sorry about that my video cut out um I was making a point about the political systems too not just economic systems um Democratic Republic within the Constitution they have a parliamentary system with some democracy also note that the two powers that are being defeated and what's not on here is Italy too Nazis totalitarian regime militarist jingoist totalitarian regime and then fascist Italy which is being defeated too but there is an outlier to this on the Allied side that is proving to be very Victorious because of its grit and the means of actually waging scorched Earth tactics which means that it's willing to burn its own Countryside and willing to wage a significant cost in civilian casualties is the Soviet Union the Soviet Union was a totalitarian Communist Regime um you know no real voting no real rule of law no real markets so that's something that needs to be factored in there as well let's take a look at tank production um the Allies are clearly out producing the Axis powers and they even look at the United States compared to the Soviet Union if you also think about we took a look at the maps right of the Pacific Theater and the European theater of operations the Soviet Union is featuring the biggest tank battle that's in the history of mankind which is the battle at Kursk in the United States though is really only using tanks in its Western theater of operations and still the Soviet Union are the ones that are doing the most of the heavy lifting and the southeast Asia it is ships aircraft tanks are being used but this is but this just speaks to its production this country's production um which is mind-blowing these things are what eventually leads to the end of the Great Depression again the New Deal stops it this is the unemployment rate this is where it spikes during the Great Depression this beginning of it and remember we hit a depression during another recession during 1938 but as America becomes involved in the Second World War Lend Lease right starts in 1941 Pearl Harbor hits we gotta activate the arsenal of democracy building ships tanks guns ammunition boxes Vehicles this is what gets the unemployment rate low is the second world war because it puts people to work for better for worse and there are a few conferences that happen that are gonna pretty much Factor what the world will look like at the end of the second World War and the first one happens in Tehran in 1943 and this is the conference remember this is before D-Day before uh Western Europe was invaded where the big three Allied Powers agree that that operation towards the invasion of Sicily will happen and then Western Europe will be invaded sometime in 1944. to Stalin Chagrin by the way he wasn't a big fan of it but it's interesting because in order to defeat Japan and Germany you have capitalism uh Democratic Republic parliamentary system that has Mark its former Empire and a totalitarian Communist Regime that are putting aside their differences to be allies that's not nothing at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference these are going to lay the plans and infrastructure to eventually create What's called the United Nations it's taking a look at the League of Nations its failures its shortcomings and it wants to create something that is much more International a real body that actually is internationally Democratic in order to prevent global war again Yalta in 1945 is a big one because this is where they go uh to the Crimean Peninsula which is in Stalin's backyard and they agreed to certain things is what's going to happen again after the second world war is over because they know that it's only a matter of time before Germany and Japan are defeated so they are arguing over someone like the finer details like what happens to Poland will they have free elections and representative government who gets what from Germany um how are we going to work together the thing about the Alta conference is just this gentleman is playing uh a little bit loose with the facts um he's agreeing to things like democracy he's agreeing to things like self-determination knowing full well that he's never going to give it to the individuals of which he's speaking to as long as they fall within the Soviet sphere of influence Winston Churchill's aware of this um but there's really not much you can do because the Soviet Union has paid for their seat at the peace table with blood and Franklin Roosevelt if you just take a look at him you can see how unhealthy he is he's going to be dead in a couple months he's agreeing to a lot of this stuff in order to keep the peace and even after the altitude he is going to set up a meeting with King sod from what you know with Saudi Arabia aboard his uh ship that that took him to Yalta which was the USS Quincy and they're going to agree to United States having access to Saudi Arabian oil this that happens after the Alta conference before Roosevelt dies that agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia will be very important in our last week when we take a look at operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and also today um that even reverberates uh you know with our relations with Saudi Arabia in the larger Middle East all this is going on and then the Potsdam Conference you notice that we have Harry Truman here because Roosevelt's dead his vice president Harry Truman is now the new president still the big three-year meeting and this is the big thing that that comes from the Potsdam is they decide how they're going to divide up Germany into occupation zones this will have big time repercussions for our cold war that we'll start talking about a little bit this week but also you'll read about a little bit this week but then next week and there's also this weird moment where Harry Truman goes up to Joseph Stalin and he goes hey Joe I don't know if he calls him Joe but in that world for our purposes we'll just say he goes Hey Joe um we're going to use a new weapon that we've developed and it's going to be very destructive I just want to give you a heads up Stalin had Russian spies and what we now know as the Manhattan Project and he was aware of this weapon and he goes well I hope you use it to the best of your advantage now let's talk a little bit about Harry Truman because when Franklin Roosevelt dies in office the war is still going on and his vice president Harry Truman is going to inherit all of that Franklin Roosevelt had led the United States for the Great Depression and through most of the second world war um Harry Truman was kept in the dark about a lot of stuff and now he's going to inherited a lot of that and the big one in addition to all the military stuff is the Manhattan Project which is where they're enriching uranium and plutonium in order to build Atomic nuclear weapons right and just the infrastructure of the Manhattan Project typically we think about Los Alamos which as you know right here in New Mexico [Music] but these are all the sites that were involved with the Manhattan Project from the labs to the actual mineral enrichment this was a nationwide Endeavor that was kept at such top secret um security clearances and um you know under the rug that um Truman was just confounded um when he inherited this information the nuclear bombs uh will also coincide with strategic bombing so by this stage late in the war the Allies are waging strategic bombing which is targeting and carpet bombing cities in Germany and in Japan in order to defeat their means of production um particularly in Japan so this is how it would work most of Japan cities are made of wood and you would have bombers that would drop conventional bombs and also incendiary bombs which carried jelly gasoline we now refer to it as Napalm with the idea of destroying civilian infrastructure manufacturing homes and also targeting civilians because the justification by military leaders like Curtis LeMay who was involved in the U.S Army Air corps at the time was if we kill them they're going to make less bullets that are going to kill our soldiers it all ties into that idea of unconditional surrender this is how you kill a civilization I'm not here to bastardize this nor demonize it um nor am I here to glorify it if you're looking for unconditional surrender and if you're trying to Stamp Out a political and uh ideological system that's as toxic as Nazism or militaristic Japan this is how you do it so they're targeting cities and you they're creating what are called firestorms which they pretty much burn cities um with civilians and defense production as their main targets these are not there to Target soldiers so cities across Germany and Japan are completely leveled um and this is also leads to the justification for dropping nuclear bombs but we'll come back to that as the war gets into its later stages it also gets more nasty because you have strategic bombing from the Allies that are using it to wage war against nasty opponents but these nastier opponents Germany and Japan are going to be coming more desperate this is where you get kamikaze pilots who are flying their aircraft into United States ships I'm not unlike modern contemporary suicide bombers rather than you know agreeing to that unconditional surrender you're getting this kind of desperation in Germany as both the Soviets and the United States penetrate deeper into Germany particularly as the Soviets get into Berlin what's making up most of Hitler's Army are old men and young boys and the young boys in particular are radicalized and brainwashed they are fighting to the death and they're not making it easier on the Soviets or even on the western allies as they penetrate deeper into German territory so this is there's connecting tissue between the old men and young boys the kamikazes the Japanese civilians that are committing mass suicide in Japan as war in its final stages when a belligerent is starting to see the end coming um this is what desperation looks like and it's disgusting so the fall of Berlin happens when the Soviet Red Army occupies it in May of 1945 Germany's done um this is VE day which means victory in Europe day that's May 8th 1945 and then the ground war and the naval war and the air War and the Pacific Theater of operations is still going on like Okinawa happened from April to June 1945 which was some of the fiercest fighting that United States Marines had seen on an island and it did feature some of those Hallmarks where it's mass suicide by Japanese civilians um even though they have occupied the island they're still catching bullets even when they think that the Japanese Army had been defeated but they aren't giving up so on August 6 1945 this aircraft which was a B-29 bomber that was called the Enola Gay is going to take off and in its cargo hold as a new weapon that's called little boy and little boy is an atomic bomb and its Target is Hiroshima which was kind of preserved by the US Army Air corps as it wasn't subject to strategic bombing as the United States military and Harry President Truman they had options what they could do with this new weapons technology they could just let the world know that they had it not demonstrate it they could have picked a Target that would have been a non-city just to demonstrate its power or they could Target a city like Hiroshima and that's exactly what had happened um the bomb is dropped and it explodes just above the city and within seconds you know tens of thousands of people are dead and this is arguably an accelerated means of Destruction um that was already happening through strategic bombing it just it happens like that I snap my fingers for those and I know you folks can't see me on here this does not cause Japan to surrender because immediately Nagasaki happens where the second Atomic device has dropped over this city on August 9 1945. Nagasaki was just like Hiroshima where it was kind of preserved and there's justification for this too where as Okinawa and like Saipan are demonstrating that if the United States military has to invade Japan its home islands like they were doing in Germany it's just going to be desperation how many tens of thousands of more lives are going to be sacrificed in order for Japan to finally agree to unconditional surrender so that was also part of the calculus for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and soon after this 1945 on August 14th there's VJ Day which is when Japan officially surrenders and then we are now in the post-war world one of the assignments I want you to do is I want you to list the casualties for all the major belligerents and then I want you to draw a conclusion um uh you know I want you to interpret that as you know historians what do these numbers mean so the United States was obviously involved um isolationism is done I mean uh we still haven't gone back to isolationism decide despite our best efforts and the United States military saw a lot of stuff some of that they were engaged in like strategic bombing and amphibious Landings and hand-to-hand combat but also like for instance when they saw the mass suicide of Japanese civilians or they liberated concentration camps they decided that the world was not so innocent right isolationism was giving them a perspective that was through rose-colored glasses and the world's very complicated so these lessons are going to bleed through our culture going forward they're still with us today um and the complications are not just going to stop through culture is once the war is over the armies are going to stop so if we take a look at the Korean Peninsula for instance the Soviet Union declared war on Japan late in the game their armies are going to stop at the 38th parallel our forces will be in South Korea and it's the same in Germany our forced to stop in West Germany their forces Stop in East Germany and this is going to set up the battlefields of the Cold War so that's all I've got for this week please do your reading and take the quizzes and I'll see you next time