JULY 1942 Land Purchased for Marine Corps Air Station El Toro
AN AGE OF GLOBAL WAR World War II
JUNE 13, 1942 Office of War Information to Guide Hollywood
Figure 33. (Left) Invading German soldiers roll past barriers at the Polish frontier. Image courtesy of Library of Congress. Figure 34. (Below) Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt confer at the Atlantic Charter Conference conducted aboard a war ship on the high seas. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
APRIL 1942 Santa Ana Naval Air Station (Blimp Hangars) Established
FEBRUARY / MARCH 1942 Japanese Americans Interned
DECEMBER 27, 1941 Rationing of Gasoline and Food
SEPTEMBER 1–3, 1939 Germany Invades Poland; Britain & France Declare War
The humiliation of defeat in World War I, the turmoil of the 1920’s, and the onset of the Great Depression had fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party to power in Germany. Becoming chancellor in 1933 and having created a one party dictatorship, Hitler rapidly embarked on overturning the Treaty of Versailles and “restoring” the Germans of Central and Eastern Europe to a greater German fatherland. In the spring of 1938 he sent troops to annex Austria. In the autumn, at the Munich Conference, he intimidated Britain and France into allowing him to seize the ethnically German borderlands of Czechoslovakia. When he occupied Prague in March 1939, despite promises not to do so, London and Paris responded by guaranteeing Polish independence. When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Western allies felt compelled to declare war, an act that marked the beginning of World War II. SEE FIGURE 33 JUNE 21, 1941 Germany Invades the Soviet Union Having conquered most of Europe and driven by a long-standing desire to acquire “living space” for Germans in the Ukrainian region, Hitler unleashed his military forces on Stalin’s Russia in a surprise attack on the first day of summer in 1941. Moving rapidly eastward, the German army reached the outskirts of Moscow and deep into the Caucasus by December, but it was unable to deliver the knockout blow that the Fuehrer (leader) had hoped to achieve. Hitler was now engaged in a two front war, as Britain and
DECEMBER 18, 1941 War Powers Act Gives Roosevelt Unprecedented Authority
the Soviet Union, not by choice, became allies in the struggle against German Nazism and Italian Fascism.
DECEMBER 7, 1941 Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor
AUGUST 14, 1941 Atlantic Charter – Democracy’s Response
NOVEMBER 1941 Douglas Aircraft Opens Long Beach Plant
At a critical moment for the anti-Axis cause, though the United States was not yet at war, President Franklin Roosevelt met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill aboard a battleship off the coast of Newfoundland to discuss long-range goals and strategy. Their joint declaration provided the ideological foundation for the war effort and the peace to follow. It called for postwar economic collaboration and guarantees of political stability so that “all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” The declaration also supported free trade, self-determination, and collective security. SEE FIGURE 34
AUGUST 14, 1941 Atlantic Charter– Democracy’s Response
JUNE 21, 1941 Germany Invades the Soviet Union
SEPTEMBER 1–3, 1939 Germany Invades Poland, Britain & France Declare War
NOVEMBER 1941 Douglas Aircraft Opens Long Beach Plant
America’s aircraft industry was heavily concen- trated in southern California by 1938, but war transformed Los Angeles and its environs into the nation’s air-age Detroit, with companies like North
WORLD WAR II
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