FDR Dies-Truman takes over
FDR was only three months into his 4th term when died in April of 1945 of a stroke. It was about a year before the end of the war. Truman then took over.
In WW1 Truman fought in France as an artilary officer. He joined FDR as his running mate in 1944. Truman called the shots in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945. He had to deal with the postwar recovery of US economy. He worked at eliminating racism and delt with a lot of foreign policies dealing with the ending of ww2.
Truman was re-elected in 1948 as he shockingly beat Thomas E. Dewey. By the time he left office he was one of the most unpopular presidents that we have ever had.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1945/apr45/12apr45.htm
Truman above and FDR below.
Intelligence gathering--Ultra/Magic
Ultra was what we called the German secret messaging code. The western powers, mainly Britian, ended up decoding it. It all started with the Polish secret services. They copied the Germans basic enciphering machines. This made it a lot easier to decode it. They then handed this over to British and French forces, and then British cryptanalysts finished and decoded it.
Magic was a project of the US Army's Signals Intelligence Section (SIS) and the US Navy's Communication Special Unit before and during WW2. They dealt with cryptography which is just the study of techniques of things like secret writing or secret codes.
Some of their biggest achievements include:
Red was a Japanese code used from WW1. It was decoded because a navy officer stole a Japanese Secret Operating Code codebook. The pictures that were in the codebook were given to a cryptanalysts to be worked with. The folder they kept these in was red so it was called the Red code.
Blue was another code used by the Japanese and was broken by the Research Bureau in just two years.
Purple was a German code that was much more complicated and harder for us to crack. It was the last one of the three and wasn't decoded until it was too late. It got the name purple from how when you mix blue and red together you get purple. It wasn't decoded until three years into the war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(cryptography)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra
Comments
Good but a bit brief and be sure to include personal thoughts!