The United States Becomes a Superpower

The United States Becomes a Superpower

Dictators Threaten World Peace

The

Totalitarians Seize Control

Fascism and Supernationalism

Adolf Hitler and Nazism

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Totalitarians Graphic Organizer

World War II Map- Europe & Pacific

Textbook

Global War

The

Blitzkrieg

Germany Advances Across Europe

The Battle of Britain

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Blitzkrieg

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World War II Map- Europe & Pacific

Textbook

America Mobilizes for War

The

Isolationism

Lend-Lease & the Atlantic Charter

Preparing for War

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Atlantic Charter Analysis

Arsenal of Democracy QCA

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The Holocaust

The

Antisemitism in Germany

The Final Solution

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The War for Europe and North Africa

By the time the United States joined the war Germany had already taken control of most of the European continent and had threatened to cut off the British Isles through unrestricted sub-warfare. Despite these challenges, the United States entrance in the war gave the Allies an immediate boost by providing the vast resources and industrial might that were unmatched. The first order of business for the new Allies was to reverse the tide of the war and push back the German advance to establish a Western Front which could be used to surround Germany and destroy the Nazi war machine.

The United States Joins Britain

The German blitzkrieg had overrun Britain's chief ally of France in 1940 and the Afrika Korps was threatening to take Egypt and its vital Suez Canal. Inexperienced American soldiers were rushed to North Africa to help stop the German advance.

The Eastern Front

In June of 1941 Hitler broke his Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin and launched an invasion of the Soviet Union designed to give Germany the lebensraum Hitler envisioned and destroy communism. The Eastern Front proved to be a brutal war for survival between two totalitarian dictators.

The Battle of Stalingrad

Early on the German Wehrmacht overwhelmed the unprepared Red Army and they were forced into a humiliating and chaotic retreat. The German Army pushed far hundreds of miles into Soviet territory in what was the largest invasion in history. Despite the initial disaster, the Soviet Union drew the Hitler into a war of attrition which the Germans had no chance of winning. As the Germans advanced farther and farther into Russia it became increasingly difficult to supply the army and their advance ground to a halt outside Moscow. Frustrated by the army's failure to finish off Russia in 1941, Hitler and his generals launched a new offensive in Southern Russia to seize the vital oil fields around Baku and force the Soviet Union out of the war. The only obstacle which stood in their way was the city of Stalingrad.

The Germans had been fighting in the Soviet Union since June 1941. In November 1941, the bitter cold had stopped them in their tracks outside the Soviet cities of Moscow and Leningrad. When spring came, the German tanks were ready to roll. In the summer of 1942, the Germans took the offensive in the southern Soviet Union. Hitler hoped to capture Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus Mountains. He also wanted to wipe out Stalingrad, a major industrial center on the Volga River.

The German army confidently approached Stalingrad in August 1942. “To reach the Volga and take Stalingrad is not so difficult for us,” one German soldier wrote home. “Victory is not far away.” The Luftwaffe—the German air force—prepared the way with nightly bombing raids over the city. Nearly every wooden building in Stalingrad was set ablaze. The situation looked so desperate that Soviet officers in Stalingrad recommended blowing up the city’s factories and abandoning the city. A furious Stalin ordered them to defend his namesake city no matter what the cost.

For weeks the Germans pressed in on Stalingrad, conquering it house by house in brutal hand-to-hand combat. By the end of September, they controlled nine-tenths of the city—or what was left of it. Then another winter set in. The Soviets saw the cold as an opportunity to roll fresh tanks across the frozen landscape and begin a massive counterattack. The Soviet army closed around Stalingrad, trapping the Germans in and around the city and cutting off their supplies. The Germans’ situation was hopeless, but Hitler’s orders came: “Stay and fight! I won’t go back from the Volga.”

The fighting continued as winter turned Stalingrad into a frozen wasteland. “We just lay in our holes and froze, knowing that 24 hours later and 48 hours later we should be shivering precisely as we were now,” wrote a German soldier, Benno Zieser. “But there was now no hope whatsoever of relief, and that was the worst thing of all.” The German commander surrendered on January 31, 1943. Two days later, his starving troops also surrendered. In defending Stalingrad, the Soviets lost a total of 1,100,000 soldiers—more than all American deaths during the entire war. Despite the staggering death toll, the Soviet victory marked a turning point in the war. From that point on, the Soviet army began to move westward toward Germany

D-Day and the Battle for France

Even as the Allies were battling for Italy in 1943, they had begun work on a dramatic plan to invade France and free Western Europe from the Nazis. The task of commanding Operation Overlord, as it was called, fell to American General Dwight D. (“Ike”) Eisenhower.

Under Eisenhower’s direction in England, the Allies gathered a force of nearly 3 million British, American, and Canadian troops, together with mountains of military equipment and supplies. Eisenhower planned to attack Normandy in northern France. To keep their plans secret, the Allies set up a huge phantom army with its own headquarters and equipment. In radio messages they knew the Germans could read, Allied commanders sent orders to this make believe army to attack the French port of Calais—150 miles away—where the English Channel is narrowest. As a result, Hitler ordered his generals to keep a large army at Calais.

The Allied invasion, code-named Operation Overlord, was originally set for June 5, but bad weather forced a delay. Banking on a forecast for clearing skies, Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for D-Day—June 6, 1944, the first day of the invasion. Shortly after midnight, three divisions parachuted down behind German lines. They were followed in the early morning hours by thousands upon thousands of seaborne soldiers—the largest land-sea-air operation in army history.

Despite heavy casualties, the Allies held the beachheads. After seven days of fighting, the Allies held an 80-mile strip of France. Within a month, they had landed a million troops, 567,000 tons of supplies, and 170,000 vehicles in France. On July 25, General Omar Bradley unleashed massive air and land bombardment against the enemy at St. Lô, providing a gap in the German line of defense through which General George Patton and his Third Army could advance. On August 23, Patton and the Third Army reached the Seine River south of Paris. Two days later, French resistance forces and American troops liberated the French capital from four years of German occupation. Parisians were delirious with joy. Patton announced this joyous event to his commander in a message that read, “Dear Ike: Today I spat in the Seine.”

By September 1944, the Allies had freed France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. This good news—and the American people’s desire not to “change horses in midstream”—helped elect Franklin Roosevelt to an unprecedented fourth term in November, along with his running mate, Senator Harry S. Truman.