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Benito Mussolini
Known as II Duce ("the leader"), Mussolini was on e of the key figures in the creation of fascism. On June 10, 1940, Mussolini sided with Germany, though he was aware that Italy did not gave the military capaticy in 1940 to carry out a long war with France and the United Kingdom. On July 24, 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against him, and the King had him arrested the following day. -
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Harry Truman
Truman was the 33rd President of the UNited States. As the final running mate of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, Truman succeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died after months of declining health. Under truman, the Allies concluded World War II; in the aftermath of the conflict, tensions with the Soviet Union increased, marking the start of the Cold War. -
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Hideki Tojo
Tojo was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, the leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, and the 40th Prime Minister of Japan during most of World War II, from October 17, 1941 to July 22, 1944. As Prime Minister, he was directly responisble for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which initiated war between Japan and the United States, although planning for it had begun before he entered office. After the end of the war, Tojo was arrested, senteced to death for Japanese war crimes. -
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George S. Pattan
George Smith Patton, Jr. was a United States Army general, who commanded the Seventh United States Army in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of World War II, but is best known for his leadership of the Third United States Army in France and Germany following the Allied invasion of Normandy. -
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Adolf Hitler
He was an Austrian-born Germany politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933, to 1945. Hitler was at the centre of Nazi Germany, World War II in Europe, and the Holocaust. -
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
He was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star genereal in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942-43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944-45 from the Western Front. -
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Omar Bradley
He was an United States Army field commander in North Africa and Europe during World War II, and a Gerneral of the Army. From the NOrmandy landings through the end of the war in Europe, Bradley had command of all U.S. ground forces invading Germany from the west; he ultimately commanded forty-three divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a U.S. field commander. -
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Vernon Baker
Baker was a United States Army officer who received the Medal of Honor, the highest military award given by the United States Government for his volorous actions during World War II. He was awarded the medal for his actions on April 5-6, 1945 near Viareggio, Italy. Baker was the only living black American World War II veteran of the seven belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor when it was bestowed upon him by President Bill Clinton in 1997. He died in 2010 at the age of 90. -
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The Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsered persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire". The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "radically superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. -
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Merchant Ships
The availability or non-availability of merchant shipping determined what the Allies could or couldn't do militarily when sinkings of Allied merchant vessels exceed production, when slow turnarounds, convoy delays, roundabout, routing, and long voyages taxed transport severely, or when the cross-Channel invasion planned for 1942 had to be postponed for many months for reasons which included insufficient shipping. -
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Flying Tigers
The 1st American Volunteer GRoup of the Chinese Air Force, nicknamed the Flying TIgers, comprised pilots from the United States Army Air Corps, Navy, and Marine Corps, recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennaoult. The shark-faced nose art of the Flying Tigers remains among the most recognizable image of any induvidual combat aircraft or combat unit of World War II. -
Executive Order 9066
United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Debruary 19, 1942, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones. Eventually, EO 9066 cleared the way for the deportation of Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans to internment camps. The executive order was spurred by a combination of war hysteriaand reactions to the Niihau Incident. -
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Manhattan Project
This was a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canado. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Froves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. -
Bataan Death March
The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of 60,000-80,000 Filipino and American POW after the 3 month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. All told, approximately 2500-10,000 Filipino and 100-650 American POW died before they could reach their destination at Camp O'Donnel. The reported death tolls vary, especially amongst Filipino POWs, because historians cannot determine how many prisoners blended in with the civilian population and left -
Navajo Code Talkers
Early in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions which demonstrated that Navajo men could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds, versus the 30 minutes required by machines at that time. The idea was accepted, with Vogel recommending that the Marines recruit 200 Navajo. -
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Battle of Midway
This was acrucial and decisive naval battle in the Pacific Theater or World War II. Between June 4th and 7th of 1942, only six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the United States Navy defeated an attacking fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy on Midway Atoll, inflicting serious and irreparable damage on the Japanese fleet. -
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Office of War Information
This was a United States government agency created during World War II to consolidate existing government information services and deliver propaganda both at home and abroad. OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other forms of media, the OWI was the connection between the battlefront and civilian communities. The office also established several overseas branches. -
D-Day Invasion
The D-Day invasions, also known as the Normandy Landings, were the landing operation of the Allied invasion or Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. The largest seaborne invasion in history, the operation began the invasion of German-occupied western Europe, led to the liberation of France from Nazi control, and contributed to an Allied victory in the war. -
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Korematsu VS. United States
This was a landmark United States Supreme COurt case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship. -
Atomic Bomb
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The White Sands Proving Ground, where the test was conducted, was in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. -
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Potsdam COnference
The Conference was held at Cecilienhof, the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in Potsdam, occupied Germany. Participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The three powers were represented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill, and later, Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. -
Hiroshima
Hiroshima was minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, but it also had large stockpiles of military supplies. The city was a communications center, a key port for shipping and an assembly area for troops. It was also the second largest city in Japan after Kyoto that was still undamaged by air raids, due to the fact that it lacked the aircraft manufacturing idustry that was the XXI Bomber Commnad's priority target. -
Nagasaki
On the day of the nuclear strike on Thursday, August 9, 1945, the population in Nagasaki was estimated to be 263,000, which consisted of 240,000 Japanese residents, 10,000 Korean residents, 2500 conscripted Korean workers, 9000 Japanese soldiers, 600 conscripted Chinese workers, and 400 Allied "Prisoners of War." That day, the Boeing B-29 Superfortess Bockscar departed from Tinian's North Field just before dawn, this time carrying a plutonium bomb code-named "Fat Man" -
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Nuremberg Trials
The trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Muremburg, Germany. The first, and best known of these trials, described as "the greates trial in history" by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges who presided over it, was the trial of the major war criminals before the IMT.
