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Containment is a geopolitical strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as a Cold War foreign policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism.

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A puppet state, puppet regime, or puppet government is a state that is independent but is completely dependent upon an outside power. It is nominally sovereign but effectively controlled by a foreign or otherwise alien power, for reasons such as financial interests, economic or military support.

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Polish Committee of National Liberation - Wikipedia

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The Polish Committee of National Liberation ( Polish: Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN), also known as the Lublin Committee, was an executive governing authority established by the communists in Poland at the later stage of World War II.

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Red Army, Russian Krasnaya Armiya, Soviet army created by the Communist government after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The name Red Army was abandoned in 1946.

The Russian imperial army and navy, together with other imperial institutions of tsarist Russia, disintegrated after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917. By a decree of January 28 (January 15, Old Style), 1918, the Council of People's Commissars created a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army on a voluntary basis. The first units, fighting with a revolutionary fervour, distinguished themselves against the Germans at Narva and Pskov on February 23, 1918, which became Soviet Army Day. On April 22, 1918, the Soviet government decreed compulsory military training for workers and peasants who did not employ hired labour, and this was the beginning of the Red Army. Its founder was Leon Trotsky, people's commissar for war from March 1918 until he lost the post in November 1924.

The Red Army was recruited exclusively from among workers and peasants and immediately faced the problem of creating a competent and reliable officers' corps. Trotsky met this problem by mobilizing former officers of the imperial army. Up to 1921 about 50,000 such officers served in the Red Army and with but few exceptions remained loyal to the Soviet regime. Political advisers called commissars were attached to all army units to watch over the reliability of officers and to carry out political propaganda among the troops. As the Russian Civil War continued, the short-term officers' training schools began to turn out young officers who were regarded as more reliable politically.

The number of Communist Party members increased among the Red Army's ranks from 19 to 49 percent during 1925-33, and among officers this increase was much higher. Moreover, all commanders were graduates of Soviet military academies and officers' training schools, admission to which was limited to those recommended by the Communist Party.

In May 1937 a drastic purge, affecting all potential opponents of Joseph Stalin's leadership, decimated the officer corps and greatly reduced the morale and efficiency of the Red Army. On June 12, Mikhayl Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, first deputy people's commissar of war, and seven other Red Army generals were found guilty of plotting to betray the Soviet Union to Japan and Germany, and all were shot. Many other generals and colonels were either cashiered or sent to forced-labour camps, or both. The purge's effects were apparent in the serious defeats suffered by the Red Army during the first months of the German invasion (1941), but a corps of younger commanders soon emerged to lead the Soviet Union to victory in World War II.

By war's end the Soviet armed forces numbered 11,365,000 officers and men. Demobilization, however, started toward the end of 1945, and in a few years the armed forces fell to fewer than 3,000,000 troops.

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In 1946 the word Red was removed from the name of the armed forces. Thus, a Soviet soldier, hitherto known as a krasnoarmiich ("Red Army man"), was subsequently called simply a ryadovoy ("ranker"). Discipline in the Soviet forces was always strict and punishments severe; during World War II, penal battalions were given suicidal tasks. In 1960, however, new regulations were introduced making discipline, and certainly punishments, less severe. Officers were to use more persuasion and were charged with developing their troops' political consciousness, thus ending the dual control of military commanders and political commissars. By contrast, enlisted men increasingly brutalized each other; conscripts with longer service took advantage of new recruits, and ethnic communities worked out mutual hostilities in the barracks. The era of the revolutionary "Red Army" ended, in fact as well as in name, long before the final disappearance of the Soviet Union. In Russia, February 23, now known as Defender of the Fatherland Day, is still the official day to honour military veterans.

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Red Army, Russian Krasnaya Armiya, Soviet army created by the Communist government after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The name Red Army was abandoned in 1946. The Russian imperial army and navy, together with other imperial institutions of tsarist Russia, disintegrated after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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The history of Scottish women in the late 19th century and early 20th century was not fully developed as a field of study until the 1980s. In addition, most work on women before 1700 has been published since 1980.

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Other important criteria throughout history are that great powers should have enough influence to be included in discussions of contemporary political and diplomatic questions and exercise influence on the final outcome and resolution. Historically, when major political questions were addressed, several great powers met to discuss them.

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United Nations Security Council - Wikipedia

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The United Nations Security Council ( UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations ( UN), charged with the maintenance of international peace and security as well as accepting new members to the United Nations and approving any changes to its United Nations Charter.

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Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection supports research and learning internationally in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies through fellowships and internships, meetings, and exhibitions. Located in residential Georgetown, Dumbarton Oaks welcomes researchers at all career stages who come to study its books, objects, images, and documents.

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Learn about this topic in these articles:

major reference

In law of war: Occupation
World War II illustrated that civilians in occupied territory were largely unprotected by the laws of war. In consequence, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 provided detailed rules for their protection. A protected person is anyone who, at a given moment and in any...
Read More

postwar Germany

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Other articles where occupation zone is discussed: law of war: Occupation: World War II illustrated that civilians in occupied territory were largely unprotected by the laws of war. In consequence, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 provided detailed rules for their protection. A protected person is anyone who, at a given moment and in any...

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Tehran Conference

Prior to the Yalta Conference, the three leaders met in November 1943 in Tehran, Iran, where they coordinated the next phase of war against the Axis Powers in Europe and the Pacific.

At the Tehran Conference, the United States and Britain had committed to launching an invasion of northern France in mid-1944, opening another front of the war against Nazi Germany. Stalin, meanwhile, had agreed in principle to join the war against Japan in the Pacific after Germany was defeated.

By February 1945, as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin gathered again at Yalta, an Allied victory in Europe was on the horizon. Having liberated France and Belgium from Nazi occupation, the Allies now threatened the German border; to the east, Soviet Union troops had driven back the Germans in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania and gotten within 40 miles of Berlin.

This put Stalin at a distinct advantage during the meeting at the Black Sea resort, a location he himself had proposed after insisting his doctors had barred him from traveling long distances.

Pacific War

While the war in Europe was winding down, Roosevelt knew the United States still faced a protracted struggle against Japan in the Pacific War, and wanted to confirm Soviet support in an effort to limit the length of and casualties sustained in that conflict. At Yalta, Stalin agreed that Soviet forces would join the Allies in the war against Japan within "two or three months" after Germany's surrender.

In return for its support in the Pacific War, the other Allies agreed, the Soviet Union would gain control of Japanese territory it had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, including southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands.

Stalin also demanded that the United States grant diplomatic recognition of Mongolia's independence from China: the Mongolian People's Republic, founded in 1924, was a Soviet satellite.
WATCH VIDEO: FDR: The War Years
Division of Germany

At Yalta, the Big Three agreed that after Germany's unconditional surrender, it would be divided into four post-war occupation zones, controlled by U.S., British, French and Soviet military forces. The city of Berlin would also be divided into similar occupation zones.

France's leader, Charles de Gaulle, was not invited to the Yalta Conference, and Stalin agreed to include France in the post-war governing of Germany only if France's zone of occupation was taken from the US and British zones.

The Allied leaders also determined that Germany should be completely demilitarized and "denazified," and that it would assume some responsibility for post-war reparations, but not sole responsibility.

Poland and Eastern Europe

Stalin took a hard line on the question of Poland, pointing out that within three decades, Germany had twice used the nation as a corridor through which to invade Russia. He declared that the Soviet Union would not return the territory in Poland that it had annexed in 1939, and would not meet the demands of the Polish government-in-exile based in London.

Stalin did agree to allow representatives from other Polish political parties into the communist-dominated provisional government installed in Poland, and to sanction free elections there-one of Churchill's key objectives.

In addition, the Soviets promised to allow free elections in all territories in Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

In return, the United States and Britain agreed that future governments in Eastern European nations bordering Soviet Union should be "friendly" to the Soviet regime, satisfying Stalin's desire for a zone of influence to provide a buffer against future conflicts in Europe.

United Nations

At Yalta, Stalin agreed to Soviet participation in the United Nations, the international peacekeeping organization that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to form in 1941 as part of the Atlantic Charter. He gave this commitment after all three leaders had agreed on a plan whereby all permanent members of the organization's Security Council would hold veto power.

Having discussed these key issues, the Big Three agreed to meet again after Germany's surrender, in order to finalize the borders of post-war Europe and other outstanding questions.

"There is no doubt that the tide of Anglo-Soviet-American friendship had reached a new high," wrote James Byrnes, who accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, in his memoirs. Though Roosevelt and Churchill also considered the Yalta Conference an indication that their wartime cooperation with the Soviets would continue in peacetime, such optimism would prove to be short-lived.

Impact of the Yalta Conference

By March 1945, it had become clear that Stalin had no intention of keeping his promises regarding political freedom in Poland. Instead, Soviet troops helped squash any opposition to the provisional government based in Lublin, Poland. When elections were finally held in 1947, they predictably solidified Poland as one of the first Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe.

Many Americans criticized Roosevelt-who was seriously ill during the Yalta Conference and died just two months later-for the concessions he made at Yalta regarding Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.

President Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, would be far more suspicious of Stalin that July, when the leaders of the Allied powers met again at the Potsdam Conference in Germany to hash out the final terms for ending World War II in Europe.

But with his troops occupying much of Germany and Eastern Europe, Stalin was able to effectively ratify the concessions he won at Yalta, pressing his advantage over Truman and Churchill (who was replaced mid-conference by Prime Minister Clement Attlee).

In March 1946, barely a year after the Yalta Conference, Churchill delivered his famous speech declaring that an " iron curtain" had fallen across Eastern Europe, signaling a definitive end to cooperation between the Soviet Union and its Western allies, and the beginning of the Cold War.
READ MORE: How the 'Big Three' Teed Up the Cold War at the 1945 Yalta Conference
Sources

The Yalta Conference 1945. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
Terry Charman, "How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Planned to End the Second World War." Imperial War Museums, January 12, 2018.
The End of World War II and the Division of Europe. Center for European Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Yalta Conference: Definition, Date & Outcome - HISTORY

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The Yalta Conference of 1945 was an historic meeting of three World War II allies: U.S. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet Premier Stalin.

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Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called "containment." In his famous "Long Telegram," the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]." As a result, America's only choice was the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

"It must be the policy of the United States," he declared before Congress in 1947, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation...by outside pressures." This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC-68 had echoed Truman's recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly " arms race." In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans' everyday lives.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit. Sputnik's launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile-seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space-made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government.

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World."

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully "contain" communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem's behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"-"relaxation"-toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon's efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and " perestroika," or economic reform.

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall-the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War-was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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Cold War: Summary, Combatants, Start & End

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The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for decades and resulted in anti-communist suspicions and international incidents that led the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear disaster.

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an incendiary bomb... See the full definition

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Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Causes, Impact & Lives Lost

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On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, immediately killing 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

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Trinity Site - White Sands National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)

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In 1965, Army officials erected a monument on Ground Zero. In 1975, the National Park Service designated Trinity Site as a National Historic Landmark. The landmark includes base camp, where the scientists and support group lived; the McDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core was assembled; as well as Ground Zero.

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Nuclear Bombs and Hydrogen Bombs

A discovery by nuclear physicists in a laboratory in Berlin, Germany, in 1938 made the first atomic bomb possible, after Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman discovered nuclear fission.

In nuclear fission, the nucleus of an atom of radioactive material splits into two or more smaller nuclei, which causes a sudden, powerful release of energy. The discovery of nuclear fission opened up the possibility of nuclear technologies, including weapons.

Atomic bombs get their energy from fission reactions. Thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs, rely on a combination of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is another type of reaction in which two lighter atoms combine to release energy.

Manhattan Project

On December 28, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the formation of the Manhattan Project to bring together various scientists and military officials working on nuclear research.

The Manhattan Project was the code name for the American-led effort to develop a functional atomic bomb during World War II. The project was started in response to fears that German scientists had been working on a weapon using nuclear technology since the 1930s.

Who Invented the Atomic Bomb?

Much of the work in the Manhattan Project was performed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the " father of the atomic bomb."

On July 16, 1945, in a remote desert location near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated-the Trinity Test. It created an enormous mushroom cloud some 40,000 feet high and ushered in the Atomic Age.

Hiroshima And Nagasaki Bombings

Scientists at Los Alamos had developed two distinct types of atomic bombs by 1945-a uranium-based design called "the Little Boy" and a plutonium-based weapon called "the Fat Man." (Uranium and plutonium are both radioactive elements.)

While the war in Europe had ended in April, fighting in the Pacific continued between Japanese forces and U.S. troops. In late July, President Harry Truman called for Japan's surrender with the Potsdam Declaration. The declaration promised "prompt and utter destruction" if Japan did not surrender.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped its first atomic bomb from a B-29 bomber plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The "Little Boy" exploded with about 13 kilotons of force, leveling five square miles of the city and killing 80,000 people instantly. Tens of thousands more would later die from radiation exposure.

When the Japanese did not immediately surrender, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb three days later on the city of Nagasaki. The "Fat Man" killed an estimated 40,000 people on impact.

Nagasaki had not been the primary target for the second bomb. American bombers initially had targeted the city of Kokura, where Japan had one of its largest munitions plants, but smoke from firebombing raids obscured the sky over Kokura. American planes then turned toward their secondary target, Nagasaki.

Citing the devastating power of "a new and most cruel bomb," Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender on August 15-a day that became known as ' V-J Day '-ending World War II.

The Cold War

The United States was the only country with nuclear weaponry in the years immediately following World War II. The Soviet Union initially lacked the knowledge and raw materials to build nuclear warheads.

Within just a few years, however, the U.S.S.R. had obtained-through a network of spies engaging in international espionage-blueprints of a fission-style bomb and discovered regional sources of uranium in Eastern Europe. On August 29, 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb.

The United States responded by launching a program in 1950 to develop more advanced thermonuclear weapons. The Cold War arms race had begun, and nuclear testing and research became high-profile goals for several countries, especially the United States and the Soviet Union.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Over the next few decades, each world superpower would stockpile tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Other countries, including Great Britain, France, and China, developed nuclear weapons during this time, too.

To many observers, the world appeared on the brink of nuclear war in October of 1962. The Soviet Union had installed nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. This resulted in a 13-day military and political standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

President John F. Kennedy enacted a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the United States was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize the perceived threat.

Disaster was avoided when the United States agreed to an offer made by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the United States promising not to invade Cuba.

Three Mile Island

Many Americans became concerned about the health and environmental effects of nuclear fallout-the radiation left in the environment after a nuclear blast-in the wake of World War II and after extensive nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific during the 1940s and 1950s.

The antinuclear movement emerged as a social movement in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. During Women Strike for Peace demonstrations on November 1, 1961 co-organized by activist Bella Abzug, roughly 50,000 women marched in 60 cities in the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons.

The antinuclear movement captured national attention again in the 1970s and 1980s with high profile protests against nuclear reactors after the Three Mile Island accident-a nuclear meltdown at a Pennsylvania power plant in 1979.

In 1982, a million people marched in New York City protesting nuclear weapons and urging an end to the Cold War nuclear arms race. It was one of the largest political protests in United States history.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

The United States and Soviet Union took the lead in negotiating an international agreement to halt the further spread of nuclear weapons in 1968.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (also called the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT) went into effect in 1970. It separated the world's countries into two groups-nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states.

Nuclear weapons states included the five countries that were known to possess nuclear weapons at the time-the United States, the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, France and China.

According to the treaty, nuclear weapons states agreed not to use nuclear weapons or help non-nuclear states acquire nuclear weapons. They also agreed to gradually reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons with the eventual goal of total disarmament. Non-nuclear weapons states agreed not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, there were still thousands of nuclear weapons scattered across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Many of the weapons were located in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. These weapons were deactivated and returned to Russia.

Illegal Nuclear Weapon States

Some countries wanted the option of developing their own nuclear weapons arsenal and never signed the NPT. India was the first country outside of the NPT to test a nuclear weapon in 1974.

Other non-signatories to the NTP include: Pakistan, Israel and South Sudan. Pakistan has a known nuclear weapons program. Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, though has never officially confirmed or denied the existence of a nuclear weapons program. South Sudan is not known or believed to possess nuclear weapons.

North Korea

North Korea initially signed the NPT treaty, but announced its withdrawal from the agreement in 2003. Since 2006, North Korea has openly tested nuclear weapons, drawing sanctions from various nations and international bodies.

North Korea tested two long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2017-one reportedly capable of reaching the United States mainland. In September 2017, North Korea claimed it had tested a hydrogen bomb that could fit on top an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Iran, while a signatory of the NPT, has said it has the capability to initiate production of nuclear weapons at short notice.

Sources

Pioneering Nuclear Science: The Discovery of Nuclear Fission. International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Development and Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. NobelPrize.org.
Here are the facts about North Korea's nuclear test. NPR.

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Atomic Bomb: Nuclear Bomb, Hiroshima & Nagasaki - HISTORY

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The atomic bomb and nuclear bombs, powerful weapons that use nuclear reactions as their source of explosive energy, are regulated by international agreements.

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Sword Beach is one of three Anglo-Canadian landing areas. The area of Sword, east of Juno Beach, is located between the localities of Langrune-sur-Mer and Ouistreham. It represents the eastern flank of the Allied amphibious attack in Normandy.
Committed units

The British of the 8th Brigade (belonging to the 3rd Infantry Division) and the Commandos (numbers 4, 6, 8, 10, 41 and 45) of the 1st Special Service Brigade (including Commando No.4 with the 177 French marines, commanded by Commandant Kieffer) who will land on Sword Beach. These allied forces are under command of the 1st Corps, led by the British Lieutenant General John Crocker.
The beach is divided into four main areas, from the west to the east: "Oboe", "Peter", "Queen" and "Roger".

Sword Beach is defended by the men of the 716th German Infantry Division, composed of 29 companies and armed with 500 machine guns, 50 mortars and 90 guns of various calibres.

Allied ships, planes and gliders on the way to the objective: Sword. Photo: IWM
The assault
This assault is preceded, as on the other beaches of the invasion, by an aerial bombardment and then by a naval bombardment two hours before the beginning of the landing, which must begin at 7:25 am.
On Sword Beach, as on Gold and Juno, engineers are instructed to clear several accesses to the beach, 20 minutes before H-Hour, by removing elements from the beach defenses, in order to facilitate navigation of the landing craft.

After the tanks, the first infantry assault wave is arriving. Photo: IWM

Special tanks, 25 in total, called "funnies", are supposed to landing first, before the infantry. Despite a navigation made difficult because of a very strong swell, the boats reach the beach at the appointed time. German fires are numerous, and mortar shells explode near units, wounding or killing assailants.

British soldiers taking shelter from German fire on the beach. Photo: IWM

When the infantry begins to land, the tanks have already destroyed some German strongpoints, but the British face difficulties moving between the shore and the line of houses directly on the beach, both because of the defenders and of the beach defenses. The rising tide reduces the area of the beach, which is gradually being overwhelmed by various equipment, destroyed vehicles and human bodies.

Landing troops regrouping themselves under the enemy fire. Photo: IWM

When Lord Lovat arrives, he is accompanied by his piper Bill Millin, a bagpiper who before the war was at his service in the Lord's castle. During the ship's journey to the beach, Lovat told Millin, who had taken his bagpipe and had not stopped playing it at his military base in England: ": " Go for Highland Laddie". And the piper obeys: when he reaches the Normandy beach, he starts the well known song and the melody even reaches the ears of the Germans, according to the French veteran Maurice Chauvet, from 1er Bataillon de Fusiliers Marins Suddenly, when Millin started playing, the Germans stopped shooting for a few seconds, they could not believe their eyes ... and their ears! "

The assailants protect themselves behind the dune or the anti-tank wall along the road, regroup, cross the lines of barbed wire under the fire of the last German resistance points, still active on the beach, and invest the inland, supported by amphibious and "funnies" tanks.

The infantry, supported by amphibious tanks, liberates the surrounding villages. Photo: IWM

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Sword Beach is one of three Anglo-Canadian landing areas. The area of Sword, east of Juno Beach, is located between the localities of Langrune-sur-Mer and Ouistreham. It represents the eastern flank of the Allied amphibious attack in Normandy.

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Operation Overlord was an Allied landing in France that was scheduled for June in 1944. The operation had many commanders but the overall commander was General Dwight Eisenhower. Operation Overlord is not only notable for the significance it would have in World War II but also use it was an operation that required the kind of logistics that were unprecedented before it.

The element of surprise was essential for the operation to succeed, keeping it top secret was a challenge however because of the many parties that participated in the landings, beside the Americans there were also British troops and members of the French resistance present at operation Overlord.

Operation Overlord Commanders

Allied Forces
Dwight Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander)

Arthur Tedder (Deputy Supreme Allied Commander)
Bernard Montgomery (Ground Forces Commander in Chief)
Trafford Leigh-Mallory (Air Commander in Chief)
Bertram Ramsay (Naval Commander in Chief)
German Forces
Gerd von Rundstedt (Oberbefehlshaber West)
Erwin Rommel (Heeresgruppe B)

Operation Overlord Losses

Allied Forces
226,386 casualties
4,101 planes
~4,000 tanks
German Forces
209,875 - 450,000 casualties
2,127 planes
~2,200 tanks and assault guns
French Civilians
13,632-19,890 French civilians killed or injured

Operation Overlord Map

Operation Overlord Training and Preparation Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2sQkhZL-z4

Operation Overlord Summary

The decision to land on Normandy was a risky one but the beaches weren't very well suited for landing that much equipment and that many troops. One of the earlier attacks that predated Operation Overlord was named COSSAC which stood for Combined Anglo-American plan. The plan was the use of airborne bridges to protect the landings and this plan was ultimate added to Operation Overlord was Montgomery. He wanted that the five beaches of Normandy are attacked by the land and sea forces while air forces served as support.

Eisenhower supported Montgomery's plan as well and Operation Overlord was more or less how Montgomery wanted it, the only difference was that Montgomery wanted to land five divisions while Eisenhower wanted to have a lot more men, he wanted to have at least 18 initial divisions with a contingency for more later on.

This operation was like no other in history because of the massive amount of equipment and troops involved, one of the most important parts of the operation was keeping it top secret because the main idea of the operation was to catch the Germans off guard, but if the Germans got wind of Operation Overlord it could turn out disastrous. What the Allies did was present Pays de Calais as the main target so Germans don't expect a full out attack on Normandy.

The operation required so much equipment and logistics that it was a logistical nightmare, over 100,000 troops and more than 13,000 vehicles. The operation even included a man-made harbor that would make it easier to land both troops and equipment. Overlord ultimately had around 3,000,000 men in 47 divisions that were transported with 6000 ships and were protected by over 5000 fighter planes.

Invasion of Normandy Video

Operation Overlord Conclusions

The success of operation Overlord shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's familiar with how much military planning was done.

This operation was planned out so well that it would have been surprising if it failed especially if one takes into account the state of the German military at the time. The training of the Allied troops was a testament to how well prepared the operation was, the troops to be were trained with live ammunition on terrain that closely resembled the place of invasion. They were trained how to properly operate in teams and use teamwork to their advantage even in getting rid of obstacles like enemy gun placement and trenches. Special units were trained in taking out special targets such as close range artillery.

Napoleon famously said "an army marches on its stomach" in modern times supplies are the equivalent of what food was in Napoleon's time. For the supplies during Operation Overlord two artificial harbors were created and were to serve as the primary location for unloading the supplies from ships to the shore until the port was available. Unfortunately a violent storm destroyed one of the harbors and severely damaged the other so it was decided to unload the supplies directly on the beech which all in all proved to be much more efficient than anybody thought.

Even though Operation Overlord was the first part of what would go down in history as The Invasion of Normandy or the Battle of Normandy, as many people don't know it's name. It is significant because it would be the first part of an operation that would turn the tide in the war against Germany for good. Most people remember the day that contributed to the ending of the way, D-Day which was in fact the first day of the Invasion of Normandy.

Operation Overlord References

BBC Operation Overlord Tutorial, last accessed April 10th, 2013.

Booknotes interview with Stephen Ambrose on D-Day: June 6, 1944, last accessed on April 10th, 2013.

Leighton, Richard M. (2000 (reissue from 1960)). "Chapter 10: Overlord Versus the Mediterranean at the Cairo-Tehran Conferences". In Greenfield, Kent Roberts. Command Decisions. United States Army Center of Military History. CMH Pub 70-7.

Guide to materials on the planning of Operation Overlord at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, last accessed April 10th, 2013.

U.S. Army's official interactive D-Day website, last accessed 10 April 2013.

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Operation Overlord was an Allied landing in France that was scheduled for June in 1944. The operation had many commanders but the overall commander was General Dwight Eisenhower. Operation Overlord is not only notable for the significance it would have in World War II but also use it was an operation that required the kind of logistics that were unprecedented before it.

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Frank Russell Capra (born Francesco Rosario Capra; May 18, 1897 - September 3, 1991) was an Italian American film director, producer and writer who became the creative force behind some of the major award-winning films of the 1930s and 1940s.

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Seventy-five years ago this week, the United States held its first War Loan Drive. The Second World War cost the United States $300 billion dollars, with the federal budget rising from $9 billion in 1939 to $98 billion in 1945. How was the nation to pay for that?

Taxes were increased with an additional 5 percent Victory Tax. To assure payment, on June 10, 1943 the government approved the first automatic deduction of taxes from paychecks. But more was needed, and the government turned to bonds, which had been effective in World War I. War bonds were sold at 75 percent of face value (a $25 bond sold for $18.75) and matured over ten years. While the rate of return was below market value, bonds were a stable investment with the bonus of aiding the war effort. Channeling cash into bond purchases helped prevent inflation in the robust wartime economy as well.

How Bonds Were Purchased

Defense Bonds first went on the market on May 1, 1941, and they were renamed War Bonds after the US entered the war in December 1941. Bonds were available in denominations of $25 through $1000, designed to be affordable for everyone. For 10 cents, people could purchase stamps, which were placed in special albums. When full, the albums were redeemed for a bond. War stamps were especially popular with children.

Employers set up automatic payroll deduction systems, so employees could set aside a certain amount for War Bonds with each paycheck. A robust advertising campaign, rallies and other promotions, and a series of War Loan Drives brought in even more needed money.

Advertising War Bonds

As part of the war effort, many newspapers, magazines, and radio stations donated advertising space and time. Posters sprang up in store fronts. Even comic books got in the act as superheroes promoted bond sales. Popular songs also encouraged sales, such as Bing Crosby's recording of "The Road to Victory" for the Sixth War Loan Drive.

Promotions for War Bonds

Bond rallies were extremely popular, featuring Hollywood stars and popular musicians. Celebrities conducted auctions - a kiss from Hedy Lamarr, Betty Grable's stockings, Jack Benny's violin, and the horseshoes of Triple Crown winner Man O' War. Movie theaters and baseball stadiums sometimes offered free admission with the purchase of a War Bond. At the UCLA-USC game on 12 December 1942, a student-led war bond drive raised $2 million.

War Loan Drives

Eight War Loan Drives were conducted in the US from 1942 to 1945. Each was meant to raise an additional $9-$15 billion in sales. Towns received quotas, with the aim of promoting competition between towns. Volunteers went door-to-door, pleading for sales and rewarding purchasers with stickers to display on their window or door. The drives were conducted on the following dates:

First War Loan Drive: Nov. 30 to Dec. 23, 1942

Second War Loan Drive: Apr. 12 to May 1, 1943

Third War Loan Drive: Sep. 9 to Oct. 1, 1943

Fourth War Loan Drive: Jan. 18 to Feb. 15, 1944

Fifth War Loan Drive: June 12 to July 8, 1944

Sixth War Loan Drive: Nov. 20 to Dec. 16, 1944

Seventh War Loan Drive: May 14 to June 30, 1945

Victory Loan Drive: Oct. 29 to Dec. 8, 1945

By the end of the war, 85 million Americans (out of a population of 131 million) had purchased $185.7 billion dollars of bonds - over $2000 per person, at a time when the average income was $2000 per year.

The patriotism and personal sacrifice of the average citizen played a significant part in the Allied war effort.

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Seventy-five years ago this week, the United States held its first War Loan Drive. The Second World War cost the United States $300 billion dollars, with the federal budget rising from $9 billion in 1939 to $98 billion in 1945. How was the nation to pay for that?

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The Women's Army Corps ( WAC) was the women's branch of the United States Army. It was created as an auxiliary unit, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps ( WAAC) on 15 May 1942 by Public Law 554, and converted to an active duty status in the Army of the United States as the WAC on 1 July 1943.

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The Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October - 11 November 1942) was a battle of the Second World War that took place near the Egyptian railway halt of El Alamein. With the Allies victorious, it was the watershed of the Western Desert Campaign.

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Closing the Ring is a 2007 romantic drama film directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Stephen Amell, Neve Campbell, Pete Postlethwaite, and Brenda Fricker. It was the final film directed by Attenborough, then aged 83, who died seven years later.

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V1 and V2 Rockets - Engineering and Technology History Wiki

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After the war, the V2 rocket became the basis of space and missile programs in Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The allied countries grabbed rockets and rocket parts, shipping them home for study along with the German engineers who had designed them.

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Wake Island is a tiny island in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean, located 2/3 of the way from Honolulu to Guam, best known for its role in World War II. It is an unorganized United States territory, with no permanent residents, just members of the U.S. military and civilian contractors who manage the facility.

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Called "the greatest American battle of the war" by Winston Churchill, the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes region of Belgium was Adolf Hitler's last major offensive in World War II against the Western Front. Hitler's aim was to split the Allies in their drive toward Germany. The German troops' failure to divide Britain, France and America with the Ardennes offensive paved the way to victory for the allies.

Lasting six brutal weeks, from December 16, 1944, to January 25, 1945, the assault, also called the Battle of the Ardennes, took place during frigid weather conditions, with some 30 German divisions attacking battle-fatigued American troops across 85 miles of the densely wooded Ardennes Forest.

As the Germans drove into the Ardennes, the Allied line took on the appearance of a large bulge, giving rise to the battle's name. The battle proved to be the costliest ever fought by the U.S. Army, which suffered over 100,000 casualties. The formerly serene, wooded region of Ardennes was hacked into chaos by fighting as the Americans dug in against the German advance at St.-Vith, Elsenborn Ridge, Houffalize and, later, Bastogne, which was defended by the 101st Airborne Division.

"Did you ever see land when a tornado's come through? Did you ever see trees and stuff, twisted and broken off? The whole friggin' forest was like that," said U.S. Army Charlie Sanderson in My Father's War: Memories from Our Honored WWII Soldiers.
READ MORE: 8 Things You May Not Know About the Battle of the Bulge
The surprise German attack broke through the front on day one as stories quickly spread of massacred soldiers and civilians, according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

"For those who had lived through 1940, the picture was all too familiar. Belgian townspeople put away their Allied flags and brought out their swastikas," the center writes. "Police in Paris enforced an all-night curfew. British veterans waited nervously to see how the Americans would react to a full-scale German offensive, and British generals quietly acted to safeguard the Meuse River's crossings. Even American civilians, who had thought final victory was near were sobered by the Nazi onslaught."

Troops Faced Severe Cold

Hitler's mid-December timing of the attack-one of the bloodiest of the war-was strategic, as freezing rain, thick fog, deep snow drifts and record-breaking low temperatures brutalized the American troops. More than 15,000 "cold injuries"-trench foot, pneumonia, frostbite-were reported that winter.

"I was from Buffalo, I thought I knew cold," baseball Hall of Famer and WWII veteran Warren Spahn said in The Love of Baseball. "But I didn't really know cold until the Battle of the Bulge."

Nazis Sent in Imposters and Changed Road Signs

Another Nazi strategy was to attempt to infiltrate the Allied troops.

Veteran Vernon Brantley, a private first class in the 289th Regiment, told the Fort Jackson Leader in 2009 that his unit had just arrived in Germany from France when they were told to load up and return to Luxembourg.

"We got word that the Germans had dropped a lot of paratroopers behind our lines, and that they were dressed like American Soldiers and spoke English," he said. "... They were there to create confusion."

The Germans also changed road signs and spread misinformation.

"The Nazis were carefully groomed for their dangerous mission," LIFE magazine reported in 1945. "They spoke excellent English and their slang had been tuned up by close association with American prisoners of war in German camps. ... Under the rules of the Hague Convention these Germans were classifiable as spies and subject to an immediate court martial by a military tribunal. After brief deliberation American officers found them guilty, and ordered the usual penalty for spies: death by firing squad."

To stop infiltrators, the U.S. troops would ask suspected Germans to answer American trivia questions.

"Three times I was ordered to prove my identity," Gen. Omar Bradley recalled, according to the Washington Post. "The first time by identifying Springfield as the capital of Illinois; the second by locating the guard between the center and the tackle on a line of scrimmage; the third time by naming the then-current spouse of a blonde named Betty Grable."
Click here to watch the full episode on the Battle of the Bulge and more from WWII in HD on History Vault
Allied Air Forces Arrived on Christmas Day

It wasn't until Christmas Day that the weather conditions finally cleared, allowing Allied air forces to strike.

"It was on that bright, clear and cold Christmas morning in 1944 that the ground froze solid," Brantley told the Leader. "The tanks and air forces could finally maneuver, and get assistance to all of us who were previously blocked off. ... It was a welcome sign to see the sun come up. It meant that we were alive for one more day."

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. led the American defense to restore the front. According to the National Archives' Bloodiest Battle, Eisenhower gave Patton the Third Army, about 230,000 soldiers, and ordered him to head to the Ardennes.

101st Airborne Division Arrive in Bastogne

In the small, pivotal Belgian town of Bastogne, the Germans surrounded thousands of Allied troops. Eisenhower, in response, sent in more units, including the famed 101st Airborne Division.

"When the Germans sent a message demanding the surrender of the 101st on December 22, they got a one-word response from its commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe: 'Nuts!'" the Bloodiest Battle states. "This was interpreted by German officers as a more colorful-and negative-response to their demand. The day after Christmas, units of Patton's rapidly approaching Third Army finally arrived, broke through the German lines, and rescued the troops."

Claiming victory of the battle on January 25, 1945, and the Allies headed for Berlin. The war ended less than five months later with Germany's May 7 surrender.

In all, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, 1 million-plus Allied troops, including some 500,000 Americans, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, with approximately 19,000 soldiers killed in action, 47,500 wounded and 23,000-plus missing. About 100,000 Germans were killed, wounded or captured.

"The Ardennes campaign of 1944-45 was only one in a series of difficult engagements in the battle for Europe," wrote John S.D. Eisenhower, in his 1969 book, The Bitter Woods. "Nevertheless, it can be said that the Ardennes campaign epitomized them all. For it was here that American and German combat soldiers met in the decisive struggle that broke the back of the Nazi war machine."

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Battle of the Bulge - Definition, Dates & Who Won

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The Battle of the Bulge took place in December 1944, after Adolf Hitler launched a surprise blitzkrieg against Allied Forces in northwest Europe. Caught off-guard, American units fought to stem the German advance. As the Germans pushed through American defenses, the front line took on the appearance of a large bulge, giving rise to the battle's name.

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Axis powers, coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan that opposed the Allied powers in World War II. The alliance originated in a series of agreements between Germany and Italy, followed by the proclamation of an "axis" binding Rome and Berlin (October 25, 1936), with the two powers claiming that the world would henceforth rotate on the Rome-Berlin axis. This was followed by the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union (November 25, 1936).

Hostile acts of expansionism by the three countries during the 1930s sowed the seeds of world war. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. Imperial Japan, which had occupied Manchuria (Northeast China) since 1931, engaged Chinese troops near Beijing on July 7, 1937, thus launching full-scale warfare there. Nazi Germany occupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria and the Sudetenland two years later.

On September 13, 1936, as he began to set his sights on the Soviet Union, German dictator Adolf Hitler boasted of the blind obedience that he would be able to command from the German people in a struggle against bolshevism. Hitler's tirades against bolshevism were delivered not only in order to justify German intervention on the side of the fascist-oriented Falange in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) but also to prepare the ground for alliance with Japan, where nationalism and militarism had been ascendant since Japan's occupation of Manchuria. On November 25, 1936, Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Japan's ambassador in Berlin, Count Mushakoji, signed an agreement, the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact: since the Comintern, or Third International, based in Moscow, existed in order "to disintegrate and subdue existing states," Germany and Japan undertook "to consult with one another on the necessary preventive measures and to carry these through in close collaboration."

Germany had not enacted any sanctions against Italy during the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-36): firmly resolved on annexing Austria to Germany, Hitler was waiting until Italy's war was over before making his next move on the international chessboard. Then, after a bitter campaign in the Nazi press against the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, German diplomat Franz von Papen, in May 1936, started negotiations with Schuschnigg for a modus vivendi. A draft agreement between Germany and Austria was submitted to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose approval was obtained on June 5. An official communique published in Berlin and in Vienna on July 11 stated that the German Reich recognized Austria's full sovereignty and that Austria undertook, "both in general and toward the German Reich," to pursue the policy of "a German state." A visit by Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and minister of foreign affairs, to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on October 24 was followed by Germany's becoming the first power to recognize Italy's annexation of Ethiopia. On November 1, in Milan, Mussolini completed the bargain by proclaiming the Rome-Berlin Axis and by violently attacking communism.

In the last week of September 1937, when he paid a state visit to Germany, Mussolini received a spectacular welcome. Convinced that in a forthcoming war the Nazi Reich would be victorious, he formally subscribed to the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact on November 6 of that year, and on December 11 he withdrew Italy from the League of Nations. Germany, Italy, and Japan now formed a triangle.

The connections among the Axis powers were strengthened by a full military and political alliance between Germany and Italy (the Pact of Steel, May 22, 1939) and by the Tripartite Pact, signed by all three powers on September 27, 1940, one year after Germany's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. During the war a number of other countries joined the Axis, induced by coercion or promises of territory or protection by the Axis powers. They included Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia (after Czechoslovakia had divided in 1939) in November 1940, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in March 1941, and, after the wartime breakup of Yugoslavia, Croatia (June 1941). Finland, although it did not formally join the Tripartite Pact, cooperated with the Axis because of its opposition to the Soviet Union (to which Finland had been forced to cede territory in 1940) and entered the war in 1941.

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Axis powers, coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan that opposed the Allied powers in World War II. It originated in a series of agreements between Germany and Italy, followed by the proclamation of an 'axis' binding Rome and Berlin (October 25, 1936), on which they claimed the world would rotate.

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Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during World War II, and she became perhaps the most iconic image of working women. American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during the war, as widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force. Between 1940 and 1945, the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home.

Rosies in the Workforce

While women during World War II worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers.

More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, making up 65 percent of the industry's total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years). The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as illustrated by the U.S. government's Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign.

Based in small part on a real-life munitions worker, but primarily a fictitious character, the strong, bandanna-clad Rosie became one of the most successful recruitment tools in American history, and the most iconic image of working women in the World War II era.

Did you know? Though women who entered the workforce during World War II were crucial to the war effort, their pay continued to lag far behind their male counterparts: Female workers rarely earned more than 50 percent of male wages.

In movies, newspapers, propaganda posters, photographs and articles, the Rosie the Riveter campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the workforce. On May 29, 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published a cover image by the artist Norman Rockwell, portraying Rosie with a flag in the background and a copy of Adolf Hitler's racist tract "Mein Kampf" under her feet.

Though Rockwell's image may be a commonly known version of Rosie the Riveter, her prototype was actually created in 1942 by a Pittsburgh artist named J. Howard Miller, and was featured on a poster for Westinghouse Electric Corporation under the headline "We Can Do It!"

Early in 1943, a popular song debuted called "Rosie the Riveter," written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, and the name went down in history.

Who Was Rosie the Riveter?

The true identity of Rosie the Riveter has been the subject of considerable debate. For years, the inspiration for the woman in the Westinghouse poster was believed to be Geraldine Hoff Doyle of Michigan, who worked in a Navy machine shop during World War II.

Other sources claim that Rosie was actually Rose Will Monroe, who worked as a riveter at the Willow Run Bomber Plant near Detroit. Monroe also was featured in a promotional film for war bonds.

And Rosalind P. Walter from Long Island, New York, is known to be the Rosie from the popular song by Evans and Loeb. Walter was, in fact, a riveter on Corsair fighter planes.

But the most credible claim on Rosie's legacy came from Naomi Parker Fraley, who was photographed working in the machine shop at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California. In the 1942 photo, she is sporting a telltale polka-dotted bandana. Fraley passed away in January 2018.

WACs

In addition to factory work and other home front jobs, some 350,000 women joined the Armed Services, serving at home and abroad. At the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and women's groups, and impressed by the British use of women in service, General George C. Marshall supported the idea of introducing a women's service branch into the Army.

In May 1942, Congress instituted the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, later upgraded to the Women's Army Corps, which had full military status. Its members, known as WACs, worked in more than 200 non-combatant jobs stateside and in every theater of the war.

By 1945, there were more than 100,000 WACs and 6,000 female officers. In the Navy, members of Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) held the same status as naval reservists and provided support stateside. The Coast Guard and Marine Corps soon followed suit, though in smaller numbers.

WASPs

One of the lesser-known roles women played in the war effort was provided by the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. These women, each of whom had already obtained their pilot's license prior to service, became the first women to fly American military aircraft.

They ferried planes from factories to bases, transporting cargo and participating in simulation strafing and target missions, accumulating more than 60 million miles in flight distances and freeing thousands of male U.S. pilots for active duty in World War II.

More than 1,000 WASPs served, and 38 of them lost their lives during the war. Considered civil service employees and without official military status, these fallen WASPs were granted no military honors or benefits, and it wasn't until 1977 that the WASPs received full military status.

Impact of Rosie the Riveter

The call for women to join the workforce during World War II was meant to be temporary and women were expected to leave their jobs after the war ended and men came home. The women who did stay in the workforce continued to be paid less than their male peers and were usually demoted. But after their selfless efforts during World War II, men could no longer claim superiority over women. Women had enjoyed and even thrived on a taste of financial and personal freedom-and many wanted more. The impact of World War II on women changed the workplace forever, and women's roles continued to expand in the postwar era.

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Rosie the Riveter - Real Person, Facts & Norman Rockwell

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Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during World War II. Artist Normal Rockwell's cover image of Rosie, made in 1943, became, perhaps the most iconic image of working women.

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The War Powers Act is a congressional resolution designed to limit the U.S. president's ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad. Among other restrictions, the law requires that presidents notify Congress after deploying the armed forces and limits how long units can remain engaged without congressional approval. Enacted in 1973 with the goal of avoiding another lengthy conflict such as the Vietnam War, its effectiveness has been repeatedly questioned throughout its history, and several presidents have been accused of failing to comply with its regulations.

What Is the War Powers Act?

The War Powers Act-officially called the War Powers Resolution-was enacted in November 1973 over an executive veto by President Richard M. Nixon.

The law's text frames it as a means of guaranteeing that "the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply" whenever the American armed forces are deployed overseas. To that end, it requires the President to consult with the legislature "in every possible instance" before committing troops to war.

The resolution also sets down reporting requirements for the chief executive, including the responsibility to notify Congress within 48 hours whenever military forces are introduced "into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances."

Additionally, the law stipulates that Presidents are required to end foreign military actions after 60 days unless Congress provides a declaration of war or an authorization for the operation to continue.

Origins of the War Powers Act

In the U.S. Constitution, the power to make war is shared by the executive and legislative branches. As commander-in-chief of the military, the president is charged with directing the armed forces. Congress, meanwhile, is vested with the power "to declare war" and "raise and support armies."

These provisions were traditionally interpreted to mean that Congress had to approve American involvement in overseas wars. By the 1970s, however, many lawmakers had grown wary of presidents deploying the armed forces abroad without first consulting Congress.

President Harry S. Truman had committed U.S. troops to the Korean War as part of a United Nations "police action," and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had overseen the long and controversial undeclared conflict during the Vietnam War.

Legislative efforts to reign in presidential war powers coalesced during the Nixon administration. Disturbed by revelations about the Vietnam conflict-including news that Nixon had been conducting a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia-the House and Senate crafted the War Powers Act as a means of reasserting Congressional authority over foreign wars.

Presidential Challenges

President Nixon was an early critic of the War Powers Act, and he vetoed the law on the grounds that it was an "unconstitutional and dangerous" check on his duties as commander-in-chief of the military.

In a message accompanying his veto, Nixon argued that the resolution "would attempt to take away, by a mere legislative act, authorities which the President has properly exercised under the Constitution for almost 200 years."

Congress overrode Nixon's veto, but he wasn't the last chief executive to bristle at the restrictions of the War Powers Act. Since the 1970s, every sitting president has either sidestepped some of the law's provisions or labeled it unconstitutional.

One of the first major challenges to the War Powers Act came in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan deployed military personnel to El Salvador without consulting or submitting a report to Congress. In 1999, President Bill Clinton continued a bombing campaign in Kosovo beyond the 60-day time limit cited in the law.

A more recent War Powers Act dispute arose in 2011, when President Barack Obama initiated a military action in Libya without congressional authorization.

Members of Congress have occasionally objected to the executive branch's disregard for the War Powers Act, but attempts to take the issue to court have been unsuccessful. In 2000, for example, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case on whether the law had been violated during military operations in Yugoslavia.

Is the War Powers Act Effective?

Ever since its passage in 1973, politicians have been divided on the War Powers Act's effectiveness. Supporters of the resolution maintain that it is a much-needed check on the president's ability to make war without Congressional approval.

Critics, meanwhile, argue the law has failed to create better coordination between the executive and legislative branches. Some believe the law is too restrictive on the president's ability to respond to foreign emergencies, while others contend that it gives the president free reign to commit troops overseas.

Most experts tend to agree that the War Powers Act has rarely worked as intended. According to one study by the Congressional Research Service, presidents have traditionally avoided citing certain provisions of the resolution whenever they submit reports to Congress. As a result, the 60-day time limits of the law have rarely been triggered, and it has never been used to bring an end to a foreign military operation.

Because of the War Powers Act's contentious history, there have occasionally been calls for the resolution to be repealed or amended. One notable attempt came in 1995, when the U.S. House of Representatives voted on an amendment that would have repealed many of the Act's main components. The measure was narrowly defeated by a vote of 217-204.

Sources

War Powers Resolution. The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute.
War Powers. The Law Library of Congress.
War Powers Resolution Revisited: Historic Accomplishment or Surrender? William and Mary Law Review.
War Powers Resolution: Presidential Compliance. Congressional Research Service.
The War Powers Resolution: Concepts and Practice. Congressional Research Service.

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War Powers Act - 1973, Definition & Purpose

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The War Powers Act is a congressional resolution designed to limit the U.S. president's ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad. Among other restrictions, the law requires that presidents notify Congress after deploying the armed forces and limits how long units can remain engaged without congressional approval.

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War of the Grand Alliance | European History, Causes & Consequences

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War of the Grand Alliance, (1689–97), the third major war of Louis XIV of France, in which his expansionist plans were blocked by an alliance led by England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Austrian Habsburgs. The deeper issue underlying the war was the balance of power between the

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Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.

The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler's particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract " Mein Kampf " (or "my struggle"), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan," and with the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party's status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany's supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000-just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an "Aryanization" of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass" in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, starting World War II. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler's SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution) to "the Jewish question."

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and urged the German leaders and people to follow "the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples"-the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide. Germany's formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz, the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat."

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust-known in Hebrew as "Shoah," or catastrophe-were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust's bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people's responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.
Sources
The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum.
What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums.
Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe.
Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations.

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Holocaust: Definition, Remembrance & Meaning - HISTORY

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The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, Romani people, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime from 1933-1945.

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After the Battle of Midway, the United States launched a counter-offensive strike known as "island-hopping," establishing a line of overlapping island bases, as well as air control. The idea was to capture certain key islands, one after another, until Japan came within range of American bombers. Led by General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of the Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, the first stage of the offensive began with the Navy under Nimitz, and Marine landings on Guadalcanal and nearby islands in the Solomons.

From that point on, Nimitz and MacArthur engaged in "island-hopping" amphibious drives that bypassed strongly-held islands to strike at the enemy's weak points. In an effort to liberate the people of the Philippine Islands, MacArthur pushed along the New Guinea coast with Australian allies, while Nimitz crossed the central Pacific by way of the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, Carolines, and Palaus. Both campaigns would entail seemingly endless, bloody battles — ultimately leading to the unconditional surrender of the Japanese.
Preparing for U.S. counterattack
Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, flew to MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, where they discussed campaign strategy. MacArthur's headquarters issued plans on April 26th that laid out a two-pronged offensive, code-named CARTWHEEL, which would corner the Japanese at Rabaul Island. One prong — MacArthur — would advance along the northern shores of New Guinea and into the Bismarck Archipelago. The second prong — Halsey — would drive northwest from Guadalcanal and control the remainder of the Solomon Islands.
Buna
By November 1942 the Japanese had established a jungle fortress around Buna and Gona. Inexperienced with guerilla warfare, weather-beaten, sick, and short on artillery and rations, the Australians and Americans could not dislodge the dug-in Japanese. General MacArthur sent Lt. General Robert Eichelberger to lead the Buna campaign.

On December 9, 1942, the Allies stormed Gona and captured it during the last week of January 1943. MacArthur then turned his attention to the key Japanese airfield at Lae and control of the coastline facing New Britain. After a series of land and sea attacks, the Allies landed in New Britain at the end of 1943.
Solomon Islands Guadalcanal
To make the first Buna Allied offensive in the Pacific more effective, the Americans readied a separate attack from a different direction. That decision brought American forces into the Solomon Islands and U.S. Army infantry onto the island of Guadalcanal.

On the morning of August 7th, 1942, the First Marine Division followed heavy naval preparatory shelling, and landed on the north beaches east of the Tenaru River. In a three-month struggle marked by disease (diarrhea, malaria, dysentery, skin fungus), and many casualties, the marines took an airfield and established a beachhead roughly six miles wide and three miles deep.

During the last weeks of 1942 and the first weeks of 1943, the Americans strengthened their foothold on Guadalcanal by reorganizing and bringing in fresh troops, the Second Marine Division and the 25th Infantry Division. The Japanese held off five American battalions for a month, which delayed the advance west long enough for the defenders to evacuate 13,000 men from the island. Allied forces quickly constructed landing strips — the first series of island hopping had begun.
New Georgia
Admiral Halsey landed troops on New Georgia, while MacArthur's troops moved to Nassau Bay, New Guinea.

The New Georgia offensive, code-named TOENAILS, was a learning experience for Allied forces in the region. Shallow reefs surrounded those islands, making it difficult to navigate large watercraft through narrow rock channels. Also, Japanese soldiers in pillboxes, and deeply dug in, were nasty obstacles to overcome during the New Georgia Campaign.

Heavy rains reduced visibility almost completely, and high winds and rough seas wreaked havoc with the landing operation. Amphibious vehicles had to follow the sound of breaking waves to find the shore. In the ensuing chaos, six landing craft became lodged on the coral reef, while others discharged troops at the wrong site and then had to reload. Over the next four days, marines and Solomon Island soldiers, supported by 105-mm howitzers from the 152d Field Artillery Battalion, rooted out the Japanese from Wickham Anchorage.

On August 5th, 1943, the capture of Munda airfield was assured, giving the Allies a huge vantage point. However, it was only one phase of the New Georgia campaign. Japanese were still on New Georgia, as well as on other surrounding islands. Those islands had to be taken or neutralized before the Americans could continue island-hopping up the Solomons chain.

While firing their remaining artillery, Japanese forces desperately attacked through the ravines and gullies of northern New Georgia. A pounding barrage of counter mortar fire by the 129th mounted tank-infantry rained down on the the Japanese, devastating them in front of the American line. After suffering terribly (more than 5,000 killed), the remaining Japanese troops left behind their wounded and retreated off the island. With the highest number of non-combatant U.S. casualties (jungle disease) in the island-hopping campaign, the New Georgia mission became a costly success. The next few weeks brought sporadic fighting as XIV Corps pursued the beaten Japanese. During those operations the First Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, became the first black American infantry unit to engage in combat during the war. The 25th Regimental Combat Team of the 93d Division also joined in the final operations of CARTWHEEL.
Bougainville
On November 1, 1943, the Allies attacked, going ashore at Empress Augusta Bay. The 60,000 elite Japanese troops, concentrated in the southern half of the island, did not want a repeat of Guadalcanal. Although the western part of Bougainville was left relatively undefended by the Japanese, the Allies concentrated on attacking from the sea and the sky.

The Japanese responded with naval and air vessels from Rabaul, but were pummeled and sustained heavy casualties. Four days later, on November 5th, Admiral Halsey dispatched a carrier air strike against Rabaul, thus knocking down many Japanese planes and forcing the naval forces to flee to the open ocean. The battle for Bougainville proved to be the site of some of the fiercest battles during World War II.

In November 1944, command of all island operations passed from General Griswold to Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Savige of the Australian Army, and by mid-December Australian forces had relieved all American units.

In the Solomons, most of the Japanese soldiers who escaped fought again another day.
Gilbert Islands
Near the close of 1943, a thrust at the Gilbert Islands from the Central Pacific, in which Tarawa, Makin, and Apamama were seized, paved the way for the assault on the Marshall Islands on January 31, 1944.

Previous raids by bombers of a U.S. Navy task force had brought the Gilberts under fire in January 1942. The following August, "devil dogs" (marines) spent an active night there demolishing installations and most of the small Japanese barracks.

Landings at Makin and Tarawa, 105 miles away, were planned to begin simultaneously by two separate landing forces from Task Force 54, Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner commanding. A complement of six fleet carriers, five light carriers, six battleships, six cruisers, and 21 destroyers were deployed; 7,000 troops of the 27th Infantry Division also were deployed. At 8:30 a.m., November 20th, 1943, the first landing craft were to touch the beach at each atoll*.

While the 27th Division Landing Team, with attached units, took Makin on the 20th of November, the Second Marine Division was to assault Tarawa, leaving one of its combat teams in reserve for the support of one or both operations. If that reserve remained uncommitted, it was later to occupy Apamama. LVTs (Landing Vehicle, Tracked), popularly called "alligators," were ordered to move at once to the flanks and there establish positions defending the beaches.

After four days of relatively low resistance, Makin was secured. However, Tarawa was a different story. Betio, the primary island of Tarawa atoll, is only two miles long and 600 yards wide, but it had the only airstrip in the islands and was vigorously defended by highly trained Japanese troops.

Machine gun positions, concrete bunkers and pillboxes (Japanese foxholes), mines, and eight-inch coastal gun emplacements, told a story of formidable Japanese defenses. Admiral Keiji Shibasaki (Japanese commander on Betio) boasted that a million men could not take Tarawa in a hundred years. Shibaski soon realized his under-estimation of Allied capabilities — mostly by way of America's relatively new invention, the flame thrower.

Banzai! After two hours of heavy bombing, and before dawn on November 20th, 1943, the first wave of marines stormed the Tarawa atoll. "Bloody Tarawa," as it soon was known, required 76 hours before a final "Banzai" (suicide) rush of the Japanese signaled the end. While the Americans inched inland, the 4,500 Japanese defiant defenders were slowly crushed. Only 17 Japanese troops, of the original 4,500, made it out alive. One thousand of the 5,600 Americans that rushed the beaches of Tarawa gave their lives — 3,000 of them were wounded.
MacArthur pushes for the Philippines
Meanwhile, American forces in the Southwest Pacific were approaching Mindanao, southernmost of the Philippine Islands, by advances through New Guinea in which Japanese armies were neutralized and isolated on New Ireland and New Britain.

The capture of Wakde on the northeastern coast of New Guinea in May 1944 was followed by the seizure of Biak and Noemfoor. During the summer, a Japanese army attempting to break out from Wewak in Australian New Guinea was chastened. The invasion of Morotai in September placed American forces within 300 miles of Mindanao.
Marshall Islands
Near the close of 1943, a thrust at the Gilbert Islands from the Central Pacific, in which Tarawa, Makin, and Apamama were seized, paved the way for the assault on the Marshalls on 31 January 1944. American forces gained control of Kwajalein, Majuro, and Eniwetok, and their fleet and air arms moved forward.

At the same time, American carriers attacked Truk heavily, and that formidable enemy naval base in the Carolines was thenceforth immobilized. Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas fell to American arms in summer 1944. The capture of the Marianas, and later Iwo Jima, provided fixed bases for B-29 Superfortress air attacks against Japan and surrounding islands.

With the first Battle of the Philippine Sea, the U.S. Navy administered a crushing defeat of the Japanese fleet that tried to interfere with the American push westward. In September and October, the Americans occupied Ulithi in the western Carolines for use as an anchorage and advanced fleet base, and took Angaur and Peleliu in the Palau Islands, situated close to the Philippines.
Aleutian Islands
Fighting in the Aleutians was known as the " Thousand-Mile War," the approximate distance between American bases on the Alaska coast, Dutch Harbor, and the westernmost Aleutian Islands. Attu and Kiska became a U.S. military priority because of a 57-mile gap that the Japanese feared the United States would use to attack their homeland — so the Japanese attacked first. Furthermore, the islands had important military value for the enemy because, if successfully held, they would more easily managed to take territory farther down the coast.

A Canadian and American force of 100,000 troops was deployed to push the Japanese from America's northwestern-most territory. In May 1943, after nearly two weeks of bloodshed under frostbitten climatic conditions, across some of the globe's most forbidding terrain, the 2,000 Attu-based Japanese were uprooted by the American Seventh Infantry Division.
Iwo Jima and Okinawa Iwo Jima
The volcanic island of Iwo Jima was a crucial location for the island-hopping campaign to succeed. The island's proximity would make it possible for B-29 raids — halfway from Marianas Island to mainland Japan. Three airstrips, which the Japanese had been using for their Kamikaze** attacks, also made Iwo Jima a primary target. With the island captured, the Kamikazes would have to operate from Okinawa or Kyushu.

On February 19th, 1945, the U.S. Marine Corps' legendary Third, Fourth and Fifth divisions landed on Iwo Jima at 8:59 a.m. That came after 10 weeks of relentless bombing from carrier-based planes and medium bombers. The preliminary bombardment was the heaviest up to that point in the war. A total of 70,000 U.S. Marines charged the sandy beaches of Iwo Jima, against an opposing force of 27,000 Japanese.

The beaches were eerily quiet as the Higgins boats landed ashore and the marines began to offload. The minimal resistance, however, proved to be only a bluff to draw the exposed marines onto the beaches. It was then that 27,000 determined Japanese defenders, led by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, opened up from a vast underground network of caves and tunnels. The relentless pre-invasion bombardment from naval and air forces had done little damage. While literally inching their way across the island, the marines were able to secure Iwo Jima after 36 days of brutal combat.

But victory came at a heavy price. At the battle's conclusion, 6,281 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese were killed. Twenty-two marines and five sailors received the Congressional Medal of Honor for their actions on Iwo Jima — the most bestowed for any campaign. Admiral Nimitz remarked, "Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue."
Okinawa
Code-named Operation ICEBURG, the invasion of Okinawa began on April 1st, 1945, when 60,000 troops (two marine and two army divisions) landed with little opposition.

The day began and ended with the heaviest concentration of naval gunfire ever used to support an amphibious landing. Strategically, positions off the invasion beaches were occupied by 10 older American battleships, including several Pearl Harbor survivors — the USS Tennessee, Maryland, and West Virginia; as well as nine cruisers, 23 destroyers and destroyer escorts, and 117 rocket gunboats. Together they fired 3,800 tons of shells at Okinawa during the first 24 hours.

The initial charge by U.S. troops was met by little opposition. However, the 100,000-plus Japanese who were dug into caves and tunnels on the high ground away from the beaches in an attempt to withstand the Allies' superior sea and air power.

The battle proceeded in four phases: One, the advance to the eastern coast — April first through the fourth; Two, the clearing of the northern part of the island — April fifth through the 18th; Three, the occupation of the outlying islands — April 10th through June 26; and Four, the main battle against the dug-in elements of the 32nd Army — April sixth through the 21st of June.

Although the first three phases encountered only mild opposition, the final phase proved extremely difficult because the Japanese were deep underground and naval gunfire support was ineffective.

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and other craft of all types were sunk, mostly by Kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft were damaged. The fleet lost 763 aircraft. The total American casualties in the operation numbered more than 12,000 killed (including nearly 5,000 navy and almost 8,000 marine and army) and 36,000 wounded.
A-bomb
On July 2, 1945, while the Sixth Marine Division rested, trained, and prepared for the expected invasion of mainland Japan, the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico. An alternative to invasion was now a definite possibility. The morning of August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. No mainland invasion would take place; the fighting was over.

*an island consisting of a circular coral reef surrounding a lagoon.
**Japanese Special Attack Group of suicide dive-bombing pilots that flew modified Mitubishi A6M fighter planes.

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After the Battle of Midway, the United States launched a counter-offensive strike known as "island-hopping," establishing a line of overlapping island bases, as well as air control. The idea was to capture certain key islands, one after another, until Japan came within range of American bombers.

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Prelude to the Battle of Stalingrad

In the middle of World War II - having captured territory in much of present-day Ukraine and Belarus in the spring on 1942 - Germany's Wehrmacht forces decided to mount an offensive on southern Russia in the summer of that year.

Under the leadership of ruthless head of state Joseph Stalin, Soviet forces had already successfully rebuffed a German attack on the western part of the country - one that had the ultimate goal of taking Moscow - during the winter of 1941-42. However, Stalin's Red Army had suffered significant losses in the fighting, both in terms of manpower and weaponry.

Stalin and his generals, including future Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev, fully expected another Nazi attack to be aimed at Moscow. However, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had other ideas.

They set their sights on Stalingrad, because the city served as an industrial center in Russia, producing, among other important goods, artillery for the country's troops. The Volga River, which runs through the city, was also an important shipping route connecting the western part of the country with its distant eastern regions.

Ultimately, Adolf Hitler wanted the Wehrmacht to occupy Stalingrad, seeing its value for propaganda purposes, given that it bore Stalin's name. For similar reasons, the Russians felt a special need to protect it.

When Hitler proclaimed that upon taking Stalingrad all of the city's male residents would be killed and its women deported, the stage was set for a bloody, hard-fought battle. Stalin ordered all Russians strong enough to hold a rifle to take up arms in defense of the city.

The 6th Army of the Wehrmacht began their assault on August 23, 1942.

Battle of Stalingrad Begins

Russian forces were initially able to slow the German Wehrmacht's advances during a series of brutal skirmishes just north of Stalingrad. Stalin's forces lost more than 200,000 men, but they successfully held off German soldiers.

With a firm understanding of Hitler's plans, the Russians had already shipped much of the stores of grain and cattle out of Stalingrad. However, the city's 400,000-plus residents were not evacuated, as the Russian leadership believed their presence would inspire troops.

Within a few days of launching its attack, Germany's Luftwaffe air force had rendered the Volga River impassable to shipping and had sunk several Russian commercial vessels in the process. From late August through the end of the assault, the Luftwaffe conducted dozens of air strikes on the city.

The number of civilian casualties is unknown. However, it's believed that tens of thousands were killed, and that tens of thousands more were captured and forced into slave labor in camps in Germany.

By September, the Luftwaffe essentially had control of the skies over Stalingrad, and the Russians were getting desperate. Workers in the city not involved in war-related weapons production were soon asked to take up fighting, often without firearms of their own. Women were enlisted to dig trenches at the front lines.

And yet, the Russians continued to suffer heavy losses. By the fall of 1942, Stalingrad was in ruins.

'Not a Step Back!'

Despite heavy casualties and the pounding delivered by the Luftwaffe, Stalin instructed his forces in the city to not retreat, famously decreeing in Order No. 227: "Not a step back!" Those who surrendered would be subject to a trial by military tribunal and face possible execution.

With fewer than 20,000 troops in the city and less than 100 tanks, Stalin's generals finally began sending reinforcements into the city and surrounding areas. Fighting raged in the streets of Stalingrad, with both sides using snipers poised on the roofs of the city's buildings.

Russian generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky organized Russian troops in the mountains to the north and west of the city. From there, they launched a counterattack, famously known as Operation Uranus.

Although they again sustained significant losses, Russian forces were able to form what in essence was a defensive ring around the city by late November 1942, trapping the nearly 300,000 German and Axis troops in the 6th Army. This effort became the subject of a propaganda film produced after the war, The Battle of Stalingrad.

With the Russian blockade limiting access to supplies, German forces trapped in Stalingrad slowly starved. The Russians would seize upon the resulting weakness during the cold, harsh winter months that followed.

Russian Winter Sets In

As Russia's brutal winter began, Soviet generals knew the Germans would be at a disadvantage, fighting in conditions to which they weren't accustomed. They began consolidating their positions around Stalingrad, choking off the German forces from vital supplies and essentially surrounding them in an ever-tightening noose.

Thanks to Russian gains in nearby fighting, including in Rostov-on-Don, 250 miles from Stalingrad, the Axis forces - mostly Germans and Italians - were stretched thin. Through Operation Little Saturn, the Russians began to break the lines of mostly Italian forces to the west of the city.

At this point, German generals abandoned all efforts to relieve their beleaguered forces trapped in Stalingrad. Still, Hitler refused to surrender even as his men slowly starved and ran out of ammunition.

Battle of Stalingrad Ends

By February 1943, Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March. Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation.

The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in World War II.

In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the United States.

In February 2018, Russians gathered in what is now known as Volgograd to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the battle that had ravaged their city.

Sources

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "75th Anniversary Of Victory In The Battle Of Stalingrad." rferl.org.

Barnes, T. (2018). "Russians take to streets in their thousands to mark 75 years since Battle of Stalingrad. Independent.co.uk.

BBC World Service: Witness. "The battle of Stalingrad." BBC.co.uk.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Battle of Stalingrad - Definition, Dates & Significance

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The Battle of Stalingrad was a brutal military campaign between Russian forces and those of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers during World War II. Germany's defeat in the battle marked a turning point of the war in favor of the Allies.

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The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 stated that the U.S. government could lend or lease (rather than sell) war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." Under this policy, the United States was able to supply military aid to its foreign allies during World War II, while still remaining officially neutral in the conflict. Most importantly, passage of the Lend-Lease Act enabled a struggling Great Britain to continue fighting against Germany virtually on its own until the United States entered World War II late in 1941.
WATCH: World War II Documentaries on HISTORY Vault
Neutrality in Wartime

In the decades following World War I, many Americans remained extremely wary of becoming involved in another costly international conflict. Even as fascist regimes like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler took aggressive action in Europe the 1930s, isolationist members of Congress pushed through a series of laws limiting how the United States could respond.

But after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and full-scale war broke out again in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that while the United States would remain neutral by law, it was impossible "that every American remain neutral in thought as well."

Before passage of the Neutrality Act of 1939, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to allow the sale of military supplies to allies like France and Britain on a "cash-and-carry" basis: They had to pay cash for American-made supplies, and then transport the supplies on their own ships.
WATCH VIDEO: The Lend-Lease Act
Great Britain Asks for Help

But by the summer of 1940, France and much of northern Europe had fallen to the Nazis, and Britain was fighting virtually alone against Germany on land, at sea and in the air. The London Blitz and other German offenses had taken a serious toll on British morale and military strength.

After the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, appealed personally to Roosevelt for help, the U.S. president agreed to exchange more than 50 outdated American destroyers for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland, which would be used as U.S. air and naval bases.

That December, with Britain's currency and gold reserves dwindling, Churchill warned Roosevelt that his country would not be able to pay cash for military supplies or shipping much longer. Though he had recently been re-elected on a platform promising to keep America out of World War II, Roosevelt wanted to support Great Britain against Germany.

After hearing Churchill's appeal, he began working to convince Congress (and the American public) that providing more direct aid to Britain was in the nation's own interest.

Arsenal of Democracy

In December 1940, Roosevelt introduced a new policy initiative whereby the United States would lend, rather than sell, military supplies to Great Britain for use in the fight against Germany. Payment for the supplies would be deferred, and could come in any form Roosevelt deemed satisfactory.

"We must be the great arsenal of democracy," Roosevelt declared in one of his signature " fireside chats " on December 29, 1940. "For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war."

Lend-Lease Policy

Lend-Lease, as Roosevelt's plan became known, ran into strong opposition among isolationist members of Congress, as well as those who believed the policy gave the president himself too much power. During the debate over the bill, which continued for two months, Roosevelt's administration and supporters in Congress argued convincingly that providing aid to allies like Great Britain was a military necessity for the United States.

"We are buying...not lending. We are buying our own security while we prepare," Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "By our delay during the past six years, while Germany was preparing, we find ourselves unprepared and unarmed, facing a thoroughly prepared and armed potential enemy."

Finally, in March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act (subtitled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States") and Roosevelt signed it into law.

Impact of the Lend-Lease Act

Roosevelt quickly took advantage of his authority under the new law, ordering large quantities of U.S. food and war materials to be shipped to Britain from U.S. ports through the new Office of Lend-Lease Administration.

The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food. By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy was extended to include other U.S. allies, including France, China and the Soviet Union.

Through the end of World War II the United States would use it to provide a total of some $50 billion in aid (equal to $690 billion in 2020 dollars) to more than 30 nations around the globe, from the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile of Poland, the Netherlands and Norway to Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

For Roosevelt, Lend-Lease was not motivated primarily by altruism or generosity, but was intended to serve the interest of the United States by helping to defeat Nazi Germany without entering the war outright-at least not until the nation was prepared for it, both militarily and in terms of public opinion.

Through Lend-Lease, the United States also succeeded in becoming the "arsenal of democracy" during World War II, thus securing its preeminent place in the international economic and political order once the war drew to a close.

Ukraine Lend-Lease Act

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act. Much like Roosevelt's 1941 program, this act allowed the U.S. government to lend or lease a wide range of military equipment to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

Resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the current Lend-Lease Act exempted the Biden administration from provisions of law that govern the loan or lease of military equipment to foreign countries. The act was designed to expire in 2023.

Sources

Lend-Lease Act, 1941. OurDocuments.gov.
Mark Seidl, "The Lend-Lease Program, 1941-45." Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
Lend-Lease and Military Aid to the Allies in the Early Years of World War II. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
Biden Signs Lend-Lease Act to Supply More Security Assistance to Ukraine. U.S. Department of Defense.

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The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 stated that the U.S. government could lend or lease (rather than sell) war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." Under this policy, the United States was able to supply military aid to its foreign allies during World War II, while still remaining officially neutral in the conflict.

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Munitions definition, materials used in war, especially weapons and ammunition. See more.

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Contents

1. Germany's Aggression in Europe Stokes Fears of War

2. Hitler and Stalin Rethink their Positions

3. The Germans and Soviets Make a Deal

On August 23, 1939-shortly before World War II (1939-45) broke out in Europe-enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. With Europe on the brink of another major war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) viewed the pact as a way to keep his nation on peaceful terms with Germany, while giving him time to build up the Soviet military. German chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) used the pact to make sure Germany was able to invade Poland unopposed. The pact also contained a secret agreement in which the Soviets and Germans agreed how they would later divide up Eastern Europe. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact fell apart in June 1941, when Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union.

Germany's Aggression in Europe Stokes Fears of War

On March 15, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, breaking the agreement it had signed with Great Britain and France the year before in Munich, Germany. The invasion jolted British and French leaders and convinced them that Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, could not be trusted to honor his agreements and was likely to keep committing aggressions until stopped by force or a massive deterrent.

Did you know? Hitler disliked the photograph taken when the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed in the Kremlin because it showed Stalin with a cigarette in his hand. Hitler felt the cigarette was unsuited to the historic occasion and had it airbrushed from the photo when it was published in Germany.

In the previous year, Hitler had annexed Austria and had taken the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia; in March 1939, his tanks rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia. It appeared that he was determined to undo the international order set up by the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I (1914-18). (The treaty, which required Germany to make numerous concessions and reparations, was highly unpopular with Hitler and his Nazi Party.) It also seemed that Hitler was planning to strike next against its neighbor Poland. To block him, France and Britain pledged on March 31, 1939, to guarantee Poland's security and independence. The British and French also stepped up diplomatic engagement with the Soviet Union, trying to draw it closer by trade and other agreements to make Hitler see he would also have to face Joseph Stalin if he invaded Poland. But Hitler already knew the Soviets would not stand by if he tried to occupy Poland-an act that would extend the border of Germany right up to the Soviet Union. He also knew France and the Soviets had concluded a defense alliance several years earlier-a treaty that gave Stalin an additional reason to fight Germany if it ventured into Poland and triggered France's pledge.

It was clear during the tense spring and summer of 1939 that little, if anything, could be taken for granted. In May, Germany and Italy signed a major treaty of alliance, and Hitler's representatives had begun conducting important trade talks with the Soviets. Just two years prior, however, as Laurence Rees notes in "War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin," Hitler had called the Soviet Union "the greatest danger for the culture and civilization of mankind which has ever threatened it since the collapse of the ... ancient world."

Hitler and Stalin Rethink their Positions

Through the spring and summer of 1939, Hitler stepped up his demands on the Polish government in Warsaw, and pushed for allowing Germany to reclaim the port city of Danzig (a former German city internationalized by the Treaty of Versailles). Hitler also wanted to put a stop to the alleged mistreatment of Germans living in the western regions of Poland. At the same time, he advanced his plans for attacking Poland in August 1939 if his demands were not met. However, Hitler's fervor for a war with Poland made his generals nervous. They knew Stalin's purges of his military commanders in 1937 and 1938 had seriously weakened the Soviet army, but the Germans were leery of a campaign that could easily lead to the nightmare faced in World War I-a two-front war, in which they would be fighting Russians troops in the east and French and British troops in the west.

To avoid such a scenario, Hitler had cautiously begun exploring the possibility of a thaw in relations with Stalin. Several brief diplomatic exchanges in May 1939 fizzled by the next month. But in July, as tensions continued building across Europe and all major powers were feverishly casting about for potential allies, Hitler's foreign minister dropped hints to Moscow that if Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union might be permitted some Polish territory. This caught Stalin's attention. On August 20, Hitler sent a personal message to the Soviet premier: War with Poland was imminent. If Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow for a vitally important discussion, would Stalin receive him? Stalin said yes.

The Germans and Soviets Make a Deal

On August 22, 1939, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946) flew from Berlin to Moscow. He was soon inside the Kremlin, face-to-face with Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986), who had been working with von Ribbentrop to negotiate an agreement. (The Soviet minister is also the namesake for the incendiary device known as a Molotov cocktail.) Ribbentrop carried a proposal from Hitler that both countries commit to a nonaggression pact that would last 100 years. Stalin replied that 10 years would be sufficient. The proposal also stipulated that neither country would aid any third party that attacked either signatory. Finally, the proposal contained a secret protocol specifying the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe both parties would accept after Hitler conquered Poland. The Soviet Union would acquire the eastern half of Poland, along with Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

During the Kremlin meeting, Ribbentrop several times telephoned Hitler, who was nervously awaiting news at his country estate in Bavaria. Finally, in the early hours of August 23, Ribbentrop called to say that everything had been settled. As Ian Kershaw notes in "Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis," the German chancellor was ecstatic. He congratulated his foreign minister and said the pact "will hit like a bombshell." It neutralized the French-Soviet treaty, which would reassure Hitler's generals, and cleared the way for Germany's attack on Poland.

Aftermath

The public part of the Moscow agreement was announced with great fanfare on August 25, 1939, the day Hitler had planned to launch his "blitzkrieg" (quick, surprise attacks) strike east into Poland. Earlier this same day, however, Great Britain and France, knowing the Nazi-Soviet agreement was pending, reacted by formalizing their pledge to Poland in a treaty declaring each would fight in Poland's defense if it were attacked.

Hitler was incensed by this counterthrust but quickly cancelled his order for the invasion. Then, in a wild gamble that France and Great Britain would not meet their treaty obligations to Poland, and knowing he had nothing to fear from the Soviet army, Hitler ordered his troops to strike east into Poland on September 1, 1939. Two days later, on September 3, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. And less than two years after that, Hitler scrapped his pact with Stalin and sent some 3 million Nazi soldiers pouring into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Four years later, with no hope of a German victory in World War II, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 8, the Allies accepted Nazi Germany's surrender.

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On August 23, 1939-shortly before World War II (1939-45) broke out in Europe-enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Marco Polo Bridge Incident, (July 7, 1937), conflict between Chinese and Japanese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge (Chinese: Lugouqiao) outside Beiping (now Beijing), which developed into the warfare between the two countries that was the prelude to the Pacific side of World War II.

In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria (now Northeast China) and established the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manzhouguo), spending large sums to develop the region's industry and continuing to expand their occupation into northern China around Beiping and Tianjin. This violation of China's territorial integrity produced a growing anti-Japanese movement in China. By 1937 this movement had grown so strong that the Chinese communists and Nationalists agreed to end their civil war and form a United Front against further Japanese aggression.

Before the incident occurred, the Japanese army had occupied Fengtai, the railway junction close to the Marco Polo Bridge, southwest of Beiping. On the night of July 7, 1937, a small Japanese force on maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge demanded entry to the tiny walled town of Wanping in order to search for one of their soldiers. The Chinese garrison in the town refused the Japanese entry; a shot was heard, and the two sides began firing. The Chinese government, under strong anti-Japanese pressure, refused to make any concessions in the negotiation of the dispute. The Japanese also maintained their position. As a result, the conflict continued to grow.

As the fighting spread to central China, the Japanese scored successive victories. The Japanese government, under mounting public pressure not to retreat, decided to seek a quick victory in China. However, this eluded them, and the two sides plunged into what was to become the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and, in 1941, the Pacific theatre of World War II.

Zhihou Xia.

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Marco Polo Bridge Incident | Asian history

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Marco Polo Bridge Incident, (July 7, 1937), conflict between Chinese and Japanese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge (Chinese: Lugouqiao) outside Beiping (now Beijing), which developed into the warfare between the two countries that was the prelude to the Pacific side of World War II.

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cash
(kӕʃ) noun

1. coins or paper money, not cheques, credit cards etc. Do you wish to pay cash?

2. payment by money or cheque as opposed to payment by account. Cash or account, madam?

3. money in any form. He has plenty of cash.

verb

to turn into, or exchange for, money. You may cash a traveller's cheque here; Can you cash a cheque for me?

cashier (kӕˈʃiə) noun

a person who receives and pays out money ( eg in a bank), works at a cash register etc. a bank cashier; a cashier in a supermarket.

ˌcash-and-ˈcarry noun

a store where goods are sold more cheaply for cash and taken away by the buyer.

ˈcash machine noun

( also ˈcash dispenser, ~cashpoint ; American ATM) a machine, usually outside a bank, from which people can get money with their credit cards or bank cards.

cash register

a machine for holding money, which records the amount put in.

cash in

to exchange for money. I've cashed in all my shares.

cash in on

to take financial or other advantage of (a situation etc). He is the sort of person who cashes in on other people's misfortunes.

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Define cash-and-carry. cash-and-carry synonyms, cash-and-carry pronunciation, cash-and-carry translation, English dictionary definition of cash-and-carry. adj. Sold for cash, usually without delivery service. n. The policy of selling cash-and-carry goods. adj , adv sold or operated on a basis of cash payment...

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Anti-Semitic definition is - relating to or characterized by anti-Semitism : feeling or showing hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a cultural, racial, or ethnic group. How to use anti-Semitic in a sentence.

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The Good Neighbor policy was the foreign policy of the administration of United States President Franklin Roosevelt towards Latin America. Although the policy was implemented by the Roosevelt administration, President Woodrow Wilson had previously used the term-but subsequently went on to invade Mexico. Senator Henry Clay had coined the term Good Neighbor in the previous century.

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World Economic Conference of 1933 - Conservapedia

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The World Economic Conference of 1933 (or the London Monetary and Economic Conference) was a meeting of the major economic powers to coordinate strategy for dealing with the Great Depression. It met in London in June 10 to July 28, 1933, but collapsed after President Franklin D.

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The Empire of Japan's Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria on 18 September 1931, immediately following the Mukden Incident. At the war's end in February 1932, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo. Their occupation lasted until the success of the Soviet Union and Mongolia with the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation in mid-August 1945, towards the end of the Second World War.

The South Manchuria Railway Zone and the Korean Peninsula had been under the control of the Japanese Empire since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Japan's ongoing industrialization and militarization ensured their growing dependence on oil and metal imports from the US. The US sanctions which prevented trade with the United States (which had occupied the Philippines around the same time) resulted in Japan furthering its expansion in the territory of China and Southeast Asia. The invasion of Manchuria, or the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937, are sometimes cited as alternative starting dates for World War II, in contrast with the more commonly accepted date of September 1, 1939.

With the invasion having attracted great international attention, the League of Nations produced the Lytton Commission (headed by British politician Victor Bulwer-Lytton) to evaluate the situation, with the organization delivering its findings in October 1932. Its findings and recommendations that the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo not be recognized and the return of Manchuria to Chinese sovereignty prompted the Japanese government to withdraw from the League entirely.

A minor dispute known as the Wanpaoshan incident between Chinese and Korean farmers occurred on July 1, 1931. The issue was highly sensationalized in the Imperial Japanese and Korean press, and used for considerable propaganda effect to increase anti-Chinese sentiment in the Empire of Japan.

Believing that a conflict in Manchuria would be in the best interests of Japan, and acting in the spirit of the Japanese concept of , Kwantung Army Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara independently devised a plan to provoke Japan into invading Manchuria by setting up a false flag incident for the pretext of invasion.

The operation was originally planned to be executed on 28 September, but the date was changed to September 18[citation needed ]. When 1st Lieutenant Suemori Komoto of the Independent Garrison Unit (独立守備隊) of the 29th Infantry Regiment (which guarded the South Manchuria Railway) placed explosives near the tracks, but far enough away to do no real damage. At around 10:20 pm (22:20) on September 18, the explosives were detonated. However, the explosion was minor and only a 1.5-meter section on one side of the rail was damaged. In fact, a train from Changchun passed by the site on this damaged track without difficulty and arrived at Shenyang at 10:30 pm (22:30).

On the morning of September 19, two artillery pieces installed at the Mukden officers' club opened fire on the Chinese garrison nearby, in response to the alleged Chinese attack on the railway. Zhang Xueliang's small air force was destroyed, and his soldiers fled their destroyed Beidaying barracks, as five hundred Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison of around seven thousand. The Chinese troops were no match for the experienced Japanese troops. By the evening, the fighting was over, and the Japanese had occupied Mukden at the cost of five hundred Chinese lives and only two Japanese lives, thus starting the greater invasion of Manchuria.

On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, which had decided upon a policy of localizing the incident, communicated its decision to the Kwantung Army command. However, Kwantung Army commander-in-chief General Shigeru Honjō instead ordered his forces to proceed to expand operations all along the South Manchuria Railway. Under orders from Lieutenant General Jirō Tamon, troops of the 2nd Division moved up the rail line and captured virtually every city along its 1,170-kilometre (730-mile) length in a matter of days.

Likewise on September 19, in response to General Honjō's request, the Joseon army in Korea under General Senjūrō Hayashi ordered the 20th Infantry Division to split its force, forming the 39th Mixed Brigade, which departed on that day for Manchuria without authorization from the Emperor. On September 19, the Japanese occupied Yingkou, Liaoyang, Shenyang, Fushun, Dandong, Siping (Jilin Province), and Changchun. On September 21, the Japanese captured Jilin City. On 23 September, the Japanese took Jiaohe (Jilin) Province) and Dunhua. On 1 October, Zhang Haipeng surrendered the Taonan area. Sometime in October, Ji Xing (吉興) surrendered the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture area and on 17 October, Yu Zhishan surrendered Eastern Liaoning to the Japanese.

Tokyo was shocked by the news of the Army acting without orders from the central government. The Japanese civilian government was thrown into disarray by this act of "gekokujō" insubordination, but as reports of one quick victory after another began to arrive, it felt powerless to oppose the Army, and its decision was to immediately send three more infantry divisions from Japan, beginning with the 14th Mixed Brigade of the IJA 7th Division.[when? ] During this era, the elected government could be held hostage by the Army and Navy, since Army and Navy members were constitutionally necessary for the formation of cabinets. Without their support, the government would collapse.

After the Liaoning Provincial government fled Mukden, it was replaced by a "Peoples Preservation Committee" which declared the secession of Liaoning province from the Republic of China. Other secessionist movements were organized in Japanese-occupied Kirin by General Xi Qia head of the "New Kirin" Army, and at Harbin, by General Chang Ching-hui. In early October, at Taonan in northwest Liaoning province, General Zhang Haipeng declared his district independent of China, in return for a shipment of a large number of military supplies by the Japanese Army.

On October 13, General Chang Hai-peng ordered three regiments of the Hsingan Reclamation Army under General Xu Jinglong north to take the capital of Heilongjiang province at Qiqihar. Some elements in the city offered to peacefully surrender the old walled town, and Chang advanced cautiously to accept. However his advance guard was attacked by General Dou Lianfang's troops, and in a savage fight with an engineering company defending the north bank, were sent fleeing with heavy losses. During this fight, the Nenjiang railroad bridge was dynamited by troops loyal to General Ma Zhanshan to prevent its use.

Using the repair of the Nen River Bridge as the pretext, the Japanese sent a repair party in early November under the protection of Japanese troops. Fighting erupted between the Japanese forces and troops loyal to the acting governor of Heilongjiang province Muslim General Ma Zhanshan, who chose to disobey the Kuomintang government's ban on further resistance to the Japanese invasion.

Despite his failure to hold the bridge, General Ma Zhanshan became a national hero in China for his resistance at Nenjiang Bridge, which was widely reported in the Chinese and international press. The publicity inspired more volunteers to enlist in the Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies.

The repaired bridge made possible the further advance of Japanese forces and their armored trains. Additional troops from Japan, notably the 4th Mixed Brigade from the 8th Division, were sent in November.

On November 15, 1931, despite having lost more than 400 men and 300 left wounded since 5 November, General Ma declined a Japanese ultimatum to surrender Qiqihar. On 17 November, in subzero weather, 3,500 Japanese troops, under the command of General Jirō Tamon, mounted an attack, forcing General Ma from Qiqihar by 19 November.

In late November 1931, General Honjō dispatched 10,000 soldiers in 13 armored trains, escorted by a squadron of bombers, in an advance on Chinchow from Mukden. This force had advanced to within 30 kilometres (19 mi) of Chinchow when it received an order to withdraw. The operation was cancelled by Japanese War Minister General Jirō Minami, due to the acceptance of modified form of a League of Nations proposal for a "neutral zone" to be established as a buffer zone between China proper and Manchuria pending a future Chinese-Japanese peace conference by the civilian government of Prime Minister Baron Wakatsuki in Tokyo.

However, the two sides failed to reach a lasting agreement. The Wakatsuki government soon fell and was replaced by a new cabinet led by Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. Further negotiations with the Kuomintang government failed, the Japanese government authorized the reinforcement of troops in Manchuria. In December, the rest of 20th Infantry Division, along with the 38th Mixed Brigade from the 19th Infantry Division were sent into Manchuria from Korea while the 8th Mixed Brigade from the 10th Infantry Division was sent from Japan. The total strength of the Kwantung Army was thus increased to around 60,450 men.[citation needed ]

With this stronger force, the Japanese Army announced on December 21, the beginning of large-scale anti-bandit operations in Manchuria to quell a growing resistance movement by the local Chinese population in Liaoning and Kirin provinces.

On December 28, a new government was formed in China after all members of the old Nanjing government resigned. This threw the military command into turmoil, and the Chinese army retreated to the south of the Great Wall into Hebei province, a humiliating move which lowered China's international image. Japanese forces occupied Chinchow on January 3, 1932, after the Chinese defenders retreated without giving combat.

With southern Manchuria secure, the Japanese turned north to complete the occupation of Manchuria. As negotiations with Generals Ma Zhanshan and Ting Chao to defect to the pro-Japanese side had failed, in early January Colonel Kenji Doihara requested collaborationist General Qia Xi to advance his forces and take Harbin.

The last major Chinese regular force in northern Manchuria was led by General Ting Chao who organized the defense of Harbin successfully against General Xi until the arrival of the IJA 2nd Division under General Jirō Tamon. Japanese forces took Harbin on February 4, 1932.

By the end of February Ma had sought terms and joined the newly formed Manchukuo government as governor of Heilongjiang province and Minister of War.

On February 27, 1932, Ting offered to cease hostilities, ending official Chinese resistance in Manchuria, although combat by guerrilla and irregular forces continued as Japan spent many years in their campaign to pacify Manchukuo.

The conquest of Manchuria, a land rich in natural resources, was widely seen as an economic "lifeline" to save Japan from the effects of the Great Depression, generating much public support. The American historian Louise Young described Japan from September 1931 to the spring of 1933 as gripped by "war fever" as the conquest of Manchuria proved to be an extremely popular war. The metaphor of a "lifeline" suggested that Manchuria was crucial to the functioning of the Japanese economy, which explains why the conquest of Manchuria was so popular and why afterwards Japanese public opinion was so hostile towards any suggestion of letting Manchuria go.

At the time, censorship in Japan was nowhere near as stringent as it later became, and Young noted: "Had they wished, it would have been possible in 1931 and 1932 for journalists and editors to express anti-war sentiments". The liberal journal criticized the war with the journalist Gotō Shinobu in the November 1931 edition accusing the Kwangtung Army of a "two-fold coup d'état" against both the government in Tokyo and against the government of China. Voices like Kaizō were a minority as mainstream newspapers like the soon discovered that an anti-war editorial position hurt sales, and so switched over to an aggressively militaristic editorial position as the best way to increase sales. Japan's most famous pacifist, the poet Akiko Yosano had caused a sensation in 1904 with her anti-war poem "Brother Do Not Give Your Life", addressed to her younger brother serving in the Imperial Army that called the war with Russia stupid and senseless. Such was the extent of "war fever" in Japan in 1931 that even Akiko succumbed, writing a poem in 1932 praising , urging the Kwantung Army to "smash the sissified dreams of compromise" and declared that to die for the Emperor in battle was the "purest" act a Japanese man could perform.

The Western media reported on the events with accounts of atrocities such as bombing civilians or firing upon shell-shocked survivors. It aroused considerable antipathy to Japan, which lasted until the end of World War II.

When the Lytton Commission issued a report on the invasion, despite its statements that China had to a certain extent provoked Japan, and China's sovereignty over Manchuria was not absolute, Japan took it as an unacceptable rebuke and withdrew from the already declining League of Nations, which also helped create international isolation.

The Manchurian Crisis had a significant negative effect on the moral strength and influence of the League of Nations. As critics had predicted, the League was powerless if a strong nation decided to pursue an aggressive policy against other countries, allowing a country such as Japan to commit blatant aggression without serious consequences. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were also aware of this, and ultimately both followed Japan's example in aggression against their neighbors: in the case of Italy, against Abyssinia; and Germany, against Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Thorne, Christopher. "Viscount Cecil, the Government and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931." Historical Journal 14, no. 4 (1971): 805-26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2638108 online].

Sun, Fengyun. 《東北抗日聯軍鬥爭史》

Coogan, Anthony (1994). Northeast China and the Origins of the Anti-Japanese United Front. Modern China, Vol. 20, No. 3 (July 1994), pp. 282-314: Sage Publications.

Matsusaka, Yoshihisa Tak (2003). The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932. Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 978-0-674-01206-6.

Guo, Rugui (2005-07-01). Huang Yuzhang (ed.). 中国抗日战争正面战场作战记 [China's Anti-Japanese War Combat Operations]. Jiangsu People's Publishing House. ISBN 7-214-03034-9.

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Japanese invasion of Manchuria - Wikipedia

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The Empire of Japan's Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria on 18 September 1931, immediately following the Mukden Incident. At the war's end in February 1932, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo. Their occupation lasted until the success of the Soviet Union and Mongolia with the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation in mid-August 1945, towards the end of the Second World War.

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this link will define fascism

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fas·​cism | \ ˈfa-ˌshi-zəm also ˈfa-ˌsi- \

often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

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a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible... See the full definition