APUSH Chapter 23

Internal Allied powers conflict

Axis hopes for victory depended on a short war. Leaders in Germany and Japan knew that, if the United States had time to fully mobilize, flooding the theaters of war with armaments and reinforcing Allied troops with fresh, trained men, the war was lost. However, powerful factions in the Japanese military and German leadership believed that the United States would concede if it met with early, decisive defeats. Hitler, blinded by racial arrogance, had stated shortly after declaring war on the United States,"I don't see much future for the Americans....It's a decayed country. . . . American society [is] half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together." By mid-1942, the Axis powers understood that they had underestimated not only American resolve but also the willingness of other Allies to sacrifice unimaginable numbers of their citizens to stop the Axis advance. The chance of Axis victory grew increasingly slim as the months passed, but though the outcome was virtually certain after spring 1943, two years of bloody fighting lay ahead.

WACs (Women's Army Corps)

Although military service was widespread, the burdens of combat were not equally shared. Women served their nation honorably and often courageously, but women's roles in the U.S. military were much more restricted than in the British or Soviet militaries, where women served as anti-aircraft gunners and in other combat-related positions. U.S. women served as nurses, in communications offices, and as typists or cooks. The recruiting slogan for the WACs (Women's Army Corps) was "Release a Man for Combat." However, most men in the armed forces never saw combat either; one-quarter never left the United States. The United States had the most extreme "teeth-to-tail" ratio of any of the combatants, with each combat soldier backed up by eight or more support personnel. Japan's ratio was almost one to one. One-third of U.S. military personnel served in clerical positions, filled mainly by well-educated men. African Americans, though assigned dirty and dangerous tasks, were largely kept from combat service. In World War II, lower-class, less-educated white men bore the brunt of the fighting.

Selective Training and Service Act of 1940

Also in September, Roosevelt signed into law the hotly debated and narrowly passed Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime military draft in American history. All men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five were required to register, and President Roosevelt himself read out the first number drawn in the national draft lottery. Meanwhile, Roosevelt won reelection in November 1940 with promises of peace: "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, who in the emerging spirit of bipartisanship had not made an issue of foreign policy, snapped, "That hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me!" And it did.

Smith-Connally Act

However, the government did not hesitate to restrict union power if it threatened war production. When coal miners in the United Mine Workers union went on strike in 1943 after the NWLB attempted to limit wage increases to a cost-of-living adjustment, railroads and steel mills shut down for lack of coal. Few Americans supported this strike. One air force pilot claimed he'd "just as soon shoot down one of those strikers as shoot down Japs—they're doing as much to lose the war for us." As antilabor sentiment grew, Congress passed the War Labor Disputes (Smith-Connally) Act. This act gave the president authority to seize and operate any strike-bound plant deemed necessary to the national security. It also created criminal penalties for leading strikes and tried to constrain union power by prohibiting unions from contributing to political campaigns during time of war.

Lend-Lease Act

To that end, he proposed a "Lend-Lease" bill. Because Britain was broke, the president explained, the United States should lend rather than sell weapons, much as a neighbor lends a garden hose to fight a fire. Most lawmakers needed little persuasion. In March 1941, with pro-British sentiment running high, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act with overwhelming support. The initial appropriation was $7 billion, but by the end of the war the amount had reached $50 billion, more than $31 billion of it for Britain. To make sure Lend-Lease supplies were delivered safely, Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Navy to patrol halfway across the Atlantic and stationed U.S. troops in Greenland and Iceland. He also sent Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union, which Hitler had attacked in June (thereby shattering the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact). If the Soviets could hold off two hundred German divisions in the east, Roosevelt calculated, Britain would gain some breathing room. Churchill, with dark humor, responded: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

Pacific Campaign

In the Pacific, the war continued. Since halting the Japanese advance in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, American strategy had been to "island-hop" toward Japan, skipping the most strongly fortified islands whenever possible and taking the weaker ones, aiming to strand the Japanese armies on their island outposts. To cut off supplies being shipped from Japan's home islands, Americans also targeted the Japanese merchant marine. Allied and Japanese forces fought savagely for control of tiny specks of land scattered throughout the Pacific. By 1944, Allied troops—from the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—had secured the Solomon, Gilbert, Marshall, and Mariana Islands. General Douglas MacArthur landed at Leyte to retake the Philippines for the United States in October 1944.

Potsdam Declaration

On July 26, 1945, the Allies delivered an ultimatum to Japan: promising that the Japanese people would not be "enslaved," the Potsdam Declaration called for the Japanese to surrender unconditionally or face "prompt and utter destruction." Tokyo radio announced that the government would respond with mokusatsu (literally, "kill with silence," or ignore the ultimatum). On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named after the pilot's mother, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb above the city of Hiroshima. A flash of dazzling light shot across the sky; then a huge, purplish mushroom cloud boiled forty thousand feet into the atmosphere. Much of the city was leveled by the blast. The bomb ignited a firestorm, and thousands who survived the initial blast burned to death. Approximately 130,000 people were killed. Tens of thousands more would suffer the effects of radiation poisoning. American planes continued their devastating conventional bombing. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 9, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing at least 60,000 people. Five days later, on August 14, Japan surrendered. Recent histories argue that the Soviet declaration of war played a more significant role in Japan's decision to surrender than America's use of atomic weapons. In the end, the Allies promised that the Japanese emperor could remain as the nation's titular head. Formal surrender ceremonies were held September 2 aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The Second World War was over.

Impact of the Radio

- Fireside chats - Hitler used them to preach directly into the homes of Germans - Told them about how "the Jews and Marxists wronged Germany" - 1938 NBC and CBS broadcast news about Hitler's annexation of Austria - Listen in to appeasement discussion - Murrow gave reports of the bombing of London in 1941 - Etc

Battle of Stalingrad

And in Russia, against all odds, the Soviet army hung on, fighting block by block for control of the city of Stalingrad in the deadly cold, to defeat the German Sixth Army in early 1943. Stalingrad, like Midway, was a major turning point in the war. By the spring of 1943, Germany, like Japan, was on the defensive. But relations among the Allies remained precarious. The Soviet Union had lost 1.1 million men in the Battle of Stalingrad. The United States and Britain, however, continued to resist Stalin's demand that they immediately open a second front. The death toll, already in the millions, continued to mount.

Progressive Tax Policies

And wartime legislation increased the number of Americans paying personal income tax from 4 million to 42.6 million—at rates ranging from 6 to 94 percent—and introduced a new system in which employers "withheld" taxes from employee paychecks. For the first time, individual Americans paid more in taxes than corporations.

Double V

As America mobilized for war, some African American leaders attempted to force the nation to confront the uncomfortable parallels between the racist doctrines of the Nazis and the persistence of Jim Crow segregation in the United States. Proclaiming a "Double V" campaign (victory at home and abroad), groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hoped to "persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation . . . into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people." Membership in civil rights organizations soared.

Internal migration

Despite hardships and fears, the war offered home-front Americans new opportunities, and millions of Americans took them. More than 15 million civilians moved during the war. More than half moved to another state, and half that number moved to another region. Seven hundred thousand black Americans left the South during the war years; in 1943, ten thousand black migrants poured into Los Angeles every month. More than forty thousand Native Americans left reservations to work in the defense industry. People who had never traveled farther than the next county found themselves on the other side of the country—or of the world. People moved for defense jobs or to be close to loved ones at state-side military postings. Southerners moved north, northerners moved south, and 1.5 million people moved to California. The rapid influx of war workers to major cities and small towns strained community resources. Migrants crowded into substandard housing—even woodsheds, tents, or cellars—and into trailer parks without adequate sanitary facilities. Disease spread: scabies and ringworm, polio, tuberculosis. Many long-term residents found the newcomers—especially the unmarried male war workers—a rough bunch. In the small town of Lawrence, Kansas, civic leaders bragged of the economic boost a new war plant gave the town but fretted over the appearance of bars, "dirty windowed dispensaries" that sold alcohol to the war workers. In and around Detroit, where car factories now produced tanks and planes, established residents called war workers freshly arrived from southern Appalachia "hillbillies" and "white trash." A new joke circulated: "How many states are there in the Union? Forty-five. Tennessee and Kentucky moved to Michigan, and Michigan went to hell." Many of these migrants knew little about urban life. One young man from rural Tennessee, unfamiliar with traffic lights and street signs, navigated by counting the number of trees between his home and the war plant where he worked. Some Appalachian "trailer-is" appalled their neighbors by building outdoor privies or burying garbage in their yards.

Enemy alien camps

During the war, the government interned 14,426 Europeans in Enemy Alien Camps. Fearing subversion, the government also prohibited ten thousand Italian Americans from living or working in restricted zones along the California coast, including San Francisco and Monterey Bay.

Chamber of Horrors

For those who fought, combat in World War II was as horrible as anything humans have experienced. Home-front audiences for the war films Hollywood churned out saw men die bravely, shot cleanly through the heart and comforted by their buddies in their last moments. What men experienced was carnage. Less than 10 percent of casualties were caused by bullets. Most men were killed or wounded by mortars, bombs, or grenades. Seventy-five thousand American men remained missing in action at the end of the war, lost at sea or other inaccessible locations or blown into fragments of flesh too small to identify. Combat meant days and weeks of unrelenting rain in malarial jungles, sliding down a mud-slicked hill to land in a pile of putrid corpses. It meant drowning in the waters of the frigid North Atlantic amid burning wreckage of a torpedoed ship. It meant using flamethrowers that burned at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit on other human beings. It meant being violently ill on a landing craft steering through floating body parts of those who had attempted the landing first, knowing that if you tripped you would likely drown under the sixty-eight-pound weight of your pack, and that if you made it ashore you would likely be blown apart by artillery shells. Service was "for the duration" of the war. Only death, serious injury, or victory offered release. In this hard world, men fought to victory. In forty-five months of war, close to three hundred thousand American servicemen died in combat. Almost 1 million American troops were wounded, half of them seriously. Medical advances, such as the development of penicillin and the use of blood plasma to prevent shock, helped wounded men survive—but many never fully recovered from those wounds. Between 20 and 30 percent of combat casualties were psychoneurotic, as men were pushed past the limits of endurance. The federal government strictly censored images of American combat deaths for most of the war, consigning them to a secret file known as "the chamber of horrors." Americans at home rarely understood what combat had been like, and many men, upon return, never talked about their experiences in the war.

War Refugee Board (WRB)

Later that year, stirred by Morgenthau's well-documented plea, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, which set up refugee camps in Europe and played a crucial role in saving 200,000 Jews from death. But, lamented one American official, "by that time it was too damned late to do too much." By war's end, the Nazis had systematically murdered almost 11 million people.

D-Day

The second front opened in the dark morning hours of June 6, 1944: D-Day. In the largest amphibious landing in history, more than 140,000 Allied troops under the command of American general Dwight D. Eisenhower scrambled ashore at Normandy, France. Thousands of ships ferried the men within one hundred yards of the sandy beaches. Landing craft and soldiers immediately encountered the enemy; they triggered mines and were pinned down by fire from cliffside pillboxes. Meanwhile, 15,500 Allied airborne troops, along with thousands of dummies meant to confuse the German defense, dropped from aircraft. Although heavy aerial and naval bombardment and the clandestine work of saboteurs had softened the German defenses, the fighting was ferocious.

Kamikaze attacks

The supporting fleet endured waves of mass kamikaze (suicide) attacks, in which Japanese pilots intentionally crashed bomb-laden planes into American ships. Almost 5,000 seamen perished in these attacks. On Okinawa, 7,374 American soldiers and marines died in battle. Almost the entire Japanese garrison of 100,000 was killed. More than one-quarter of Okinawa's people, or approximately 80,000 civilians, perished as the two powers struggled over their island.

Economic expansion and prosperity

The war disrupted the lives of all Americans and demanded profound sacrifice from some. But it also offered many Americans new prosperity. Per capita income rose from $691 in 1939 to $1,515 at war's end. OPA-administered price controls kept inflation down so that wage increases did not disappear to higher costs. And with little to buy, people saved money.

Manhattan Project

Wartime needs also created a new relationship between science and the U.S. military. Millions of dollars went to fund research programs at America's largest universities: $117 million to Massachusetts Institute of Technology alone. Such federally sponsored research programs developed new technologies of warfare, such as vastly improved radar systems and the proximity fuse. The most important government-sponsored scientific research program was the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion secret effort to build an atomic bomb. Roosevelt had been convinced by scientists fleeing the Nazis in 1939 that Germany was working to create an atomic weapon, and he resolved to beat them at their own efforts. But secrecy was paramount. The handful of key Congressional leaders who knew about the project hid its funding in the budget of the U.S. Army; almost all of Congress, and even FDR's vice president, remained in the dark. The Manhattan Project achieved the world's first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942 at the University of Chicago, and in 1943 the federal government set up a secret community for atomic scientists and their families at Los Alamos, New Mexico. In this remote, sparsely populated, and beautiful setting, some of America's most talented scientists worked with Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to develop the weapon that would change the world.

North Africa

Against his advisers' recommendation, Roosevelt accepted Churchill's plan. The U.S. military was not yet ready for a major campaign and Roosevelt needed to show the American public some success in the European war. Thus, instead of coming to the rescue of the USSR, the British and Americans made a joint landing in North Africa in November 1942. American troops, facing relatively light resistance, won quick victories in Algeria and Morocco. In Egypt, the British confronted General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps in a struggle for control of the Suez Canal and the Middle East oil fields. Rommel's army, trapped between British and American troops, was forced to retreat into northern Tunisia and surrendered after six months.

Office of War Information (OWI)

Although Americans strongly supported the war, govern- ment leaders worried that they would gradually become less willing to sacrifice. The Office of War Information (OWI), created in 1942, used Hollywood filmmakers and New York copywriters to sell the war at home. OWI posters exhorted Americans to save and sacrifice, and reminded them to watch what they said, for "loose lips sink ships."

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

As Americans debated, the stakes grew higher. In March 1940, the Soviet Union—which had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler shortly before Germany invaded Poland in 1939— invaded Finland. In April, Germany conquered Denmark and Norway. "The small countries are smashed up, one by one, like matchwood," sighed Winston Churchill, who became Britain's prime minister on May 10, 1940—the same day that Germany attacked Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. German divisions pushed French and British forces back to the English Channel, and between May 26 and June 6, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers escaped from Dunkirk to Britain on a flotilla of small boats. The Germans occupied Paris a week later. The French government plunged into disunion and chaos, from which emerged a new regime located in the town of Vichy, France, concluded an armistice with Germany on June 22 and collaborated with the conquering Nazis for the remainder of the war. With France out of the picture, the German Luftwaffe (air force) launched massive bombing raids against Great Britain in preparation for a full-scale invasion. Alarmed by the swift defeat of one European nation after another, Americans increasingly questioned isolationist principles. Some liberals left the isolationist fold; it became more and more the province of conservatives. Emotions ran high. Roosevelt called the isolationists "ostriches" and charged that some were pro-Nazi subversives. More significantly, the president worked to prevent the fall of Britain. In May 1940, he ordered the sale of old surplus military equipment to Britain and France. In July, he cultivated bipartisan support by naming Republicans Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, ardent backers of aid to the Allies, secretaries of war and the navy, respectively. In September, by executive agreement, the president traded fifty over-age American destroyers for leases to eight British military bases, including Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Jamaica.

American 442nd Regional Combat Team

Far more sought to demonstrate their loyalty. The all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, drawn heavily from young men in internment camps, was the most decorated unit of its size. Suffering heavy casualties in Italy and France, members of the 442nd were awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, 350 Silver Stars, and more than 3,600 Purple Hearts. In 1988, Congress issued a public apology and largely symbolic payment of $20,000 to each of the 60,000 surviving Japanese American internees.

President Harry S. Truman

Franklin D. Roosevelt, reelected to an unprecedented fourth term in November 1944, did not live to see the war's end. He died on April 12, and Vice President Harry S Truman became president and commander-in-chief. Truman, a senator from Missouri who had replaced former vice president Henry Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944, was inexperienced in foreign policy. He was not even informed about the top-secret atomic weapons project until after he became president. The day after Roosevelt's death, Truman sought out old friends, Democrats and Republicans, in Congress, to ask for their help in this "terrible job." Shortly afterward, he told reporters, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." Eighteen days into Truman's presidency, Adolf Hitler killed himself in a bunker in bomb-ravaged Berlin. On May 8, Germany surrendered.

Iwo Jima and Okinawa

In February 1945, while the Big Three were meeting at Yalta, U.S. and Japanese troops battled for Iwo Jima, an island less than five miles long, located about seven hundred miles south of Tokyo. Twenty-one thousand Japanese defenders occupied the island's high ground. Hidden in a network of caves, trenches, and underground tunnels, they were protected from the aerial bombardment that U.S. forces used to clear the way for an amphibious landing. The stark volcanic island offered no cover, and marines were slaughtered as they came ashore. For twenty days, U.S. forces fought their way, yard by yard, up Mount Suribachi, the highest and most heavily fortified point on Iwo Jima. The struggle for Iwo Jima cost the lives of 6,821 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese—some of whom committed suicide rather than surrender. Only 200 Japanese soldiers survived. A month later, American troops landed on Okinawa, an island in the Ryukyus chain at the southern tip of Japan, from which Allied forces planned to invade the main Japanese islands. Fighting raged for two months; death was everywhere. The monsoon rains began in May, turning battlefields into seas of mud filled with decaying corpses.

Braceros

Mexican workers also filled wartime jobs in the United States. Although the U.S. government had deported Mexicans as unemployment rose during the Great Depression, about 200,000 Mexican workers, or braceros, were offered short-term contracts to fill agricultural jobs left vacant as Americans sought well-paid war work. Mexican and Mexican American workers alike faced discrimination and segregation, but they seized the economic opportunities newly available to them. In 1941, the Los Angeles shipyards employed not a single Mexican American; by 1944, 17,000 worked there.

Alien Registration (Smith) Act

More complex was the question of how to handle dissent and how to guard against the possibility that enemy agents were operating within the nation's borders. The Alien Registration (Smith) Act, passed in 1940, made it unlawful to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence, or to join any organization that did so. After Pearl Harbor, the government used this authority to take thousands of Germans, Italians, and other Europeans into custody as suspected spies and potential traitors.

Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter was an inspiring image, but she did not represent most women workers. Only 16 percent of female employees worked in defense plants, and women filled only 4.4 percent of "skilled" jobs (such as riveting). Nonetheless, the number of women in the workforce grew by 57 percent, as more than 6 million women took wartime jobs, while other women—including over 400,000 African American domestic workers—moved to higher-paying industrial jobs, often with union benefits. Workers in defense plants were often expected to work ten days for every day off or to accept difficult night shifts. In an effort to keep employees on the job, both businesses and the federal government offered new forms of support. The West Coast Kaiser shipyards paid very well, but also provided child care, subsidized housing, and health care: the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, a forerunner of today's health maintenance organization (HMO), cost workers a weekly payroll deduction of 50 cents. The federal government also funded child care centers and before- and after-school programs.

CORE

The NAACP, 50,000 strong in 1940, had 450,000 members by 1946. And in 1942, civil rights activists, influenced by the philosophy of India's Mohandas Gandhi, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which stressed "nonviolent direct action" and staged sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Military service was a key issue for African Americans, who understood the traditional link between the duty to defend one's country and the rights of full citizenship. But the U.S. military remained segregated by race and strongly resisted efforts to use black units as combat troops. As late as 1943, less than 6 percent of the armed forces were African American, compared with more than 10 percent of the population. The marines at first refused to accept African Americans at all, and the navy approximated segregation by assigning black men to service positions in which they would rarely interact with nonblacks as equals or superiors.

War bonds

Fighting World War II cost the United States approximately $304 billion (more than $3 trillion in today's dollars). The national debt skyrocketed from $49 billion in 1941 to $259 billion in 1945 (and was not paid off until 1970). The government did not just defer those costs to later generations. It sold war bonds—thus borrowing money from those who bought them.

Hitler's "Final Solution"

America's inaction in the face of what we now call the Holocaust is a tragic failure, though the consequences are clearer in retrospect than they were at the time. As the United States turned away refugees on the MS St. Louis in early 1939 and refused to relax its immigration quotas to admit European Jews and others fleeing Hitler's Germany, almost no one fore- saw that the future would bring death camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka. Americans knew they were turning away people fleeing dire persecution, and while anti-Semitism played a significant role in that decision, it was not unusual to refuse those seeking refuge, especially in the midst of a major economic crisis that seemed to be worsening. As early as 1942, American newspapers reported the "mass slaughter" of Jews and other "undesirables" (Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped) under Hitler. Many Americans, having been taken in by manufactured atrocity tales during World War I, wrongly discounted these stories. But Roosevelt knew about the existence of Nazi death camps capable of killing up to two thousand people an hour using the gas Zyklon-B. In 1943, British and American representatives met in Bermuda to discuss the situation but took no concrete action. Many Allied officials, though horrified, saw Hitler's "Final Solution" as just one part of a larger, worldwide holocaust in which tens of millions were dying. Appalled by the reluctance to act, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. charged that the State Department's foot dragging made the United States an accessory to murder. "The matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile," he wrote bitterly in 1944.

A Philip Randolph

America's new defense factories, running around the clock, required millions of workers. At first, workers were plentiful: 9 million Americans were still unemployed in 1940 when war mobilization began, and 3 million remained without work in December 1941. But during the war, the armed forces took almost 16 million men out of the potential civilian labor pool, forcing industry to look elsewhere for workers. Women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, poor whites from the isolated mountain hollows of Appalachia and the tenant farms of the Deep South—all streamed into jobs in defense plants. In some cases, federal action eased their path. In 1941, as the federal government poured billions of dollars into war industries, many industries refused to hire African Americans. "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and other similar capacities," one executive notified black applicants. A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to demand equal access to defense industry jobs.

Nissei and Sansei

American anger at Japan's "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor fueled the calls for internment, as did fears that West Coast cit- ies might yet come under enemy attack. Long-standing racism was evident, as the chief of the Western Defense Command warned, "The Japanese race is an enemy race." Finally, people in economic competition with Japanese Americans strongly supported internment. Although Japanese nationals could not become U.S. citizens or own property, American-born Nissei (second generation) and Sansei (third generation), all U.S. citizens, were increasingly successful in business and agriculture. The eviction order forced Japanese Americans to sell property valued at $500 million for a fraction of its worth. West Coast Japanese Americans also lost their positions in the truck-garden, floral, and fishing industries. The internees were sent to camps carved out of tax- delinquent land in Arkansas's Mississippi River floodplain, to the intermountain terrain of Wyoming and the desert of western Arizona, and to other arid and desolate spots in the West. The camps were bleak and demoralizing. Behind barbed wire stood tar-papered wooden barracks where entire families lived in a single room furnished only with cots, blan- kets, and a single bare light bulb. Most had no running water. Toilets and dining and bathing facilities were communal; privacy was almost nonexistent. In such difficult circumstances, people nonetheless attempted to sustain community life, setting up consumer cooperatives and sports leagues (one Arkansas baseball team called itself the Chiggers), and for many, maintaining Buddhist worship in the face of pressure to adopt Christian beliefs.

Battle of Midway

As losses mounted, the United States began to strike back. On April 18, sixteen American B-25 bombers appeared in the skies over Japan. The Doolittle raid (named after the mission's leader) did little harm to Japan, but it had an enormous psychological impact, pushing Japanese commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to bold action. Instead of consolidating control close to home, Yamamoto concluded, Japan must move quickly to lure the weakened United States into a "decisive battle." The target was Midway—two tiny islands about one thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, where the U.S. Navy had a base. If Japan could take Midway—not implausible, given Japan's string of victories—it would have a secure defensive perimeter far from the home islands. By using Guam, the Philippines, and perhaps even Australia as hostages, Japan believed, it could negotiate a favorable peace agreement with the United States. Admiral Yamamoto did not know that America's MAGIC code-breaking machines could decipher Japanese messages. This time, surprise was on the side of the United States, and the Japanese fleet found the U.S. Navy and its carrier-based dive-bombers lying in wait. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was a turning point in the Pacific war. Japanese strategists had hoped that the United States, discouraged by Japan's early victories, would withdraw and leave Japan to control the Pacific. That outcome was no longer a possibility. Now Japan was on the defensive.

1943 Detroit Race Riot

As people from different backgrounds confronted one another under difficult conditions, tensions rose. Widespread racism made things worse. In 1943, almost 250 racial conflicts exploded in forty-seven cities. Outright racial warfare blood- ied the streets of Detroit in June. White mobs, undeterred by police, roamed the city, attacking blacks. Blacks hurled rocks at police and dragged white passengers off streetcars. At the end of thirty hours of rioting, twenty-five blacks and nine whites lay dead. Surveying the damage, an elderly black woman said, "There ain't no North anymore. Everything now is South."

Potsdam Conference

As the great powers jockeyed for influence after Germany's surrender, the Grand Alliance began to crumble. At the Potsdam Conference in mid-July, Truman—a novice at international diplomacy—was less patient with the Soviets than Roosevelt had been. And Truman learned during the conference that a test of the new atomic weapon had been successful. The United States, possessing such a weapon, no longer needed the Soviet Union's help in fighting the Pacific war. Roosevelt had secretly promised Stalin territory from Japan's wartime holdings in exchange for help in defeating Japan; the bomb made those concessions unnecessary. The Allies did agree that Japan must surrender unconditionally. But with the defeat of Hitler and the end of the European war, the wartime bonds among the Allies were strained to breaking.

Operation Overlord

As the war continued, the Allies' suspicions of one another undermined cooperation. The Soviets continued to press Britain and the United States to open a second front to the west of Germany and so draw German troops away from the USSR, but the United States and Britain continued to delay. Stalin was not mollified by the massive "thousand-bomber" raids on Germany that Britain's Royal Air Force began in 1942, nor by the Allied invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943. With the alliance badly strained, Roosevelt turned to personal diplomacy. The three Allied leaders met in Tehran, Iran, in December 1943. Churchill again proposed a peripheral attack, this time through the Balkans to Vienna. But Stalin had had enough, and this time Roosevelt joined him. The three finally agreed to launch Operation Overlord—the cross-channel invasion of France—in early 1944. And the Soviet Union promised to aid the Allies against Japan once Germany was defeated.

Tuskegee Airmen

As the war wore on, African American servicemen did fight on the front lines, and fought well. The Marine Corps commandant in the Pacific proclaimed that "Negro Marines are no longer on trial. They are Marines, period." The "Tuskegee Airmen," pilots trained at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, saw heroic service in all-black units, such as the Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron, which won eighty Distinguished Flying Crosses. After the war, African Americans—as some white Americans had feared—called on their wartime service to claim the full rights of citizenship. African Americans' wartime experiences were mixed, but the war was a turning point in the movement for equal rights.

National War Labor Board (NWLB)

Because America's war strategy relied on industrial production, the federal government tried to prevent the labor strikes that had been so common in the 1930s. Just days after Pearl Harbor, a White House labor-management conference agreed to a no-strike/no-lockout pledge, and in 1942, Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) to settle labor disputes. The NWLB forged a temporary compromise between labor union demands for a "closed shop," in which only union members could work, and management's desire for "open" shops: workers could not be required to join a union, but unions could enroll as many members as possible. Between 1940 and 1945, union membership ballooned from 8.5 million to 14.75 million.

Korematsu v United States (1944)

Betrayed by their government, many internees were profoundly ambivalent about their loyalty to the United States. Some sought legal remedy, but the Supreme Court upheld the government's action in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). Almost one-quarter of all adults in one Arkansas camp, when asked if they would "swear unqualified allegiance to the United States," answered "no" or expressed some reserv tion. And almost 6,000 of the 120,000 internees renounced U.S. citizenship and demanded to be sent to Japan.

Joseph Stalin

British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin disagreed vehemently, however, over how to wage the war against Germany. By late 1941, before the fierce Russian winter stalled their onslaught, German troops had nearly reached Moscow and Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) and had slashed deeply into Ukraine, taking Kiev. Over a million Soviet soldiers had died defending their country. Stalin pressed for British and American troops to attack Germany from the west, through France, to draw German troops away from the Soviet front. Roosevelt believed "with heart and mind" that Stalin was right and promised to open a "second front" to Germany's west before the end of 1942. Churchill, however, blocked this plan. He had not forgotten Stalin's nonaggression pact with Hitler, and British military commanders, remembering the agonies of prolonged trench warfare in World War I, did not want to launch a large-scale invasion of Europe. Churchill promoted air attacks on Germany. He wanted to win control of the North Atlantic shipping lanes and to launch a smaller, safer attack on Axis positions in North Africa; halting the Germans there would protect British imperial possessions in the Mediterranean and the oil-rich Middle East.

Battle of the Bulge

By late July, 1.4 million Allied troops were fighting in France. They spread across the countryside, liberating France and Belgium by the end of August but leaving a path of devastation in their wake. Allied bombing, one British soldier wrote, left villages appearing "dead, mutilated and smothered, a gigantic sightless rubble heap so confounded by devastation as to suggest an Apocalypse." Almost 37,000 Allied troops died in that struggle, and up to 20,000 French civilians were killed. In September, the Allies pushed into Germany. German armored divisions counterattacked in Belgium's Ardennes Forest in December, hoping to push on to Antwerp to halt the flow of Allied supplies through that Belgian port. After weeks of heavy fighting in what as come to be called the Battle of the Bulge—because of the "bulge" created as German troops had pushed back the Allied line—the Allies gained control in late January 1945. By that point, "strategic" bombing (though not nearly as precise as was publicly claimed) had destroyed Germany's war-production capacity and devastated its economy. In early 1945, the British and Americans began "morale" bombing, kill- ing tens of thousands of civilians in aerial attacks on Berlin and then Dresden. Meanwhile, battle-hardened Soviet troops marched through Poland and cut a path to Berlin. American forces crossed the Rhine River in March 1945 and captured the heavily industrial Ruhr Valley. Several units peeled off to enter Austria and Czechoslovakia, where they met up with Soviet soldiers.

Atomic Bomb

By this time, U.S. troops were mobilizing for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. The experiences of Iwo Jima and Okinawa weighed heavily in the planning; Japanese troops had fought on, well past any hope of victory, and death tolls for Japanese and American troops alike had been enormous. News of the success of the Manhattan Project offered another option, and President Truman took it. Using atomic bombs on Japan, Truman believed, would end the war quickly and save American lives. Historians still debate Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb. Why would he not negotiate surrender terms? Was Japan on the verge of an unconditional surrender, as some argue? Or was the antisurrender faction of Japanese military leaders strong enough to prevail? Truman knew the bomb could give the United States both real and psychological power in negotiating the peace; how much did his desire to demonstrate the bomb's power to the Soviet Union, or to prevent the Soviets from playing a major role in the last stages of the Pacific war, influence his decision? Did racism or a desire for retaliation play a role? How large were the projected casualty figures for invasion on which Truman based his decision, and were they accurate? No matter the answers to these ongoing debates, bombing (whether conventional or atomic) fit the established U.S. strategy of using machines rather than men whenever possible.

"Europe first" strategy

Despite the importance of these early Pacific battles, America's war strategy was "Europe First." Germany, American war planners recognized, was a greater danger to the United States than Japan. If Germany conquered the Soviet Union, they believed, it might directly threaten the United States. Roosevelt also feared that the Soviet Union, suffering almost unimaginable losses as its military battled Hitler's invading army, might pursue a separate peace with Germany and so undo the Allied coalition. Therefore, the United States would work first with Britain and the USSR to defeat Germany, then deal with an isolated Japan.

Office of War Industry / War Manpower Commission

Doesn't exist? Maybe she means below vvv Early in the war production boom, employers insisted that women were not suited for industrial jobs. But as labor shortages began to threaten the war effort, employers did an about-face. The government's War Manpower Commission glorified the invented worker "Rosie the Riveter," who was featured on posters, in magazines, and in the recruiting jingle "Rosie's got a boyfriend, Charlie / Charlie, he's a marine / Rosie is protecting Charlie / Working overtime on the riveting machine."

Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms"

During the war, the U.S. government worked hard to explain to its citizens the reasons for their sacrifices. In 1941, Roosevelt had pledged America to defend "four essential human freedoms"—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—and government- sponsored films contrasted democracy and totalitarianism, freedom and fascism, equality and oppression. Despite such confident proclamations, as America fought the totalitarian regimes of the Axis powers, the nation confronted questions with no easy answers: What limits on civil liberties were justified in the interest of national security? How freely could information flow to the nation's citizens without revealing military secrets to the enemy and costing American lives? How could the United States protect itself against the threat of spies or saboteurs, especially from German, Italian, or Japanese citizens living in the United States? And what about America's ongoing domestic problems—particularly the problem of race? Could the nation address its own citizens' demands for reform as it fought the war against the Axis? The answers to these questions often revealed tensions between the nation's democratic claims and its wartime practices. For the most part, America handled the issue of civil liberties well. American leaders embraced a "strategy of truth," declaring that citizens of a democratic nation required a truthful accounting of the war's progress. However, the government closely controlled information about military matters. Censorship was serious business, as even seemingly unimportant details might tip off enemies about troop movements or invasion plans: radio stations were forbidden to broadcast weather reports—or even to mention weather conditions—leaving residents without warning of impending storms and sportscasters with no way to explain why play had been suspended or games had been called. During the war, government-created propaganda sometimes dehumanized the enemy, most especially the Japanese. Nonetheless, the American government resorted to hate-mongering much less frequently than during the First World War.

Yalta Conference

Even as Allied forces faced the last, desperate resistance from German troops in the Battle of the Bulge, Allied leaders began planning the peace. In early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, by this time very ill, called for a summit meeting to discuss a host of political questions—including what to do with Germany. The three Allied leaders met at Yalta, in the Russian Crimea, in February 1945. Each had definite goals for the shape of the postwar world. Britain, its formerly powerful empire now vulnerable and shrinking, sought to protect its colonial possessions and to limit Soviet power. The Soviet Union, with 21 million dead, wanted Germany to pay reparations to fund its massive rebuilding effort. The Soviets hoped to expand their sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe and to guarantee their national security; Germany, Stalin insisted, must be permanently weakened. Two German invasions in a quarter-century were more than enough. The United States, like the other powers, hoped to expand its influence and to control the peace. To that end, Roosevelt lobbied for the United Nations Organization, approved in principle the previous year at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., through which the United States hoped to exercise influence. The lessons of World War I also shaped American proposals; seeking long-term peace and stability, the United States hoped to avoid the debts-reparations fiasco that had plagued Europe after the First World War. U.S. goals included self-determination for liberated peoples; gradual and orderly decolonization; and management of world affairs by what Roosevelt had once called the Four Policemen: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, and China. (Roosevelt hoped China might help stabilize Asia after the war; the United States abolished the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 in an attempt to consolidate ties between the two nations.) The United States was also determined to limit Soviet influence in the postwar world. Obviously, there was much about which to disagree.

Bombing

Even with American forces entrenched just 350 miles from Japan's main islands, Japanese leaders still refused to admit defeat. A powerful military faction was determined to preserve the emperor's sovereignty and to avoid the humiliation of unconditional surrender. They hung on even while American bombers leveled their cities. On the night of March 9, 1945, 333 American B-29 Superfortresses commanded by General Curtis LeMay dropped a mixture of explosives and incendiary devices on a four-by-three-mile area of Tokyo. Attempting to demonstrate the strategic value of airpower, they created a firestorm, a blaze so fierce that it sucked all the oxygen from the air, producing hurricane-force winds and growing so hot it could melt concrete and steel. Almost 100,000 people were incinerated, suffocated, or boiled to death in canals where they had taken refuge from the fire. Over the following five months, American bombers attacked sixty-six Japanese cities, leaving 8 million people homeless, killing almost 900,000. Japan, at the same time, was attempting to bomb the U.S. mainland. Thousands of bomb-bearing high-altitude balloons, constructed out of rice paper and potato-flour paste by schoolgirls, were launched into the jet stream. Those that did reach the United States fell on unpopulated areas, occasionally starting forest fires. The only mainland U.S. casualties in the war were five children and an adult on a Sunday school picnic in Oregon who accidentally detonated a balloon bomb that they found in the underbrush. As Admiral Yamamoto had realized at the war's beginning, American resources would far outlast Japan's. Early in the summer of 1945, Japan began to send out peace feelers through the Soviets. Japan was not, however, willing to accept the "unconditional surrender" terms on which the Allied leaders had agreed at Potsdam, and Truman and his advisers chose not to pursue a negotiated peace.

Government Military Contracts

For close to four years, American factories operated twenty- four hours a day, seven days a week, fighting the war on the production front. By war's end, the United States was producing 40 percent of the world's weaponry. Between 1940 and 1945, American factories turned out roughly 300,000 airplanes, 102,000 armored vehicles, 77,000 ships, 20 million small arms, 40 billion bullets, and 6 million tons of bombs. To reach such numbers, American factories had transformed skilled work in industries such as shipbuilding into an assembly-line process of mass production. Henry Ford, now seventy-eight years old, created a massive bomber plant on farmland along Willow Run Creek not far from Detroit. Willow Run's assembly lines, almost a mile long, turned out B-24 Liberator bombers at the rate of one an hour. On the West Coast, William Kaiser used mass-production techniques to cut construction time for Liberty ships—the huge, 440-foot-long cargo ships that transported the tanks and guns and bullets overseas—from 355 to 56 days. (As a publicity stunt, Kaiser's Richmond shipyard, near San Francisco, built one Liberty ship in 4 days, 15 hours, and 26 minutes.) The ships were not well made; their welded hulls sometimes split in rough seas, and one ship even foundered while still docked at the pier. However, as the United States struggled to produce cargo ships faster than German U-boats could sink them, speed of production counted for more than quality. Although American propaganda during the war badly overreached when comparing the contributions of well-paid war workers to those of men in combat, 102,000 men and women were killed doing war production work during the first two years of the war and more than 350,000 were seriously injured.

Atlantic Charter

In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt met for four days on a British battleship off the coast of Newfoundland. They got along well, trading naval stories and making much of the fact that Churchill was half American (his mother was from New York). This meeting produced the Atlantic Charter, a set of war aims reminiscent of Wilsonianism: collective security, disarmament, self-determination, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas. Churchill later recalled that Roosevelt told him in Newfoundland that he could not ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, but "he would wage war" and "become more and more provocative." Within days of that meeting, German and American ships came into direct contact in the Atlantic. On September 4, a German submarine launched torpedoes at (but did not hit) the American destroyer Greer. In response, Roosevelt gave the U.S. Navy authority to fire first when under threat. He also publicly announced what he had promised Churchill in private: American warships would convoy British merchant ships across the ocean. The United States thus entered into an undeclared naval war with Germany. When a German submarine torpedoed the U.S. destroyer Kearny off the coast of Iceland a month later, Roosevelt declared that "the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot." Later in October, when the destroyer Reuben James went down with the loss of more than one hundred American lives, Congress revised the Neutrality Acts to allow armed American merchant ships to carry weapons to Britain. The United States was edging very close to being a belligerent.

Japanese Internment Camps

In March 1942, Roosevelt ordered that all 112,000 foreign-born Japanese and Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and the state of Washington (the vast majority of the mainland population) be removed from the West Coast to "relocation centers" for the duration of the war. Each of the Italian and German nationals interned by the U.S. government faced specific, individual charges. That was not the case for Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. They were imprisoned as a group, under suspicion solely because they were of Japanese descent.

War Production Board

In late December 1940—almost a year before the United States entered the war—Franklin Roosevelt pledged that America would serve as the world's "great arsenal of democracy," making the machines that would win the war for the Allies. After Pearl Harbor, U.S.strategy remained much the same. The United States would prevail through a "crushing superiority of equipment," Roosevelt told Congress. Although the war would be fought on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, the nation's strategic advantage lay on the "production front" at home. Goals for military production were staggering. In 1940, with war looming, American factories had built only 3,807 airplanes. Following Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt asked for 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and double that number in 1943. Plans called for building 16 million tons of shipping and 120,000 tanks. The military needed supplies to train and equip a force that would grow to almost 16 million men. Thus, for the duration of the war, military production took precedence. Turning from consumer desires to military needs, jukebox manufacturer Rock-Ola produced M1 carbines and Eureka Vacuum-made gas masks, while automobile plants manufactured tanks and dress factories sewed military uniforms. The War Production Board, established in early 1942, had the enormous task of allocating resources and coordinating production among thousands of independent factories.

General Douglas MacArthur

In the Pacific, the war was largely America's to fight. The Soviets had not declared war on Japan, and there were too few British troops protecting Great Britain's Asian colonies to make much difference. By late spring of 1942, Japan had captured most European colonial possessions in Southeast Asia: the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia); French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia); and the British colonies of Malaya, Burma, Western New Guinea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In the American Philippines, the struggle went on longer, but also in vain. The Japanese attacked the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor and, finding the entire force of B-17 bombers sitting on the airfields, destroyed U.S. air capability in the region. American and Filipino troops retreated to the Bataan Peninsula, hoping to hold the main island, Luzon, but Japanese forces were superior. In March 1942, under orders from Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, departed the Philippines for Australia, proclaiming, "I shall return."

Operation MAGIC Pt. 1

It seems ironic, therefore, that the Second World War came to the United States by way of Asia. Roosevelt had wanted to avoid war with Japan in order to concentrate American resources on the defeat of Germany. In September 1940, after Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis powers, Roosevelt halted shipments of aviation fuel and scrap metal to Japan. Because the president believed the Japanese would consider a cutoff of oil a life-or-death matter, he did not embargo that vital commodity. But in July 1941 Japanese troops occupied French Indochina, seeking to cut off Western shipments of oil and other supplies to China, with whom Japan was at war, while also positioning Japanese troops to seize much of southeast Asia. In response, Washington froze Japanese assets in the United States, virtually ending trade (including oil) with Japan. Tokyo proposed a summit meeting between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Prince Konoye, but the United States rejected the idea. American officials insisted that the Japanese first agree to respect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and to honor the Open Door policy—in short, to get out of China. For Roosevelt, Europe still claimed first priority, but he supported Secretary Hull's hard-line policy against Japan's pursuit of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—the name Tokyo gave to the vast Asian region it intended to dominate. Fundamentally, the United States was unwilling to cede control of East Asia to Japan, and Japan understood that U.S. terms required it to abandon its growing empire and claims to power in the region, remaining subject to U.S. economic power.

USS Arizona

Japan had planned a daring raid on U.S. and British territory in the Pacific, one that required coordinating forces for near- simultaneous attacks on sites stretching over nearly seven thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean. In order to hit the most distant site—the U.S. Territory of Hawai'i—an armada of sixty Japanese ships, with a core of six carriers bearing 360 air- planes, had crossed three thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean in total radio silence. Early in the morning of December 7, some 230 miles north of Honolulu, the carriers unleashed their planes, each stamped with a red sun representing the Japanese flag. They swept down on the unsuspecting American naval base and nearby airfields, dropping torpedoes and bombs and strafing buildings. In Pearl Harbor, the battleship USS Arizona fell victim to a Japanese bomb that ignited explosives below deck, killing more than a thousand sailors.The USS Nevada tried to escape the inferno by heading out to sea, but when a second wave of aerial attackers struck the ship the crew ran her aground to avoid blocking the harbor channel. Japanese forces sank or damaged eight battleships and many smaller vessels and destroyed more than 160 aircraft on the ground. By chance, all three of the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped the bombing.

Bataan Death March

Left behind were almost eighty thousand American and Filipino troops. Starving and weakened by disease, they held on for almost another month before surrender- ing. Those who survived long enough to surrender faced worse horror. Japanese troops, lacking supplies themselves, were not prepared to deal with a large number of prisoners, and most believed the prisoners had forfeited honorable treatment by surrendering. In what came to be known as the Bataan Death March, the Japanese force-marched their captives to prison camps more than 65 miles away, denying them food and water and bayoneting or beating to death those who fell behind. As many as ten thousand Filipinos and six hundred Americans died on the march. Tens of thousands of Filipino civilians also died under Japanese occupation.

Office of Price Administration (OPA)

Many consumer goods were rationed or unavailable. To save wool for military use, the War Production Board directed that men's suits would have narrow lapels, shorter jackets, and no vests or pant cuffs. Bathing suits, the WPB specified, must shrink by 10 percent. When silk and nylon were diverted from stockings to parachutes, women used makeup on their legs and drew in the "stocking" seam with eyebrow pencil. The Office of Price Administration (OPA), created by Congress in 1942, established a nationwide rationing system for sugar, coffee, gasoline, and other consumer goods. By early 1943, the OPA had instituted a point system for rationing food, and feeding a family required complex calculations. Each citizen—regardless of age—was allotted forty-eight blue points (canned fruits and vegetables) and sixty-four red points (meat, fish, and dairy) a month. In September 1944 a small bottle of ketchup "cost" twenty blue points and sirloin steak thirteen red points a pound (in addition to their cost in dollars and cents), while pork shoulder required only dollars. Sugar was tightly rationed, and people saved for months to make a birthday cake or holiday dessert. Rationed goods were available on the black market, but most Americans understood that sugar produced alcohol for weapons manufacture and meat went to feed "our boys" overseas.

Continued

Military positions at the time of the Yalta conference helped shape the negotiations. Soviet troops occupied eastern European nations they had liberated, including Poland, where Moscow had installed a pro-Soviet regime despite a British-supported Polish government-in-exile in London. With Soviet troops in place, Britain and the United States had limited negotiating power over eastern Europe. As for Germany, the Big Three agreed that some eastern German territory would be transferred to Poland and the remainder divided into four zones—the fourth zone to be administered by France, which Britain had pressed to be included in plans for postwar control of Germany, so as to reduce the Soviet zone from one- third to one-quarter. Berlin, within the Soviet zone, would also be divided among the four victors. Yalta marked the high point of the Grand Alliance; in the tradition of diplomatic give-and-take, each of the Allies came away with something it wanted. In exchange for U.S. promises to support Soviet claims on territory lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Stalin agreed to sign a treaty of friendship with Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), America's ally in China, rather than with the communist Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), and to declare war on Japan two or three months after Hitler's defeat.

The "Victory Plan"

Nonetheless, the nation was not ready for war. Throughout the 1930s, military funding had been a low priority. In September 1939 (when Hitler invaded Poland and began what would become the Second World War), the U.S. Army ranked forty-fifth in size among the world's armies and could fully equip only one-third of its 227,000 men. The peacetime draft instituted in 1940 expanded the U.S. military to 2 million men, but Roosevelt's 1941 survey of war preparedness, the "Victory Plan," estimated that the United States could not be ready to fight before June 1943. In December 1941, many analysts thought U.S. victory unlikely. In Europe, the Allies were losing the war. Hitler had claimed Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. Romania was lost, then Greece and Bulgaria. France had fallen in June 1940. Britain fought on, but German planes rained bombs on London. More than 3 million soldiers under German command had penetrated deep into the Soviet Union and Africa. German U-boats controlled the Atlantic from the Arctic to the Caribbean. Within months of America's entry into the war, German submarines sank 216 vessels—some so close to American shores that people could see the glow of burning ships.

Impact of Hollywood and Movies

Popular culture also reinforced wartime messages. Songs urged Americans to "Remember December 7th" or to "Accentuate the Positive." Others made fun of America's enemies ("You're a sap, Mr. Jap / You make a Yankee cranky / You're a sap, Mr. Jap / Uncle Sam is gonna spanky") or, like "Cleanin' My Rifle (and Dreamin' of You)," dealt with the hardship of wartime separation. Movies drew 90 million viewers a week in 1944—out of a total population of 132 million. During the war "Draftee Duck" joined the army, chickens produced for the war effort at "Flockheed," and audiences sang along with an animated version of the song "Der Fuehrer's Face" ("When der fuehrer says we is de master race/We heil (pffft) heil (pffft) right in der fuehrer's face") in pre-film cartoons. For the most part, Hollywood tried to meet Eleanor Roosevelt's challenge to "Keep 'em laughing," though some films, such as Bataan or Wake Island, portrayed actual—if sanitized—events in the war. But even at the most frivolous comedies, the war was present. Theaters held "plasma premieres" with free admission to those who donated a half-pint of blood to the Red Cross. Before the film began, audiences sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and watched newsreels with carefully censored footage of recent combat. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, as Allied troops landed at Normandy, theater managers across the nation led audiences in the Lord's Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd . . . "). It was in movie theaters that Americans saw the horror of Nazi death camps in May 1945. The Universal newsreel narrator ordered audiences, "Don't turn away. Look."

Tripartite Pact

Recognizing America's move toward war, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in late September, 1940. The pact formalized existing alliances among the three nations, formally creating the Axis Powers. It officially recognized two separate spheres of influence, with Japan controlling Greater East Asia and—significantly—made clear that if the United States joined the war it would face enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

"Arsenal of democracy"

Roosevelt portrayed America's role as "the arsenal of democracy," and claimed that the United States could stay out of the war by enabling the British to win.

Operation MAGIC

Roosevelt told his advisers to string out ongoing Japanese-American talks as a way to gain time—time to fortify the Philippines and to deal with the crisis in Europe. But because the United States had broken Japan's diplomatic code through Operation MAGIC, officials knew that Tokyo's patience with diplomacy was waning rapidly. In late November, the Japanese rejected American demands to withdraw from Indochina. On December 6, the United States intercepted a 14-part message to the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., along with instructions to destroy their cipher machines once it was received. American officials understood the significance of such instructions and, once the document was fully decrypted, sent warnings to American military installations in the Pacific. However, due to some questionable decisions about how to transmit the material, coupled with technical difficulties, the warnings arrived too late.

Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)

Roosevelt, fearing that the march might provoke race riots and that communists might infiltrate the movement, offered the March on Washington movement a deal. In exchange for canceling the march, the president issued Executive Order No. 8802, which prohibited discrimination in the defense industry and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to deal with violations. Although enforcement was uneven, this official act led hundreds of thousands of black Americans to leave the South, seeking work and new lives in the industrial cities of the North and West.

Declaration of War

The attack on Pearl Harbor would become a rallying cry for Americans at war, but on that same day (it was December 8 on the other side of the International Date Line), Japan also attacked the neutral nation of Thailand, as well as Malaya, Shanghai, Singapore, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Wake Island, and Midway—all of which were Pacific possessions of Western powers. Pearl Harbor was one piece of Japan's broader strategy. Some critics at the time—and later—charged that Roosevelt had conspired to leave the fleet vulnerable to attack so that the United States could enter the Second World War through the "back door" of Asia. However, historians agree that no evidence supports that claim. American officials did believe, based on decrypted diplomatic cables, that war was likely on the horizon. But they knew nothing more. The decrypted messages never discussed the coming attacks, and most military commanders in Hawai'i were confident—wrongly—that distance offered protection from Japanese attack. On December 8, referring to the previous day as "a date which will live in infamy," Roosevelt vowed that Americans would never forget "the character of the onslaught against us" and asked Congress to declare war against Japan. A unanimous vote in the Senate and a 388-to-1 vote in the House thrust America into war. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana voted no, repeating her vote against entry into the First World War. Britain declared war on Japan, but the Soviet Union did not. Three days later, Germany and Italy, honoring the Tripartite Pact they had signed with Japan in September 1940, declared war against the United States. "Hitler's fate was sealed," Churchill later wrote. "Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. . . . I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The decision to use the bomb did not seem as momentous to Truman as it does in retrospect. The moral line had already been crossed, as the move to wholesale bombing of civilian populations continued throughout the war: The Japanese had bombed the Chinese city of Shanghai in 1937. Germans had "terror-bombed" Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. British and American bombers had purposely created firestorms in German cities; on a single night in February 1945, 25,000 people perished in the bombing of Dresden. The American bombing of Japanese cities—accomplished with conventional weapons—had already killed close to a million people and destroyed fifty-six square miles of Tokyo alone. What distinguished the atomic bombs from conventional bombs was their power and their efficiency— not that they killed huge numbers of innocent civilians in unspeakably awful ways.

Gender roles during wartime

The dislocations of war also had profound impacts on the nation's families. Despite policies that exempted married men and fathers from the draft during most of the war, almost 3 million families were broken up. Young children grew up not knowing their fathers. The divorce rate of 16 per 1,000 marriages in 1940 almost doubled to 27 per 1,000 in 1944. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of men and women were getting married. The number of marriages rose from 73 per 1,000 unmarried women in 1939 to 93 in 1942. Some couples scrambled to get married before the man was sent overseas; others sought military deferments. The birth rate climbed as well: 2.4 million babies were born in 1939 and 3.1 million in 1943. Many were "goodbye babies," conceived with the idea that the father might not survive the war. On college campuses, some virtually stripped of male students, women complained, along with the song lyrics, "There is no available male." But other young women found an abundance of male company and their elders worried that the war was undermining sexual morality. Youth in Crisis, a 1943 newsreel, featured a girl with "experience far beyond her age" necking with a soldier on the street, while Newsweek warned of the "victory girls" or "cuddle bunnies" who were said to support the war effort by giving their all to men in uniform. Many young men and women, caught up in the emotional intensity of war, behaved as they never would in peacetime. Often that meant hasty marriages to virtual strangers, especially if a baby was on the way. Despite changes in behavior, taboos against unwed motherhood remained strong, and only 1 percent of births during the war were to unmarried women. Wartime mobility also increased opportunities for same-sex relationships, and gay communities grew in such cities as San Francisco. In many ways, the war reinforced traditional gender roles that had been weakened during the depression, when many men lost the role of breadwinner. Now men defended their nation while women "kept the home fires burning." Some women took "men's jobs," but most understood that they were "for the duration"—the home-front equivalent to men's wartime military service. Even so, women who worked were frequently blamed for neglecting their children and creating an "epidemic" of juvenile delinquency—evidenced by the "victory girl." Nonetheless, millions of women took on new responsibilities in wartime, whether on the factory floor or within their family.

Victory Gardens

The fighting was distant, but the war was a constant presence in the lives of Americans on "the home front." Although Americans were never so unified as the widespread images of "the greatest generation" suggest, civilians supported the war effort in many ways, and "shared sacrifice" was a powerful ideal and significant reality. During the war, families planted 20 million "victory gardens" to replace food that went to America's fighting men. Housewives saved fat from cooking and returned it to butchers, for cooking fat yielded glycerin to make the gunpowder used in shells or bullets. Children collected scrap metal, aware that the iron in one old shovel blade was enough for four hand grenades and that every tin can helped make a tank or Liberty ship.

Zoot Suit Riots

The heightened racial and ethnic tensions of wartime also led to riots in Los Angeles in 1943. Young Mexican American gang members, or pachucos, had adopted the zoot suit: a long jacket with wide padded shoulders, loose pants "pegged" below the knee, a wide-brimmed hat, and dangling watch chain. With cloth rationed, wearing pants requiring five yards of fabric was a political statement, and some young men wore the zoot suit as a purposeful rejection of wartime ideals of service and sacrifice. Although in fact a high percentage of Mexican Americans served in the armed forces, many white servicemen believed otherwise. Racial tensions were not far from the surface in overcrowded L.A., and rumors that pachucos had attacked white sailors quickly led to violence. For four days, mobs of white men—mainly soldiers and sailors—roamed the streets, attacking zoot-suiters and stripping them of their clothes. The city of Los Angeles outlawed zoot suits and arrested men who wore them. The "zoot suit riots" ended only when naval personnel were removed from the city.

Rationale for Segregation

Why did the United States fight a war for democracy with a segregated military? The U.S. military understood that its sole priority was to stop the Axis and win the war, and the federal government and War Department decided that the midst of world war was no time to try to integrate the armed forces. The majority of Americans (approximately 89 percent of Americans were white) opposed integration, many of them vehemently. As a sign of how deeply racist beliefs penetrated the United States, the Red Cross segregated blood plasma during the war. In most southern states, racial segregation was not simply custom; it was the law. Integration of military installations and training camps, the majority of which were in the South, would have provoked a crisis as federal power contradicted state law. Pointing to outbreaks of racial violence in southern training camps as evidence, government and military officials argued that wartime integration would almost certainly provoke even more racial violence, create disorder within the military, and hinder America's war effort. Such resistance might have been short term, but the War Department did not take that chance. Justifying its decision, the War Department argued that it could not "act outside the law, nor contrary to the will of the majority of the citizens of the Nation." General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, proclaimed that it was not the job of the army to "solve a social problem that has perplexed the American people throughout the history of this nation. . . . The army is not a sociological laboratory." Hopes for racial justice, so long deferred, were another casualty of the war. Despite such discrimination, many African Americans stood up for their rights. Lieutenant Jackie Robinson refused to move to the back of the bus while training at the army's Camp Hood, Texas, in 1944—and faced court-martial, even though military regulations forbade racial discrimination on military vehicles, regardless of local law or custom. Black sailors disobeyed orders to return to work after surviving an explosion that destroyed two ships, killed 320 men, and shattered windows 35 miles away—an explosion caused by the navy practice of assigning men who were completely untrained in handling high explosives to load bombs from the munitions depot at Port Chicago, near San Francisco, onto Liberty ships. When they were court-martialed for mutiny, future Supreme Court justice and chief counsel for the NAACP Thurgood Marshall asked why only black sailors did this work. Marshall argued, "This is not fifty men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward N----."