Fun fact:4 billion German marks = 1 American dollar
Appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933
Was said to have fought in the first world war and was wounded
Was rejected by art school
Got into politics
Formed Nazi Party
Rose through Nazi Party
Hates treaty of Versailles
Most of parliament were mostly part of Nazi part
installed Hitler as chancellor
Introduction:
- State-sponsored persecution
- 6 million European Jews killed
- Genocide known as “The final solution (to the Jewish question)”
- Holocaust also called “The Sho’ah” or “catastrophe”
Anti-semitic
Anti-Semitism:
- Accused Jews of causing Germany’s social, economic, political and cultural problems
Jewish were called Untermenschen (“Subhumans”)
- Nazi’s referred to Germans as “The Aryan Race” and that they were part of a “master race”
- Marriage and sexual activity with Jews were prohibited
- Jews because subjects of the state
- Jews defined as “Jews, those with at least three Jewish grandparents; and mischlinge (“mongrels”, or ”mixed breeds”), people with one or two Jewish grandparents”
- Jews felt German fought for their rights and in the first world war
Refugees and Night of Broken glass:
-“We bow down before God; we stand erect before man.”-Rabbi Leo Baeck
- Late 1930s Jews were desperate for refuge
Most countries denied any or large amounts of Jewish immigration
- Evening of the 9th of November, 1938, Anti-semitic rioters burned and/or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues, then ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 Jewish businesses
- Storm troopers raided gay bars in 1933
- 20,000 of Jehovah’s witnesses imprisoned
- Social democrats sent to concentration camps
- 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16-60 were arrested and taken to concentration camps
Taking the Freedom of Jews:
- German Jews barred from collecting insurance
- Jews prohibited from university degrees, owning businesses, or learning law or medicine
- Euthanasia program: murder of intellectually, physically disabled, or emotionally disturbed
- Disabled Germans interfered with German ideology of a master race
- Polish priests and politicians were killed after invasion of Poland
Key terms:U-boatsHuge German shipsWolf packs35 merchant ships and 6 escortBlack pitArea where most Wolf packs exist
Introduction:
- 72,000 allied deaths
- 30,000 German deaths
- Battle for control over vital shipping routes
Beginning of Battle:
- Germany believed that taking over the atlantic means that
Canadians escorted hundreds of convoys that gathered near Halifax, and Sydney nova scotia
- First convoy left Halifax September 16th 1939
- Canadians only six destroyers and 3,500 personnel
- U-boats
Turning the tables:
- U-boats sank about 100 ships
- British had cracked Enigma code
- British used this to turn the tides on the Germans by predicting movements
- Long ranged aircraft
- Expansion of escorts
- Canadian destroyer HMCS st. Croix Was
- 2 acoustic torpedoes fired by U-305
- 81 out of 148 crewmen survived for 13 hours
- British warship HMS Itchen rescued the survivors
- Less than 40 merchant vessels in the beginning
- 400 built by the end
- 25,000 voyages
- Merchant mariners not recognized until 1992
- 90,000 sailors
- 6,000 in Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service
- Canada ended with the fourth largest Naval service
Introduction:
- Enlistment or call up of citizens for military service (also referred to as “The draft”)
- Once somebody reaches of age they get drafted for military service
- People who can be excused are people with physical or mental illness or disability
Two sides of the same coin:
- September 1939 government renewed pledge against conscription overseas
- National Resources Mobilization Act on June 21st
- Enlistment only for home defense
- Prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King holds non-binding referendum asking Canadians to release promises against conscription after it’s sudden popularity
- Ligue pour la défense du Canada
- Against conscription
- 72.9 of Quebec
- Every other province was with conscription
- Government convinced of conscriptions positive effects
- 12,908 conscriptions
- Known as zombies
Introduction:
- Surprise aerial attack on U.S naval base on Pearl harbor
- Entry of U.S into ww2
- Conflict between china and Japan
Before the bombing:
- July 1939 the U.S announces termination of Treaty of commerce
- U.S restrict export of war things to Japan
July 1941, Japan occupies all of Indochina
- Embargo (prohibition of exports to specific place) of Japan for petroleum and vital war material
- Tokyo resentment for U.S aid of China
- Negotiations between U.S and Japan
- No agreement made
- Order of assault issued on November 5th 1941
- Warning sent out for the possibility of war
- Training
- Radar
- No additional action taken
- Japan calls for a meeting signaling beginnings of war
The bombing:
- George C. Marshall Sent new warning and instructed that communication be made with navy
- First bomb diver at 7:55 (local time)
- 42 planes destroyed
- 41 damaged
- 43 left
- Only 6 U.S planes went to the air to defend
- 180 aircraft destroyed
- Anchored ships targeted
- Battleships damaged within first 30 minutes
- Second attack at 8:50 am
- Battleship USS Pennsylvania set ablaze
- Destroyer USS Shaw split in two by explosion
- Japanese withdrew after 9:00 am
- 3,400 casualties
- 2,300 killed
- Japan lost 29-60 planes
- 2 aircraft carriers were not in the harbor, saving them from disaster
- Investigation was made
Fun fact: First Japanese person in Canada, was named "Manzo Nagano"
Introduction:
- Canadians detained, relocated, and dispossessed more than 90% of all Japanese Canadians
- Prime minister, Brian Mulrone, apologizes on behalf of the War measures act
Discrimination against Japanese Canadians:
- Law passed to prevent Japanese from working in the mines and voting
- Prohibited from working on government funded projects
- News comes of Japans attack on Pearl Harbor where Canadian troops were stationed
- Canada fear Japanese invasion
- Canadian distrust toward Japanese Canadians spread
- Arrests towards suspected Japanese operatives
- Royal Canadian Navy impounded 1,200 Japanese owned fishing boats
- Japanese newspaper and schools voluntarily shut down to avoid racist backlash
- From the army point of view, Japanese Canadians did not pose any threat
- February 24th, 1942, Federal Cabinet of Prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King issued to remove and detain any and all persons from any “protective area” in the country
- Internment of Japanese Canadians:
- March 16, first Japanese Canadians taken from areas 160 km from Pacific coast
- Trains carried detained Japanese Canadians to Slocan, New denver, Kaslo, Greenwood, and Sandon
- Could only take was could be carried on hand
- Property taken under government “protective custody”
- Others offered options of working on sugar beet farm in Alberta and Manitoba to keep families intact
- Camps not surrounded with barbed wire, due to being in the U.S, conditions were poor
- Poor
- Overcrowded
- No electricity
- No running water
- Resisting internment sent to prisoner war camps
- Order in council signed 19 January 1943 to take possession of Japanese Canadian property
- Property sold to pay for the detainment of Japanese Canadians
- Japanese labourers in sugar beet farms
- Crowded in small shacks
- Little pay for hard labour
- More than 90% of Japanese canadians (plus an additional 21,000 people) taken during the war
- Majority were British subjects by birth
- Japanese Canadians campaigned for compensation on 29th of June 1984
- Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau replied with “I do not see how I can apologize for some historic event to which we…were not a party. We can regret that it happened.”
- Japanese Canadians campaign for the abolition of the “War measures Act”
Introduction:
- Considered the greatest battle of the entire conflict
Prevented the German advance into the Soviet Union
- Marked turning point for the Allies
- Stalingrad was large industrial city
- Prized land for German army
- Capture of Stalingrad would cut Soviet transport links with southern Russia
- Would cause humiliation to Joseph Stalin
- Plan to eliminate Soviet forces in the south and secure resources
Losing the Battle:
- July 9th Hitler changes plan to capture both Stalingrad and Caucasus
- Stalin and Soviet responded to summer offensive
- Formation of Stalingrad Front
- Sixty-second, Sixty-third, and Sixty-fourth armies
- Lead by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko
- Eighth air and army and Twenty-first army under Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s command
- Stalin issued Order No.227, decreeing that Stalingrad defenders take “Not One Step Back”.
- 330,000 finest German troops sent
- August 23rd, German Spearhead penetrated the city’s northern suburbs
Operation Uranus:
- Planned by generals Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, and Nikolay Nikolayevich Voronov
- Germans underestimated
- “Deep penetration” maneuver
- Attacking weaker flanks on the outskirts to encircle the stronger flank in the center
- November 23rd both sides of the attack met after clearing out their respective
Failed rescue and Germany's loss:
- Field marshal Erich von Manstein sent to rescue Paulus’ forces
- Refuses to let Paulus fight westward so that he could meet up with Manstein
- Paulus’ forces doomed due to the decision and lack of resources
- Hitler exhorted that they fight to the death
- Paulus’ promoted to field Marshal
- Paulus disobeyed and surrendered
- February 2nd the last of 91,000 German soldiers surrendered
- Soviets recovered 250,000 Germans and romanian
- 5,000-6,000 Germans returned to their homelands
- 1,100,000 Deaths of the Red army
- 40,000 civilians
- 1495 Stalingrad was proclaimed hero city of the Soviet Union
Introduction:
- D-Day invasion in 1944
- 5,000 of 6,100 were Canadians
- 1,000 British
- 50 American
- Raid supported by 8 allied destroyers and 74 allied air squadrons
- 8 belongs to the Canadian Air Force
- 3,367 casualties
- Germans penetrated deeply into Russia
- Forces attack 5 different points on front roughly 16 kilometers long
Eastern Flanks:
- August 19th
- Encountered small German convoy
- Sound of fighting alerted Germans
- Crafts carrying No. 3 Commando were scattered
- 20 commandos get within 180 meters of German battery
- Beach was narrow
- Pinned on the beach by machine gun fire
- 200 killed and 20 died later of their wounds upon landing
- The rest were taken prisoner
- Heaviest toll taken on Canadians in a single day
Western Flank:
- Some degree of surprise
- No. 4 completely successful
- Destroyed gun in the battery near Varengeville
- South Saskatchewan Regiment and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlander of Canada assaulted the beach
- Heavy fighting until stopping short of the town of Dieppe
- Inland airfield and advanced 3 kilometers advanced 3 kilometers before needing to halt
- Canada suffered heavy losses
- Many wounded
- Surrendered after running out of ammunition and further evacuation was impossible
The Main attack:
- Across pebble beach
- Planned half and hour later than flank assault
- Germans overlooked the promenade
- Essex Scottish Regiment assaulted open eastern section
- Attempts to breach wall were beaten back with casualties
- Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal was sent to help
- Exposed to enemy fire immediately
- The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry landed west end
- Calgary Regiment with unexpected obstacles
- Naval bombardment
- Left infantry without support during first critical minutes of attack
- Stopped by gunfire, pebbles, and seawall
- Narrow streets caused issues
- Immobilized tanks assisted infantry
- Tank crews became prisoners of war
- Last troops to land were part of the Royal Marine “A” commando
- Not able to accomplish mission due to casualties
- Raid produces air battle
- Air raid provided protection for the ships off Dieppe from luftwaffe
Aftermath:
- Early August 19th 1942, operation Jubilee is over
- Debate over merit raid consistently even until present day
- Raid of Dieppe was studied carefully in planning later attacks enemy coast of France
- June 6th 1944, Dieppe important in saving countless lives
- Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Meritt took charge over crossing of of bridge over River Scie
916 casualties
Fun facts:Major David Currie awarded Victoria crossD-DayReferring to when Normandy was invaded
Introduction:
- Also D-Day
- Canada plays critical role
- Called Operation Overlord
- 150,000 troops land
- 14,000 Canadian casualties on Juno beach
- Royal Canadian Navy contributes
- 110 ships
- 10,000 sailors
- RCAF
- 15 fighter and fighter-bomber squadrons
- 209,000 Total casualties
Atlantic wall:
- Battle war mostly won
- Soviets rolling back German war machines
- Summer 1943, Allies agree to launch invasion
- Dwight Eisenhower appointed supreme commander
- Allies needed French harbor but raid on Dieppe prevented it
- French port had become Atlantic wall due to German bunkers and machine gun nests
Just the beginning:
- Germans knew an invasion was coming, but not when or where
- They thought most likely Pas de Calais because of short distance
- Attempted to land 156,000 soldiers on 5 beaches
- Largest seaborne invasion in history
- Fake equipment built to convince Germans of an invasion from Pas de Calais
- Force was gather in southwest England
- Vast majority with 3rd infantry division
- Many missed landing zones
- Many drowned due to German flooding
- Soldier had to dodge bullets while in chest high water
Omaha beach:
- U.S forces cut down
- 2,000 Americans killed
March towards Germany:
- Expected for armies to advance east towards France within weeks
- Took a summer of hard fighting
- First week after D-Day, Canadian forces push toward Caen
- Encountered opposition
- 12th SS Panzer division murdered 156 Canadian soldier that week
- Major Lockie Fulton calls battle for Carpiquet “worst day of the entire war
- Canadian and Polish move south toward Falaise,and american forces
- Broken enemy lines in the west
- Falaise gap closed
- Germans on the run are trapped
Introduction:
- After Germany’s unconditional surrender
- Celebration caused looting and rioting
- Conflict in Japan continued
- Debate over conscription divided Canadians and the government of the Prime Minister Williams Lyon Mackenzie King
- More than a million Canadians had served in the armed forces, 42,000 had been killed and tens of thousands more were wounded or waiting in war camps
Surrender reports:
- First reports of German surrender had been met with celebration
- The first, on April 28th, wasn’t actually true
- The second on the morning of May 7th, was premature
Adolf Hitler commit suicide in the Berlin bunker
The military surrender agreement for the German forces was signed in Rheims, France, at 2:41 am local time on the 7th of May 1945 by Colonel General Gustav Jodl, the German army’s chief of staff; Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff for the Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower; General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet Union; and General Francois Sevez for France
Celebration:
- Celebration begins across North America, but before it was confirmed which dampened the excitement
- Celebration resumed once the confirmation came out
- Many were tasked with providing security to occupied
- Germany, and bringing aid to the Netherlands, where Dutch are in need for emergency food and medical supplied distributed by Canadian forces
Halifax Riots:
- VE-day riots break out due to celebration
- Widespread looting, violence and vandalism were seem in both cities
- Both exhausted by their wartime
Canadians played only a small role in the Pacific war
War in Pacific ended 4 months after VE-Day
August 14th, after second atomic bomb, Japanese Emperor
Hirohito acceted U.S demand for unconditional surrender
News of surrender reached Canada and other Allied nations the following day
Official signing of Japan’s surrender in a ceremony on board the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay not until September 2nd
Canadians celebrated in the streets
Some revelry devolved into looting and rioting
$40,000 in damages to downtown Sudbury
Police were used to disperse those breaking windows
Halifax had shocking riots on VE-Day so things were kept under control
- Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- American bombing raids on the Japanese cities of hiroshima (August 6th 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9th 1945)
- Tens of thousands killed in the initial explosions and many more would later succumb to radiation poisoning
- On August 10, The Japanese government issued a statement agreeing to accept the Allied surrender terms that had been dictated in the Potsdam Declaration
- January 1939, German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, with clues provided by Iréne Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savic in France (1938)
- Proved definitely that the bombardment of uranium with neutrons produced radioisotopes of barium, lanthanum, and other things
- January 26th, announcement to the world, the discovery of process that Meitner and Frisch had termed fission
- Enrico Fermi proposed to Bohr that neutron might be released during the fission process
- Raised possibility of sustained nuclear chain reaction
- Studies by Bohr and Wheeler disproved it, but it could take place in uranium-235
- June 1940, the basic facts concerning the release of atomic energy were known throughout scientific world
- - U.S launches scientific effort, involving 37 installations throughout the country, more than a dozen university laboratories, and 100,000 people
- Including Arthure Holly Compton, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Ernest Lawrence, and Harold Urey
- March 1939, conference was arranged between Fermi and officers of the U.S. Nacy.
- Three goes on to New York to meet with National Recovery Administration economist Alexander Sachs
- February 1940, fund of $6,000 was made available to begin research
- By the end, budget would exceed $2 billion
- U.S becomes away of Adolf Hitler
- By August 1943, combined policy committee established with U.K and Canada
- Number of scientists moved to U.S to join project
- December 6 1941, on day before Pearl Harbor, project was placed under the direction of Vannver Bush, and the Office of Scientific Research and development (OSRD)
- Bush’s staff includes Harvard University
- Top policy group consisting of Bush, Conant, Roosevelt, U.S Vice Pres. Henry Wallace, U.S secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and U.S Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.
- Simultaneous research on several methods of isolating uranium-235 while researching reactor development.
- Goal was twofold: to learn more about the chain reaction for bomb design and to develop a method of producing a new element, plutonium
- Plutonium expected to be fissile and could be isolated from uranium chemically
- Lawrence and his team developed an electromagnetic separation process at the University of California, Berkeley
- Conversion of uranium into gaseous compound to enable diffuse through porous barriers
- Both methods, require complex facilities and huge amounts of electric power to produce even small amounts of separated uranium-235
- Infrastructure would have to be able to support project
- June 18th 1942, War department assigned management of construction work related to the project to the U.S Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan District
- Manhattan Project becomes code name
- First experimental reactor
- Graphite cube
- 8 feet or 2.4 feet
- July 1942
- December 2nd 1942, first self sustaining nuclear chain reaction
- Carried out under Fermi’s supervision in Chicago Pile No. 1
- Proved atomic energy is feasible for production of power and manufacture of plutonium
- February 1943 construction began on a pilot uranium enrichment plant located on the Clinch River in the Tennessee
- 5,000 technicians
- January 1943 Groves had selected a 580-square-mile tract in south-central Washington for the Project’s plutonium production facilities
- Peak of summer 1944, the huge complex at hanford employed more than 50,000 people
- Beginning in April 1943, scientists and engineers began arriving at the Los Alamos Laboratory
- At its peak in 1945 more than 5,000 scientists, engineers. Technicians, and their families lived at the Los Alamos site
- Roosevelt died on April 12 1945, within 24 hours Pres. Harry S. Truman had been briefed about the atomic bomb program
- Germany surrendered May 1945, ending war in Europe
War in Pacific
- Strong impetus to see the Manhattan project through to the end
- Summer of 1945, production plants delivered a sufficient amount of fissionable material to produce a nuclear explosion
- Bomb development advanced to the point of field testing of nuclear weaponary
- Violent collision of 2 slugs cause the uranium-235 to reach critical mass, triggering a chain reaction and explosion
- Engineers confident that it would work
- Insufficient quantity of uranium-235 would not be available until August 1,1945
- Hanford site would be able to deliver enough plutonium-239 for testing by early July
- Testing site south of Albuquerque, New Mexico called “Trinity” in reference to one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets
- First Atomic bomb called “Gadget”
- Raised to top of 100 foot steel tower dubbed “Zero”
- Base of tower dubbed “Ground Zero”
- Military officials and scientists occupied observation posts at distances ranging from 10,000 to 17,000 yards
- Instructed to lay down with feet towards tower to protect eyes
- July 16th 1945 Gadget detonated at 5:29:45 am
- News of successful test reaches Truman, who was attending the final meeting of the “Big Three” Allied powers at Potsdam
July 16, Heavy cruiser USS indianapolis left port at San Francisco with the gun assembly mechanism, roughly half of the U.S. supply of uranium-235 and several Los Alamos technicians
July 26th, assembly began on the bob dubbed “Little Boy”
Indianapolis departed Tinian after delivery, but it was sunk en route to the Philippines by the Japanese sub I-58 on July 30th
Hundred of crew who survived torpedo attack died in the water awaiting rescue
Second bomb “Fat Man”, transported to Tinian by air
Special bombing mission 13 - an atomic attack on the Japanese home islands
Specially modified B-29s that would serve as delivery vehicles for bombs
Col. Paul W. Tibbet, Jr., Commander of 509th, would pilot B-29 that would drop the first bomb
The 11-man crew included Maj. Thomas Ferebee
Concern that a crash would cause bomb to detonate
Enola Gay ascended to an attack altitude of 31,000 feet
Took 45 seconds for Little Boy to descend to an altitude of 1,900 feet
Exploded directly above Shima Hospital
Temperature at ground level exceeded 7,000 degrees celsius
Scoured the landscape
343,000 inhabitant and 70,000 people killed instantly and in the end of the year, death toll surpasses 100,000
“Nuclear shadows” to all those left from people subjected to intense thermal radiation
Mushroom cloud rose to a height of 40,000 feet
Less than 2% of uranium-235 contained in Little Boy has achieved fission
Bomb was horrifying in its destructive power
Explosion yield was the equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT
Enola Gay’s tail unner described scene as “peep into hell”
Shockwaves rocked Enola Gay as it departed
Distance of nearly 400 miles mushroom was still visible
August 8th 1845, Soviet troops had invaded Manchuria and Sakhalin island
Japanese have not surrendered
3:47 am the B-29 Bockstar took off from Tinian
Piloted by Maj. Charles Sweeney, with Capt. Kermit Beahan, and Manhattan Project veteran Comdr. Frederick Ashworth in the role of weaponeer
Payload was Fat Man
Fat man was fully assembled when it was loaded onto Bockscar
9:45 am local time Bockscar reached Kokura, but by then visibility had degraded badly
45 minutes passed as Bockscar lingered over Kokura
Diminishing fuel caused Ashworth to head to Nagasaki, the second target
Uneven terrain reduces destructive potential
11:00 am local time, Bockscar arrived at Nagasaki
Gap in the clouds revealed itself and Beahan released the bomb
Descended to an altitude of 1,650 feet/500 meters
11:02 am, explosion occurs over Urakami Valley
Fat Man detonated with the explosive force of 21,000 tons of TNT
40,000 killed instantly
30,000 more would succumb to their injuries and radiation poisoning by the end of the year
40% of city buildings were completely destroyed or severely damaged