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Research
WW2
The war started on September 1st, 1939
The war ended on September 2nd, 1945
There were 40,000,000 - 50,000,000 deaths
The holocaust claimed the lives of 6 million jews
The immediate cause of WW2 was the German invasion of Poland
The Holocaust claimed the lives of 6 million Jews
At the end of WW1,the Treaty of Versailles was signed. This casted all the blame for WW1 onto Germany, meaning they had to pay reparations and disarm the country. This encouraged Hitler to promise to restore Germany in the 1930s.
Women
Prior to World War II, women were mostly homemakers. Those that worked outside the home usually worked as secretaries, receptionists or department store clerks.
Once World War II began, however, men went off to war by the millions and women stepped into the civilian and military jobs they left behind. Women were proud to serve their country.
Around 350,000 women served in the military during World War II.
Rosie the Riveter
The government initiated a massive publicity campaign to persuade women to replace men on assembly lines in factories and defense plants. They produced posters and film reels of glamorous women in the workplace to entice women to serve their country as part of the home-front labor force.
Yet the not-so-glamorous image of Rosie the Riveter depicting a confident-looking woman wearing coveralls and a red bandana and flexing her muscles under the headline, “We Can Do It!” remains one of the best-known icons of World War II.
Meant to inspire patriotism, the image of Rosie the Riveter was a new and different way of portraying women, and many historians cite her as an inspiration for female liberation.
At first, women weren’t always welcomed into the workplace. They received less pay and some men looked down on them and felt they weren’t up to handling a “man’s job.” They often faced sexual harassment, long hours and dangerous working conditions.
Women in factories
Around 950,000 British women worked in munitions factories during the Second World War, making weapons like shells and bullets. Munitions work was often well-paid but involved long hours, sometimes up to seven days a week. Workers were also at serious risk from accidents with dangerous machinery or when working with highly explosive material.
Royal Ordnance Factory
In February 1944 there was a serious accident at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Kirby, Lancashire. In one building 19 workers, mainly women, were filling trays of anti-tank mine fuses when one of the fuses exploded, setting off the rest of the fuses in the tray.
The girl working on that tray was killed outright and her body disintegrated; two girls standing behind her were partly shielded from the blast by her body, but both were seriously injured, one fatally. The factory was badly damaged: the roof was blown off, electric fittings were dangling precariously; and one of the walls was swaying in the breeze.
Canary Girls
Some munitions workers handled toxic chemicals every day. Those who handled sulphur were nicknamed ‘Canary Girls’, because their skin and hair turned yellow from contact with the chemical.
"I slipped on the floor with one of these big cans and I was covered in TNT. My eyes were concealed and everything, up my nose, it was everywhere. Some of the chaps that were working there got hold of me and put me onto a trolley and took me down to the medical place and obviously I had to wait for it to set on my face. I had quite a job getting it off my eyelashes, you know and that sort of thing. And of course my face then was red and scarred with the hot TNT, you know. They put me on the bed for an hour or something, and then it was straight back to work after that" - Gwen Thomas
During WWII women worked in factories producing munitions, building ships, aeroplanes, in the auxiliary services as air-raid wardens, fire officers and evacuation officers, as drivers of fire engines, trains and trams, as conductors and as nurses.
Women on the front lines
Some women wanted to be able to actually fight for their country, and there were several cases of female soldiers who enlisted disguised as men in order to get to the front line. But most women were left at home to keep the country operating while the men were away at war.
Frieda Belinfante (1904–1995) was a prominent musician and World War II Dutch Resistance fighter who disguised herself as a man for 6 months to avoid capture by the Gestapo