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Chapter 24 & Chapter 26 – World War II Mr. Duez

Compare and Contrast the two major theatres of war during World War II. How was
war different in Asia as compared to the war in Europe?

Use the documents below and your understanding of World War II to help you answer
the question.
DOCUMENT A:
I found it more difficult to go back each time we squared away our gear to move forward into the zone
of terror… And it wasn’t just dread of death or pain, because most men felt somehow they wouldn’t be
killed… Each time we went up, I felt the sickening dread of fear itself and the revulsion at the ghastly
scenes of pain and suffering among comrades that a survivor must witness. The increasing dread of
going back into action obsessed me. It became the subject of the most tortuous and persistent of all
the ghastly war nightmares that have haunted me for many, many years. The dream is always the
same, going back up to the lines during the bloody month of May on Okinawa.
SOURCE: Eugene Sledge: Memoir excerpts selections from "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and
Okinawa."

DOCUMENT B (right):
SOURCE: "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima",
by Joe Rosenthal / The Associated Press.

DOCUMENT C (below):
SOURCE: D-Day Allies Invasion Map

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DOCUMENT D:
"I shall return!"
SOURCE: American General Douglass MacArthur, following defeat in the Philippines

DOCUMENT E:
SOURCE: Photograph of the atomic
bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

DOCUMENT F:
HITLER SENDS GERMAN TROOPS INTO RHINELAND
Berlin, March 7- Germany today cast off the last shackles fastened upon her by the Treaty of Versailles
when Adolf Hitler, as commander-in-chief of the Reich defense forces, sent his new battalions into the
Rhineland's demilitarized zone....
"After three years of ceaseless battle," Hitler concluded, "I look upon this day as marking the
close of the struggle for German equality status and with that re-won equality the path is now
clear for Germany's return to European collective cooperation."
SOURCE: The New York Times, March 8, 1936 (adapted)

DOCUMENT G:
By twos and threes, the Company K men forming the front line eased onto a barren, muddy,
shell-torn ridge named Half Moon Hill and into the foxholes of the company we were relieving….It
was the most ghastly corner of hell I had ever witnessed…The place was choked with the putrefaction
of death, decay and destruction. In a shallow defilade to our right…lay about twenty dead Marines,
each on a stretcher and covered to his ankles with a poncho… but as I looked out I saw that other
Marine dead couldn’t be tended properly. Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a
Marine corpse. The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and
water, rusting weapons still in hand. Everywhere lay Japanese corpses, killed in the fighting. Swarms
of big flies hovered above them…For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the
muck… I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool.
SOURCE: Eugene Sledge: Memoir excerpts selections from "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and
Okinawa."

DOCUMENT H:
SOURCE: Japanese kamikaze pilots before takeoff
and in flight.

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DOCUMENT I:
SOURCE: American infantrymen of the 290th Regiment fight in fresh snowfall near Amonines, Belgium
4 January 1945
Braun, USA

DOCUMENT J:
SOURCE: Excerpt from Chapter One, “Sacred Ground” from the book Flags of Our Fathers, By James Bradley
with Ron Powers Pub. Date: August 2006
The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know --Harry Truman

In the spring of 1998 six boys called to me from half a century ago on a distant mountain, and I
went there. For a few days I set aside my comfortable life--my business concerns, my life in
Rye, New York--and made a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, to a tiny Japanese island
in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo Jima.

There, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible battle
half a century earlier. The Japanese called the mountain Suribachi, and on its battle-scarred
summit the boys raised an American flag to symbolize our country's conquest of that volcanic
island, even though the fighting would rage for another month.

One of those flag raisers was my father.

DOCUMENT K (Newspaper on right):

SOURCE: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 7, 1941

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 DOCUMENT L:
SOURCE: General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
Order of the Day, June 6, 1944.

DOCUMENT M:

Holborn Circus in London burns at the height of the

Blitz. London was bombed on 76 consecutive nights
as part of the Battle of Britain campaign by the
German airforce during 1940.

DOCUMENT N:

(Document N information) Visitors walk through the entrance gate of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp
in Oswiecim, southern Poland. The phrase 'Arbeit Macht Frei’ is German for 'Work Sets You Free.’