EVENTS WHICH LED

TO THE END OF WWII

L.O: I CAN LOOK INTO THE EVENTS WHICH
LED TO THE END OF WWII.
History rewind:
What was the government scheme called which encouraged
others to grow their own vegetables?

What impact do you think rationing may have had to help

the war effort?
IMPACT: DEATHS
World War II ended six years and one day after Germany’s
invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, sparked the 20th
century’s second global conflict.
By the time it concluded on the deck of an American warship on
September 2, 1945, World War II had claimed the lives of an
estimated 60-80 million people, approximately 3 percent of the
world’s population.
The vast majority of those who died in history’s deadliest war
were civilians, including 6 million Jews killed in Nazi
concentration camps during the Holocaust.
GERMANY
Germany employed its “blitzkrieg” (“lightning war”) strategy to
sweep across the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the war’s
opening months and force more than 300,000 British and other
Allied troops to evacuate continental Europe from Dunkirk. In
June 1941, German dictator Adolf Hitler broke his nonaggression
pact with the Soviet Union and launched Operation Barbarossa,
which brought Nazi troops to the gates of Moscow.
CONTEXT
By the time the United States entered World War II following
the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, German forces occupied
much of Europe from the Black Sea to the English Channel. The
Allies, however, turned the tide of the conflict, and the following
major events brought World War II to an end.

(See the next slides for events which brought the war to an end).
 1) GERMANY REPELLED ON TWO FRONTS

After storming across Europe in the first three years of the war, overextended
Axis forces were put on the defensive after the Soviet Red Army rebuffed them
in the brutal Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 to February
1943. The fierce battle for the city named after Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin resulted in nearly two million casualties, including the deaths of tens of
thousands of Stalingrad residents.

As Soviet troops began to advance on the Eastern Front, the Western

Allies invaded Sicily and southern Italy, causing the fall of Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini’s government in July 1943.

The Allies then opened a Western Front with the amphibious D-Day invasion of
Normandy on June 6, 1944. They gained a foothold in northern France, Paris,
followed by Paris less than two weeks later.
2) BATTLE OF THE BULGE
Germany found itself squeezed on both sides as Soviet troops
advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania
while the Western Allies continued to push eastward. Forced to
fight a two-front war with dwindling resources, an increasingly
desperate Hitler authorized a last-ditch offensive on the Western
Front in hopes of splitting the Allied lines.
The Nazis launched a surprise attack along an 80-mile, densely
wooded stretch of the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and
Luxembourg on December 16, 1944.

The German onslaught caused the Allied line to bulge, but it

would not break during six weeks of fighting in subzero
conditions that left soldiers suffering from hypothermia,
frostbite and trench foot. American forces withstood the full
might of what was left of Germany’s power but lost
approximately 20,000 men in what was their deadliest single
battle in World War II.
What became known as the Battle of the Bulge would turn out to
be Germany’s last gasp as the Soviet Red Army launched a winter
offensive on the Eastern Front that would have them at the Oder
River, less than 50 miles from the German capital of Berlin, by the
spring.
3) GERMANY
SURRENDERS
After the firebombing of Dresden and
other German cities that killed tens of
thousands of civilians, the Western Allies
crossed the Rhine River and moved
eastward toward Berlin. As they closed in
on the capital, Allied troops discovered
the horror of the Holocaust as they
liberated concentration camps such as
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. With both
fronts collapsing and defeat
inevitable, Hitler committed suicide in
his bunker deep below the Reich
Chancellery on April 30, 1945.
 4) ATOMIC BOMBING OF
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
Even after the Allied victory in Europe, World War II
continued to rage in the Pacific Theater. American forces
had made a slow, but steady push toward Japan after
turning the course of the war with victory at the June
1942 Battle of the Midway. The Battles of Iwo
Jima and Okinawa in the winter and spring of 1945 were
among the bloodiest of the war, and the American military
projected that as many as 1 million casualties would
accompany any invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Weeks after the first successful test of the atomic

bomb occurred in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16,
1945, President Harry Truman, authorized its use against
Japan in the hopes of bringing a swift end to the war. On
August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola
Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the manufacturing city of
Hiroshima, immediately killing an estimated 80,000 people.
Tens of thousands later died of radiation exposure. When
Japan failed to immediately surrender after the bombing of
Hiroshima, the United States detonated an even more
powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later that
killed 35,000 instantly and another 50,000 in its aftermath.
 5) SOVIETS DECLARE WAR, JAPAN
SURRENDERS
In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan came under increasing
pressure when the Soviet Union formally declared war on August 8 and invaded
Japanese-occupied Manchuria in northeastern China. With his Imperial Council
deadlocked, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito broke the tie and decided that his country must
surrender. At noon on August 15 (Japanese time), the emperor announced Japan’s
surrender in his first-ever radio broadcast.

On September 2, World War II ended when U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted

Japan’s formal surrender aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay
along with a flotilla of more than 250 Allied warships. 

At the signing of the agreement that brought an end to 2,194 days of global war,

MacArthur told the world in a radio broadcast, “Today the guns are silent. A great
tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”