APUSH Unit 9A Ch 35 Vocab

War Production Board

Orchestrated by the War Production Board Board, American factories poured forth an avalanche of weaponry: 40 billion bullets, 300,000 aircraft, 76,000 ships, 86,000 tanks, and 2.6 million machine guns. The Board halted the manufacture of nonessential items such as passenger cars. It assigned priorities for transportation and access to raw materials.

Potsdam Conference

The Potsdam conference, held near Berlin in July 1945, sounded the death knell of the Japanese. These President Truman, still new on his job, met in a seventeen-day parley with Joseph Stalin and the British leaders. The conferees issued a stern ultimatum to Japan: surrender or be destroyed. American bombers showered the dire warning on Japan in tens of thousands of leaflets, but no encouraging response was forthcoming.

Teheran Conference and the second front

The Soviets had never ceased their clamor for an all-out second front, and the time rapidly approached for Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to meet in person to coordinate the promised effort. Marshal Joseph Stalin, with a careful eye on Soviet military operations, balked at leaving Moscow. FDR, who jauntily remarked in private, "I can handle to old buzzard," was eager to confer with him. Teheran, the capital of Iran (Persia), was finally chosen as the meeting place. To this ancient city Roosevelt riskily flew, after a stopover conference in Cairo with Britain's Churchill and China' Jiang Jieshi regarding the war against Japan. At Teheran the discussions among Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill -- from Nov 28 to Dec 1, 1943 -- progressed smoothly. Perhaps the most important achievement was agreement on broad plans, esp. those for launching Soviet attacks on Germany from the east simultaneously with the prospective Allied assault for the west. add?

Eisenhower's invasion of North Africa

An assault on French-held North Africa was a compromise second front, a far cry from what the badly battered Soviets were demanding. The highly secret attack, launched in Nov 1942, was headed by a gifted and easy-smiling American general, Dwight Eisenhower, a master of organization and conciliation. As a joint Allied operation ultimately involving some 400,000 men (British, Canadian, French, and chiefly American) and about 850 ships, the invasion was the mightiest waterborne effort up to that time in history. After savage fighting, the remnants of the German-Italian army were finally trapped in Tunisia and surrendered in May 1943.

General Douglas MacArthur

General MacArthur fought in the Philippines, but before the inevitable American surrender, he was ordered by Washington to depart secretly for Australia, there to head the resistance against the Japanese. American and Australian forces, under General MacArthur, had been hanging on courageously to the southeastern tip of New Guinea, the last buffer protecting Australia. The scales of war gradually began to tip as the American navy, including submarines, inflicted lethal losses on Japanese supply ships and troop carriers. Conquest of the north coast of New Guinea was completed by August 1944, after General MacArthur had fought his way westward through tropical jungle hells. This hard-won victory was the first leg on his long journey to the Philippines.

MacArthur and Leyte Gulf, Philippines

General MacArthur was also on the move. Completing the conquest of jungle-draped New Guinea, he headed northwest for the Philippines, en route to Japan, with 600 ships and 250,000 men. In a scene well stage for the photographers, he splashed ashore at Leyte Island on Oct 20, 1944. Japan's navy -- still menacing -- now made one last effort to destroy MacArthur by wiping out his transports and supply ships. A gigantic clash at Leyte Gulf, fought on the sea and in the air, was actually three battles (Oct 23-26, 1944). The Americans won all of them, though the crucial engagement was almost lost when Admiral William Halsey was decoyed by a feint. Japan was through as a sea power: it had lost about sixty ships in the greatest naval battle of all time.

kamikazes

The US Navy, which covered the invasion of Okinawa, sustained severe damage. Japanese suicide pilots ("kamikazes") in an exhibition of mass hara-kiri for their decks of the invading fleet. All told, the death squads sank over thirty ships and badly damaged scores more.

V-J Day

On Aug 10, 1945, Tokyo sued for peace on one condition: that Hirohito, the bespectacled Son of Heaven, be allowed to remain on his ancestral thrown as nominal emperor. Despite their "unconditional surrender" policy, the Allies accepted this condition on Aug 14, 1945. The Japanese, though facing losing face, were able to save both their exalted ruler and what was left of their native land. The formal end came, with dramatic force, on Sept 2, 1945. Official surrender ceremonies were conducted by General MacArthur on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At the same time, Americans at home hysterically celebrated V-J Day -- Victory in Japan Day -- after the most horrible war in history had ended in mushrooming atomic clouds.

Casablanca Conference and unconditional surrender

At Casablanca, in newly occupied French Morocco, FDR, who had boldly flown the Atlantic, met in a historic conference with Winston Churchill in Jan 1943. The Big Two agreed to step up the Pacific war, invade Sicily, increase pressure on Italy, and insist upon an "unconditional surrender" of the enemy, a phrase earlier popularized by General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. Such an unyielding policy would presumably hearten the ultra-suspicious Soviets, who professed to fear separate Allied peace negotiations. It would also forestall charges of broken armistice terms, such as had come after 1918. Paradoxically, the tough-sounding unconditional surrender declaration was an admission of the weakness of the Western Allies. Still unable to mount the kind of second front their Soviet partner desperately demanded, the British and the Americans had little but words to offer Stalin. add?

gross national product (GNP)

By the war's end much of the planet was a smoking ruin. But in America the war invigorated the economy and lifted the country out of a decade-long depression. The gross national product vaulted from less than $100 billion in 1940 to more the $200 billion in 1945. GNP is the total value of goods produced and services provided by a country during one year, equal to the gross domestic product plus the net income from foreign investments. Corporate profits rose from about $6 billion in 1940 to almost twice that amount for years later.

the Marianas

Especially prized were the Marianas, including America's conquered Guam. From bases in the Marianas, the United States' new B-26 superbombers could cary out round-trip bombing raids on Japan's home islands. The assault on the Marianas opened on June 19, 1944, with what American pilots called the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." A combination of the combat superiority of the recently developed American "Hellcat" fighter plane and the new technology of the antiaircraft proximity fuse destroyed nearly 250 Japanese aircraft, with a loss of only 29 American planes. The following day, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, US naval forces sank several Japanese carriers. The Japanese navy never recovered from these massive losses of planes, pilots, and ships. After fanatical resistance, including a mass suicide leap of surviving Japanese soldiers and civilians from "Suicide" Cliff on Saipan, the major islands of the Marianas fell to the US attackers in July and August 1944. With these unsinkable aircraft carriers now available, virtual round-the-clock bombing of Japan began in November 1944.

code breakers (Enigma)

Eventaully Allied antisubmarine tactics improved substantially, thanks esp. to British code-breakers, who had cracked the Germans' "Enigma" codes and could therefore pinpoint the locations of the U-boats lurking in the North Atlantic.

Battle of Guadalcanal

In August 1942 American ground forces gained a toehold on Guadalcanal Island, in the Solomons, in an effort to protect the lifeline from America to Australia through the Southwest Pacific. An early naval defeat inflicted by the Japanese shortened American supplies dangerously, and for weeks the US troops held on to the malarial island only by their fingernails. After several desperate sea battles for naval control, the Japanese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in February 1943. Japanese losses were 20,000, compared to 1,700 for the Americans. That casualty ratio of more than ten to one, Japanese to American, persisted throughout the Pacific war.

American and Soviet armies meet at the Elbe River

In March 1945, forward-driving American troops reached Germany's Rhine River, where, by incredibly good luck, they found one strategic bridge undemolished. Pressing their advantage, General Eisenhower's troops reached the Elbe River in April 1945. There, a short distance south of Berlin, American and Soviet advance guards dramatically clasped hands amid cries of "Amerikanskie tovarishchi" (American comrades).

Navajo code talkers

Some twenty-five thousand Native American men served in the armed forces. Comanches in Europe and Navajos in the Pacific made especially valuable contributions as "code talkers." They transmitted radio messages in their native languages, which were incomprehensible to the Germans and the Japanese.

Italian campaign and delay

The Allied forces, victorious in Africa, now turned against the not-so-soft underbelly of Europe. Sicily fell in August 1943 after sporadic but sometimes bitter resistance. Shortly before the conquest of the island, Mussolini was deposed, and Italy surrendered unconditionally soon thereafter, in Sept 1943. But if Italy dropped out of the war, the Germans did not drop Italy. Hitler's well-trained troops stubbornly resisted the Allied invaders now pouring into the toe of the Italian boot. They also unleashed their fury against the Italians, who had turned their coats and declared war on Germany in Oct 1943. For many months Italy appeared to be a dead end, as the Allied advance was halted by a seemingly impregnable German defense centered on the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino. Rome was finally taken on June 4, 1944. The tremendous cross-channel invasion of France begun two days later turned Italy into a kind of sideshow, but the Allies, limited in manpower, continued to fight their way slowly and painfully into norther Italy. While the Italian second front opened the Mediterranean and diverted some German divisions from the blazing Soviet and French battle lines, it also may have delayed the main Allied invasion of Europe, from England across the English Channel to France, by many months -- allowing more time for the Soviet army to advance in Eastern Europe.

"get-Germany-first" strategy of the Allies

Washington, in the so-called ABC-1 agreement with the British, had wisely adopted the strategy of "getting Germany first." If America diverted its main strength to the Pacific (Japan), Hitler might crush both the Soviet Union and Britain and then emerge unconquerable in Fortress Europe. But if Germany was knocked out first, the combined Allied forces could be conquered on Japan, and its daring game of conquest would be up. The get-Germany-first strategy was the solid foundation on which all American military strategy was built. But it encountered much ignorant criticism from two-fisted Americans who thirsted for revenge against Japan.

rationing

When the Japanese invasion of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies snapped America's lifeline of natural rubber, the government imposed a national speed limit and gasoline rationing in order to conserve rubber and built fifty-one synthetic-rubber plants. Rationing held down the consumption of critical goods such as meat and butter, though some "black marketeers" and "meatleggers" cheated the system.

Yalta Conference 1945 (see p 863)

A final fateful conference of the Big Three had taken place in Feb 1945 at Yalta. Stalin, Churchill, and the fast-failing FDR reached momentous agreements, after pledging their faith with vodka. Final plans were laid for smashing the buckling German lines and assigning occupation zones in Germany to the victorious powers. Stalin agreed that Poland, with revised boundaries, should have a representative government based of free elections -- a pledge he soon broke. Bulgaria and Romania were likewise to have free elections -- a promise also flouted. The Big Three further announced plans for fashioning a new international peacekeeping organization -- the United Nations. Of all the grave decisions at Yalta, the most controversial concerned the Far East. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, and Washington strategists expected frightful American casualties in the projected assault on Japan. From FDR's standpoint it seemed highly desirable that Stalin enter the Asian war, pin down Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea, and lighten American losses. Stalin agreed to attack Japan within three months after the collapse of Germany, and he later redeemed this pledge in full. In return, the Soviets were promised the southern half of Sakhalin Island, lost by Russia to Japan in 1905, and Japan's Kurile Islands as well. The Soviet Union was also granted control over the railroads of China's Manchuria and special privileges in the two key seaports of that area. add?

Einstein, nuclear bomb, Manhattan Project

America had a fantastic ace up its sleeve. Early in 1940, after Hitler's wanton assault in Poland, Roosevelt was persuaded by American and exiled scientists, notably German-born Albert Einstein, to push ahead with preparations for unlocking the secret of an atomic bomb. Congress, at FDR's blank-check request, blindly made available nearly $2 billion. Many military minds were skeptical of this "dammed professor's nonsense," but fears that the Germans might first acquire such an awesome weapon provided a powerful spur to action. As it happened, the war against Germany ended before the American weapon was ready. In a cruel twist of fate, Japan -- not Germany, the original target -- suffered the fate of being the first nation subjected to atomic bombardment. What was called the Manhattan Project pushed feverishly forward, as American know-how and industrial power were combined with the most advanced scientific knowledge. Much technical skill was provided by British and refugee scientists, who had fled to America to escape the torture chambers of the dictators. Finally, in the desert new Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the experts detonated the first awesome and devastating atomic device.

American advantages during WWII

America was fortunate in emerging with its mainland virtually unscathed. Though unprepared for it at the outset, the nation was better prepared than for the others, partly because it had begun to buckle on its armor about a year and a half before the war officially began. In the end the US showed itself to be resourceful, tough, adaptable -- able to accommodate itself to the tactics of an enemy who was relentless and ruthless. American military leadership proved to be of the highest order. A new crop of war heroes emerged in brilliant generals like Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Marshall and in an imaginative admirals like Nimitz and Spruance. President FDR and Prime Minister Churchill collaborated closely in planning strategy. Industrial leaders were no less skilled, for marvels of production were performed almost daily. Assembly lines proved as important as battle lines, and victory went again to the side with the most smokestacks. ADD?

Iwo Jima, Okinawa

America's steel vise was tightening mercilessly around Japan. The tiny island of Iwo Jima, needed as a haven for damaged American bombers returning from Japan, was captured in March 1945. This desperate twenty-five-day assault cost over four thousand American dead. Okinawa, a well-defended Japanese island, was next on the list: it was needed for closer bases from which to blast and burn enemy cities and industries. Fighting dragged on from April to June 1945. Japanese soldiers, fighting with incredible courage from their caves, finally sold Okinawa for 50,000 American casualties, while suffering far heavier losses themselves.

Bracero program

As the arsenal of democracy, the US exempted certain key categories of industrial and agricultural workers from the draft, in order to keep its might industrial and food-producing machines humming. But even with these exemptions, the draft left the nation's farms and factories so short of personnel that new workers had to be found. An agreement with Mexico in 1942 brought thousands of Mexican agricultural workers, called braceros, across the border to harvest the fruit and grain crops of the West. The bracero program outlived the war by some twenty years, becoming a fixed feature of the agricultural economy in many western states.

fall of the Philippines; Bataan Death March

Better news came from the Philippines, which succeeded dramatically in slowing down the mikado's warriors for five month. The Japanese promptly landed a small but effective army, and General MacArthur, an American commander, withdrew to a strong defensive position at Bataan, not far from Manila. There about 20,000 American troops, supported by a much larger force of ill-trained Filipinos, held off violent Japanese attacks until April 9, 1942. The defenders, reduced to eating mules and monkeys, heroically traded their lives for time in the face of hopeless odds. Before the inevitable American surrender, General MacArthur was ordered by Washington to depart secretly for Australia, there to head the resistance against the Japanese. After the battered remnants of his army had hoisted the white flag, they were treated with vicious cruelty in the infamous eighty-mile Bataan Death March to prisoner-of-war camps -- the first in a series of atrocities committed by both sides in the unusually savage Pacific war.

Rosie the Riveter and female employment

Even more dramatic was the march of women onto the factory floor. More than 6 million women took up jobs outside the home; over half of them had never before worked for wages. Many of them were mothers, and the government was obliged to set up some 3,000 day-care centers to care for "Rosie the Riveter's" children while she drilled the the fuselage of a heavy bomber or joined the links of a tank track. When the war ended, Rose and many of her sisters were in no hurry to put down their tools. They wanted to keep working and often did. The war thus foreshadowed an eventual revolution in the roles of women in American society. add?

A. Philip Randolph, Double-V campaign, NAACP

Explosive tensions between blacks and whites developed over employment, housing, and segregated facilities. Black leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a massive "Negro March on Washington" in 1941 to demand equal opportunities for blacks in war jobs and armed forces. Blacks were also drafted into the armed forces, though they were still generally assigned to service branches rather than combat units and subjected to petty degradations such as segregated blood banks for the wounded. But in general the war helped to embolden blacks in their long struggle for equality. They rallied behind the slogan "Double V" -- victory over the dictators abroad and over racism at home. Membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shot up almost to the half-million mark, and a new militant organization, the Congress of Racial Equality, was founding in 1942.

defense jobs move to the "Sunbelt"

FDR had called the South "the nation's number one economic problem" in 1938; when war came, he seized the opportunity to accelerate the region's economic development. The states of the old Confederacy received a disproportionate share of defense contracts, including nearly $6 billion of federally financed industrial facilities. Here were the seeds of the postwar blossoming of the "Sunbelt." ADD?

D-Day, June 6 1944, Normandy Invasion (France)

French Normandy, less heavily defended than other parts of the European coast, was pinpointed for the invasion assault. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the enormous operation, which involved some forty-six hundred vessels, unwound. Stiff resistance was encountered from the Germans, who had been misled by a feint into expecting the blow to fall farther north. The Allies had already achieved mastery of the air over France. They were thus able to block reinforcements by crippling the railroads, while worsening German fuel shortages by bombing gasoline-producing plants. The Allied beachhead, at first clung to with fingertips, was gradually enlarged, consolidated, and reinforced. After desperate fighting, the invaders finally broke out of the German iron ring that enclosed the Normandy landing zone.

fire-bomb raid over Tokyo

Giant bomber attacks were more spectacular. Launched from Saipan and other captured Mariana islands, they were reduced Japan's fragile cities to cinders. The massive fire-bomb raid on Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945, was annihilating. It destroyed over 250,000 buildings, gutted a quarter of the city, and killed an estimated 83,000 people -- a loss comparable to that later inflicted by the atomic bombs.

wolf packs

Hitler had entered the war with a formidable fleet of ultramodern submarines, which ultimately operated in "wolf packs" with frightful effect, esp. in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. During ten months of 1942 more than 500 merchant ships were reported lost -- 11 in June alone -- as ship destruction far outran construction.

Battle of the Bulge

Hitler staked everything on one last throw of his reserves. Secretly concentrating a powerful force, he hurled it, on Dec 16, 1944, against the thinly held American lines in the heavily befogged and snow-shrouded Ardennes Forest. His objective was the Belgian port of Antwerp, key to the Allied supply operation. Caught off guard, the outmanned Americans were driven back, creating a deep "bulge" in the Allied line. The ten-day penetration was finally halted after the 101st Airborne Division had stood firm at the vital bastion of Bastogne. The commander, Brigadier General A.C. McAuliffe, defiantly answered the German demand for surrender with one word: "Nuts." Reinforcements were rushed up, and the last-gasp Hilterian offensive was at length bloodily stemmed in the Battle of the Bulge.

Detroit race riots

In 1943 young "zoot-suit"-clad Mexicans and Mexican Americans in LA were viciously attacked by Anglo sailors who cruised the streets in taxicabs searching for victims. Order was restored only after the Mexican ambassador made an emotional plea, pointing out that such outbreaks were grist for Nazi propaganda mills. At almost the same time, an even more brutal race riot that killed twenty-five blacks and nine whites erupted in Detroit. ADD?

Stalingrad

In Sept 1942 the Russians stalled the German steamroller at rubble-strewn Stalingrad, graveyard of Hitler's hopes. More than a score of invading divisions, caught in an icy noose, later surrendered or were "mopped up." In Nov 1942 the resilient Russians unleashed a crushing counteroffensive, which was never seriously reversed. A year later Stalin had regained about two-thirds of the blood-soaked Soviet motherland wrested from him by the German invader.

Battle of Midway

Japan next undertook to seize Midway Island, more than a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu. From this strategic base, it could launch devastating assault on Pearl Harbor and perhaps force the weakened American Pacific fleet into destructive combat -- possibly even compel the US to negotiate a cease-fire in the Pacific. An epochal naval battle was fought near Midway on June 3-6, 1942. Admiral Chester Nimitz, a high-grade naval strategist, directed a smaller but skillfully maneuvered carrier force, under Admiral Raymond Spruance, against the powerful invading fleet. The fighting was all done by aircraft, and the Japanese broke off action after losing four vitally important carriers. Combined with the Battle of the Coral Sea, the US success at Midway halted Japan's juggernaut.

Soviets demand a "Second Front"

Many Americans, including FDR, were eager to begin a diversionary invasion of France in 1942 or 1943. They feared that the Soviets, unable to hold out forever against Germany, might make a separate peace as they had in 1918 and leave the Western Allies to face Hitler's fury alone. FDR rashly promised the Soviets in early 1942 that he would open a second front on the European continent by the end of the year -- a promise that proved utterly impossible to keep. British military planners, remembering their appalling losses in 1914-1918, were not enthusiastic about a frontal assault on German-held France. It might end in disaster. They preferred to attack Hitler's Fortress Europe through the "soft underbelly" of the Mediterranean. Faced with British boot-dragging and a woeful lack of resources, the Americans reluctantly agreed to postpone a massive invasion of Europe.

Henry J. Kaiser "Liberty" ships

Massive military orders -- over $100 bullion in 1942 -- almost instantly soaked up the idle industrial capacity of the still-lingering Great Depression. Miracle-man shipbuilder Henry Kaiser was dubbed "Sir Launchalot" for his prodigies of ship construction; one of his ships was fully assembled in fourteen days, complete with life jackets and coat hangers. ADD liberty ships.

carpet bombing of German cities

Meanwhile, the turning point of the land-air war against Hitler had come late in 1942. The British had launched a thousand-plane raid on Cologne in May. In August 1942 they were joined by the American air force and were cascading bombs on German cities. ADD

low unemployment; end of the Great Depression

Millions of men and women worked for Uncle Sam in the armed forces. Millions more worked for him in the defense industries, where their employers and unions were monitored by the FEPC and WLB, and their personal needs were cared for by government-sponsored housing projects, day-care facilities, and health plans. The flood of war dollars -- not the relatively modest rivulet of New Deal spending -- at last swept the plague of unemployment from the land. War, not enlightened social policy, cured the depression. As the postwar economy continued to depend dangerously on military spending for its health, many observers looked back to the years 1941-1945 as the origins of a "warfare-welfare state."

liberation of Paris

Most spectacular were the lunges across France by American armored divisions, brilliantly commanded by blustery and profane General George Patton. The retreat of the German defenders was hastened when an American-French force landed in Aug 1944 on the southern coast of France and swept northward. With the assistance of French "underground," Paris was liberated in Aug 1944, amid exuberant manifestations of joy and gratitude.

Battle of the Atlantic

Not until the spring of 1943 did the Allies clearly have the upper hand against the German U-boat. If they had not won the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain would have been forced under, and a second front could not have been launched from its island springboard. Victory over the undersea raiders was nerve-rackingly narrow. When the war ended, Hitler was about to mass-produce a fearsome new submarine -- on the could remain underwater indefinitely and cruise at seventeen knots when submerged.

V-E Day May 8, 1945

On May 7, 1945, what was left of the German government surrendered unconditionally. May 8 was officially proclaimed V-E (Victory in Europe) Day and was greeted with frenzied rejoicing in the Allied countries.

Roosevelt's death

President Roosevelt, while relaxing at Warm Springs, Georgia, suddenly died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. The crushing burden of twelve depression and war years in the White House had finally taken its toll. Knots of confused, leaderless citizens gathered to discuss the future anxiously, as a bewildered, unbriefed Vice President Truman took the helm.

Japan spreads in the Pacific

Simultaneously with the assault on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched widespread and uniformly successful attacks on various Far Eastern bastions. These included the American outposts of Guam, Wake, and the Philippines. In a dismaying short time, the Japanese invader seized not only the British-Chinese port of Hong Kong but also British Malaya, with its critically important supplies of rubber and tin. The overambitious soldiers of the emperor, plunging into the snake-infested jungles of Burma, cut the famed Burma Road. This was the route the US had been trucking a trickle of munitions to the armies of the Chinese generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), who was still resisting the Japanese invader of China. The Japanese lunged southward against the oil-rich Dutch East Indies next. The islands speedily fell to the assailants after the combined British, Australian, Dutch, and American naval and air forces had been smashed at an early date by their numerically superior foe.

Rommel "Desert Fox" in North Africa

The Germans under Marshal Erwin Rommel -- the "Desert Fox" -- had driven eastward across the hot sands of North Africa into Egypt, perilously close to the Suez Canal. A break-through would have spelled disaster for the Allies. But late in October 1942, British general Bernard Montgomery delivered a withering attack at El Alamein, west of Cairo. With the aid of several hundred hastily shipped American Sherman tanks, he speedily drove the enemy back to Tunisia, more than a thousand miles away.

island-hopping strategy

The US Navy, with marines and army divisions doing the meat-grinder fighting, had meanwhile been "leapfrogging" the Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. Old-fashioned strategy dictated that the American forces, as they drove toward Tokyo, should reduce the fortified Japanese outposts on their flank. This course would have taken many bloodstained months, for the holed-in defenders were prepared to die to the last man in their caves. The new strategy of island hopping called for bypassing some of the most heavily fortified Japanese posts, capturing nearby islands, setting up airfields on them, and then neutralizing the enemy bases through heavy bombing. Deprived of essential supplies from the homeland, Japan's outposts would slowly wither on the vine -- as they did.

"wildcat" strikes; War Labor Board

The War Labor Board imposed ceilings on wage increases. Labor unions, whose membership grew from about 10 million to more than 13 million workers during the war, fiercely resented the government-dictated wage ceilings. Despite the no-strike pledges of most of the major unions, a rash of labor walkouts plagued the war effort. Prominent among the strikers were the Uniter Mine Workers, who several times were called off the job by their crusty and iron-willed chieftain, John L. Lewis. Add?

Battle of the Coral Sea

The aggressive warriors from Japan pushed relentlessly southward. They invaded the island of New Guinea, north of Australia, and landed on the Solomon Islands, from which they threatened Australia itself. Their onrush was finally checked by a crucial naval battle fought in the Coral Sea, in May 1942. An American carrier task force, with Australian support, inflicted heavy losses on the victory-flush Japanese. For the first time in history, the fighting was all done by carrier-based aircraft, and neither fleet saw or fired a shot directly at the other.

WAAC, WAVES, SPARS, G.I.'s

The armed services enlisted nearly 15 million men in WWII and some 216,000 women, who were employed for noncombat duties. Best known of these "women in arms" were the WAACs (army), WAVES (navy), and SPARs (Coast Guard). As the draft net was tightened after Pearl Harbor, millions of young men were plucked from their homes and clothed in "GI" (government issue) outfits.

national debt, income tax, war bonds and other borrowing

The conflict was phenomenally expensive. The wartime bill amounted to more than $300 billion -- ten times the direct cost of WWI and twice as much as all previous federal spending since 1776. FDR would have preferred to follow a pay-as-you-go policy to finance the war, but the costs were simply too gigantic. The income-tax net was expanded to catch about four times as many people as before, and maximum tax rates rose as high as 90 percent. But despite such drastic measures, only about two-fifths of the war costs were paid from current revenues. The remainder was borrowed. The national debt skyrocketed from $49 billion in 1941 to $259 billion in 1945. When production finally slipped into high gear, the war was costing about $10 million an hour. This was the price of victory over such implacable enemies.

liberation of concentration camps

The conquering Americans were horrified to find blood-splattered and still-stinking concentration camps, where the German Nazis had engaged in scientific mass murder of "undesirables," including an estimated 6 million Jews. The Washington government had long been informed about Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Jews and had been reprehensibly slow to take steps against it. FDR's administration had bolted the door against large numbers of Jewish refugees, and his military commanders declined even to bomb the rail lines that carried the victims to the camps. But until the war's end, the full dimensions of the "Holocaust" had not been known. When the details were revealed, the whole world was aghast.

African-American "Great Migration" north (also page 892)

The northward migration of African Americans accelerated after the war, thanks to the advent of the mechanical cotton picker -- an invention whose impact rivaled that of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Introduced in 1944, this new mechanical marvel did the work of fifty people at about one-eighth the cost. Overnight, the Cotton South's historic need for cheap labor disappeared, so some 5 million black tenant farmers and sharecroppers headed north in the three decades after the war. Theirs was one of the great migrations in American history, comparable to the immigrant floods from Ireland, Italy, and Poland. By 1970 half of all blacks lived outside the South, and urban had become almost a synonym for black. ADD PAGE 892

Roosevelt's fourth election 1944, Harry S. Truman

The presidential campaign of 1944, which was bound to divert energy from the war program, came most awkwardly as the awful conflict roared to its climax. But the normal electoral processes continued to function, despite the loose talk of suspending them "for the duration." Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, popular vote-getting governor of NY. FDR, aging under the strain, was the "indispensable man" of the Democrats. No other major figure was available, and the war was apparently grinding to its finale. He was nominated at Chicago on the first ballot by acclamation. But in a sense he was the "forgotten man" of the convention, for in view of his age, an unusual amount of attention was focused on the vice presidency. With FDR's blessing, vice-presidential nomination finally went to smiling and self-assured Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. Hitherto inconspicuous, he had recently attained national visibility as the efficient chairman of a Senate committee conducting an investigation of wasteful war expenditures. FDR won with 432 electoral votes to 99, primarily because the war was going well. A winning pitcher is not ordinarily pulled from the game. Foreign policy was a decisive factor with untold thousands of voters, who concluded that FDR's experienced hand was needed in fashioning a future organization for world peace. add?

radar

The tide of subsea battle turned with agonizing slowness. Old techniques, such as escorting convoys of merchant vessels and dropping depth bombs from destroyers, were strengthened by air patrol, the newly invented technology of radar, and teh bombing of submarine bases.

Hitler suicide

The vengeful Soviets, clawing their way forward from the east, reached Berlin in April 1945. After desperate house-to-house fighting, followed by an orgy of pillage and rape, they captured the bomb-shattered city. Adolf Hitler, after a hasty marriage to his mistress, committed suicide in an underground bunker on April 30, 1945.

end of the New Deal era

The war prompted other changes in the American mood. Many programs of the once-popular New Deal -- including that Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration -- were wiped out by the conservative Congress elected in 1942. FDR declared in 1943 that "Dr. New Deal" was going into retirement, to be replaced by "Dr. Win-the-War." His announcement acknowledged not only the urgency of the war effort but the power of the revitalized conservative forces in the country. The era of the New Deal reform was over.

Korematsu v. U.S. and later reparations

The wartime Supreme Court in 1944 upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese relocation in Korematsu vs. US. But more than four decades later, in 1988, the US government officially apologized for its actions and approved the payment of reparations of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

Japanese-Americans; internment camps

There was virtually no government witch-hunting of minority groups during WWII, as had happened in WWI. A painful exception was the plight of some 110,000 Japanese Americans, concentrated on the Pacific Coast. The Washington top command, fearing that they might act as saboteurs for Japan in case of invasion, forcibly herded them together in concentration camps, though about two-thirds of them were American-born US citizens. This brutal precaution was both unnecessary and unfair, as the loyalty and combat record of Japanese Americans proved to be admirable. But a wave of post-Pearl Harbor hysteria, backed by the long historical swell of anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast, temporarily robbed many Americans of their good sense -- and their sense of justice. The internment camps derived these uprooted Americans of dignity and basic rights; the internees also lost hundreds of millions of dollars in property and foregone earnings.

Office of Price Administration

These wonders of production also brought economic strains. Full employment and scarce consumer goods fueled a sharp inflationary surge in 1942. The Office of Price Administration eventually brought ascending prices under control with extensive regulations.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki

With Japan still refusing to surrender, the Potsdam threat was fulfilled. On Aug 6, 1945, a lone American bomber dropped one atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. In a blinding flash of death, followed by a funnel-shaped cloud, about 180,000 people were left killed, wounded, or missing. Some 70,000 of them died instantaneously. Sixty thousand more soon perished from burns and radiation disease. Fanatically resisting Japanese, though facing atomization, still did not surrender. American aviators, on Aug 9, dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The explosion took a horrible toll of about 80,000 people killed or missing.