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Hitler was obsessed with "pure" German race and he also started WWII

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Paul von Hindenburg died so through a series of elections the NAZI party took power

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Tojo served as the prime minister in WWII and he took command chief in 1944

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Tojo took power because Konoye resigned due to tension between the two which aloud him to become prime minister

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Benito was Hitlers puppet leader and he once tried to cross the frontier disguised as a German soldier

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He led a coalition of fascist leaders to Rome and forced the king to yield the government

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Stalin and Hitler signed the German Soviet nonaggression pact and he was very hands on in his war efforts

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Stalin took over after Vladimir Lenins death

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Roosevelt was the president during WWII and he supervised the mobilization on the U.S economy

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Roosevelt was a governor and after working his way up he won the 1932 election

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He led Britain to victor in WWII and he served in the British Parliament for 6 monarchs

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CHurchhill took over after Chamberlain resigned in 1940

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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tojo-is-born

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Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the war, is born in Tokyo.

After graduating from the Imperial Military Academy and the Military Staff College, Tojo was sent to Berlin as Japan's military attache after World War I. Having already earned a reputation for sternness and discipline, Tojo was given command of the 1st Infantry Regiment upon return to Japan. In 1937, he was made chief of staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, China. Returning again to his homeland, Tojo assumed the office of vice-minister of war and quickly took the lead in the military's increasing control of Japanese foreign policy, advocating the signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in 1940 that made Japan an "Axis" power. In July of 1940, he was made minister of war and soon clashed with the Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who had been fighting to reform his government by demilitarizing its politics. In October, Konoye resigned because of increasing tension with Tojo, who succeeded as prime minister while holding on to his offices of army minister and war minister, and assuming the offices of minister of commerce and of industry as well.

Tojo, now a virtual dictator, quickly promised a "New Order in Asia," and toward this end supported the bombing of Pearl Harbor despite the misgivings of several of his generals. Tojo's aggressive policies paid big dividends early on, with major territorial gains in Indochina and the South Pacific. But despite Tojo's increasing control over his own country, even assuming the position of the chief of the general staff, he could not control the determination of the United States, which began beating back the Japanese in the South Pacific. When Saipan fell to the U.S. Marines and Army, Tojo's government collapsed. Upon Japan's surrender, Tojo tried to commit suicide by shooting himself with an American .38 pistol but was saved by an American physician who gave him a transfusion of American blood. He lived only to be convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal-and was hanged on December 22, 1948.

Asao Uchida portrayed him in the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!.

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Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo is born

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Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the war, is born in Tokyo. After graduating from the Imperial Military Academy and the Military Staff College, Tojo was sent to Berlin as Japan's military attache after World War I. Having already earned a reputation for sternness and discipline, Tojo was given command of the 1st Infantry Regiment upon return to Japan.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/mussolini_benito.shtml

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Mussolini was the founder of Fascism and leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He allied Italy with Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 in Predappio in northern central Italy. His father was a blacksmith. Employment prospects in the area were poor so in 1902 Mussolini moved to Switzerland, where he became involved in socialist politics. He returned to Italy in 1904, and worked as a journalist in the socialist press, but his support for Italy's entry into World War One led to his break with socialism. He was drafted into the Italian army in September 1915.

In March 1919, Mussolini formed the Fascist Party, galvanising the support of many unemployed war veterans. He organised them into armed squads known as Black Shirts, who terrorised their political opponents. In 1921, the Fascist Party was invited to join the coalition government.

By October 1922, Italy seemed to be slipping into political chaos. The Black Shirts marched on Rome and Mussolini presented himself as the only man capable of restoring order. King Victor Emmanuel invited Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini gradually dismantled the institutions of democratic government and in 1925 made himself dictator, taking the title 'Il Duce'. He set about attempting to re-establish Italy as a great European power. The regime was held together by strong state control and Mussolini's cult of personality.

In 1935, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and incorporated it into his new Italian Empire. He provided military support to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Increasing co-operation with Nazi Germany culminated in the 1939 Pact of Steel. Influenced by Hitler, Mussolini began to introduce anti-Jewish legislation in Italy. His declaration of war on Britain and France in June 1940 exposed Italian military weakness and was followed by a series of defeats in North and East Africa and the Balkans.

In July 1943, Allied troops landed in Sicily. Mussolini was overthrown and imprisoned by his former colleagues in the Fascist government. In September, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. The German army began the occupation of Italy and Mussolini was rescued by German commandos. He was installed as the leader of a new government, but had little power. As the Allies advanced northwards through Italy, Mussolini fled towards Switzerland. He was captured by Italian partisans and shot on 28 April 1945.

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Read a short biography about the life of Benito Mussolini - the founder of Fascism and Hitler's WW2 ally.

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https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/bios/all_bio_joseph_stalin.htm

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The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost. Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia. Permanently scarred from a childhood bout with smallpox and having a mildly deformed arm, Stalin always felt unfairly treated by life, and thus developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect, combined with a shrewd streak of calculating cold-heartedness towards those who had maligned him. He always felt a sense of inferiority before educated intellectuals, and particularly distrusted them.

Sent by his mother to the seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest, the young Stalin never completed his education, and was instead soon completely drawn into the city's active revolutionary circles. Never a fiery intellectual polemicist or orator like Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin specialized in the humdrum nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity, risking arrest every day by helping organize workers, distributing illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause, while Lenin and his bookish friends lived safely abroad and wrote clever articles about the plight of the Russian working class. Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government.

In 1922, Stalin was appointed to another such post, as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Stalin understood that "cadres are everything": if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way--by controlling all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed their position to him. By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his (mostly mediocre) people in place, while Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them. At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the 1930s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot. The particularly pesky Leon Trotsky, who continued to badger Stalin from Mexico City after his exile in 1929, had to be silenced once and for all with an ice pick in 1940. The purges, or "repressions" as they are known in Russia, extended far beyond the Party elite, reaching down into every local Party cell and nearly all of the intellectual professions, since anyone with a higher education was suspected of being a potential counterrevolutionary. This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole intellectual force in the country--an expert on virtually every human endeavor.

Driven by his own sense of inferiority, which he projected onto his country as a whole, Stalin pursued an economic policy of mobilizing the entire country to achieve the goal of rapid industrialization, so that it could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Capitalist powers. To this end, he forcefully collectivized agriculture (one of the Bolsheviks' key policy stances in 1917 was to give the land to the peasants; collectivization took it back from them and effectively reduced them to the status of serfs again), instituted the Five-Year Plans to coordinate all investment and production in the country, and undertook a massive program of building heavy industry. Although the Soviet Union boasted that its economy was booming while the Capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression, and its industrialization drive did succeed in rapidly creating an industrial infrastructure where there once had been none, the fact is that all this was done at exorbitant cost in human lives. Measures such as the violent expropriation of the harvest by the government, the forced resettlement and murder of the most successful peasants as counterrevolutionary elements, and the discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag.

As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone. Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in 1941 that the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such blasphemy. As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense. By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion.

During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN. The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life. Still, he was not finished. Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was ostensibly uncovered in the Kremlin itself. A new purge seemed imminent, and was cut short only by Stalin's death. He remained a hero to his people until Khrushchev's well-known "secret" speech to a Party Congress in 1956, in which Stalin's excesses, at least as far as power grabbing in the Party itself, were denounced.

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The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost. Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia.

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https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power

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Hitler rose to power during a time of economic and political instability in Germany. Learn more about how and when Hitler came to power.

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https://www.fdrlibrary.org/wwii-facts

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When did World War II begin?
World War II formally began on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland without a formal declaration of war. In support of their mutual defense treaty obligations with Poland, France and Great Britain issued ultimatums to Hitler for the immediate withdrawal of German forces from Poland. When the ultimatum deadlines expired, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 2, 1939.

When did the United States enter World War II?
On December 7, 1941 Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, inflicting heavy casualties and severe damage to the United States naval forces anchored there. Before a Joint Session of Congress on December 8, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the attack "a date which will live in infamy." Later that day, the United States formally declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

When did America declare war on Germany?
As a result of the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan (commonly known as the "Axis "), Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Later that same day, the United States formally declared that a state of war existed with Germany and Italy.

When were Japanese Americans interned?
In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 empowering military authorities to relocate residents of "military areas" to prevent sabotage and espionage. Although there were no reliable reports that Japanese-Americans on the United States West Coast presented a subversive threat, on March 2, 1942 the military declared California, Oregon and Washington State strategic areas from which Americans of Japanese decent were to be excluded. More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans (64% of whom were American-born citizens) were required to abandon their homes and jobs and to live in 10 relocation camps. The United States Supreme Court finally ruled that continued detention without cause was unconstitutional, and the military relocation order was rescinded in December 1944.

Did Japanese-Americans fight for the United States during World War II?
Despite discrimination and internment at home, Japanese-Americans served in the United States armed forces in great numbers with distinction and valor. For example, the 100th Battalion, composed of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii, suffered such a high rate of casualties in the 1944 Italian campaign that they were called the "Purple Heart Battalion."

The survivors of the 100th were integrated into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and continued to sustain heavy casualties until the war's end. The unit won many commendations for valor, including a Congressional Medal of Honor, and became the most decorated unit in United States history. A recent review resulted in a decision to award 21 more Congressional Medals of Honor to members of the unit.

What restrictions were placed on Italians during World War II?
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, approximately 600,000 Italian legal aliens in the United States were placed under restrictions. Among the restrictions were prohibitions on travel more than five miles from home; curfews from 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.; confiscation of shortwave radios, firearms, cameras, flashlights, and other "signaling devices"; and evacuation from coastal towns.

About 1,600 Italians were interned in a network of camps across the United States, but primarily in Missoula, Montana. The restrictions against the Italians were lifted in October 1942, although it was not until the Italian surrender in September 1943 that most internees were released.

What restrictions were placed on Germans in the United States during World War II?
Restrictions similar to those imposed on Italian legal aliens were also placed on German legal aliens in the United States during World War II. Such restrictions included curfews, confiscation of personal property, travel restriction, and evacuation from coastal towns. Approximately 10,905 Germans were interned in camps across the United States, including Missoula , Montana and Crystal City, Texas. The last German internees were released in 1948.
What major conferences were held during World War II?
Who were "The Big Three"?
The "Big Three" was a term used after the summer of 1941 to denote the leaders of the three major powers opposing Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War II: Roosevelt (United States), Churchill (Great Britain), and Stalin (the Soviet Union). They term was also used in reference to the three Allied countries themselves. The Big Three was expanded to the Big Four when China joined the Allies, and the Big Four nations later played a major role in establishing the United Nations.

What was the Lend-Lease program?
In December 1940, Churchill advised FDR that Great Britain could not guarantee up-front payments for further arms and supplies after June 1941 as was required by United States law. Fearing the loss of Britain to Nazi Germany, FDR announced in a Fireside Chat on December 29, 1940 that America must become "the Arsenal of Democracy" through a Lend-Lease Program.

Lend-Lease was a method by which the United States could provide Great Britain and any other nation that the president decided was vital to US security, with arms, supplies and material. Signed into law in March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act gave the President the discretion to set any repayment terms necessary in order to keep supplies flowing to nations needing them for survival without formally involving the United States as a belligerent.

In Press Conference No. 702 held on December 17, 1940, FDR described the Lend-Lease Program as similar to loaning a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire, thereby protecting one's own house.

What was the Atlantic Charter?
The Atlantic Charter was the statement of principles agreed to by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain at their first wartime conference held on board naval vessels anchored Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The Charter was not an official document, but rather a joint statement expressing the war aims of the two countries: one belligerent and one technically neutral.

The Charter expressed the two countries' beliefs in the rights of self-determination, of all people to live in freedom from fear and want, and of freedom of the seas, as well as the belief that all nations must abandon the use of force and work collectively in the fields of economics and security.

What role did FDR play in creating the atomic bomb?
Nuclear fission was discovered in February 1939 by scientists in Germany. FDR was informed personally of the discovery and its potential in October 1939 when scientist Alexander Sachs read aloud Albert Einstein's letter warning the president of fission's military implications. Based on Einstein's letter and concepts of scientists working in Britain, FDR set up a joint Anglo-American effort to produce atomic bombs for potential use during the war. The result was the Manhattan Project that would ultimately create the weapon. In August 1943 at the Quebec Conference, FDR and Churchill signed a secret agreement governing collaboration between the two countries on the development of the atomic bomb. FDR also foresaw that atomic weapons would become the basis for post-war military and diplomatic policy, and on September 18, 1944 he and Churchill signed the Hyde Park Aide-Memoire committing the two powers to a monopoly on atomic information in the hopes of keeping the peace in a post-war world. FDR did not live to see the use of the weapon in August 1945 against Japan.

What were the Four Freedoms?
In his Annual Message to Congress delivered on January 6, 1941 FDR warned the Congress and the nation of the peril faced by the United States and the world's democracies from the aggression abroad. Roosevelt declared that "in future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms." They are Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

The artist Norman Rockwell depicted each of the Four Freedoms in paintings later used by the Office of War Information for popular posters during WW II.
Who were FDR's commanders during World War II?
General Omar N. Bradley was General Eisenhower's top commander in the European theater. Bradley commanded the US First Army in the D-Day landings. Bradley led his Twelfth Army Group (later known as the Central Group of Armies) consisted of about one million men in over 40 combat divisions. The Twelfth Army Group invaded Normandy and liberated Paris, was the first to cross the Rhine into Central Germany, and the first Allied troops on the Western front to make contact with Soviet troops.

General Dwight David (Ike) Eisenhower was the Allied Commander in the European theater. In 1942, FDR selected Ike over 366 other senior officers to command US Army forces in Europe. He commanded forces in Operation Torch, the invasion of French Northwest Africa, and in 1943 his forces seized Sicily and invaded southern Italy. Ike earned high regard from FDR and Churchill because of his abilities to produce military victories, to work out differences between senior Allied officers, and to negotiate effective resolutions to diplomatic problems. In December 1943, FDR and Churchill entrusted Ike with the position of Supreme Allied Commander of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe.

Admiral William Frederick (Bull) Halsey, Jr. was a friend of FDR's from the days of Roosevelt's service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson Administration. Halsey took over the South Pacific command in 1942 playing a vital role in the victories at Guadalcanal, the Philippines, and Leyte Gulf. In March 1945, a month before FDR's death, the President awarded Halsey the Gold Star. Halsey's flagship the Battleship Missouri was the site of the formal Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945.

General Thomas Holcomb was appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps prior to WWII. He served in this capacity until he retired at the end of 1943.

Admiral Ernest J. King was appointed Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In March 1942, FDR made King Chief of Naval Operations, and he was the first officer to hold both positions simultaneously. King's strategic decisions included the battles of Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands that seriously weakened the Japanese naval power in the Pacific as well as the destroyer escort convoy system that defeated the German U-boat offensive in the Atlantic.

Admiral William Daniel Leahy was appointed Chief of Staff to the President in July 1942.

General Curtis E. LeMay became the commander of the 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific B29 offensive on Japan

General Douglas MacArthur retired as Chief of Staff of the army in late 1935. From autumn of 1935 until mid-1941 he served as military advisor to the Philippine Commonwealth. Roosevelt federalized the Philippine army in July 1941 and appointed MacArthur to command U.S. armed forces in the Far East. In 1942 MacArthur went to Australia and assumed command of Allied ground, sea, and air forces in the new Southwest Pacific Theater. He was elevated the five-star general in late 1944, and the following spring was named commander of all American Army forces in the Pacific. He was chosen by President Truman to be Supreme Allied Commander over the occupation of Japan, and he supervised the signing of the formal surrender on September 2, 1945 aboard the USS Missouri.

Admiral Chester Nimitz was appointed commander of the Pacific fleet and Pacific Ocean areas after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On September 2, 1945, Nimitz signed the Japanese instrument of surrender as representative of the United States.

General George C. Marshall was appointed chief of staff for the army in 1939. He served FDR in that capacity until the President's death and continued under Truman until November 1945. Marshall accompanied FDR on all of his wartime conferences, and he was such a valuable military advisor that FDR chose Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe rather than Marshall so that Marshall would not leave Washington, DC. Upon the President's death Eleanor Roosevelt asked Marshall to arrange the details of the funeral.

General George S. Patton, Jr. commanded the Second U.S. Corps in Africa, the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily, and the Third Army in the French campaign.

General Henry Harley (Hap) Arnold was Chief/Commanding General, U.S. Army Air Corps/U.S. Army Air Forces, from 1938 to 1946.

Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark was FDR's Chief of Naval Operations at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, serving in that post from 1939 to 1942 at which time he was appointed to command US naval forces in Europe.

General Joseph Warren (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell commanded American forces in the China-Burma-India theater from 1942 to 1944. He commanded the Tenth US Army in Okinawa in 1945. Stilwell died of cancer in 1946, just five months prior to his retirement.

General Alexander Archer Vandegrift commanded troops at the successful invasions of Guadalcanal and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. In November 1943, he was appointed Commandant of the US Marine Corps. Vandegrift was the first Marine Corps officer to hold the rank of full general.

Russell Randolph Waesche was United States Coast Guard Commandant from 1936 to 1945. During World War II the Coast Guard was part of the Navy.

Who were the Tuskegee Airmen and what other roles did African Americans play in World War II?
The Tuskegee Airmen were African-American fighter pilots of the 99th Fighter Squadron who flew escort missions for American bombers during the Italian Campaign. They were called "Red Tailed Black Angels" by the bomber crews because they did not lose a single plane to German fighters.

While the Tuskegee Airmen are the most famous, by December 1945 over 2.5 million African-American men and women registered for the draft or volunteered for service. Unfortunately, at the outbreak of the war, discriminatory barriers were still in place in the armed forces, often keeping African-Americans in servile roles or denying them enlistment. In December 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9279 forcing all services to end officially such restrictions. While change was slow, by the end of 1944 there were 700,000 African-Americans in the Army; 165,000 in the Navy; 5,000 in the Coast Guard; and 17,000 in the Marine Corps.

Also by the end of 1944, over 5,000 African-Americans were commissioned officers including Benjamin O. Davis, the first African-American general. On the Home Front, thousands of African-American men and women served their country by filling the gaps in the labor force left by men sent off to war.

What effects did World War II have on the United States Home Front?
World War II had many effects on the United States home front, including the following:

Industry
Increase production during wartime completed the economic recovery started by FDR's New Deal. However, with millions of American men entering the armed forces, a serious gap in the labor force occurred. This had serious implications for America's continued ability to produce war materials and other goods.

Women
Women entered into the work force to replace the departed men. They worked in factories in many capacities, including as riveters, welders, and heavy machinery operators. While many African Americans also enlisted in the armed forces, many also entered the labor force at home in large numbers to replace enlisted workers. In the workplace, Americans were urged to work to their best abilities in support of the war effort and the troops overseas.

Farms
Like the factories, America's farms also suffered a labor shortage as a result of wartime enlistment. Here again, women took over tasks previously done by men. Farmers also used workers deferred from the military services.

Hollywood
Hollywood and the entertainment industry joined in the war effort, producing many patriotic movies and songs. The United Service Organization (USO) sent volunteer celebrities, such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Marlene Dietrich to perform for the troops, and provide recreation (Canteens) for off duty service men and women.

Shortages
The war made many items scarce or unavailable, particularly items of Pacific origin such as sugar oil, fruit, and other fruit stuffs. New cars and appliances were not produced because factories were converted to the production of military equipment. Sugar, gasoline, and shoes were among the many items placed under severe rationing. Many Americans grew Victory gardens to produce vegetables and to increase the available food supply. The shortage of metal, rubber, and silk led to many scrap collection drives. Even fat from butcher shops was collected for use in making ammunitions.

Price Controls
Price controls were introduced to keep down the price of items that were in short supply as a result of the war.

Civil Defense
Blackouts were introduced along the United States coasts so enemy submarines could not use the lights to illuminate or pinpoint targets. Civil Defense Wardens enforced blackout compliance.

War Bonds
War Bonds and Stamps were sold to help pay for the war and to foster a sense of Home Front participation and sacrifice. . Schools and industries joined in supporting the many bond and stamp drives.

Prisoners of War
Many enemy prisoners of war were transported to the United States and housed in prison camps throughout the country.

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World War II Facts - FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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When did World War II begin? World War II formally began on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland without a formal declaration of war. In support of their mutual defense treaty obligations with Poland, France and Great Britain issued ultimatums to Hitler for the immediate withdrawal of German forces from Poland.

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https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/winston-churchill

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Winston Churchill was one of the best-known, and some say one of the greatest, statesmen of the 20th century. Though he was born into a life of privilege, he dedicated himself to public service. His legacy is a complicated one: He was an idealist and a pragmatist; an orator and a soldier; an advocate of progressive social reforms and an unapologetic elitist; a defender of democracy - especially during World War II - as well as of Britain's fading empire. But for many people in Great Britain and elsewhere, Winston Churchill is simply a hero.

Early Life

Winston Churchill came from a long line of English aristocrat-politicians. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was descended from the First Duke of Marlborough and was himself a well-known figure in Tory politics in the 1870s and 1880s.

His mother, born Jennie Jerome, was an American heiress whose father was a stock speculator and part-owner of The New York Times. (Rich American girls like Jerome who married European noblemen were known as "dollar princesses.")

Did you know? Sir Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his six-volume history of World War II.

Churchill was born at the family's estate near Oxford on November 30, 1874. He was educated at the Harrow prep school, where he performed so poorly that he did not even bother to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, in 1893 young Winston Churchill headed off to military school at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Battles and Books

After he left Sandhurst, Churchill traveled all around the British Empire as a soldier and as a journalist. In 1896, he went to India; his first book, published in 1898, was an account of his experiences in India's Northwest Frontier Province.

In 1899, the London Morning Post sent him to cover the Boer War in South Africa, but he was captured by enemy soldiers almost as soon as he arrived. (News of Churchill's daring escape through a bathroom window made him a minor celebrity back home in Britain.)

By the time he returned to England in 1900, the 26-year-old Churchill had published five books.

Churchill: "Crossing the Chamber"

That same year, Winston Churchill joined the House of Commons as a Conservative. Four years later, he "crossed the chamber" and became a Liberal.

His work on behalf of progressive social reforms such as an eight-hour workday, a government-mandated minimum wage, a state-run labor exchange for unemployed workers and a system of public health insurance infuriated his Conservative colleagues, who complained that this new Churchill was a traitor to his class.

Churchill and Gallipoli

In 1911, Churchill turned his attention away from domestic politics when he became the First Lord of the Admiralty (akin to the Secretary of the Navy in the U.S.). Noting that Germany was growing more and more bellicose, Churchill began to prepare Great Britain for war: He established the Royal Naval Air Service, modernized the British fleet and helped invent one of the earliest tanks.

Despite Churchill's prescience and preparation, World War I was a stalemate from the start. In an attempt to shake things up, Churchill proposed a military campaign that soon dissolved into disaster: the 1915 invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.

Churchill hoped that this offensive would drive Turkey out of the war and encourage the Balkan states to join the Allies, but Turkish resistance was much stiffer than he had anticipated. After nine months and 250,000 casualties, the Allies withdrew in disgrace.

After the debacle at Gallipoli, Churchill left the Admiralty.

Churchill Between the Wars

During the 1920s and 1930s, Churchill bounced from government job to government job, and in 1924 he rejoined the Conservatives. Especially after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Churchill spent a great deal of time warning his countrymen about the perils of German nationalism, but Britons were weary of war and reluctant to get involved in international affairs again.

Likewise, the British government ignored Churchill's warnings and did all it could to stay out of Hitler's way. In 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even signed an agreement giving Germany a chunk of Czechoslovakia - "throwing a small state to the wolves," Churchill scolded - in exchange for a promise of peace.

A year later, however, Hitler broke his promise and invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war. Chamberlain was pushed out of office, and Winston Churchill took his place as prime minister in May 1940.

Churchill: The "British Bulldog"

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," Churchill told the House of Commons in his first speech as prime minister.

"We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."

Just as Churchill predicted, the road to victory in World War II was long and difficult: France fell to the Nazis in June 1940. In July, German fighter planes began three months of devastating air raids on Britain herself.

Though the future looked grim, Churchill did all he could to keep British spirits high. He gave stirring speeches in Parliament and on the radio. He persuaded U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide war supplies - ammunition, guns, tanks, planes - to the Allies, a program known as Lend-Lease, before the Americans even entered the war.

Though Churchill was one of the chief architects of the Allied victory, war-weary British voters ousted the Conservatives and their prime minister from office just two months after Germany's surrender in 1945.

The Iron Curtain

The now-former prime minister spent the next several years warning Britons and Americans about the dangers of Soviet expansionism.

In a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, for example, Churchill declared that an anti-democratic "Iron Curtain," "a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization," had descended across Europe. Churchill's speech was the first time anyone had used that now-common phrase to describe the Communist threat.

In 1951, 77-year-old Winston Churchill became prime minister for the second time. He spent most of this term working (unsuccessfully) to build a sustainable détente between the East and the West. He retired from the post in 1955.

In 1953, Queen Elizabeth made Winston Churchill a knight of the Order of the Garter. He died in 1965, one year after retiring from Parliament.

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Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945, he led the country through World War II, and from 1951 to 1955. He is considered one of the best-known, and some say one of the greatest, statesmen of the 20th century.