1939-1945European and Pacific Theaters

WW Dos

The BelligerentsTreaties/Pacts

Pact of Steel Italy and Nazi

GermanyRome-Berlin-Tokyo

Axis - 1936 Non-Aggression

Pact - 1939Nazi Germany and

the Soviet Union

Allied PowersFrance and Great

BritainAgree to protect the

sovereignty of Poland

Axis PowersJapan, Italy, Nazi

Germany, and the Soviet UnionWhy will the S.U.

leave this treaty?

Operation White and Blitzkrieg

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939Warsaw capitulated on

September 28th.Military opposition ended

October 6th, 1939.

65,000 Polish troops were killed in the invasion.

Hundreds of thousands were captured/wounded.

• “Lightening War”

• Combine tanks, planes, trucks, and infantry in concentrated attacks

• How is this a different form of warfare than WWI?

BLITZKRIEG

Nazi Tactics in Occupied Poland Diary of Polish Doctor Zygmunt Klukowski

October 11, 1939

The town is crowded with Germans…In general the Germans are trying to clean up the city. For this work they are using only Jews. Jews must sweep the streets, clean all the public latrines, and fill all the street trenches. Plastered everywhere are German notices giving an idea of what we can expect in the future.

We must return all arms. We must record all contagious diseases. The police curfew is from 10 P.M. until 5:30 A.M. The restrictions applying to Jewish shops change from day to day. Sometimes the Jews are allowed to open their shops, and sometimes they are not. It seems that most of the orders are aimed at the Jews.

February 18, 1940

I met a woman, an official of the Zamoyski estate. She had just arrived from Chelmo. For some time I've been receiving alarming information about the execution of the mentally ill patients of the psychiatric ward at Chelmo Hospital. I asked her if this happened. She verified that it was true.

All the mentally ill were shot with machine guns, but under penalty of death the hospital personnel are forbidden to talk about this crime.

It is so hard to believe anything as terrible as this.

After the defeat of Poland in 1939 Hitler turned his focus Westward in 1940

Battles in the WestPhony War

Period of no fighting between Oct. 1939 and June 1940

Why wouldn’t the Allies attack?

Invasion of France 1940Allied army encircled at

DunkirkOver 300,000 Allied soldiers

evacuatedFrance defeated in 6 weeks

Battle of Britain Hitler’s attempt to

defeat GB Defeat the RAF and

then plan an invasion

RAF and radar help prevent a German invasion

Hitler’s plans for Western dominance put on hold

Defeat of the Allied army and evacuation at Dunkirk

The Fall of France - 1940Northern France and its

government under complete control of the NazisTurn in Jews to Nazis

Vichy (Free) France led by Marshall PetainWWI hero Treason

Resistance movement led by Charles de Gaulle PM post WWII

Enigma Machine

“The Wizards War” and the role of technology

Radar Unit

What is the purpose or intention of Churchill’s speech? "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.“

Who is Churchill referring to?"Never in the field of human conflict was so much

owed by so many to so few."

Churchill during the Battle of Britain

Battle of Britain

Europe 1941

• Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union

• Over 3 million men

• Need for Lebensraum

• Why would his invasion ultimately fail?

• What are his three targets or objectives?

Operation Barbarossa - June 1941

Siege of Leningrad – 1941-1944

The Germans had the city Leningrad captive and starved the people and bombed the warehouses.

The people of Leningrad ate the cow and horse food, and cats, dogs, and even crows and rats.

A million people or more died in Leningrad

The first deaths from starvation were recorded only a few weeks after the ring of the siege closed,

and by midwinter it was common to see corpses lying in the streets. A dance teacher at the

Mariinsky ballet school noted a dead man who leant for months against a lamppost opposite the Philharmonia: 'With his back to the post a man

sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack ... For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He

sat 1. Without his knapsack 2. Without his rags 3. In his underwear 4. Naked 5. A skeleton with

ripped out entrails.'

Battle of Stalingrad – 1942-1943

• Why would Hitler orders Army Group South to attack Stalingrad?

• Over 1.1 million Soviet casualties

• Over 800,000 German causalities

• Hitler’s war machine permanently crippled

Stalingrad through the eyes of the combatants German AccountPanzergrenadier officer - "We have fought for fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, machine guns, grenades and bayonets.  The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms...The street is no longer measure in metres, but in corpses.  Stalingrad is no longer a town.  By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames.  And when night arrives -- one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights -- the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank.  The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them.  Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure"

Russian AccountNikolai Nikulin, Russian soldier: "During the night I crawled twice to a shell crater for water.  It was as thick and brown as coffee, and smelt of explosives and something else.  In the morning, I saw a black crooked hand protruding from that crater.  My tunic and trousers are as stiff as cardboard with mud and blood, the knees and elbows holed by crawling on them.  I have thrown away my helmet -- not many people wear them here; one normally shits into a helmet, then throws it out of the trench.  The corpse near me stinks unbearably; there are so many of them around, old and new.  Some turn black as they dry, and lie in all sorts of postures.  Here and there in the trench one sees body parts trampled into the mud - a flattened face, a hand, all as brown as the soil.  We walk on"

1941-1945

Nazi persecution and elimination of Jews in the

Eastern Front

Gas extermination van

The progression of Nazi extermination

“The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”

SS Mobile Killing Squads

Einsatzgruppen- A – B – C – D Undressing prior to execution

Wannsee Conference January 1942

Liberation of Concentration Camps – click me!

Western Front - 1944

• Offensive to reestablish an offensive in Europe

• Stalin needed it – why?

• Largest amphibious invasion in history

•Why was it so risky?

•I SPY – What do you see?

Invasion of Normandy

Yalta Conference – February 1945

“The Big Three”

Points of Discussion

Poland – Communist buffer

Free elections in Eastern Europe

• Division of Germany• United Nations

Race to Berlin – 1945 – click me!British and American

forces sweep through France toward Germany from the West

Soviet forces sweep through Eastern Europe toward Germany from the East

War in the Pacific – 1941-1945Japanese occupation of

Manchuria – 1931

Invasion of China – 1937

Policy of Island-HoppingWhat is it?War of attrition

What does Japan acquire when it takes over territory?

• US naval forces are able to destroy multiple Japanese aircraft carriers

• Japanese expansion halted and begins to contract toward Japan

• Turning point in the Pacific theater

Battle of Midway - 1942

Outer Ring of Japanese Empire

Invasion of Iwo Jima – February 1945.US closing in on the Japanese home island

Island Hopping…Closing in on Japan

Okinawa – click meThe last stop before the Japanese home islands

Dresden, Germany “The fire storm transformed thousands of

individual blazes into a sea of flames, ripping off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air, and simultaneously sucking the oxygen out of the air-raid shelters.

  ”Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly, their bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then, as the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a thick liquid sometimes three or four feet deep.”    “Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the ‘human soup’ found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden.”

Allied Fire bombing Tokyo, Japan –

100,000

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

EFFECTS OF WWII War in Europe ends in May

1945

War in the Pacific ends in August 1945

Demilitarization of both countries

War crimes tribunals in both countries

Rise of communism in Eastern Europe Soviet Bloc

Emergence of two superpowers: US and SU and the start of the Cold War

Decrease in colonialism Independence movements

Beginning of the nuclear age