{"id":74,"date":"2023-06-19T15:32:40","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T15:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/?page_id=74"},"modified":"2023-06-19T19:28:04","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T19:28:04","slug":"24-world-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/24-world-war-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"24. World War II"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"A<\/a>
American soldiers recover the dead on Omaha Beach in 1944. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here<\/a> to improve this chapter.*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. Introduction<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The 1930s and 1940s were trying times. A global economic crisis gave way to a global war that became the deadliest and most destructive in human history. Perhaps eighty million individuals lost their lives during World War II. The war saw industrialized genocide and nearly threatened the eradication of an entire people. It also unleashed the most fearsome technology ever used in war. And when it ended, the United States found itself alone as the world\u2019s greatest superpower. Armed with the world\u2019s greatest economy, it looked forward to the fruits of a prosperous consumers\u2019 economy. But the war raised as many questions as it would settle and unleashed new social forces at home and abroad that confronted generations of Americans to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. The Origins of the Pacific War<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Although the United States joined the war in 1941, two years after Europe exploded into conflict in 1939, the path to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack that threw the United States headlong into war, began much earlier. For the Empire of Japan, the war had begun a decade before Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On September 18, 1931, a small explosion tore up railroad tracks controlled by the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway near the city of Shenyang (Mukden) in the Chinese province of Manchuria. The railway company condemned the bombing as the work of anti-Japanese Chinese dissidents. Evidence, though, suggests that the initial explosion was neither an act of Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment nor an accident but an elaborate ruse planned by the Japanese to provide a basis for invasion. In response, the privately operated Japanese Guandong (Kwangtung) army began shelling the Shenyang garrison the next day, and the garrison fell before nightfall. Hungry for Chinese territory and witnessing the weakness and disorganization of Chinese forces, but under the pretense of protecting Japanese citizens and investments, the Japanese Imperial Army ordered a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. The invasion was swift. Without a centralized Chinese army, the Japanese quickly defeated isolated Chinese warlords and by the end of February 1932, all of Manchuria was firmly under Japanese control. Japan established the nation of Manchukuo out of the former province of Manchuria. ((For the second Sino-Japanese War, see, for instance, Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919\u20131941<\/em> (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Dick Wilson, When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937\u20131945<\/em> (New York: Viking, 1982); and Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937\u20131945<\/em> (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This seemingly small skirmish\u2014known by the Chinese as the September 18 Incident and the Japanese as the Manchurian Incident\u2014sparked a war that would last thirteen years and claim the lives of over thirty-five million people. Comprehending Japanese motivations for attacking China and the grueling stalemate of the ensuing war are crucial for understanding Japan\u2019s seemingly unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, and, therefore, for understanding the involvement of the United States in World War II as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite their rapid advance into Manchuria, the Japanese put off the invasion of China for nearly three years. Japan occupied a precarious domestic and international position after the September 18 Incident. At home, Japan was riven by political factionalism due to its stagnating economy. Leaders were torn as to whether to address modernization and lack of natural resources through unilateral expansion (the conquest of resource-rich areas such as Manchuria to export raw materials to domestic Japanese industrial bases such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or international cooperation (a philosophy of pan-Asianism in an anti-Western coalition that would push the colonial powers out of Asia). Ultimately, after a series of political crises and assassinations inflamed tensions, pro-war elements within the Japanese military triumphed over the more moderate civilian government. Japan committed itself to aggressive military expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Zhang Xueliang appealed to the League of Nations for assistance against Japan. The United States supported the Chinese protest, proclaiming the Stimson Doctrine in January 1932, which refused to recognize any state established as a result of Japanese aggression. Meanwhile, the League of Nations sent Englishman Victor Bulwer-Lytton to investigate the September 18 Incident. After a six-month investigation, Bulwer-Lytton found the Japanese guilty of inciting the September 18 incident and demanded the return of Manchuria to China. The Japanese withdrew from the League of Nations in March 1933.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japan isolated itself from the world. Its diplomatic isolation empowered radical military leaders who could point to Japanese military success in Manchuria and compare it to the diplomatic failures of the civilian government. The military took over Japanese policy. And in the military\u2019s eyes, the conquest of China would not only provide for Japan\u2019s industrial needs, it would secure Japanese supremacy in East Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China. It assaulted the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937, and routed the forces of the Chinese National Revolutionary Army led by Chiang Kai-shek. The broken Chinese army gave up Beiping (Beijing) to the Japanese on August 8, Shanghai on November 26, and the capital, Nanjing (Nanking), on December 13. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands of women were raped, when the Japanese besieged and then sacked Nanjing. The Western press labeled it the Rape of Nanjing. To halt the invading enemy, Chiang Kai-shek adopted a scorched-earth strategy of \u201ctrading space for time.\u201d His Nationalist government retreated inland, burning villages and destroying dams, and established a new capital at the Yangtze River port of Chongqing (Chungking). Although the Nationalists\u2019 scorched-earth policy hurt the Japanese military effort, it alienated scores of dislocated Chinese civilians and became a potent propaganda tool of the emerging Chinese Communist Party (CCP). ((See Joshua A. Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans read about the brutal fighting in China, but the United States lacked both the will and the military power to oppose the Japanese invasion. After the gut-wrenching carnage of World War I, many Americans retreated toward isolationism by opposing any involvement in the conflagrations burning in Europe and Asia. And even if Americans wished to intervene, their military was lacking. The Japanese army was a technologically advanced force consisting of 4,100,000 men and 900,000 Chinese collaborators\u2014and that was in China alone. The Japanese military was armed with modern rifles, artillery, armor, and aircraft. By 1940, the Japanese navy was the third-largest and among the most technologically advanced in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Chinese Nationalists lobbied Washington for aid. Chiang Kai-shek\u2019s wife, Soong May-ling\u2014known to the American public as Madame Chiang\u2014led the effort. Born into a wealthy Chinese merchant family in 1898, Madame Chiang spent much of her childhood in the United States and graduated from Wellesley College in 1917 with a major in English literature. In contrast to her gruff husband, Madame Chiang was charming and able to use her knowledge of American culture and values to garner support for her husband and his government. But while the United States denounced Japanese aggression, it took no action during the 1930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Chinese Nationalists fought for survival, the Communist Party was busy collecting people and supplies in the northwestern Shaanxi Province. China had been at war with itself when the Japanese came. Nationalists battled a stubborn communist insurgency. In 1935 the Nationalists threw the communists out of the fertile Chinese coast, but an ambitious young commander named Mao Zedong recognized the power of the Chinese peasant population. In Shaanxi, Mao recruited from the local peasantry, building his force from a meager seven thousand survivors at the end of the Long March in 1935 to a robust 1.2 million members by the end of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Japan had conquered much of the country, the Nationalists regrouped and the communists rearmed. An uneasy truce paused the country\u2019s civil war and refocused efforts on the invaders. The Chinese could not dislodge the Japanese, but they could stall their advance. The war mired in stalemate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. The Origins of the European War<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Across the globe in Europe, the continent\u2019s major powers were still struggling with the aftereffects of World War I when the global economic crisis spiraled much of the continent into chaos. Germany\u2019s Weimar Republic collapsed with the economy, and out of the ashes emerged Adolf Hitler\u2019s National Socialists\u2014the Nazis. Championing German racial supremacy, fascist government, and military expansionism, Hitler rose to power and, after aborted attempts to take power in Germany, became chancellor in 1933 and the Nazis conquered German institutions. Democratic traditions were smashed. Leftist groups were purged. Hitler repudiated the punitive damages and strict military limitations of the Treaty of Versailles. He rebuilt the German military and navy. He reoccupied regions lost during the war and remilitarized the Rhineland, along the border with France. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hitler and Benito Mussolini\u2014the fascist Italian leader who had risen to power in the 1920s\u2014intervened for the Spanish fascists, toppling the communist Spanish Republican Party. Britain and France stood by warily and began to rebuild their militaries, anxious in the face of a renewed Germany but still unwilling to draw Europe into another bloody war. ((On the origins of World War II in Europe, see, for instance, P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1986).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf<\/em>, Hitler advocated for the unification of Europe\u2019s German peoples under one nation and that nation\u2019s need for Lebensraum<\/em>, or living space, particularly in Eastern Europe, to supply Germans with the land and resources needed for future prosperity. The Untermenschen<\/em> (lesser humans) would have to go. Once in power, Hitler worked toward the twin goals of unification and expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Photograph<\/a>
The massive Nuremberg rallies, such as this one in 1935, instilled a fierce loyalty to (or fearful silence about) Hitler and the National Socialist Party in Germany. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and set its sights on the Sudetenland, a large, ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France, alarmed but still anxious to avoid war, agreed\u2014without Czechoslovakia\u2019s input\u2014that Germany could annex the region in return for a promise to stop all future German aggression. They thought that Hitler could be appeased, but it became clear that his ambitions would continue pushing German expansion. In March 1939, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and began to make demands on Poland. Britain and France promised war. And war came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitler signed a secret agreement\u2014the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact\u2014with the Soviet Union that coordinated the splitting of Poland between the two powers and promised nonaggression thereafter. The European war began when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later and mobilized their armies. Britain and France hoped that the Poles could hold out for three to four months, enough time for the Allies to intervene. Poland fell in three weeks. The German army, anxious to avoid the rigid, grinding war of attrition that took so many millions in the stalemate of World War I, built their new modern army for speed and maneuverability. German doctrine emphasized the use of tanks, planes, and motorized infantry (infantry that used trucks for transportation instead of marching) to concentrate forces, smash front lines, and wreak havoc behind the enemy\u2019s defenses. It was called Blitzkrieg<\/em>, or lightning war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the fall of Poland, France and its British allies braced for an inevitable German attack. Throughout the winter of 1939\u20131940, however, fighting was mostly confined to smaller fronts in Norway. Belligerents called it the Sitzkrieg<\/em> (sitting war). But in May 1940, Hitler launched his attack into Western Europe. Mirroring the German\u2019s Schlieffen Plan of 1914 in the previous war, Germany attacked through the Netherlands and Belgium to avoid the prepared French defenses along the French-German border. Poland had fallen in three weeks; France lasted only a few weeks more. By June, Hitler was posing for photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower. Germany split France in half. Germany occupied and governed the north, and the south would be ruled under a puppet government in Vichy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With France under heel, Hitler turned to Britain. Operation Sea Lion\u2014the planned German invasion of the British Isles\u2014required air superiority over the English Channel. From June until October the German Luftwaffe fought the Royal Air Force (RAF) for control of the skies. Despite having fewer planes, British pilots won the so-called Battle of Britain, saving the islands from immediate invasion and prompting the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, to declare, \u201cNever before in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
The German bombing of London left thousands homeless, hurt, or dead. This child, holding a stuffed toy, sits in the rubble as adults ponder their fate in the background. 1945. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

If Britain was safe from invasion, it was not immune from additional air attacks. Stymied in the Battle of Britain, Hitler began the Blitz\u2014a bombing campaign against cities and civilians. Hoping to crush the British will to fight, the Luftwaffe bombed the cities of London, Liverpool, and Manchester every night from September to the following May. Children were sent far into the countryside to live with strangers to shield them from the bombings. Remaining residents took refuge in shelters and subway tunnels, emerging each morning to put out fires and bury the dead. The Blitz ended in June 1941, when Hitler, confident that Britain was temporarily out of the fight, launched Operation Barbarossa\u2014the invasion of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoping to capture agricultural lands, seize oil fields, and break the military threat of Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union, Hitler broke the two powers\u2019 1939 nonaggression pact and, on June 22, invaded the Soviet Union. It was the largest land invasion in history. France and Poland had fallen in weeks, and German officials hoped to break Russia before the winter. And initially, the Blitzkrieg<\/em> worked. The German military quickly conquered enormous swaths of land and netted hundreds of thousands of prisoners. But Russia was too big and the Soviets were willing to sacrifice millions to stop the fascist advance. After recovering from the initial shock of the German invasion, Stalin moved his factories east of the Urals, out of range of the Luftwaffe. He ordered his retreating army to adopt a \u201cscorched earth\u201d policy, to move east and destroy food, rails, and shelters to stymie the advancing German army. The German army slogged forward. It split into three pieces and stood at the gates of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad, but supply lines now stretched thousands of miles, Soviet infrastructure had been destroyed, partisans harried German lines, and the brutal Russian winter arrived. Germany had won massive gains but the winter found Germany exhausted and overextended. In the north, the German army starved Leningrad to death during an interminable siege; in the south, at Stalingrad, the two armies bled themselves to death in the destroyed city; and, in the center, on the outskirts of Moscow, in sight of the capital city, the German army faltered and fell back. It was the Soviet Union that broke Hitler\u2019s army. Twenty-five million Soviet soldiers and civilians died during the Great Patriotic War, and roughly 80 percent of all German casualties during the war came on the Eastern Front. The German army and its various conscripts suffered 850,000 casualties at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. ((Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942\u20131943 <\/em>(New York: Penguin, 1999); Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941\u201345: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare<\/em> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986); Catherine Merridale, Ivan\u2019s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939\u20131945<\/em> (New York: Picador, 2006).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. The United States and the European War<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

While Hitler marched across Europe, the Japanese continued their war in the Pacific. In 1939 the United States dissolved its trade treaties with Japan and the following year cut off supplies of war materials by embargoing oil, steel, rubber, and other vital goods. It was hoped that economic pressure would shut down the Japanese war machine. Instead, Japan\u2019s resource-starved military launched invasions across the Pacific to sustain its war effort. The Japanese called their new empire the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and, with the cry of \u201cAsia for the Asians,\u201d made war against European powers and independent nations throughout the region. Diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States collapsed. The United States demanded that Japan withdraw from China; Japan considered the oil embargo a de facto declaration of war. ((Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japanese military planners, believing that American intervention was inevitable, planned a coordinated Pacific offensive to neutralize the United States and other European powers and provide time for Japan to complete its conquests and fortify its positions. On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Japanese military planners hoped to destroy enough battleships and aircraft carriers to cripple American naval power for years. Twenty-four hundred Americans were killed in the attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American isolationism fell at Pearl Harbor. Japan also assaulted Hong Kong, the Philippines, and American holdings throughout the Pacific, but it was the attack on Hawaii that threw the United States into a global conflict. Franklin Roosevelt called December 7 \u201ca date which will live in infamy\u201d and called for a declaration of war, which Congress answered within hours. Within a week of Pearl Harbor the United States had declared war on the entire Axis, turning two previously separate conflicts into a true world war.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"This<\/a>
This pair of U.S. military recruiting posters demonstrates the way that two branches of the military\u2014the Marines and the Women\u2019s Army Corps\u2014borrowed techniques from professional advertisers to \u201csell\u201d a romantic vision of war to Americans. One shows Marines at war in a lush jungle, reminding viewers that the war was taking place in exotic lands; the other depicted women taking on new jobs as a patriotic duty. Bradshaw Crandall, Are You a Girl with a Star-Spangled Heart? Recruiting Publicity Bureau, U.S. Women\u2019s Army Corps Recruiting Poster (1943); Unknown, Let\u2019s Go Get \u2019Em. Beck Engraving Co. (1942). Library of Congress.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The American war began slowly. Britain had stood alone militarily in Europe, but American supplies had bolstered their resistance. Hitler unleashed his U-boat \u201cwolf packs\u201d into the Atlantic Ocean with orders to sink anything carrying aid to Britain, but Britain\u2019s and the United States\u2019 superior tactics and technology won them the Battle of the Atlantic. British code breakers cracked Germany\u2019s radio codes and the surge of intelligence, dubbed Ultra, coupled with massive naval convoys escorted by destroyers armed with sonar and depth charges, gave the advantage to the Allies and by 1942, Hitler\u2019s Kriegsmarine was losing ships faster than they could be built. ((For the United States on the European front, see, for instance, John Keegan, The Second World War<\/em> (New York: Viking, 1990); and Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II<\/em> (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In North Africa in 1942, British victory at El Alamein began pushing the Germans back. In November, the first American combat troops entered the European war, landing in French Morocco and pushing the Germans east while the British pushed west. ((Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942\u20131943<\/em> (New York: Holt, 2002.)) By 1943, the Allies had pushed Axis forces out of Africa. In January President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss the next step of the European war. Churchill convinced Roosevelt to chase the Axis up Italy, into the \u201csoft underbelly\u201d of Europe. Afterward, Roosevelt announced to the press that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the Army Air Force (AAF) sent hundreds (and eventually thousands) of bombers to England in preparation for a massive strategic bombing campaign against Germany. The plan was to bomb Germany around the clock. American bombers hit German ball-bearing factories, rail yards, oil fields, and manufacturing centers during the day, while the British RAF carpet-bombed German cities at night. Flying in formation, they initially flew unescorted, since many believed that bombers equipped with defensive firepower flew too high and too fast to be attacked. However, advanced German technology allowed fighters to easily shoot down the lumbering bombers. On some disastrous missions, the Germans shot down almost 50 percent of American aircraft. However, the advent and implementation of a long-range escort fighter let the bombers hit their targets more accurately while fighters confronted opposing German aircraft.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Photograph<\/a>
In 1943, Allied forces began a bombing campaign of railroad and oil targets in Bucharest, part of the wider policy of bombing expeditions meant to incapacitate German transportation. Bucharest was considered the number one oil target in Europe. Photograph, August 1, 1943. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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\"Photograph<\/a>
Bombings throughout Europe caused complete devastation in some areas, leveling beautiful ancient cities like Cologne, Germany. Cologne experienced an astonishing 262 separate air raids by Allied forces, leaving the city in ruins as in the photograph above. Amazingly, the Cologne Cathedral stood nearly undamaged even after being hit numerous times, while the area around it crumbled. Photograph, April 24, 1945. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In the wake of the Soviets\u2019 victory at Stalingrad, the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) met in Tehran in November 1943. Dismissing Africa and Italy as a sideshow, Stalin demanded that Britain and the United States invade France to relieve pressure on the Eastern Front. Churchill was hesitant, but Roosevelt was eager. The invasion was tentatively scheduled for 1944.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Italy, the \u201csoft underbelly\u201d turned out to be much tougher than Churchill had imagined. Italy\u2019s narrow, mountainous terrain gave the defending Axis the advantage. Movement up the peninsula was slow, and in some places conditions returned to the trenchlike warfare of World War I. Americans attempted to land troops behind them at Anzio on the western coast of Italy, but, surrounded, they suffered heavy casualties. Still, the Allies pushed up the peninsula, Mussolini\u2019s government revolted, and a new Italian government quickly made peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the day the American army entered Rome, American, British and Canadian forces launched Operation Overlord, the long-awaited invasion of France. D-Day, as it became popularly known, was the largest amphibious assault in history. American general Dwight Eisenhower was uncertain enough of the attack\u2019s chances that the night before the invasion he wrote two speeches: one for success and one for failure. The Allied landings at Normandy were successful, and although progress across France was much slower than hoped for, Paris was liberated roughly two months later. Allied bombing expeditions meanwhile continued to level German cities and industrial capacity. Perhaps four hundred thousand German civilians were killed by allied bombing. ((Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy <\/em>(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nazis were crumbling on both fronts. Hitler tried but failed to turn the war in his favor in the west. The Battle of the Bulge failed to drive the Allies back to the English Channel, but the delay cost the Allies the winter. The invasion of Germany would have to wait, while the Soviet Union continued its relentless push westward, ravaging German populations in retribution for German war crimes. ((Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won<\/em> (New York: Norton, 1997).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

German counterattacks in the east failed to dislodge the Soviet advance, destroying any last chance Germany might have had to regain the initiative. 1945 dawned with the end of European war in sight. The Big Three met again at Yalta in the Soviet Union, where they reaffirmed the demand for Hitler\u2019s unconditional surrender and began to plan for postwar Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Soviet Union reached Germany in January, and the Americans crossed the Rhine in March. In late April American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe while the Soviets pushed relentlessly by Stalin to reach Berlin first and took the capital city in May, days after Hitler and his high command had died by suicide in a city bunker. Germany was conquered. The European war was over. Allied leaders met again, this time at Potsdam, Germany, where it was decided that Germany would be divided into pieces according to current Allied occupation, with Berlin likewise divided, pending future elections. Stalin also agreed to join the fight against Japan in approximately three months. ((Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany, 1945<\/em> (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. The United States and the Japanese War<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

As Americans celebrated V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, they redirected their full attention to the still-raging Pacific War. As in Europe, the war in the Pacific started slowly. After Pearl Harbor, the American-controlled Philippine archipelago fell to Japan. After running out of ammunition and supplies, the garrison of American and Filipino soldiers surrendered. The prisoners were marched eighty miles to their prisoner-of-war camp without food, water, or rest. Ten thousand died on the Bataan Death March. ((For the Pacific War, see, for instance, Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books, 1985); Keegan, Second World War<\/em>; John Costello, The Pacific War: 1941\u20131945<\/em> (New York: Harper, 2009); and John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War<\/em> (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as Americans mobilized their armed forces, the tide turned. In the summer of 1942, American naval victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the aircraft carrier duel at the Battle of Midway crippled Japan\u2019s Pacific naval operations. To dislodge Japan\u2019s hold over the Pacific, the U.S. military began island hopping: attacking island after island, bypassing the strongest but seizing those capable of holding airfields to continue pushing Japan out of the region. Combat was vicious. At Guadalcanal American soldiers saw Japanese soldiers launch suicidal charges rather than surrender. Many Japanese soldiers refused to be taken prisoner or to take prisoners themselves. Such tactics, coupled with American racial prejudice, turned the Pacific Theater into a more brutal and barbarous conflict than the European Theater. ((Dower, War Without Mercy<\/em>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japanese defenders fought tenaciously. Few battles were as one-sided as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, or what the Americans called the Japanese counterattack, the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Japanese soldiers bled the Americans in their advance across the Pacific. At Iwo Jima, an eight-square-mile island of volcanic rock, seventeen thousand Japanese soldiers held the island against seventy thousand Marines for over a month. At the cost of nearly their entire force, they inflicted almost thirty thousand casualties before the island was lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By February 1945, American bombers were in range of the mainland. Bombers hit Japan\u2019s industrial facilities but suffered high casualties. To spare bomber crews from dangerous daylight raids, and to achieve maximum effect against Japan\u2019s wooden cities, many American bombers dropped incendiary weapons that created massive firestorms and wreaked havoc on Japanese cities. Over sixty Japanese cities were fire-bombed. American fire bombs killed one hundred thousand civilians in Tokyo in March 1945.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In June 1945, after eighty days of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, the Americans captured the island of Okinawa. The mainland of Japan was open before them. It was a viable base from which to launch a full invasion of the Japanese homeland and end the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estimates varied, but given the tenacity of Japanese soldiers fighting on islands far from their home, some officials estimated that an invasion of the Japanese mainland could cost half a million American casualties and perhaps millions of Japanese civilians. Historians debate the many motivations that ultimately drove the Americans to use atomic weapons against Japan, and many American officials criticized the decision, but these would be the numbers later cited by government leaders and military officials to justify their use. ((Michael J. Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory<\/em> (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb<\/em> (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the war, fearing that the Germans might develop an atomic bomb, the U.S. government launched the Manhattan Project, a hugely expensive, ambitious program to harness atomic energy and create a single weapon capable of leveling entire cities. The Americans successfully exploded the world\u2019s first nuclear device, Trinity, in New Mexico in July 1945. (Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was designed, later recalled that the event reminded him of Hindu scripture: \u201cNow I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d) Two more bombs\u2014Fat Man and Little Boy\u2014were built and detonated over two Japanese cities in August. Hiroshima was hit on August 6. Over one hundred thousand civilians were killed. Nagasaki followed on August 9. Perhaps eighty thousand civilians were killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan on August 15. On September 2, aboard the battleship USS Missouri<\/em>, delegates from the Japanese government formally signed their surrender. World War II was finally over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI. Soldiers\u2019 Experiences<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Almost eighteen million men served in World War II. Volunteers rushed to join the military after Pearl Harbor, but the majority\u2014over ten million\u2014were drafted into service. Volunteers could express their preference for assignment, and many preempted the draft by volunteering. Regardless, recruits judged I-A, \u201cfit for service,\u201d were moved into basic training, where soldiers were developed physically and trained in the basic use of weapons and military equipment. Soldiers were indoctrinated into the chain of command and introduced to military life. After basic, soldiers moved on to more specialized training. For example, combat infantrymen received additional weapons and tactical training, and radio operators learned transmission codes and the operation of field radios. Afterward, an individual\u2019s experience varied depending on what service he entered and to what theater he was assigned. ((Works on the experiences of World War II soldiers are seemingly endless and include popular histories such as Stephen E. Ambrose\u2019s Citizen Soldiers<\/em> (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997) and memoirs such as Eugene Sledge\u2019s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa<\/em> (New York: Presidio Press, 1981).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soldiers and Marines bore the brunt of on-the-ground combat. After transportation to the front by trains, ships, and trucks, they could expect to march carrying packs weighing anywhere from twenty to fifty pounds containing rations, ammunition, bandages, tools, clothing, and miscellaneous personal items in addition to their weapons. Sailors, once deployed, spent months at sea operating their assigned vessels. Larger ships, particularly aircraft carriers, were veritable floating cities. In most, sailors lived and worked in cramped conditions, often sleeping in bunks stacked in rooms housing dozens of sailors. Senior officers received small rooms of their own. Sixty thousand American sailors lost their lives in the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During World War II, the Air Force was still a branch of the U.S. Army and soldiers served in ground and air crews. World War II saw the institutionalization of massive bombing campaigns against cities and industrial production. Large bombers like the B-17 Flying Fortress required pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators, and four dedicated machine gunners. Airmen on bombing raids left from bases in England or Italy or from Pacific islands and endured hours of flight before approaching enemy territory. At high altitude, and without pressurized cabins, crews used oxygen tanks to breathe and on-board temperatures plummeted. Once in enemy airspace, crews confronted enemy fighters and anti-aircraft flak from the ground. While fighter pilots flew as escorts, the Air Corps suffered heavy casualties. Tens of thousands of airmen lost their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the ground, conditions varied. Soldiers in Europe endured freezing winters, impenetrable French hedgerows, Italian mountain ranges, and dense forests. Germans fought with a Western mentality familiar to Americans. Soldiers in the Pacific endured heat and humidity, monsoons, jungles, and tropical diseases. And they confronted an unfamiliar foe. Americans, for instance, could understand surrender as prudent; many Japanese soldiers saw it as cowardice. What Americans saw as a fanatical waste of life, the Japanese saw as brave and honorable. Moreover, American soldiers and American military leadership brought their historical anti-Asian prejudices to bear against the Japanese. Atrocities flourished in the Pacific at a level unmatched in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VII. The Wartime Economy<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Economies win wars no less than militaries. The war converted American factories to wartime production, reawakened Americans\u2019 economic might, armed Allied belligerents and the American armed forces, effectively pulled America out of the Great Depression, and ushered in an era of unparalleled economic prosperity. ((See, for instance, Michael Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Kennedy, Freedom from Fear<\/em>).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal had ameliorated the worst of the Depression, but the economy still limped its way forward into the 1930s. But then Europe fell into war, and, despite its isolationism, Americans were glad to sell the Allies arms and supplies. And then Pearl Harbor changed everything. The United States drafted the economy into war service. The \u201csleeping giant\u201d mobilized its unrivaled economic capacity to wage worldwide war. Governmental entities such as the War Production Board and the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion managed economic production for the war effort and economic output exploded. An economy that was unable to provide work for a quarter of the workforce less than a decade earlier now struggled to fill vacant positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Government spending during the four years of war doubled <\/em>all federal spending in all of American history up to that point. The budget deficit soared, but, just as Depression-era economists had counseled, the government\u2019s massive intervention annihilated unemployment and propelled growth. The economy that came out of the war looked nothing like the one that had begun it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Military production came at the expense of the civilian consumer economy. Appliance and automobile manufacturers converted their plants to produce weapons and vehicles. Consumer choice was foreclosed. Every American received rationing cards and, legally, goods such as gasoline, coffee, meat, cheese, butter, processed food, firewood, and sugar could not be purchased without them. The housing industry was shut down, and the cities became overcrowded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the wartime economy boomed. The Roosevelt administration urged citizens to save their earnings or buy war bonds to prevent inflation. Bond drives were held nationally and headlined by Hollywood celebrities. Such drives were hugely successful. They not only funded much of the war effort, they helped tame inflation as well. So too did tax rates. The federal government raised income taxes and boosted the top marginal tax rate to 94 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
As in World War I, citizens were urged to buy war bonds to support the effort overseas. Rallies, such as this 1943 event, appealed to Americans\u2019 sense of patriotism. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

With the economy booming and twenty million American workers placed into military service, unemployment virtually disappeared. More and more African Americans continued to leave the agrarian South for the industrial North. And as more and more men joined the military, and more and more positions went unfilled, women joined the workforce en masse. Other American producers looked outside the United States, southward, to Mexico, to fill its labor force. Between 1942 and 1964, the United States contracted thousands of Mexican nationals to work in American agriculture and railroads in the Bracero Program. Jointly administered by the State Department, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Justice, the binational agreement secured five million contracts across twenty-four states. ((Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico<\/em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With factory work proliferating across the country and agricultural labor experiencing severe labor shortages, the presidents of Mexico and the United States signed an agreement in July 1942 to bring the first group of legally contracted workers to California. Discriminatory policies toward people of Mexican descent prevented bracero contracts in Texas until 1947. The Bracero Program survived the war, enshrined in law until the 1960s, when the United States liberalized its immigration laws. Though braceros suffered exploitative labor conditions, for the men who participated the program was a mixed blessing. Interviews with ex-braceros captured the complexity. \u201cThey would call us pigs . . . they didn\u2019t have to treat us that way,\u201d one said of his employers, while another said, \u201cFor me it was a blessing, the United States was a blessing . . . it is a nation I fell in love with because of the excess work and good pay.\u201d ((Interview with Rogelio Valdez Robles by Valerie Martinez and Lydia Valdez, transcribed by Nancy Valerio, September 21, 2008; interview with Alvaro Hern\u00e1ndez by Myrna Parra-Mantilla, February 5, 2003, Interview No. 33, Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso.)) After the exodus of Mexican migrants during the Depression, the program helped reestablish Mexican migration, institutionalized migrant farm work across much of the country, and further planted a Mexican presence in the southern and western United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIII. Women and World War II<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had encouraged all able-bodied American women to help the war effort. He considered the role of women in the war critical for American victory, and the public expected women to assume various functions to free men for active military service. While most women opted to remain at home or volunteer with charitable organizations, many went to work or donned a military uniform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

World War II brought unprecedented labor opportunities for American women. Industrial labor, an occupational sphere dominated by men, shifted in part to women for the duration of wartime mobilization. Women applied for jobs in converted munitions factories. The iconic illustrated image of Rosie the Riveter, a muscular woman dressed in coveralls with her hair in a kerchief and inscribed with the phrase We Can Do It!<\/em>, came to stand for female factory labor during the war. But women also worked in various auxiliary positions for the government. Although such jobs were often traditionally gendered female, over a million administrative jobs at the local, state, and national levels were transferred from men to women for the duration of the war. ((Alecea Standlee, \u201cShifting Spheres: Gender, Labor, and the Construction of National Identity in U.S. Propaganda During the Second World War,\u201d Minerva Journal of Women and War<\/em> 4 (Spring 2010): 43\u201362.))<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Women<\/a>
With so many American workers deployed overseas and so many new positions created by war production, women entered the work force in massive numbers. Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For women who elected not to work, many volunteer opportunities presented themselves. The American Red Cross, the largest charitable organization in the nation, encouraged women to volunteer with local city chapters. Millions of women organized community social events for families, packed and shipped almost half a million tons of medical supplies overseas, and prepared twenty-seven million care packages of nonperishable items for American and other Allied prisoners of war. The American Red Cross further required all female volunteers to certify as nurse\u2019s aides, providing an extra benefit and work opportunity for hospital staffs that suffered severe personnel losses. Other charity organizations, such as church and synagogue affiliates, benevolent associations, and social club auxiliaries, gave women further outlets for volunteer work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Military service was another option for women who wanted to join the war effort. Over 350,000 women served in several all-female units of the military branches. The Army and Navy Nurse Corps Reserves, the Women\u2019s Army Auxiliary Corps, the Navy\u2019s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the Coast Guard\u2019s SPARs (named for the Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus<\/em>, \u201cAlways Ready\u201d), and Marine Corps units gave women the opportunity to serve as either commissioned officers or enlisted members at military bases at home and abroad. The Nurse Corps Reserves alone commissioned 105,000 army and navy nurses recruited by the American Red Cross. Military nurses worked at base hospitals, mobile medical units, and onboard hospital \u201cmercy\u201d ships. ((Major Jeanne Holm, USAF (Ret.), Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution<\/em> (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982), 21\u2013109; Portia Kernodle, The Red Cross Nurse in Action, 1882\u20131948<\/em> (New York: Harper), 406\u2013453.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim Crow segregation in both the civilian and military sectors remained a problem for Black women who wanted to join the war effort. Even after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 in 1941, supervisors who hired Black women still often relegated them to the most menial tasks on factory floors. Segregation was further upheld in factory lunchrooms, and many Black women were forced to work at night to keep them separate from whites. In the military, only the Women\u2019s Army Auxiliary Corps and the Nurse Corps Reserves accepted Black women for active service, and the army set a limited quota of 10 percent of total end strength for Black female officers and enlisted women and segregated Black units on active duty. The American Red Cross, meanwhile, recruited only four hundred Black nurses for the Army and Navy Nurse Corps Reserves, and Black Army and Navy nurses worked in segregated military hospitals on bases stateside and overseas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for all of the postwar celebration of Rosie the Riveter, after the war ended the men returned and most women voluntarily left the workforce or lost their jobs. Meanwhile, former military women faced a litany of obstacles in obtaining veteran\u2019s benefits during their transition to civilian life. The nation that beckoned the call for assistance to millions of women during the four-year crisis hardly stood ready to accommodate their postwar needs and demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IX. Race and World War II<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

World War II affected nearly every aspect of life in the United States, and America\u2019s racial relationships were not immune. African Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Jews, and Japanese Americans were profoundly impacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early 1941, months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest Black trade union in the nation, made headlines by threatening President Roosevelt with a march on Washington, D.C. In this \u201ccrisis of democracy,\u201d Randolph said, many defense contractors still refused to hire Black workers and the armed forces remained segregated. In exchange for Randolph calling off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, the Fair Employment Practice in Defense Industries Act, banning racial and religious discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to monitor defense industry hiring practices. While the armed forces remained segregated throughout the war, and the FEPC had limited influence, the order showed that the federal government could stand against discrimination. The Black workforce in defense industries rose from 3 percent in 1942 to 9 percent in 1945. ((William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights<\/em> (New York: Norton, 2013).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than one million African Americans fought in the war. Most Black servicemen served in segregated, noncombat units led by white officers. Some gains were made, however. The number of Black officers increased from five in 1940 to over seven thousand in 1945. The all-Black pilot squadrons, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, completed more than 1,500 missions, escorted heavy bombers into Germany, and earned several hundred merits and medals. Many bomber crews specifically requested the Red Tail Angels as escorts. And near the end of the war, the army and navy began integrating some of their units and facilities, before the U.S. government finally ordered the full integration of its armed forces in 1948. ((Stephen Tuck, Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II<\/em> (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).))<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Photograph<\/a>
The Tuskegee Airmen stand at attention in 1941 as Major James A. Ellison returns the salute of Mac Ross, one of the first graduates of the Tuskegee cadets. The photographscaptures the pride and poise of the Tuskegee Airmen, who continued the tradition of African Americans\u2019 military service despite widespread racial discrimination and inequality at home. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

While Black Americans served in the armed forces (though they were segregated), on the home front they became riveters and welders, rationed food and gasoline, and bought victory bonds. But many Black Americans saw the war as an opportunity not only to serve their country but to improve it. The Pittsburgh Courier<\/em>, a leading Black newspaper, spearheaded the Double V campaign. It called on African Americans to fight two wars: the war against Nazism and fascism abroad and the war against racial inequality at home. To achieve victory, to achieve \u201creal democracy,\u201d the Courier<\/em> encouraged its readers to enlist in the armed forces, volunteer on the home front, and fight against racial segregation and discrimination. ((Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism<\/em> (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the war, membership in the NAACP jumped tenfold, from fifty thousand to five hundred thousand. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was formed in 1942 and spearheaded the method of nonviolent direct action to achieve desegregation. Between 1940 and 1950, some 1.5 million Black southerners, the largest number of any decade since the beginning of the Great Migration, also indirectly demonstrated their opposition to racism and violence by migrating out of the Jim Crow South to the North. But transitions were not easy. Racial tensions erupted in 1943 in a series of riots in cities such as Mobile, Beaumont, and Harlem. The bloodiest race riot occurred in Detroit and resulted in the death of twenty-five Black and nine White Americans. Still, the war ignited in African Americans an urgency for equality that they would carry with them into the subsequent years. ((Dominic J. Capeci Jr. and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943<\/em> (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Americans had to navigate American prejudice, and America\u2019s entry into the war left foreign nationals from the belligerent nations in a precarious position. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) targeted many on suspicions of disloyalty for detainment, hearings, and possible internment under the Alien Enemy Act. Those who received an order for internment were sent to government camps secured by barbed wire and armed guards. Such internments were supposed to be for cause. Then, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any persons from designated \u201cexclusion zones\u201d\u2014which ultimately covered nearly a third of the country\u2014at the discretion of military commanders. Thirty thousand Japanese Americans fought for the United States in World War II, but wartime anti-Japanese sentiment built on historical prejudices, and under the order, people of Japanese descent, both immigrants and American citizens, were detained and placed under the custody of the War Relocation Authority, the civil agency that supervised their relocation to internment camps. They lost their homes and jobs. Over ten thousand German nationals and a smaller number of Italian nationals were interned at various times in the United States during World War II, but American policies disproportionately targeted Japanese-descended populations, and individuals did not receive personalized reviews prior to their internment. This policy of mass exclusion and detention affected over 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-descended individuals. Seventy thousand were American citizens. ((Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied<\/em>, the congressionally appointed Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that \u201cthe broad historical causes\u201d shaping the relocation program were \u201crace prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.\u201d ((Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians<\/em> (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 18).)) Although the exclusion orders were found to have been constitutionally permissible under the vagaries of national security, they were later judged, even by the military and judicial leaders of the time, to have been a grave injustice against people of Japanese descent. In 1988, President Reagan signed a law that formally apologized for internment and provided reparations to surviving internees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if actions taken during war would later prove repugnant, so too could inaction. As the Allies pushed into Germany and Poland, they uncovered the full extent of Hitler\u2019s genocidal atrocities. The Allies liberated massive camp systems set up for the imprisonment, forced labor, and extermination of all those deemed racially, ideologically, or biologically \u201cunfit\u201d by Nazi Germany. But the Holocaust\u2014the systematic murder of eleven million civilians, including six million Jews\u2014had been under way for years. How did America respond?<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"This<\/a>
This photograph, originally from J\u00fcrgen Stroop’s May 1943 report to Heinrich Himmler, circulated throughout Europe and America as an image of the Nazi Party\u2019s brutality. The original German caption read: “Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs”. Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Initially, American officials expressed little official concern for Nazi persecutions. At the first signs of trouble in the 1930s, the State Department and most U.S. embassies did relatively little to aid European Jews. Roosevelt publicly spoke out against the persecution and even withdrew the U.S. ambassador to Germany after Kristallnacht. He pushed for the 1938 Evian Conference in France, in which international leaders discussed the Jewish refugee problem and worked to expand Jewish immigration quotas by tens of thousands of people per year. But the conference came to nothing, and the United States turned away countless Jewish refugees who requested asylum in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1939, the German ship St. Louis<\/em> carried over nine hundred Jewish refugees. They could not find a country that would take them. The passengers could not receive visas under the U.S. quota system. A State Department wire to one passenger read that all must \u201cawait their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.\u201d The ship cabled the president for special privilege, but the president said nothing. The ship was forced to return to Europe. Hundreds of the St. Louis<\/em>\u2019s passengers would perish in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anti-Semitism still permeated the United States. Even if Roosevelt wanted to do more\u2014it\u2019s difficult to trace his own thoughts and personal views\u2014he judged the political price for increasing immigration quotas as too high. In 1938 and 1939, the U.S. Congress debated the Wagner-Rogers Bill, an act to allow twenty thousand German-Jewish children into the United States. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed the measure, but the president remained publicly silent. The bill was opposed by roughly two thirds of the American public and was defeated. Historians speculate that Roosevelt, anxious to protect the New Deal and his rearmament programs, was unwilling to expend political capital to protect foreign groups that the American public had little interest in protecting. ((Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 149.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knowledge of the full extent of the Holocaust was slow in coming. When the war began, American officials, including Roosevelt, doubted initial reports of industrial death camps. But even when they conceded their existence, officials pointed to their genuinely limited options. The most plausible response for the U.S. military was to bomb either the camps or the railroads leading to them, but those options were rejected by military and civilian officials who argued that it would do little to stop the deportations, would distract from the war effort, and could cause casualties among concentration camp prisoners. Whether bombing would have saved lives remains a hotly debated question. ((Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life<\/em> (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late in the war, secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, himself born into a wealthy New York Jewish family, pushed through major changes in American policy. In 1944, he formed the War Refugees Board (WRB) and became a passionate advocate for Jewish refugees. The WRB saved perhaps two hundred thousand Jews and twenty thousand others. Morgenthau also convinced Roosevelt to issue a public statement condemning the Nazi\u2019s persecution. But it was already 1944, and such policies were far too little, far too late. ((David Mayers, Dissenting Voices in America\u2019s Rise to Power<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 274.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X. Toward a Postwar World<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Americans celebrated the end of the war. At home and abroad, the United States looked to create a postwar order that would guarantee global peace and domestic prosperity. Although the alliance of convenience with Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union would collapse, Americans nevertheless looked for the means to ensure postwar stability and economic security for returning veterans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inability of the League of Nations to stop German, Italian, and Japanese aggressions caused many to question whether any global organization or agreements could ever ensure world peace. This included Franklin Roosevelt, who, as Woodrow Wilson\u2019s undersecretary of the navy, witnessed the rejection of this idea by both the American people and the Senate. In 1941, Roosevelt believed that postwar security could be maintained by an informal agreement between what he termed the Four Policemen\u2014the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China\u2014instead of a rejuvenated League of Nations. But others, including secretary of state Cordell Hull and British prime minister Winston Churchill, disagreed and convinced Roosevelt to push for a new global organization. As the war ran its course, Roosevelt came around to the idea. And so did the American public. Pollster George Gallup noted a \u201cprofound change\u201d in American attitudes. The United States had rejected membership in the League of Nations after World War I, and in 1937 only a third of Americans polled supported such an idea. But as war broke out in Europe, half of Americans did. America\u2019s entry into the war bolstered support, and, by 1945, with the war closing, 81 percent of Americans favored the idea. ((Fraser J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads of Peace<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 258; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of a Modern Idea<\/em> (New York: Penguin, 2012, 208.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever his support, Roosevelt had long shown enthusiasm for the ideas later enshrined in the United Nations (UN) charter. In January 1941, he announced his Four Freedoms\u2014freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear\u2014that all of the world\u2019s citizens should enjoy. That same year he signed the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, which reinforced those ideas and added the right of self-determination and promised some sort of postwar economic and political cooperation. Roosevelt first used the term united nations<\/em> to describe the Allied powers, not the subsequent postwar organization. But the name stuck. At Tehran in 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill convinced Stalin to send a Soviet delegation to a conference at Dumbarton Oaks, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in August 1944, where they agreed on the basic structure of the new organization. It would have a Security Council\u2014the original Four Policemen, plus France\u2014which would consult on how best to keep the peace and when to deploy the military power of the assembled nations. According to one historian, the organization demonstrated an understanding that \u201conly the Great Powers, working together, could provide real security.\u201d But the plan was a kind of hybrid between Roosevelt\u2019s policemen idea and a global organization of equal representation. There would also be a General Assembly, made up of all nations; an International Court of Justice; and a council for economic and social matters. Dumbarton Oaks was a mixed success\u2014the Soviets especially expressed concern over how the Security Council would work\u2014but the powers agreed to meet again in San Francisco between April and June 1945 for further negotiations. There, on June 26, 1945, fifty nations signed the UN charter. ((Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations<\/em> (New York: Random House, 2006).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anticipating victory in World War II, leaders not only looked to the postwar global order, they looked to the fate of returning American servicemen. American politicians and interest groups sought to avoid another economic depression\u2014the economy had tanked after World War I\u2014by gradually easing returning veterans back into the civilian economy. The brainchild of Henry Colmery, the former head of the American Legion, the G.I. Bill won support from progressives and conservatives alike. Passed in 1944, the G.I. Bill was a multifaceted, multibillion-dollar entitlement program that rewarded honorably discharged veterans with numerous benefits. ((Kathleen Frydl, The G.I. Bill<\/em> (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faced with the prospect of over fifteen million members of the armed services (including approximately 350,000 women) suddenly returning to civilian life, the G.I. Bill offered a bevy of inducements to slow their influx into the civilian workforce as well as reward their service with public benefits. The legislation offered a year\u2019s worth of unemployment benefits for veterans unable to secure work. About half of American veterans (eight million) received $4 billion in unemployment benefits over the life of the bill. The G.I. Bill also made postsecondary education a reality for many. The Veterans Administration (VA) paid the lion\u2019s share of educational expenses, including tuition, fees, supplies, and even stipends for living expenses. The G.I. Bill sparked a boom in higher education. Enrollments at accredited colleges, universities, and technical and professional schools spiked, rising from 1.5 million in 1940 to 3.6 million in 1960. The VA disbursed over $14 billon in educational aid in just over a decade. Furthermore, the bill encouraged home ownership. Roughly 40 percent of Americans owned homes in 1945, but that figure climbed to 60 percent a decade after the close of the war. Because the bill did away with down payment requirements, veterans could obtain home loans for as little as $1 down. Close to four million veterans purchased homes through the G.I. Bill, sparking a construction bonanza that fueled postwar growth. In addition, the VA also helped nearly two hundred thousand veterans secure farms and offered thousands more guaranteed financing for small businesses. ((Kathleen Frydl, G.I. Bill<\/em>; Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens<\/em>.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all Americans, however, benefited equally from the G.I. Bill. Indirectly, since the military limited the number of female personnel, men qualified for the bill\u2019s benefits in far higher numbers. Colleges also limited the number of female applicants to guarantee space for male veterans. African Americans, too, faced discrimination. Segregation forced Black veterans into overcrowded \u201chistorically Black colleges\u201d that had to turn away close to twenty thousand applicants. Meanwhile, residential segregation limited Black home ownership in various neighborhoods, denying Black homeowners the equity and investment that would come with home ownership. There were other limits and other disadvantaged groups. Veterans accused of homosexuality, for instance, were similarly unable to claim GI benefits. ((Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer\u2019s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America<\/em> (New York: Knopf, 2003).))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The effects of the G.I. Bill were significant and long-lasting. It helped sustain the great postwar economic boom and, even if many could not attain it, it nevertheless established the hallmarks of American middle class life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XI. Conclusion<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The United States entered the war in a crippling economic depression and exited at the beginning of an unparalleled economic boom. The war had been won, the United States was stronger than ever, and Americans looked forward to a prosperous future. And yet new problems loomed. Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union and the proliferation of nuclear weapons would disrupt postwar dreams of global harmony. Meanwhile, Americans who had fought a war for global democracy would find that very democracy eradicated around the world in reestablished colonial regimes and at home in segregation and injustice. The war had unleashed powerful forces that would reshape the United States at home and abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

XII. Primary Sources<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

1. Charles A. Lindbergh, \u201cAmerica First\u201d (1941)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Lindbergh won international fame in 1927 after completing the first non-stop, solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. As Hitler\u2019s armies marched across the European continent, many Americans began to imagine American participation in the war. Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee, advocating \u201cAmerica First,\u201d championed American isolationism.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. A. Phillip Randolph and Franklin Roosevelt on Racial Discrimination in the Defense Industry (1941)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the United States prepared for war, Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph recoiled at rampant employment discrimination in the defense industry. Together with NAACP head Walter White and other leaders, Randolph planned \u201ca mass March on Washington\u201d to push for fair employment practices. President Franklin Roosevelt met with Randolph and White on June 18, and, faced with mobilized discontent and a possible disruption of wartime industries, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25. The order prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry. Randolph and other leaders declared victory and called off the march.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The Atlantic Charter (1941)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The leaders of the United States and United Kingdom signed the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. The short document neatly outlined an idealized vision for political and economic order of the postwar world.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. FDR, Executive Order No. 9066 (1942)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During World War II, the federal government removed over 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent (both foreign-born \u201cissei\u201d and native-born \u201cnisei\u201d) from the West Coast and interned in camps. President Roosevelt authorized the internments with his Executive Order No. 9066, issued on February 19, 1942.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga on Japanese Internment (1942\/1994)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was born in 1924 in Los Angeles, California. A second-generation (\u201cNisei\u201d) Japanese American, she was incarcerated at the Manzanar internment camp in California and later at other internment camps in Arkansas. Her she describes learning about Pearl Harbor, her family\u2019s forced evacuation, and her impressions of her internment camp.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Harry Truman Announcing the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima (1945)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On August 6, 1945, Harry Truman disclosed to the American public that the United States had detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vietnam, which had been colonized by the French and then by the Japanese, declared their independence from colonial rule\u2014particularly the re-imposition of a French colonial regime\u2014in the aftermath of Japan\u2019s defeat in World War II. Proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh in September 1945, Vietnam\u2019s Declaration of Independence reflected back the early promises of the Allies in World War II and even borrowed directly from the American Declaration of Independence.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Tuskegee Airmen (1941)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tuskegee Airmen stand at attention as Major James A. Ellison returns the salute of Mac Ross, one of the first graduates of the Tuskegee cadets. The Tuskegee Airmen who continued a tradition of African American military service while honorably serving a country that still considered them second-class citizens.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. World War II Recruitment Posters (1942 & 1943)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This pair of US Military recruiting posters demonstrates the way that two branches of the military\u2014the Marines and the Women\u2019s Army Corps\u2014borrowed techniques from advertising professionals to \u201csell\u201d a romantic vision of war to Americans. These two images take different strategies: one shows Marines at war in a lush jungle, reminding viewers that the war was taking place in exotic lands, the other depicted women taking on new jobs as a patriotic duty.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

XIII. Reference Material<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke, with content contributions by Mary Beth Chopas, Andrew David, Ashton Ellett, Paula Fortier, Joseph Locke, Jennifer Mandel, Valerie Martinez, Ryan Menath, Chris Thomas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended citation: Mary Beth Chopas et al., \u201cWorld War II,\u201d Joseph Locke, ed., in The American Yawp<\/em>, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended Reading<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • Adams, Michael. The Best War Ever: America and World War II.<\/em> Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Anderson, Karen. Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During WWII.<\/em> Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profit and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies.<\/em> New York: Free Press, 1987.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II.<\/em> New York: Marine Books, 1976.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Borgwardt, Elizabeth. A New Deal for the World: America\u2019s Vision for Human Rights.<\/em> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II.<\/em> New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War<\/em>. New York: Pantheon, 1993.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II.<\/em> Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Hooks, Gregory Michael. Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II\u2019s Battle of the Potomac.<\/em> Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Kaminski, Theresa. Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Keegan, John. The Second World War.<\/em> New York: Viking, 1990.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Kennedy, David. Freedom from Fear: America in Depression and War, 1929\u20131945.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Leonard, Kevin Allen. The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II.<\/em> Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor\u2019s War at Home: The CIO in World War II.<\/em> New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Malloy, Sean L. Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb.<\/em> Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Meyer, Leisa D. Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women\u2019s Army Corps During WWII.<\/em> New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Murray, Alice Yang. Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress.<\/em> Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • O\u2019Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America\u2019s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II.<\/em> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb.<\/em> New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Russell, Jan Jarboe. The Train to Crystal City: FDR\u2019s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America\u2019s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II.<\/em> New York: Scribner, 2015.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Schulman, Bruce J. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938\u20131980.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Sparrow, James T. Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Spector, Ronald H. Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan<\/em>. New York: Random House, 1985<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Takaki, Ronald T. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II.<\/em> New York: Little, Brown, 2000.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Wynn, Neil A. The African American Experience During World War II.<\/em> New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Notes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    *The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.* I. Introduction The 1930s and 1940s were trying times. A global economic crisis gave way to a global war that became the deadliest and most destructive in human history. Perhaps eighty million individuals lost their lives during World War II. The war […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-74","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","post","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/commentpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}