{"id":33431,"date":"2020-01-17T23:58:20","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T04:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.myedme.com\/login\/?p=33431"},"modified":"2020-01-17T23:58:31","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T04:58:31","slug":"world-war-ii-european-theater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/world-war-ii-european-theater\/","title":{"rendered":"World War II – European Theater"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From:<\/strong> Openstax College Textbook on U.S. History<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

WARTIME DIPLOMACY<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Franklin Roosevelt entered World War II with an \neye toward a new postwar world, one where the United States would \nsucceed Britain as the leader of Western capitalist democracies, \nreplacing the old British imperial system with one based on free trade \nand decolonization. The goals of the Atlantic Charter had explicitly \nincluded self-determination, self-government, and free trade. In 1941, \nalthough Roosevelt had yet to meet Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, he had \nconfidence that he could forge a positive relationship with him, a \nconfidence that Churchill believed was born of naivet\u00e9. These allied \nleaders, known as the Big Three, thrown together by the necessity to defeat common enemies, took steps towards working in concert despite their differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt met together multiple times during the war. One such conference was located in Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Through a series of wartime conferences, Roosevelt and the other global leaders sought to come up with a strategy to both defeat the Germans and bolster relationships among allies. In January 1943, at Casablanca, Morocco, Churchill convinced Roosevelt to delay an invasion of France in favor of an invasion of Sicily. It was also at this conference that Roosevelt enunciated the doctrine of \u201cunconditional surrender.\u201d Roosevelt agreed to demand an unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan to assure the Soviet Union that the United States would not negotiate a separate peace between the two belligerent states. He wanted a permanent transformation of Germany and Japan after the war. Roosevelt thought that announcing this as a specific war aim would discourage any nation or leader from seeking any negotiated armistice that would hinder efforts to reform and transform the defeated nations. Stalin, who was not at the conference, affirmed the concept of unconditional surrender when asked to do so. However, he was dismayed over the delay in establishing a \u201csecond front\u201d along which the Americans and British would directly engage German forces in western Europe. A western front, brought about through an invasion across the English Channel, which Stalin had been demanding since 1941, offered the best means of drawing Germany away from the east. At a meeting in Tehran, Iran, also in November 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met to finalize plans for a cross-channel invasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE INVASION OF EUROPE<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Preparing to engage the Nazis in Europe, the \nUnited States landed in North Africa in 1942. The Axis campaigns in \nNorth Africa had begun when Italy declared war on England in June 1940, \nand British forces had invaded the Italian colony of Libya. The Italians\n had responded with a counteroffensive that penetrated into Egypt, only \nto be defeated by the British again. In response, Hitler dispatched the \nAfrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel, and the outcome of the \nsituation was in doubt until shortly before American forces joined the \nBritish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the Allied campaign secured control of \nthe southern Mediterranean and preserved Egypt and the Suez Canal for \nthe British, Stalin and the Soviets were still engaging hundreds of \nGerman divisions in bitter struggles at Stalingrad and Leningrad. The \ninvasion of North Africa did nothing to draw German troops away from the\n Soviet Union. An invasion of Europe by way of Italy, which is what the \nBritish and American campaign in North Africa laid the ground for, \npulled a few German divisions away from their Russian targets. But while\n Stalin urged his allies to invade France, British and American troops \npursued the defeat of Mussolini\u2019s Italy. This choice greatly frustrated \nStalin, who felt that British interests were taking precedence over the \nagony that the Soviet Union was enduring at the hands of the invading \nGerman army. However, Churchill saw Italy as the vulnerable underbelly \nof Europe and believed that Italian support for Mussolini was waning, \nsuggesting that victory there might be relatively easy. Moreover, \nChurchill pointed out that if Italy were taken out of the war, then the \nAllies would control the Mediterranean, offering the Allies easier \nshipping access to both the Soviet Union and the British Far Eastern \ncolonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D-Day<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
U.S. troops in a military landing craft approach the beach code-named \u201cOmaha\u201d on June 6, 1944. More than ten thousand soldiers were killed or wounded during the D-day assault along the coast of Normandy, France.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A direct assault on Nazi Germany\u2019s \u201cFortress Europe\u201d was still necessary for final victory. On June 6, 1944, the second front became a reality when Allied forces stormed the beaches of northern France on D-day. Beginning at 6:30 a.m., some twenty-four thousand British, Canadian, and American troops waded ashore along a fifty-mile piece of the Normandy coast (Figure 27.16<\/a>). Well over a million troops would follow their lead. German forces on the hills and cliffs above shot at them, and once they reached the beach, they encountered barbed wire and land mines. More than ten thousand Allied soldiers were wounded or killed during the assault. Following the establishment of beachheads at Normandy, it took months of difficult fighting before Paris was liberated on August 20, 1944. The invasion did succeed in diverting German forces from the eastern front to the western front, relieving some of the pressure on Stalin\u2019s troops. By that time, however, Russian forces had already defeated the German army at Stalingrad, an event that many consider the turning point of the war in Europe, and begun to push the Germans out of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nazi Germany was not ready to surrender, however. On December 16, in a surprise move, the Germans threw nearly a quarter-million men at the Western Allies in an attempt to divide their armies and encircle major elements of the American forces. The struggle, known as the Battle of the Bulge, raged until the end of January. Some ninety thousand Americans were killed, wounded, or lost in action. Nevertheless, the Germans were turned back, and Hitler\u2019s forces were so spent that they could never again mount offensive operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: Openstax College Textbook on U.S. History WARTIME DIPLOMACY Franklin Roosevelt entered World War II with an eye toward a new postwar world, one where the United States would succeed Britain as the leader of Western capitalist democracies, replacing the old British imperial system with one based on free trade and decolonization. The goals of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33434,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33431\/revisions\/33434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}