APUSH Unit 8: WWII and the Cold War – Flashcards

Roosevelt implemented this policy in the 1930s in Latin America, in hopes that it would help him to defend the Western Hemisphere. This policy renounced the corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and directly contradicted Big Stick and Dollar Diplomacy policies by focusing on consultation and nonintervention. It was successful in creating alliances with foreign countries, though it did hurt some American businessmen.

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology often accompanied by dictatorship. During World War II, it was used by Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy.

Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party dictator of Germany during the WWII era. The Nazi Party was a political party in Germany that focused on Racism and employed the Hitler Youth.

Benito Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited as one of the key figures in the creation of fascism. He became the 40th Prime Minister in Italy in 1922 and was a powerful leader in the Axis side of World War II.

The Axis Powers, Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), and Japan (Hirohito) were the alignment of nations that fought in WWII against the Allied forces. Their alliance began in 1936, and they officially became a military alliance in 1939 under the Pact of Steel.

Isolationism is the policy of isolating one's country from the affairs of other nations by declining to enter into alliances, economic commitments, trade, etc. The United States attempted to practice this policy with the Neutrality Acts after WWI as the country did not want to enter another war, but they eventually dropped the doctrine and became a major belligerent in the war.

These acts, created in 1935, 1936, and 1937 legislated that when the president proclaimed the existence of a foreign war, certain restrictions would automatically go into effect, like restricting Americans from sailing on ships of the enemy, selling or giving ammunition to the enemy, or loaning money to the enemy. It marked the abandonment of the traditional American policy of the freedom of the seas, but the main goal of these acts was to keep America out of conflicts such as those that began World War I (if these acts had been in place then, America would probably not have been pulled in). The act of the same name passed in 1939 added that the president could declare certain areas of the water 'impassable' by American merchant ships.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was a war between Spanish rebels (led by fascistic General Francisco Franco) and the Republican government in Madrid. Hitler and Mussolini aided the rebels. The United States placed an embargo on both sides and other countries followed their lead, as the Spanish democracy crumbled to fascist dictators.

Symbolized by the word "Munich", this technique was used by the American government to attempt to placate the dictators of Italy and Germany. It ultimately failed and was seen as more of surrender than an actual technique to create peace.

1933- Hitler withdraws Germany from League of Nations and takes Rhineland , 1937- Hitler issued statement that Germany is going to ignore the Treaty of Versailles, 1938- Germany invades Austria, then Czechoslovakia and Sudetenland, September 1st, 1939- Germany breaks promise and invades Poland

In Chicago, Roosevelt delivered this speech in 1937, that called for economic embargoes on aggressors (namely Japan and Italy). The speech created fear among Americans who worried that this was the first step to foreign entanglement.

Blitzkrieg, German for "lightning war", is an all-motorized force concentration of tanks, infantry, artillery, combat engineers and air power, concentrating overwhelming force at high speed to break through enemy lines. Through constant motion, it attempts to keep its enemy off balance, making it difficult to respond. Germany used this technique during its Poland invasion in 1939 and invasions of France in 1940.

This policy, requested by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, replaced the Neutrality Acts by allowing the sale of materials to belligerents as long as they arranged for the transport using their own ships and paid immediately in cash.

This 1941 State of the Union, better known by this name, articulated the four fundamental freedoms that people everywhere in the world deserve the right to enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

This was the location of the final major conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The two main effects of this conference were the decision to give Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania representative government based on free elections (which Stalin eventually broke), and the decision for Stalin to attack japan within three months of the capture of Germany in return for Japan's Kurile Islands and joint control over railroads in Manchuria.

The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, also known as the Burke-Wadsworth Act, was the first peacetime draft in US history. It required men between 21 and 35 register with local draft boards. During WWII, all men aged 18 to 45 were made liable for military service.

The Lend-Lease Bill allowed the US to send a limitless supply of arms to the victims of aggression, who in turn would take down their aggressors and keep the US out of their wars. After the war, they would return reusable weapons or pay back the United States. This bill marked the abandonment of any pretense of neutrality, as the United States was now openly supporting the Allies through supplying goods. It also built up US factories for all-out war production, and helped the US when they eventually did join the war. Hitler saw this act as an unofficial declaration of war.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy conducted a surprise military strike on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. About 400 Japanese fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers, attacked the base. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. About 2,500 Americans were killed and 1,300 were wounded. Only about 100 Japanese men were killed or wounded. The attack led directly to the American entry into World War II in both the Pacific and European areas. The next day, December 8th, the US declared war on Japan and the strong domestic support for isolationism virtually disappeared.

This research and development program produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. It began in 1939 and worked with uranium and plutonium in about thirty different sites, and built the "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist who is known as the "father of the atomic bomb" because of his work with the Manhattan project After the war, he became a chief adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to attempt to avert an arms race with the Soviet Union.

An Atomic Bomb, or nuclear weapon, is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or fusion. "Little Boy" and "Fat man" in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were both atomic bombs made of uranium and plutonium.

During the final stages of World War II in August of 1945, the Allies (mainly the United States) dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9). The major US commanders and leaders were William Parsons and Paul Tibbets. These two devastating bombs together killed over 250,000 Japanese, many of whom were women and children. The effects of these bombs still exist today, as tuberculosis rates climbed and still remain high in Hiroshima and Nagasaki areas as a result of the radiation from the nuclear bombs. The United States motive for dropping these bombs was to hurry the complete and unconditional surrender of Japan, at all costs. Japan surrendered a few days later.

The United Nations was a successor to the League of Nations. It differed from the League in that no member of the Security Council, dominated by the Big Five powers (US, Britain, USSR, France, and China) could have action taken against it without its consent. As opposed to the League of Nations, the United Stations was overwhelmingly approved in the Senate in July of 1945. It preserved peace in Iran, Kashmir, created the state of Israel, etc.

Truman's policy of containment used different strategies to attempt to prevent the spread of communism abroad. It held that Russia, whether tsarist or communist, was relentlessly expansionary, and that it needed to be held back. One of the ways he implemented this was through the Truman Doctrine, that granted hundreds of millions of dollars to Greece and proposed that the United States should provide aid to any country that is resisting Communist aggression. Also, George Marshall's plan for joint economic recovery with Europe created terms for cooperation with Europe, but deliberately impossible terms for the USSR. This allowed the US to give aid to Europe that encouraged democracy and capitalism. Finally, NSC-68, the once-classified report on US strategy against the soviets, emphasized military containment over cooperation, and that containment (a policy of calculated and gradual coercion) was the only way to move forward.

The Truman Doctrine of 1947 said that the US would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere. This doctrine is often considered the start of the Cold War.

The Marshall Plan was the large-scale American program to aid Europe. The US gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of WWII in order to prevent the spread of Soviet Communism.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949. The main purpose of this alliance is the agreement that if one of the countries is attacked, all countries will respond and defend it. The Korean War outbreak in 1950 raised the threat of all Communist countries working together, and forced NATO to develop military plans. In 1952, NATO brought together hundreds of ships and thousands of personnel for Korea, and two years later turned down the Soviet Union's attempt to join.

NSC-68 was a once-classified report on US strategy in regards to the Soviet Union, which emphasized containment over cooperation.

The Korean War, from June of 1950 to July of 1953 was a war between the Republic of Korea or South Korea (supported mostly by the US, NATO and contributions from the UN) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or North Korea (supported by China and the Soviet Union. Korea had been under the control of Japan, but when World War II ended America divided the peninsula between the United States and the Soviet Union. This direct clash between capitalism and communism intensified tensions and lead to the first armed conflict of the Cold War. A cease-fire agreement was signed in 1953 to end the active war and restore the border with a Demilitarized Zone, but minor outbreaks of fighting continue in Korea to the present day.

The nuclear arms race during the Cold War was a period of high tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. Neither country wanted to implement their nuclear arsenals; the goal was only to have more nuclear weapons than the opponent. In an arms race, neither country wants to win: both countries simply want to stay better.

The Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas in the post-WWII and Cold War era. The boundary lay vertically through the middle of Germany. On the west side was the Soviet Union, Poland, Finland, Hungary, Austria, Romania and West Germany, and on the east side was England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and East Germany.

Joseph Stalin was the leader premier of the Soviet Union from May 1941 to March 1953.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were two American communists who were controversially convicted and executed in 1953 for passing information about he atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

In 1950, Truman vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Bill, which among other provisions authorized the president to arrest and detain suspicious people during an "internal security emergency". Critics protested that the bill was police state in nature and used concentration camp tactics. But the congressional guardians of the Republic's liberties enacted the bill over Truman's veto.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities was an investigative committee of the House of Representatives established in 1947 that investigated potential Communists in the United States.

The Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act of 1940 is a federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the US government and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government. It was used against political organizations and figures like alleged communists and fascist. In 1957, many of these prosecutions were repealed as unconstitutional.

Joseph McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican US Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1857, when he died He was powerfully anti-Communist and focused his efforts on ridding American of hiding Communist sympathizers. He is the origin of McCarthyism, a term referring to reckless and unsubstantiated accusations.

The Fair Deal was the set of proposals by Truman to Congress in his 1949 State of the Union. It focused on improvements for the unemployed, increases in the minimum wage, increased aid to farmers, a revision of the taxation system, and improvements in aid to war veterans.

The Labor-Management Relations Act was a US federal law that monitored the activities and power of labor unions. It was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred Hartley, and overrode Truman's 1947 veto. Truman argued that the bill was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech".

Modern Republicanism is a political concept that is relatively liberal in domestic affairs, while remaining conservative globally. It began with Dwight Eisenhower's administration.

Dwight Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He served as Supreme Commander of World War II Allied Forces in Europe and eventually the first supreme commander of NATO. He was a Republican and his policy known as the New Look, focused on using nuclear threats to take care of issues, like ending the Korean War. He was a main proponent of the Space Race with the Soviet Union, helped remove Joseph McCarthy from power, and continued New Deal agencies by growing Social Security and creating the Interstate Highway System.

In October 1957, Soviet scientists put Sputnik I into orbit around the globe (a 200 pound satellite). A month later they sent up an even larger satellite (Sputnik II) weighing 1,120 pounds and carrying a dog. This breakthrough hurt American self-confidence and cast doubts on America's assumed scientific superiority. It also raised questions about the Soviet's nuclear abilities. In direct response to this, Eisenhower established NASA and directed billions of dollars to missile development.

In 1933, this conference was an attempt to stabilize the values of various nations' currencies and the rates by which they could be exchanged. Roosevelt planned on attending and sent his Secretary of State, but had second thoughts about his own techniques of inflating the value of the dollar to improve the American economy and withdrew from the conference. The collapse conference also strengthened the global trend toward extreme nationalism, making international cooperation even more difficult.

This act granted the Philippines independence in twelve years by gradually severing ties and building structures that would allow the Philippines to be a stable nation on its own. It showed the US's desires to move away from imperialist ideas and focus on a more isolationist policy.