Wars & Battles — World War II in Europe flashcards
10 of 80 cards free to study here · 7 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
The war against Nazi Germany from Versailles and appeasement to V-E Day: the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the Eastern Front, North Africa and Italy, the Atlantic, D-Day to Berlin, and the Holocaust.
Learn deck · part of Wars and famous battles · written against: Conventional dates and outcomes from ancient Greece to 1945; contested figures given as ranges or left out. Updated 2026-10-10.
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Which part of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles did Germans resent most, because it blamed them for the war and justified reparations?Article 231, the "war guilt" clause. It made Germany and its allies accountable for the war's losses, the legal basis for the reparations bill.Road to War
Why: Hitler built his early appeal on overturning this "dictated peace". -
How did the Great Depression open the door for the Nazis?Mass unemployment after 1929 pushed desperate voters toward extremes, and by the July 1932 election the Nazi Party was the largest party in the Reichstag.Road to War
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What does "Blitzkrieg" mean, and what was the idea behind it?"Lightning war": massed tanks, motorised infantry and aircraft punch through a narrow point, then race deep into the rear before the enemy can react.Blitzkrieg & the Battle of Britain
Watch out: Historians still debate whether it was a doctrine worked out before the war or a set of methods pieced together after the early victories. -
What was the "Phoney War"?The lull on the Western Front from September 1939 to spring 1940, when Britain and France were at war with Germany but almost no land fighting happened there. In German it was called the Sitzkrieg ("sitting war").Blitzkrieg & the Battle of Britain
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What was Operation Barbarossa, and when did it begin?Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, launched on 22 June 1941 with three army groups aimed at Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine.Eastern Front
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Why did the Red Army suffer such huge early defeats in 1941?Stalin had dismissed warnings of attack, his purges had stripped the officer corps of experience, and German pincers trapped whole Soviet armies in vast encirclements such as Kiev.Eastern Front
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Why did Hitler send Erwin Rommel to North Africa in February 1941?To rescue his Italian ally after Britain's Operation Compass routed the Italian army in Libya. Rommel's Afrika Korps earned him the nickname "the Desert Fox".North Africa & Italy
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Why was the Battle of the Atlantic a matter of survival for Britain?As an island, Britain relied on shipping for food, fuel and raw materials; if U-boats cut the sea lanes it could not fight on, and later no American army could cross to Europe.War in the Atlantic
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Operation Overlord or Operation Neptune: which name covers the whole Normandy campaign, and which the landing itself?Overlord was the entire Allied invasion of northwest Europe; Neptune was its naval and assault phase, the Channel crossing and landings of 6 June 1944.D-Day to Berlin
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What did the two Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 do?The Reich Citizenship Law stripped German Jews of citizenship, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.The Holocaust
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About these cards
Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Checked against the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org); the Avalon Project's texts of the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its secret protocol, the 1940 Franco-German armistice, the Yalta Conference protocol, the German surrender instruments and the Nuremberg indictment and judgment (avalon.law.yale.edu); Hansard (api.parliament.uk); Admiral Ramsay's Dunkirk despatch (London Gazette, 17 July 1947); the U.S. National Archives (archives.gov) and the State Department's Office of the Historian (history.state.gov); the RAF Museum's Battle of Britain history (rafmuseum.org.uk); Bletchley Park (bletchleypark.org.uk) and GCHQ's history page on the 1939 Pyry meeting (gchq.gov.uk); Naval History and Heritage Command pages (history.navy.mil); the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (auschwitz.org), the Majdanek State Museum (majdanek.eu) and the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de); the Eisenhower Presidential Library (eisenhowerlibrary.gov), the American Battle Monuments Commission (abmc.gov), the Miller Center (millercenter.org), GOV.UK's history of past prime ministers (gov.uk), the United Nations' Holocaust Outreach Programme (un.org) and the National WWII Museum (nationalww2museum.org); Imperial War Museums history pages (iwm.org.uk) and Encyclopaedia Britannica; the National Army Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, the Canadian War Museum, Veterans Affairs Canada, The Canadian Encyclopedia, the National Park Service and the International Churchill Society; and edited reference works (the Oxford Companions to British History and to American Military History, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Gale's Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Encyclopedia of Russian History, World War II Reference Library and Encyclopedia of U.S. History: War, the Dictionary of American History and the Encyclopedia of World Biography). Reference only; all wording original.
- Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO (dhm.de/lemo), consulted, not copied.
- World History Encyclopedia (worldhistory.org), consulted, not copied.
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