The History of the Twentieth Century

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.

The winter of 1941-42 was not a happy one for the German Army. On the Eastern Front it was battered by a record cold winter and a Soviet counteroffensive. In North Africa, a British offensive pushed Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps all the way back to central Libya, from where he had begun.

After the sinking of Bismarck, the Germans abandoned surface raiding in the Atlantic and turned to their greatest naval strength: submarine warfare.