Chapter 26 Notes The German Path to War Adolf Hitler believed that Germany could build a great civilization. To do this, Germany needed more land to support more German people. He wanted lands in the east in the Soviet Union and prepared for war. His plan was to use the land for German settlements. The Slavic people would become slaves. In March of 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, which was supposed to be a demilitarized area. France would not oppose Germany for this treaty violation without British support. Great Britain saw Hitler s actions as reasonable and therefore did not call for a military response. This was the beginning of the policy of appeasement, one based on the belief that if European states satisfied the reasonable demands of dissatisfied states, the dissatisfied states would be content, and peace would be preserved. Hitler gained new allies. Benito Mussolini was the Fascist leader of Italy. He invaded Ethiopia in 1935 with the support of German troops. In 1936, both Italy and Germany sent troops to Spain to support General Francisco Franco. By 1937, Germany had become a very powerful nation. In 1938, Hitler pursued a long-held goal, union with Austria, or Anschluss. By threatening to invade Austria, Hitler forced the Austrians to put Austrian Nazis in charge of the government. The new government then invited German troops into Austria to help maintain order. Hitler then annexed Austria to Germany. In 1938, Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland in northwestern Czechoslovakia be given to Germany. After the Munich Conference, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that the settlement meant peace for our time. He believed Hitler s promises that Germany would make no more demands. After Munich, Hitler was even more convinced that France and Great Britain would not fight. In March of 1939, Hitler invaded western Czechoslovakia, and made a Nazi puppet state out of Slovakia in eastern Czechoslovakia. France and Great Britain began to react. Great Britain said it would protect Poland if Hitler invaded. France and Britain began negotiations with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. They knew that they would need the Soviet Union to help contain the Nazis. Hitler was afraid of an alliance between the West and the Soviet Union. In August of 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. They promised not to attack each other. Hitler offered Stalin eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Hitler knew that eventually he would break the pact. However, it enabled him to invade Poland without fear. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.
The Japanese Path to War In September 1931, Japanese soldiers seized Manchuria. When the League of Nations investigated and condemned the attack, Japan withdrew from the league. For several years, Japan strengthened its hold on Manchuria, which it renamed Manchukuo. Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek tried to avoid a war with Japan. In July 1937, the Chinese and Japanese clashed south of BeijingThe Japanese seized the capital of Nanjing. Chiang Kai-shek refused to surrender and moved the capital. Japanese military leaders wanted to establish a New Order in East Asia. The order would include Japan, Manchuria, and China. The Japanese thought that, as the only modernized country, they could guide the other East Asian nations to prosperity. The Japanese needed natural resources. They looked to expand into Southeast Asia for sources. At the same time they knew that they risked strong response from European colonial powers and the United States. They decided to take the risk. The United States responded by imposing economic sanctions, or restrictions on trade that are intended to enforce international law, unless Japan withdrew to its borders of 1931. The economic sanctions were a very real threat. In the end, after long debate, Japan decided to launch a surprise attack on U.S. and European colonies in Southeast Asia. Europe at War The 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany took just four weeks. The speed and efficiency of the German army stunned the world. Called blitzkrieg ( lightning war ), the Germans used panzer divisions (strike forces of about 300 tanks and soldiers) that were supported by airplanes. On September 28, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland. The Germans trapped the entire British army and French forces on the beaches of Dunkirk. The British navy and private boats were able to evacuate 338,000 Allied troops, barely averting a complete disaster. On June 22, the French signed an armistice with the Germans, who occupied three-fifths of France. An authoritarian French regime under German control was set up to govern the rest of the country. Led by Marshal Henri Pétain, it was named Vichy France. Germany now controlled western and central Europe. Only Britain remained undefeated. In August 1940, the Luftwaffe German air force began a major bombing offensive against military targets in Britain. Aided by a good radar system, the British fought back and inflicted crippling losses on the Germans. Having lost the Battle of Britain, Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely at the end of September. Hitler was convinced that the way to defeat Britain was to first smash the Soviet Union. He planned to invade in the spring of 1941 but was delayed by problems in the Balkans. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The attack on the Soviet Union stretched out for 1,800 miles. German troops moved quickly and captured two million Russian soldiers by November. The Germans were within 25 miles of Moscow. However, winter came early in 1941 and, combined with fierce Russian resistance, forced the Germans to halt. This marked the first time in the war that the Germans had been stopped. The Germans were not equipped for the bitter Russian winter. In December, the Soviet army counterattacked. Japan at War On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In spite of some fierce resistance in places such as the Philippines, by the spring of 1942, the Japanese controlled almost all of Southeast Asia and much of the western Pacific. The Japanese created the Greater East-Asia Coprosperity Sphere, which included the entire region under Japanese control. Japan announced its intention to liberate colonial nations in Southeast Asia, but it first needed their natural resources. The Japanese treated the occupied countries as conquered lands. The Japanese thought that their attacks on the U.S. fleet would destroy the U.S. Navy and lead the Americans to accept Japanese domination in the Pacific. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor had the opposite effect. It united the American people and convinced the nation that it should enter the war against Japan. Hitler thought that the Americans would be too involved in the Pacific to fight in Europe. Four days after Pearl Harbor, he declared war on the United States. The Allies Advance A new coalition was formed called the Grand Alliance. It included Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The three nations agreed to focus on military operations and ignore political differences. They agreed in 1943 to fight until the Axis Powers Germany, Italy, and Japan surrendered unconditionally. At the beginning of 1942, the Germans continued to fight the war against Britain and the Soviet Union. The Germans were also fighting in North Africa. The Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel broke through British lines in Egypt and advanced on Alexandria. By the fall of 1942, the war had turned against the Germans. In the summer of 1942, the British in North Africa had stopped the Germans at El Alamein. The Germans retreated. On the Eastern Front, Hitler decided to attack Stalingrad, a major Soviet industrial center. Between November 1942 and February 1943 the Soviets counterattacked. They surrounded the Germans and cut off their supply lines. In May, the Germans were forced to surrender. In 1942, the Allies had their first successes in the Pacific. In June, the Battle of Midway Island was the turning point in the Pacific war. U.S. planes destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers and established naval superiority.
Last Years of the War By early 1943, the tide had turned against the Axis forces. In May, the Axis forces surrendered in Tunisia, North Africa. The Allies then moved north and invaded Italy in September. Winston Churchill called Italy the soft underbelly of Europe. After the Allies captured Sicily, Mussolini was removed from office. However, the Germans rescued Mussolini and set him up as dictator of a puppet German state in northern Italy. The Allies had long been planning a second front in western Europe. They planned to invade France from Great Britain across the English Channel. On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), the Allies under U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed on the beaches in Normandy. Though the Germans were expecting the invasion to take place in another location, there was still heavy resistance. However, because the Germans thought the invasion was a diversion, they were slow to respond. This gave the Allies the chance to set up a beachhead. By landing two million men and a half-million vehicles, the Allies eventually broke through the German lines. The Soviets had turned the tables on the Germans in 1943. In the north, Soviet troops occupied Warsaw in January 1945 and entered Berlin in April. Along a southern front, the Soviets swept through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. By January 1945, Hitler had moved into an underground bunker in Berlin. In the end he blamed the Jews for the war. On April 30, he committed suicide. Two days before, Italian partisans resistance fighters had shot Mussolini. On May 7, 1945, German commanders surrendered, and the war in Europe was over. The war in Asia continued. Beginning in 1943, the Allied forces had gone on the offensive and moved across the Pacific. As the Allies came closer to the Japanese home islands in 1945, U.S. president Harry S Truman decided to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. He hoped that this would avoid an invasion of Japan. The first bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were completely destroyed. Thousands died immediately, and thousands more died later of radiation sickness. The Japanese surrendered on August 14. World War II was over. Seventeen million people had died in battle in World War II. Some estimate that, including civilian losses, as many as seventy million people died in the war. The New Order in Europe In 1942, the Nazis controlled Europe from the English Channel in the west to near Moscow in the east. The Nazis were especially ruthless in eastern Europe. The Nazis saw the Slavic peoples as racially inferior. The Nazis wanted the lands for German settlers. Soon after they conquered Poland, they began to put their plans for an Aryan racial empire into action.
Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, was put in charge of German resettlement plans in the east. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler anticipated turning all the people into slaves and inhabiting the conquered lands with German peasants. Himmler stated that German plans could involve killing 30 million Slavs. Due to labor shortages in Germany, the Nazis starting rounding up foreign workers as slave labor. By the summer of 1944, seven million Europeans were laboring in Germany. Another seven million were forced to work in their own countries. Forced labor caused problems for the Germans. Bringing workers to Germany reduced the number of workers left in occupied countries. The Germans brutal tactics led more and more people to resist Nazi occupation forces. The Holocaust Hitler s vision divided the world into the Aryan race and those who would destroy it. He was convinced that the Jewish people were the greatest threat to his Aryan Empire. He directed that Jews in Europe be exterminated completely. His plan was called the Final Solution. The SS under Himmler was responsible for carrying out the Final Solution. The Final Solution was genocide, or the physical extermination, of the Jewish people. Reinhard Heydrich was the head of the SS s Security Service. He was in charge of the Final Solution. He created special forces, called Einsatzgruppen, to carry out Nazi plans. In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen began acting as mobile killing units. They followed the army, rounded up all Jews, and executed them. They buried the victims in mass graves. Perhaps one million Jews were killed in this way. However, the Nazis found that this process was too slow. The next step was to build death camps. Six death camps were built in Poland. The largest was Auschwitz. About 30 percent of the arrivals were sent to work in a labor camps. Many of those were starved or worked to death. The rest were exterminated in mass gas chambers. By the spring of 1942, the death camps were fully operating. Throughout the war, the Final Solution continued to have top priority. Even as the Nazis were losing the war in 1944, Jews were being shipped from Greece and Hungary to the death camps. The Final Solution had priority over the military for trains. The Nazis were also responsible for the deaths of at least nine to ten million non-jewish people. About 40 percent of Europe s Gypsies were killed, as were Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians who lost their lives as slave laborers. The Nazis also probably killed at least three to four million Soviet prisoners of war. This mass slaughter of European civilians, particularly European Jews, is called the Holocaust. Though the Allies knew about the death camps, they chose to concentrate on ending the war. They did not learn the full truth until the war was over. Young people of all ages were victims of World War II. Jewish children were the first to be put to death in the gas chambers because they could not work.
1.2 million Jewish children died in the Holocaust. By 1945 there were 13 million orphaned children in Europe. The New Order in Asia Japan hoped to use its newly conquered countries as sources of raw materials, such as tin, oil, and rubber. The possessions would also provide a market for Japanese goods. The Japanese used the slogan Asia for the Asiatics. They contacted anticolonialist forces and promised them that local governments would be set up under Japanese control. However, each territory was actually run by the Japanese military. In Vietnam, the Japanese took rice from the people. A million people starved to death in 1944 and 1945. Like the Germans, the Japanese had little respect for the lives of people in occupied countries. In Nanjing, China, the Japanese soldiers looted the city and killed and raped its people. The Japanese used labor forces composed of prisoners of war and local peoples. In one case, 12,000 Allied prisoners of war died while constructing the Burma-Thailand railway in 1943. Nationalists in occupied countries were conflicted. Some, like Ho Chi Minh in French Indochina, or Vietnam, turned against the Japanese and worked with the Allies. The Mobilization of Peoples: Four Examples Even more than World War I, World War II was a total war. Economic mobilization was more extensive. In the Soviet Union initial defeats led to drastic emergency measures. For example, Leningrad was under siege for nine hundred days. Over a million people died there due to food shortages. People had to eat dogs, cats, and mice. The military and industrial mobilization of the Soviet Union produced 78,000 tanks and 98,000 artillery pieces. In 1943, 55 percent of the national income went to war materials. As a result there were severe shortages of food and housing. The war did not come to the home territory of the United States. The country became an arsenal for the Allies. The United States produced much of the military equipment needed to fight the Axis. In 1943, the United States was building six ships a day and ninety-six thousand planes per year. African Americans were profoundly impacted by the war. Over a million African Americans moved from the South to cities in the North and West to work in war industries. A million African Americans joined the military. They served in segregated units. Angered by their treatment, many returned from the war ready to fight for their civil rights. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were moved to internment camps away from the ocean. Sixty-five percent of them had been born in the United States. In spite of that, they were required to take loyalty oaths and were forced to live in camps surrounded by barbed wire.
Of American descendants of the Axis Power countries, Japanese Americans were the only group to be put into camps. In 1939 in Germany, many civilians feared that the war would bring disaster. To keep up public morale, Hitler refused to cut consumer-goods production for the first two years of the war. This decision may have cost Germany the war. After defeats on the Russian front, the policy changed. Early in 1942, Hitler increased arms production and the size of the army. Albert Speer became minister for armaments and munitions. He tripled armament production between 1942 and 1943. In July 1944, the German economy was totally mobilized. Wartime Japan was a highly mobilized society. The government controlled prices, wages, labor, and resources. The Japanese government opposed employing women. General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister from 1941 to 1944, argued that employing women would weaken the family system and the nation. The Japanese met labor shortages by using Korean and Chinese laborers. Frontline Civilians: The Bombing of Cities Bombing was used against military targets, enemy troops, and civilian populations. World War II was the first war in which large masses of civilians were bombed. Toward the end of World War I, there had been a few bombing raids against civilian targets. The raids had caused great public outcry. After the war, European nations began to think that bombing civilian targets could be used to force governments to make peace. During the 1930s, European nations developed long-range bombers. The first sustained civilian bombing was done by the Germans against London. There were heavy casualties and tremendous damage. In spite of the heavy bombing, British morale remained high. The idea that bombing civilians would force peace was proved wrong. In 1942, the British began major bombing campaigns against German cities. Ignoring their own experience, the British hoped that the bombing would break the morale of the German people. Thousands of bombers were used to attack major German cities. The bombing of Germany added to civilian terror. The Germans particularly feared incendiary bombs, which spread fire when they exploded. In some cities, such as Dresden, enormous firestorms resulted from the bombing, killing hundreds of thousands of people and burning everything that could burn. The bombing of Germany by the Allies may have killed a half-million civilians. In spite of the terrible destruction, the bombing did not seem to sap the morale of the German people or destroy the German industrial capacity. However, the destruction of transportation systems and fuel supplies strongly impacted the ability of the Germans to supply their military forces. In November 1944, the Allies began attacks on Japanese cities. By that time, the Japanese air force could no longer defend Japan. By the following summer, a fourth of Japanese dwellings and many of its industries had been destroyed. The bombing of civilians then reached an unprecedented level when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Peace and a New War After the end of World War II, a new international conflict emerged, the Cold War. The Cold War was primarily an ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It dominated world politics until the end of the 1980s. In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met in Tehran to decide the future course of the war. Their countries were known as the Big Three of the Grand Alliance. The Big Three decided that the Americans and British would attack Germany through France in 1944. They would then meet the Soviet forces somewhere in a defeated Germany. This meant the Soviet troops would probably liberate most of Eastern Europe. They also agreed to partition postwar Germany. In February of 1945, the Big Three powers met at Yalta in southern Russia. Roosevelt and Churchill realized that eleven million Soviet troops were taking possession of much of Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin was suspicious of the Western powers and wanted a Communist buffer between the West and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt wanted to create the United Nations organization to help resolve difficult international disagreements. The Big Three powers at Yalta accepted his plans and set the founding meeting of the United Nations for April 1945, in San Francisco. The Big Three also confirmed at the Yalta Conference that Germany would have to surrender unconditionally. They agreed to divide Germany into four zones. The zones would be occupied and governed by France, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Potsdam Conference was held in July 1945. Roosevelt had died in April and was replaced by Harry Truman. Truman demanded that free elections be held throughout Eastern Europe. The only way to force free elections in Eastern Europe would have been to invade the Soviet-held territory. Many Western leaders thought that the Soviets intended to spread communism throughout the world. The Soviets saw Western policy, particularly that of the United States, as global capitalist expansionism. In March 1946, Winston Churchill declared that an iron curtain had descended across the continent. This iron curtain divided Europe into two hostile sides. Stalin responded by calling Churchill s speech a call to war with the Soviet Union. The world seemed to be bitterly divided again.