US Homefront:
-Homefront is what you're doing at your home (usually means making stuff but there is more as well)
1. Selective Training and Service Act
-1940
-First peacetime draft in US history (passed before we were in war)
-Used until 1973 to fill military needs, and afterward the military depended on volunteers to fill needs
2. Women's role in WWII
-Rosie the Riveter represented women workers in WWII
-Many women got better educations and did more work outside the home
-Helped the women out with achieving equal rights
-Women started working in the factories
-Helped us win because without them things wouldn't have gotten made and we wouldn't have had more things to help us
-Many women worked as military nurses
-Women are the ones who had to type up the letters that said if you son/husband died in the war
-Worked on farms, waitresses, messengers, do laundry, teachers, conductors, etc.
-Every branch in the military had their own women division
-Womens Army Core (WAC) did things like typing, transporting, developing pictures, and other desk-like jobs
-Started rationing goods (so much gas/food per week)
-Growing and canning their own food
-WAVES - Women's Navy
-Transport planes, test out new airplanes
-"Tokyo Rose"/Iva Toguri was an American citizen in Japan that said she was forced to broadcast propaganda to the Allied troops for Japan (try to take away their will to fight/make them homesick). She was convicted of treason
3. African-American's role in WWII
-Blacks and whites were segragated (same with all races)
-Worked in factories, but many men went to war and even achieved awards from it
4. Asian's role in WWII
-Japanese Americans were forced to sell their homes and move to camps
5. Hollywood's role in WWII
-They entertained troops by making propaganda films and tried to get people to buy war bonds
-Sent people oversead to entertain troops
-Cary Grant was one of the more popular actors at the time
-Bob Hope was a comedian/actor/singer
-USO Tour was designed to entertain the troops, and Bob Hope was a part of it (had singers/actors/dancers/comedians)
-Kilroy Was Here was believed to have started during WWII by JJ Kilroy. He worked on the docks and started writing "Kilroy Was Here" on the ships. It caught on so everyone started doing it
6. Office of Price Administration
-Office of Price Administration was set up in 1941 to administer price controls and rationing goods
-Food rationing included restrictions on sugar and meat; clothing rationing restricted silk and nylon
-Gas became rationecd in May 1942 on the East coast and was limited to 5 gallons per week
-Half of the nation's automobiles were issued an A sticker, common person, allowing 4 gallons per week. B stickers were supplementary allowance for war workers, and C stickers were vital occupations such as doctor. Truckers had T stickers for unlimited amounts.
-Many fake stickers were made, and 32,000 people were arrested for it
-Once your stamps were gone for the week, you had to wait because you could only get so much
-There were many laws with ration books. If you die, someone has to return your book to the ration board
-You had to wait in long lines to get things
-Horse meat was not rationed, so you could get as much as you wanted
7. War Production Board
-All about production and was aimed to make sure factories could make as much as they could, as effeciently and quickly as they could
8. National War Labor Board
-It brought all the workers together
-The governemnt didn't want them to go on strike so they decided everyone needed to work together
9. Why the Homefront helped win the war
10. How US/Allies fought back against U-boats
-U-boat/submarine
-Battle of the Atlantic was mostly about controling the seas and shipping lines and trying to prevent stuff from getting to Great Britain
-Germany went under the water to have success at the high seas because United States and Great Britain had control of the top of the seas
-By intercepting German radio transmissions (code) you could figure out where the u-boats were located and avoid them
-Convoy system (power in numbers) you would go in a group and be surrounded by battleships and destroyers
-U-boats could get a few ships but most would go through
-HF/DF was used to locate the source of submarines
-Hunter/Killer ships and airplanes that were specifically designed to go after u-boats
-Depth Charges were bombs that would sink a submarine and cause an underwater explosion
11. Intelligence gathering--Ultra/Magic
-Churchill and Roosevelt knew the importance of intercepting code, and would share with eachother
-ULTRA (British) and MAGIC (United States against Japan) were the code names for the intercepting and decepting of diplimatic and military codes
-Once we knew were U-boats were located we would take a different route
-Enigma was the machine that Germany used to transfer their information through codes
-Eventually intercepted Enigma codes
12. Operation Barborossa(USSR vs Germany)
-Hitler invaded the Soviet Union because of Lebensraum and wanted the Ikraine for farmland
-Many German Military generals said not to do it, but Hitler thought otherwise
-He despised the people living in the Soviet Union because he didn't like Slavs
-He could use the people as slave labor and defeating the USSR would further isolate te Allies
-Hitler didn't trust Stalin and Germany propaganda showed that Russia was planning on attacking Germany
-Wanted the oilfields in the Caucasus mountains
-The Soviet Union was his true prize because it's what he wanted more than anything
-Greatest land war in recorded history (manpower and caualties) began at 3:30am on June 22, 1941
-Main front would eventually expand to 1490 miles and depth of 600 miles
-3,500,000 Red Army soldiers were in captivity and 4,000,000 died in battle
-Germans occupied 900,000 square miles of Soviet territory at one time
-Germany Army in USSR was split
-Army Group North whose main goal was Leningrad
-Army Group Centre whose main goal was Moscow
-Army Group South whose main goals were Rostov, the Caucasus Mountains, the Crimean Peninsula, and Stalingrad
-Soviets started to slowly push the Germans back about a year and a half after Germany invaded them
-Battle of Moscow: October 1941-January 1942
-Moscow was what Hitler really wanted
-Hitler believed Moscow was the major military and political target in the USSR as it would lead to the collapse of the country
-Germany got within 12 miles of Moscow before Soviet troops stopped the advance of the Germans
-This battle marked a major turning point on the Eastern Front
-Hitler was upset so he fired his commander-in-chief in December 1941 and tookk personal charge of the German Army (Wehrmacht)
-Hitler took control and made all military decisions afterward
-Led many experiences German officers to go against Hitler, and Hitler decided to surround himself with young officers with little experience so they would listen to everything he said
-The Siege of Leningrad started on September 8, 1941 when the last land connection to the city was cut off by Germany
-Largest in history (lasted for 872 days, until January 27, 1944)
-Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941-1942 after all the animals had been eaten by survivors (birds/rats/pets)
-A successful Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad drained necessary resources the Germans needed to continue the blockade, and it eventually failed
-The Germans never took any of the three major Soviet cities
13. Battle in Africa and Italy
-Erwin Rommel (The Desert Fox) was the hed German in Africa
-Bernard Montgomery-Monty and George Patton didn't like each other and had a competition going to see who could beat Rommel first
-George Patton defeated Rommel and goes down in history as a great US General
-Operation Torch was the code name for the British-American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942 (invaded Maracco)
-My mid 1943 we defeated the Germans, Italians and Vichy France
-Stalin wasn't happy because he thought we should invade France instead of Africa
-Fighting in the desert with tanks was huge in Northern Africa (Tank Warfare)
-Casablanca Conference (January 1942) 'we will not make peace, we will only accept Germany's unconditional surrender'
-FDR and Churchill
-After Africa we turned our attetion to the Mediteranian Islands
-Italy was a major part of the war for the American soldiers
-Italy was the "soft underbelly of Europe" according to Churchill and thought we should attack them
-Once Italy surrendered they became allies of ours
-We weren't quite ready to attack France so we attacked Italy
14. US Generals-Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz, Bradley
-George C. Marshall was the Chief of Staff of the US Military during WWII
15. D-Day-Operation Overlord
16. Battle of the Bulge
17. FDR Dies-Truman takes over
18. VE Day
19. Battle in the Pacific-Island Hopping, Philippines, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa,
20. Navajo Code Talkers
21. Doolittle's Raid
22. Manhattan Project
23. Hiroshima bombing
24. Nagasaki bombing
25. VJ Day
26. Yalta Conference
27. Nuremburg Trials
28. Japanese Internment Camps in US
29. Why did we win WWII?
-Henry Kaiser had many ships made
-By the end of the war we were making more stuff in a year than all the countries combined
-Lots of credit go to the people who made and decifered systems like Ultra and Magic
Comments