240-259 vt terms Flashcards
between 40 and 50 million people
Estimate of the death toll of WW II
The turning point in the Pacific war came in a naval engagement near the Midway Islands on June 4, 1942. The United States prevailed there partly because U.S. aircraft carriers had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- Although the United States had few carriers, it did have a secret weapon: a code-breaking operation known as Magic, which enabled a cryptographer monitoring Japanese radio frequencies to discover the plan to attack Midway.
The Turning Point in the War in the Pacific
On Okinawa the Japanese introduced this — pilots who “volunteered” to fly planes with just enough fuel to reach an Allied ship and dive-bomb into it. In the two-month battle, the Japanese flew nineteen hundred kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of ships and killing more than five thousand U.S. soldiers. The kamikaze, and the defense mounted by Japanese forces and the 110,000 Okinawan civilians who died refusing to surrender, convinced many people in the United States that the Japanese would never willingly surrender.
Kamikaze Warfare
The fall of Saipan in July 1944 and the subsequent conquest of Iwo Jima and Okinawa brought the Japanese homeland within easy reach of U.S. strategic bombers.
- The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 destroyed 25 percent of the city’s buildings, killed approximately one hundred thousand people, and made more than a million people homeless. The Allies were hitting non military targets…. this is important
- The final blows came on August 6 and 9, 1945, when the United States used a revolutionary new weapon, the atomic bomb, against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombs either instantaneously vaporized or slowly killed by radiation poisoning upward of two hundred thousand people.
The Japanese surrender
On May 8, 1945, World War II in Europe came to an end. As the news of Germany’s surrender reached the rest of the world, joyous crowds gathered to celebrate in the streets, clutching newspapers that declared Victory in Europe.
V-E Day
Japanese and German authorities administered their respective empires for economic gain and proceeded to exploit the resources of the lands under their control for their own benefit, regardless of the consequences for conquered peoples. The occupiers pillaged all forms of economic wealth that could fuel the German and Japanese war machines.
Axis Power Exploitation
Once your land was occupied by the Nazi’s you had two choices, collaborate or resist.
Occupation, collaboration or resistance
It played a vital part in aiding the Allies to success in Western Europe – especially leading up to D-Day in June 1944. The resistance movement developed to provide the Allies with intelligence, attack the Germans when possible and to assist the escape of Allied airmen.
The French Resistance
Though northern France and the Atlantic coast came under military rule, the Vichy government remained the civilian authority in the unoccupied southeastern part of the country. Named for its locale in central France, the Vichy government provided a prominent place for those French willing to collaborate with German rule.
The Vichy government
The treatment of POWs by German and Japanese authorities spoke to the horrors of the war as well. The death rate among soldiers in Japanese captivity averaged almost 30 percent, although it was even higher among Chinese POWs. The racial ideologies of Hitler’s regime were reflected in the treatment meted out to Soviet prisoners of war in particular. By February 1942, 2 million out of the 3.3 million Soviet soldiers in German custody had died from starvation, exposure, disease, or outright murder. Beyond the callous mistreatment of POWs, both German and Japanese authorities engaged in painful and often deadly medical experiments on thousands of unwilling subjects. In China, special Japanese military units, including the most infamous Unit 731, conducted cruel experiments on civilians and POWs. Victims, for example, became the subject of vivisection (defined as experimental surgery conducted on a living organism) or amputation without anesthesia. Tens of thousands of Chinese became victims of germ warfare experiments after they were deliberately infected with bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and other diseases. German physicians carried out similarly unethical medical experiments in concentration camps. Experimentation ranged from bone-grafting surgeries without anesthesia to exposing victims to phosgene and mustard gas in order to test possible antidotes. German doctors also directed painful experiments to determine how different “races” withstood various contagious diseases.
Atrocities
Also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.
The Holocaust
Hitler’s end game. His plan to exterminate (murder) all Jewish people.
The final solution
(April 18, 1942), during World War II, U.S. Army Air Forces bombing raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Lieut. Col. James H. Doolittle led 16 B-25 bombers from the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Hornet in a spectacular surprise attack that caused little damage but boosted Allied morale. The raid prompted the Japanese to retain four army fighter groups in Japan during 1942 and 1943, when they were badly needed in the South Pacific. The attack also compelled the Japanese to push beyond their originally planned defensive perimeter, thereby increasing the vulnerability of their supply lines.
The Doolittle Raid
An English mathematician, logician and cryptographer, he was responsible for breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. His work gave the Allies the edge they needed to win the war in Europe, and led to the creation of the computer.. his machine ( the forerunner to the computer) broke the Nazi Code which was considered unbreakable.
Alan Turing
Leader of the SS and chief of the German police.
Heinrich Himmler
