hitler ultimatum (Sept. 1),declare war (Sept. 3). Disabled German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee blown up off Montevideo, Uruguay, on Hitler's orders (Dec. 17). Limited activity (“Sitzkrieg”) on Western Front.
- 1940
- Nazis invade Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg (May 10). Chamberlain resigns as Britain's prime minister; Churchill takes over (May 10). Germans cross French frontier (May 12) using air/tank/infantry “Blitzkrieg” tactics. Dunkerque evacuation—about 335,000 out of 400,000 Allied soldiers rescued from Belgium by British civilian and naval craft (May 26-June 3). Italy declares war on France and Britain; invades France (June 10). Germans enter Paris; city undefended (June 14). France and Germany sign armistice at Compiegne (June 22). Nazis bomb Coventry, England (Nov. 14).
- 1941
- Germans launch attacks in Balkans. Yugoslavia surrenders—General Mihajlovic continues guerrilla warfare; Tito leads left-wing guerrillas (April 17). Nazi tanks enter Athens; remnants of British Army quit Greece (April 27). Hitler attacks Russia (June 22). Atlantic Charter—Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Churchill agree on war aims (Aug. 14). Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Philippines, Guam force U.S. into war; U.S. Pacific fleet crippled (Dec. 7). U.S., Britain, and Australia declare war on Japan. Germany and Italy declare war on U.S.; Congress declares war on those countries (Dec. 11).
- 1942
- British surrender Singapore to Japanese (Feb. 15). Roosevelt orders Japanese and Japanese Americans in western U.S. to be exiled to “relocation centers,” many for the remainder of the war (Feb. 19). U.S. forces on Bataan peninsula in Philippines surrender (April 9). U.S. and Filipino troops on Corregidor island in Manila Bay surrender to Japanese (May 6). Village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia razed by Nazis (June 10). U.S. and Britain land in French North Africa (Nov. 8).
- 1943
- Casablanca Conference—Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agree on unconditional surrender goal (Jan. 14-24). German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad—turning point of war in Russia (Feb. 1-2). Remnants of Nazis trapped on Cape Bon, ending war in Africa (May 12).Mussolini deposed; Badoglio named premier (July 25). Allied troops land on Italian mainland after conquest of Sicily (Sept. 3). Italy surrenders (Sept. 8). Nazis seize Rome (Sept. 10). Cairo Conference: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek pledge defeat of Japan, free Korea (Nov. 22-26). Teheran Conference: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin agree on invasion plans (Nov. 28-Dec. 1).
- 1944
- U.S. and British troops land at Anzio on west Italian coast and hold beachhead (Jan. 22). U.S. and British troops enter Rome (June 4). D-Day—Allies launch Normandy invasion (June 6). Hitler wounded in bomb plot (July 20). Paris liberated (Aug. 25). Athens freed by Allies (Oct. 13).Americans invade Philippines (Oct. 20). Germans launch counteroffensive in Belgium—Battle of the Bulge (Dec. 16).
- 1945
- Yalta Agreement signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin—establishes basis for occupation of Germany, returns to Soviet Union lands taken by Germany and Japan; U.S.S.R. agrees to friendship pact with China (Feb. 11). Mussolini killed at Lake Como (April 28). Admiral Doenitz takes command in Germany; suicide of Hitler announced (May 1). Berlin falls (May 2).Germany signs unconditional surrender terms at Rheims (May 7). Allies declare V-E Day (May 8). Potsdam Conference—Truman, Churchill, Atlee (after July 28), Stalin establish council of foreign ministers to prepare peace treaties; plan German postwar government and reparations (July 17-Aug. 2). A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima by U.S. (Aug. 6). U.S.S.R. declares war on Japan (Aug. 8). Nagasaki hit by A-bomb (Aug. 9). Japan agrees to surrender (Aug. 14). V-J Day—Japanese sign surrender terms aboard battleship Missouri (Sept. 2).
https://prezi.com/m/ik1bqmjdxd4g/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy
World War II 1939-1945
World War II, 1939–1945
The German and Japanese occupations of neighboring countries led to a brutal war that took millions of lives. Both countries were defeated, but not before the Nazis had killed millions of people in pursuit of Aryan domination of Europe.
Paths to War
Aggressive moves by Germany and Japan set the stage for World War II. Adolf Hitler began a massive military buildup and instituted a draft in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The German annexation of Austria alarmed France but did not shake Great Britain's policy of appeasement. Mussolini became a German ally. Appeasement of Germany peaked at a conference in Munich where Hitler claimed he sought only one final territory, the Czech Sudetenland. This soon proved false. When Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Japanese expansion into Manchuria and northern China brought condemnation from the League of Nations. While still at war with China, Japan launched a surprise attack on U.S. and European colonies in Southeast Asia.
The Course of World War II
German forces swept through northern Europe early in the war and set up the Vichy government in France. German air attacks on Great Britain resulted in fierce British retaliation. In the east, harsh weather and a resolute Soviet Union defeated an invading German army. The Japanese conquered the Pacific but miscalculated when they attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States surprised Japan by abandoning its neutrality and entering the war to retake the Pacific. By the end of 1943, the tide had turned against Germany, Italy, and Japan. After the invasion of Normandy, the Allies liberated Paris and defeated Germany. U.S. President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin met at Potsdam, Germany, to plan the post-war world. The war in Asia continued until the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing massive casualties and bringing Japan's surrender.
The New Order and the Holocaust
To further their war effort and Hitler's plans for Aryan expansion, the Nazis forced millions of people to resettle as forced laborers. No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews. As part of the Nazis' Final Solution, Jews were locked into cramped, unsanitary ghettos or forced to dig their own mass graves before being killed. When this proved too slow for the Nazis, they transported Europe's Jews to death camps where they were worked to death or sent to die in gas chambers. The Nazis killed between five and six million Jews and nine to ten million non-Jews. In Asia, Japan showed little respect for the conquered peoples in its effort to secure industrial markets and raw materials. Japanese treatment of prisoners of war was equally harsh. Japan professed a commitment to ending Western colonialism, but the brutality of the Japanese convinced many Asians to resist Japanese occupation.
23-4 The American Home Front
The Home Front and the Aftermath of the War
World War II reached almost every area of the world, and mobilization for war brought widespread suffering and even starvation. The war caused 20 million civilian deaths. The United States, which did not fight the war on its own territory, sent its forces to fight and produced much of the military equipment for the Allies. Segregation in the U.S. military led African Americans to demand civil rights. Racism and suspicion led to the war-time detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. The bombing of cities by the Allied and Axis powers cost thousands of lives, but probably did nothing to weaken the morale of either side. After the war, ideological conflict between the West and the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War. The Cold War centered around the status of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
World War II 1939-1945
Note Taking
Reading and Listening Skill: Recognize Sequence
As you read and listen, keep track of the sequence of events that led to the outbreak of World War II by completing a table like the one below.
Note Taking
Reading Skill: Recognize Sequence
Complete this timetable of German aggression as you read.
The German Path to War
Hitler pursued his goal of bringing all German-speaking people into the Third Reich. He also took steps to gain “living space” for Germans in Eastern Europe. Hitler, who believed in the superiority of the German people, or “Aryan race,” thought that Germany had a right to conquer the inferior Slavs to the east. “Nature is cruel,” he claimed, “therefore we, too, may be cruel. . . .I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”
Hitler on the History of the Aryan Race (Mein Kampf in English), 3:10
https://youtu.be/m4trUdPUO_8
Throughout the 1930s, challenges to peace followed a pattern. Dictators took aggressive action but met only verbal protests and pleas for peace from the democracies. Mussolini, Hitler, and the leaders of Japan viewed that desire for peace as weakness and responded with new acts of aggression. With hindsight, we can see the shortcomings of the democracies’ policies. These policies, however, were the product of long and careful deliberation. At the time, some people believed they would work.
The First Steps
Hitler, too, had tested the will of the Western democracies and found it weak. First, he built up the German military in defiance of the treaty that had ended World War I. Then, in 1936, he sent troops into the “demilitarized” Rhineland bordering France—another treaty violation.
March 1936 Rhineland remilitarized
Hitler's Occupation of the Rhineland 1:47
From, "Why We Fight"
https://youtu.be/SpxdYTNkbe4
Germans hated the Versailles treaty, and Hitler’s successful challenge made him more popular at home. The Western democracies denounced his moves but took no real action. Instead, they adopted a policy of appeasement, or giving in to the demands of an aggressor in order to to keep the peace.
The Western policy of appeasement developed for a number of reasons. France was demoralized, suffering from political divisions at home. It could not take on Hitler without British support. The British, however, had no desire to confront the German dictator. Some even thought that Hitler’s actions constituted a justifiable response to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which they believed had been too harsh on Germany.
In both Britain and France, many saw Hitler and fascism as a defense against a worse evil—the spread of Soviet communism. Additionally, the Great Depression sapped the energies of the Western democracies. Finally, widespread pacifism, or opposition to all war, and disgust with the destruction from the previous war pushed many governments to seek peace at any price.
As war clouds gathered in Europe in the mid-1930s, the United States Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts. One law forbade the sale of arms to any nation at war. Others outlawed loans to warring nations and prohibited Americans from traveling on ships of warring powers. The fundamental goal of American policy, however, was to avoid involvement in a European war, not to prevent such a conflict.
New Alliances
In the face of the apparent weakness of Britain, France, and the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan formed what became known as the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. Known as the Axis powers, the three nations agreed to fight Soviet communism. They also agreed not to interfere with one another’s plans for territorial expansion. The agreement cleared the way for these anti-democratic, aggressor powers to take even bolder steps.
In Italy, Mussolini decided to act on his own imperialist ambitions. Italy’s defeat by the Ethiopians at the battle of Adowa in 1896 still rankled. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, located in northeastern Africa. Although the Ethiopians resisted bravely, their outdated weapons were no match for Mussolini’s tanks, machine guns, poison gas, and airplanes. The Ethiopian king Haile Selassie (hy luh suh lah see) appealed to the League of Nations for help. The League voted sanctions against Italy for violating international law. But the League had no power to enforce the sanctions, and by early 1936, Italy had conquered Ethiopia.
Union with Austria
From the beginning, Nazi propaganda had found fertile ground in Austria. By 1938, Hitler was ready to engineer the Anschluss (ahn shloos), or union of Austria and Germany. Early that year, he forced the Austrian chancellor to appoint Nazis to key cabinet posts. When the Austrian leader balked at other demands in March, Hitler sent in the German army to “preserve order.” To indicate his new role as ruler of Austria, Hitler made a speech from the Hofburg Palace, the former residence of the Hapsburg emperors.
The Anschluss violated the Versailles treaty and created a brief war scare. Some Austrians favored annexation. Hitler quickly silenced any Austrians who opposed it. And since the Western democracies took no action, Hitler easily had his way.
Demands and Appeasement
Germany turned next to Czechoslovakia. At first, Hitler insisted that the three million Germans in the Sudetenland (soo day tun land)—a region of western Czechoslovakia—be given autonomy. Czechoslovakia was one of only two remaining democracies in Eastern Europe. (Finland was the other.) Still, Britain and France were not willing to go to war to save it. As British and French leaders searched for a peaceful solution, Hitler increased his demands. The Sudetenland, he said, must be annexed to Germany.
At the Munich Conference in September 1938, British and French leaders again chose appeasement. They caved in to Hitler’s demands and then persuaded the Czechs to surrender the Sudetenland without a fight. In exchange, Hitler assured Britain and France that he had no further plans to expand his territory.
After the horrors of World War I, Western democracies desperately tried to preserve peace during the 1930s while ignoring signs that the rulers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were preparing to build new empires. Despite the best efforts of Neville Chamberlain and other Western leaders, the world was headed to war again.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to a jubilant crowd upon returning to London from a conference with Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, in September 1938:
“For the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time . . . Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”
"Peace in our Time," Chamberlain, September 1938, 3:24
https://youtu.be/kmH5A6QsqRY
Great Britain and France React
Hitler and the Soviets
Just as Churchill predicted, Europe plunged rapidly toward war. In March 1939, Hitler broke his promises and gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia. The democracies finally accepted the fact that appeasement had failed. At last thoroughly alarmed, they promised to protect Poland, most likely the next target of Hitler’s expansion.
In August 1939, Hitler stunned the world by announcing a nonaggression pact with his great enemy—Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Publicly, the Nazi-Soviet Pact bound Hitler and Stalin to peaceful relations. Secretly, the two agreed not to fight if the other went to war and to divide up Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe between them.
Stalin-Hitler pact commemorated, 3:58
The pact was based not on friendship or respect but on mutual need. Hitler feared communism as Stalin feared fascism. But Hitler wanted a free hand in Poland. Also, he did not want to fight a war with the Western democracies and the Soviet Union at the same time. For his part, Stalin had sought allies among the Western democracies against the Nazi menace. Mutual suspicions, however, kept them apart. By joining with Hitler, Stalin tried to protect the Soviet Union from the threat of war with Germany and grabbed a chance to gain land in Eastern Europe.
In-class
Reading Check
Identifying
Where did Hitler believe he could find more "living space" to expand Germany?
The Japanese Path to War
One of the earliest tests had been posed by Japan. Japanese military leaders and ultranationalists thought that Japan should have an empire equal to those of the Western powers. In pursuit of this goal, Japan seized Manchuria in 1931. When the League of Nations condemned the aggression, Japan simply withdrew from the organization. Japan’s easy success strengthened the militarist faction in Japan. In 1937, Japanese armies overran much of eastern China, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War. Once again, Western protests did not stop Japan.
Japanese Invasion of Manchuria, 2:06
https://youtu.be/t_aZWY2Pm3g
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the Japanese saw a chance to grab European possessions in Southeast Asia. The rich resources of the region, including oil, rubber, and tin, would be of immense value in fighting its war against the Chinese.
In 1940, Japan advanced into French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. To stop Japanese aggression, the United States banned the sale of war materials, such as iron, steel, and oil to Japan. Japanese leaders saw this move as an attempt to interfere in Japan’s sphere of influence.
Asian Holocaust - Asia-Pacific theatre of war, World War II, 1:07
This short clip highlights the human scale of the tragedy in the Second World War Asia-Pacific theatre. Between 1931-1945, Japanese Imperial Forces invaded and occupied parts of China, Manchukuo, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), New Guinea, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), British Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Borneo, American-occupied Philippines. This clip is part of a project on www.asianholocaust.org to gather resources and information to commemorate the Asian and Allied victims of this epic conflict.
https://youtu.be/6NOeiauGlhk
Japan and the United States held talks to ease the growing tension. But extreme militarists, such as General Tojo Hideki, hoped to expand Japan’s empire, and the United States was interfering with their plans.
War with China
The New Asian Order
In-class
Reading Check
Explaining
Why did Japan want to establish a New Order in East Asia?
The Course of World War II
German forces swept through northern Europe early in the war and set up the Vichy government in France. German air attacks on Great Britain resulted in fierce British retaliation. In the east, harsh weather and a resolute Soviet Union defeated an invading German army. The Japanese conquered the Pacific but miscalculated when they attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States surprised Japan by abandoning its neutrality and entering the war to retake the Pacific. By the end of 1943, the tide had turned against Germany, Italy, and Japan. After the invasion of Normandy, the Allies liberated Paris and defeated Germany. U.S. President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin met at Potsdam, Germany, to plan the post-war world. The war in Asia continued until the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing massive casualties and bringing Japan's surrender.
Europe At War
Hitler's Early Victories
23-2a Blitzkrieg and Doubt
Blitzkrieg Tactic 2:17
https://youtu.be/gUjrnlMAtQ4
The Battle of Britain
Battle of Britain - The final battle 5:09
Largely orchestral scene from the 1969 movie 'Battle of Britain' which depicts the RAF doing battle in the skies with the German Luftwaffe in the closing stages of the battle - of which the Germans tasted defeat, causing Hitler to postpone his invasion plans for Britain.
https://youtu.be/gTv_4DPQUnQ
Attack on the Soviet Union
In-class
Reading Check
Identifying
Where did Hitler believe he could find more "living space" to expand Germany?
Japan At War
Pearl Harbor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 3:46
https://youtu.be/m8NCBoLpS8s
Describing
By the spring of 1942, which territories did Japan control?
23-2 American Foreign Policy Before the War
23-2a 1930s Isolation
23-2b From Isolation to Intervention
Isolationist
Clash: Rubio vs. Paul
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/11/10/rubio-battles-with-committed-isolationist-rand-paul-in-tense-clash-over-foreign-policy-taxes/
The Allies Advance
The European Theater
The Asian Theater
In-class
Reading Check
Summarizing
Why was the German assault on Stalingrad a crushing defeat for the Germans?
Last Years of the War
The European Theater
People in History
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill KG OM CH TD DL FRS RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer (as Winston S. Churchill), and an artist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.
Return to the Admiralty
On 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany following the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, the same position he had held during the first part of the First World War. As such he was a member of Chamberlain's small War Cabinet.[178][179][180]In this position, he proved to be one of the highest-profile ministers during the so-called "Phoney War," when the only noticeable action was at sea and the USSR's attack on Finland. Churchill advocated the pre-emptive occupation of the neutral Norwegian iron-ore port of Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, early in the war. However, Chamberlain and the rest of the War Cabinet disagreed, and the operation was delayed until the successful German invasion of Norway.
"We shall never surrender"
In June 1940, to encourage the neutral Irish state to join with the Allies, Churchill indicated to the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera that the United Kingdom would push for Irish unity, but believing that Churchill could not deliver, de Valera declined the offer. The British did not inform the Government of Northern Ireland that they had made the offer to the Dublin government, and De Valera's rejection was not publicised until 1970.
An element of British public and political sentiment favoured a negotiated peace with Germany, among them Halifax as Foreign Secretary, but Churchill refused to consider an armistice. Although at times personally pessimistic about Britain's chances for victory—Churchill told Hastings Ismay on 12 June 1940 that "[y]ou and I will be dead in three months' time"—his use of rhetoric hardened public opinion against a peaceful resolution and prepared the British for a long war. Coining the general term for the upcoming battle, Churchill stated in his "finest hour" speech to the House of Commons on 18 June, "I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin." By refusing an armistice with Germany, Churchill kept resistance alive in the British Empire and created the basis for the later Allied counter-attacks of 1942–45, with Britain serving as a platform for the supply of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Western Europe.
In response to previous criticisms that there had been no clear single minister in charge of the prosecution of the war Churchill created and took the additional position of Minister of Defence, making him the most powerful wartime prime minister in British history. He immediately put his friend and confidant, industrialist and newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of aircraft production. It was Beaverbrook's business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering, which eventually made the difference in the war.
... we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, 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:
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'.
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
"Rhetorical power", wrote Churchill, "is neither wholly bestowed, nor wholly acquired, but cultivated." Not all were impressed by his oratory. Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia and himself a gifted phrase-maker, said of Churchill during the Second World War: "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way." Another associate wrote: "He is ... the slave of the words which his mind forms about ideas ... And he can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery."
Mental and physical health
Since the appearance in 1966 of Lord Moran's memoir of his years as Churchill's doctor, with its claim that "Black Dog" was the name Churchill gave to "the prolonged fits of depression from which he suffered", many authors have suggested that throughout his life Churchill was a victim of, or at risk from, clinical depression. Formulated in this way, Churchill's mental health history contains unmistakable echoes of the seminal interpretation of Lord Moran's Black Dog revelations made by Dr Anthony Storr. In drawing so heavily on Moran for what he took to be the latter's totally reliable, first-hand clinical evidence of Churchill's lifelong struggle with "prolonged and recurrent depression" and its associated "despair", Storr produced a seemingly authoritative and persuasive diagnostic essay that, in the words of John Ramsden, "strongly influenced all later accounts."However, Storr was not aware that, as Moran's biographer Professor Richard Lovell has shown, Moran, contrary to the impression created in his book, kept no diary, in the dictionary sense of the word, during his years as Churchill's doctor. Nor was Storr aware that Moran's book as published was a much rewritten account which mixed together Moran's contemporaneous jottings with later material acquired from other sources. As Wilfred Attenborough has demonstrated, the key Black Dog 'diary' entry for 14 August 1944 was an arbitrarily dated pastiche in which the explicit reference to Black Dog—the first of the few in the book (with an associated footnote definition of the term)—was taken, not from anything Churchill had said to Moran, but from much later claims made to Moran by Brendan Bracken (a non-clinician, of course) in 1958. Although seemingly unnoticed by Dr Storr and those he influenced, Moran later on in his book retracts his earlier suggestion, also derived from Brendan Bracken, that, towards the end of the Second World War, Churchill was succumbing to "the inborn melancholia of the Churchill blood"; also unnoticed by Storr et al., Moran, in his final chapter, states that Churchill, before the start of the First World War, "had managed to extirpate bouts of depression from his system".
Despite the difficulties with Moran's book, the many illustrations it provides of a Churchill understandably plunged into temporary low mood by military defeats and other severely adverse developments constitute a compelling portrait of a great man reacting to, but not significantly impeded by, worry and overstrain, a compelling portrait that is entirely consistent with the portraits of others who worked closely with Churchill. Moreover, it can be readily deduced from Moran's book that Churchill did not receive medication for depression - the amphetamine that Moran prescribed for special occasions, especially for big speeches from the autumn of 1953 onwards, was to combat the effects of Churchill's stroke of that year.
Churchill himself seems, in a long life, to have written about Black Dog on one occasion only: the reference, a backward-looking one, occurs in a private handwritten letter to Clementine Churchill dated July 1911 which reports the successful treatment of a relative's depression by a doctor in Germany. His ministerial circumstances at that date, the very limited treatments available for serious depression pre-1911, the fact of the relative's being "complete cured", and, not least, the evident deep interest Churchill took in the fact of the complete cure, can be shown to point to Churchill's pre-1911 Black Dog depression's having been a form of mild (i.e. non-psychotic) anxiety-depression, as that term is defined by Professor Edward Shorter.
It will be apparent from the preceding paragraphs that there is a serious doubt about the reliability of the evidential foundations of the dominant, essentially Storrian, perception that Churchill's mental health was an open-and-shut case of clinical depression. Moran himself leaned strongly in the direction of his patient's being "by nature very apprehensive"; close associates of Churchill have disputed the idea that apprehension was a defining feature of Churchill's temperament, although they readily concede that he was noticeably worried and anxious about some matters, especially in the buildup to important speeches in the House of Commons and elsewhere. And Churchill himself all but openly acknowledged in his book 'Painting as a Pastime' that he was prey to the "worry and mental overstrain [experienced] by persons who, over prolonged periods, have to bear exceptional responsibilities and discharge duties upon a very large scale". The fact that he found a remedy in painting and bricklaying is a strong indicator that the condition as he defined it did not amount to 'clinical depression', certainly not as that term was understood during the lifetimes of himself and Lord Moran.
According to Lord Moran, during the war years Churchill sought solace in his tumbler of whisky and soda and his cigar. Churchill was also a very emotional man, unafraid to shed tears when appropriate. During some of his broadcast speeches it was noticed that he was trying to hold back the tears. Nevertheless, although the fall of Tobruk was, by Churchill's own account "one of the heaviest blows" he received during the war, there seem to have been no tears. Certainly, the next day Moran found him animated and vigorous. Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had been present when President Roosevelt broke the news of the tragedy to Churchill, focused afterwards in his diary on the superbly well judged manner in which the President made his offer of immediate military assistance, despite Alanbrooke's being ever ready to highlight what he perceived to be Churchill's contradictory motivations and flawed character during the war. For example, in his diary entry for 10 September 1944:
... And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine that Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no idea what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of this otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again ... Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.Alanbrooke, in the words of Paul Reid, "was egalitarian: he criticized everybody, American and British".
Churchill's physical health became more fragile during the war, as shown by a mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House and also in December 1943 when he contracted pneumonia. Despite this, he travelled over 100,000 miles (160,000 km) throughout the war to meet other national leaders. For security, he usually travelled using the alias Colonel Warden.
Relations with the United States
Churchill was party to treaties that would redraw post-Second World War European and Asian boundaries. These were discussed as early as 1943. At the Second Quebec Conference in 1944 he drafted and, together with Roosevelt, signed a less-harsh version of the original Morgenthau Plan, in which they pledged to convert Germany after its unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character."[221] Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were officially agreed to by President Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam. Churchill's strong relationship with Harry Truman was also of great significance to both countries. While he clearly regretted the loss of his close friend and counterpart Roosevelt, Churchill was enormously supportive of Truman in his first days in office, calling him, "the type of leader the world needs when it needs him most."
Relations with the Soviet Union
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill, a vehement anti-communist, famously stated "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons," regarding his policy toward Stalin. Soon, British supplies and tanks were flowing to help the Soviet Union.The Casablanca Conference, a meeting of Allied powers held in Casablanca, Morocco, on 14 January through 23 January 1943, produced what was to be known as the "Casablanca Declaration". In attendance were Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle. Joseph Stalin had bowed out, citing the need for his presence in the Soviet Union to attend to the Stalingrad crisis. It was in Casablanca that the Allies made a unified commitment to continue the war through to the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers. In private, however, Churchill did not fully subscribe to the doctrine of "unconditional surrender," and was taken by surprise when Franklin Roosevelt announced this to the world as Allied consensus.
The settlement concerning the borders of Poland, that is, the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union and between Germany and Poland, was viewed as a betrayal in Poland during the post-war years, as it was established against the views of the Polish government in exile. It was Winston Churchill, who tried to motivate Mikołajczyk, who was prime minister of the Polish government in exile, to accept Stalin's wishes, but Mikołajczyk refused. Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders.
As he expounded in the House of Commons on 15 December 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble ... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions." However the resulting expulsions of Germans were carried out in a way which resulted in much hardship and, according to a 1966 report by the West German Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons, the death of over 2.1 million. Churchill opposed the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it at the conferences.
Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty–fifty about Yugoslavia?Stalin agreed to this Percentages agreement, ticking a piece of paper as he heard the translation. In 1958, five years after the account of this meeting was published (in The Second World War), authorities of the Soviet Union denied that Stalin accepted the "imperialist proposal".
One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the Allies would return all Soviet citizens that found themselves in the Allied zone to the Soviet Union. This immediately affected the Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Allies, but was also extended to all Eastern European refugees. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called the Operation Keelhaul "the last secret" of the Second World War. The operation decided the fate of up to two million post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.
Dresden bombings controversy
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.On reflection, under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Sir Charles Portal (Chief of the Air Staff) and Sir Arthur Harris (AOC-in-C of RAF Bomber Command), among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one. This final version of the memo completed on 1 April 1945, stated:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies ... We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy's war effort.[237][238]Ultimately, responsibility for the British part of the attack lay with Churchill, which is why he has been criticised for allowing the bombings to occur. German historian Jörg Friedrich claims that Churchill's decision was a "war crime", and writing in 2006 the philosopher A. C. Grayling questioned the whole strategic bombing campaign by the RAF, presenting the argument that although it was not a war crime it was a moral crime that undermines the Allies' contention that they fought a just war. On the other hand, it has also been asserted that Churchill's involvement in the bombing of Dresden was based on the strategic and tactical aspects of winning the war. The destruction of Dresden, while immense, was designed to expedite the defeat of Germany. As historian and journalist Max Hastings wrote in an article subtitled "the Allied Bombing of Dresden": "I believe it is wrong to describe strategic bombing as a war crime, for this might be held to suggest some moral equivalence with the deeds of the Nazis. Bombing represented a sincere, albeit mistaken, attempt to bring about Germany's military defeat." British historian Frederick Taylor asserts that "All sides bombed each other's cities during the war. Half a million Soviet citizens, for example, died from German bombing during the invasion and occupation of Russia. That's roughly equivalent to the number of German citizens who died from Allied raids."
Second World War ends (in Europe)
As Europe celebrated peace at the end of six years of war, Churchill was concerned with the possibility that the celebrations would soon be brutally interrupted.He concluded that the UK and the US must anticipate the Red Army ignoring previously agreed frontiers and agreements in Europe, and prepare to "impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire." According to the Operation Unthinkable plan ordered by Churchill and developed by the British Armed Forces, the Third World War could have started on 1 July 1945 with a sudden attack against the allied Soviet troops. The plan was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.
Churchill and the bombing of Dresden
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/heroesvillains/g1/
Now that the European theater war is over, and considering the context of the controversial bombing of Dresden, how can the Americans end war in the Asian theater? In short, if you had a devastating weapon of war, should you use it?The Asian Theater
23-5c Defeat of Japan
Reading Check
In-class
Identifying
What was the "second front" that the Allies opened in Western Europe?
The New Order and the Holocaust
To further their war effort and Hitler's plans for Aryan expansion, the Nazis forced millions of people to resettle as forced laborers. No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews. As part of the Nazis' Final Solution, Jews were locked into cramped, unsanitary ghettos or forced to dig their own mass graves before being killed. When this proved too slow for the Nazis, they transported Europe's Jews to death camps where they were worked to death or sent to die in gas chambers. The Nazis killed between five and six million Jews and nine to ten million non-Jews. In Asia, Japan showed little respect for the conquered peoples in its effort to secure industrial markets and raw materials. Japanese treatment of prisoners of war was equally harsh. Japan professed a commitment to ending Western colonialism, but the brutality of the Japanese convinced many Asians to resist Japanese occupation.
Resources
See the war through the eyes of soldiers, secret agents, pilots and evacuees.
Life for children during the war.
Listen to an air raid warning.
The blitz and the home front in the UK.
Churchill and the bombing of Dresden
London, England during World War II
23-4 The American Home Front
The Home Front and the Aftermath of the War
The Home Front and the Aftermath of the War
World War II reached almost every area of the world, and mobilization for war brought widespread suffering and even starvation. The war caused 20 million civilian deaths. The United States, which did not fight the war on its own territory, sent its forces to fight and produced much of the military equipment for the Allies. Segregation in the U.S. military led African Americans to demand civil rights. Racism and suspicion led to the war-time detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. The bombing of cities by the Allied and Axis powers cost thousands of lives, but probably did nothing to weaken the morale of either side. After the war, ideological conflict between the West and the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War. The Cold War centered around the status of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
The Mobilization of Peoples: Four Examples
The Soviet Union
The United States
Germany
Japan
In-class
Reading Check
Evaluating
How did World War II contribute to racial tensions in the United States?
Front line Civilians: The Bombing of Cities
p. 615, "The ferocious bombing of Dresden from February 13 to 15, 1945, created a firestorm that may have killed as many as a hundred thousand inhabitants and refugees. . . . Germany suffered enormously from the Allied bombing raids. Millions of buildings were destroyed, and possibly half a million civilians died."
Britain
Germany
Japan
Science, Technology & Society
"Of the city's [Hiroshima] 350,000 inhabitants, 140,000 had died by the end of 1945. By the end of 1950, another 50,000 had died from the effects of radiation."
In-class
Reading Check
Explaining
Why were civilian populations targeted in bombing raids?
Peace and a New War
The Tehran Conference
The Yalta Conference
The Potsdam Conference
War Crimes Trails
A New Struggle
In-class
Reading Check
Identifying
Why did Stalin want to control Eastern Europe after World War II?
Resources
Online guide to the Holocaust
Colonel Paul Tibbets describes dropping the A-Bomb on Hiroshima August 6, 1945.
Cf. http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/vohiroshima.htm
See the war through the eyes of soldiers, secret agents, pilots and evacuees.
Life for children during the war.
Listen to an air raid warning.
The blitz and the home front in the UK.
Churchill and the bombing of Dresden
Audio file of the death dive of a Kamikaze.
Cf. http://avanimation.avsupport.com/sound/Kamikaze.wav
London, England during World War II
Cologne, 1944
100 Years of Propaganda: WW I to the Present Day, John Church
World Wars, Desert Storm
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
George Creel
Wilson influenced by Birth of a Nation, Lippmann a Captain in the Creel Committee
The Little American, Mary Pickford
Charlie Chaplin, British, Shoulder Arms, shooting scene
Lippmann, manufacturing consent, Chomsky
Triumph of the Will, Leni vs. Why We Fight, Frank Capra
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dln2dQyLNVU
Why We Fight series
Uncle Walt, Donald Duck, Commando Duck, Against the Japanese
Education for Death
Commando Duck, 6:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzfnFeNPj1g
Education for Death, 10:18
https://youtu.be/jNka-cfNGes
Desert Storm: CNN Effect
Wag the Dog
Three Kings
America's Team
Faked Kuwaiti girl testimony
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
George Orwell
Today
The Interview
American Sniper
RESOURCES
Crash Course World War II history, 13:12
Betty Davis Declares Frank Capra a Great Director, 3:13
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78COTwT7nE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HV9Ovo7rVcs
Betty Davis Eyes, Kim Carnes, 1981, 3:16
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EPOIS5taqA8
Donald Duck der Nazi, 7:52
https://youtu.be/kzH1iaKVsBM
Question 1: Multiple Choice Correct All of the following are evidence of a car culture, except Given Answer: Correct Growing numbers of social clubs Correct Answer: Growing numbers of social clubs out of 5 points Question 2: Multiple Choice Correct Truman eventually managed to break the Berlin blockade by Given Answer: Correct sending massive amounts of food and supplies by regular airlift. Correct Answer: sending massive amounts of food and supplies by regular airlift. out of 5 points Question 3: Multiple Choice Correct Critics thought NSC-68 was a gross overreaction by U.S. officials to communism until Given Answer: Correct North Korea's invasion of South Korea. Correct Answer: North Korea's invasion of South Korea. out of 5 points Question 4: Multiple Choice Correct The main reason that the Dixiecrats broke with Truman in 1948 and formed their own party was his Given Answer: Correct support for civil rights. Correct Answer: support for civil rights. out of 5 points Question 5: Multiple Choice Correct All of the following is true about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, except Given Answer: Correct Once segregation in Montgomery's local bus service had broken down, it quickly crumbled elsewhere in the state of Alabama and throughout the South. Correct Answer: Once segregation in Montgomery's local bus service had broken down, it quickly crumbled elsewhere in the state of Alabama and throughout the South. out of 5 points Question 6: Multiple Choice Correct John F. Kennedy's greatest disaster as president was Given Answer: Correct the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Correct Answer: the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. out of 5 points Question 7: Multiple Choice Correct The main goal of those who participated in Freedom Summer was to Given Answer: Correct register blacks to vote in the South. Correct Answer: register blacks to vote in the South. out of 5 points Question 8: Multiple Choice Correct In his Great Society program, LBJ included all of the following EXCEPT Given Answer: Correct a school voucher system. Correct Answer: a school voucher system. out of 5 points Question 9: Multiple Choice Correct The Free Speech Movement, begun on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley is significant because Given Answer: Correct All of these choices. Correct Answer: All of these choices. out of 5 points Question 10: Multiple Choice Correct The Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave President Johnson specific permission to Given Answer: Correct do whatever was necessary to take care of the situation in South Vietnam. Correct Answer: do whatever was necessary to take care of the situation in South Vietnam.
