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World War II
Europe in the 1930’s
• Adolph Hitler
– Rise because of
WWI
– Criticized rather
than submitted a
plan for progress
– Forced his way
into the
chancellorship
Europe in the 1930’s
• Austria
– Hitler threatened invasion
– Merged with Germany
• Czechoslovakia
– German-speaking area turned over
– Meeting in Munich
• Peace declared
– Non-aggression pact with Stalin
Germany’s Attack in Europe
• Polish invasion
– Sept. 1, 1939
– Blitzkrieg
– Warsaw Ghetto
"The Nazi occupation of Poland was horrific.
Twenty percent of the Polish people died in forced
labor, of hunger, or from fighting. Resistance
was impossible. Even the feeblest opposition
brought devastating, over-whelming reprisals.
Drs. Lazowski and Matulewicz decided to resist
anyway, and their solution was brilliant. They
knew that the Germans were terrified of a typhus
outbreak. So they injected dead typhus bacteria
into various patients, then sent blood samples to
the German authorities. The blood tested
positive for typhus. The Germans conducted
more tests, and most were also positive. The
occupation authorities quarantined the area. The
people were not deported for slave labor and
German troops stayed away. Drs. Lazowski and
Matulewics spared their neighbors the worst of
World War II, because even impossible problems
have solutions."
– Thorpe, Scott, How to Think Like Einstein, Barnes & Noble
Books, Inc., 2000, p. 127.
Germany’s Attack in Europe
• Denmark, Holland
• Norway (Quisling)
• Belgium and France
– Dunkirk
• Britain
– Winston Churchill
Dunkirk
“...We shall not flag or fail. We shall go
on to the end...We shall fight in the seas
and oceans...We shall fight on the
beaches, we shall fight on the landinggrounds, we shall fight in the fields and in
the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we
shall never surrender...”
— Winston Churchill
“We have nothing to offer but blood,
toil, tears and sweat.”
— Winston Churchill
“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 say, ‘This was their
finest hour.’”
— Winston Churchill
“Never in the field of human conflict
was so much owed by so many to so
few.”
— Winston Churchill
Germany’s Attack in Europe
• Balkans
• Russia
• US isolation
Maximum Axis Control (Sept 1942)
Allied Counterattacks in
Europe
• Soviet
• North Africa
• Italy
• Normandy
• Battle of the
Bulge
Allied Counterattacks in
Europe
• Surrender
– Stalin, Churchill,
Roosevelt
• The Marshall
Plan
"Men occasionally stumble over
the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if
nothing happened."
– Churchill, Winston, quoted in Thorpe, Scott, How to Think
Like Einstein, Barnes & Noble Books, Inc., 2000, p.119.
Japan’s Invasion
• China
– Blockade
• Pearl Harbor
• Southeast Asia
Allied Counterattacks in the
Pacific
• Midway
• Southeast Asia
• Island hopping
• Japanese main
islands
Pacific War
Creativity
• How was creativity affected by the
war?
• What was the center of creativity?
"I am tired and sick of war.
Its glory is all moonshine...
War is hell."
– William Tecumseh Sherman (quoted in John
Keegan, A History of Warfare, 1993, 6)
“If a man does his best, what
else is there?”
-General George S. Patton
(1885-1945)