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Before we even begin, let’s get the
teams straight….
Major
ALLIED Powers
Major
AXIS Powers
Germany
United States
Italy
Soviet Union
(eventually)
Japan
Great Britain
Section 1: Paths to War
The BIG Idea:
Competition Among Countries The
ambitions of Japan and Germany
paved the way for the outbreak of
World War II.
Focus Question:
How did German and Japanese
actions lead to World War II?
• WW2 in Europe had its
beginnings in the ideas of
Adolf Hitler.
– Germans belonged to a
superior Aryan race.
– Germany should build a great
civilization.
– A great civilization needs
more land to support a large
population. They would go
East and fight the Soviet
Union for land.
– Slavic people would be used
as slave labor to build the
Third Reich.
• Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles by
creating a new air force and expanding
Germany’s army. France, Great Britain, and
Italy condemned these actions.
Treaty of Versailles
Germany has to take full responsibility for the war.
Germany has to pay Allied governments for war damages.
Germany has to reduce its army size.
The Rhine River must become a demilitarized zone.
Definitions
Demilitarized—elimination or
prohibition of weapons,
fortifications, and other
military installations.
Appeasement—satisfying
reasonable demands of
dissatisfied powers in an
effort to maintain peace and
stability.
• Hitler’s first
aggressive move
occurred when he
invaded a
demilitarized zone
in Germany known
as the Rhineland.
• Great Britain
adopted a policy of
appeasement and
did not take military
action against
Germany.
• Hitler looked for allies with
common political and economic
interests, which he found in Benito
Mussolini of Italy.
• Mussolini and Hitler created the
Rome-Berlin Axis, a pact
recognizing their shared political
and economic goals.
• By November of 1936, Hitler
formed an anti-communist alliance
with Japan known as the AntiComintern Pact.
• Hitler annexed his homeland of Austria on March 13,
1938.
• Hitler announced, in 1938, that he would wage a world
war if he was denied occupation of Sudetenland, an
area in northwestern Czechoslovakia.
• France, Great Britain, Italy, and Germany all agreed to
Hitler’s plan at the Munich Conference, abandoning
the Czechs.
• Hitler continued to advance into Czechoslovakia and
eventually demanded the Polish Port of Danzig.
• Great Britain and France soon realized they would
need help from Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union to
contain Nazi aggression.
• To avoid fighting a war on two fronts and
to gain access into Poland, Hitler signed
the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact on
August 23, 1939, with Joseph Stalin.
• On September 1, 1939, German forces
invaded Poland, causing Britain and
France to declare war on Germany two
days later.
• The need for natural resources fueled the
Japanese plan to seize other countries.
• The Japanese cleverly devised a ruse to justify
conquering Manchuria, a country containing 30
million Chinese and vast natural resources.
– On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops dressed as
Chinese and blew up a portion of a Japanese-owned
railway. Japan then blames the Chinese for the
incident.
– Against worldwide protest, Japan “retaliated” by
seizing and renaming Manchuria as Manchukuo.
• Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the
Chinese Nationalist Party, was
embattled in a civil war against
the Chinese Communist Party
and did not want to go to war
with Japan.
• Chiang and the Communists
put their differences aside and
united against the Japanese
for the entire length of the war.
• Japan wanted a New Order in East Asia, which would
comprise Japan, China, and Manchuria, and act as a
model for other developing nations.
• Japan did not want to fight the European colonial
powers or the United States, but by 1940, they began
to demand rights to French Indochina.
• The United States objected and warned that it would
retaliate with economic sanctions including refusing to
import oil and scrap iron.
Focus Question:
How did German and Japanese actions
lead to World War II?
Section 2: The Course of
World War 2
The BIG Idea:
Devastation of War Allied perseverance,
effective military operations, and Axis
miscalculations brought the devastation
of World War II to an end.
Focus Question:
How did the entrance of the United
States into the war change its course?
• Germany’s use of blitzkrieg, or
“lightning war,” to attack Poland
stunned Europe with the speed
and efficiency of the attack.
– Blitzkrieg or “lightening war”—a
form of attack that used tank
divisions supported by air attacks
• In September 1939, Germany
and the Soviet Union divided
Poland.
• By spring
1940, Hitler
used
blitzkrieg
tactics to
attack
Denmark,
Norway, the
Netherlands,
Belgium,
and France.
• On June 22, 1940, the French signed an
armistice allowing German armies to occupy
three-fifths of France.
– Armistice—a truce or ceasefire.
• U.S. citizens did not want to get involved in the
war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted a
policy of isolationism, but denounced
Germany’s attacks. A series of neutrality acts
prevented the United States from becoming
involved.
• In August of 1940, the
German air force, the
Luftwaffe, launched a
major offensive on Great
Britain.
• The British air force
inflicted enough damage
on Luftwaffe bombers to
persuade Hitler to
postpone the invasion of
Great Britain.
• Hitler believed that Britain would not remain in the war
without the support of the Soviet Union.
• Hitler confidently invaded the Soviet Union, hoping to
obtain full occupation by winter.
• The German forces quickly captured two million
Russian soldiers and swept through Ukraine.
• An early winter turned the tide of German successes;
German troops did not have adequate winter supplies
and were forced to halt their advances.
• The Soviet forces launched a counterattack in
December of 1941.
• On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the U.S.
naval base at Pearl Harbor, hoping to destroy the Pacific fleet
and any attempt of U.S. involvement.
• Japan quickly acquired territory throughout Southeast Asia,
creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
• Japan had hoped that their lightening strike in the Pacific would
destroy the U.S. fleets and that the U.S. would have to accept
the Japanese domination of the Pacific.
• With overwhelming public support, the United States joined
forces with European nations and Nationalist China to battle
Japan.
• Four days later, Hitler declared war on the United States,
creating a global war.
• The three major Allied forces agreed to fight until the
Axis Powers surrendered unconditionally.
• Hitler was still confident in 1942, as Japan continued
to advance in the Pacific, and German forces fought in
the Soviet Union and North Africa.
• In May of 1943, the tide of the war turned when a
British and American coalition forced German and
Italian troops to surrender in French North Africa.
• By the spring of 1943, Hitler realized that the battle
over Stalingrad would end in a German defeat.
• The turning point of the war in
Asia came when Japanese
forces were defeated at the
Battle of Midway Island when
U.S. planes destroyed four
attacking Japanese aircraft
carriers.
• With the help of General
Douglas MacArthur, the U.S.
Army, Marine, and Navy
forces freed the Japaneseheld islands of the Pacific and
Southeast Asia.
• The Allies turned the tide of the war with the
surrender of Axis forces in Tunisia on
May 13, 1943.
• In September, the Allies took Sicily (an island
off the coast of Italy), an area Winston Churchill
referred to as the “soft underbelly” of Europe.
• The Allied forces planned a strategic invasion of
France from Great Britain known as D-Day.
• Allied Forces, under
U.S. General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, landed on
the Normandy
beaches in history’s
greatest naval invasion
on June 6, 1944.
• Allied troops liberated
Paris by the end of
August 1944.
• With the imminent defeat of Germany and the
partisan murder of Mussolini, Hitler committed
suicide on April 30, 1945.
• Soviet forces advanced through Eastern
Europe until Germany surrendered on
May 7, 1945.
• Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, after
President Harry S. Truman authorized the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• World War II was finally over, with casualty
estimates totaling 60 million.
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