Continued with the WWII test questions:
20. Navajo Code Talkers: The Navajo Code Talkers were people that were able to speak the Navajo language, and their language is so complex that one mispronounced syllable would change the entire meaning of the sentence. Their codes were used to transmit information to US intelligence during the war. The codes were vague enough so the Japanese and the Germans wouldn't understand it. There were only 29 code talkers during WWII and George W. Bush gave a special medal of honor to the 4 living code talkers that still may be alive today.
21. Doolittle's Raid: The raid was lead by General James Doolittle, but people called him Jimmy. The raid was to bomb Japan and cause them to be insufficient in fighting the war. The main purpose of the raid was to get a moral boost for the US and to lower the moral for Japan. Japan had said they were invulnerable, but the US caused them to change their minds. The planes needed to be lightened if they were to be successful in the raid.
22. Manhattan Project: The Manhattan Project was the project for the US to build an atomic bomb because they heard that Hitler was planning on making one also. It costed millions of dollars then, which would be millions upon millions in cost today. The project was very secret because they didn't want word getting around Germany, which would in turn, in some way, make it's way to Germany. General Leslie Groves wanted to lead out in a battlefield, but he was placed to be the lead of the project to build the atomic bomb. He was somewhat slighted by the fact that he was jammed into a lab instead of fighting on the front lines, but he didn't quite understand the importance of the operation yet. J Robert Oppenheimer was the scientist in charge of the US operation.
23. Hiroshima bombing: There was a list of different locations that the US could have bombed, but the location that would be bombed must be able to be clearly seen (cloud cover, fog, etc.). When the pilots noticed that Hiroshima was a clear shot, they had only enough bombs to destroy only Hiroshima, so they went ahead with it.
There was a lot of devastation in Japan because of the Hiroshima bombing. Whether it be horrible burns, painful deaths, or radiation sickness, there was a lot of horrible suffering.
24. Nagasaki bombing: August 5, 1945, and it was targeted instead of Tokyo or Kyoto because, if we were to bomb their capitol or a major city with lots of history and other values, we would tick them off so bad that they might join up with another major power. One thought that we had was that they would join up with the Soviet Union if we got them mad enough. We didn't want them joining up with another power because we had some hope that they would still become an ally...even after we were in war with them for however long.
The main message in the mission to bomb Nagasaki was to "not hit your target unless you see it". There were a lot of things that went wrong in that mission, but Japan surrendered only a week or so afterward.
25. VJ Day: The day that Japan surrendered and the war with them was over. Happened on August 14, 1945
26. Yalta Conference: the Yalta Conference was a compromise on different topics, but it mostly focused on what was going to happen to Germany after WWII. Germany was to be broken into four different occupation zones (US, Great Britain, France, and the USSR). Stalin promised that there would be free elections in Eastern Europe, but that never happened, and he continued to take over different parts of Europe. He also promised that he would join the war against Japan after the war with Germany was over, but that didn't happen either. He wanted something out of Japan, so he didn't want to be a part of destroying it.
Will continue tomorrow.
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