The concise encyclopedia of world war II 2 volumes (greenwood encyclopedias of modern world wars) ( PDFDrive ) 941

Ninety-Day Wonder administrative and territorial integrity, thereby slapping down hard Japan’s infamous wartime “Twenty-one Demands.” The treaty reflected the rising influence of the United States in the Pacific, as it tried to make long-standing American principles binding on all other Asian powers A notable exception was the Soviet Union, which was absent from the Washington Conference as from all other international bodies and associations at that time The treaty required that Japan return the German leasehold at Shandong to China However, by 1931 its terms were in tatters as the Great Depression raised tariff walls worldwide and Japan overran Manchuria Once Tokyo set up a puppet regime and colony it called “Manchukuo,” it excluded foreign enterprises in violation of the Open Door principle and Nine Power Treaty In 1937 a conference was called to discuss Japan’s follow-on invasion of China, but the Japanese contemptuously refused to attend and the conclave therefore solved nothing NINETY-DAY WONDER U.S Army slang for a fresh 2nd lieutenant who received a commission following a 90-day course at Officer Candidate School (OCS) NINETY-DIVISION ARMY See Marshall, George; U.S Army NISSAN See Green Islands NKVD “Narodnii Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del” or “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.” The Soviet secret and political police, which operated under this name from 1934 to 1954 This single umbrella organization provided secret police functions to the Party and state; maintained prisons; ran the GULAG work camp system; and arrested, judged, and executed in secret terror The NKVD was responsible for millions of deaths among so-called “kulaks” during forced collectivization of the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s, notably in Ukraine It carried out the great political and military purges of the latter 1930s that eviscerated the old Bolshevik leadership and the senior officer cadres of the Red Army It was led by Nikolai I Yezhov (1894–1939) from 1936 to 1938 He was replaced, thereupon executed, by Lavrenti Beria, who retained control of the NKVD throughout the war Beria’s own ouster and execution took place in 1953, carried out by a Politburo faction led by Nikita Khrushchev that feared he would emerge as a second Stalin over them NKVD repression of despised or suspected non-Russian minorities began in 1939–1940, as its units moved into annexed regions of Poland, Rumania, and the Baltic States, to impose uniform Soviet policy such as collectivized agriculture and to round up recruits for the Soviet armed forces The “Special Section” (“Osobyi otdel” or OO/NKVD) was responsible for military counterintelligence In practice, that meant ferreting out “treason” and “enemies of the state,” whether real or fanciful And that in turn led to “liquidating” deserters, shirkers, or even 788