Milton Hershey and the Hershey's chocolate

Milton Hershey and the Hershey's chocolate

Milton Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, in a farmhouse near the Central Pennsylvania village of Derry Church. Milton was in the fourth grade when his Mennonite father, Henry Hershey, found his son a position as an printer's apprentice in Gap, Pennsylvania. Milton later became an apprentice to a candy-maker in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and candy-making became a passion which Milton grew to love.

Milton Hershey - First Candy Shop

In 1876, when Milton was only eighteen-years old, he opened his own candy shop in Philadelphia. However, the shop was closed after six years and Milton moved to Denver, Colorado, where he worked with a caramel manufacturer and learned caramel-making. In 1886, Milton Hershey moved back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and started the successful Lancaster Caramel Company.

Hershey's Chocolate

In 1893, Milton Hershey attended the Chicago International Exposition where he bought German chocolate-making machinery and began making chocolate-coated caramels.

In 1894, Milton started the Hershey Chocolate Company and produced Hershey chocolate caramels, breakfast cocoa, sweet chocolate and baking chocolate. He sold his caramel business and concentrated on chocolate-making.

Famous Brands

The Hershey Chocolate Company has made or currently owns many famous Hershey chocolate candies including: Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars, Cadbury Creme Eggs candy, Hershey's Cookies 'n' Creme candy bar, Hershey's milk chocolate and milk chocolate with almonds bars, Hershey's Nuggets chocolates, Hershey's Kisses and Hershey's Hugs chocolates, Kit Kat wafer bar, Reese's crunchy cookie cups, Reese's NutRageous candy bar, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Sweet Escapes candy bars, TasteTations candy, Twizzlers candy, Whoppers malted milk balls, and York Peppermint Patties.

Hershey's Kisses chocolates were first introduced in 1907 by Milton Hershey, who trademarked the "plume" extending out of the wrapper in 1924.

Photo Descriptions

First: Heart-shaped boxes of Hershey's chocolate are displayed at Hershey's Chicago February 13, 2006 in downtown Chicago, Illinois. The store, the second retail shop for the company outside Hershey, Pennsylvania, opened in Chicago in June 2005. Business at the store has been better than anticipated leading up to Valentine's Day

Second: The world's largest Hershey's Kisses chocolate is unveiled at the Metropolitan Pavilion July 31, 2003 in New York City. The consumer-sized chocolate contains 25 calories; the world's largest contains 15,990,900.

Source: http://inventors.about.com/

Legacy of the Roman Empire

The "legacy of the Roman Empire" refers to the set of cultural values, religious beliefs, as well as technological and other achievements of Ancient Rome which were passed on after the demise of the empire itself and continued to shape other civilizations, a process which continues to this day. The city of Rome was the civitas, from which came the word "civilization" and consequently the actual western civilization on which is centered our contemporary world.

Language

Latin was the lingua franca of the early Roman Empire and later the Western Roman Empire, while particularly in the East indigenous languages such as Greek and to lesser degree Egyptian and Aramaic language continued to be in use. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of the Middle Ages, not in the least because it became the official language of theRoman Catholic Church. Koine Greek, which served as a lingua franca in the Eastern Empire, is still used today as a sacred language in some Eastern Orthodox churches.

In Western, Central Europe, and parts of Africa, Latin retained its elevated status as the main vehicle of communication for the learned classes throughout the medieval period well into the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Works which made a revolutionary impact on science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) were composed in Latin, which was not supplanted for scientific purposes by modern languages until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions in zoology and botany survived to the later 20th century:^[1] the modern international Binomial nomenclature holds to this day that the scientific name of each species is classified by a Latin or Latinized name.

Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended from Latin, are spoken by more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Additionally, the vocabulary of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, or English contains a large percentage of Latin words. In the case of English, the proportion of words with a Latin or Romance origin is estimated to be over 50%.^[2] English has many grammatical similarities to the Romance languages, particularly French, due to the Norman occupation.

Script

All three official scripts of the modern European Union—Latin, Greek and Cyrillic—descend from writing systems of the Roman Empire. Today, the Latin script, the script of the Latin alphabet spread by the Roman Empire to most of Europe, and derived from Phoenician alphabet through an ancient form of Greek alphabet adopted and modified by Etruscan, is the most far-spread and commonly used script in the world. Spread by various colonies, trade routes, and political powers, the script has continued to grow in influence. The Greek alphabet, which had been popularized throughout the eastern Mediterranean region during the Hellenistic period, remained the primary script of the Eastern Empire through the Byzantine Empire until its demise in the 15th century.

Latin literature

The Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth century rescued many works of Latin from oblivion: manuscripts transcribed at that time are our only sources for works that later fell into obscurity once more, only to be recovered during the Renaissance: Tacitus, Lucretius, Propertius and Catullus are examples. Other Latin writers were always read: Virgil was reinterpreted as a prophet of Christianity by the fourth century, and gained the reputation of a sorcerer in the twelfth century.

Cicero, in a limited number of his works, remained a model of good style, mined for quotations. Ovid was read with a Christian allegorical interpretation. Seneca was reimagined as the correspondent of Saint Paul. Lucan,Persius, Juvenal, Horace, Terence, and Statius survived in the continuing canon and historians Valerius Maximus and Livy continued to be read for the moral lessons history was expected to impart.

Through the Roman Empire Greek literature also continued to make an impact in Europe long after the Empire's fall, especially after the recovery of Greek texts from the East during the high Middle Ages and the resurgence of Greek literacy during the Renaissance. Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, for instance, originally written in Greek, was widely read by educated Westerners from the Renaissance up to the 20th century. Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar takes most of its material from Plutarch's biographies of Caesar, Cato and Brutus, whose exploits were frequently discussed and debated by the literati of the time.

Numerals and units

Roman numerals continued as the primary way of writing numbers in Europe until the 14th century, when they were largely replaced in common usage by Hindu-Arabic numerals. The Roman numeral system continues to be widely used, however, in certain formal and minor contexts, such as on clock faces, coins, in the year of construction on cornerstone inscriptions, and in generational suffixes (such as Louis XIV or William Howard Taft IV).

The Romans solidified the modern concept of the hour as one-24th part of a day and night. The English measurement system also retains features of the Ancient Roman foot, which was used in England prior to the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain. The Roman foot was equal to 11.65 inches in modern units. The inch itself derives from the Roman uncia, meaning one-twelfth part.

Religion

Christianity spread through the Roman Empire; since emperor Theodosius I (AD 379-395), the official state church of the Roman Empire was Christianity. Subsequently, former Roman territories became Christian states which exported their religion to other parts of the world, through colonization and missionaries.

Christianity also served as a conduit for preserving and transmitting Greco-Roman literary culture. Classical educational tradition in the liberal arts was preserved after the fall of the empire by the medieval Christian university. Education in the Middle Ages relied heavily on Greco-Roman books such as Euclid's Elements and the influential quadrivium textbooks written in Latin by the Roman statesman Boethius (AD 480–524).

Furthermore, early Christians read and wrote major works of Greek and Latin literature. Many of the most influential works of the early Christian tradition were written by Roman and Hellenistic theologians who were well read in the literature of the time and engaged heavily with the culture of the empire (See church fathers). St. Augustine's (AD 354-430) City of God, for instance, draws extensively on Virgil, Cicero, Varro, Homer, Plato, and elements of Roman values and identity to criticize paganism and advocate for Christianity amidst a crumbling empire. The engagement of early Christians as both readers and writers of important Roman and Greek literature helped to ensure that the literary culture of Rome would persist after the fall of the empire. For thousands of years to follow, religious scholars in the Latin West from Bede to Thomas Aquinas and later renaissance figures such as Dante, Montaigne and Shakespeare would continue to read, reference and imitate both Christian and pagan literature from the Roman Empire. In the east, the empire's prolific tradition of Greek literature continued uninterrupted after the fall of the west, in part due to the works of the Greek fathers, who were widely read by Christians in medieval Byzantium and continue to influence religious thought to this day.

Science and philosophy

While much of the most influential Greek science and philosophy was developed before rise of the Empire, major innovations occurred under Roman rule that have had a lasting impact on the intellectual world. The traditions of Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian scholarship continued to flourish at great centers of learning such as Athens, Alexandria, and Pergamon.

Epicurean philosophy reached a literary apex in the long poem by Lucretius, who advocated an atomic theory of matter and revered the older teachings of the Greek Democritus. The works of the philosophers Seneca the Younger, Epictetus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius were widely read during the revival of Stoic thought in the Renaissance, which synthesized Stoicism and Christianity. Fighter pilot James Stockdale famously credited the philosophy of Epictetus as being a major source of strength when he was shot down and held as prisoner during the Vietnam War. Plato's philosophy continued to be widely studied under the Empire, growing into the sophisticated neoplatonic system through the influence of Plotinus. Platonic philosophy was largely reconciled with Christianity by the Roman theologian Augustine of Hippo, who, while a staunch opponent of Roman paganism, viewed the Platonists as having more in common with Christians than the other pagan schools. To this day, Plato's Republic is considered the foundational work of Western philosophy, and is read by students around the globe.

The widespread Lorem ipsum text, which is widely used as a meaningless placeholder in modern typography and graphic design, is derived from the Latin text of Cicero's philosophical treatise De finibus.

Pagan philosophy was gradually supplanted by Christianity in the later years of the Empire, culminating in the closure of the Academy of Athens by Justinian I. Many Greek-speaking philosophers moved to the east, outside the borders of the Empire. Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism gained a stronghold in Persia, where they were a heavy influence on early Islamic philosophy. Thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës) engaged deeply with Greek philosophy, and played a major role in saving works of Aristotle that had been lost to the Latin West. The influence of Greek philosophy on Islam was dramatically reduced In the 11th century when the views of Avicenna and Avveroes were strongly criticized by Al-Ghazali. His Incoherence of the Philosophers is among the most influential books in Islamic history. In Western Europe, meanwhile, the recovery of Greek texts during the Scholastic period had a profound influence on Latin science and theology from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.

In science, the theories of the Greco-Roman physician Galen dominated Western medical thought and practice for more than 1,300 years. Ptolemy produced the most thorough and sophisticated astronomical theory of antiquity, documented in the Almagest. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system would remain the dominant approach to astronomy across Europe and the Middle East for more than a thousand years.

At Alexandria, the engineer and experimentalist Hero of Alexandria founded the study of mechanics and pneumatics. In modern geometry, Heron's formula bears his name. Roman Alexandria also saw the seeds of modern algebra arise in the works of Diophantus. Greek algebra continued to be studied in the east well after the fall of the Western Empire, where it matured into modern algebra in the hands of al-Khwārizmī . The study of Diophantine Equations and Diophantine Approximations are still important areas of mathematical research today.

Roman law and politics

Although the law of the Roman Empire is not used today, modern law in many jurisdictions is based on principles of law used and developed during the Roman Empire. Some of the same Latin terminology is still used today. The general structure of jurisprudence used today, in many jurisdictions, is the same (trial with a judge, plaintiff, and defendant) as that established during the Roman Empire.

The modern concept of republican government is directly modeled on the Roman Republic. The republican institutions of Rome survived in many of the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The United States Congress is inspired by the Roman senate and legislative assemblies, while the president holds a position similar to that of a Roman consul. Many European political thinkers of the Enlightenment were avid consumers of Latin literature. Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, and John Adams were all strongly influenced by Cicero, for instance. Adams recommended Cicero as a model for politicians to imitate, and once remarked that "the sweetness and grandeur of his sounds, and the harmony of his numbers give pleasure enough to reward the reading if one understood none of his meaning.

Inventions

Many Roman inventions were improved versions of other people's inventions and ranged from military organization, weapon improvements, armour, siege technology, naval innovation, architecture, medical instruments, irrigation, civil planning, construction, agriculture and many more areas of civic, governmental, military and engineering development.

That said, the Romans also developed a huge array of new technologies and innovations. Many came from common themes but were vastly superior to what had come before, whilst others were totally new inventions developed by and for the needs of Empire and the Roman way of life.

Some of the more famous examples are the Roman aqueducts (some of which are still in use today), Roman roads, water powered milling machines, thermal heating systems (as employed in Roman baths, and also used in palaces and wealthy homes) sewage and pipe systems and the invention and widespread use of concrete.

Metallurgy and glass work (including the first widespread use of glass windows) and a wealth of architectural innovations including high rise buildings, dome construction, bridgeworks and floor construction (seen in the functionality of the Colosseum's arena and the underlying rooms/areas beneath it) are other examples of Roman innovation and genius.

Military inventiveness was widespread and ranged from tactical/strategic innovations, new methodologies in training, discipline and field medicine as well as inventions in all aspects of weaponry, from armor and shielding to siege engines and missile technology.

This combination of new methodologies, technical innovation, and creative invention in the military gave Rome the edge against its adversaries for half a millennium, and with it, the ability to create an empire that even today, more than 2000 years later, continues to leave its legacy in many areas of modern life.

Colonies and roads

Rome left a legacy of founding many cities as Colonia. There were more than 500 Roman colonies spread through the Empire, most of them populated by veterans of the Roman legions. Some Roman colonies rose to become influential commercial and trade centers, transportation hubs and capitals of international empires, like Constantinople, London, Paris and Vienna. All those colonies were connected by another important legacy of the Roman Empire: the Roman roads. Indeed, the empire comprised more than 400,000 km of roads, of which over 80,500 kilometres (50,000 mi) were stone-paved.^[9] The courses (and sometimes the surfaces) of many Roman roads survived for millennia. Many are overlaid by modern roads, like the Via Emilia in northern Italy.

Architecture

In the mid-18th century, Roman architecture inspired neoclassical architecture. Neoclassicalism was an international movement. Though neoclassical architecture employs the same classical vocabulary as late Baroque architecture, it tends to emphasize its planar qualities, rather than sculptural volumes. Projections and recessions and their effects of light and shade are flatter; sculptural bas-reliefs are flatter and tend to be enframed in friezes, tablets or panels. Its clearly articulated individual features are isolated rather than interpenetrating, autonomous and complete in themselves.

International neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, especially the Old Museum in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built White House and Capitol inWashington, DC in the United States. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in St. Petersburg.

Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archaeological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings

Imperial idea

The Roman line continued uninterrupted to rule the Eastern Roman Empire, whose main characteristics were Roman concept of state, medieval Greek culture and language, and Orthodox Christian faith. The Byzantines themselves never ceased to refer to themselves as "Romans" (Rhomaioi) and to their state as the "Roman Empire", the "Empire of the Romans" (in Greek Βασιλεία των Ῥωμαίων, Basileía ton Rhōmaíōn) or "Romania" (Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía). Likewise, they were called "Rûm" (Rome) by their eastern enemies to the point that competing neighbours even acquired its name, such as the Sultanate of Rûm.

The designation of the Empire as "Byzantine" is a retrospective idea: it began only in 1557, a century after the fall of Constantinople, when German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of Byzantine sources. The term did not come in general use in the Western world before the 19th century, when modern Greece was born. The end of the continuous tradition of the Roman Empire is open to debate: the final point was the capture of Constantinople in 1453 AD, while some place it at the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204.

In Western Europe, the Roman concept of state was continued for almost a millennium by the Holy Roman Empire whose emperors, mostly of German tongue, viewed themselves as the legitimate successors to the ancient imperial tradition (King of the Romans) and Rome as the capital of its Empire. The German title of "Kaiser" is derived from the Latin word for "Caesar". The word Caesar is pronounced /kae:sar/ in Classical Latin. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 owing to pressure byNapoleon I. In the early 20th century, the Italian fascists under their "Duce" Benito Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman Empire as an Italian one, encompassing theMediterranean basin.

In Eastern Europe, the Russian czars (Czar derived from Caesar) adopted the idea of Moscow in Russia being a Third Rome (with Constantinople being the second). Sentiments  of being the heir of the fallen Eastern Roman Empire began during the reign of Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow who had married Sophia Paleologue, the niece of Constantine XI, the last Eastern Roman Emperor. Being the most powerfulOrthodox Christian state, the Tsars were thought of in Russia as succeeding the Eastern Roman Empire as the rightful rulers of the Orthodox Christian world. There were also competing Bulgarian, Wallachian and Ottoman claims for legal succession of the Roman Empire, Mehmet II "the Conqueror" claiming the title Kayser-i Rûm, meaning Caesar of Rome.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/

Independence day

Variously known as the Fourth of July and Independence Day, July 4th has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1941, but the tradition of Independence Day celebrations goes back to the 18th century and the American Revolution (1775-83). In June 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies then fighting in the revolutionary struggle weighed a resolution that would declare their independence from Great Britain. On July 2nd, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence, and two days later its delegates adopted the Declaration of Independence, a historic document drafted by Thomas Jefferson. From 1776 until the present day, July 4th has been celebrated as the birth of American independence, with typical festivities ranging from fireworks, parades and concerts to more casual family gatherings and barbecues.

THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

When the initial battles in the Revolutionary War broke out in April 1775, few colonists desired complete independence from Great Britain, and those who did were considered radical. By the middle of the following year, however, many more colonists had come to favor independence, thanks to growing hostility against Britain and the spread of revolutionary sentiments such as those expressed in Thomas Paine’s bestselling pamphlet “Common Sense,” published in early 1776. On June 7, when the Continental Congress met at the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a motion calling for the colonies’ independence. Amid heated debate, Congress postponed the vote on Lee’s resolution, but appointed a five-man committee–including Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Robert R. Livingston of New York–to draft a formal statement justifying the break with Great Britain.

On July 2nd, the Continental Congress voted in favor of Lee’s resolution for independence in a near-unanimous vote (the New York delegation abstained, but later voted affirmatively). On that day, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that July 2 “will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival” and that the celebration should include “Pomp and Parade…Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.” On July 4th, the Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, which had been written largely by Jefferson. Though the vote for actual independence took place on July 2nd, from then on the 4th became the day that was celebrated as the birth of American independence.

EARLY FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATIONS

In the pre-Revolutionary years, colonists had held annual celebrations of the king’s birthday, which traditionally included the ringing of bells, bonfires, processions and speechmaking. By contrast, during the summer of 1776 some colonists celebrated the birth of independence by holding mock funerals for KingGeorge III, as a way of symbolizing the end of the monarchy’s hold on America and the triumph of liberty. Festivities including concerts, bonfires, parades and the firing of cannons and muskets usually accompanied the first public readings of the Declaration of Independence, beginning immediately after its adoption. Philadelphia held the first annual commemoration of independence on July 4, 1777, while Congress was still occupied with the ongoing war. George Washington issued double rations of rum to all his soldiers to mark the anniversary of independence in 1778, and in 1781, several months before the key American victory at Yorktown, Massachusetts became the first state to make July 4th an official state holiday.

After the Revolutionary War, Americans continued to commemorate Independence Day every year, in celebrations that allowed the new nation’s emerging political leaders to address citizens and create a feeling of unity. By the last decade of the 18th century, the two major political parties–Federalists and Democratic-Republicans–that had arisen began holding separate Independence Day celebrations in many large cities.

JULY 4TH BECOMES A NATIONAL HOLIDAY

The tradition of patriotic celebration became even more widespread after the War of 1812, in which the United States again faced Great Britain. In 1870, the U.S. Congress made July 4th a federal holiday; in 1941, the provision was expanded to grant a paid holiday to all federal employees. Over the years, the political importance of the holiday would decline, but Independence Day remained an important national holiday and a symbol of patriotism.

Falling in mid-summer, the Fourth of July has since the late 19th century become a major focus of leisure activities and a common occasion for family get-togethers, often involving fireworks and outdoor barbecues. The most common symbol of the holiday is the American flag, and a common musical accompaniment is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States.

Source: www.history.com

(Part 11)World War II Full History

Pacific and Philippines

In June 1942, the US emerged from the Battle of Midway with naval superiority in the Pacific. General MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz seized the initiative, launching an ‘Island Hopping’ campaign. Their strategy was to capture the Pacific islands one by one, advancing towards Japan and bypassing and isolating centres of resistance. Macarthur and Nimitz planned a two pronged attack: MacArthur would push northwest along the New Guinea coast and into the Bismarck Archipelago with the eventual aim of liberating the Philippines; Nimitz would cross the central Pacific, ‘hopping’ through the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline and Marianas islands. The execution of the plan would place Japan within the range of US bombers, and eventually allow the Americans to launch a mainland invasion.

The offensive against the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Archipelago marked the beginning of ‘Island Hopping’. The Guadalcanal Campaign, fought between August 1942 and February 1943, eventually succeeded in forcing Japan to relinquish the island. With the great Southwest Pacific offensive firmly underway, Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey landed his troops on New Georgia on 1 July while MacArthur moved his forces to Nassau Bay, New Guinea. In the face of perilous reefs, heavy rains and high winds, and heavily dug-in Japanese troops, MacArthur’s men succeeded in taking the Munda Airfield on 5 August, forcing the Japanese into retreat. MacArthur’s next strike was against Bougainville on 1 November; where the invaders pummelled the occupiers, inflicting heavy casualties. New Britain was attacked on 15 December; Halsey’s carrier strike against Rabaul inflicted huge damage upon Japanese planes and isolated the port; the last Japanese naval forces would eventually withdraw in March 1944.

Meanwhile, in the Central Pacific, Nimitz set out to recapture the Aleutian Islands, defeating the Japanese in a campaign fought between May and August 1943. On 20 November, landings on Makin and Tarawa marked the beginning of the Gilbert Islands offensive. Nimitz’s troops secured Makin after four days. Tarawa, with its network of pillboxes, mines and coastal gun emplacements proved more difficult; after a bloody landing operation, US troops inched inland, slowly crushing the Japanese defences and receiving some hard lessons in amphibious operations.

The victory paved the way for the invasion of the Marshall Islands. During January and February 1944, the US wrestled control of Kwajelein, Majuro and Einwetok from the Japanese. They also succeeded in neutralising Truk, the formidable Japanese naval base on the Caroline Islands. Now able to move its fleet and air units forward, the US captured Saipan, Tinian and Guam in the Marianas in June and July. Crucially, the capture of the Marianas provided a fixed base from which to launch B-29 air attacks on the Japanese home islands. Between September and October 1944, the US Navy crushed the Japanese fleet as it tried to halt the US advance in the First Battle of Philippine Sea; the unstoppable island hoppers then took Ulithi in western Caroline Islands and Peleliu in the Palau Islands.

Between October 1944 and February 1945, MacArthur fulfilled his famous promise to return to the Philippines. Between October and December, a fierce naval battle raged in Leyte Gulf. As the US slowly gained control, Manila and Luzon were occupied in February 1945. The next step was the first American landing on Japanese territory, at Iwo Jima. US troops invaded in February 1945, following ten weeks of relentless aerial bombardment. As the Japanese emerged from tunnels and underground bunkers, a bloody 36 day combat began. While the US lost 6381 men, 20,000 Japanese soldiers perished. The invasion of Okinawa followed in April 1945. The Japanese launched massive kamikaze attacks on the US invasion fleet in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. In August 1945, the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan forced the country to surrender, rendering an invasion of the Japanese mainland unnecessary.

China

By 1941, the Chinese position was precarious. The largest forces opposing the Japanese were the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek, but the foreign military aid they had been receiving in the 1930s had dried up because of the war in Europe. Chiang’s forces were badly trained, badly disciplined and badly equipped. Their loyalty was questionable. The truce with their Communist rival, the CCP, was fragile. Both sides seemed more intent on maintaining control in their own territory than in fighting the Japanese. Both were expecting and preparing for a fresh civil war as soon as Japan was defeated. Many of Chiang’s men also held allegiances to local warlords.

In February 1942, when Congress approved a 500 million dollar loan to China, Roosevelt described China as the US’s main ally against Japan. Chiang Kai-Shek was enchanted to now be described as one of the ‘Big Four’ Allied war-leaders. General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stillwell became Chiang’s Chief of Staff, as well as commander of US forces in China, Burma and India. Chiang believed China would be the centre of US efforts against Japan.

The reality was different. Difficulties in sending supplies, British reservations, general concern about Chiang’s motives, and the urgency of operations in the Pacific and elsewhere meant that China did not become a theatre of main effort for the Allies. Stillwell’s mission to improve the efficiency of Chiang’s forces and turn the tide against the Japanese proved difficult. Chiang, Stillwell and Chennault disagreed fiercely over how to use the limited aid that could be flown in from India across the ‘Hump’ (the Himalayan mountains). To the frustration of Chinese Communists and Nationalists, the beginning of Pacific offensives in 1943 meant that US strategy ceased to depend upon China. The priority given to aid for China plummeted.

By 1944, with the air defence situation improving, more supplies began arriving across the Hump. The Ledo Road (later christened the ‘Stillwell Road’) reopened, having been closed by Japanese conquests in Burma. In April 1944, the ‘Ichi-Go’ offensive saw the Japanese invade the airfields of Kiangsi and Kwangsi; by June the Peking-Hankow Railway was under Japanese control. Despite US concerns that defeat was looming, Chinese forces resisted, repelling two Japanese offensives during summer 1945. Two events brought the war in China to a swift conclusion: on 6 August, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later Stalin, honouring his promise to the Western Allies, declared war on Japan, and Soviet forces overran the Japanese army in Manchuria. Japanese forces in China, Formosa and French Indochina surrendered to Chiang. As many as 20 million Chinese had died in the eight year-long conflict. Fighting between the KMT and the CCP resumed almost immediately.

Atomic Bomb

At approximately 8.15am on 6 August 1945 a US B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing around 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, causing the deaths of 40,000 more. The dropping of the bombs, which occurred by executive order of US President Harry Truman, remains the only nuclear attack in history. In the months following the attack, roughly 100,000 more people died slow, horrendous deaths as a result of radiation poisoning.

Since 1942, more than 100,000 scientists of the Manhattan Project had been working on the bomb’s development. At the time, it was the largest collective scientific effort ever undertaken. It involved 37 installations across the US, 13 university laboratories and a host of prestigious participants such as the Nobel prizewinning physicists Arthur Holly Compton and Harold Urey. Directed by the Army's chief engineer, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project was also the most secret wartime project in history. At first, scientists worked in isolation in different parts of the US, unaware of the magnitude of the project in which they were involved. Later, the project was centralised and moved to an isolated laboratory headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. On 16 July 1945, scientists carried out the first trial of the bomb in the New Mexico desert. President Truman received news of the successful test whilst negotiating the post-war settlement in Europe at the Potsdam Conference.

Although voices within the US Military expressed caution regarding the use of the new weapon against Japan, Truman was convinced that the bomb was the correct and only option. Six months of intense strategic fire-bombing of 37 Japanese cities had done little to break the Hirohito regime’s resolve, and Japan continued to resolutely ignore the demand for unconditional surrender made at Potsdam. In such circumstances, the use of the atom bomb was seen as the best means of forcing Japan to surrender, and ending the war. The alternative, of an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, was expected to cost hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The effects of the attack were devastating. The predicted Japanese surrender, which came on 15 August - just six days after the detonation over Nagasaki - ended World War II. Yet the shocking human effects soon led many to cast doubts upon the use of this weapon. The first western scientists, servicemen and journalists to arrive on the scene produced vivid and heartrending reports describing a charred landscape populated by hideously burnt people, coughing up and urinating blood and waiting to die.

As questions regarding the ethical implications of the attacks grew, the US Air Force and Navy both published reports which claimed (respectively) that the conventional bombing and submarine war against Japan would have soon forced her to surrender. Joseph Grew, America’s last ambassador to Japan before the war started, also publicly alleged that the Truman administration knew about (and ignored) Japanese attempts to open surrender negotiations with the US using the USSR as a mediator. At this time, another interpretation - most famously espoused in 1965 by political economist Gar Alperovitz in his book Atomic Diplomacy - emerged: the atomic bombing of Japan had been motivated by a desire to demonstrate the US’s military might to the Soviet Union, about whom the Americans were increasingly nervous.

The moral aspect of the attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to divide historians. While some argue that the terrible long term human cost to the Japanese population can never justify the use of such weapons, others maintain that in the context of total war, it would have been immoral if atomic weapons had not been used to end the war as quickly as possible.

Credit to: http://www.history.co.uk for my source of this story

(Part 10)World War II Full History

Battle of Midway

The Battle of Midway was a decisive episode in the struggle for naval hegemony in the Pacific Ocean, fought in June 1942. As a result of the Battle of the Coral Sea, which had taken place a month earlier, Japanese Pacific expansion had been temporarily halted. Now Japanese admiral Isoruko Yamamoto wanted to force a decisive clash in the Pacific before US industrial power was fully mobilised against Japan. His chosen location was Midway Atholl, a small and solitary archipelago northeast of Hawaii. Yamamoto knew that the US would defend Midway to the bitter end. If the archipelago fell, Hawaii would fall within range of Japanese aircraft, allowing Japan to invade within a matter of weeks.

Yamamoto knew that the US’s Pacific aircraft carriers would be despatched to protect the islands; he hoped to lure them into a trap and destroy them. The Japanese occupation of Midway was also part of a plan to push out her defensive perimeter after the Doolittle Raid: a dramatic propaganda air attack on Tokyo launched from the carrier USS Hornet. Furthermore, the Japanese hoped a decisive, humiliating and demoralising defeat in the Pacific would force America to negotiate an end to the war on terms beneficial to Japan.

Yamamoto’s plans were scuppered by two principle factors. Firstly, the Japanese underestimated the US’s naval strength. They were unaware that the US Yorktown - which had been badly damaged during the Battle of the Coral Sea - had been repaired and was back in action. Secondly, American code breakers were able to determine the exact date and location of the attack. This allowed US Admiral Chester Nimitz to weave an elaborate web of decoy tactics and to plan a deadly pre-emptive ambush. This main US attack, which began at 10:26 on the morning of 4 June, took the Japanese by surprise and succeeded in destroying four aircraft carriers in a matter of hours.

The US Navy inflicted irreversible and debilitating damage upon the Japanese fleet. In contrast, the US lost just one aircraft carrier and a destroyer. Although a number of Japanese pilots did survive, many of the highly trained maintenance teams who ensured the efficiency of ships and aircraft perished in the battle. These heavy losses permanently weakened the Japanese armed forces. While the US continued to construct ships and train new pilots at a huge rate, Midway inflicted losses on the Japanese from which she could not recover. From this point on, the US enjoyed indisputable naval superiority in the Pacific.

Guadalcanal

At dawn on 7 August 1942, 10,000 US soldiers landed at Guadalcanal, the easternmost island of the Solomon archipelago. The island, which had formed part of the British Empire from 1568 until the Japanese occupied it in May 1942, would take on immense strategic importance. The Solomon Islands were the gateway to northern Australia, which was now vulnerable to Japanese invasion. And when the Japanese began building an airfield on Guadalcanal, from which they could attack supply routes between the US, Australia and New Zealand, it became vital for the Allies to retake the island.

The Guadalcanal Campaign was the first major Allied offensive against Imperial Japan. Lasting from August 1942 until February 1943, it consisted of a series of fiercely contested battles at sea, in the air, and on the ground. In the latter arena, US Marine and Army troops with little combat experience faced an enemy which hid in the jungle, launched attacks at the dead of night and obeyed a strict code of honour in which death was preferable to surrender.

US landings on Guadalcanal met with great initial success. The outnumbered Japanese defenders were quickly overwhelmed, and the airfield under construction (which would be named Henderson’s Field) was captured. Between August and November 1942, the Japanese, who were taken aback by the speed and strength of the Allied offensive, made several attempts to recapture the airfield. They used fast ships to ferry reinforcements and supplies to the island by night, so avoiding Allied air attack from Henderson’s Field. These nightly deliveries were known to the Allies as the ‘Tokyo Express’.

The struggle for the island culminated in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal: the decisive moment in the Guadalcanal Campaign and a key turning point in the Pacific War. Between 12 and 15 November 1942, the Japanese staged a last ditch attempt to recapture the airfield, organising a transport convoy to ferry 7,000 troops to Guadalcanal, and sending several warships to shell the airfield. US forces, having learnt of Japanese plans, sent their own naval forces to intercept them.

Although the US suffered more losses than the Japanese, they succeeded in turning back Japanese warships send to attack the airfield. Air attacks carried out by Allied aircraft also managed to sink a great number of Japanese troop transports, preventing the bulk of the Japanese troops and equipment from reaching Guadalcanal. Although the Japanese did not finish evacuating their forces until February 1943, the Allies effectively won their victory in December 1942, when the Japanese abandoned any further attempt to recapture Guadalcanal.

Burma

In December 1941, the Japanese invasion of Burma opened what would be the longest land campaign for Britain of the entire war. It began with defeat and pell-mell retreat, as Rangoon fell to the invader in March 1942. British, Indian and Chinese forces were driven back into India. The fighting would stretch on, over a varied terrain of jungles, mountains, plains and wide rivers, stopping only for the monsoon, until Japanese surrender in 1945.

After the initial retreat, the British began to rebuild their army and resources from Assam in north-eastern India. This process was slow because priority was given to the war against Germany. The British position was also complicated by discontent in India, the result of British failure to clearly address the issue of post-war independence. The Japanese capitalised on this anti-British sentiment, recruiting captured Indian troops into the 40,000 strong Indian National Army, commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose, that fought alongside the Japanese.

With most of the Chinese coast under Japanese control, the Burma Road was the main supply route available to the Chinese Nationalists, fighting the Japanese in China. This gave the Burmese campaign great strategic importance. In December 1942, a limited British offensive to capture the Arakan coastal region met with failure. The only glimmer of hope came from the Chindits, long range penetration groups which waged guerrilla war in the Burmese jungle. Despite limited military success, their exploits boosted public morale.

Throughout 1943, the horizon looked bleak for the British, who lacked the resources and organisation to recapture Burma. In November 1943, the South East Asia Command was formed to centralise and organise Allied forces. General Slim slowly rebuilt morale and forged an efficient offensive combat force: the cosmopolitan Fourteenth Army, made up of British, Indians, Gurkhas, and East and West Africans.

The Japanese had also been regrouping. On 7 March, Operation U-Go was launched. Although this bold attempt to invade India surprised the Fourteenth Army, new tactics and growing confidence ensured that they maintained their positions on the crucial roadways to India. When Slim’s forces found themselves surrounded at Imphal and Kohima, an epic struggle ensued. The British Commonwealth forces, thanks to air resupply, managed to drive the Japanese into retreat, causing the largest defeat ever suffered by the Japanese army. Of the 85,000 soldiers, 30,000 were killed.

The Fourteenth Army now went on the offensive. By October 1944, it had crossed the river Chindwin and was approaching Mandalay and Meiktila. After two months of arduous combat in a coastal zone of reservoirs and river deltas, Meiktila was taken on 4 March 1945. Two months later, an ambitious amphibious operation allowed Slim’s army to re-enter Rangoon on 6 May 1945. Although this was effectively the end of the campaign, the remaining Japanese forces in Burma did not surrender until 28 August 1945.

Credit to: http://www.history.co.uk for my source of this story

(Part 9)World War II Full History

Pearl Harbor

Shortly before 8am on Sunday 7 December 1941, the first of two waves of Japanese aircraft launched a devastating attack on the US Pacific Fleet, moored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The raid, which came with no warning and no declaration of war, destroyed four battleships and damaged four more in just two hours. It also destroyed 188 US aircraft. While 100 Japanese perished in the attack, more than 2,400 Americans were killed, with another 1,200 injured.

The causes of the attack on Pearl Harbor stemmed from intensifying Japanese-American rivalry in the Pacific. Japan’s imperial ambitions had been evident from as early as 1931, when she invaded Manchuria. The conquered region’s bountiful resources were then used to supply Japan’s war machine. Leaving the League of Nations in 1933, Japan pursued an aggressive foreign policy aimed at creating the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’, a euphemism for a Japanese empire modelled on European ones of the 19th century.

Japan became seen as a serious threat to the economic interests and influence of the US and European powers in Asia. By July 1937, with Japan engaged in all-out war with China, relations plunged to new lows. US President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions, and Japan turned to the Axis powers, signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940.

When Japan occupied French Indochina in July 1941, Roosevelt continued to avoid direct confrontation. But Japan’s imperial ambitions in the Pacific had placed her on a collision course with the United States, which controlled the Philippines and had extensive economic interests throughout the region. When the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, threatening to suffocate her economy, Japan’s response was to risk everything on a massive pre-emptive strike which would knock the US out of the Pacific, clearing the way for a Japanese conquest of resource-rich South East Asia.

The Japanese achieved complete surprise at Pearl Harbor, something that can largely be attributed to failures in US intelligence. Although the US had cracked Japanese radio codes, in this case the raw data was not interpreted correctly by army and navy. Although the attack pummelled American battleships, US aircraft carriers escaped unscathed. This was critical because the Pacific Fleet would have been virtually incapable of operating without them.

The following day, the US declared war against Japan, where a shared sense of outrage and hatred had united the country’s bitterly divided media and public behind Roosevelt. On 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, thus bringing America into World War II.

Pearl Harbor appeared to be a huge success for Japan. It was followed by rapid Japanese conquests in Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, Malaya and New Guinea. Yet in the long term, the attack was strategically catastrophic. The ‘sleeping giant’ had been awoken, and in America, a sense of fury now accompanied the mobilisation for war of the world’s most powerful economy. The losses at Pearl Habor would soon be more than made good, and used to take a terrible vengeance on Japan.

Singapore and Hong Kong

December 1941 was a black month for the Allies. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December, the seemingly unstoppable Japanese steamed their way through the Pacific and South East Asia, attacking the islands of Wake and Guam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. For Britain, the most severe material, strategic and psychological blow came with the loss of two of the ‘jewels’ in its imperial crown: Hong Kong and Singapore.

Just eight hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 52,000 Japanese troops attacked Hong Kong. British, Canadian and Indian forces, commanded by General Maltby and supported by the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force, were outnumbered three to one. On the first day of the battle, the Japanese wreaked destruction upon RAF aircraft, achieving immediate air supremacy. On 10 December, they breached the recently constructed defences of Gin Drinker’s Line, causing the evacuation of Kowloon and forcing Maltby’s forces to retreat onto Hong Kong Island. On Christmas Day, following a week of bombardment and fierce fighting, the beleaguered Allied forces surrendered. It was the first time in history that a British crown colony had surrendered to an invading force. It became known as ‘Black Christmas’.

Yet the worst blow to British imperial pride was still to come. Singapore, situated at the end of the Malayan Peninsula, was known as ‘the Gibraltar of the East’, and was a powerful symbol of British power in Asia.

When the Japanese arrived in February 1942, Singapore’s defenders were woefully underprepared. The head of the British Army in Malaysia, General Arthur Percival, had repeatedly delayed the reinforcement of Singapore’s defences. He was convinced that no army would be capable of crossing the dense jungle which protected the colony in the north. He also saw the construction of defences as dangerous to civilian and military morale. To make matters worse, the two biggest British warships in the Far East, Repulse and Prince of Wales, had been sunk by Japanese air attack on 10 December 1941, which destroyed any hope for the naval defence of Singapore.

In the ensuing battle, Japanese forces were commanded by General Tomuzuki Yamashita, who became known as the ‘Tiger of Malaysia’. His troops had essentially entered ‘by the back door’, crossing Thailand and moving down the east coast of Malaya. Japanese forces began landing on Singapore Island on 8 February. In some areas there was fierce resistance, but thanks to Japanese air cover, and the poor preparations and deployment of Commonwealth troops, the Japanese soon made critical inroads into the defences. General Percival surrendered the island’s garrison after 7 days of fighting. It was the largest surrender of British-led troops in history. 80,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers became prisoners of war. The defenders lost 138,000 men in the battle; the invaders 10,000.

For Churchill, the fall of Singapore was the ‘worst disaster in British history’. In the mentality of the time, the easy defeat of the ‘white man’ by Asiatic forces represented a huge loss of face for the British. Many historians argue that the defeats fuelled the confidence and strength of the post-war anti-British movements. Both Hong Kong and Singapore were occupied by the Japanese until the end of the war.

Occupation and POWs

During the Second World War, Japan invaded and occupied vast swathes of territory in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In some countries, the invaders established puppet governments. In China, invaded in 1937 but never fully conquered, the Japanese recruited Wang Ching Wei – a deserter from Chiang Kai-Shek’s army – to head the Nanking Government. Wang’s collaborationists had no real power. Treated with disdain by the Japanese, they were basically a tool to impose social control and curb the power of local warlords. In Burma, occupied from 1942, the Japanese capitalised upon anti-imperialist sentiment among the local population, granting nominal independence in 1943 and establishing a puppet government under Ba Maw. The Japanese also used captured Indian troops to form a National Indian Army commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose, which fought alongside the Japanese in the cause of Indian independence from Britain.

Other occupied territories were controlled by military governments and subject to martial law. Hong Kong was ruled by a military government under General Rensuke Isogai which controlled every area of political and public life. The Pacific island of Guam was also ruled directly by an army which ruthlessly imposed Japanese cultural practices upon the population. The Chamorros were forced to learn Japanese customs. Yen became the currency. People suspected of hiding friends or family members wanted by the authorities were harassed, beaten, tortured and executed.

These regimes were all characterised by a brutality that had become ingrained in the Japanese Imperial Army. The occupation of Hong Kong began with the bayoneting of wounded Allied soldiers in St. Stephen’s Hospital; it continued in the same bloody manner. Roughly 10,000 women were raped in the month following Japanese victory. The occupiers recruited former members of the Hong Kong Police to orchestrate public executions. In Indonesia, occupied in 1942, civilians were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and sexually abused. Thousands were interned in concentration camps or used as slave labour for Japanese military projects.

Prisoners of War taken by the Japanese originated from many different countries: China, India, Burma, Britain and the Commonwealth, the USA, the Netherlands and the Philippines. Japanese military culture did not subscribe to the idea of surrender; becoming a POW was to disgrace oneself and one’s country. Prisoners taken by the Japanese were brutally treated; the 1927 Geneva Convention was flagrantly ignored. The Red Cross was denied access to camps; beatings, executions, medical experiments, poor sanitation, starvation rations, disease and torture were part of everyday life. Prisoners such as Philip Meninsky visually chronicled their experiences using human hair, plant juice, blood and toilet rolls. Their work was later used as evidence at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

The Bataan Death March is one of the most infamous example of Japanese brutality towards POWs. Following the fall of Bataan in the Philippines, 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners were marched from the Bataan peninsula to prison camps; they suffered physical abuse, murder, torture and starvation. The construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway, a horrific slave labour project which killed around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied POWs (mainly through overwork, malnutrition and disease) is another. According to the figures of the Tokyo Tribunal, 27.1% of all western prisoners taken by the Japanese died; the Chinese figure is much higher. While just over 80,000 Western Allied POWS were released after the Japanese surrender, the Chinese figure was just 56. The Tribunal condemned the Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and six others to death for their responsibility for these crimes; sixteen more were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Credit to: http://www.history.co.uk for my source of this story