7.4 Military Strategy, Allied Conferences, and the Atomic Bomb

Strategy as conference minutes

Independent OpenExamPrep teaching treats 1942–1945 as military strategy plus wartime diplomacy. The map items are Europe first, North Africa, Italy, D-Day (6 June 1944), and Pacific island hopping—Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. The table items are Casablanca, Tehran, Yalta (February 1945), Potsdam, the atomic bombs, and the United Nations as a project begun before Japan surrendered. This section stops at the threshold of the next chapter: you need Yalta’s Poland language and the occupation zones to understand later fights, but you do not need George Kennan’s long telegram, the Truman Doctrine, or containment as a full doctrine here.

Europe first, Torch, Italy, Overlord

At the Arcadia Conference in Washington (22 December 1941–14 January 1942), Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Germany was the prime enemy. Japan had just wrecked Pearl Harbor; the agreement still said the Atlantic/European war came first. That is Europe first (sometimes “Germany first”). It did not mean the Pacific was abandoned—Midway and Guadalcanal prove otherwise—it meant the largest U.S. ground commitment and the cross-Channel invasion would be aimed at Hitler.

Operation Torch (8 November 1942) landed Anglo-American forces in Morocco and Algeria. Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded. Vichy authorities resisted briefly; Admiral Darlan’s deal still stains the episode. The Kasserine Pass (February 1943) was a German tactical shock to green U.S. units. Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered in May 1943. Torch was Churchill’s Mediterranean preference and Roosevelt’s way to put Americans into combat with Germany in 1942 when a jump straight to France was not ready. Sicily (Operation Husky, July 1943) knocked Italy’s island out and coincided with Mussolini’s fall (25 July 1943). Italy’s armistice (announced 8 September 1943) did not end the fighting: Germany occupied the peninsula. Salerno, Anzio, Monte Cassino, and the capture of Rome on 4 June 1944—two days before Normandy—are the Italian campaign’s exam dates. Italy was a second front of a sort; it was not the second front Stalin wanted in France.

D-Day, 6 June 1944, was Operation Overlord: landings on Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Eisenhower held supreme Allied command in the west. On the order of 156,000 Allied troops came ashore the first day. The breakout (Cobra), the liberation of Paris (August), and the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944–January 1945) complete the western sequence. Germany surrendered in early May; V-E Day is 8 May 1945 in the American and British calendar. Soviet armies had taken Berlin. Do not start a containment lecture from the Elbe meeting; note only that armies met as allies.

Midway to Okinawa

Midway (4–7 June 1942) is the Pacific turning-point battle in survey courses: U.S. carriers (with broken Japanese codes) sank four Japanese fleet carriers. The Yorktown was lost. Japan did not again hold the strategic initiative in the central Pacific. Guadalcanal (landings 7 August 1942, fighting into February 1943) was the first major Allied offensive on land in the Solomons—jungle, night naval battles, and a name items pair with Midway as “the United States goes over to the attack.”

Island hopping (leapfrogging) meant seizing some islands for airfields and harbors and bypassing others, leaving Japanese garrisons cut off. Douglas MacArthur advanced along New Guinea toward the Philippines; Chester Nimitz drove through the central Pacific (Tarawa, the Marshalls, the Marianas). The Marianas (Saipan, 1944) put B-29s in range of Japan. Iwo Jima (19 February–26 March 1945) cost about 6,800 American dead for a small volcanic island used as an emergency field and fighter escort base; the Suribachi flag-raising is the image, not the strategy. Okinawa (1 April–22 June 1945) was worse: on the order of 12,500 U.S. dead, mass civilian deaths, and kamikaze attacks on the fleet. Okinawa is the casualty argument that later appears in invasion-versus-bomb debates. Do not treat Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa as the same year.

Holocaust knowledge, Yalta, Potsdam, the bomb, the UN

American and British governments had substantial knowledge of Nazi mass murder well before 1945. The Riegner telegram (August 1942) and the Allied 17 December 1942 declaration named the extermination of Jews as policy. The Bermuda Conference (April 1943) became a symbol of rescue delayed. The War Refugee Board (22 January 1944), pushed from the Treasury (Henry Morgenthau Jr., John Pehle), was a late operational effort—Raoul Wallenberg’s Budapest mission is the usual attached name. U.S. armies liberated Buchenwald (11 April 1945) and Dachau (29 April 1945); the Soviets liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Exam stems that say “Americans knew nothing until the photographers arrived” are false. Stems that say the United States ran a large early rescue state from 1939 are also false. Knowledge, public condemnation, limited refuge, and liberation are four different facts.

Conference diplomacy is a table you should be able to rebuild from memory.

Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. Harry S. Truman inherited both the UN conference and the bomb. The United Nations Conference on International Organization met at San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. Fifty governments signed the Charter on 26 June 1945. The U.S. Senate consented on 28 July 1945 (89–2)—a contrast item with the League fight in Chapter 5. The Charter entered into force in October. Treat the UN here as wartime Allied institution-building, Dumbarton Oaks (1944) plus San Francisco, not as a Cold War debating society.

Truman learned at Potsdam that Trinity had worked. The Potsdam Declaration did not mention the bomb by name. On 6 August 1945 a uranium gun-type bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay. On 8–9 August the Soviet Union opened its war against Japan in Manchuria. On 9 August a plutonium implosion bomb (Fat Man) was dropped on Nagasaki. Immediate deaths are estimated in the tens of thousands in each city, with much higher tolls by the end of 1945—do not treat any single textbook integer as a laboratory measurement. Japan’s emperor announced surrender on 15 August; the 2 September 1945 ceremony on the USS Missouri is the formal V-J date. Official U.S. rationale stressed ending the war without an invasion of Kyushu and Honshu after Okinawa’s losses. Historians still argue over how much the Soviet entry, Japanese peace feelers, and demonstration alternatives mattered. The exam wants you to know who decided, which cities, which dates, and that a debate exists—not to settle the moral case in one option.

What this section will not do is walk containment. Yalta’s Polish elections and the German zones became arguments in 1945–47. Those arguments are the next chapter’s starting pistol. Here, the war ends with unconditional surrender policies, a new international organization the Senate actually joined, and nuclear weapons used in combat.

Exam traps: Europe first is priority, not Pacific abandonment. Torch is November 1942, D-Day is June 1944, Rome is 4 June 1944. Midway is 1942; Iwo Jima and Okinawa are 1945. Yalta is Roosevelt’s last conference; Potsdam is Truman’s. The UN Charter is 1945 San Francisco, not the 1941 Atlantic Charter under a new name. Hiroshima is 6 August, Nagasaki 9 August, Soviet entry in between.