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CHAPTER
Twenty-six
World War II
Introduction
• Threats to the balance of power
• A conflict among nations, peoples, and
ideals
• The new methods of warfare
• The Holocaust and the atomic bomb
• The war of absolutes and the values of
Western civilization
The Causes of the War: Unsettled Quarrels,
Economic Fallout, and Nationalism
• The peace settlement
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Created more problems than it solved
Eastern European satellite states
Allied naval blockade of Germany
German “war guilt”
The Causes of the War: Unsettled Quarrels,
Economic Fallout, and Nationalism
• Peace and security
• No binding standards created for peace and
security
• The League of Nations
• Never a league of all nations
• Germany and the Soviet Union were excluded
• The United States never joined
The Causes of the War: Unsettled Quarrels,
Economic Fallout, and Nationalism
• Economic conditions
• Depression as last blow to Weimar
Germany
• Power passed to the Nazis (1933)
• Germany ignored provisions of Versailles
• Decline of Japanese exports played into the
hand of Japan’s military
• Invasion of Manchuria (1931)
The Causes of the War: Unsettled Quarrels,
Economic Fallout, and Nationalism
• Ideologies
• Violent nationalism
• Glorifying the nation and national destiny
• Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany formed the
“Axis” (later joined by Japan)
• Fascist regimes in Eastern Europe
• Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• An atmosphere of fear and apprehension
• Aggression as a challenge to civilization
• Avoiding another war
• The 1930s as “a low, dishonest decade” (W.
H. Auden, 1939)
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• Appeasement
• Assumptions
• The outbreak of another world war was
unthinkable
• British and American arguments that Germany
had been mistreated at Versailles
• Fascist states were a bulwark against Soviet
communism
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• The League of Nations
• Japanese invasion of China turned into an
invasion of the whole country
• The Rape of Nanking (1937)
• The League expressed shock but did nothing
• Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935
• Avenging the defeat of 1896
• League imposed sanctions on Italy but without
enforcement
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
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A weak republican government could not overcome opposition
Extreme right-wing military officers rebelled
Francisco Franco (r. 1936–1975)
Hitler and Mussolini sent in troops and tested new weapons;
war was a dress rehearsal
• The Soviets sided with the Republican government
• Volunteers from England, France, and the United States
• Saw the war as a test of the West’s determination to resist
fascism
• April 1937—the destruction of Guernica
• Hitler’s lessons
• Britain, France, and the Soviet Union would have a hard time
containing fascism
• Britain and France would do anything to avoid another war
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• German rearmament and the politics of
appeasement
• Hitler played on Germans’ sense of shame and
betrayal
• Reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936
• France and Britain did nothing
• The annexation of Austria (1938)
• Hitler declared his intention to occupy the
Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia)
• Neville Chamberlain
• With the Sudetenland, Germany’s ambitions would be
satisfied
• Believed Germany could not commit to a sustained war
• Eastern Europe ranked low in British priorities
The 1930s: Challenges to the Peace,
Appeasement, and the “Dishonest Decade”
• German rearmament and the politics of
appeasement
• Munich—September 29, 1938
• Daladier (France), Chamberlain, Mussolini, and
Hitler met
• Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time”
• March 1939—Germany invaded Czechoslovakia
• Convinced public of the futility of appeasement
• Stalin’s response
• Feared the West might strike a deal with Hitler
• August 1939—the Nazi-Soviet pact of
nonaggression
The Outbreak of Hostilities and the
Fall of France
• Poland
• Hitler demanded the abolition of the Polish
Corridor
• Poland stood firm, but Hitler attacked on
September 1, 1939
• Britain and France declared war on
September 3, 1939
• The Blitzkrieg (lightning war)
• Poland fell in four weeks
The Outbreak of Hostilities and the
Fall of France
• The phony war
• Scandinavia—Germans took Denmark in
one day (spring 1940)
• May 10, 1939—Germans moved through
Belgium toward France
The Outbreak of Hostilities and the
Fall of France
• The fall of France
• French army overwhelmed by the German
advance
• French army poorly organized
• Dunkirk—300,000 British and French troops
evacuated to England
• June 22, 1939—French surrendered
• Germans occupied northern France
• Southern France fell under the Vichy regime,
headed by Marshal Pétain
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• The Battle of Britain (July 1940–June
1941)
• Forty thousand civilians dead
• Stalemate in the air
• British resistance
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• Winston Churchill (1940–1945, 1951–
1955)
• Language and personal diplomacy
• Convinced FDR to break with American
neutrality
• Lend-Lease
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• A global war
• The battle of the Atlantic
• German submarines (“wolf packs”) sank millions
of tons of merchant shipping
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• A global war
• North Africa
• British needed to protect the Suez
• British humiliated Italian invasion force in Libya
• Forced Germany to intervene
• Afrika Korps and Erwin Rommel
• Rommel’s army defeated at El Alamein in Egypt
(1942)
• United States landed in French territories of
Algeria and Morocco
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• A global war
• Japan
• December 7, 1941—Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor
• Set out to destroy U.S. fleet
• Most American ships were out to sea
• Japanese swept through British protectorate of
Malaya
• Singapore fell in December 1941
• The invasion of the Philippines
Not Alone: The Battle of Britain and
the Beginnings of a Global War
• A global war
• The American navy
• Chester Nimitz and William Halsey
• Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal
• “Island hopping”
The Rise and Ruin of Nations: Germany’s War
in the East and the Occupation of Europe
• German victories
• 1941—Germany took Yugoslavia
• Established a Croatian puppet state
• Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria sided with
Germany
• Greece ultimately fell to the Germans
The Rise and Ruin of Nations: Germany’s War
in the East and the Occupation of Europe
• Hitler’s ultimate goal
• Nazi-Soviet pact as a matter of convenience for
Hitler
• On June 22, 1941, Hitler authorized Operation
Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union
• Stalin’s purges had gotten rid of Russia’s most capable
commanders
• War against the Soviets pitted one ideology against
another
• Racial hatred
• Cleansing occupied territories of “undesirable elements”
• Hitler diverted his attack from Moscow to the
industrial south
The Rise and Ruin of Nations: Germany’s War
in the East and the Occupation of Europe
• The Nazi New Order
• A patchwork affair
• Occupied countries paid “occupation costs”
in taxes, food, industrial production, and
manpower
• Puppet regimes
• Norway and the Netherlands
• Dedicated party of Nazis governed
• At the same time, well-organized resistance
movement
The Rise and Ruin of Nations: Germany’s War
in the East and the Occupation of Europe
• The Nazi New Order
• France
• Collaboration ranged from simple survival tactics
to active Nazi support
• The isolation or deportation of French Jews
• Communist activists
• Had a long tradition of smuggling and resisting
government
• Became active guerillas and saboteurs
• The Free French and Charles de Gaulle
The Rise and Ruin of Nations: Germany’s War
in the East and the Occupation of Europe
• The Nazi New Order
• Yugoslavia
• Fascist Croats against most Serbs
• Josip Broz (Tito) emerged as the leader of the
Yugoslav resistance
• Communist guerrilla army
• Gained support of the Allies
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• World War II as a racial war
• Fall 1939—Himmler directed massive
population transfers
• Ethnic Germans moved into the Reich
• Poles and Jews were deported
• A campaign of terror
• Poles deported to forced-labor camps
• Special death squads shot Jews in the streets
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• World War II as a racial war
• Rassenkampf (racial struggle)
• Radicalized by the war itself
• June 1941 (Barbarossa) marked a turning point
in the path to the Holocaust
• A “war of extermination”
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• From systematic brutality to atrocities to
murder
• More than 5 million military prisoners
marched to camps to work as slave labor
• The Einsatzgruppen (death squads)
• 1943—2.2 million Jews killed
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• The Holocaust
• Nazis discussed plans for mass killings in
death camps
• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Systematic annihilation of Jews and Gypsies
• 1942–1944: one million killed
• Anonymous slaughter?
• People were tortured, beaten, and executed
publicly
• Death marches
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• The Holocaust
• Who knew?
• Extermination involved the knowledge and cooperation of
many not directly involved in killing
• Most who suspected the worst were terrified and
powerless
• The Jewish “problem”
• Many Europeans believed problem needed to be solved
• Nazis tried to conceal the death camps
• Little resistance was possible
• Rebellions at Auschwitz and Treblinka
• Warsaw ghetto uprising (1943)
• Eighty percent of the residents had been deported
• Small Jewish underground movement
Racial War, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Holocaust
• The Holocaust
• Human costs
• 4.1–5.7 million Jews killed
• Some long-standing Jewish communities were
annihilated
• A new Europe?
Total War: Home Fronts, the War of
Production, Bombing and “the Bomb”
• War demanded massive resources and a
national commitment to industry
• United States, Britain, and Soviet Union
• Long work shifts
• Effects on women and the family
• Production
• Propaganda campaigns encouraged the production of war
equipment
• Patriotism, communal interests, and a common stake in
winning the war
• Allies built tanks, ships, and airplanes by the tens of
thousands
• Germany was less efficient in the use of workers and
resources
Total War: Home Fronts, the War of
Production, Bombing and “the Bomb”
• New targets
• Centers of industry as military targets
• American and British strategic bombing
• Dresden firebombed
Total War: Home Fronts, the War of
Production, Bombing and “the Bomb”
• The race to build the bomb
• Nuclear fission
• German experiments
• Best specialists were Jews or anti-Nazis now working for
the Allies
• Lacked crucial bits of technical information
• The Manhattan Project
• Managing the effort to build an American atomic bomb
• Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943)
• Laboratory that brought together most capable nuclear
physicists
• First atomic test on July 16, 1945, near Los Alamos
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The Nazi penetration of the Soviet Union
• The siege of Leningrad
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The Eastern Front
• Changes in the character of war
• War to save the Russian motherland (rodina)
• Victory during the “General Winter,” which took
its toll on Nazi supplies
• Astonishing recovery of Soviet army
• Whole industries were rebuilt
• Whole populations moved to work in new factories
• Soviets found the Blitzkrieg predictable
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The Eastern Front
• The turning point—1943
• Germans aimed an all-out assault on Stalingrad
• January 1943—German surrender
• Six thousand of 250,000 Germans survived
• One million Soviet deaths
• Soviet offensives
• The leadership of Grigorii Zhukov
• Ukraine back in Soviet hands, Romania knocked
out of the war
• Soviet victories in Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The Western Front
• Stalin pressured the Allies to open a second
front in the west
• The Allied invasion of Sicily
• Mussolini surrendered in summer 1943
• The Normandy invasion (June 6, 1944)
• The liberation of Paris (August 14, 1944)
• The Battle of the Bulge (December 1944)
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The Western Front
• Allies crossed the Rhine in April 1945
• Germans preferred to surrender to the
Americans or British rather than face the
Russians
• Soviets entered Berlin on April 21, 1945
• Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945
• Germany surrendered unconditionally on
May 7
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The war in the Pacific
• Okinawa fell to the Americans (June 1945)
• Chinese communists and nationalists
pushed the Japanese back on Hong Kong
• Soviet forces marched through Manchuria to
Korea
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The war in the Pacific
• United States, Britain, and China called on
Japan to surrender or be destroyed on July
26
• B-29s began systematic bombing of Japanese
cities
• Japan refused to surrender
• The decision to drop the bomb
• Was it necessary? Japan had already been
beaten
• Harry Truman
The Allied Counterattack and the
Dropping of the Atomic Bomb
• The war in the Pacific
• August 6, 1945—Hiroshima, August 9—
Nagasaki
• Japan surrendered unconditionally on
August 14, 1945
Conclusion
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A new world ravaged by war
Western imperialism
Mass killing
Technology, genocide, and global war
This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint for Chapter 26.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/wciv_16e/brief