Download WWII Faces

Heinrich Himmler
(1900-45), German National Socialist (Nazi) official, notorious as
the head of the Nazi police forces. He joined the party in 1925,
and from 1926 to 1930 he was its director of propaganda. In 1929
he became chief of the Schutzstaffel (known as the SS, or Black
Shirts), an elite military force of the party, and in 1934 he won
control of the Gestapo (secret police).
As head of all German police forces from 1936 to 1945 he carried
out a ruthless program for the extermination of Jews and the
suppression of all opposition to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Hitler
appointed him minister of the interior in 1943, and in 1944
Himmler became director of home-front operations and chief of
the German armed forces operating within the borders of Germany.
In April 1945 he was captured by the British army. Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with
the other German leaders as a major war criminal, but he committed suicide shortly after he was
arrested.
Emperor Hirohito
(1901-89), Emperor of Japan (1926-89), who was the last ruler to
uphold (during the first part of his reign) the Shinto idea of imperial
divinity. After atom bomb were dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Hirohito called a meeting of the Supreme Council on 9th
August, 1945. After a long debate Hirohito intervened and said he
could no longer bear to see his people suffer in this way. On 15th
August the people of Japan heard the Emperor's voice for the first
time when he announced the unconditional surrender and the end of
the war.
Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945), German dictator, chancellor (1933-1945),
founder and leader (führer) of German fascism (Nazism).
Making anti-Semitism a keystone of his propaganda and
policies, he built up the Nazi party into a mass movement.
Once in power, he converted Germany into a fully militarized
society and launched World War II. For a time he dominated
most of Europe and North Africa. He caused the slaughter of
millions of Jews and others whom he considered inferior
human beings.
Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945), premier-dictator of Italy (1922-43), the
founder and leader (Il Duce) of Italian Fascism.
Mussolini was born in Predappio on July 29, 1883,
the son of a socialist blacksmith. Largely selfeducated, he became a schoolteacher and socialist
journalist in northern Italy. In 1910 he married
Rachele Guidi (1890-1979), who bore him five
children.
Mussolini was jailed for his opposition to Italy's war
in Libya (1911-12). Soon after that, he was named
editor of Avanti!, the Socialist party newspaper in
Milan. When World War I began, in 1914,
Mussolini first denounced it as "imperialist," but he
soon reversed himself and called for Italy's entry on
the Allied side.
Erwin Rommel
(1891-1944), German field marshal, renowned for his African
desert victories during World War II.
Born in Heidenheim, he joined the German army in 1910.
After winning awards for bravery in World War I, he taught
in military academies. In the German push to the English
Channel in 1940 Rommel headed the victorious 7th Tank
Division. He was made a lieutenant general the following
year and placed in command of the Afrika Korps in North
Africa.
Hideki Tojo
(1884-1948), Japanese leader during World War II. The son
of an army officer, Tojo was born in Tokyo, and educated at
the Imperial Military Academy. An extreme militarist and
advocate of total war, he became army chief of staff in 1937,
commanding the Japanese Kwantung army against the
Chinese in Manchuria.
In 1940 he was made minister of war in the Japanese cabinet,
and in 1941, two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, he was appointed prime minister. He controlled the
government and directed the military operations of his
country in World War II until 1944, when he resigned in
disgrace because of reverses suffered by Japanese forces.
At the conclusion of the war in 1945, he was arrested as a
war criminal. Tojo was tried and convicted by an
international military tribunal, and he was executed on Dec.
23, 1948.
Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965), Great Britain's greatest 20th-century
statesman, best known for his courageous leadership as
prime minister during World War II. Churchill, born Nov.
30, 1874, was the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill
and the American heiress Jennie Jerome (1854-1921). He
graduated from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst,
but having served in India and the Sudan he resigned his
cavalry commission in 1899 to become a correspondent
during the Boer War. A daring escape after he had been
captured made him a national hero, and in 1900 he was
elected to Parliament as a Conservative. Despite his
aristocratic background, he switched in 1904 to the
Liberal party. In 1908 he became president of the Board
of Trade in Herbert Henry Asquith's Liberal cabinet.
Then, and later as home secretary (1910-11), he worked
for special reform in tandem with David Lloyd George. As first lord of the admiralty (1911-15),
Churchill was a vigorous modernizer of the navy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1890 - 1969), Recognized as an excellent coalition commander,
Eisenhower was appointed head of the Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and was given
responsibility for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe.
During the Second World War, he served as Supreme
Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with responsibility for
planning and supervising the successful invasion of France and
Germany in 1944–45. In 1951, he became the first supreme
commander of NATO. His popularity during World War II
secured him election as the 34th president of the U.S. (1953 - 61).
Douglas MacArthur
(1880-1964), American general, who commanded Allied troops
in the Pacific during World War II, supervised the postwar
occupation of Japan, and led UN forces during the Korean War.
He was born in Little Rock, Ark., on Jan. 26, 1880, the son of
Gen. Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912), a hero of the American
Civil War who was later military governor of the Philippines.
Bernard Montgomery
(1887-1976), British military leader, who played a prominent
role in the Allied victories in Africa and Europe during World
War II.
He was born in London on Nov. 17, 1887, and educated at the
Royal Military College. He entered the British army in 1908
and served in World War I as a captain. In 1942, during World
War II, he was appointed commander of the British Eighth
Army in Africa; two months later he began an offensive at alAlamayn (el-Alamein), Egypt, which resulted in the expulsion
of the German-Italian forces under the German general Erwin
Rommel, first from Egypt and then from Cyrenaica and
Tripolitania in Libya.
In 1943 he gained another victory over Rommel at the Battle of
the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. As commander in chief of
the British armies on the western front, he served under the supreme commander of Allied
forces, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, from December 1943 to August 1944, when he was
promoted to field marshal in command of English and Canadian troops.
George Smith Patton
(1885-1945), American army officer, born in San Gabriel,
Calif., and educated at the U.S. Military Academy.
On his graduation in 1909 he was commissioned a second
lieutenant; he advanced in rank to full general by 1945.
He served as aide-de-camp to the American general John
Joseph Pershing on Pershing's expedition to Mexico in
1917.
In France during World War I, Patton established a tank
training school and commanded a tank brigade. In 1942
and 1943, during World War II, he commanded U.S.
forces in Morocco, Tunisia, and Sicily. Early in 1944 he
was given command of the Third Army.
Controversial throughout the war for his personal
flamboyance, outspokenness, uncompromising standards,
and aggressive combat strategy, he played a key role in
the headlong Allied armored thrust to Germany after DDay.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(1882-1945), 32d president of the U.S. (1933-45);
elected for an unprecedented four terms, he was one of
the 20th century's most skillful political leaders.
His New Deal program, a response to the Great
Depression, utilized the federal government as an
instrument of social and economic change in contrast to
its traditionally passive role. Then, in World War II, he
led the Allies in their defeat of the Axis powers.
Josef Stalin
(1879-1953), Soviet Communist leader, the longtime
ruler who more than any other individual molded the
features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped
the direction of post-World War II Europe; in this regard,
Stalin is considered by many to be the most powerful
person to live during the 20th century.
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was originally
named-he adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning "a
man of steel," only about 1910-was born on Dec. 21,
1879, in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia. Both his
parents were Georgian peasants. Neither of them spoke
Russian, but Stalin was forced to learn it, as the language
of instruction, when he attended the Gori church school
in 1888-94. The best pupil in the school, Soso (his schoolboy nickname) earned a full
scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary.
Chester W. Nimitz
(1885 – 1966), United States Admiral Chester William Nimitz
was the commander of the Pacific Fleet during World War II,
the man who directed the U.S. victories at Midway, Iwo Jima
and Okinawa. Nimitz grew up in Texas, raised by his widowed
mother and grandfather. He graduated from the U.S. Naval
Academy in 1905 and was promoted to ensign by 1907.
Nimitz's first command was the destroyer Decatur, but it ran
aground in 1908; he was reprimanded and assigned to
submarine duty. He spent the next three decades working his
way up in the navy, commanding submarines and surface
ships, serving in staff positions and becoming an expert on
diesel engines. Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor
on 7 December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named
Nimitz to relieve Admiral Husband E. Kimmel as commander
of the Pacific Fleet. An experienced and well-liked leader,
Nimitz was also an effective military strategist who directed
U.S. forces as they closed in on Japan, beginning in May and
June of 1942 with the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Nimitz was promoted to the newlycreated rank of fleet admiral in 1944 and became the naval equivalent to the army's General
Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the war Nimitz oversaw the demobilization of the navy, served as a
United Nations goodwill ambassador and, later, co-authored Sea Power, A Naval History (1960).
He and his wife settled in the San Francisco area, where Nimitz was active in the community and
a regent at the University of California.
Isoroku Yamamoto
(1884 – 1943), Isoroku Yamamoto studied at Harvard from 1919 to
1921, and returned to the United States in 1925 on a diplomatic
mission. He didn't want to go to war with the United States, but when
called upon by his country Yamamoto planned the sneak attack on Pearl
Harbor and then led the Japanese navy to its early victories in World
War II. When the U.S. decoded a Japanese message in 1943 that
included Admiral Yamamoto's itinerary, they ambushed his plane in the
south Pacific and killed him.