Chapter Overviews

Chapter 19: World War II

Chapter Overviews

The German and Japanese occupations of neighboring countries led to World War II. Both countries were defeated, but not before 40 to 60 million people died because of the war.

Section 1 Paths to War
Aggressive moves by Germany and Japan set the stage for World War II. In 1935 Adolf Hitler began a massive military buildup and instituted a draft in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936 Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland which alarmed France, but neither France nor Britain responded with force. In 1936, Germany and Italy became allies, as did Germany and Japan. Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Appeasement of Germany peaked at the Munich Conference where Hitler claimed he sought only one final territory, the Czech Sudetenland and Britain and France agreed to Hitler's demands. This soon proved false as Hitler continued his invasions. When Hitler signed the Nonaggression Pact with Stalin and invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Japanese expansion into Manchuria and northern China brought condemnation from the League of Nations. Japan was at war with China. In December 1937 Japan destroyed Nanjing and massacred 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war. Next, Japan was rebuked by the United States for its efforts to exploit resources in French Indochina.

Section 2 The Course of World War II
German forces swept through central and northern Europe early in the war. After Germany occupied ¾ of France, Hitler set up the Vichy government in France. Meanwhile, the United States followed a policy of isolationism. German air attacks on Great Britain resulted in fierce British retaliation. In the east, harsh weather and a resolute Soviet Union defeated an invading German army. The Japanese conquered the Pacific but miscalculated when they attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States surprised Japan by abandoning its neutrality and entering the war to retake the Pacific. By the end of 1943, the tide had turned against Germany, Italy, and Japan. After the invasion of Normandy, the Allies liberated Paris and defeated Germany. The war in Asia continued until the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing massive casualties and bringing Japan's surrender.

Section 3 The New Order and the Holocaust
To further their war effort and Hitler's plans for Aryan expansion, the Nazis forced millions of people to resettle in Germany as forced laborers. No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews. As part of the Nazis' Final Solution, Jews were locked into cramped, unsanitary ghettos or forced to dig their own mass graves before being killed. When this proved too slow for the Nazis, they transported Europe's Jews to death camps where they were starved, worked to death, sent to die in gas chambers, or subjected to cruel "medical experiments". The Nazis killed approximately six million Jews and nine to ten million non-Jewish people. Japan showed little respect for the peoples it conquered in Southeast Asia in its effort to secure industrial markets and raw materials. Japanese treatment of prisoners of war was equally harsh. Japan professed a commitment to ending Western colonialism, but the brutality of the Japanese convinced many Asians to resist Japanese occupation.

Section 4 Home Front and Aftermath of War
World War II reached almost every area of the world, and mobilization for war brought widespread suffering and even starvation. The war caused about 20 million civilian deaths. The Soviet Union won the war by using its income for war materials; there were food and housing shortages. The United States, which did not fight the war on its own territory, sent its forces to fight and produced much of the military equipment for the Allies. Segregation in the U.S. military later led African Americans to demand civil rights. Racism and suspicion led to the wartime internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. Nazi Germany did not cut customer goods or raise military production until after the first two years of the war. Total mobilization of the economy did not come until July 1944, which was too late to save Germany from defeat. Wartime Japan was a highly mobilized society. Calls for sacrifice led some Japanese pilots, known as kamikazes, to serve in suicide missions against U.S. ships. The bombing of cities by the Allied and Axis powers destroyed buildings and cost hundreds of thousands of lives including civilians. U.S. President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, the Big Three, met at Yalta to plan the post-war world. After the war, ideological conflict between the West and the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War.