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| 4383356027 | Blitzkrieg | A German term for "lightning war," blitzkrieg is a military tactic designed to create disorganization among enemy forces through the use of mobile forces and locally concentrated firepower. Its successful execution results in short military campaigns, which preserves human lives and limits the expenditure of artillery. German forces tried out the blitzkrieg in Poland in 1939 before successfully employing the tactic with invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands and France in 1940. | 0 | |
| 4383408142 | Battle of Britain 1940-1941 | In the summer and fall of 1940, German and British air forces clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest sustained bombing campaign to that date. A significant turning point of World War II, the Battle of Britain ended when Germany's Luftwaffe failed to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force despite months of targeting Britain's air bases, military posts and, ultimately, its civilian population. Britain's decisive victory saved the country from a ground invasion and possible occupation by German forces while proving that air power alone could be used to win a major battle. | 1 | |
| 4383448274 | Battle of Britain, Germans Downfall | but a combination of bad intelligence and British attacks on Berlin led the Luftwaffe to change its operational approach to massive attacks on London. The first attack on London on September 7 was quite successful; the second, on September 15, failed not only with heavy losses, but also with a collapse of morale among German bomber crews when British fighters appeared in large numbers and shot down many of the Germans | 2 | |
| 4383471262 | Destroyers for Bases | US gave older ships to the British in exchange for access to Caribbean ports controlled by the English | 3 | |
| 4383483032 | Lend Lease | Proposed in late 1940 and passed in March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act was the principal means for providing U.S. military aid to foreign nations during World War II. It authorized the president to transfer arms or any other defense materials for which Congress appropriated money to "the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States." By allowing the transfer of supplies without compensation to Britain, China, the Soviet Union and other countries, the act permitted the United States to support its war interests without being overextended in battle. | 4 | |
| 4384074980 | General Tojo | Headed the Japanese military government. Leader of the invasion of China to protect Manchuran resources. Supported the attack on the United State and Great Britain and became and Allie of Germany. | 5 | |
| 4384136179 | Pearl Harbor | Tensions were high between Japan and the US before Pearl Harbor. THe US did not like what they were doing to China and started cutting off some of their supplies. This did not make Japan any weaker, it just made them mad. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In all, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor crippled or destroyed nearly 20 American ships and more than 300 airplanes. Dry docks and airfields were likewise destroyed. Most important, almost 2,500 men were killed and another 1,000 were wounded. | 6 | |
| 4384237253 | The Battle of Stalingrad | The German sixth army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad expecting to take it in short order on July 17, 1942 . When they showed up they were met with Russian resistance. The Germans were able to force their way into Stalingrad. The fighting was street fighting resulting in tremendous loses. The Germans were able to raise the swastika flag in the center of town. At this point the Germans were running lo won supplies and men. This is when the Russians sent in their counter offence. The Russians had the Germans encircled, which they coul dhave retreated, but Hitler would not allow. The supplies for the German never arrived and they were forced to surrender February 2, 1943. | 7 | |
| 4384371405 | Second Front | The Soviets and Stalin wanted a major attack in Western Europe to draw the Nazi troops out of the Soviet Union. The rest of the allies did not have enough men ti do this. | 8 | |
| 4384419766 | D-Day Normandy | Lead by Dwight Eisenhower, the Allies planned an attack on Germany. The Allies were creating diversions to throw off the Germans to where they would actually attack. By dawn on June 6, thousands of paratroopers and glider troops were already on the ground behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads. The amphibious invasions began at 6:30 a.m. The British and Canadians overcame light opposition to capture beaches codenamed Gold, Juno and Sword, as did the Americans at Utah Beach. U.S. forces faced heavy resistance at Omaha Beach, where there were over 2,000 American casualties. However, by day's end, approximately 156,000 Allied troops had successfully stormed Normandy's beaches.According to some estimates, more than 4,000 Allied troops lost their lives in the D-Day invasion, with thousands more wounded or missing. | 9 | |
| 4384594758 | Nuremberg Trials | Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity. | 10 | |
| 4384672996 | Percentage Agreement | an agreement between Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill during the Fourth Moscow Conference on October 1944, about how to divide various European countries into spheres of influence. | 11 | |
| 4386230884 | Yalta Conference | The February 1945 Yalta Conference was the second wartime meeting of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the conference, the three leaders agreed to demand Germany's unconditional surrender and began plans for a post-war world. Stalin also agreed to permit free elections in Eastern Europe and to enter the Asian war against Japan, for which he was promised the return of lands lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Although most of these agreements were initially kept secret, the revelations of the conference particulars became controversial after Soviet-American wartime cooperation degenerated into the Cold War. | 12 | |
| 4386507107 | Domino Theory | The domino theory, which governed much of U.S. foreign policy beginning in the early 1950s, held that a communist victory in one nation would quickly lead to a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighboring states. In Southeast Asia, the United States government used the domino theory to justify its support of a non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist government of North Vietnam, and ultimately its increasing involvement in the long-running Vietnam War (1954-75). In fact, the American failure to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam had much less of a global impact than had been assumed by the domino theory. Though communist regimes did arise in Laos and Cambodia after 1975, communism failed to spread throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. | 13 | |
| 4386602272 | The Truman Doctrine | With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. | 14 | |
| 4386650527 | The Marshall Plan | an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion (approximately $130 billion in current dollar value as of March 2016) in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-devastated regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, make Europe prosperous again, and prevent the spread of communism. The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total), followed by France (18%) and West Germany (11%). Some 18 European countries received Plan benefits | 15 | |
| 4387203199 | The Berlin Crisis | In 1958 the Soviets gave a speech demanding that the US, Great Britain, and French pull out of Berlin. West Berlin remained under western control, but it was located deep inside East German territory, and that made its protection from communist takeover a constant challenge for the western powers. The Soviet leader Khruschev and the US leader Kennedy, met to discuss the issue but neither could come to an understanding. Kennedy starting getting reserves together, as Russia did the same. In 1961 the Berlin wall went up, seperating west germany from east Germany. This became one of the most tense moments of the war. One wrong move on either side and a war could have broken out. | 16 | |
| 4387491926 | The Korean Conflict | The Korean conflict is based on the division between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north and the Republic of Korea in the south, both of which claim to be the government of the whole country. During the Cold War, North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union, China, and other Communist states, and South Korea was backed by the United States and its allies. | 17 | |
| 4387527237 | Cuban Revolution | The Cuban Revolution (1953-59) was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the U.S.-backed authoritarian government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953,[4] and continued sporadically until the rebels finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. The 26th of July Movement later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Communist Party in October 1965.[5] Batista became anti-communist which helped with relations with US, but the Cubans, especially Castro did not approve, and they revolted. | 18 | |
| 4387571413 | Bay of Pigs | On January 1, 1959, a young Cuban nationalist named Fidel Castro (1926-) drove his guerilla army into Havana and overthrew General Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), the nation's American-backed president. For the next two years, officials at the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attempted to push Castro from power. Finally, in April 1961, the CIA launched what its leaders believed would be the definitive strike: a full-scale invasion of Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro took over. However, the invasion did not go well: The invaders were badly outnumbered by Castro's troops, and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting. | 19 | |
| 4387593336 | The Cuban Missile Crisis | During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. | 20 | |
| 4387634242 | Ho Chi Minh | Ho Chi Minh first emerged as an outspoken voice for Vietnamese independence while living as a young man in France during World War I. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Communist Party and traveled to the Soviet Union. He helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, in 1941. At World War II's end, Viet Minh forces seized the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi and declared a Democratic State of Vietnam (or North Vietnam) with Ho as president. Known as "Uncle Ho," he would serve in that position for the next 25 years, becoming a symbol of Vietnam's struggle for unification during a long and costly conflict with the strongly anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam and its powerful ally, the United States. | 21 | |
| 4387655314 | Geneva Accord | During the Geneva conference, they made proposal. On Indochina, the conference produced a set of documents known as the Geneva Accords. These agreements temporarily separated Vietnam into two zones, a northern zone to be governed by the Việt Minh, and a southern zone to be governed by the State of Vietnam, then headed by former emperor Bảo Đại. | 22 |
