One of the earliest tests was posed by Japan, they seized Manchuria in 1931.

The League of nations voted sanctions against Italy for having violated international law.

Western Powers denounced Hitler’s moves, but took no action; they adopted a policy of appeasement.

In 1920’s, Spain was monarchy dominated by a landowing upper class, the Catholic Church, and the military.

In 36, Francisco Franco led a revolt that set off a bloody civil war.

Both sides committed unbelievable atrocities, the ruinous struggle took almost 1 million lives.

Hitler wanted to bring all the German-speaking people into the Third Reich, and tried to gain “living space” for Germans in East Europe.

From the outset, Nazi propaganda had found fertile ground in Austria.

In the House of Commons, Neville Chamberlain declared that the Munich Pact had saved Czechoslovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon

In 1939, Hitlergobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia, the democracies failed.

In August 1939, Hitler stunned the world by announcing a nenaggression pact w/his enemy, Stalin.

On September 1, 1939, German forces stormed into Poland, and WW2 began.

Many factors contributed to World War 2, from all countries

Since 1939, people have debated issues such as why the western democracies failed to respond forcefully to the nazi threat.

Many historians today think that Hitler might have been stopped in 1936, before Germany was fully rearmed.

In September 1939, Nazi forces stormed into Poland, revealing the enormous power of Hitler’s blitzkrieg, “lighting war.”

While Germany attacked from the west, Stalin’s forces invaded from the east.

With Poland crushed, Hitler passed the winter w/out much action.

On August 12, 1940, the first wave of German bombers appeared over England’s southern coast.

For a month, the British Royal Air Force valiantly battled the German Luftwaffe.

Then the Germans changed their tactics, turning their attention from military targets to the bombing, or blitz of London.

While the Luftwaffe was blasting Britain, Axis armies were pushing into Africa, and the Balkans.

In 1940, Italian forces invaded Greece, when they met resistances, Germany came to the rescue.

By 1941, the Axis powers or their allies controlled most of Western Europe.

In Operation Barbarosssa, Hitler unleashed a new blitzkrieg, 3 million Germans poured into Russia.

There, the German drive stalled, like Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812, Hitler’s forces weren’t prepared for the fury of Russia’s winter.

Russians suffered appalling hardships, the 2 and a half year siege of Leningrad began in September

In early 1941, FDR convinced Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act.

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly on a warship in the Atlantic.

They pledged to support the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.

In December 1941, the Allies gained a vital boost when a surprose action by Japan suddenly pitched the United States into the war.

In 1940, Japan advanced into French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia.

Japan and the united States held talks to ease the growing tension.

Hitler’s new order grouw out of his racial obsessions, he set up puppet governments in Western European countries that were peopled by Aryans or related races.

In some cases, friends, neighbors, or others concealed or protected Jews from the holocaust.

The Nazis deliberately set out to destroy the Jews for no other reason than religious and ethnic heritage.

After the united States entered the war, the Allied leaders met periodically to hammer out their strategy.

Roosevelt felt that Churchill had ambitions to expand the British imperial power.

Democratic governments in the united States and Britian directed economic resources into the war effort.

During the years of 1942, and 1943, the Allies won serverl victories that would turn the tide of the battle.

They then turned the tables on the Desert Fox, driving the Axis forces back across Libya into Tunisia.

Hitler sent the German troops to rescue Mussolini and stiffen the will of Italians fighting in the North side.

Another major turning point in the war occurred in the Soviet union, after their advance in 41, the Germans were stalled outside Moscow and Leningrad.

As winter closed in, a bitter street by street, house by house struggle raged.

After the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army took the offensive, they lifted the siege of Leningrad and drove the invaders out of the Soviet Union.

By 1944, the Allies were at last ready to open the long awaited second front in Europe-- the invasion of France

he and other Allied leaders faced teh enourmous task of planning the operation and assembling troops and supplies.

They targeted factories and destroyed aircraft that might be used against the invasion force.

A major turning point in the Pacific war occurred just six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The goal of the campaign was to recapture some Japanese held islands while bypassing other.

On the captured islands, the Americans built air bases to enable them to carry the war much closer than Japan.

To win the assault on Fortress Europe, the Allies had to use devastating force.

As they advanced into Belgium in December 1944, Germany launched a massive counterattack.

As Soviet troops fought their way into the city, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker. He knew the end was near.

Some American officials estimated that an invasion of Japan would cost a million or more casualties.

While Allied military leaders planned for invasion, scientists offered another way to end the war.

To save thier homeland, young Japanese became kamikaze pilots, who undertook suicide missions, crashing their planes loaded w/explosives into American warships.

After the surrender, American forces occupied teh smoldering ruins of Japan.

In both countries, the Allies faced difficult decisions about the future.

In Germany meanwhile, the Allies had divided hitler’s fallen empireinto four zones of occupation- French, British, American, and Russian.

While the Allies celebrated victory, the appalling costs of the war began to emerge.

In Europe about 38 million people world wide. ;

Numbers alone didn’t tell the story of the Nazi nightmare in Europe of the Japanese brutality in Asia.

As in 1919, the World War 2 Allies set up an international organization to secure the peac.

In April 1945, delegates from about fifty nations met in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations

The organization would take on many world problems, from preventing disease and improving education to protecting refugees and aiding nations to develop economically.

Amid the rubble of war, a new power structure emerged that would shape events in the postwar world.

During the war, the Soviet union and teh nations of the West had cooperated to defeat Nazi Germany.

As the Red Army had pushed German forces out of Eastern Europe, it left behind occupying forces.

Like Churchill, President Truman saw communism as an evil force creeping across Europe and threatening countries around the world.

The Truman Doctrine was rooted in the idea of containment, limiting communism to the areas already under Soviet control.

In 1949, as tensions grew, the United States, Cana, and nine Western European countries formed a military alliance.