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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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