-
Germany's Invasion of Poland
Germany's action that began World War II in 1939. Germany invaded Poland a couple days after signing the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, under which the Soviet Union agreed not to defend Poland from the east if Germany attacked it from the west. -
German Blitzkrieg
"blitzkrieg" is a highly mobile form of infantry and armour, working in combined arms. It can be mechanized infantry formations with close air support, breaks through the opponent's line of defense by short, fast, powerful attacks and then dislocates the defenders, using speed and surprise to encircle them. Occurred during interwar period and was major cost for Poland. -
Fall of Paris
The Fall of Paris was German invasion of France and the Low Countries. The German plan for the battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes and then along the Somme valley to cut off and surround the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium to meet the German threat. Belgian and adjacent French forces were pushed back to the sea by the highly mobile and well-organized German operation, the British government -
Battle of Britain
German and British air forces clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest bombing campaign to that day. A significant turning point of World War II, the Battle of Britain ended when Germany’s Luftwaffe failed to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force despite months of targeting Britain’s air bases, military posts and, ultimately, its civilian population. -
Operation Barbarossa
(German: Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. Adolf Hitler took his armies eastward in a massive invasion of the Soviet Union: three great army groups with over three million German soldiers, 150 divisions, and three thousand tanks smashed across the frontier into Soviet territory. The invasion covered a front from the North Cape to the Black Sea, a distance of two thousand miles -
Pearl Harbor
A major United States naval base in Hawaii that was attacked without warning by the Japanese air force on December 7, 1941, with great loss of American lives and ships. But the Japanese had failed to cripple the Pacific Fleet. By the 1940s, battleships were no longer the most important naval vessel: Aircraft carriers were, and as it happened, all of the Pacific Fleet’s carriers were away from the base on December 7. -
Bataan Deach March
U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II, about 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. Thousands of people died during the time span of the march. They had to do it without assistance of the naval and air support. -
Battle of Midway
A naval and air battle fought in World War II in which planes from American aircraft carriers blunted the Japanese naval threat in the Pacific Ocean after Pearl Harbor. It resulted from Japan’s desire to sink the American aircraft carriers that had escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor. -
Battle of Stalingrad
Soviet defense of the city of Stalingrad in the U.S.S.R. Russians consider it to be the greatest battle of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favor of the Allies. -
D-Day
Allied forces invaded northern France by means of beach landings in Normandy. Western Allied effort to liberate mainland Europe from Nazi. However, many other invasions and operations had a designated D-Day, both before and after that operation. Major financial debt and thousands of deaths followed. There was much planning for liberation before occurrance of act, -
Liberation of Concentration Camps
Concentration Camps were liberated once allied troops began to encounter tens of thousands of people who were suffering from starvation and disease. Soviet forces were the first to see the suffrage and Germans tried to hide the evidence of mass murder. US forces liberated camps as they came along their path to free people still alive and give them care, soon other forces were doing the same. -
Battle of the Bulge
Major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe. They caught the allies by surprise. United States forces bore the brunt of the attack and incurred their highest casualties for any operation during the war. The battle also severely depleted Germany's armored forces on the western front, and Germany was largely unable to replace them. -
Battle of Iwo Jima
Major battle in which the U.S. Marines landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese Imperial Army. The American's goal was capturing the entire island, including the three Japanese-controlled airfields (including the South Field and the Central Field), to provide a staging area for attacks on the Japanese main islands. This five-week battle comprised some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the War in the Pacific of World War II. -
VE Day
VE Day is a public holiday to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. It was the official ending of WWII -
Battle of Okinawa
Series of battles fought in the Ryukyu Islands, centered on the island of Okinawa, and included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War. It lasted about 82 days. Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, a large island only 340 miles away from mainland Japan, as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland (coded Operation Downfall). Four divisions of the U.S. 10th Army and two Marine Divisions. -
Potsdam Declaration
This was a statement that called for the surrender of all Japanese armed forces. Truman, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China Chiang Kai-shek issued the document, which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan as agreed at the Potsdam Conference. If Japan did not surrender, it would face "prompt and utter destruction." -
Dropping of the Atomic Bombs
United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited the Cold War. -
VJ Day
News of the surrender was announced to the world. This sparked spontaneous celebrations over the final ending of World War II. On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was held in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. At the time, President Truman declared September 2 to be VJ Day.
