German forces overran Poland in September 1939 with blitzkrieg, a German term meaning lightning war, combining fast tanks and aircraft.
Missing Word
blitzkrieg
Blitzkrieg means lightning war, the German tactic of rapid strikes by tanks and aircraft. Its speed shocked Europe and helped Germany defeat France in about six weeks in 1940.
Category: Road to War
Question 2
In Italy, Benito Mussolini built a Fascist dictatorship after becoming prime minister in 1922.
Missing Word
Mussolini
Mussolini founded the Fascist movement in 1919 and turned Italy into a one-party state in the mid-1920s. He later allied Italy with Hitler's Germany.
Category: Road to War
Question 3
At the Munich Conference of 1938, Britain and France agreed to let Germany occupy the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with many German-speaking residents.
Missing Word
Sudetenland
The Sudetenland was the border region of Czechoslovakia that Hitler demanded. Giving it to him was the high point of appeasement, and Germany seized the rest of Czechoslovakia months later.
Category: Road to War
Question 4
Germany, Italy and Japan were the leading members of the wartime alliance known as the Axis Powers.
Missing Word
Axis
The alliance took its name from the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis agreement between Italy and Germany. Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, Italy joined it in 1937, and the three formally allied in the 1940 Tripartite Pact. The Allies, led by Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, fought against them.
Category: Road to War
Question 5
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a march on Washington in 1941 to protest discrimination in defense jobs.
Missing Word
Randolph
Randolph's threat pressured Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 against discrimination in defense industries. He called off the march once the order was signed.
Category: Civil Rights in Wartime
Question 6
Many African American combat pilots of World War II trained in a program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Missing Word
Tuskegee
The Tuskegee Airmen flew combat missions in segregated units in North Africa and Europe. Eleanor Roosevelt publicized the program by flying with one of its Black pilots in 1941.
Category: Civil Rights in Wartime
Question 7
Many historians see the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, where an entire German army surrendered in February 1943, as the turning point of the war in Europe.
Missing Word
Stalingrad
Stalingrad was the Soviet city where the German Sixth Army was surrounded and forced to surrender. After it, the Soviets pushed the Germans steadily west toward Berlin.
Category: European Theater
Question 8
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy on the coast of northern France.
Missing Word
Normandy
Normandy is the region of northern France where British, Canadian and American troops landed. The invasion opened a second front in western Europe and led to the liberation of Paris that summer.
Category: European Theater
Question 9
General Dwight D. Eisenhower served as supreme commander of the Allied forces that invaded western Europe in 1944.
Missing Word
Eisenhower
Eisenhower commanded the D-Day invasion and the campaign that followed across France and into Germany. He later became president of the United States.
Category: European Theater
Question 10
At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Truman, Stalin and the British leaders confirmed plans to divide Germany into four occupation zones.
Missing Word
Potsdam
Potsdam, near Berlin, hosted the last wartime meeting of the major Allied leaders. The zones, agreed in principle earlier and confirmed there, were assigned to the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, and disagreements at the conference foreshadowed the Cold War.
Category: Allied Diplomacy
Question 11
In August 1942, two months after Midway, U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, opening the first major American offensive in the Pacific.
Missing Word
Guadalcanal
Guadalcanal was an island in the Solomons where months of fighting ended with an American victory in early 1943. It marked the shift from defending against Japan to attacking.
Category: Pacific Theater
Question 12
Japanese pilots who deliberately crashed their planes into American ships late in the war were called kamikaze, a word meaning divine wind.
Missing Word
kamikaze
Kamikaze attacks were suicide missions flown against Allied ships, especially around Okinawa. Americans saw them as evidence that Japan would fight to the end, which shaped the decision to use the atomic bomb.
Category: Pacific Theater
Question 13
The physicist Albert Einstein, who had fled Nazi Germany, signed a 1939 letter warning Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb.
Missing Word
Einstein
Einstein's letter led Roosevelt to start American atomic research, which grew into the Manhattan Project. Einstein himself did not work on building the bomb.
Category: Atomic Bomb
Question 14
On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb used in war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Missing Word
Hiroshima
Hiroshima was a military headquarters and supply center, and the blast leveled much of the city. A second bomb fell on Nagasaki three days later.
Category: Atomic Bomb
Question 15
Emperor Hirohito, whose reign is known in Japan as the Showa era, broke a deadlock among Japan's leaders after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, and Japan accepted the Allied surrender terms.
Missing Word
Hirohito
Hirohito reigned as emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. After his intervention, Japan announced on August 15, 1945, that it would surrender, and the Allies allowed him to remain emperor during the occupation. Japan formally signed the surrender on September 2, 1945.
Category: Atomic Bomb