The document provides a detailed overview of the key events of World War II from 1939-1945. It describes how the political and economic instability in Germany following WWI led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. It then outlines Germany's aggression across Europe in the late 1930s that precipitated the start of WWII. The document discusses the major military campaigns and battles across Europe and in the Pacific theater between the Allied and Axis powers. It also describes the implementation of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its allies that resulted in the genocide of approximately 6 million European Jews.

1. 1939-46
WORLD WAR II

2. • The devastation of the Great
War had greatly destabilized
Europe, and in many
respects World War II grew
out of issues left unresolved
by that earlier conflict.
• - In particular, political and
economic instability in
Germany, and lingering
resentment over the harsh
terms imposed by the
Versailles Treaty, fueled the
rise to power of Adolf
Hitler and his National
Socialist (Nazi) Party.

3. • -Obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the “pure” German race,
which he called “Aryan,” Hitler believed
that war was the only way to gain the
necessary “Lebensraum,” or living space,
for that race to expand.
• - In the mid-1930s, he began the
rearmament of Germany, secretly and in
violation of the Versailles Treaty.
• -After signing alliances with Italy and
Japan against the Soviet Union, Hitler sent
troops to occupy Austria in 1938 and the
following year annexed Czechoslovakia.

5. OUTBREAK OF WAR
• -In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed
the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in
London and Paris.
• -News of the signing, on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual
assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to supersede a previous
though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of hostilities
for a few days.
• -Finally, at 12:40 PM on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland
to start at 4:45 the next morning.
-In response, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3,
at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM, respectively. World War II had begun.

7. • -The main Allied powers were Great
Britain, The United States, China, and
the Soviet Union. The leaders of the Allies
were Franklin Roosevelt (the United
States), Winston Churchill (Great
Britain), and Joseph Stalin (the Soviet
Union).
• -The main Axis powers were Germany,
Japan and Italy. The Axis leaders were
Adolf Hitler (Germany), Benito Mussolini
(Italy), and Emperor Hirohito (Japan).

8. • -On September 17, Soviet troops
invaded Poland from the east.
• -Stalin’s forces then moved to
occupy the Baltic States (Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania) and defeated
a resistant Finland in the Russo-
Finish War.
• British and German navies faced off
in heated battle, and lethal German
U-boat submarines struck at
merchant shipping bound for
Britain, sinking more than 100
vessels in the first four months of
World War II.

9. “BLITZKRIEG”
• -On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously
invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the
war began in earnest.
• -On May 10, German forces swept through
Belgium and the Netherlands in what became
known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war.
• German tanks were used in massed formations
in conjunction with motorized artillery to punch
holes in the enemy line and to isolate segments of
the enemy, which were then surrounded and
captured by motorized German infantry divisions
while the tanks ranged forward to repeat the
process:

10. • -Mechanization was the key to the
German blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” so
named because of the unprecedented
speed and mobility that were its salient
characteristics.
• -The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe,
was also the best force of its kind in 1939.
• - With France on the verge of
collapse, Benito Mussolini of Italy put his
Pact of Steel with Hitler into action, and
Italy declared war against France and
Britain on June 10.

11. • -France was subsequently divided
into two zones, one under German
military occupation and the other under
Petain’s government, installed at Vichy.
• -Hitler now turned his attention to
Britain, which had the defensive
advantage of being separated from the
Continent by the English Channel.
• -With Britain’s defensive resources
pushed to the limit, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill began receiving
crucial aid from the U.S. under
the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress
in early 1941.

13. OPERATION BARBAROSSA (1941-42)
• -By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the
Axis, and German troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April.
• -Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans was a precursor for his real
objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast territory
would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed.
• -The other half of Hitler’s strategy was the extermination of the
Jews from throughout German-occupied Europe. Plans for the
“Final Solution” were introduced around the time of the Soviet
offensive, and over the next three years more than 4 million Jews
would perish in the death camps established in occupied Poland.

14. WORLD WAR II IN THE PACIFIC (1941-43)
• With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the
United States was the only nation capable of
combating Japanese aggression
• -On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft
attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl
Harbor in Hawaii.
• -The attack on Pearl Harbor served to unify
American public opinion in favor of entering
World War II, and on December 8 Congress
declared war on Japan with only one
dissenting vote.

15. • - After a long string of Japanese victories,
the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of
Midway in June 1942, which proved to be a
turning point in the war.
• - On Guadalcanal, one of the southern
Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success
against Japanese forces in a series of battles
from August 1942 to February 1943, helping
turn the tide further in the Pacific.
• - This “island-hopping” strategy proved
successful, and Allied forces moved closer to
their ultimate goal of invading the Japanese
homeland.

16. TOWARD ALLIED VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II
• -In North Africa, British and American
forces had defeated the Italians and Germans
by 1943.
• - An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy
followed, and Mussolini’s government fell
in July 1943, though Allied fighting against
the Germans in Italy would continue until
1945.
• - On World War II’s Eastern Front, a Soviet
counteroffensive launched in November 1942
ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which
had seen some of the fiercest combat of the
war.

17. • - On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-
Day”–the Allied began a massive
invasion of Europe, landing 156,000
British, Canadian and American
soldiers on the beaches of Normandy,
France.
• Soviet troops soon advanced into
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
Romania, while Hitler gathered his
forces to drive the Americans and
British back from Germany in the
Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-
January 1945), the last major German
offensive of the war.

18. • - An intensive aerial bombardment
in February 1945 preceded the Allied
land invasion of Germany, and by the
time Germany formally surrendered
on May 8, Soviet forces had occupied
much of the country.
• - Hitler was already dead, having
committed suicide on April 30 in his
Berlin bunker.

19. WORLD WAR II ENDS (1945)
• -At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman
(who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed
the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany.
• - Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and
Okinawa (April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of Japan led
Truman to authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon–the atomic bomb–on
the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August.
• - On August 10, the Japanese government issued a statement declaring they would
accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and on September 2, U.S.
General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the
USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

20. THE ATOMIC BOMB
• At approximately 8.15am on 6 August 1945
a US B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb
on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly
killing around 80,000 people.
• The dropping of the bombs, which occurred
by executive order of US President Harry
Truman, remains the only nuclear attack in
history.
• Since 1942, more than 100,000 scientists of
the Manhattan Project had been working on
the bomb’s development.
• At the time, it was the largest collective
scientific effort ever undertaken

21. • - Directed by the Army's chief engineer,
Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the
Manhattan Project was also the most secret
wartime project in history.
• -On 16 July 1945, scientists carried out
the first trial of the bomb in the New
Mexico desert.
• Although voices within the US Military
expressed caution regarding the use of the
new weapon against Japan, Truman was
convinced that the bomb was the correct
and only option.

22. THE HOLOCAUST
• The Holocaust was the systematic,
bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution
and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi
regime and its collaborators.
• The Nazis, who came to power in Germany
in January 1933, believed that Germans
were "racially superior" and that the Jews,
deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to
the so-called German racial community.
• By 1945, the Germans and their
collaborators killed nearly two out of every
three European Jews as part of the "Final
Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the
Jews of Europe.

23. • -As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe,
the Germans and their collaborators
persecuted and murdered millions of
other people.
• In the early years of the Nazi regime,
the National Socialist government
established concentration camps to
detain real and imagined political and
ideological opponents.
• To concentrate and monitor the Jewish
population as well as to facilitate later
deportation of the Jews, the Germans
and their collaborators
created ghettos, transit camps, and
forced-labor camps for Jews during
the war years.

24. • - German SS and police units,
supported by units of the Wehrmacht
and the Waffen SS, murdered more
than a million Jewish men, women,
and children, and hundreds of
thousands of others.
• -Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi
German authorities deported millions
of Jews from Germany, from occupied
territories, and from the countries of
many of its Axis allies to ghettos and
to killing centers, often called
extermination camps, where they
were murdered in specially
developed gassing facilities.