Today in class we were trying to do some presentations but there were some technical difficulties so it took a while.
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The Spying Game
Spying is getting secret information from somewhere and taking it back to whoever you are working for. Takeo Yoshikawa was a Japanese spy who went to Pearl Harbor and got pictures of places on the islands and figured out where all of the ships and flying routines would take place and where they would be. Reinhard Gehlen was Hitler’s top intelligence person and he had many spies under him to get information about the Russian front and he turned himself over to the US. Morris Cohen was a spy for the Soviets that gave them info about the atomic bombs. Most spies were multilingual and they interrogated POW’s or other people. People in the US thought the Japanese were spies so they put them into internment camps so they couldn’t spy.
The Enigma Machine was a coding machine for Germany. We were able to crack the Enigma Code. Ultra was the codename for interception and deciphering German code and the machine that broke the code was called the Bomb. Magic was the codename for intercepting and deciphering Japanese naval code. The Navajo code talkers were Navajo Indians that used their language to relay messages and they couldn’t decipher our code but we deciphered theirs.
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Yalta/Potsdam Conference
The conference was held in Yalta to decide the fate of post-war Europe. The big three met there (FDR, Churchill, and Stalin). They wanted to discuss what would happen to Germany. The plan was to break Germany into four zones (French, British, American, Soviet). Three months after the war was over the Soviets were going to enter against the Japan which he did at the end of the war since he was a little mad at us.
The Potsdam conference was after the Yalta conference. Truman had just learned of the atomic bombs. It agreed to set up the four zones, break up the Nazi Party, to bring Nazi criminals to justice, and give some German land to the Soviets. We didn’t want to give Germany and more control of Europe since they were now gaining land in Europe.
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