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WORLD WAR 2 1939-1945 :
THE WORLD WAS ON FIRE .
BUT WHAT HAPPENED 60 YEARS AGO ?
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 Let's Go ! These were the words General Ike Eisenhower used to give green light to Operation Overlord.
But Let's Go are also words the allied commanders used on every theater during World War II,this to get their men forward.
The Air Force to get in to an air battle.
These words were used in the most different languages of the world to get the war to an end.
It's now 60years ago that WWII ended it's time now to remember this period in our world history,time to remember the battles, the places and those who didn't return home alive .This is not just a WWII site more , this site i a passport into the future by knowing our past.
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World War II the men who changed history
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The Evil warlords of the 2nd World War :
Hirohito
HIROHITO, (1901-1989), 124th Emperor of Japan, who succeeded to the throne in 1926 after a period of five years as regent. The Showa era, as his reign is called, witnessed dramatic transformations in Japanese life, including the status of the Emperor himself. Japan had undertaken military operations for the subjugation of China proper, and was making preparations for the expansion of its empire into Southeast Asia and the rich island groups of the Southwest Pacific.In December 1941, Japan thought the time ripe to extend her empire into a Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere which it did very rapidly against meager opposition. It was the Japanese plan to fortify this area so strongly as to withstand American counterattacks and eventually gain a negotiated peace based on the status quo. The attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines brought the United States into the war and greatly altered the balance of power in favor of the Allies.
MUSSOLINI Benito
BENITO MUSSOLINI, (1883-1945), Fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He centralized all power in himself as the leader (il duce) of the Fascist party and attempted to create an Italian empire, ultimately in alliance with HITLER's Germany. The defeat of Italian arms in WORLD WAR II brought an end to his imperial dream and led to his downfall.
THE ALLIES AGAINST EVIL :
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 Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd president of the United States (1933-1945). Roosevelt served longer than any other president. His unprecedented election to four terms in office will probably never be repeated; the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, passed after his death, denies the right of any person to be elected president more than twice.
By the mid-1930's dictatorial regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy were casting their shadows across the blank pages of the future. In 1936, in his speech accepting renomination as president, Roosevelt had said, "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." By 1938, Roosevelt was spending increasing amounts of time on international affairs. Until then he had acquiesced in congressional "neutrality" acts designed to keep the United States out of another world war. Roosevelt did not share the isolationist sentiments that lay behind such legislation. But he hoped very much to avoid war, and he dared not risk his domestic program by challenging Congress over foreign policy. For these reasons he was slow to warn the people about the dangers of German fascism.
Germany's aggressiveness in 1939 forced Roosevelt to take a tougher stance. Early in the year he tried unsuccessfully to secure revision of a neutrality act calling for an embargo on armaments to all belligerents, whether attacked or attacker. When Hitler overran Poland in September and triggered the formal beginning of World War II, Roosevelt tried again for repeal of the embargo, and succeeded
Most historians agree that Hitler was a menace to Western civilization, that American intervention was necessary to stop him, and that domestic isolationism hampered the president's freedom of response. But they regret that Roosevelt, in seeking his ends, chose to deceive the people and to abuse his powers.
Historians also debate Roosevelt's policies toward Japan, whose leaders were bent on expansion in the 1930's. Hoping to contain this expansion, the president gradually tightened an embargo of vital goods to Japan. He also demanded that Japan halt its aggressive activities in China and Indochina. Instead of backing down, the militarists who controlled Japan decided to fight, by attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, and by assaulting the East Indies. These moves left no doubt about Japan's aggressive intentions. In asking for a declaration of war, the president called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy." He brought a united America into World War II. By December 11, the United States was at war with Germany and Italy.
By 1945, Roosevelt was 63 years old. The events early in that year added to the strains on his heart, and on April 12, 1945, he died suddenly at Warm Springs, Ga.
Dwight D. "IKE"Eisenhower |
World War II began in Europe in 1939 and, although the United States was not involved, there was concern that it soon would be. The Congress of the United States responded by ordering a military draft that began in 1940. Suddenly the army was expanding, and Eisenhower’s abilities were in demand. When the army held maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941, he played a leading role as a staff officer, adding to his reputation and securing him a promotion to brigadier general. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the next day the United States entered World War II against the Axis Powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy). A week later, the army’s new chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, called Eisenhower to Washington, D.C., and put him in charge of the War Plans Division.Opinions differed on how to fight the war. The United States had been attacked in the Pacific Ocean, but it was also threatened by Germany from the Atlantic side. As chief American war planner, Eisenhower favored the strategy of “Europe first,” meaning the United States would make its major effort against Germany. He felt that a major attack should not be launched in the Pacific until the Allies—consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and their partners in the war—defeated Germany. Marshall and President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
Churchill came of a military dynasty. His ancestor John Churchill had been created first Duke of Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV early in the War of the Spanish Succession. Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for Marlborough. As a young man of undistinguished academic accomplishment--he was admitted to Sandhurst after two failed attempts--he entered the army as a cavalry officer. He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) and between 1895 and 1898 managed to see three campaigns: Spain's struggle in Cuba in 1895, the North-West Frontier campaign in India 1897 and the Sudan campaign of 1898, where he took part in what is often described as the British Army's last cavalry charge, at Omdurman. Even at 24, Churchill was steely: "I never felt the slightest nervousness," he wrote to his mother. "[I] felt as cool as I do now." In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent, and in India and the Sudan he was present both as a war correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest in public affairs. He was to write all his life. His "Life of Marlborough" is one of the great English biographies, and "The History of the Second World War" helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature. Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics consumed him. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant political failure. Early in life, Winston determined to succeed where his father had failed. His motives were twofold. His father had despised him. Writing in August 1893 to Winston's grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, he said the boy lacked "cleverness, knowledge and any capacity for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off, exaggeration and make-believe." His disapproval surely stung, but Churchill reacted by venerating his father's memory. Winston fought to restore his father's honor in Parliament (where it had been dented by the Conservative Party). Thirty years after Lord Randolph's death, Winston wrote, "All my dreams of comradeship were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory." Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904 he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that he stepped onto the world stage.A passionate believer in the navy's historic strategic role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval Division to an intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by the stalemate in Belgium and France that followed, he initiated the Allies' only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to the Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill's resignation and led to his political eclipse. It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. Despite his readmission to office in 1917, after a spell commanding an infantry battalion on the Western Front, he failed to re-establish the reputation as a future national statesman he had won before the war. In 1935 he warned the House of Commons of the importance not only of "self-preservation but also of the human and the world cause of the preservation of free governments and of Western civilization against the ever advancing sources of authority and despotism." His anti-Bolshevik policies had failed. By espousing anti-Nazi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and 1939, he ensured that when the moment of final confrontation between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He had decried the prewar appeasement policies of the Conservative leaders Baldwin and Chamberlain. When Chamberlain lost the confidence of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership. His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat of France, Britain truly, in his words, "stood alone." It had no substantial allies and, for much of 1940, lay under threat of German invasion and under constant German air attack. He nevertheless refused Hitler's offers of peace, organized a successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk, to the Middle East to oppose Hitler's Italian ally, Mussolini. This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in history. Convinced that Hitler could not invade Britain while the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained intact, he dispatched the army to a remote theater of war to open a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against Mussolini during 1940-41 both humiliated and infuriated Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler's invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator's plans to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia. Churchill's tendency to conduct strategy by impulse infuriated his advisers. His chief of staff Alan Brooke complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of which was good--and he did not know which one. Yet Churchill the romantic showed acute realism in his reaction to Russia's predicament. He reviled communism. Required to accept a communist ally in a struggle against a Nazi enemy, he did so not only willingly but generously. He sent a large proportion of Britain's war production to Russia by Arctic convoys, even at a time when the convoys from America to Britain, which alone spared the country starvation, suffered devastating U-boat attacks. From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half American by birth, had rested his hope of ultimate victory in U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship with President Roosevelt that he hoped would flower into a war-winning alliance. Roosevelt's reluctance to commit the U.S. beyond an association "short of war" did not dent his optimism. He always hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan, Hitler's ally, to attack the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he confided to himself, "So we had won after all." America's entry into the Second World War marked the high point of Churchill's statesmanship. Britain, demographically, industrially and financially, had entered the war weaker than either of its eventual allies, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Defeats in 1940 had weakened it further, as had the liquidation of its international investments to fund its early war efforts. During 1942, the prestige Britain had won as Hitler's only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill understandably exulted in the success of the D-day invasion when it came in 1944. By then it was the Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however, that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the last Big Three conference in February 1945.
CHARLES de GAULLE
(b. Nov. 22, 1890, Lille, Fr.--d. Nov. 9, 1970, Colombey-les-Deux-Églises),
De Gaulle was an intelligent, hard-working, and zealous young soldier and, in his military career, a man of original mind, great self-assurance, and outstanding courage. In World War I, he fought at Verdun, was three times wounded, spent two years and eight months as a prisoner of war (during which time he made five unsuccessful attempts to escape), and was three times mentioned in dispatches. After a brief visit to Poland as a member of a military mission, a year's teaching at Saint-Cyr, and a two-year course of special training in strategy and tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre (War College), he was promoted by Marshal Pétain in 1925 to the Staff of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre (Supreme War Council). During 1927-29 he served as major in the army occupying the Rhineland and could see for himself both the potential danger of German aggression and the inadequacy of the French defense. He also spent two years in the Middle East and then, having been promoted to lieutenant colonel, spent four years as a member of the secretariat of the Conseil Supérieur de la Défense Nationale (National Defense Council). At the outbreak of the war he commanded a tank brigade attached to the French 5th Army. In May 1940, having been made a temporary brigadier general in the 4th Armoured Division--the rank that he retained for the rest of his life--he was twice given the opportunity to apply his theories on tank warfare. He was mentioned as "an admirable, energetic, and courageous leader." On June 6 he entered the government of Paul Reynaud as undersecretary of state for defense and war, and he undertook several missions to England to explore the possibilities of continuing the war. When the Reynaud government was replaced by that of Marshal Pétain, who intended to seek an armistice with the Germans, de Gaulle left for England. On June 18, he broadcast from London his first appeal to his compatriots to continue the war under his leadership. On Aug. 2, 1940, a French military court tried him and sentenced him in absentia to death, deprivation of military rank, and confiscation of property. De Gaulle entered on his wartime career as a political leader with tremendous liabilities. He had only a handful of haphazardly recruited political supporters and volunteers for what were to become the Free French Forces. He had no political status and was virtually unknown both in England and in France. But he had an absolute belief in his mission and conviction that he possessed the qualities of leadership. He was totally devoted to France and had the strength of character (or obstinacy, as it often appeared to the British) to fight for French interests as he saw them with all the resources at his disposal. In his country, to the politicians of the left, a career officer who was a practicing Roman Catholic was not an immediately acceptable political leader, while to those on the right he was a rebel against Philippe Pétain, a national hero and France's only field marshal. Broadcasts from London, the action of the Free French Forces, and the contacts of resistance groups in France either with his own organization or with those of the British secret services brought national recognition of his leadership. But full recognition by his allies came only after the liberation of Paris. In London, de Gaulle's relations with the British government were never easy, and de Gaulle often added to the strain, at times through his own misjudgment or touchiness. In 1943 he moved his headquarters to Algiers, where he became president of the French Committee of National Liberation, at first jointly with General Henri Giraud. De Gaulle's successful campaign to edge Giraud out gave the world proof of his skill in political maneuver. On Sept. 9, 1944, he and his shadow government returned from Algiers to Paris. He headed two successive provisional governments but, on Jan. 20, 1946, abruptly resigned, apparently owing to irritation with the political parties forming the coalition government.
JOSEPH STALIN
Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953), general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1953, the despotic ruler who more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of Europe after World War II ended in 1945.Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the town of Gori, Georgia, which at the time was part of the vast Russian Empire. He was the third and only surviving child of a cobbler and a housecleaner. In 1888 Stalin began attending the Gori Church School, where he learned Russian and excelled at his studies, winning a scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in the Georgian capital in 1894.Although Stalin’s policy in the mid-1930s was to support the Communist International (Comintern) in forming a popular front against the rise of fascism in Europe, he gave up the idea of collective security with the West and in August 1939 decided upon an alliance with Nazi Germany. The “Secret Protocols” of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact carved up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence; the Soviets allowed Germany to invade Poland in exchange for Hitler’s promised nonaggression against Soviet territory. Despite warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise in June 1941 when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged attack against the USSR. Although the Soviets were poorly prepared for the invasion and at first suffered huge losses, the country rallied behind Stalin, who assumed direct leadership of the war effort. Following their defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, the Nazis lost the initiative and were finally forced to retreat in 1945, which allowed Soviet troops to move into Eastern Europe. Having obtained recognition from Allied governments of a Soviet sphere of influence in these newly liberated countries, Stalin established puppet Communist regimes and drew the so-called Iron Curtain between Eastern and Western Europe.
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