The History of the Twentieth Century

Adolf Hitler redeployed Luftwaffe units from the Eastern front to the Mediterranean. With Axis air superiority in the region established, shipments of equipment and supplies to Panzer Army Africa substantially increased. Soon Rommel was on the move again, this time driving the British deep into Egypt.

Rommel was surprised by a British offensive (Operation Crusader) and his forces were driven all the way back to where he had started from a year earlier. But in a few months, he and his army pushed the British back to where they had started.

When the United States entered the war, the German U-boats suddenly had many more targets.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most vicious of the Nazis. So much so that the Czechoslovak and British governments decided that he needed to be eliminated.

The Japanese execute their attempted ambush at Midway, and it fails catastrophically.

The US Navy sent two of its carriers into the southwest Pacific to thwart the Japanese campaign to take New Caledonia and isolate Australia. The Japanese responded by sending two of their own. The carriers engaged each other in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt asked the military to find a way to strike back at the Japanese Home Islands. It took an unorthodox approach to make this possible.

For India, like Australia, the entry of Japan into the war meant it was no longer a distant, European struggle. By May 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army was at the Indian border.

In 1942, many Americans feared a Japanese invasion of the West Coast of the US or Canada was imminent. Regrettably, these fears led to the belief--unsupported by facts--that the ethnic Japanese population on the West Coast represented a dangerous fifth column of potential spies and saboteurs.

Sometime in the autumn of 1941, a decision was made among the Nazi elite to murder every Jewish person in Europe--or within reach, anyway. No record exists of how that decision was made, but we have a very detailed record of how it was carried out.