Words at War: Mother America / Log Book / The Ninth Commandment
On 1 September 1939, Germany and Slovakia—a client state in 1939—attacked Poland.[46] On 3 September France and Britain, followed by the countries of the Commonwealth,[47] declared war on Germany but provided little support to Poland other than a small French attack into the Saarland.[48] Britain and France also began a naval blockade of Germany on 3 September which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort.[49][50]
On 17 September, after signing a cease-fire with Japan, the Soviets also invaded Poland.[51] Poland's territory was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, with Lithuania and Slovakia also receiving small shares. The Poles did not surrender; they established a Polish Underground State and an underground Home Army, and continued to fight with the Allies on all fronts outside Poland.[52]
About 100,000 Polish military personnel were evacuated to Romania and the Baltic countries; many of these soldiers later fought against the Germans in other theatres of the war.[53] Poland's Enigma codebreakers were also evacuated to France.[54] During this time, Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by late September.[55]
Following the invasion of Poland and a German-Soviet treaty governing Lithuania, the Soviet Union forced the Baltic countries to allow it to station Soviet troops in their countries under pacts of mutual assistance.[56][57][58] Finland rejected territorial demands and was invaded by the Soviet Union in November 1939.[59] The resulting conflict ended in March 1940 with Finnish concessions.[60] France and the United Kingdom, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to entering the war on the side of the Germans, responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting the USSR's expulsion from the League of Nations.[58]
In Western Europe, British troops deployed to the Continent, but in a phase nicknamed the Phoney War by the British and Sitzkrieg (sitting war) by the Germans, neither side launched major operations against the other until April 1940.[61] The Soviet Union and Germany entered a trade pact in February 1940, pursuant to which the Soviets received German military and industrial equipment in exchange for supplying raw materials to Germany to help circumvent the Allied blockade.[62]
In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to secure shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were about to disrupt.[63] Denmark immediately capitulated, and despite Allied support, Norway was conquered within two months.[64] In May 1940 Britain invaded Iceland to preempt a possible German invasion of the island.[65] British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the replacement of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940.[66]
Kansas | Wikipedia audio article
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Kansas
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- Socrates
SUMMARY
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Kansas (listen) is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean people of the (south) wind although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison.
Kansas was first settled by European Americans in 1812, in what is now Bonner Springs, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery debate. When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854 with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists prevailed, and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas grew rapidly when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland.
By 2015, Kansas was one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas, which has an area of 82,278 square miles (213,100 square kilometers) is the 15th-largest state by area and is the 34th most-populous of the 50 states with a population of 2,911,641. Residents of Kansas are called Kansans. Mount Sunflower is Kansas's highest point at 4,041 feet (1,232 meters).