WWII, strategic bombing, atomic bomb

1. Chapter 26
“It was a denial of God. It was a denial of man. It was the
destruction of the world in miniature form.”
-Auschwitz Survivor Hugo Gryn

2. War demanded massive resources and a national
commitment
 Rationing
 Production
 Propaganda campaigns encouraged the production of war
equipment
 Patriotism, communal interests, and a common stake in winning the
war

3. War demanded massive resources and a national
commitment
 Production
 Allies built tanks, ships, and airplanes by the tens of thousands
 U.S. Britain and Soviets had more resources and people available for
wartime production
 Mobilization of women
 Long work shifts
 Germany was less efficient in the use of workers and resources
 Germany and Japan robbed occupied territories of resources

4. New targets
 Centers of industry as military targets
 American and British strategic bombing
 For the British, a war of retribution
 For the Americans, grinding down Germany without sacrificing too
many Allied lives
 The Dresden firebombing

5. Dresden, Germany C. 1910

6. Dresden, March, 1945

7. Dresden

8. Dresden

9. The Nazi penetration of the Soviet Union
The siege of Leningrad
The Eastern Front
 Changes in the character of war
 War to save the Russian motherland (rodina)—the Russian will to survive
 Victory during the “General Winter”—took its toll on Nazi supplies

10. The Eastern Front
 Changes in the character of war
 Astonishing recovery of Soviet army
 Whole industries were rebuilt
 Soviets found the Blitzkrieg predictable

11. The Eastern Front
 The turning point—1943
 Germans aimed an all-out assault on Stalingrad
 Drawn into bitter house-to-house fighting with Soviet snipers
 Stalingrad destroyed
 With supplies low, the Russian armies surrounded the Germans in the
city
 January 1943: German surrender of Stalingrad

12. 23 August 1942 –
2 February, 1943
Casualty estimates as high
As 2,000,000.

15. The Eastern Front
 Soviet offensives
 Kursk (1943)
 Six thousand tanks and 2 million men in battle lasting six weeks
 German army was crushed
 Ukraine back in Soviet hands, Romania knocked out of the war
 Soviet victories in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia

16. The Western Front
 Stalin pressured the Allies to open a second front in the West
 The Allied invasion of Sicily
 Mussolini surrendered in summer 1943
 The Normandy invasion (June 6, 1944)
 The liberation of Paris (August 14, 1944)
 The Battle of the Bulge (December 1944)

17. Storming “Fortress Europe.”

18. The Western Front
 Allies crossed the Rhine in April 1945
 Germans preferred to surrender to the Americans or British rather than
face the Russians
 Soviets entered Berlin on April 21, 1945
 Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the
Chancellery on April 30, 1945
 Germany surrendered unconditionally on
May 7

19. “Raising the Red Flag Over the Reichstag, ” Evgeny Khaldei, May 1, 1945

20. The war in the Pacific
 British, Indian, and Nepalese troops liberated Rangoon
(Burma)
 Australians recaptured Dutch East Indies
 Okinawa fell to the Americans (June 1945)
 Chinese communists and nationalists pushed the Japanese
back on Hong Kong

21. The war in the Pacific
 Soviet forces marched through Manchuria to Korea
 United States, Britain, and China called on Japan to surrender
or be destroyed on July 26
 B-29s began systematic bombing of Japanese cities
 Japan refused to surrender

22. The race to build the bomb
 Nuclear fission and the chain reaction
 British passed technical information on to American scientists
 The Manhattan Project
 Managing the effort to build an American atomic bomb

23. The race to build the bomb
 Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943)
 Laboratory that brought together most capable nuclear physicists
 J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) placed in charge of the project
 First atomic test on July 16, 1945, near Los Alamos

24. The war in the Pacific
 The decision to drop the bomb
 Was it necessary? Japan had already been beaten
 Harry Truman
 August 6, 1945: Hiroshima, August 9: Nagasaki
 Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945

25. The Atom Bomb

28. A new world ravaged by war
Mass killing
Technology, genocide, and global war

29. Estimated 50-70 million total deaths
 Military Casualties 22-25 million
 Civilian casualties 38-55 million
Deaths by Country
 USSR: 22-26 million
 Germany: 7-9 million
 Japan: 2-3 million
 Poland: 5.6- 5.8 million
 China: 10-20 million
 France: 567,600
 Britain: 450,900
 United States: 418,500 (

31. Nazi Manifesto, Documents of the International Military
Tribunal for Germany, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Vol.
4, Avalon Project at Yale Law School,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/nca_v4men
u.asp
German Soldiers leading Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto
during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleI
d=10005188&MediaId=734
WWII War Deaths by Alliance. Wikimedia Commons,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWarII-DeathsByAlliance-
Piechart.png