Download How the Allies won

THE SECOND WORLD WAR,
1939-1945
BLITZKRIEG IN POLAND
• 1 Sept. 1939: phoney attack on German
border post
• Overpowering “lightning war”
• Main weapons:
– Panzerdivisions
– Stuka dive bombers
RUSSIAN GAINS IN
EASTERN EUROPE, 1939-1940
• Eastern Poland occupied
• Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania incorporated in
Soviet Union
• Finnish “Winter War” – Finns forced to
surrender Vyborg in March 1940
THE FALL OF FRANCE
• Start of the attack: 10 May – German raids
over Belgium and Holland
• Bypassing the Maginot Line through the
Ardennes
• Germans slicing through Allied supplylines
• Race to the coast
• Saving the BEF: organized evacuation of
300,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
•
•
•
•
No surrender
Winston Churchill’s: man of the people
Britain sheltering behind the Navy
For Germany to defeat Britain, the Luftwaffe had
to control the skies
• The London Blitz
• Churchill: working on the Grand Alliance
• Lend-Lease: : destroyers exchanged for bases
(March 1941)
THE NEW ORDER
• SS ruled Germany and terrorized a
continent -- the RSHA
• Originally, blackshirted bodyguards
• German hegemony: the German race and
the rest -- two main fields of action:
demography and the economy
• Impact of German hegemony: exploitation
of slave workers, population transfers,
annihilation
OCCUPATION AND
COLLABORATION IN EUROPE
• Hitler’s main allies: Fascist Italy, Vichy
France, Romania
• Spanish neutrality
• Danish Resistance
• Occupied Poland
• Delays in the Balkans…
OPERATION BARBAROSSA,
June 1941
• The German invasion and occupation of the
Soviet Union
• Stalin forewarned many times by his spies
• A Blitzkrieg too far?
• Confidence that the Red Army would be quickly
smashed
• 5 million Russian prisoners in six months
• Scorched earth policy and dogged Russian
resistance
• Russian weather: mud and artic frost (-30
degrees in December)
PEARL HARBOR: A RUDE
AWAKENING
• Japan’s attack on the U.S (December 7
1941)
• Churchill’s joy: “We have won the war!”
• Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S.
(December 1941)
• Hitler miscalculated that Roosevelt would
focus on the Pacific.
• As an autodidact, Hitler was ignorant of
US achievements and dynamism
THE TIDE TURNS
• Midway
• El Alamein
• Battle of the Atlantic
• Stalingrad
AXIS IN RETREAT
• The Italian Campaign
• British Bombing Strategy
• Operation Overlord: D-Day
• Burma and the Pacific
VE DAY AND THE SURRENDER
OF GERMANY
• Battle of Arnhem
• Battle of the Bulge: the role of GI Joes
• Liberating the concentration camps
• Battle of Berlin
JAPAN: NO SURRENDER IN
WORLD WAR TWO
• The meaning of Bushido: Samurai code of
ethics
• The Manhattan Project – Germanspeaking refugees and US “can-do” spirit
• Truman and the Bomb: Hiroshima and
Nagasaki Crimes against Humanity?
HOW THE ALLIES WON
• Soviet transformation
• American power
• German errors