World War II Part II

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World War IIPart II
For 2,000 years Japan had never been defeated.
There was no word for "surrender" in the
Japanese dictionary. And although the
Japanese government never believed it could
defeat the United States, it did intend to
negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms
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War in the Pacific

• Rape of Nanking
• The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of
  Nanking, was an episode of mass murder and mass
  rape committed by Japanese troops against Nanking
  (China)
• 1937
• Historians and witnesses have estimated that
  250,000 to 300,000 people were killed.

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War in the Pacific
Japanese Empire 1942
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War in the Pacific

• Battle of Midway
• The Japanese fleet was taken by surprise
• by the American planes
• Forced the Japanese to assume a defensive
  strategy

Midway is roughly equidistant between North
America and Asia
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• Island Hopping
• winning territory from Japan

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Nearing Japan

• Iwo Jima (March 1945)
• Okinawa (April 1945)
• Crucial for invading Japan
• 75,000 American casualties

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The Manhattan ProjectAtomic bomb

• Albert Einstein
• prompted FDR to build the weapon
• J. Robert Oppenheimer
• scientist in charge of the project

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• What would you do?
• Soviet Union approaching from the West
• Japan would not surrender
• Fighting on Mainland Japan might cost One Million
  American lives.

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• In order to save American lives,
• Harry Truman decided to drop an atomic bomb on
  Hiroshima
• More than 60,000 dead from blast
• Nagasaki
• More than 35,000 dead from blast

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• Emperor Hirohito
• surrendered to the Allies in August 1945
• V-J Day

http//www.history.com/videos/atomic-bomb-ends-wwI
Iatomic-bomb-ends-wwII
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WW IIOnly two Winners

• United States
• A Bomb meant U.S. stood alone in Power
• Soviet Union
• Emerged as a great power
• Helped found the United Nations