World+War+II

The tension that led to **World War II** began brewing shortly after the end of World War I as a result of discontent with the Treaty of Versailles. These issues came to the forefront when Germany and the U.S.S.R invaded Poland in 1939, which led to the declaration of war a few days later by Britain and France. With a new war came new technological advances such as the atomic bomb and new terrors such as the Holocaust, which triggered previously unimagined levels of destruction and death. From this rubble into which the world collapsed arose new poetic work and artistic movements developed as a form of retaliation against the world's state of affairs.

=**Culminating Events**=

The Treaty of Versailles
A year after the conclusion of the World War I in 1918, the "Big Four": Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy met in Paris to discuss the consequences that Germany would face for its role in World War I. President Wilson originally proposed a 14-point plan that would carefully outline Germany's restrictions, however Premier Clemenceau wanted revenge for the massive destruction and death caused by Germany. Prime Minister Lloyd wanted something similar to Wilson's plan, but he knew that if he supported the proposal there was very little chance that he would be reelected because the people of Britain also desired retribution. Prime Minister Lloyd attempted to reach a compromise between President Wilson's relatively lenient plan, and the less forgiving plan proposed by France. The resulting treaty came out very differently from the 14-point plan that President Wilson and Germany expected. This treaty came to be known as the Treaty of Versailles.

The treaty had 440 clauses, the first 26 of which dealt with the establishment of the League of Nations. The remaining clauses described Germany's fate. The four main points that the 414 other clauses spelled out were that: This treaty was perhaps understandably very disagreeable for Germany, however on the 28th of June they were summoned to sign the treaty. ======
 * 1) Germany had to accept the blame for initiating World War I
 * 2) Germany had to pay approximately 6,600 million Euros for the damage caused by WWI
 * 3) A considerable amount of land would be taken from Germany and divided among surrounding nations
 * 4) Germany's large military force from the previous war was reduced to about 100,000 men, six ships, no air force, no submarines, and no tanks.

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler came into power as Germany's leader in 1933. The German people needed a change; they resented the Treaty of Versailles, which required immense reparations that sapped their economy and led to widespread poverty. When Hitler initially began to gain recognition, he inspired a great deal of German pride, however almost immediately following his gain of political status, he gave the economy a jump start and began building secretly rebuilding the military. Though Britain and France were aware of this, they weren't willing to take any action. Despite the violation, they were more concerned with the communist threat originating in the Soviet Union. If Germany's military was slightly increased, they could offer aid against the communist threat, and that was the biggest concern. Additionally, they were not eager to start another conflict. These factors, along with the United States' President Franklin D. Roosevelt announcing that he would not become involved with European affairs, and Japan's and Italy's right wing German-sympathetic governments, gave Hitler the push he needed to invade Rhineland in 1936. France, though horrified, did not take action and would not do anything without Britain's support. They were willing to let it go. Hitler's next steps were to reclaim the land taken from Germany by the treaty. Fueled by this success, the Rome-Berlin Axis Pact that allied Germany and Italy, and the Anti-Comintern Pact that allied Germany and Japan, Germany felt secure invading Austria. This was not a great concern, because once Artur Seyss-Inquart, leader of the Austrian Nazi Party, was elected Chancellor he invited Hitler in to annex Austria and combine armies. Germany then took over the Sudetenland, a strip of land on the border of Czechoslovakia, which England and France accepted providing that he did not take over the rest of the country or advance further into Europe. He agreed to these terms, but then invaded Poland in September of 1939 after he already signed a Nazi-Soviet Pact with the Soviet Union a month previous in August. After the invasion of Poland, France and Britain were left with no choice but to declare war on Germany and commence World War II.

Other Factors
In October of 1935 Italy was permitted to Invade Ethiopia without any serious political backlash. The Second Sino-Japanese War officially started in 1937, but had been going on for decades as the result of Japan starting to take over China to gain control over its vast land mass and natural resources. China finally fought back and initiated the Second Sino-Japanese War at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking. Japan quickly seized control over all the coastal cities, surrounded the capital of China, Nanking in December of 1937 and began the Nanking Massacre.

=Allies vs the Axis=

Allies
Though many people like to think of the Allies and Axis as one cohesive group that worked together against the opposing force, this wasn't accurate. The Allies started with countries that were against Germany's expansion.
 * Major Allies Before the Invasion of Poland (1939)**
 * United Kingdom
 * France
 * Australia
 * New Zealand

Poland joined the Allies after being invaded by Germany. The Soviet Union had an alliance with Germany and attacked Poland from the east sixteen days after Germany invaded, which precipitated the official beginning of World War II. Due to the Soviet Union's actions against Poland, the country was classified as a member of the Axis. France fell to Germany in June of 1940, which left England as the last European country standing against the Axis. However, in 1941 Germany broke their alliance with the Soviet Union by invading, and so the Soviet Union changed alliances to become a member of the Allies. Hitler's troops found the Soviet Union winters difficult to endure, and so they were not able to advance and conquer it as they had previous countries. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of that year the United States officially entered the war, along with countries in Central and South America, and thus turned the tides to the Allies' favor.

>
 * Lesser Allied Powers**:
 * Canada
 * Netherlands
 * Greece

Axis

 * Major Axis Powers:**
 * Germany
 * Italy
 * Japan

Italy joined the Allied Powers in 1943 when Allied forces invaded the country. Italy was no military match against the Allied armies without aid from Germany. Mussolini's Fascist government collapsed with the Allied invasion. Italy became divided, with the South belonging to the Allied Powers and the North a refuge for the remnants of the old Fascist regime.

The Soviet Union is considered a former Axis Party because they did not join the Allied Powers until late into the war. Japan was an Axis Party due to their attempts to invade and control China, attacks on the United States, and their alliance with Germany.


 * Lesser Axis Powers**:
 * Thailand
 * Denmark
 * Romania

=World War II 1939-1945=

Although Japan was already at war with China in 1937, the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and most of the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Germany set out to establish a large empire in Europe.

In December 1941, Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia, attacked the United States and European possessions in the Pacific Ocean, quickly conquering much of the region. The Axis advance was stopped in 1942 after the defeat of Japan in a series of naval battles and after defeats of European Axis troops in North Africa and, decisively, at Stalingrad. In 1943, with a series of German defeats in Eastern Europe, the Allied invasion of Fascist Italy, and American victories in the Pacific, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded France, while the Soviet Union regained all territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. The war in Europe ended with the capture of Berlin by Soviet and Polish troops and the subsequent German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. The Japanese Navy was defeated by the United States, and invasion of the Japanese Archipelago ("Home Islands") became imminent.

The war ended with the total victory of the Allies over the Axis in 1945.

[|TimelineMazi]

=The Holocaust=

In addition to starting World War II, the German Nazis were also responsible for the deaths of approximately six million Jews in the genocide that became known as the Holocaust. The Nazi Party, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, advocated white puritan ideals that viewed others as unworthy of living in the "perfect" world in which they wanted to set up after completing their world domination. These exclusionist principles eventually led to the indiscriminate killing of Jews, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others that Hitler deemed responsible for befouling the world.

At first, the Nazis used firing squads and mass graves to accomplish this, but this soon proved to be an inefficient method of execution. Eventually, gas chambers were utilized in what was called the Final Solution. "Undesirables", the most well known and most common of these were Jews, were boarded onto trains and sent to concentration camps. Some of the most infamous of these camps were Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald.

= = =Artistic Movements of the World War II Era=

==== Surrealism, as pioneered by Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, influenced the art produced during the WWII period, in particular, the work of Roberto Matta, whose painting Years of Fear, completed in 1941, is pictured at right. Matta escaped Europe for America during the war, and while he continued to incorporate the Surrealist techniques of tapping the subconscious and using mythical figures, he felt compelled to address the issue of social commentary through his painting, an idea scorned by Surrealists. Like Picasso, he tackled the brutality of war openly with his brush. "Many of Matta's paintings from this period incorporate strangely menacing, machine-like contraptions and totemic human forms. He pitted these elements against each other in seemingly constant battle within a landscape of amorphous spaces and vaguely architectural planes. These works have a new emotional immediacy, reverberating with a formal tension created by the often violently oppositional form . His social activism triggered by his World War II experiences continued through his life. He is credited with influencing the Abstract Impressionist movement as well. Abstract Impressionism sprung up from the roots of Surrealism, incorporating the concept of the influence of the subconscious on the expression of art, specifically the self-expression of art, and using mythical or primitive art subjects The movement expanded to include the work of Mark Rothko with his luminous, floating rectangles of color, and Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings. Other influential artists of the movement included Black Mountain poets Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still and Willem de Kooning.

=Poetic Movements of the World War II Era=

Black Mountain poetry began with the influential poets of the Black Mountain College, including Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan and Hilda Morley. The Beat poets, including Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, formed another movement, as did the Confessional poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell  "Ginsberg and the Beats developed an aesthetic that renounced intellectual abstractions and poeticized individual lived experience—what Ginsberg described in 1948, in a letter to Trilling, as “the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the conscious mind Confessional poetry focused on the experiences and emotions of the poet, a change in perspective that placed the emphasis on the author and not the reader "While their treatment of the poetic self may have been groundbreaking and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of craftsmanship through their careful attention to and use of prosody Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" echoes the Holocaust and is excerpted below, while Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" speaks of the societal and political discontent following WWII. Both poems contain elements of the authors personal experiences.


 * Excerpt from "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . >
 * Excerpt from "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

I have always been scared of //you//, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

=Technological Advances=



World War II saw some of the most substantial advances in technology than any other war has brought. Advances were made in nearly every aspect of warfare, and subsequently the world, during WWII.

Land, air and sea driven battles were now fueled by the advancements in technology that had be created as results of World War I. Land warfare changed from the divisional lines of trench warfare to the idea of Mobility across a battlefield. This was a result to the advances made in portable machine guns, submachine guns, and the creation of assault rifles.

Land warfare also changed because of the advances made in Tank warfare. Tanks, which were primarily used as infantry support in World War I, were now being used as the main weapon in the fight on the ground as advancements made in tank design, as early as 1930, bred a new idea behind the use of tanks.

Aeronautical warfare had been seen as an unsuccessful part of the battlefield until the emergence of Aircraft Carriers. These large ships created a much larger protection radius, while also being easier and much more cost effective to maintain. This established the carrier as the dominant headquarters of the fleet in place of the Battleship.

Codebooks, Cryptography, and the use of ciphering Machines became the new idea for security, as well as the new idea behind military intelligence and the use of deception. The war also included the world's first programmable computers, guided missiles and modern rockets.

The most notable advancement in technology was that of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was a research and development program that created the first Atomic Bomb. The Manhattan Project began at the start of the war in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $24.4 billion as of 2012). Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissionable materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.

The end result of the Manhattan Project were two Atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, also having detonated one for testing named Trinity, as well as plans to have another 7 ready by October 1945.

On August 6th 1945, the United States green lit the mission to drop Little Boy over Hiroshima after the Japanese rejected the Postdam Declaration. Little boy exploded 1,750 feet above ground and was estimated to be equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT.

On August 9th 1945, the U.S. dropped the second Atomic Bomb, Fat Man, over Nagasaki. Fat Man detonated with the equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT, which was similar to the test bomb, Trinity.

=WWII propaganda=



Propaganda is a powerful tool used by governments to increase support for the war effort. They were used in all areas of World War Two, some from the Nazi's to help further the Nazi anti- Semitic ideals, and others from the Allied forces in all kinds of forms including cartoons, posters, fliers, and movies. Propaganda in WWII was also used to create hate for the enemy, urged increased production efforts, and conservation. Posters were the most commonly used form of propaganda, and were displayed in public areas such as post offices, schools, restaurants, and retail stores. These propaganda techniques were based in two separate forms, one showing off "America's strength", and informing civilians what they could do to help out with the war. These posters would include men loading giant ammunition shells, pictures of women lending their services to the war effort, like Rosie the Riveter, who was an icon for women who took over work in the factories; and pictures that encouraged people to get in carpools (conservation), or to buy war bonds.

The second kind of war propaganda was the kind that were made to scare civilians into action. They reminded civilians what would happen if they didn't buy war bonds, didn't ration their supplies, or had loose lips: that soldiers could (and were) dying because of their lack of effort. It reminded civilians of the real cost of their freedom. These posters often had really offensive and sinister pictures of German and Japanese soldiers meant to scare civilians into the war effort and ended up alienating a lot of Japanese and German citizens. These kinds of propaganda also featured pictures of dead, dying, or wounded soldiers, and had violent pictures of Allied Powers literally crushing the Axis.

=Combat Artists= ==

== During World War II more than one hundred soldiers and civilians served as combat artists. Their job was to document the war as they saw it from the front lines. Their collection of artwork contains more than 12,000 pieces.

Art Gallery Here you can view a gallery of some of the more well known pieces.

Notable artists' biographies Here you can read the biographies of some of the more well known combat artists.

Military art programs Here you can find information on the military art programs started by the United States government.

Roberto Matta

The National WWII Museum

=External Links=

Posters from World War Two, here there are a wide a variety of posters from the World War Two era from the Allied forces

=References=

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