Word: conquest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...buttress its military strategy, Japan forged ties with another international outcast -- Germany. In 1936 they signed a pact to oppose Communism that included secret protocols to come to the other's aid during a war with the Soviet Union. With Berlin balancing out Moscow, Tokyo accelerated its conquest of China with another "incident." On July 7, 1937, a Japanese soldier stationed near Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge left his post to urinate. His superiors announced that he had been abducted by a nearby Chinese garrison and began shelling the unit. Japanese forces soon overran eastern China...
...virtually unopposed conquest of Denmark took only a few hours. Casualties on both sides totaled 56. Norway offered somewhat more resistance. As a German naval task force steamed up the fjord leading to Oslo, the Oscarsborg Fort outside the capital opened fire with its turn-of-the-century German cannons and sank the heavy cruiser Blucher, killing more than 1,000 Germans. Among them were Gestapo agents under orders to seize King Haakon VII. Reprieved, the 67-year-old King fled northward on a railroad train, along with the national gold supply, 23 tons...
...contrast to France, where the Germans had surprised everyone by being relatively "correct," the conquest of Russia was to be even more ruthless than that of Poland. "This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences," Hitler told his generals, "and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies." More specifically, Hitler announced that he was assigning Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, to carry out "special tasks" in the "liquidation" of all "commissars," meaning anyone in a leadership position. Beyond that, Hitler planned to plunder...
Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of 1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him there so that...
...term "slow suicide" to Churchill's policy of fighting on. "By refusing to consider any peace offer," he wrote, "the British government had committed the country to a course that . . . was bound, logically, to lead through growing exhaustion to eventual collapse -- even if Hitler abstained from attempting its quick conquest by invasion...