WORLD WAR II

1939 - 1945
Invasion of Poland September 1939
The Bore War/The Phoney War
10 May 1940: Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.
Trondheim April 1940
May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis

Became PM 10 May 1940

Dunkirk – Operation Dynamo
26 May – 4 June 1940
The BEF – the British
Expeditionary Force
The Fall of France -
1940 Marshall Petain – the leader of Vichy France
A French civilian cries in despair as Nazis occupy Paris
The French Resistance
Charles de Gaulle - leader of the Free French

Croix de Lorraine- symbol of the

Resistance
Name: Simone Segouin

Code name: Nicole Minet

Weapon: MP40 (German)

Record: killed large number of

Germans and captured 25 POWs
during the fall of Chartres

Medal: Croix de Guerre

Rank achieved: Lieutenant

Violette Szabo
Nancy Wake Pearl Cornioley
(Witherington)
Noor-un-Nissa Inayat Khan, also known as Nora Inayat-Khan and Nora
Baker, was a British spy in World War II who served in the Special
Operations Executive. As an SOE agent she became the first female wireless
operator to be sent from the UK into occupied France to aid the French
Resistance during World War II.
 A woolly vest
 A French/English dictionary
 A torch
 A compass
 A photograph of your loved ones
 The key to your secret code
 A pair of binoculars
 A camera
 A make-up/shaving kit
 A change of underwear
 A knife
 Needle and thread
 Hairbrush
 Headache tablets
 Wallet
 Pen and notepad
 Silver cigarette case
 Map
 Matches
 Water bottle

What would you take?

The Battle of Britain
July – October 1940
Supermarine Spitfire
Hawker Hurricane
Messerschmitt Bf109
The Maltese Cross
RAF
Roundel
Avro Lancaster
Rear gunner inside his Wellington Bomber

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/9-iconic-
aircraft-from-the-battle-of-britain
Dornier Do-17 twin-engine medium bomber
Heinkel He 111
Pilot Officer Albert Gerald Lewis DFC, a
top ace of the RAF. The South African, Erich Hartmann, the highest scoring
aged 22, shot down at least 28 Luftwaffe fighter ace in history, with 352 aerial
fighters, including on one memorable day, victories in 1,404 combat missions,
six in a six hour span - Battle of Britain - he was never shot down or forced to
1940 land.
Radio Direction Finder
Radio Detection And Ranging"

RADAR/RDF
WWII Radar Operators and Friends
Reunited after 7 Decades

428 Battery, Coastal Defence Artillery

Headquarters, Dover, Kent
NEVER IN
THE FIELD
OF HUMAN
CONFLICT
WAS SO
MUCH
OWED BY SO
MANY TO SO
FEW
https://samilhistory.com/2016/11/0
6/sailor-malan-ww2-fighter-ace-
anti-apartheid-freedom-fighter/

The Observation Post

SOUTH AFRICAN MODERN
MILITARY HISTORY
“Sailor” Malan
Adolph Gysbert Malan

Group Captain Adolph Gysbert “Sailor” Malan in conversation

with Flight Sergeant Vincent Bunting.

Bunting was one of a small group of black British and

Commonwealth pilots in full combat roles during the Second World
War – he was born in Panama in June 1918 and raised in Kingston,
Jamaica.
An integrated Air
Force
During the Battle of Britain, the British
relied on pilots from the
Commonwealth to make up a critical
pilot shortage, Sailor Malan was one of
these pilots and with him came pilots
Flight Lieutenant Ulric Cross, from Trinidad, joined the RAF
from all over the world, of all colours during the war and was awarded the DSO and DFC for bravery,
and of all cultures (there was no such two of the RAF’s highest honours

thing as a ‘colour bar’ in the Royal Air

Force) – from commonwealth countries
like India, Burma, Rhodesia, Jamaica,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa
and Canada, as well as pilots from
Poland, France, Czechoslovakia and the
USA. They made up almost one-third of
the RAF pilots involved in the Battle of
Britain (to believe the image so often
created of these men as a bunch of tea
drinking ‘tally-ho’ young white English
gentlemen is to completely
misunderstand the Battle of Britain).
The Torch Commando

In Sailor Malan’s own words, The Torch Commando was: “established to oppose
the police state, abuse of state power, censorship, racism, the removal of the
coloured vote and other oppressive manifestations of the creeping fascism of the
National Party regime”.

Sailor Malan famously accused the national party government at this rally of:

“depriving us of our freedom, with a fascist arrogance that we have not experienced
since Hitler and Mussolini met their fate”.
The Blitz
Dogfight above London, 1940

Every Bomb Dropped on London During

the Blitz
Children
Two little girls clutching
their dolls and teddy bears
before they leave London
for the country on an
evacuation train
Boy sitting in the
rubble of his home
where his parents lie
buried after a V-2
bomb hit, London
A German orphan among the debris of his
home. There were about 500,000 orphans
at the end of the war
Bus lying in a huge bomb crater in a London street after a heavy German
bombing attack during the Battle of Britain. London, September 1940
Anderson Shelters
Morrison Shelters
The Blackout
Evacuation
Animals in the Blitz
Kid goats protected by
sandbags during World
War Two, London Zoo,
A kind-hearted homeowner kept a baby March 1941
elephant in her back yard for months
during the Second World War because
zookeepers feared the animal would be
killed in a bombing raid
A sales assistant, using a stuffed
toy, demonstrates a blackout coat
for dogs to a customer at
Selfridge's department store in
London. The coat would make
sure that the dog was visible to
Churchill stops to pat a cat car drivers and pedestrians
during the dark nights of the
blackout
The Home front
Rationing
Carrots On Sticks
Parachute wedding dress
War time weddings
The Home Guard
England, 1940. An old
man knitting to help the
war effort during World Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II) in
War2 1945 in her ATS uniform during the war
where she was trained as a driver
WWII victory garden harvest

Women's Land Army

DIG FOR VICTORY!
A typewriter designed to
conserve the metal needed for
the war effort
Nazi Flak tower. Used against allied
aircraft in Europe. They had an air defense
range of 14km and could put up 8,000
rounds in a minute
Operation
Barbarossa
A German flame thrower operator Russian
sets a Russian village home alight warning
during operation Barbarossa, 1941 to
German
Troops in
WW2
Soviet Resistance

Soviet Snipers and the Nachthexen

The Red Army had over 2 000 female snipers
Klavdiya Kalugina, (age 17). She
served until the end of hostilities and
survived the war
Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who had 309
sniper kills to her credit
• Senior Sergeant Roza Shanina
was a sniper in the WWII
Soviet Army

• 54 kills of German soldiers

before her death from
wounds at age 20

• Before the war she worked as

a kindergarten teacher
17 year old Lepa Radic was
publicly hanged in January
1943,for shooting at German
soldiers

The risks were high and the punishments

harsh
The
Nachthexen
She died on July 8, 2013 at the age of 91
Hero of the Soviet Union

Nadezhda Popova
Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the
largest, longest and bloodiest engagements
in modern warfare: From August 1942 to
February 1943, more than two million
troops fought in close quarters – and
nearly two million people were killed or
injured in the fighting, including tens of
thousands of Russian civilians. The Battle
turned the tide of World War II in favour
of the Allied forces.
Pearl Harbour

7th December 1941

Japanese Zero planes
Female fire fighters at Pearl Harbour
Doris "Dorie" Miller
October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz pins a Navy Cross

on Mess Attendant Second Class Miller during
a ceremony aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6)
at Pearl Harbor, on May 27, 1942.
Executive Order 9981 was issued on July 26, 1948, by
President Harry S. Truman. This executive order
abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color,
religion or national origin" in the United States Armed
Forces, and led to the re-integration of the services during
the Korean War (1950–1953)
North Africa

APRIL 1941 – NOVEMBER 1942

El Alamein
Desert Rats 8th Army Egypt
Desert Rats deploy gas masks to peel onions
WWII men of the new formed British SAS usually supported by the Long
Range Desert Group (LRDG) in the North Africa Campaign
General
Erwin
Rommel
Field
Marshall
Bernard Law
Montgomery
Maori Battalion doing the
Haka in North Africa, 1941

Soldiers of the King's African Rifles (KAR)

during the British advance into Italian
Somaliland
Abbey of Monte Cassino

Italy – the
Winter Line
The end of a dictator: The
mutilated bodies of Benito
Mussolini (1883-1945) and his
mistress Clara Petacci (1912-
1945) after their execution by
partisans
American B17

Avro Lancaster

Bombing Missions
V1 Rocket – “buzz bomb”
“doodlebug”
V2
A bomb disposal expert defuses a 1200 lb bomb, 1940
30 000 people died during the two nights of bombing

The firebombing of Dresden

The War at Sea
An aerial view of a convoy in the Atlantic
An ARP Warden's main task was to try and protect people during air raids, when
enemy planes dropped bombs, especially on cities. They would hand out gas
masks and guide people to shelters. After an air raid wardens might have to give
First Aid assistance or help to put out fires.

Air Raid Precautions (ARP)

Ita Ekpenyon
(1899–1951) was a Nigerian teacher and
actor who was also the only known black
Air Raid Precautions (ARP) warden in the
United Kingdom.

Ita moved from Nigeria to London in the

1920s and was a volunteer Air Raid
Protection Warden (ARPW) during the
Second World War. Today, he is featured in
exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum
and the City of Westminster Archives Oku Ekpenyon
Centre.
Former head of history
at an inner London
secondary school

http://westendatwar.org.uk/documents/E._Ita_Ekpenyon_download_version_.pdf
Reporting the position of enemy aircraft to gun crews

Jobs for Women

Land girls working on a combine harvester

A female member of the British Home Guard

learns how to tackle a potential attacker
during the Second World War.
Women training as nurses in British
hospitals during World War II
Lilian Bader

The WAAF
young women flew military during
World War II as part of a program
called Women Airforce Service
Pilots — WASP for short. These
civilian volunteers ferried and
tested planes so male pilots could
head to combat duty.
Three members of WAAF, (Women's Auxiliary Air
Force), equipped with camera guns and aerial cameras
1943
Women who worked in the factories
testing the guns they made for the war.
D – Day – Operation Overlord
Medics give a blood transfusion to an injured man on Omaha Beach during D-Day
American soldiers recovering the dead from Normandy beaches
3 D – Day heroes
Vera Hay was one of the first British nurses to land in Normandy, about a week
after D-Day. At the Chateau de Beaussy, where she is photographed, she was part
of a team that treated up to 200 wounded soldiers a day – efforts that earned her
the Legion of Honour, France’s highest military decoration.
Waverly B. Woodson, Jr 1922 - 2005

Heavy machine-gun fire greeted a nauseous and bloody Waverly B. Woodson, Jr. as he disembarked onto
Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. A German shell had just blasted apart his landing craft, killing the man
next to him and peppering him with so much shrapnel that he initially believed he, too, was dying.

But Woodson, a medic with the lone African-American combat unit to fight on D-Day, managed to set up
a medical aid station. For the next 30 hours, he removed bullets, dispensed blood plasma, cleaned
wounds, reset broken bones and at one point amputated a foot. He also saved four men from drowning.
Nick Archdale, a member of the 7TH Parachute Battalion, was among the
soldiers tasked with taking and keeping Pegasus Bridge. A counter offensive
by Germans began at dawn, and Archdale was sent to the town of Le Port to
bolster defences. While edging along the wall photographed here he was
fired on by a German machine gun. Injured, he took cover in a neighbouring
house.
The Normandy Beaches
today…
West towards Omaha and Pont du hoc

Looking East towards Gold and Juno

German guns at Arromanches

Phoenix
The American
cemetery at
Omaha Beach
‘The Braves’

Omaha Beach April 2015

Pont du Hoc
Modern day view of Pointe du Hoc. Shows
the intensity of the fighting here during the
Normandy invasion in 1944
Germany surrenders
Eva Braun
The Berlin Bunker 30th April 1945
Bodies of the six Goebbels
children, who were poisoned by
their parents

Heinrich Himmler bit on

a cyanide tablet to cheat
the gallows
Gudrun Burwitz

Himmler's daughter : She works with neo-

Nazis and helps SS officers evade justice

Himmler and his daughter, Gudrun,

visiting Dachau concentration camp
Admiral Karl Doenitz
Soviets in Berlin
Victory in Europe (VE DAY 8th May 1945)
Winston Churchill and
Charles de Gaulle walking
along the Champs-Elysee
in the Armistice Day
Parade
Times Square New York
Victory over
Japan
Before and after of Nagasaki, August 1945

Ground Zero:
the point on the earth's surface directly
above or below an exploding nuclear bomb

Hiroshima, Before and After, 1945

AUG. 9, 1945 The exact moment of detonation at Nagasaki is captured in
this remarkable photograph.
Dazed survivors huddle together in the
street ten minutes after the atomic bomb
was dropped on their city, Hiroshima, 1945

91-year-old Yoshito Matsushige was the only photographer to have taken photos on
the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The image behind him is the
first photo he took at Miyuki-bashi Bridge, a little over two hours after the blast. He
took a total of 5 images, the only recorded evidence of that day that changed history. It
was not until 1952, when his photos were published in "Life" magazine, that the
American public saw the devastation the bomb had caused.
It's estimated there are 136,700 survivors
left in Japan. Known as hibakusha, many
were infants or unborn when the United
States dropped the bombs in 1945

A barefoot boy waiting in line and staring

ahead at a crematorium after the Nagasaki
bombing, with his dead baby brother
strapped to his back. Photo by US Marine
photographer Joe O’Donnell

Survivors: hibakusha
Japan signs the surrender papers on board the USS. MISSOURI
9/14/45. The very ship they sank at Pearl Harbour, 12/7/41
Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
WORLD WAR TWO IS FINALLY


OVER…

…but not for some…

Took 29 years to surrender (March 1974).
He died in 2014

Hiroo Onoda
his former commander travelled from
Japan to personally issue orders relieving
him from duty.
Why do we study WW2?
World War II is what we call a ‘watershed’ moment – a unique or important
historical change of course or one on which important developments depend.
Much of the world we live in today is the way it is because of what happened
during or immediately after WW2. You will study these further in senior
history. People emerged from the war with a whole new perspective on
international, race and gender relations. After WW2, various movements such
as the women’s movements, student movements, Civil Rights Movement and
Pan-Africanism would further change the world, making it a fairer and freer
place to live.

The importance of WW2

After all that war…peace
movements!
Student Movements
After WW2 the “baby boomer”
generation wanted changes in the
education system; they were a
different generation to their
parents! Universities and schools
are different today because of
this movement

We study this in grade 12

International
Relations
This looks at the relationship
between countries and power
blocs after WW2 – we mostly
focus on the Cold War – the
power struggle between
Capitalist West and
Communist East; we also look
at the countries who trod a
middle path … the non-
aligned countries

We study this in grade 12

Women’s
Movements
We look at different phases
of feminism and how women
have challenged their
historical place in society;
this builds on their work and
roles discovered in WW2

We study first wave

feminism in grade 10

We study second wave

feminism in grade 12
Civil Rights Movement
People from all over the world fought
and participated in WW2; when they
returned home, their perspectives were
changed forever!

We study this in grade 12

Pan-Africanism
This was a movement
started to unite all people
of African descent; WW2
had a huge impact on this

We study this in grade 11

Decolonisation
In grade 10 we look at the
process of colonisation;
then we look at how the
process was reversed -
We study this in grade 11
and grade 12