Top Ten Things You Should Know about WWII

• 1. D-Day gets a lot of press, but it wasn’t the most important battle in the war.

• 2. Pearl Harbor was certainly the instigation for the American involvement in WWII, but it’s likely that Japan and the United States would have gone to war anyway.

• 3. The world might be a far different place today if Hitler had spent more time making speeches and less time directing troop traffic.

• 4. More than anything else, many historians believe, the weapon that turned the tide of battles more often than not was airpower.

• 5. The estimated American death toll for an invasion of mainland Japan was 1 million lives.

• 6. Winston Churchill, famous for being prime minister during the “Blitz,” was already out of office a year after the war ended.

• 7. Weather played a vital role in nearly every important battle in the war.

• 8. Much has been said about the Holocaust. Much more needs to be said so that history doesn’t continue to repeat this type of event.

• 9. What really made this war possible was the tremendous manufacturing capabilities of the major players involved, which thrived and made tremendous innovations while the majority of their “usual” workers were fighting on the front lines.

• 10. In a sense the war did not end in 1945 but was frozen in the new divisions of the moment, which continued in the Cold War.