War on Two Fronts

• Ten hours after the strike at Pearl Harbor, Japanese airplanes attacked the American airfields at Manila in the Philippines, destroying much of America’s remaining air power in the Pacific.

• Three days later Guam, an American possession, fell to Japan; then Wake Island and the British colony Hong Kong.

• The great British fortress of Singapore surrendered in February 1942, the Dutch East Indies in March, Burma in April.

• In the Philippines, exhausted Filipino and American troops gave up their defense of the islands on May 6.

• American strategists planned two broad offensives to turn the tide against the Japanese.

• One, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, would move north from Australia, through New Guinea, and eventually back to the Philippines.

• The other, under Admiral Chester Nimitz, would move west from Hawaii toward major Japanese island outposts in the central Pacific.

• Ultimately, the two offensives would come together to invade Japan itself.

• The Allies achieved their first important victory in the Battle of Coral Sea, just northwest of Australia, on May 7–8, 1942, when American forces turned back the previously unstoppable Japanese fleet.

• A month later, there was an even more important turning point northwest of Hawaii.

• An enormous battle raged for four days, June 3–6, 1942, near the small American outpost at Midway Island, at the end of which the United States, despite great losses, was clearly victorious.

• The American navy destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only one, and regained control of the central Pacific for the United States.

Holding off the Germans

• In the European war, the United States had less control over military operations

• The Soviet Union, which was absorbing (as it would throughout the war) the brunt of the German effort, wanted the Allied invasion to proceed at the earliest possible moment.

• The British, on the other hand, wanted fi rst to launch a series of Allied offensives around the edges of the Nazi empire

• Roosevelt realized that to support the British plan would antagonize the Soviets and might delay the important cross channel invasion.

• But he also knew that the invasion of Europe would take a long time to prepare, and he was reluctant to wait so long before getting American forces into combat

• The Germans threw the full weight of their forces in Africa against the inexperienced Americans and inflicted a serious defeat on them at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.

• General George S. Patton, however, regrouped the American troops and began an effective counteroffensive.

• With the help of Allied air and naval power and of British forces attacking from the east under General Bernard Montgomery (the hero of El Alamein), the American offensive finally drove the last Germans from Africa in May 1943.

• The Soviet victory had come at a horrible cost. The German siege of Stalingrad had decimated the civilian population of the city and devastated the surrounding countryside.

• Indeed, throughout the war, the Soviet Union absorbed losses far greater than any other warring nation (up to 20 million casualties)—a fact that continued to haunt the Russian memory and affect Soviet policy generations later.

• But the Soviet success in beating back the German offensive persuaded Roosevelt to agree, in a January 1943 meeting with Churchill in Casablanca, to an Allied invasion of Sicily. General Marshall opposed the plan, arguing that it would further delay the vital invasion of France.

• The invasion of Italy contributed to the Allied war effort in several important ways.

• But it postponed the invasion of France by as much as a year, deeply embittering the Soviet Union, many of whose leaders believed that the United States and Britain were deliberately delaying the cross-channel invasion in order to allow the Russians to absorb the brunt of the fighting.

• The postponement also gave the Soviets time to begin moving toward the countries of eastern Europe.

America and the Holocaust

• In dealing with the global crisis, the leaders of the American government were confronted with one of history’s great horrors: the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe—the Holocaust.

• As early as 1942, high officials in Washington had incontrovertible evidence that Hitler’s forces were rounding up Jews and others (including non-Jewish Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists) from all over Europe, transporting them to concentration camps in eastern Germany and Poland

• The American government consistently resisted almost all such entreaties.

• Although Allied bombers were flying missions within a few miles of the most notorious death camp at Auschwitz in Poland, pleas that the planes try to destroy the crematoria at the camp were rejected as militarily unfeasible.

• So were similar requests that the Allies try to destroy railroad lines leading to the camps.

• The United States also resisted entreaties that it admit large numbers of the Jewish refugees attempting to escape Europe—a pattern established well before Pearl Harbor

26.1: The American People in Wartime

Prosperity

• World War II had its most profound impact on American domestic life by at last ending the Great Depression.

• By the middle of 1941, the economic problems of the 1930s—unemployment, deflation, industrial sluggishness—had virtually vanished before the great wave of wartime industrial expansion.

• The most important agent of the new prosperity was federal spending, which after 1939 was pumping more money into the economy each year than all the New Deal relief agencies combined had done.

• In 1939, the federal budget had been $9 billion, the highest level it had ever reached in peacetime; by 1945, it had risen to $100 billion

The War and the West

• The impact of government spending was perhaps most dramatic in the West, which had long relied on federal largesse more than other regions.

• By the end of the war, the economy of the Pacific Coast and, to a lesser extent, other areas of the West had been transformed.

• The Pacific Coast had become the center of the growing American aircraft industry

• Once a lightly industrialized region, parts of the West were now among the most important manufacturing areas in the country.

• Once a region without adequate facilities to support substantial economic growth, the West now stood poised to become the fastest-growing region in the nation after the war.

• Many rank-and-file union members, and some local union leaders, resented the restrictions imposed on them by the government and the labor movement hierarchy.

• Despite the no-strike pledge, there were nearly 15,000 work stoppages during the war, mostly wildcat strikes (strikes unauthorized by the union leadership).

• When the United Mine Workers defied the government by striking in May 1943, Congress reacted by passing, over Roosevelt’s veto, the Smith-Connally Act (or the War Labor Disputes Act), which required unions to wait thirty days before striking and empowered the president to seize a struck war plant.

• In the meantime, public animosity toward labor rose rapidly, and many states passed laws to limit union power.

Stabilizing the Boom

• The fear of deflation, the central concern of the 1930s, gave way during the war to a fear of inflation, particularly after prices rose 25 percent in the two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

• Congress grudgingly responded to the president’s request and passed the Anti infation Act, which gave the administration authority to freeze agricultural prices, wages, salaries, and rents throughout the country.

• Enforcement of these provisions was the task of the Office of Price Administration (OPA), led first by Leon Henderson and then by Chester Bowles.

• In part because of its success, inflation was a much less serious problem during World War II than it had been during World War I.

• Even so, the OPA was never popular

Mobilizing Production

• The search for an effective mechanism to mobilize the economy for war began as early as 1939 and continued for nearly four years.

• One failed agency after another attempted to bring order to the mobilization effort.

• The WPB was never able to win control over military purchases; the army and navy often circumvented the board entirely in negotiating contracts with producers

• Despite the administrative problems, the war economy managed to meet almost all the nation’s critical war needs.

• Enormous new factory complexes sprang up in the space of a few months, many of them funded by the federal government’s Defense Plants Corporation.

Wartime Science and Technology

• But Britain and America had advantages of their own, which quickly helped redress these imbalances.

• American techniques of mass production—the great automotive assembly lines in particular—were converted efficiently to military production in 1941 and 1942 and soon began producing airplanes, ships, tanks, and other armaments in much greater numbers than the Germans and Japanese could produce.

• Allied scientists and engineers moved quickly as well to improve Anglo-American aviation and naval technology, particularly to improve the performance of submarines and tanks.

• By late 1942, Allied weaponry was at least as advanced as that of the enemy

• Anglo-American antiaircraft technology—both on land and on sea—also improved

• Germany made substantial advances in the development of rocket technology in the early years of the war, and it managed to launch some rocket-propelled bombs (the V1s and V2s) across the English Channel, aimed at London.

• The psychological effects of the rockets on the British people were considerable.

• But the Germans were never able to create a production technology capable of building enough such rockets to make a real difference in the balance of military power.

• Beginning in 1942, British and American forces seized the advantage in the air war by producing new and powerful four-engine bombers in great numbers—among them the British Lancaster B1 and the American Boeing B17F, capable of flying a bomb load of 6,000 pounds for 1,300 miles, and capable of reaching 37,500 feet.

• Because they were able to fly higher and longer than the German equivalents, they were able to conduct extensive bombing missions over Germany (and later Japan) with much less danger of being shot down.

• But the success of the bombers rested heavily as well on new electronic devices capable of guiding their bombs to their targets.

• The Gee navigation system, which was also valuable to the navy, used electronic pulses to help pilots plot their exact location—something that in the past only a highly skilled navigator could do, and then only in good weather.

• In the first months of the war, Polish intelligence had developed an electro-mechanical computer, which it called the “Bombe,” that could decipher some Enigma messages.

• Later in the war, British scientists working for the intelligence services built the first real programmable, digital computer—the Colossus II, which became operational less than a week before the beginning of the Normandy invasion.

• The United States also had some important intelligence breakthroughs, including, in 1941, a dramatic success by the American Magic operation (the counterpart to the British Ultra) in breaking a Japanese coding system not unlike the German Enigma, a mechanical device known to the Allies as Purple.

• The result was that Americans had access to intercepted information that, if properly interpreted, could have alerted them to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

• But because such a raid had seemed entirely inconceivable to most American officials prior to its occurrence, those who received the information failed to understand or disseminate it in time.

African Americans and the War

• During World War I, many African Americans had eagerly seized the chance to serve in the armed forces, believing that their patriotic efforts would win them an enhanced position in postwar society.

• They had been cruelly disappointed.

• As World War II approached, blacks were again determined to use the conflict to improve their position in society—this time, however, not by currying favor but by making demands.

• Despite such tensions, the leading black organizations redoubled their efforts during the war to challenge the system of segregation

• Pressure for change was also growing within the military.

• At first, the armed forces maintained their traditional practice of limiting blacks to the most menial assignments, keeping them in segregated training camps and units, and barring them entirely from the Marine Corps and the Army Air Forces.

Native Americans and the War

• Approximately 25,000 Native Americans performed military service during World War II.

• Many of them served in combat

• Others worked as “code-talkers,” working in military communications and speaking their own languages (which enemy forces would be unlikely to understand) over the radio and the telephones.

• The war had important effects, too, on those Native Americans who remained civilians.

• Little war work reached the tribes, and government subsidies dwindled.

• Many talented young people left the reservations, some to serve in the military, others (more than 70,000) to work in war plants.

• This brought many Indians into close contact with white society for the first time and awakened in some of them a taste for the material benefits of life in capitalist America that they would retain after the war.

• Some never returned to the reservations, but chose to remain in the non-Indian world and assimilate to its ways.

• Others found that after the war, employment opportunities that had been available to them during the fighting became unavailable once again, drawing them back to the reservations.

Mexican American War Workers

• Large numbers of Mexican workers entered the United States during the war in response to labor shortages on the Pacific Coast, in the Southwest, and eventually in almost all areas of the nation.

• The American and Mexican governments agreed in 1942 to a program by which braceros (contract laborers) would be admitted to the United States for a limited time to work at specific jobs, and American employers in some parts of the Southwest began actively recruiting Mexican American workers.

• During the Depression, many Mexican American farmworkers had been deported to make room for unemployed white workers.

• The wartime labor shortage caused farm owners to begin hiring Mexican Americans again.

• More important, however, Mexican Americans were able for the first time to find significant numbers of factory jobs.

• They formed the second-largest group of migrants (after African Americans) to American cities in the 1940s.

• Over 300,000 of them served in the United States military.

Women and Children at War

• The war drew increasing numbers of women into roles from which, by either custom or law, they had been largely barred.

• The number of women in the workforce increased by nearly 60 percent, and women accounted for a third of paid workers in 1945

• These wage-earning women were more likely to be married and older than most women who had entered the workforce in the past.

• Many women entered the industrial workforce to replace male workers serving in the military.

• But while economic and military necessity eroded some of the popular objections to women in the workplace, obstacles remained.

• Many factory owners continued to categorize jobs by gender

• Women had been working in industry for over a century, but some began now to take on heavy industrial jobs that had long been considered “men’s work.”

• Most women workers during the war were employed not in factories but in service-sector jobs.

• The new opportunities produced new problems.

• Many mothers whose husbands were in the military had to combine working with caring for their children.

• The scarcity of child-care facilities or other community services meant that some women had no choice but to leave young children—often known as “latchkey children” or “eight-hour orphans”—at home alone (or sometimes locked in cars in factory parking lots) while they worked.

• Perhaps in part because of the family dislocations the war produced, juvenile crime rose markedly in the war years.

• Young boys were arrested

• The return of prosperity during the war helped increase the rate and lower the age of marriage after the Depression decline, but many of these young marriages were unable to survive the pressures of wartime separation.

• The divorce rate rose rapidly.

• The rise in the birth rate that accompanied the increase in marriages was the first sign of what would become the great postwar “baby boom.”

Wartime Life and Culture

• The war created considerable anxiety in American life.

• Families worried about loved ones at the front and struggled to adjust to the absence of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons— and to the new mobility of women, which also drew family members away from home.

• Businesses and communities struggled to compensate for shortages of goods and the absence of men.

• Resort hotels, casinos, and race tracks were jammed with customers.

• Dance halls were packed with young people drawn to the seductive music of swing bands

• Advertisers, and at times even the government, exhorted Americans to support the war effort to ensure a future of material comfort and consumer choice for themselves and their children.

• For men at the front, the image of home was a powerful antidote to the rigors of wartime.

• They dreamed of music, food, movies, material comforts.

• Many also dreamed of women— wives and girlfriends, but also movie stars and others who became the source of one of the most popular icons of the front: the pinup.

• But while the military took elaborate measures to root out homosexual men and women from their ranks (unceremoniously dismissing many of them with undesirable discharges), it quietly tolerated “healthy heterosexuality.”

The Internment of Japanese Americans

• World War I had produced widespread hatred, vindictiveness, and hysteria in America, as well as widespread and flagrant violations of civil liberties.

• World War II did not produce a comparable era of repression

• Nor was there much of the ethnic or cultural animosity that had shaped the social climate of the United States during World War I.

• The “zoot-suit” riots in Los Angeles and occasional racial conflicts in American cities and on military bases made clear that traditional racial and ethnic hostilities had not disappeared.

• Americans continued to eat sauerkraut without calling it by the World War I name “liberty cabbage.”

• They displayed relatively little hostility toward German or Italian Americans

• The attack on Pearl Harbor inflamed these long-standing suspicions and turned them into active animosity.

• Wild stories circulated about how the Japanese in Hawaii had helped sabotage Pearl Harbor and how Japanese Americans in California were conspiring to aid an enemy landing on the Pacific coast.

• American citizens, he said, “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”

• The internment never produced significant popular opposition.

• For the most part, once the Japanese were in the camps, other Americans (including their former neighbors on the West Coast) largely forgot about them—except to make strenuous efforts to acquire the property they had abandoned.

• Even so, beginning in 1943 conditions slowly improved.

• Some young Japanese Americans left the camps to attend colleges and universities (mostly in the East—the WRA continued to be wary of letting Japanese return to the Pacific Coast).

• Others were permitted to move to cities to take factory and service jobs

• In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. U.S. that the relocation was constitutionally permissible.

• In another case the same year, it barred the internment of “loyal” citizens, but left the interpretation of “loyal” to the discretion of the government.

• Nevertheless, by the end of 1944, most of the internees had been released; and in early 1945, they were finally permitted to return to the West Coast—where they faced continuing harassment and persecution, and where many found their property and businesses irretrievably lost.

• In 1988, they won some compensation for their losses, when, after years of agitation by survivors of the camps and their descendants, Congress voted to award them reparations.

• But by then, many of the former internees had died.

Chinese Americans and the War

• Just as America’s conflict with Japan undermined the position of Japanese Americans, the American alliance with China during World War II significantly enhanced both the legal and social status of Chinese Americans.

• In 1943, partly to improve relations with the government of China, Congress finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had barred almost all Chinese immigration since 1882

The Retreat from Reform

• Within the administration itself, many liberals found themselves displaced by the new managers of the wartime agencies, who came overwhelmingly from large corporations and conservative Wall Street law firms.

• But the greatest assault on New Deal reforms came from conservatives in Congress, who seized on the war as an excuse to do what many of them had wanted to do in peacetime: dismantle many of the achievements of the New Deal

• Republicans approached the 1944 election determined to exploit what they believed was resentment of wartime regimentation and privation and unhappiness with Democratic reform.

• They nominated as their candidate the young and vigorous governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey. Roosevelt was unopposed within his party, but Democratic leaders pressured him to abandon the controversial Vice President Henry Wallace, an outspoken liberal and hero of the CIO.

• Roosevelt, tired and frail, seemed to take little interest in the matter and passively acquiesced in the selection of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, a man he barely knew. Truman was not a prominent figure in the party, but he had won acclaim as chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee (known as the Truman Committee), which had compiled an impressive record of uncovering waste and corruption in wartime production.

• The conduct of the war was not an issue in the campaign.

• Instead, the election revolved around domestic economic issues and, indirectly, the president’s health.

• The president was in fact gravely ill, suffering from, among other things, arteriosclerosis.

• But the campaign seemed momentarily to revive him.

• He made several strenuous public appearances late in October, which dispelled popular doubts about his health and ensured his reelection.

26.2: The Defeat of the Axis

The Liberation of France

• By early 1944, American and British bombers were attacking German industrial installations and other targets almost around the clock, drastically cutting production and impeding transportation.

• Especially devastating was the massive bombing of such German cities as Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin—attacks that often made few distinctions between industrial sites and residential ones

• Military leaders claimed that the bombing destroyed industrial facilities, demoralized the population, and cleared the way

• The great Allied invasion of France was planned for the late spring.

• The air battles over Germany considerably weakened

• The Luftwaffe (the German air force) made it a less formidable obstacle to the Allied invasion

• An enormous invasion force had been gathering in England for two years: almost 3 million troops, and perhaps the greatest array of naval vessels and armaments ever assembled in one place.

• On the morning of June 6, 1944, D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, sent this vast armada into action.

• The landing came not at the narrowest part of the English Channel, where the Germans had expected and prepared for it, but along sixty miles of the Cotentin Peninsula on the coast of Normandy.

• While airplanes and battleships offshore bombarded the Nazi defenses, 4,000 vessels landed troops and supplies on the beaches.

• Bernard Montgomery, commander of Allied ground operations on D-Day and after, pushed into northern Germany with a million troops, while Bradley’s army, sweeping through central Germany, completed the encirclement of 300,000 German soldiers in the Ruhr.

• The German resistance was now broken on both fronts. American forces were moving eastward faster than they had anticipated and could have beaten the Russians to Berlin and Prague.

• Instead, the American and British high commands decided to halt the advance along the Elbe River in central Germany to await the Russians.

• That decision enabled the Soviets to occupy eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The Pacific Offensive

• In February 1944, American naval forces under Admiral Chester Nimitz won a series of victories in the Marshall Islands and cracked the outer perimeter of the Japanese Empire.

• Within a month, the navy had destroyed other vital Japanese bastions.

• American submarines, in the meantime, were decimating Japanese shipping and crippling the nation’s domestic economy.

• By the summer of 1944, the already skimpy food rations for the Japanese people had been reduced by nearly a quarter; there was also a critical gasoline shortage.

• America’s principal ally in Asia was China, and the United States hoped that the Chinese forces would help defeat the Japanese.

• The decisive battles of the Pacific war occurred not in China but at sea.

• In mid-June 1944, an enormous American armada struck the heavily fortified Mariana Islands and, after some of the bloodiest operations of the war, captured Tinian, Guam, and Saipan, 1,350 miles from Tokyo.

• In September, American forces landed on the western Carolines.

• Nevertheless, the Japanese forces seemed only to increase their resistance.

• In February 1945, American marines seized the tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima, only 750 miles from Tokyo, but only after the costliest single battle in the history of the Marine Corps.

• The marines suffered over 25,000 casualties, and the Japanese forces suffered even greater losses.

• Week after week, the Japanese sent kamikaze (suicide) planes against American and British ships, sacrifi cing 3,500 of them while infl icting great damage.

• Japanese troops on shore launched desperate nighttime attacks on the American lines.

• The United States and its allies suffered nearly 50,000 casualties before finally capturing Okinawa in late June 1945.

• More than 100,000 Japanese died in the siege.

• The same kind of bitter fighting seemed to await the Americans in Japan itself.

• But there were also signs early in 1945 that such an invasion might not be necessary.

The Manhattan Project

• Reports had reached the United States in 1939 that Nazi scientists had taken the first step toward the creation of an atomic bomb

• The United States and Britain immediately began a race to develop the weapon before the Germans did.

• The search for the new weapon emerged from theories developed by atomic physicists, beginning early in the century, and particularly from some of the founding ideas of modern science developed by Albert Einstein.

• Einstein’s famous theory of relativity had revealed the relationships between mass and energy.

• More precisely, he had argued that, in theory at least, matter could be converted into a tremendous force of energy.

• It was Einstein, by then living in the United States, who warned Franklin Roosevelt that the Germans were developing atomic weapons and that the United States must begin trying to do the same.

• The effort to build atomic weapons centered on the use of uranium, whose atomic structure made possible the creation of a nuclear chain reaction

• Despite many unforeseen problems, the scientists pushed ahead much faster than anyone had predicted.

• Even so, the war in Europe ended before they were ready to test the first weapon.

• Just before dawn on July 16, 1945, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the scientists gathered to witness the first atomic explosion in history: the detonation of a plutonium-fueled bomb that its creators had named Trinity.

• The explosion—a blinding flash of light, probably brighter than any ever seen on earth, followed by a huge, billowing mushroom cloud—created a vast crater in the barren desert.

Atomic Warfare

• News of the explosion reached President Harry S. Truman (who had taken office in April on the death of Roosevelt) in Potsdam, Germany, where he was attending a conference of Allied leaders.

• He issued an ultimatum to the Japanese (signed jointly by the British) demanding that they surrender by August 3 or face complete devastation.

• The Japanese premier wanted to accept the Allied demand, but he still could not persuade the military leaders to agree.

• There was a hint from Tokyo that the government might agree to surrender, in return for a promise that the Japanese could retain their emperor

• Controversy has raged for decades over whether Truman’s decision to use the bomb was justified and what his motives were.

• On August 6, 1945, an American B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic weapon on the Japanese industrial center at Hiroshima.

• With a single bomb, the United States completely incinerated a four-square-mile area at the center of the previously undamaged city.

• More than 80,000 civilians died, according to later American estimates.

• Many more survived to suffer the crippling effects of radioactive fallout or to pass those effects on to their children in the form of birth defects.

• The Japanese government, stunned by the attack, was at first unable to agree on a response.

• Two days later, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan

• Finally, the emperor intervened to break the stalemate in the cabinet, and on August 14 the government announced that it was ready to give up.

• On September 2, 1945, on board the American battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, Japanese officials signed the articles of surrender.

• The most catastrophic war in the history of mankind had come to an end, and the United States had emerged not only victorious but in a position of unprecedented power, influence, and prestige as well.

• It was a victory, however, that few could greet with unambiguous joy.