26, 27 Test

Question 1

US position after WW1

Answer 1

Isolationists

Question 2

Peace Groups

Answer 2

Several peace organizations worked to ensure international stability after the war

Question 3

Washington Naval Conference

Answer 3

Britain, Japan, France, Italy, China, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands joined a U.S. team led by Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes to discuss limits on naval armaments.

Question 4

Five-Power Treaty

Answer 4

Set a ten-year moratorium on the construction of capital ships and confirmed the numbers for disarmament.

Question 5

Nine-Power Treaty

Answer 5

Reaffirmed the Open Door policy in China, recognizing Chinese sovereignty.

Question 6

Four-Power Treaty

Answer 6

The US, Britain, Japan, and France agreed to respect one another’s Pacific possessions.

Question 7

Kellogg-Briand Pact

Answer 7

62 nations agreed to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy.” Many lawmakers considered it little more than a statement of moral preference because it lacked enforcement provisions. The Kellogg-Briand Pact reflected popular opinion that war was barbaric and wasteful, and the agreement stimulated serious public discussion of peace and war.

Question 8

War Debt

Answer 8

Many European nations wanted America to cancel the tremendous War debt they owed the United States, but American leaders insisted on payment. When Germany defaulted on reparations, American investors offered loans to Germany to meet its obligation.

Question 9

Export-Import Bank

Answer 9

In 1934, Hull also helped create the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that provided loans to foreigners for the purchase of American goods. The bank stimulated trade and became a diplomatic weapon, allowing the US to exact concessions through the approval or denial of loans.

Question 10

US Recognition of the Soviet Union

Answer 10

American businesses profited from Soviet purchases in the early 1930s. In 1933 Roosevelt granted US diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in return for Soviet agreement to discuss the debt question, to forgo subversive activities in the US, and to grant Americans in the Soviet Union religious freedom and legal rights.

Question 11

Good Neighbor Policy

Answer 11

To exert subtle control in Latin America, we used the “Good Neighbor Policy” (support for strong local leaders; the training of national guards; economic and cultural penetration; Export-Import Bank loans; financial supervision; and political subversion.) It meant that the US would be less blatant in its domination—less willing to defend exploitative business practices, less eager to launch military expeditions, and less reluctant to consult with Latin Americans.

Question 12

Mexican Nationalism

Answer 12

In 1938, Mexico nationalized foreign-owned petroleum companies. Fearing that Mexican oil would end up in Germany or Japan, Roosevelt reluctantly accepted the move.

Question 13

Hitler

Answer 13

In 1936 Italy and Germany formed an alliance called the Rome-Berlin Axis. Shortly thereafter, Germany and Japan united against the Soviet Union in the Anti-Comintern Pact. To these events Britain and France responded with a policy of appeasement, hoping to curb Hitler’s expansionist appetite by permitting him a few territorial nibbles.

Question 14

Spain Civil War

Answer 14

Hitler also made his presence felt in Spain, where a civil war broke out in 1936. The Loyalists defended Spain’s elected republican government against Francisco Franco’s fascist movement. The US government was officially neutral, but about 3,000 American volunteers, known as the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the “International Brigades,” joined the fight on the side of the Loyalist republicans, which also had the backing of the Soviet Union. Hitler and Mussolini sent military aid to Franco, who won in 1939, tightening the grip of fascism on the European continent.

Question 15

Nye Committee Hearings

Answer 15

A congressional committee headed by Senator Gerald P. Nye held hearings on the role of business and financiers in the US decision to enter the First World War.

Question 16

Neutrality Acts

Answer 16

The Neutrality Act of 1935 prohibited arms shipment to either side of the war, once the president had declared the existence of belligerency. The Neutrality Act of 1936 forbade loans to belligerents. After a joint resolution in 1937 declared the US neutral in the Spanish Civil War, Roosevelt embargoed arms shipments to both sides. The Neutrality Act of 1937 introduced the cash-and-carry principle: warring nations wishing to trade with the US would have to pay cash for their nonmilitary purchases and carry the goods from US ports in their own ships. The act also forbade Americans from traveling on the ships of belligerent nations.

Question 17

Nonaggression Pact

Answer 17

Berlin signed a nonaggression pact with Moscow in August 1939. Joseph Stalin believed that the West’s appeasement of Hitler had left him no choice but to cut a deal with Berlin. But Stalin also coveted territory: a top-secret protocol attached to the pact carved eastern Europe into German and Soviet zones, and permitted the Soviets to grab the eastern half of Poland and the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, formerly part of the Russian empire.

Question 18

Dunkirk, France

Answer 18

At Dunkirk, France, between May 26 and June 6, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers frantically escaped to Britain on a flotilla of small boats. The Germans occupied Paris a week later. Germany made the mistake of letting the troops get away be redistributed.

Question 19

First Peacetime Draft

Answer 19

The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 resulted in 16 million young men signing up for the draft. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 went into effect to help Britain avoid defeat. The United States became the “arsenal for democracy” by lending & leasing American military goods to those fighting the Axis powers.

Question 20

Atlantic Charter

Answer 20

in August 1941, Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which set war aims of collective security, self-determination, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas. When a German U-Boat fired at an American destroyer, the United States entered into an undeclared naval war with Germany. Relations with Germany deteriorated further when a German submarine torpedoed the U.S. destroyer Kearny in October 1941. Congress scrapped the cash-and-carry policy and revised the Neutrality Acts after the sinking of the “Reuben James” in late October 1941.

Question 21

US Demands on Japan

Answer 21

When Japan signed The tripartite Pact, the United States stopped selling aviation fuel and scrap metal to them. With the occupation of French Indochina, America froze Japanese assets, ending most trade, including oil with Japan.

Question 22

Pearl Harbor

Answer 22

On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This attack turned American sentiment sharply against the Japanese.

Question 23

Ferdinand the Bull Analogy

Answer 23

Some former critics of intervention turned to the popular children’s story Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand, though huge and powerful, just liked to “sit and smell the flowers”—until the day he was stung by a bee. However, as the world went to war, the US had not been, like Ferdinand, just “smell[ing] the flowers.” America’s embargo of shipments to Japan and refusal to accept Japan’s expansionist policies had brought the two nations to the brink of war, and the US was deeply involved in an undeclared naval war with Germany well before Japan’s attack.

Question 24

Philippines

Answer 24

The Japanese attacked the Philippines hours after their success at Pearl Harbor and, finding the entire force of B-17 bombers sitting on airfields, destroyed US air capability in the region. American and Filipino troops retreated to the Bataan Peninsula, hoping to hold the main island, Luzon, but Japanese forces were superior. Those who survived long enough to surrender faced horror. The Japanese troops, lacking supplies themselves, were unprepared to deal with such a large number of prisoners, and most believed the prisoners had forfeited honorable treatment by surrendering.

Question 25

Bataan Death March

Answer 25

In the Bataan Death March, the Japanese force-marched their captives to prison camps 80 miles away. Guards denied the prisoners food and water, and bayoneted or beat to death those who fell behind.

Question 26

Doolittle Raid

Answer 26

On April 18, 16 American B-25s appeared in the skies over Japan. The Doolittle Raid (named after the mission’s leader) did little harm to Japan, but it had an enormous psychological impact on Japanese leaders. The image of American bombers over Japan’s home islands pushed Japanese commander Yamamoto to bold action.

Question 27

The Battle of Midway

Answer 27

The target was Midway—two tiny islands about 1000 miles northwest of Honolulu, where the US Navy had a base. If Japan could take Midway—not implausible, given Japan’s string of victories—it would have a secure defensive perimeter far from the home islands. Yamamoto did not know that America’s MAGIC code-breaking machines could decipher Japanese messages. This time, surprise was on the side of the US, as the Japanese fleet found the US Navy and its carrier-based dive bombers lying in wait. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was a turning point in the Pacific war. Japanese strategists had hoped that the US, discouraged by Japan’s early victories, would withdraw and leave Japan to control the Pacific. Now Japan was on the defensive.

Question 28

Churchill vs Stalin

Answer 28

The US would first work with Britain and the USSR to defeat Germany, then deal with an isolated Japan. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin disagreed greatly over how to wage the war against Germany. Stalin pressed for British and American troops to attack Germany from the west, through France, to draw German troops away from the Soviet front. Roosevelt believed that Stalin was right and promised to open a “second front” to Germany’s west before the end of 1942. Churchill, however, blocked this plan. Churchill wanted to win control of the North Atlantic shipping lanes first and promoted air attacks on Germany. He also pushed for a smaller, safer attack on Axis positions in North Africa; halting the Germans there would protect British imperial possessions in the Mediterranean and the oil-rich Middle East. Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s plan.

Question 29

Manhattan Project

Answer 29

The most important government-sponsored scientific research program was the Manhattan Project, a secret effort to build an atomic bomb. Roosevelt had been convinced by scientists fleeing the Nazis in 1939 that Germany was working to create an atomic weapon, and he resolved to beat them. The project achieved the world’s first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942, and in 1943 the federal government set up a secret community for atomic scientists and their families.

Question 30

National War Labor Board

Answer 30

In 1942 Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) to settle labor disputes. The NWLB forged a temporary compromise between labor union demands for a “closed shop,” in which only union members could work, and management’s desire for “open” shops. Workers could not be required to join a union, but unions could enroll as many members as possible.

Question 31

War Labor Disputes Act

Answer 31

As anti labor sentiments grew, Congress passed the War Labor Disputes (Smith-Connally) Act. This act gave the president authority to seize and operate any strike-bound plant deemed necessary to national security, but it also contained broad, punitive provisions that created criminal penalties for leading strikes and tried to constrain union power by prohibiting contributions to political campaigns during the war.

Question 32

The Office of Price Administration

Answer 32

The Office of Price Administration (OPA), created by Congress in 1942, established a nationwide rationing system for such consumer goods as sugar, coffee, and gasoline. By early 1943, the OPA had instituted a point system for rationing food. Every citizen, regardless of age, received two ration books each month. Blue stamps were for canned fruits and vegetables; red for meat, fish, and dairy.

Question 33

Office of War Information

Answer 33

In 1942 Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI), which took charge of domestic propaganda and hired Hollywood filmmakers and New York copywriters to sell the war at home. OWI posters exhorted Americans to save and sacrifice, and reminded them to watch what they said, for “loose lips sink ships.”

Question 34

Zoot Suit

Answer 34

With cloth rationed, wearing pants requiring five yards of fabric was a political statement, and some men wore the zoot suit as a purposeful rejection of wartime ideals of service and sacrifice. Rumors that pachucos had attacked white sailors quickly led to violence. For 4 days, mobs of white men–mainly soldiers and sailors–roamed the streets attacking zoot-suiters and stripping them of their clothes. LA outlawed zoot suits and arrested men who wore them. The “zoot suit riots” ended only when naval personnel were removed from the city.

Question 35

Four Essential Human Freedoms

Answer 35

In 1941 Roosevelt had pledged America to defend “four essential human freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—and government-sponsored films contrasted democracy and totalitarianism, freedom and fascism, equality and oppression.

Question 36

Alien Registration Act

Answer 36

The Alien Registration (Smith) Act, passed in 1940, made it unlawful to advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence, or to join any organization that did so.

Question 37

Japanese Internment Camps

Answer 37

In March 1942, Roosevelt ordered that all 112000 foreign-born Japanese and Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and the state of Washington be removed from the West Coast to “relocation centers” for the duration of the war. They were imprisoned as a group, under suspicion solely because they were of Japanese descent. American anger at Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor fueled the calls for internment. Finally, people in economic competition with Japanese Americans strongly supported internment.

Question 38

Korematsu vs US

Answer 38

Betrayed by their government, almost 6000 internees renounced US citizenship and demanded to be sent to Japan. Some sought legal remedy, but the Supreme Court upheld the government’s action in Korematsu vs. US (1944).

Question 39

Double V

Answer 39

some African American leaders attempted to force the nation to confront the uncomfortable parallels between racist doctines of the Nazis and the persistence of Jim Crow segregation in the US. Proclaiming a “Double V” campaign (victory at home and abroad), groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hoped to “persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation…into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people.”

Question 40

CORE

Answer 40

In 1942 civil rights activists, influenced by Gandhi, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which stressed “nonviolent direct action” and staged sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters.

Question 41

Teheran

Answer 41

The three Allied leaders met in Teheran, Iran, in December 1943. Stalin dismissed Churchill’s repetitious justifications for further delaying a second front. Roosevelt had had enough, too; he also rejected Churchill’s proposal for another peripheral attack. The three finally agreed to launch Operation Overlord—the cross-Channel invasion of France—in early 1944. And the Soviet Union promised to aid the Allies against Japan once Germany was defeated.

Question 42

D-Day

Answer 42

The second front opened in the dark morning hours of June 6, 1944: D-Day. In the largest amphibious landing in history, more than 140000 Allied troops under the command of American general Dwight D. Eisenhower scrambled ashore at Normandy, France. Thousands of ships ferried the men within 100 yards of the beaches. Landing craft and soldiers immediately encountered the enemy; they triggered mines and were pinned down by fire from cliffside pillboxes. Meanwhile, 15500 Allied airborne troops, along with thousands of dummies meant to confuse the German defense, dropped from aircraft.

Question 43

Battle of the Bulge

Answer 43

After weeks of heavy fighting in what was come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge—because of a “bulge” 60 miles deep and 40 miles wide where German troops had pushed back the Allied line—the Allies gained control in late January 1945.

Question 44

Division of Germany

Answer 44

The Big Three agreed that some eastern German territory would be transferred to Poland and the remainder divided into four zones—the fourth zone to be administered by France, which Britain had pressed to be included in plans for postwar control of Germany, so as to reduce the Soviet zone from one third to one quarter. Berlin, within the Soviet zone, would also be divided among the four victors.

Question 45

Treaty of Friendship

Answer 45

In exchange for US promises to support Soviet claims on territory lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Stalin agreed to sign a treaty of friendship with Jiang Jieshi, America’s ally in China, rather than with the communist Mao Zedong, and to declare war on Japan two or three months after Hitler’s defeat.

Question 46

Harry S. Truman

Answer 46

Harry S. Truman, a senator from Missouri, was inexperienced in foreign policy. He was not even informed about the top-secret atomic weapons project until after he became president.

Question 47

Yalta Conference

Answer 47

The three Allied leaders discussed the fate of Germany and the postwar world. Stalin, his country devastated by German forces, favored a harsh approach. He wanted to keep Germany divided into occupation zones—areas controlled by Allied military forces—so that Germany would never again threaten the Soviet Union. Stalin also agreed to join in the war against Japan.

Question 48

Potsdam Conference

Answer 48

Truman’s test as a diplomat came in July 1945
when the Big Three—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—met
at the final wartime conference at Potsdam near Berlin. It was agreed that the
Soviets, British, Americans, and French would take reparations mainly from their
own occupation zones. Truman learned during the conference that a test of the new atomic weapon had been successful. The US, possessing such a weapon, no longer needed the Soviet Union’s help in fighting the Pacific war.

Question 49

Island-Hopping

Answer 49

Since halting the Japanese advance in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, American strategy had been to “island-hop” toward Japan, skipping the most strongly fortified islands whenever possible and taking the weaker ones, aiming to strand the Japanese armies on their island outposts. To cut off supplies being shipped from Japan’s home islands, Americans also targeted the Japanese merchant marine.

Question 50

Iwo Jima

Answer 50

In February 1945, while the Big Three were meeting at Yalta, US and Japanese troops battled for Iwo Jima, an island less than 5 miles long, located about 700 miles south of Tokyo. 21 thousand Japanese defenders occupied the island’s high ground. Hidden in a network of caves, trenches, and underground tunnels, they were protected from aerial bombardment that US forces used to clear the way for an amphibious landing. The island offered no cover, and marines were slaughtered as they came ashore. For 20 days, US forces fought their way up Mount Suribachi, the highest and most heavily fortified point on Iwo Jima. The struggle cost the lives of 6821 Americans and more than 20000 Japanese—some who committed suicide rather than surrender.

Question 51

Okinawa

Answer 51

A month later, American troops landed on Okinawa, an island in the Ryukyus chain at the southern tip of Japan, from which Allied forces planned to invade the main Japanese islands. The monsoon rains began in May, turning battlefields into seas of mud filled with decaying corpses. The supporting fleets endured wave of mass kamikaze (suicide) attacks, in which Japanese pilots intentionally crashed bomb-laden planes into American ships.

Question 52

March 9, 1945

Answer 52

On the night of March 9, 1945, 333 American B-29 Superfortresses dropped a mixture of explosives and incendiary devices on a 4-by-3-mile area of Tokyo. Attempting to demonstrate the strategic value of airpower, they created a firestorm.

Question 53

August 6, 1945

Answer 53

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named after the pilot’s mother, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb above the city of Hiroshima. Much of the city was leveled by the blast. The bomb ignited a firestorm, and thousands who survived the initial blast burned to death. About 130000 people were killed. Tens of thousands more would suffer the effects of radiation poisoning.

Question 54

August 8, 1945

Answer 54

On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

Question 54

August 8, 1945

Answer 54

On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

Question 55

August 9, 1945

Answer 55

On August 9, a second American atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, killing at least 60000 people.

Question 56

August 14, 1945

Answer 56

On August 14, Japan surrendered.