AP European History

WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH 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