Page 106 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Six months passed between the Polish invasion and the involvement of the Western allies in the Second
World War. Past treaties dictated that France and Great Britain declare war on the German invaders, but
no actual military action was taken until a campaign in Norway in the spring of 1940.

U.S. Involvement

In December 1941, Japanese forces bombed Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. This event spurred the United
States to get involved in the new world war. The United States joined the Allies, in their fight against
the Axis. In 1943, Benito Mussolini was decommissioned as dictator by the king of Italy,
and Italy surrendered to Allied forces under General George Patton shortly thereafter.

In June of the following year, the war swung decisively in favor of the Allies. The Allies landed troops on
the beaches of German-controlled Normandy and suffered only a momentary setback at the Battle of the
Bulge in mid-winter of 1944. Germany surrendered in May of 1945. In August the United States dropped
two nuclear bombs on Japan, the first on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki. These bombings,
concurrent with a Soviet declaration of war onJapan, led the Japanese to surrender in mid-August. The
second World War ended. Both the First and Second World Wars had taken place within a thirty year time
span.

The Cold War Era

Following World War II, there was a great deal of work to be done to put the world back in order.
Individuals were put on trial in the German city of Nuremberg for various atrocities committed during the
war; U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall put through a plan to send billions of dollars in military and
economic aid to European countries damaged by the fighting; the United Nations created a Jewish state;
and President Harry Truman initiated preferential treatment to countries resisting the spread of
communism. The fight against the spread of communism would be the target of the longest war in U.S.
history.

Communism was viewed as a threat to the commercial way of life that western societies had become
accustomed to leading. An ideological conflict between capitalism and communism, called the cold war,
began. Where the Second World War was one of direct military action and brute force, the cold war was
waged mainly by means of economic pressure, propaganda, assassination, and diplomacy. The cold war
included fifty years of gains and losses on both sides. Beginning in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
introduced social reforms that led to the end of the cold war and ultimately the dissolution of the Soviet
Union.

Two major cold war figures: Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro