The History of the Twentieth Century

The defining features of the nation of Panama are its abundant wildlife and that it is the place where the world's two largest oceans are at their closest.

The upper levels of Japanese government (and, more important, the military) increasingly came to the view that war with the United States was necessary if Japan was to survive.

At the end of the rasputitsa, the mud season, the German Army had one final, narrow opportunity, to win the war against the USSR before winter.

Even before the first German soldier crossed the frontier into the USSR, the Nazi government in Berlin had a plan for administering occupied Russia.

The German invasion of the USSR went brilliantly for the first 2-3 weeks, but instead of collapsing as expected, the Red Army only got stronger.

On June 22, 1941, Germany began an invasion of its erstwhile trade partner, the USSR. 

The Dust Bowl ravages the central United States, Charles Lindbergh's infant son is kidnapped, the America First movement opposes US involvement in the war.

Germany executes its invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece, and the Axis encourages an anti-British coup in Iraq.

As Germany made preparations to assist its ally Italy in the war against Greece, a coup in Yugoslavia prompted Adolf Hitler to order the invasion of that country as well. 

In summer of 1940, even as the Battle of Britain was just getting started, Adolf Hitler was already laying plans for war with the Soviet Union.

After the fall of Poland, British Intelligence's codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park became the center of efforts to decrypt messages from the Germans' supposedly unbreakable Enigma machine.

The British had been hugely successful at breaking German codes in the First World War. The Germans were determined not to let that happen again. This time they had Enigma, a code machine that produced messages that could not be decrypted. Or so the Germans believed.

The navy Germany had at the outbreak of the Second World War was only a small fraction of what the Allies had arrayed against it. But the Fall of France and the entry of Italy into the war changed things dramatically and created opportunities at sea that Germany had never had in the last war.

In 1940, the British government was in the frustrating position of funding research on a number of promising projects that would be valuable to the war effort, but with the Battle of Britain in full swing, British factories had to turn out fighter planes as fast as they could. There was no room for development of experimental new technologies, so the British turned to the United States

Italy's invasion of Greece was disastrous. With the British also advancing in North Africa, and a surprise air attack disabling three Italian battleships, it was no longer possible to pretend that Italy was a equal of Germany.

Benito Mussolini wanted to prove that Italy was an equal partner with Germany in the Axis alliance, so he began a war with Greece.

Germany found that it could not defeat the British on their home island; the UK was unable to fight the Germans in Europe. So what next?

When France collapsed, Roosevelt redoubled his effort to aid Britain. But there was also a Presidential election to think about; Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term.

America was preoccupied with domestic issues during the run-up to the war. When the war came, the Roosevelt Administration looked for ways to aid the Allies despite the limitations of the Neutrality Act.

More on various genres of pulp fiction, and how they led to the development of comic books.

Pulp fiction was an important form of entertainment in the twentieth century, peaking in popularity around 1940. Pulp fiction came in a variety of genres and was the birthplace for a new one: science fiction.

The 1939-40 New York World's Fair.

When the Churchill government showed no willingness to talk peace, Germany attempted the world's first purely aerial military campaign, to weaken Britain in preparation for invasion, or perhaps even to defeat the enemy entirely by air.

Theories of strategic bombing in the 1930s suggested that it alone might be enough to win a war. But the development of radar meant that the bomber might not always get through after all.

We examine the advances in aviation technology between the World Wars.