| A | B |
|---|
| D-Day | an invasion by the Allies on June 6, 1944, which marked the beginning of the end of World War II |
| Normandy | the beach where the Allies landed for the D-Day attack |
| sanctions | penalties put on a country for punishment, such as agreeing to not sell them weapons or supplies |
| appeasement | trying to keep peace by giving into the demands of an aggressor, such as Hitler, instead of standing up to him |
| pacifism | opposing all war |
| Spanish Civil War | started by Francisco Franco who led the Nationalists in revolt against the new republican government of Spain in 1936 |
| Haile Selassie | Ethiopian king who asked the League of Nations for help against Italy's invasion of Ethiopia |
| Adolf Hitler | the leader of Germany who rallied support by fighting against the Versailles treaty |
| Mussolini | the leader of Italy who invaded Ethiopia |
| Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis | Italy, Germany, and Japan's agreement to fight Soviet communism, and to not interfere with each other's plans for expansion |
| Anschluss | Hitler's planned union of Austria and Germany |
| Munich Conference | a meeting where the British and French leaders appeased Hitler by giving him the Czech Sudentenland |
| Neville Chamberlain | Britain's prime minister who returned from Munich declaring peace, one year before the start of World War II |
| Nazi-Soviet Pact | a nonagression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union |
| Invasion of Poland | Hitler's act that started World War II, after which Britain and France declared war on Germany in support of their commitment to Poland |
| Blitzkrieg | Hitler's "lightning war" used on Belgium, a method for taking over countries in a fast, active attack |
| Maginot Line | the line the French stayed behind, known as "the phony war" |
| Operation Sea Lion | Hitler's planned attack to subdue Britain |
| Winston Churchill | the new British Prime Minister who stood up to Hitler |
| Battle of Britain | the German's bombing of London for 58 straight nights, the London Blitz |
| Dunkirk | a beach where British soldiers stranded in France were picked up and returned to Britain |
| Charles de Gaulle | led in setting up the French government-in-exile |
| "Desert Fox" | nickname for Hitler's general Erwin Rommel who commanded the forces in North Africa |
| Operation Barbarossa | Hitler's plan to overtake the Soviet Union |
| Lend-Lease Act | passed by Congress in 1941, allowing President Roosevelt to sell or lend war materials |
| Atlantic Charter | pledge signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in a secret meeting on a warship in the Atlantic |
| Pearl Harbor | Japanese air attack on U.S. forces on December 7, 1941, bringing the U.S. into the war |
| collaborator | a person who worked with the Nazis to hunt down Jews |
| Holocaust | the mass destruction of the Jews by the Germans, with more than six million killed by 1945 |
| Auschwitz | famous German "death camp" for the destruction of the Jews |
| genocide | the deliberate destruction of a group of people, such as the Jews |
| Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere | the Japanese plan to make an empire out of Asia under the guise of "rescuing" Asians from western colonial rule |
| Battle of El Alamein | the beginning of the Allies victory, when Rommel was stopped in Egypt |
| Dwight Eisenhower | the American general who led forces in World War II, famous for leadership in the D-Day invasion |
| Battle of Stalingrad | Hitler's unsuccessful try to capture the Soviet Union |
| kamikaze | Japanese pilots who flew on suicide missions |
| Battle of Midway and the Coral Sea | the turning point of the war in the Pacific, after which the Allies began winning |
| V-E Day | when victory was celebrated in Europe on May 8, 1945 |
| Battle of the Bulge | Hitler's last success on the Europe front |
| Harry Truman | became U.S. president when Roosevelt died in office, decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan to end the war |
| Hiroshima | site in Japan of the first atomic bomb explosion |
| containment | limiting communism to the areas already under communist rule |
| "Iron curtain" | phrase coined by Churchill for an imaginary line behind which Russians took over with communist rule in Eastern Europe |
| UN | international peace organization set up in 1945, solving world political problems |
| Truman Doctrine | policy of the U.S. to support free people of the world from conquering armies |
| Berlin airlift | the west kept Stalin from taking Western Berlin by airlifting supplies against a Russian blockade around Berlin |
| NATO | a military alliance of the U.S., Canada, and 9 western European countries |
| Nuremberg Trials | war trials held by the allies to punish the top Nazi officials who were responsible for the holocaust |
| Holocaust | the genocide of the Jews, cruelly killing more than 6 million Jews during the war |
| Cold War | a state of tension and distrust between the Soviet Union and the U.S. |
| Marshall Plan | A U.S. plan to provide massive aid to Western Europe to ward off their fall to communism |
| East and West Germany | division of Germany between Russia and the Allies |
| Eastern Germany | the division where Russia installed communism |
| Western Germany | the division where the Allies encouraged rebuilding after World War II |
