AP EUROPEAN HISTORY: WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH

TOPICS AND TERMS Triumph of the Axis Powers - Axis Powers - Italy, Germany, Japan - 1939 - Hitler invades Poland - the Polish Corridor - England, France declare war on Germany - Poland falls - Non-Aggression Pact - Russia takes the Baltic states - Nazis round up Poles for extinction - Russo-Finnish War - 1940 - Phony War (sitzkrieg) - Maginot Line - British Expeditionary Force - Nazis overrun Denmark, Norway - Wehrmacht - blitzkrieg - miracle of Dunkirk - Free French Fighters - Mussolini “invades” southern France - France surrenders to Germany - Vichy government - Marshal Philippe Petain - Battle of Britain - Luftwaffe - Royal Air Force (RAF) - the Blitz - 1941 - Britain dives into Libya - Germans invade Greece and Yugoslavia - British occupy Iran, Iraq, Syria - Germans invade the USSR - the “General Winter” - U.S. Lend Lease Act - “arsenal of democracy” - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Winston Churchill - Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor - U.S. declares war on Japan - Germany, Italy declare war on the U.S. - the Holocaust - Jews, intellectuals, gypsies, non-Aryans - also unfit, crippled, mentally challenged, etc. - would volunteer - Concentration Camps - African campaign - Gen. Erwin Rommel (aka the Desert Fox) The Tide of War Turns (mid-1942-1943) - Rommel’s Afrika Corps - el Alamein - General Montgomery - Battle of Midway - Guadalcanal - island hopping - Okinawa - Battle of Stalingrad - Allies land in North Africa - Russians advance on Germany - Casablanca Conference - unconditional surrender Allied Victory - 1943 - Allied invasion of Sicily - Teheran Conference - D-Day invasion - Normandy - Battle of the Bulge - Russia closes in from the east - Allies close in from the west - Hitler commits suicide - atomic bomb on Hiroshima - atomic bomb on Nagasaki - Japan surrenders - Gen. Douglas MacArthur Aftermath of the War - Crucial Conferences for Post-War Europe - Yalta Conference - the Big Three - the partitioning of Germany - creation of the United Nations - Potsdam Conference - the conflict for control of Europe - U.S. and USSR are main world powers - superpowers - Soviet Bloc - satellite states - Western bloc (or “free world”) - Iron Curtain Speech - Cold War

AP EUROPEAN HISTORY: WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH 1939-1953

PRACTICE ESSAY QUESTIONS 1. “The Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was more an ideological than an actual alliance.” Assess the validity of this statement. To “determine the truth” of this statement, you have to consider the ways in which the Axis partners aided each other’s war efforts. Did the Italians and the Germans actually coordinate battlefield strategy? Recall Mussolini’s “stabbing France in the back” in 1940; the North African campaign; the “Balkans Rescue”; the invasion of Sicily. Did the European Axis partners ever coordinate battle plans, send or receive war materials, plan overall strategy with the Japanese? How were they united in aims, ideology, political methods. 2. To what extent and in what ways did the U.S., the USSR, and Britain coordinate war aims and strategies? “How and how much” is the issue here. In dealing with Russian and Western cooperation, consider the Big Three conferences: Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam (after the death of Roosevelt); the second-front controversy; the material aid from the United States to Russia. The American-British alliance is more tangible: Lend-Lease; the Atlantic Charter; North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, the bombing and invasion of Germany; the Pacific War 3. The Allied decision to demand “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers lengthened the war needlessly.” Defend or refute this statement. This has been an issue much argued, “a hypothesis contrary to fact.” Would the war have ended sooner if the Allies had negotiated with the Axis governments or even with anti-government military factions? In framing your answer, consider that despite the saturation bombing of Germany’s cities, the Nazis maintained an iron grip until the end; despite assassination attempts, Hitler ruled until his suicide when the Russians were at the gates of Berlin; despite firebombing and the dropping of the first A-Bomb, the Japanese refused to surrender. 4. Contrast and compare the results of the war on both the United States and the USSR. “Show differences”: What was the destruction to the homelands of each? What political, social, or economic changes took place for each? What were the human losses? What were the war gains? “Examine similarities”: They were the only two powers - superpowers - with the strength left to influence European and world events; they had established parallel spheres of influence; they had simultaneously solidified their competing ideologies and launched the Cold War. This is an abstract question that requires crisp organization and thoughtful presentation. 5. Analyze the way the wartime cooperation of the United States and the Soviet Union degenerated, within a few years after the end of the war, into the Cold War The wartime alliance between the West and the Soviet Union was the cooperation of competing systems in order to defeat a common enemy. Strains showed early in the Russian push for a second front, manifested themselves in the tensions at Yalta and at Potsdam in the Russian refusal to allow free elections in Russian-occupied Eastern Europe. The geographic expansion of communism because of the war frightened the West. The presence of massive US. Forces in Europe frightened the Soviets.

AP EUROPEAN HISTORY: WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH

FOCUS QUESTIONS 1. List all the countries, and partial countries thereof, that were conquered by the Nazis. 2. What was the nickname for the period between the fall of Poland and France? 3. What were the provisions of the Atlantic Charter? 4. What were some of the problems between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union before the end of World War II 5. What agreements came out of the Yalta Conference? 6. How do you account for the mass movement of the European population between 1939 and 1950? 7. What were some of the attributes of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.? 8. What did Churchill mean in his “Iron Curtain” speech? 9. What soured the relationship between the West and the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference? 10. Which nations remained powerful enough to influence world affairs after World War II? 11. What did the Allies do to German cities during World War II? 12. Why is the invasion of “fortress Europe” significant? 13. Which battles helped turn the advantage in the war from the Axis to the Allies? 14. During what year did the Axis powers control almost all of Europe and North Africa? 15. What is the “Miracle at Dunkirk”?