World History: Patterns of Interaction: Chapters 32–33

At this point, as you recall from Chapter 31, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin signed a ten-year nonaggression pact with Hitler.

The German invasion of Poland was the first test of Germany’s newest military strategy—the blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” It involved using fast-moving airplanes and tanks, followed by massive infantry forces, to take enemy defenders by surprise and quickly overwhelm them.

The Nazis claimed that all non-Aryan peoples, particularly
Jewish people, were inferior. This racist message would eventually lead to the Holocaust, the systematic mass slaughter of Jews and other groups judged inferior by the Nazis.

He ordered Jews in all countries under his control to be moved to designated cities. In those cities, the Nazis herded the Jews into dismal, overcrowded ghettos, or segregated Jewish areas.

His plan was called the “Final Solution.” It was actually a program of genocide, the systematic killing of an entire people.

The kamikazes were Japanese suicide pilots.

Nevertheless, to ensure that peace would prevail, he began a process of demilitarization, or disbanding the Japanese armed forces.

MacArthur then turned his attention to democratization, the process of creating a government elected by the people.

Churchill’s phrase “iron curtain” came to represent Europe’s division into mostly democratic Western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe.

President Truman adopted a foreign policy called containment. It was a policy directed at blocking Soviet influence and stopping the expansion of communism.

These conflicts marked the start of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. A cold war is a struggle over political differences carried on by means short of military action or war.

This willingness to go to the brink, or edge, of war became known as brinkmanship. Brinkmanship required a reliable source of nuclear weapons and airplanes to deliver them.

To expand the success of the first Five-Year Plan, Mao proclaimed the “Great Leap Forward” in early 1958. This plan called for still larger collective farms, or communes. By the end of 1958, about 26,000 communes had been created.

President Eisenhower described this threat in terms of the domino theory. The Southeast Asian nations were like a row of dominos, he said. The fall of one to communism would lead to the fall of its neighbors.

Détente, a policy of lessening Cold War tensions, replaced brinkmanship under Richard M. Nixon.