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Hitler's invasion of Poland triggered World War 11. The war pitted the Axis powers, including Germany, Italy, and Japan, against the Allies, including Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and 43 other nations. In Poland, Germany used a new kind of attack, called a blitzkrieg, or lightning war. German planes, tanks, artillery, and mechanized infantry launched a combined attack that overwhelmed the Polish resistance. After conquering Poland, Hitler waited some months before unleashing a blitzkrieg on Western Europe. By June 1940, however, Germany had defeated Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
German planes then bombed British cities, hoping to weaken the island nation before invading it. The British mounted a strong air defense, and the invasion never took place. However, the Axis advanced on other fronts. German and Italian troops seized the Balkans and attacked the British in North Africa.
By 1941, the Axis controlled almost all of Europe. They exploited the economic and human resources of the conquered lands. The Nazis persecuted Jews in the occupied lands and sent millions to their deaths in concentration camps. In most countries, however, brave individuals organized resistance movements against the Nazis. In June 1941, Hitler suddenly invaded the Soviet Union, pushing deep into the country before he was stopped by "General Winter." Both sides then dug in for a long campaign.
When World War 11 began, the United States declared its neutrality. But, as the Nazis advanced across Europe, the United States did sell military supplies to the Allies. At the same time, Americans grew increasingly worried about Japanese aggression in Asia. After invading Manchuria in 1931, Japan continued to expand into Asia. By 1938, it controlled much of northern and central China. In 1940, it seized French Indochina.
Relations between Japan and the United States grew tense as Japan spread its empire across Asia. The Japanese felt that war with the United States was unavoidable so they launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the chief American naval base in the Pacific. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes bombed American ships and planes, causing great destruction. President Franklin Roosevelt then called on Congress to declare war on Japan and the other Axis powers.
The Japanese followed their attack on Pearl Harbor with lightning assaults across the Pacific, capturing Hong Kong from the British, the Philippines from the United States, and many other islands. They also took Dutch and British colonies in Southeast Asia. The Japanese tried to win the support of other Asian peoples against the Allies by declaring "Asia for the Asians." However, Japanese policies in the occupied lands soon angered the local people.
On the home front, the Allied nations made a total commitment to the war effort. Factories switched from making consumer goods to producing war goods. Women took jobs in industry and in the armed services. Citizens accepted rationing of scarce goods.
The struggle to victory took years, but the Allies began to turn the tide first in North Africa. At the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, they stopped the Axis advance in 1942 and later forced the Axis army there to surrender. Another turning point occurred in 1942 at the Battle of Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. There, the Russians won a costly but important victory over the Germans.
In 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily and fought their way up the Italian peninsula. The next year, they opened a new front in Western Europe by invading France. On D-Day, as the invasion day was called, thousands of ships landed troops, weapons, and supplies at five beachheads on the Normandy coast. The Allies met heavy German resistance, but eventually liberated France and pushed on toward Germany. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered.
In the Pacific war, the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942 proved to be turning points because American planes badly damaged Japanese ships. In hard-won battles, the Americans went on the offensive, taking some islands from the Japanese and recapturing the Philippines. On the Asian mainland, Allied forces battled the Japanese in China and Southeast Asia.
As bombing raids took a heavy toll on Japan, the Allies called on the Japanese to surrender, but they refused. President Truman, who took office after Roosevelt died in 1945, decided to use a deadly new weapon&emdash;the atomic bomb. Truman wanted to end the war as soon as possible and save Allied lives. In early August 1945, the Americans bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people. On August 14, the Japanese surrendered, ending World War II.
During World War II, the chief Allied leaders were Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and Franklin Roosevelt (and later Harry Truman) of the United States. They met throughout the war to plan strategy and discuss postwar policy. After the war, that cooperation ended, and a cold war between the western democracies and the Soviet Union began. A cold war is a state of tension and hostility among nations without armed conflict.
Conflicts among the Allies surfaced at the end of the war. As Soviet troops freed the nations of Eastern Europe from Nazi control, they set up pro-Soviet governments. The other Allies called for free elections, but Stalin refused. He wanted Eastern Europe to serve as a buffer against any future German attack.
A second area of tension was Germany. At first, each of the Allies held its own zone of occupation in Germany. Later, the British, French, and American zones were combined into the German Federal Republic, or West Germany. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Berlin, which lay in the Soviet zone, was divided into West and East Berlin.
Berlin became a focus of the cold war in 1948 when the Soviet Union blockaded all roads and railroads leading into West Berlin. President Truman ordered an American airlift of food and other supplies into West Berlin. The Berlin airlift continued until the Soviets finally lifted their blockade. Later, the East German government built a wall between East and West Berlin to stop East Germans from fleeing to freedom in the west.
Containment. In the late 1940s, communist movements with the help of the Soviet Union seemed to be gaining ground in China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. To counter Soviet influence, the United States adopted a policy of containment. The United States set out to contain, or hold, the Soviets within their current boundaries by any means necessary. President Truman applied containment to Greece and Turkey, which were threatened by communism. In the Truman Doctrine, he promised to aid any nation resisting outside domination.
The United States tried to contain communist movements in Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. Under this program, it gave billions of dollars of aid to help countries rebuild their shattered economies. As economic and political conditions improved, the danger of communist revolution in Europe subsided.
The cold war led to the growth of military alliances. In 1949, the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to protect one another against an outside attack. In 1955, the Soviet Union set up the Warsaw Pact with seven Eastern European nations. They agreed to help each other if any of them went to war.
The United Nations. The cold war overshadowed the work of the United Nations (UN), an international peacekeeping organization set up in 1945. Members agreed to submit disputes to the UN for peaceful settlement and to work together to conquer hunger and disease. The UN has had limited successes in solving conflicts, in part because it cannot force members to agree to its decisions. However, it has done much to help developing nations combat disease and improve education.
A Brief Survey of World History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990. (p. c66-70)
HISTORY-SOCIAL SCIENCE CONTENT STANDARDS
10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.
10.9 Students analyze the international developments in the post-World World War II world.
For additional information see the California Department of Education web site at: http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf
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