Vocabulary List #13
1. Nonaggression pact-An agreement in which nations promise not to attack one another
2. Blitzkrieg-“lightning war”- a form of warfare in which surprise attacks with fastmoving airplanes are followed by massive attacks with infantry forces
3. Atlantic Charter-A declaration of principles issued in August 1941 by British prime
minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, on which the Allied
peace plan at the end of World War II was based
4. Battle of Britain- A series of battles between German and British air forces, fought
over Britain in 1940-1941
5. Battle of Midway- A 1942 sea and air battle of World War II, in which American forces
defeated Japanese forces in the central Pacific
6. Aryans-To the Nazis, the Germanic peoples who formed a “master race.”
7. Holocaust- A mass slaughter of Jews and other civilians, carried out by the Nazi
government of Germany before and during World War II
8. Ghettos- City neighborhoods in which European Jews were forced to live
9. Final Solution-Hitler’s program of systematically killing the entire Jewish people
10. Genocide-The systematic killing of an entire people
11. D-Day- June 6, 1944-the day on which the Allies began their invasion of the European
mainland during World War II
12. Battle of the Bulge-1944-1945 battle in which Allied forces turned back the last major
German offensive of World War II
13. Kamikaze-During World War II, Japanese suicide pilots trained to sink Allied ships by
crashing bomb-filled planes into them
14. Nuremberg Trials-A series of court proceedings held in Nuremberg, Germany, after
World War II, in which Nazi leaders were tried for aggression, violations of the rules of
war, and crimes against humanity
15. Demilitarization-A reduction in a country’s ability to wage war, achieved by
disbanding its armed forces and prohibiting it from acquiring weapons
16. Charles de Gaulle- Leader of France during World War II
17. Winston Churchill- Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II
18. Isoroku Yamamoto- Japanese military strategist during World War II, mastermind
behind the Pearl Harbor attack