• 11.7 Students analyze America’s participation in World War II.
  1. Examine the origins of American involvement in the war, with an emphasis on the events that precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbor.
  2. Explain U.S. and Allied wartime strategy, including the major battles of Midway, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Battle of the Bulge.
  3. Identify the roles and sacrifices of individual American soldiers, as well as the unique contributions of the special fighting forces (e.g., the Tuskegee Airmen, the 442nd Regimental Combat team, the Navajo Code Talkers).
  4. Analyze Roosevelt’s foreign policy during World War II (e.g., Four Freedoms speech).
  5. Discuss the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home front, including the internment of Japanese Americans (e.g., Fred Korematsu v. United States of America) and the restrictions on German and Italian resident aliens; the response of the administration to Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups; the roles of women in military production; and the roles and growing political demands of African Americans.
  6. Describe major developments in aviation, weaponry, communication, and medicine and the war’s impact on the location of American industry and use of resources.

First, I planned out the ten assignments we were required to use in our scrapbooks. I wrote five journal entries, one on the invasion of Poland, one on the Battle of Midway, one on the implementation of jet fighters, the Battle of Stalingrad and a pre-D-Day entry. Next, I did the only other very complicated assignment and used Photoshop to manipulate a Chinese passport to have a different name, date of birth, date of issuance, and various other information. I also changed the photograph to one of former Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi, (Miss Haselton didn't catch this. :D ) and kept the watermark over the photo. For the rest of the assignments, I wrote a variety of short responses and collected photographs to create a psuedo-life from the 1940s.

I used an extensive well of information from previous reading that I had done in and out of class. World War II has been one of my favorite topics in the past, and I have gone out of my way to learn about the military tactics and technology used during the war. I combined this knowledge with a "character" shell that I created to build a person, the Chinese-national pilot, loaned to the United States Army Air Force for airborne operations late in the war. Ultimately, I was even able to integrate creative writing and storytelling into my work, making for a very fun experience.

Honestly, I did not learn a great deal of new material on this project, considering I already knew most of the information I used concerning military aircraft and the invasion at Normandy. I did however learn more about the results of the unplanned scattering of paratroopers prior to the main naval assault. The effect of the scattering threw the Germans off balance, causing misinformed reports that created an illusion of a far larger airborne force dropping into the countryside.

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