World War Two(part one)
Topics
l America and the World
l World War II Begins
l The Holocaust
l America Enters the War
Test 6
l 1. Describe how postwar conditions contributed to the rise of antidemocratic governments in Europe.
l 2. Explain why many Americans supported a policy of isolationism in the 1930s.
l 3. Explain why Hitler was able to take over Austria and Czechoslovakia.
l 4. Describe the early events of the war and why Britain was able to resist the Nazis.
l 5. Describe Nazi prejudices against Jews and early persecution of German Jews.
l 6. Explain the methods Hitler used to try to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population.
l 7. Explain how Roosevelt helped Britain while maintaining official neutrality.
l 8. Trace the events that led to increasing tensions, and ultimately war, between the United States and Japan.
• The treaty that ended World War I and the economic depression that followed contributed to the rise of dictatorships in Europe and Asia.
• Italy developed the first major dictatorship in Europe.
l In 1919 Benito Mussolini founded Italy’s Fascist Party.
l Fascism was a kind of aggressive nationalism.
l Fascists believed that the nation was more important than the individual, and that a nation became great by expanding its territory and building its military.
l Facists were anti-Communist.
l Backed by the militia known as Blackshirts, Mussolini became the premier of Italy and set up a dictatorship.
l In 1917 the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, set up Communist governments throughout the Russian empire.
l The Russian territories were renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.
l The Communists set up a one-party rule.
l By 1926 Joseph Stalin had become the new Soviet dictator.
l In 1927 he began a massive effort to industrialize the country.
l Millions of peasants who resisted the Communist policies were killed.
l After World War I, the political and economic chaos in Germany led to the rise of new political parties.
l The Nazi Party was nationalistic and anti-Communist.
l Adolf Hitler, a member of the Nazi Party, called for the unification of all Germans under one government.
l He believed certain Germans were part of a “master race” destined to rule the world.
l He wanted Eastern Europeans enslaved.
l He felt Jews were responsible for many of the world’s problems.
l In 1933 Hitler was appointed prime minister of Germany.
l Storm troopers intimidated voters into giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
l Difficult economic times in Japan after World War I undermined the country’s political system.
l Many Japanese officers and civilians wanted to seize territory to gain needed resources.
l In 1931 the Japanese army, without the government’s permission, invaded the resource-rich Chinese province of Manchuria.
l The military took control of Japan.
l The rise of dictatorships in Europe and Asia after World War I, the refusal of European countries to repay war debts owed to the United States, and the Nye Committee findings that arms factories made huge profits caused Americans to support isolationism.
l Many Americans wanted to avoid international commitments.
l Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935 making it illegal for Americans to sell arms to any country at war.
l Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which continued the ban of selling arms to countries at war and required warring countries to buy nonmilitary supplies from the United States on a “cash and carry” basis.
l President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported internationalism.
l Internationalists believe that trade between nations creates prosperity and helps to prevent war.
• Japan aligned itself with Germany and Italy, and these three countries became known as the Axis Powers.
• After Japan launched a full-scale attack on China in 1937, Roosevelt authorized the sale of weapons to China, saying that the Neutrality Act of 1937 did not apply, since neither China nor Japan had actually declared war.
• In February 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless Austrian Nazis were given important government posts.
• In March 1938, Hitler announced the Anschluss, or unification, of Austria and Germany.
l Hitler claimed the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German-speaking population.
l Czechs strongly resisted Germany’s demand for the Sudetenland.
l France, the Soviet Union, and Britain threatened to fight Germany if it attacked Czechoslovakia.
l At the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, Britain and France, hoping to prevent another war, agreed to Hitler’s demands in a policy known as appeasement.
l In March 1939, Germany sent troops into Czechoslovakia, bringing the Czech lands under German control.
l Hitler demanded the return of Danzig–Poland’s Baltic Sea port.
l He also wanted a highway and railroad across the Polish Corridor.
l These demands convinced the British and French that appeasement had failed.
l In May 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland by the German army.
l On August 23, 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty, with a secret agreement to divide Poland.
l On September 1, 1939, Germany and the USSR invaded Poland.
l On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany–starting World War II.
l The Germans used a blitzkrieg, or lightening war, to attack Poland.
l The Polish army was defeated by October 5.
l On April 9, 1940, the German army attacked Norway and Denmark.
l Within a month, Germany overtook both countries.
l After World War I, the French built a line of concrete bunkers and fortifications called the Maginot Line along the German border.
l When Hitler decided to attack France, he went around the Maginot Line by invading the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
l The French and British forces quickly went into Belgium, becoming trapped there by German forces.
l By June 4, about 338,000 British and French troops had evacuated Belgium through the French port of Dunkirk and across the English Channel, using ships of all sizes.
l On June 22, 1940, France surrendered to the Germans.
l Germany installed a puppet government in France.
l Hitler thought that Britain would negotiate peace after France surrendered.
l He did not anticipate the bravery of the British people and their prime minister, Winston Churchill.
l On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered a defiant speech that rallied the British people and alerted the United States to Britain’s plight.
l To invade Britain, Germany had to defeat the British air force.
l In the Battle of Britain, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, launched an all-out air battle to destroy the British Royal Air Force.
l After German bombers bombed London, the British responded by bombing Berlin, Germany.
• The Royal Air Force was greatly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, but the British had radar stations and were able to detect incoming German aircraft and direct British fighters to intercept them.
l The Nazis killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of other people during the Holocaust.
l The Hebrew term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews before and during World War II is Shoah.
l The Nazis persecuted anyone who opposed them, as well as the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slavic peoples.
l The Nazis’ strongest hatred was aimed at all Jews.
l In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took citizenship away from Jewish Germans and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans.
l German Jews were deprived of many rights that citizens of Germany had long held.
l By 1936 at least half of Germany’s Jews were jobless.
l Anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany and Austria on November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass.”
• Ninety Jews died, hundreds were badly injured, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, and over 180 synagogues were wrecked.
l Between 1933 and the beginning of World War II in 1939, about 350,000 Jews escaped Nazi-controlled Germany.
l Many of them emigrated to the United States.
l Millions of Jews remained trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe because they could not get visas to the United States or to other countries.
l On January 20, 1942, Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference to decide the “final solution” of the Jews and other “undesirables.”
l The plan was to round up Jews and other “undesirables” from Nazi-controlled Europe and take them to concentration camps–detention centers where healthy individuals worked as slave laborers.
l The elderly, the sick, and young children were sent to extermination camps to be killed in large gas chambers.
l After World War II began, Nazis built concentration camps throughout Europe.
l Extermination camps were built in many concentration camps, mostly in Poland.
l Thousands of people were killed each day at these camps.
l In only a few years, Jewish culture had been virtually obliterated by the Nazis in the lands they conquered.
l Two days after Britain and France declared war against Germany, President Roosevelt declared the United States neutral.
l The Neutrality Act of 1939 allowed warring countries to buy weapons from the United States as long as they paid cash and carried the arms away on their own ships.
l President Roosevelt used a loophole in the Neutrality Act of 1939 and sent 50 old American destroyers to Britain in exchange for the right to build American bases on British-controlled Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Caribbean islands.
l After the German invasion of France and the rescue of Allied forces at Dunkirk, American public opinion changed to favor limited aid to the Allies.
l The America First Committee opposed any American intervention or aid to the Allies.
l President Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term as president in the election of 1940.
l Both Roosevelt and the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, said they would keep the United States neutral but assist the Allied forces.
l Roosevelt won by a large margin.
l President Roosevelt proposed the Lend-Lease Act, which stated that the United States could lend or lease arms to any country considered “vital to the defense of the United States.”
l Congress passed the act by a wide margin.
l In June 1941, in violation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hitler began a massive invasion of the Soviet Union.
l President Roosevelt developed the hemispheric defense zone, which declared the entire western half of the Atlantic as part of the Western Hemisphere and therefore neutral.
l This allowed Roosevelt to order the U.S. Navy to patrol the western Atlantic Ocean and reveal the location of German submarines to the British.
l In August 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to the Atlantic Charter.
l This agreement committed the two leaders to a postwar world of democracy, nonaggression, free trade, economic advancement, and freedom of the seas.
• After a German U-boat fired on the American destroyer Greer, Roosevelt ordered American ships to follow a “shoot-on-sight” policy toward German submarines.
• Germans torpedoed and sank the American destroyer Reuben James in the North Atlantic.
• Roosevelt’s primary goal between August 1939 and December 1941 was to help Britain and its allies defeat Germany.
• When Britain began moving its warships from Southeast Asia to the Atlantic, Roosevelt introduced policies to discourage the Japanese from attacking the British Empire.
l In July 1940, Congress passed the Export Control Act, giving Roosevelt the power to restrict the sale of strategic materials–materials important for fighting a war–to other countries.
l Roosevelt immediately blocked the sale of airplane fuel and scrap iron to Japan.
l The Japanese signed an alliance with Germany and Italy.
l By July 1941, Japanese aircraft posed a direct threat to the British Empire.
l Roosevelt responded to the threat by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and reducing the amount of oil shipped to Japan.
l He also sent General MacArthur to the Philippines to build up American defenses there.
l The Japanese decided to attack resource-rich British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, seize the Philippines, and attack Pearl Harbor.
l Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sinking or damaging 21 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, killing 2,403 Americans, and injuring hundreds more.
l The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
l On December 11, 1941, Japan’s allies–Germany and Italy–declared war on the United States.