14.4 Victory in Europe and the Pacific

Read the following section and answer the questions that follow. Victory in Europe and the Pacific
Terms, People, and Places
V-E Day
Bataan Death March
Douglas MacArthur
island-hopping
kamikaze
Manhattan Project
Hiroshima
Nagasaki

By early spring 1945, the war in Europe was nearing its end, and the Allies turned their attention to winning the war in the Pacific. There remained a series of bloody battles ahead, as well as an agonizing decision for American President Harry Truman.

Nazis Defeated

By March 1945, the Allies had crossed the Rhine into western Germany. From the east, Soviet troops closed in on Berlin. In late April, American and Russian soldiers met and shook hands at the
Elbe River. All over Europe, Axis armies began to surrender.
In Italy, guerrillas captured and executed Mussolini. As Soviet troops fought their way into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker. On May 7, Germany surrendered. Officially, the war in Europe ended the next day, May 8, 1945, which was proclaimed V-E Day (Victory in Europe). After just 12 years, Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” was bomb-ravaged and in ruins.
The Allies were able to defeat the Axis powers in Europe for several reasons. Because of the location of Germany and its allies, they had to fight on several fronts simultaneously. Hitler,
who took almost complete control over military decisions, made some poor ones. He underestimated the ability of the Soviet Union to fight his armies.
The enormous productive capacity of the United States was another factor. By 1944 the United States was producing twice as much as all of the Axis powers combined. Meanwhile, Allied bombing hindered German production. Oil became so scarce because of bombing that the Luftwaffe was almost grounded by the time of the D-Day invasion. With victory in Europe achieved, the Allies now had to triumph over Japan in the Pacific.

Struggle for the Pacific

Until mid-1942, the Japanese had won an uninterrupted series of victories. They controlled much of Southeast Asia and many Pacific islands. By May 1942, the Japanese had gained control of the Philippines, killing several hundred American soldiers and some 10,000 Filipino soldiers
during the 68-mile Bataan Death March. One survivor described the ordeal as “a macabre litany of heat, dust, starvation, thirst, flies, filth, stench, murder, torture, corpses, and wholesale brutality that numbs the memory.” Many Filipino civilians risked—and sometimes lost—their lives to give food and water to captives on the march.
After the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, however, the United States took the offensive. That summer, United States Marines under General Douglas MacArthur’s command landed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Victory on Guadalcanal marked the beginning of an “island-hopping” campaign. The goal of the campaign was to recapture some Japanese-held islands while bypassing others. The captured islands served as stepping stones to the next objective. In this way, American forces gradually moved north toward Japan. By 1944, the United States Navy, commanded by Admiral Chester Nimitz, was blockading Japan, and American bombers pounded Japanese cities and industries. In October 1944, MacArthur began the fight to retake the Philippines.
The British, meanwhile, were pushing Japanese forces back into the jungles of Burma and Malaya.

Defeat for Japan

With war won in Europe, the Allies poured their resources into defeating Japan. By mid-1945, most of the Japanese navy and air force had been destroyed. Yet the Japanese still had an army of two million men. The road to victory, it appeared, would be long and costly.

Invasion or the Bomb? 
In bloody battles on the islands of Iwo Jima from February to March 1945 and Okinawa from April to July 1945, the Japanese had shown that they would fight to the death rather than surrender. Beginning in 1944, some young Japanese men chose to become kamikaze (kah muh KAH zee) pilots who undertook suicide missions, crashing their explosive-laden airplanes into American warships.
While Allied military leaders planned for invasion, scientists offered another way to end the war. Scientists understood that by splitting the atom, they could create an explosion far more powerful than any yet known. Allied scientists, some of them German and Italian refugees, conducted research, code-named the Manhattan Project, racing to harness the atom. In July 1945, they successfully tested the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
News of this test was brought to the new American president, Harry Truman. Truman had taken office after Franklin Roosevelt died unexpectedly on April 12. He realized that the atomic bomb was a terrible new force for destruction. Still, after consulting with his advisors, and determining that it would save American lives, he decided to use the new weapon against Japan.
At the time, Truman was meeting with other Allied leaders in the city of Potsdam, Germany. They issued a warning to Japan to surrender or face “utter and complete destruction.” When the Japanese ignored the deadline, the United States took action.

The Brain Drain
Both before and during World War II, thousands of people emigrated from Europe to escape the brutal police of the fascist states. This massive migration included gifted artists, scholars, and scientists, many of whom were Jewish. Among the scientists were specialists who played
vital roles in the Manhattan Project, in which the United States developed the first atomic bombs. Hitler showed little concern for the negative impact that the departure of these brilliant minds would have on German science. He once said, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, we shall do without science for a few years.”

Utter Destruction
On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. The bomb flattened four square miles and instantly killed more than 70,000 people. In the months that
followed, many more would die from radiation sickness, a deadly after-effect of exposure to radioactive materials.
On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Again, Japanese leaders did not respond. The next day, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki. More than 40,000 people were killed in this second explosion.
Finally, on August 10, Emperor Hirohito intervened, an action unheard of for a Japanese emperor, and forced the government to surrender. On September 2, 1945, the formal peace treaty was signed on board the American battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

( vocab ) V-E Day

( vocab ) Bataan Death March

( vocab ) Douglas MacArthur

( vocab ) island-hopping

( vocab ) kamikaze

( vocab ) Manhattan Project

( vocab ) Hiroshima

( vocab ) Nagasaki

( standards check ) How did the Allied forces finally defeat the Germans?

( standards check ) What strategies did the Allies use to end the war with Japan?

( assessment )  How did the location of the Axis powers in Europe contribute to their defeat?

( assessment ) What factors besides ending the war in the Pacific might have contributed to President
Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb?

( objectives ) Identify and locate the Allied and Axis powers on a map and discuss the major turning points of the war, the principal theaters of conflict, key strategic decisions, and the resulting war conferences and political resolutions, with emphasis on the importance of geographic factors.

( objectives ) Describe the political, diplomatic, and military leaders during the war (e.g., Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower).

( objectives ) List the human costs of the war, with particular attention to the civilian and military losses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the United States, China, and Japan.

( focus question ) How did the Allies finally defeat the Axis powers?