WWII A-Z

1. WWII A-Z Student Sample for U.S. History Ms. Miranda

2. Adolf Hitler •   Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 and Führer (Leader) of Germany from 1934 until his death. He was leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazi Party. German political and military leader and one of the 20th century's most powerful dictators, Hitler converted Germany into a fully militarized society and launched World War II in 1939. He made anti-Semitism a keystone of his propaganda and policies and built the Nazi Party into a mass movement. He hoped to conquer the entire world.

3. Benito Mussolini • BENITO MUSSOLINI, (1883-1945), was the Fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He centralized all power in himself as the leader (il duce) of the Fascist party and attempted to create an Italian empire, ultimately in alliance with Hitler's Germany. The defeat of Italian arms in WORLD WAR II brought an end to his imperial dream and led to his downfall.

4. Concentration Camps • Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps were greatly expanded in 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime. They grew rapidly through the 1930s as political opponents and many other groups of people were incarcerated without trial or judicial process.

5. D-Day • D-Day is the name given to the landing of 160,000 Allied troops in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. The success of the invasion of Normandy was really the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The invasion, also called “Operation Overlord,” involved five separate landings by American, British, and Canadian troops and was commanded by American General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

6. General Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most famous U.S. Army general of World War II and the 34th president of the United States. A career Army man, "Ike" rose to the level of five-star general and oversaw the Allied forces in Europe, including the famous D-Day invasion of France in 1944. After the war he served briefly as president of Columbia University, then was chosen as the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1952.

7. Fascism • Fascism is the name of an authoritarian political movement founded in 1919 by Benito Mussolini. The Italian name of the movement, fascismo, is derived from fascio, "bundle, (political) group," but also refers to the movement's emblem, the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around a projecting axe-head that was carried before an ancient Roman magistrate by an attendant as a symbol of authority and power. The name of Mussolini's group of revolutionaries was soon used for similar nationalistic movements in other countries that sought to gain power through violence and ruthlessness, such as National Socialism.

8. Gestapo • Political police of Nazi Germany. It was created by Hermann Goring in 1933 from the political and espionage units of the Prussian police and by Heinrich Himmler from the police of the remaining German states. Himmler was given command in 1934. The Gestapo operated without civil restraints, and its actions were not subject to judicial appeal. Thousands of Jews, leftists, intellectuals, trade unionists, political clergy, and homosexuals disappeared into concentration camps after being arrested by the Gestapo.

9. Holocaust • The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

10. Italy • Italy entered World War II on June 10, 1940. In September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. By 1941, however, the Italians had suffered multiple military defeats; in Greece and against the British in Egypt. It was only through German intervention in Yugoslavia, the Balkans and North Africa that Italy managed to avert a major military collapse. By 1943 the Italian people had lost faith in Mussolini and no longer supported the war; Italy had lost its colonies, the allies had taken North Africa in May and Sicily had been invaded in July.

11. Japan • In 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the French Vichy government, and joined the Axis powers Germany and Italy. These actions intensified Japan's conflict with the United States and Great Britain which reacted with an oil boycott. The resulting oil shortage and failures to solve the conflict diplomatically made Japan decide to capture the oil rich Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and to start a war with the US and Great Britain.

12. Kristallnacht • On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed during the pogroms.

13. Lend-Lease • Lend-Lease was a program of the United States Federal government during World War II which enabled the United States to provide the Allied nations with war material while the US was still officially a neutral country. The Lend-Lease program began in March 1941, nine months before the US entered the war in December of 1941.

14. Manhattan Project • The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

15. Nazis • Nazi ideology stressed the failures of communism, liberalism, and democracy, and supported the "racial purity of the German people" and that of other Northwestern Europeans. The Nazis persecuted those they perceived as either race enemies or Lebensunwertes Leben, that is "life unworthy of living". This included Jews, Slavs, Roma, and so-called "Mischlings" along with Communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, and others.

16. J. Robert Oppenheimer • J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. For this reason he is remembered as "The Father of the Atomic Bomb".

17. Poland • Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 was the tripwire that set off World War II, the most devastating period in the history of the Polish state. Between 1939 and 1945, 6 million people, over 15 percent of Poland's population, perished, with the uniquely cruel inclusion of mass extermination of Jews in concentration camps in Poland. Besides its human toll, the war left much of the country in ruins, inflicting indelible material and psychic scars.

18. Q-ship • Q-ships, also known as Q-boats, Decoy Vessels, Special Service Ships or Mystery Ships, were heavily armed merchant ships with concealed weaponry, designed to lure submarines into making surface attacks. This gave Q-ships the chance to open fire and sink them. The basic ethos of every Q-ship was to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. • They were used by the United States Navy as a countermeasure against German U-boats and Japanese submarines.

19. Radar • During World War II, battles were won by the side that was first to spot enemy airplanes, ships, or submarines. To give the Allies an edge, British and American scientists developed radar technology to "see" for hundreds of miles, even at night. The research that went into improving radar helped set the stage for post-war research into the transistor.

20. Sea lion Operation • The Sea Lion Operation was Nazi Germany's plan to invade the United Kingdom during World War II, beginning in 1940. To have had any chance of success, however, the operation would have required air supremacy over the English Channel. With the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and never carried out.[

21. Tanks • Beginning in 1940, new tank designs were prepared. The Battle of France had shown the importance of medium tanks, and the United States Army had a requirement for a medium tank with a 75 mm gun. Eventually, this would become the famous Medium Tank M4, the most important tank of the war for the Western Allies.

22. U-boat • Each country in the war had an area which they excelled, and for the Germans that was the powerful U-boats with cannons, big guns and torpedoes, sailing the Atlantic.  There were many operations for U-boats during WWII. 

23. V-Mail • During World War Two, mail and morale were one and the same, and early in 1942 the military devised a simple method to deliver millions of pieces of very important news from home to the servicemen serving in Europe. It was called V-Mail, and, of course, the V meant Victory (The hyphen in the phrase "V-Mail" was printed as three dots and a dash — Morse code for the letter "V“.

24. Warsaw • The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish Ghetto in any German-occupied country, it was located in occupied Poland during World War II. The ghetto was split into two areas, the "small ghetto", generally inhabited by richer Jews and the "large ghetto", where conditions were more difficult. The two ghettos were linked by a single footbridge. The Nazis then closed the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, by building a wall and deploying armed guards.

25. Xenophobia • Xenophobia is a dislike and/or fear of that which is unknown or different from oneself. No community was more significantly affected by the World War II "enemy alien" detentions than Japanese Americans. An estimated 110,000 were detained in internment camps during the war.

26. Yalta Conference • The Yalta Conference, was the February 4–11, 1945 wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively—for the purpose of discussing Europe's postwar reorganization. Mainly, it was intended to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe.

27. Force Z • "Force Z" was the British Battleship HMS Prince of Wales and Battle cruiser HMS Repulse sunk by the Japanese ARMY twin engine bombers on December 10, 1941. The result of which, convinced Naval Officers world wide, that the Battleship no longer ruled the seas; AIRCRAFT now ruled the seas, via the Aircraft Carrier.