Axis Powers By Erin Smith Essay Research

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Axis Powers By Erin Smith Essay, Research Paper The Axis Powers World War II was started by the Axis Forces, which were comprised of Germany, Italy, and Japan. They fought against the combined might of almost the entire world, and, but for a supreme combined effort on the part of America, the USSR, and Britain, almost won. During the war, the Axis Powers were totalitarian states, controlled by their respective leader or leaders. These are their stories. During World War II, there were three men who were controlling the Japanese government, none of which liked each other. The first, Emperor Hirohito, born in 1901, was ruler from 1926 to 1989, the last divine imperial leader of Japan. During the first nineteen years of his reign he gave over power of the government to a

militant party. The result of this was the war with China from 1937 to 1945 and adherence to the Axis Powers. At the end of the war Hirohito wanted peace and, in 1945, he unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. The second, Isoroku Yamamoto, born in 1884, was the reluctant Commander- in-Chief of Japan’s naval forces during WW II. He had a clear grasp of the situation and predicted that against a country like the U.S. or Britain, Japan would quickly lose the war. He died in 1943, shot down by the U.S. 13th Air Force in a surgical assassination strike. The last, Tojo Hideki, was born in 1884, and was the most violent of the three. He was the leader of the militaristic party that controlled the government from 1926 to 1945, and the one who commanded the Japanese invasion of

Manchuria in 1937. He controlled all government and military campaigns until 1944, when, as a result of bad military defeats, he resigned as Prime Minister. Tojo was later arrested, tried, and convicted by an international military court for conventional war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. He was later executed in 1948. These three men had control over the Japanese government, and allied themselves to Germany and Italy, thus forming the Axis forces. So, as the Pacific was being dominated by the Japanese, Europe and North Africa were being equally terrorized by Germany and Italy, who were under the iron fists of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, respectively. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, the son of a very low-ranking official, and a peasant. He

wasn’t very well educated, never completed high school, and was also rejected from institutes of higher learning because of his lack of talent. Although he was a poor student, he read non-stop, and it was from books that he developed his anti-Semitic ideas. For most of his prime, he lived on meager pay, and this eventually led to his joining the army. Once again, a lacking of skills stopped his promotion to a higher rank, and he joined the German Worker’s Party. It was later renamed the National Socialist German Workers or Nazi Party, and he was eventually elected as the chairman or Furer. Hitler wanted to try to overthrow the Weimar Republic, as Germany was then called, and, after a failed uprising in Munich and his imprisonment, he decided he would have to use legal means.

During his incarceration, he wrote his book Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” and planned his next moves carefully. Hitler’s emotional speaking gave the most important thing to the poor, unemployed people of Germany that anyone could have given: someone to blame. He successfully took over the government by way of power politics, and nazified politics, business, the news, and all other cultural and social activities. Over the next few years (about 1934-1936), Hitler directly defied the unfair (to Germans) Treaty of Versailles by rearming Germany, and making pacts with the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini and the imperialist monarchy of Japan. None of the European nations tried to stop Hitler’s actions, despite the begging and pleading of Joseph Stalin that Hitler