WWII, Stalin & the Soviets

Now that we're moving towards the 21st century, you will probably know a lot more about the events that we will be covering. This is good - less work for all of us to do & less to learn! For all that I haven't covered (because I'm both busy and lazy), please consult John Green's Crash Course.

Stalin & the Soviets

Stalin & his characteristic mustache

• Stalin wanted to turn the Soviet Union into an industrial nation, so he introduced Five Year Plans in 1928. The Plans set goals for industrial output and made the Soviet Union a major power before WWII.
• Property and farmland was taken by the government. A group of peasants called the kulaks began to dissent, and soldiers forced them to go to slave labor camps (called gulags).
• Famine was common among the Soviet peasantry.
• Stalin also persecuted members of the Communist party that he felt did not support his ideas. 

The Great Depression & the Road to War

• The 1929 US stock market crash caused businesses to fail, banks to close, and many people to lose their homes and jobs. Many moved West to find new employment. 
• The Depression was global, with Germany and Japan being affected strongly.
• Some countries turned to dictatorship to help their failing economies.
• Benito Mussolini took over Italy and created the Fascist Party, which would later join Hitler in the WWII Axis alliance. 
• Hitler took over Germany in 1933 and started carrying out policies against those he deemed "inferior".
• In 1935, Hitler built up his army and created an air force - violating the Treaty of Versailles.
• Both Germany and Italy took freedoms from their people, but when Hitler invaded Poland, his motives became clear to the world.

East Asia

Mao Zedong

• In 1931, Japan conquered the province of Manchuria in China, thinking that it would solve their economic problems.
• The Chinese Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek fought the Japanese and the Communists (led by Mao Zedong). The Communists fled to the northwest in the Long March.
• In 1937, Japan conquered most of china's coastline, but they gained few advantages in the resulting war.(Spoiler: they lost)

World War II

• WWII used new technologies and covered entire oceans and continents. Hitler's method of blitzkrieg ("lightning war" - invading a country and assaulting it with all sorts of bombs and other weapons so quickly that they barely knew what had happened until they were taken over) was especially effective. 
• In 1941, Germany turned on it's once-ally, the Soviet Union, and tried to invade. The winter of 1941/2 and the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad severely weakened the Nazis. 
• The US got involved in the war after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Japan attacked because the US had stopped sending them supplies vital to the war. The Americans began to push Japan out of the countries it had conquered by mid-1942.



The D-day invasion of Normandy



An atomic bomb blast (from a test on Bikini Atoll)

• In 1944, the Allied powers landed in Normandy (France) on D-day, and then fought their way to Germany.                           

• The August 1945 bombings of Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan to surrender. 
• After Japan was defeated, Mao Zedong took over China when Chiang Kai-shek's army failed to maintain control.
• The war caused 60 million deaths, many of them of civilians.
• In the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered nearly 11 million people, 6 million of them Jews. This comes out to 1 in 6 deaths in the war.
• Industrial economies, such as the US and Soviet Union, mobilized civilians to manufacture war materials. The booming US economy provided jobs for woman and minorities. 
• The war damaged environments in war zones, some of them changing forever (Hiroshima and Nagasaki)