WWII divided into two periods

• 1939-1942 – Hitler and Axis Domination• 1943-1945 Allies on the Offensive

Major Turning Points during WWII

• Stalingrad, November, 1942• El Alamein, Summer 1942• Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942• Midway, June, July 1943

World War II – Victory for the United Nations (1939-1945)

• May 1940, France out of the War – Vichy France

• Battle of Britain – an obvious strategy would have been for a landing, but the Germans had made no preparations for amphibious warfare

• The decision was then made by Hitler and Air Marshall Goring to do the job solely with air power

Two Main Phases to the Battle of Britain

• August and September 1940, daylight bombing raids to wipe out merchant convoys, airports and fighter planes

• Almost a success for the Germans, but losses were so high that on September 17 Hitler postponed any invasion

• Shift in German strategy to bombing British cities• Winston Churchill; -- “The nations finest hour”• Air attacks continued until 1942, but the aerial

battle of Britain was over

Equally Critical was the Battle of the Atlantic

• Importance of convoys getting through to Britain

• After the sinking of the Bismarck the British controlled the ocean’s surface, the Germans beneath the waters with their submarines

The fateful decision to invade Russia – Spring, 1941

• The idea that Russia could be conquered by winter

• Russia would add considerable lebensraum or space to the German Reich

• The plan almost worked• Millions of Russians captured or killed• But when winter closed in, neither Leningrad nor

Moscow was captured• Between December 1941 and May 1942 the

German army in Russia literally froze to death

U.S. Enters WWII

• American government took steps to freeze Japanese credits in the U.S. to halt access of raw materials – summer and autumn of 1941

• Force Japan to withdraw from China• Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a “day of

infamy”• Because of treaty with Japan, Germany

declared war on America on December 11, 1941

Japan had many initial advances

• Philippines• Guam• Wake Island• Malaya• Indonesia• Borneo

The last two years of the war the Axis was on the defensive

• Attack on Germany and Italy came from three directions

• By the Russians from the east• By the British, French and Americans from the

South and West

Finishing the War in the Pacific

• “Island Hopping”– Tarawa– Eniwetok– Guam– Okinawa– Iwo JimaChina TheaterLarger Islands – Solomons, New Guinea,Phillippines

The Sudden End – the Manhattan Project

• Hiroshima and Nagaski, August 6 and 9, 1945• September 2, 1945 Japanese Surrender, Tokyo

Bay