World War II

Question 1

~World War II (1939-1945)

Answer 1

● Largest and deadliest conflict
● Involved more than sixty nations, cost several trillion dollars and killed nearly 60 million people
● Civilian deaths account for half that figure, owing largely to destructive tactics and technologies and even more to campaigns of genocide
● Shifted the balance of global strength completely

Question 2

~Axis Powers

Answer 2

● Nazi Germany, fascist Italy (joined the war in June 1940, left in July 1943) and Japan

Question 3

~Allied Powers

Answer 3

● Great Britain, France (left the war in 1940), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USSR (joined the war in June 1941), the United States (joined hte war in December 1941) and Nationalist China

Question 4

~Appeasement

Answer 4

● Letting a belligerent party have what it wants in the hope that it will ask for no more

Question 5

~Lebensraum

Answer 5

● USSR, fearing Hitler’s anti-communist rhetoric and expansion in Eastern Europe (talk of Lebensraum), ateempted a policy of collective security with ethe West

• Securing a seemingly reliable alliance with France and Czechoslovakia
• Britain distrusting hte Soviets, distanced itself form this partnership

Question 6

~Maginot Line

Answer 6

● A long chian of fortifications meant to act as the ultimate trench in France

Question 7

~Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Answer 7

● Mussolini and Hitler joined forces to intervnee in the war
● Aiding the military rebellion led by the right-winged general Franciso Franco against Spain’s recently elected coalition of liberals and leftists
● Soviets sent assitance to the Spanish government but French were perseuaded by Britain to remain neutral and disappointed Stalin and undermiined collective security
● Franco marcked to victory in 1939

Question 8

~Sudetenland

Answer 8

● In early 1938, Germany annexed Autria and then threatened war against Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland
● A border region that the Treaty of Versailles had given to the Czechs, but htat contained a large German-speaking population

Question 9

~Munich Agreement

Answer 9

● An example of appeasement
● The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and hte French premier, agreed to let Hitler take the Sudetenland in exchange for his promise to expand no further
● THe Czechs and Soviets, both uninvited, were outraged
● Hitler broke his promise and took the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and claimed Polish territory

Question 10

~Nonaggression pact

Answer 10

● Stalin, no longer trusting the democracies, secretly negotiated a nonaggression treaty with Hitler
● This Nazi-Soviet Pact kept the USSR neutral and allowed Hitler to invade Poland without worrying about a two-front war

Question 11

~Blitzkrieg

Answer 11

● Germany immediately exploited this new offensive potential with its innovatie “lightenng war”
● Used tanks and airplanes to penetrate quickly and deeply into enemy territory
● Poland fell to Germany in six weeks in the fall of 1939
● Hitler’s forces defeated Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, and France

Question 12

~Battle of Britain

Answer 12

● From the summer of 1940 to spring of 1941, Germany focused its attention on britain, trying to bomb it into submission from the air
● THe Royal Air Forrce famously defended England’s skies and Britian continued to hold out thanks to control of the seas, the skill of its pilots, its use of radar and economic aid from Canada and the US

Question 13

~Lend-lease program

Answer 13

● FDR sympathized with the Allies

● Begame economic assistance to Britain, and late hte USSR, int eh spring and summer of 1941

Question 14

~War in Africa

Answer 14

● German tank forces drove toward hte British-controlled Suez Canal in 1941

Question 15

~War in Eastern Europe

Answer 15

● Hiter began a surprise invastion of hte USSR

Question 16

~Operation Barbarossa

Answer 16

● Began in June
● Between 60-75% of all German forces would fight on this Soviet front
● It looked as though blitzkrieg would topple the USSR quickly at first
- The Germans surrounded Leningrad, the country’s second largest city, placing it under hte worst siege in modern times
- Reached outskirts of Moscow in october
● German advance was halted in December

Question 17

~Pearl Harbor

Answer 17

● Repeated US trade embargoes heightened diplomatic tensison and convinced hte Japanese to launch a massive naval and air assault throught he Pacific
● Beginning witht he Decmebr 7, 1941 surprise attack
● Brought the US into the war

Question 18

~Battle of Midway

Answer 18

● A Pacific clash in which the US Navy destroyed hte bulk of Japan’s carrier fleet
● June 1942

Question 19

~Battle of El Alamein

Answer 19

● British turned back the Germn tanks drivin toward the Suez Canal
● July-November 1942

Question 20

~Battle of Stalingrad

Answer 20

● Savage showdown on the Volga, where a huge German force nearly pushed the Soviets across hte river and gained access to the USSR’s oil reserves but was instead encircled and captured
● August 1942-February 1943

Question 21

~Island hopping

Answer 21

● US forces int he Pacific moved west toward Japan in this strategy in 1943 and 1944
● Capturing islands inconsecutively

Question 22

~Battle of Atlantic (1942-spring 1943)

Answer 22

● Germany’s U-boats vs Allied ships

● Allies were able to neutralize Germany’s submarines

Question 23

~Operation Overlord/D-Day invasion

Answer 23

● In June 1944, landed more than 170,000 British, Canadian and American troops on the beaches of Normandy int northern France
● Allies also had complete control of hte skies

Question 24

~Strategic bombing

Answer 24

● Seeking to disrupt military and economic efforts nad to break the civilian population’s morale
● by the summe of 1944, US forces were within range to do teh same to Japan
● Killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and remains one of the most controversial aspects of hte Allies’ war effort

Question 25

~Harry Truman

Answer 25

● America’s new president who had taken office after FDR’s death in April
● Feared that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would cost hundredso f thousands of casualties
● Hoped to win from the air, but conventional bombardment did not appear to be denting the Japanese leadership’s resolve
● Elected to use the atombic bomb to hasten Japan’s surrender

Question 26

~Hiroshima

Answer 26

● On August 6, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima
● Killing an estimated 80,000 initially, with tens of thousndas dying late from burns or radioactive fallout

Question 27

~Nagasaki

Answer 27

● Japan refused to yield after bombin in Hiroshima
● A secomd bomb was released over Nagasaki on August 9, killing naother 80,000 total
● Froced Japan’s capitualation
● FOrmal surredner followed in September

Question 28

~War crimes

Answer 28

● Genocide was formally defined as a crmie in WWII

Question 29

~Soviet’s brutality

Answer 29

● The Soviet army raped as many as two million owmen and girls as it advanced through Germany toward Berlin

Question 30

~Allies’ strategic bombing brutality

Answer 30

● Kileld over 600,000 German-held Europe and at least another 500,000 in Japan
● Devastating to certain cities, including Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in early 1945
● US firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed approx. 100,000 people

Question 31

~Slaughterhouse Five

Answer 31

● THe authoer Kurt Vonnegut was present in Dresden with a number of other US prisones of war
● Protrayed the event in his novel
● Dresden bombing was notorious because it took place whent eh war was essentially over and because it is debatable whether the city was militarily important enought ot warrant targeting

Question 32

~Axis atrocities

Answer 32

● Both Germany and Japan killed large numbers of civilians, executed or mistreated prisoners of war, and pressed several million enemy non-combatants into forced labor

Question 33

~Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere

Answer 33

● Japan used prisoners as human subjects to test biologicla nad chemical weapons
● Japa’s army forced thousands of women from mainland Asia to serve as “comfort women” or military prostitutes
● Its occupired territories were a part of a sphere

Question 34

~Genocide

Answer 34

● Define in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish Lawyer Rafael Lemkin

● Premeditated attempt to annihilate a group based on its ethnic identity

Question 35

~Subhumans

Answer 35

● Nazi policy singled out several racial groups as subhumans who could not be allowed to contaminate the Germans’ pure Aryan blood
● Slavs, those of African descent
● ROman/Gypsies
● Jews
● Other considered to be undesirable were homosexuals, the mentally disabled and people with venereal or incurable disease

Question 36

~Anti-Semitic persecution

Answer 36

● Before 1939 the treament of htese groups had grown steadily worse, but the war triggered an escalation of systematic violence

Question 37

~Holocaust

Answer 37

● Nazi officials estimated that there wre 11 million jews in Europe htat they would have to expel or eradicate
● Slavic peoples were to be conquered with brute force and the survivors enslaved

Question 38

~Concentration camps

Answer 38

● In 1939 and 1940, with som much of Europe coming under German control, Nazi authorieis began detaining Jews in concentration camps and city neighborhoods called ghettos

Question 39

~Special action squads (Einsatzgruppen)

Answer 39

● In spring 1941, as Germany readied its invasion o the USSR, special action squads were formed to accompany the German army and execute Soviet Jews by shooting

Question 40

~Final solution

Answer 40

● In July 1941, an order to prepare a final solution of the Jewish problem was handed down to Nazi security forces
● Inspried by how Nazi doctors had been clinically euthanizing the mentally and physcially ill since 1939, official decided in late 1941 and ealrly 1942 (principally at the Wannsee Conference) to use special exermination camps

Question 41

~Extermination camps

Answer 41

● Already under comstruciton in German-held Poalnd
● To kill victims on a truly industrial scale
● Included the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau
● Victims were gassed, their bodies plundered for hidden loot, and their remains cremated
● Some were used for medical and scientific experiemnets, to the point of mutilation and death

Question 42

~Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)

Answer 42

● Nazi leaders were prosecuted

● Concept of crimes against humanity was codified

Question 43

~Universal Declaration of Human RIghts

Answer 43

● In 1948, in a collective effort to avoid such barbarities int he future, the UN adopted the declaration

Question 44

~What was the scause of WWII?

Answer 44

● Agression during the 1930s on the part of Japan, Italy and Germany went unchecked by a feeble League of Nations and was repeatedly answered by the Western democracies with the policy of appeasement

Question 45

~When did foreign-policy destabilization begin?

Answer 45

● Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria and left the League of Nations in 1931
● Hitler pulled out of the League in 1933, began rearmament and conscitpiton in 1935 (violation of the Treaty of Versailles)

Question 46

~What explained the democracies’ passivity in the face of fascism during the 1930s

Answer 46

● US isolationism did not help and neither did British antipathy for the USSR
● The Depression kept hte democracies economically timid, and hte memory of WWI bloodshed made themr eluctant to risk a new round of fighting
● Britian and France put too much faith in defensive barriers to keep them safe (English Channel and Maginot Line)

Question 47

~What proved the hollowness of collective security

Answer 47

● In 1935, Italy brutally invaded Ethiopiad, and when League of Nations tried to sanction it, Italy abandoned hte League and drew closer to Germany
● in the spring of 1936, Hitler defied France and Britain by sending troops into the Rhineland, which the Treaty of Versailles had demilitarized, and the democracies’ failure to respond emboldened him

Question 48

~When did WWII start?

Answer 48

● Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 began WWII

Question 49

~What were the new tchnologies in WWII?

Answer 49

● aircraft carriers
● Long-rang submarines
● tanks combined with the power of artillery with excellent mobiligy
● Heavy bomber aircraft
● Radar, jet aircraft, rocketry, atomic bombs and computer

Question 50

~What events in Asia complicated the war in 1941?

Answer 50

● Japanese had occupied French Indochina, a bold move that also threatened britian’s Asian colonies and the US controlled Philippines
● By the late spring of 1942, the Japanese hava captured Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, Britain’s mighty naval base at Singapore, the Philippines and Dutch Indonesia

Question 51

~What were the three turning-point batters in the fall of 1942?

Answer 51

● Battle of Midway (June 1942)
● Battle of El Alamein (July-November 1942)
● Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943)

Question 52

~How did the Axis powers started o=losign in 1943 and 1944?

Answer 52

● US forces moved west toward Japan
● Allied armies and guerrilla uprigins sin China and Southeast Asia pinned down Japanese forces ont he mainland
● Allies invaded Italy from North Africa in 1943, deposing Mussolini’s government
● Soviets pushed the Germans out of the USSR and toward Berlin

Question 53

~When did the Axis Power in Europe collapsed?

Answer 53

● In 1945, when the Soviets sotrming Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30
● Germany ceased hostilities in early May