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WWII Vocabulary
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Benito Mussolini | Italian Fascist dictator. |
Adolf Hitler | German dictator, head of the Nazi Party |
Joseph Stalin | Communist dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 - 1953. |
Neville Chamberlain | Prime Minister of Great Britain, made the Munich Agreement with Hitler. |
General Dwight D. Eisenhower | The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. |
Tuskegee Airman | Famous segregated unit of African American pilots. |
Code Talkers | Navajo Indians recruited by the U.S. Marine Corps to transmit messages in the Navajo language. |
Pearl Harbor | U.S. Naval Base attacked by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. Led to Americans joining the war effort. |
D-Day | Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. |
Yalta Conference | The conference in which the allies planned the post-war world. |
Battle of the Bulge | The final German assault in December 1944 in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. |
Battle of Midway | The U.S. victory over the Japanese off Midway Island that proved to be the turning point of the war. |
Nuremberg Trials | The war crime trials of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, Germany. |
Potsdam Conference | The Allies’ meeting in Potsdam, Germany to plan t he end of the war. |
Lend- Lease Act | An act which allowed the United States to lend weapons to allies. |
Axis Powers | The Rome-Berlin Axis, the alliance between Mussolini and Hitler later joined by Japan. |
Appeasement | The meeting of demands from a hostile power in order to avoid war. |
Blitzkrieg | German “lightning war” tactics. In an effort to strike an opponent strategically and quickly. |
Holocaust | The Nazi German crime of killing more than 11 million Jews and other persecuted peoples in concentration camps. |
Manhattan Project | The top-secret government project to develop the atomic bomb. |
Genocide | The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with aim of destroying that nation or group. |
Island Hopping | The Allied strategy in the Pacific of invading selected islands, and using them as bases to advance closer to Japan. |
Fascism | Political philosophy that advocates a strong nationalistic dictatorship. |
Totalitarianism | A system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete obedience to the state. |
Allied Powers (WWII) | The “Big Three”, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain allied together during World War II. |
Capitalism | An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather by the state. |
Communism | An economic and political system in which the government plans and controls with the goal of common ownership. |