| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Admiral Chester Nimitz | commander of the US Navy in the Pacific; cracked Japanese code |
| Adolf Hitler | power-hungry anti-semitic schizophrenic |
| Allied Powers | Canada, Australia, China, USA, Britain, Soviet Union, France |
| appeasement | giving into an aggressor to keep peace |
| Axis Powers | Japan, Italy, Germany |
| Bataan Death March | Japanese marched more than 70,000 Americans + Filipinos 65 miles across the Bataan Peninsula to prison camps |
| Battle of Britain | battle between RAF and Luftwaffe for the skies over Britain |
| Battle of El Alamein | British forces under Generald Bernard Montgomery stopped Rommel's advance |
| Battle of Leyte Gulf | New Guinea; General MacArthur; Japanese tried to block Allied invasion force; Allies won |
| Battle of Midway | Midway islands northwest of Hawaii; June 3-6; Chester Nimitz, battle of carrier-based airplanes |
| Battle of Stalingrad | German army entered Stalingrad + started fighting for it. Soviets surrounded Germans. |
| Battle of the Atlantic | long fight to control the ocean trade routes after Germany tried to cut UK off from USA |
| Battle of the Coral Sea | northeast of Australia; US planes sank + damaged 2 aircraft carriers, US ships Yorktown sunk + Lexington damaged |
| Benito Mussolini | leader of Italy during the war, friend of Hitler's |
| Blitzkrieg | a new kind of "lightning war", concentrated planes in strategic areas to break through enemy lines |
| D-Day | June 6th, 1944, allied soldiers landed in Normandy, hundreds of warships protected with artillery fire |
| Enola Gay - the A-bomb | B-29 bomber flew over Hiroshima, Japan, killed 70,000 - 80,000 people, caused by splitting atoms |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | US president during the war, met up with Winston Churchill |
| General Bernard Montgomery | British General; stopped Rommel's advance in the Battle of El Alamein |
| General Douglas MacArthur | led US and Filipino forces stand against the Japanese invasion |
| General Dwight Eisenhower | US general; master at orginazation + planning, forces pushed back Germans |
| General Erwin Rommel | led the German Afrika Corps, fought Allies in back-and-forth battle over 1500 miles |
| General George Marshall | Roosevelt's top military advisor; supported Allied invasion of German-occupied France |
| General George Patton | led tank forces that broke through German lines in July after D-Day |
| General Hideki Tojo | under him, Japan continued its policy of expansion, troops retreated across Manila Bay |
| General Omar Bradley | US general; led breakout from beaches into occupied France after D-Day |
| Guadalcanal | one of the Solomon Islands in southwest Pacific, Japanese building airstrip, August 1942 battle, Allies won |
| Holocaust | the attempt by Hitler and the Nazis to murder the Jews of Europe |
| Island-hopping | conquering one island after another, landing only on the important islands |
| Japanese Internment Camps | US government forcibly relocated and imprisoned Japanese Americans |
| kamikaze | crashing piloted planes into allied ships |
| Lend Lease Act | allowed president to loan $7 billion worth of weapons and supples to Britain |
| Maginot Line | a fortified line of defenses along France's border with Germany |
| Manhattan Project | huge effort to develop an atomic bomb, employed 600,000 people, Los Alamos, New Mexico |
| Pearl Harbor | December 7th, 1941, surprise Japanese attack, sank or damaged all US battleships |
| President Harry Truman | became president during the war after FDR died of a stroke |
| The Battle of the Bulge | December 16, German attacked in heavy snow, surprise attack |
| Winston Churchill | British politician, became Prime Minister during war, lead Britain to victory |
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