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A Native American Boy Plays at War

C H A P T E R 25World War II

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N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1934, grew up onNavajo,Apache, and Pueblo reservations. He was only 11 years old when World WarII ended, yet the war had changed his life. Shortly after the United States entered thewar, Momaday’s parents moved to New Mexico, where his father got a job with an oilcompany and his mother worked in the civilian personnel office at an army air force

American Stories

This World War II poster depicts the many nations united in the fight against the Axis powers.In reality there were often disagreements. Notice that to the right, the American sailor ismarching next to Chinese and Soviet soldiers. Within a few years after victory, they would beenemies. (University of Georgia Libraries, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

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base. Like many couples, they had struggled through the hard times of the Depression.The war meant jobs.

Momaday’s best friend was Billy Don Johnson, a “reddish, robust boy of great goodhumor and intense loyalty.” Together they played war, digging trenches and draggingthemselves through imaginary minefields. They hurled grenades and fired endlessrounds from their imaginary machine guns, pausing only to drink Kool-Aid from theircanteens.At school, they were taught history and math and also how to hate the enemyand be proud of America. They recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and sang“God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Likemost Americans, they believed that World War II was a good war fought against evil em-pires.The United States was always right, the enemy always wrong. It was an attitudethat would influence Momaday and his generation for the rest of their lives.

Momaday’s only difficulty was that his Native American face was often mistaken forthat of an Asian.Almost every day on the playground, someone would yell,“Hi ya, Jap,”and a fight was on. Billy Don always came to his friend’s defense, but it was discon-certing to be taken for the enemy. His father read old Kiowa tales to Momaday, whowas proud to be an Indian but prouder still to be an American. On Saturday, he and hisfriends would go to the local theater to cheer as they watched a Japanese Zero or aGerman ME-109 go down in flames.They pretended that they were P-40 pilots.“Thewhole field of vision shuddered with our fire: the 50-caliber tracers curved out, fixingbrilliant arcs upon the span, and struck; then there was a black burst of smoke, andthe target went spinning down to death.”

Near the end of the war, his family moved again, as so many families did, so that hisfather might get a better job.This time they lived right next door to an air force base,and Momaday fell in love with the B-17 “Flying Fortress,” the bomber that militarystrategists thought would win the war in the Pacific and in Europe. He felt a real senseof resentment and loss when the B-17 was replaced by the larger but not nearly soglamorous B-29.

Looking back on his early years, Momaday reflected on the importance of the warin his growing up. “I see now that one experiences easily the ordinary things of life,”he decided,“the things which cast familiar shadows upon the sheer, transparent panelsof time, and he perceives his experience in the only way he can, according to his age.”Though Momaday’s life during the war differed from the lives of boys old enough tojoin the armed forces, the war was no less real for him.Though his youth was affectedby the fact that he was male, was an Indian, and lived in the Southwest, the most im-portant influence was that he was an American growing up during the war. Ironically,his parents had been made U.S. citizens by an act of Congress in 1924, but like all Na-tive Americans living in Arizona and New Mexico, they were denied the right to voteby state law.

The Momadays fared better than most Native Americans, who found prejudiceagainst them undiminished and jobs, even in wartime, hard to find. Native Americanservicemen returning from the war discovered that they were still treated like “Indi-ans.” They were prohibited from buying liquor in many states, and those who returnedto the reservations learned that they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits. Still, Mo-maday thought of himself not so much as an Indian as an American, and that too was aproduct of his generation. But as he grew to maturity, he became a successful writerand spokesman for his people. In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel HouseMade of Dawn. He also recorded his experiences and memories in a book called TheNames (1976). In his writing, he stresses the Native American’s close identificationwith the land.Writing about his grandmother, he says:“The immense landscape of thecontinental interior lay like memory in her blood.”

Momaday was just a child during World War II, but it had a profound effect on

his life as it did on all of those who remembered the conflict. His generation

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Twisting Road to WarForeign Policy in a Global AgeEurope on the Brink of WarEthiopia and SpainWar in EuropeThe Election of 1940Lend-LeaseThe Path to Pearl Harbor

The Home FrontMobilizing for WarPatriotic FervorInternment of Japanese AmericansAsian,African, and Hispanic

Americans at War

Social Impact of the WarWartime OpportunitiesWomen Workers for VictoryEntertaining the PeopleReligion in Time of WarThe GIs’ WarWomen in Uniform

A War of Diplomats andGeneralsWar AimsA Year of DisasterA Strategy for Ending the WarThe Invasion of FranceThe Politics of VictoryThe Big Three at YaltaThe Atomic Age Begins

Conclusion: Peace, Prosperity,and InternationalResponsibilities

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828 PART 5 A Modernizing People, 1900–1945

would judge the global events of the rest of the

twentieth century in terms of their sense of patriotism

and valor acquired during the war. Although no

American cities were bombed and the mainland was

never invaded, World War II influenced almost every

aspect of American life. The war ended the Depression.

Industrial jobs were plentiful, and even though

prejudice and discrimination did not disappear, blacks,

Hispanics, women, and other minorities had new

opportunities. Like World War I, the second war

expanded cooperation between government and

industry and increased the influence of government in

all areas of American life. The war also ended the last

remnants of American isolationism. The United States

emerged from the war in 1945 as the most powerful

and prosperous nation in the world.

This chapter traces the gradual involvement of the

United States in the international events during the

1930s that finally led to participation in the most devas-

tating war the world had seen. It recounts the diplo-

matic and military struggles of the war and the search

for a secure peace. It also seeks to explain the impact of

the war on ordinary people and on American attitudes

about the world, as well as its effect on patriotism and

the American way of life. Even those, like N. Scott

Momaday, who grew up during the war and were too

young to fight, were influenced by the war—and the

sense of moral certainty that the war inspired—for the

rest of their lives. The war brought prosperity to some as

it brought death to others. It left the American people

the most affluent in the world and the United States the

most powerful nation.




THE TWISTING ROAD TO WARLooking back on the events between 1933 and1941 that eventually led to American involvementin World War II, it is easy either to be critical of de-cisions made or actions not taken or to see every-thing that happened during the period as in-evitable. Historical events are never inevitable,and leaders who must make decisions never havethe advantage of retrospective vision; they have todeal with situations as they find them, and theynever have all the facts.

Foreign Policy in a Global AgeIn March 1933, Roosevelt faced not only over-whelming domestic difficulties but also an interna-tional crisis. The worldwide depression had causednear financial disaster in Europe. Germany had de-faulted on its reparations installments, and mostEuropean countries were unable to keep up thepayments on their debts to the United States.

Roosevelt had no master plan in foreign policy,just as he had none in the domestic sphere. In thefirst days of his administration, he gave conflictingsignals as he groped to respond to the interna-tional situation. At first, it seemed that the presi-dent would cooperate in some kind of interna-tional economic agreement on tariffs andcurrency. But then he undercut the American dele-gation in London by refusing to go along with anyinternational agreement. Solving the American do-mestic economic crisis seemed more important to

Roosevelt in 1933 than international economic cooperation. His actions signaled a decision to goit alone in foreign policy in the 1930s.

Roosevelt did, however, alter some of the foreignpolicy decisions of previous administrations. Herecognized the Soviet government, hoping to gain amarket for surplus American grain. Although the ex-pected trade bonanza never materialized, the SovietUnion agreed to pay the old debts and to extendrights to American citizens living in the SovietUnion. Diplomatic recognition opened communi-cations between the two emerging world powers.

The United States continued to support dicta-tors, especially in Central America, because theypromised to promote stability and preserve Ameri-can economic interests. But Roosevelt completedthe removal of American military forces from Haitiand Nicaragua in 1934, and in a series of pan-Amer-ican conferences, he joined in pledging that nocountry in the hemisphere would intervene in the“internal or external affairs” of any other.

The first test case came in Cuba, where a revolu-tion threatened American investments of more than$1 billion. But the United States did not send troops.Instead, Roosevelt dispatched special envoys towork out a conciliatory agreement with the revolu-tionary government. A short time later, when a coupled by Fulgencio Batista overthrew the revolutionarygovernment, the United States not only recognizedthe Batista government but also offered a large loanand agreed to abrogate the Platt Amendment(which made Cuba a virtual protectorate of theUnited States) in return for the rights to the Guan-tanamo naval base on the island.



CHAPTER 25 World War II 829

The Trade Agreements Act of 1934 gave the presi-dent power to lower tariff rates by as much as 50percent. Using this act, the Roosevelt administra-tion negotiated a series of agreements that im-proved trade. By 1935, half of American cotton ex-ports and a large proportion of other products weregoing to Latin America. The Good Neighbor policywas good business for the United States, but in-creased trade did not solve the economic problemsfor either the United States or Latin America.

Another test of Latin American policy came in1938 when Mexico nationalized the property of anumber of American oil companies. Instead of in-tervening, as many businessmen urged, the StateDepartment patiently worked out an agreementthat included some compensation for the compa-nies. The American government might have acteddifferently, however, if the threat of war in Europe in1938 had not suggested that all the Western Hemi-sphere nations would have to cooperate to resist thegrowing power of Germany and Italy. At a pan-American conference held that year, the UnitedStates and most Latin American countries agreed toresist all foreign intervention in the hemisphere.

Europe on the Brink of WarAround the time that Roosevelt was first electedpresident, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.Born in Austria in 1889, Hitler had served as a cor-poral in the German army during World War I. Likemany other Germans, he was angered by the Treatyof Versailles, and he blamed Germany’s defeat onthe Communists and the Jews. World War II in Eu-rope was caused by World War I and by Germany’sattempt to reverse the peace settlement.

Hitler became the leader of the National Socialistparty of the German workers (Nazi is short for theGerman National Sozialist), and in 1923, after lead-ing an unsuccessful coup, he was sentenced to

prison. While in jail he wrote Mein Kampf(“My Struggle”), a long, rambling bookspelling out his theories of racial purity,his hopes for Germany, and his ven-omous hatred of the Jews. After his re-lease from prison, Hitler’s following grew.He had a charismatic style and a plan. OnJanuary 30, 1933, he became chancellor

of Germany, and within months the Reichstag (par-liament) suspended the constitution, making HitlerFuehrer (leader) and dictator. His Fascist regimeconcentrated political and economic power in acentralized state. He intended to conquer Europeand to make the German Third Reich (empire) thecenter of a new civilization.

Under Hitler’s leadership, Germany prosperedand recovered from the Depression faster than anyother country except Japan. Economic re-covery was caused in part by militaryspending, but Hitler also provided moneyfor public works, autobahns (superhigh-ways), and the development of the Volks-wagen (“people’s car”). He raised thequality of workers’ lives and provided freerecreational facilities and better healthcare. Many Germans were so grateful for restoredprosperity and national pride that they failed to no-tice the dark side of his regime, which included con-centration camps and virulent anti-Semitism.

In 1934, Hitler announced a program of Germanrearmament, violating the Versailles Treaty of 1919.Meanwhile, in Italy, the Fascist dictator Benito Mus-solini was building a powerful military force; in1934, he threatened to invade the East African coun-try of Ethiopia. These ominous rumblings in Europefrightened Americans at the very time they were re-examining American entry into the Great War andvowing that they would never again get involved in aEuropean conflict.

Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, who hadhelped expose the Teapot Dome scandal in 1924,turned to an investigation of the connection be-tween corporate profits and American participationin World War I. His committee’s public hearings re-vealed that many American businessmen had closerelationships with the War Department. Businessesproducing war materials had made huge profits.Though the committee failed to prove a conspiracy,it was easy to conclude that the United States hadbeen tricked into going to war by the people whoprofited the most from it.

On many college campuses, students demon-strated against war. On April 13, 1934, a day of protestaround the country, students at Smith College placedwhite crosses on the campus as a memorial to thepeople killed in the Great War and those who woulddie in the next one. The next year, even more stu-dents went on strike for a day. Students joined orga-nizations such as Veterans of Future Wars and FutureGold Star Mothers and protested the presence of theReserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) on theircampuses. One college president, who supported thepeace movement, announced, “We will be calledcowards . . . [but] I say that war must be banishedfrom civilized society if democratic civilization andculture are to be perpetuated.” Not all students sup-ported the peace movement, but in the mid-1930s,many young people as well as adults joined peace so-cieties such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation andthe Women’s International League for Peace and

GermanPainting

Idealizing Hitler

Hitler atNuremberg

Rally, ca. 1928



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Freedom. They were determined never again to sup-port a foreign war. But in Europe, Asia, and Africa,there were already rumblings of another great inter-national conflict.

Ethiopia and SpainIn May 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia after rejectingthe League of Nations’ offer to mediate the difficul-ties between the two countries. Italian dive bombersand machine guns made quick work of the smalland poorly equipped Ethiopian army. The Ethiopianwar, remote as it seemed, frightened Congress,which passed a Neutrality Act authorizing the presi-dent to prohibit all arms shipments to nations atwar and to advise all U.S. citizens not to travel onbelligerents’ ships except at their own risk. Remem-bering the process that had led the United Statesinto World War I, Congress was determined that itwould not happen again.

The League of Nations condemned Italy as theaggressor in the war, and Great Britain moved itsfleet to the Mediterranean. Roosevelt used the au-thority of the Neutrality Act of 1935 to impose anarms embargo. But, in the midst of depression, nei-ther Britain nor the United States wanted to stopshipments of oil to Italy or to commit its own sol-diers to the fight. The embargo on arms had littleimpact on Italy, but it was disastrous for Ethiopia.

Many African Americans were disappointed and an-gry as they watched Europe and the United Statesfail to intervene to stop the invasion of Ethiopia,which for many symbolized black African freedomand independence.

“We shun political commitments which mightentangle us in foreign war,” Roosevelt announced in1936. “We are not isolationist except in so far as weseek to isolate ourselves completely from war.” Butisolation became more difficult when a civil warbroke out in Spain in 1936. General FranciscoFranco, supported by the Catholic church and largelandowners, revolted against the republican govern-ment. Mussolini had joined forces with Germany toform the Rome–Berlin Axis in 1936, and Germanyand Italy aided Franco, sending planes and otherweapons, while the Soviet Union came to the sup-port of the anti-Franco Loyalists. On April 26, 1937,German airplanes bombed and machine-gunnedthe historic Basque capital city of Guernica, killingover 1,600 people. It was a preview of the massivedestruction of cities and the death of hundreds ofthousands of civilians during World War II.

The war in Spain polarized the United States.Most Catholics and many anti-Communists sidedwith Franco. But many American radicals, eventhose opposed to all war a few months before, foundthe Loyalist cause worth fighting and dying for.More than 3,000 Americans joined the Abraham

Picasso’s Guernica On April 26, 1937, German airplanes supporting Franco’s soldiers bombed andmachine-gunned the historic Basque capital city of Guernica, killing more than 1,600 people and foreshadowingthe massive destruction of civilians during World War II. Pablo Picasso, probably the most famous artist of thetwentieth century, painted this black-and-white mural to denounce the attack. After the defeat of the Republi-can forces in Spain, Picasso refused to allow the painting to be displayed in the country. Only in 1975, after theend of the Franco regime, did the painting return to Madrid. What kind of symbols and images can you find inthe painting? (Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Art Resource, NY/© 2007 The Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists RightsSociety [ARS], New York)




Lincoln Brigade, and hundreds were killed fightingfascism in Spain. “If this were a Spanish matter, I’dlet it alone,” Sam Levenger, a student at Ohio State,wrote. “But the rebellion would not last a week if itweren’t for the Germans and the Italians. And ifHitler and Mussolini can send troops to Spain to at-tack the government elected by the people, whycan’t they do so in France? And after France?” Lev-enger was killed in Spain in 1937 at age 20.

Not everyone agreed that the moral issues inSpain were worth dying for. The U.S. government

tried to stay neutral and to ship arms andequipment to neither side. While theUnited States, along with Britain andFrance, carefully protected its neutrality,Franco consolidated his dictatorship withthe active aid of Germany and Italy.Meanwhile, Congress in 1937 passed an-other Neutrality Act, this time making it

illegal for American citizens to travel on belliger-ents’ ships. The act extended the embargo on armsand made even nonmilitary items available to bel-ligerents only on a cash-and-carry basis.

In a variety of ways, the United States tried toavoid repeating the mistakes that had led it intoWorld War I. Unfortunately, World War II, whichmoved closer each day, would be a different kind ofwar, and the lessons of the first war would be of lit-tle use.

War in EuropeRoosevelt was by no means an isolationist, but hewanted to keep the United States out of the Euro-pean conflagration. When he announced, “I hatewar,” he was expressing a deep personal belief thatwars solve few problems. Unlike his distant cousinTheodore Roosevelt, he did not view war as a test ofone’s manhood. In foreign policy, just as in domesticaffairs, FDR responded to events, but he moved re-luctantly toward more and more American involve-ment in the war.

In March 1938, Hitler’s Germany annexed Aus-tria and then in September, as a result of the Mu-nich Conference, occupied the Sudetenland, a partof Czechoslovakia. Within six months, Hitler’sarmies had overrun the rest of Czechoslovakia. Lit-tle protest came from the United States. MostAmericans sympathized with the victims of Hitler’saggression, and at first, almost everyone hopedthat compromises could be worked out and thatEurope could settle its own problems. But that no-tion was destroyed on August 23, 1939, by the newsof a Nazi–Soviet pact. Fascism and communismwere political philosophies supposedly in deadly

opposition. Many Americans had secretly hopedthat Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would fight itout, neutralizing each other. Now they had signeda nonaggression pact. A week later, Hitler’s armyattacked Poland, marking the official beginning ofWorld War II. Britain and France honored theirtreaties and came to Poland’s defense. “This nationwill remain a neutral nation,” Roosevelt an-nounced, “but I cannot ask that every American re-main neutral in thought as well.”

Roosevelt asked for a repeal of the embargo sec-tion of the Neutrality Act and for the approval of thesale of arms on a cash-and-carry basis to Franceand Britain. The United States would helpthe countries struggling against Hitler,but not at the risk of entering the war oreven at the threat of disrupting the civil-ian economy. Yet Roosevelt did take somesecret risks. In August 1939, Albert Ein-stein, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Ger-many, and other distinguished scientistswarned the president that German re-searchers were at work on an atomicbomb. Fearing the consequences of a powerful newweapon in Hitler’s hands, Roosevelt authorizedfunds for a top-secret project to build an Americanbomb first. Only a few advisers and key members ofCongress knew of the project, which was officiallyorganized in 1941 and would ultimately change thecourse of human history.

The war in Poland ended quickly. With Germanyattacking from the west and the Soviet Union fromthe east, the Poles were overwhelmed in a month.The fall of Poland in September 1939 brought a lullin the fighting. A number of Americans, who fearedcommunist Russia more than fascist Germany,urged the United States to take the lead in negotiat-ing a peace settlement that would recognize theGerman and Russian occupation of Poland. TheBritish and French, however, were not interested insuch a solution, and neither was Roosevelt.

Great Britain sent several divisions to aid theFrench against the expected German attack, but formonths nothing happened. This interlude, some-times called the “phony war,” dramatically ended onApril 9, 1940, when Germany attacked Norway andDenmark with a furious air and sea assault. A fewweeks later, using armored vehicles supported bymassive air strikes, the German Blitzkrieg (“light-ning war”) swept through Belgium, Luxembourg,and the Netherlands. A week later, the Germansstormed into France.

The famed Maginot line, a series of fortificationsdesigned to repulse a German invasion, was useless,as German mechanized forces swept around the

Hitler andMussolini in

Munich, 1940Albert Einstein,

Letter toPresidentRoosevelt(1939)






end of the line and attacked from the rear. TheFrench guns, solidly fixed in concrete and pointingtoward Germany, were never fired. France surren-dered in June as the British army fled back acrossthe English Channel from Dunkirk.

How should the United States respond to the newand desperate situation in Europe? William Allen

White, journalist and editor, and otherconcerned Americans organized theCommittee to Defend America by Aidingthe Allies, but others, including CharlesLindbergh, the hero of the 1920s, sup-ported a group called America First. Theyargued that the United States should for-get about England and concentrate ondefending America. Roosevelt steered a

cautious course. He approved the shipment toBritain of 50 overage American destroyers. In return,the United States received the right to establishnaval and air bases on British territory from New-foundland to Bermuda and British Guiana.

Winston Churchill, prime minister of GreatBritain, asked for much more, but Roosevelt hesi-tated. In July 1940, the president did sign a measureauthorizing $4 billion to increase the number ofAmerican naval warships. In September, Congresspassed the Selective Service Act, which provided forthe first peacetime draft in the history of the UnitedStates. More than a million men were to serve in thearmy for one year, but only in the Western Hemi-sphere. As the war in Europe reached a crisis in thefall of 1940, the American people were still unde-cided about the proper response.

The Election of 1940Part of Roosevelt’s reluctance to aid Great Britainmore energetically came from his genuine desire tokeep the United States out of the war, but it was alsorelated to the presidential campaign waged duringthe crisis months of the summer and fall of 1940.Roosevelt broke a long tradition by seeking a thirdterm. He marked the increasing support he wasdrawing from the liberal wing of the Democraticparty by selecting liberal farm economist HenryWallace of Iowa as his running mate.

The Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie of In-diana. Despite his big-business ties, Willkie approvedof most New Deal legislation and supported aid toGreat Britain. Energetic and attractive, Willkie wasthe most persuasive and exciting Republican candi-date since Theodore Roosevelt, and he appealed tomany people who distrusted or disliked Roosevelt.Yet in an atmosphere of international crisis, mostvoters chose to stay with Roosevelt. He won, 27 mil-lion to 22 million, and carried 38 of 48 states.

Lend-LeaseAfter the election, Roosevelt invented a scheme forsending aid to Britain without demanding pay-ment. He called it “lend-lease.” He compared thesituation to lending a garden hose to a neighborwhose house was on fire. Senator Robert Taft ofOhio, however, thought the idea of lending militaryequipment and expecting it back was absurd. Hedecided it was more like lending chewing gum to afriend: “Once it had been used you did not want itback.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler, an extreme iso-lationist, branded lend-lease “Roosevelt’s triple Aforeign policy” (after the Agricultural AdjustmentAct) because it was designed to “plow under everyfourth American boy.”

The Lend-Lease Act, which Congress passed inMarch 1941, destroyed the fiction of neutrality. Bythat time, German submarines were sinking half a

CharlesLindbergh,

Radio Address(1941)

Bil

lio

ns

of

do

llar

s

280

260

240

220

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

Year

National debt Military expenditures

1929

1927

1931

1933

1935

1937

1939

1941

1943

1945

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Military Expenditures and the National Debt,1929–1945

Increased taxes, the sale of war bonds, and price con-trols kept inflation under relative control during the war.Still, the war industry not only stimulated the economybut also increased the national debt. In what other waysdo wars influence the economy?

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million tons of shipping each month in the Atlantic.In June, Roosevelt proclaimed a national emergencyand ordered the closing of German and Italian con-sulates in the United States. On June 22, Germanysuddenly attacked the Soviet Union. It was one ofHitler’s biggest blunders of the war, forcing hisarmies to fight on two fronts.

When Roosevelt extended lend-lease aid to Rus-sia in November 1941, most Americans accepted theSoviet Union as a friend and ally. By the autumn of1941, the United States was virtually at war withGermany in the Atlantic. On September 11, Roo-sevelt issued a “shoot on sight” order for all Ameri-can ships operating in the Atlantic, and on October30, a German submarine sank an American de-stroyer off the coast of Newfoundland. The war inthe Atlantic, however, was undeclared. Eventually,the sinking of enough American ships or anothercrisis would probably have provided the excuse for aformal declaration of war against Germany. It wasnot Germany, however, but Japan that catapultedthe United States into World War II.

The Path to Pearl HarborJapan, controlled by ambitious military leaders, wasthe aggressor in the Far East as Hitler’s Germany wasin Europe. Intent on becoming a major world poweryet desperately needing natural resources, espe-cially oil, Japan was willing to risk war with China,the Soviet Union, and even the United States to get

those resources. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931and launched an all-out assault on China in 1937.This was the beginning of what the Japanese wouldcall “the Pacific War.” The Japanese leaders assumedthat at some point the United States would go to warif Japan tried to take the Philippines, but the Japan-ese attempted to delay that moment as long as pos-sible by diplomatic means. The United States feareda two-front war and was willing to delay the con-frontation with Japan until it had dealt with the Ger-man threat. Thus, between 1938 and 1941, theUnited States and Japan engaged in a kind of diplo-matic shadow boxing.

The United States began to apply economic pres-sure in July 1939, giving Japan the required sixmonths’ notice regarding cancellation of the 1911commercial agreement between the two countries.In September 1940, the Roosevelt administration for-bade the shipment of airplane fuel and scrap metal toJapan. Other items were added to the embargo untilby the spring of 1941, the United States allowed onlyoil to be shipped to Japan, hoping that the threat ofcutting off this important resource would lead to ne-gotiations and avert a crisis. Japan did open negotia-tions with the United States, but there was little todiscuss. Japan would not withdraw from China as theUnited States demanded. Indeed, Japan, taking ad-vantage of the situation in Europe, occupied FrenchIndochina in 1940 and 1941. In July 1941, Rooseveltfroze all Japanese assets in the United States, effec-tively embargoing trade with Japan.

Pearl Harbor An ex-ploding American destroyerat Pearl Harbor, December7, 1941. The attack on PearlHarbor united the countryand came to symbolizeJapanese treachery andAmerican lack of prepared-ness. Photographs such asthis were published through-out the war to inspire Amer-icans to work harder. DoesPearl Harbor still have mean-ing in our society today? (©SuperStock, Inc./SuperStock)




Roosevelt had an advantage in the negotiationswith Japan, for the United States had broken theJapanese secret diplomatic code. But Japanese in-tentions were hard to decipher from the interceptedmessages. The American leaders knew that Japanplanned to attack, but they didn’t know where. InSeptember 1941, the Japanese decided to strikesometime after November unless the United Statesoffered real concessions. The strike came not in thePhilippines but at Pearl Harbor, the main AmericanPacific naval base, in Hawaii.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japaneseairplanes launched from aircraft carriers attackedthe U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack de-stroyed or disabled 19 ships (including 5 battle-ships) and 150 planes and killed 2,335 soldiers andsailors and 68 civilians. On the same day, the Japan-ese launched attacks on the Philippines, Guam, andthe Midway Islands, as well as on the Britishcolonies of Hong Kong and Malaya. The next day,with only one dissenting vote, Congress declaredwar on Japan.

Corporal John J. “Ted” Kohl, a 25-year-old fromSpringfield, Ohio, was standing guard that Sundaymorning near an ammunition warehouse at HickamField, near Pearl Harbor. He had joined the armytwo years before when his marriage failed and hecould not find work. A Japanese bomb hit nearby,and Ted Kohl blew up with the warehouse. It wasnot until Wednesday evening, December 10, that thetelegram arrived in Springfield. “The Secretary ofWar desires to express his deep regrets that your sonCpl. John J. Kohl was killed in action in defense ofhis country.” There would be hundreds of thou-sands of telegrams and even more tears before thewar was over.

December 7, 1941, was a date that would “live ininfamy,” in the words of Franklin Roosevelt. It wasalso a day that would have far-reaching implica-tions for American foreign policy and for Americanattitudes toward the world. The surprise attackunited the country as nothing else could have. Evenisolationists and America First advocates quicklyrallied behind the war effort.

After the shock and anger subsided, Americanssearched for a villain. Someone must have blun-dered, someone must have betrayed the country tohave allowed the “inferior” Japanese to have carriedout such a successful and devastating attack. Amyth persists to this day that the villain was Roo-sevelt, who, the story goes, knew of the Japanese at-tack but failed to warn the military commanders sothat the American people might unite behind thewar effort against Germany. But Roosevelt did notknow. There was no specific warning that the attack

was coming against Pearl Harbor, and the Americanability to read the Japanese coded messages was ofno help because the fleet kept radio silence.

The irony was that the Americans, partly becauseof racial prejudice against the Japanese, underesti-mated their ability. They ignored many warning sig-nals because they did not believe that the Japanesecould launch an attack on a target as far away asHawaii. Most of the experts, including Roosevelt, ex-pected the Japanese to attack the Philippines or per-haps Thailand. Many people blundered, but therewas no conspiracy.

Even more important in the long run than theway the attack on Pearl Harbor united the Americanpeople was its effect on a generation of military andpolitical leaders. Pearl Harbor became the symbol ofunpreparedness. For a generation that experiencedthe anger and frustration of the attack on Pearl Har-bor by an unscrupulous enemy, the lesson was to beprepared and ready to stop an aggressor before ithad a chance to strike. The smoldering remains ofthe sinking battleships at Pearl Harbor on the morn-ing of December 7, 1941, and the history lessonlearned there would influence American policy notonly during World War II but also in Korea, Vietnam,and the international confrontations thereafter.




THE HOME FRONTToo often wars are described in terms of presidentsand generals, emperors and kings, in terms of grandstrategy and elaborate campaigns. But wars affect thelives of all people—the soldiers who fight and thewomen and children and men who stay home. WorldWar II especially had an impact on all aspects of soci-ety—the economy, the movies and radio, even atti-tudes toward women and blacks. For many people,the war represented opportunity and the end of theDepression. For others, the excitement of farawayplaces meant that they could never return homeagain. For still others, the war left lasting scars.

Mobilizing for WarConverting American industry to war productionwas a complex task. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roo-sevelt created the War Production Board (WPB) andappointed Donald Nelson, executive vice presidentof Sears, Roebuck, to mobilize the nation’s re-sources for an all-out war effort. The WPB offeredbusinesses cost-plus contracts, guaranteeing afixed and generous profit. Often the governmentalso financed new plants and equipment. Secretaryof War Henry Stimson explained: “If you . . . go to




war . . . in a capitalist country, you have to let busi-ness make money out of the process or businesswon’t work.”

Roosevelt set up the Office of Scientific Researchand Development (OSRD) to perfect new weaponsand other products. The most important science andtechnology project carried on during the war was thedevelopment of the atomic bomb, but OSRD also im-proved radar and developed high-altitude bombsights, jet engines, pressurized cabins for airplanes,and penicillin and other miracle drugs. Scientists un-der contract to the government also developed DDTand other effective insecticides, but none of the sci-entists recognized the dangerous side effects thatDDT would have on the environment. The wartimecollaboration of science, industry, and the govern-ment would lay the groundwork for massive projectsin the postwar years.

The Roosevelt administration tried hard to gainthe cooperation of businesspeople, many of themalienated by New Deal policies. The president ap-pointed many business leaders to key positions andabandoned antitrust actions in any industry that wasremotely related to the war effort. The policy worked.Industrial production and net corporate profitsnearly doubled during the war. Large commercial

farmers also profited. The war years accelerated themechanization of the farm and dramatically in-creased the use of fertilizer, but between 1940 and1945 the farm population declined by 17 percent.

Many government agencies in addition to the WarProduction Board helped monitor the war effort. TheOffice of Price Administration (OPA) set prices andrationed products—and because it affected so manylives so disagreeably, many Americans regarded it asoppressive. The National War Labor Board (NWLB)had the authority to set wages and hours and to regu-late working conditions, and it could seize factorieswhose owners refused to cooperate.

Union membership grew rapidly during the war,from 10.5 million in 1941 to 14.7 million in 1945. Inreturn for a “no-strike pledge,” the NWLB allowedagreements that required workers to retain theirunion membership through the life of a contract.Labor leaders, however, complained about in-creased government regulations and argued thatwage controls coupled with wartime inflation wereunfair. The NWLB finally allowed a 15 percent cost-of-living increase on some contracts, but that didnot apply to overtime pay, which helped drive upwages in some industries during the war by about70 percent.

GN

P (

in b

illio

ns

of

do

llars

)

Year

GNP Unemployment rate

1940 1942 1943 1944 1945

250

200

150

100

50

01941

14.6%

9.9%

4.7%1.9%

1.2%1.9%

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Gross National Product and Unemployment, 1940–1945

The war economy virtually wiped out unemployment and increased production to un-precedented levels.




In addition to wage and price controls and ra-tioning, the government tried to reduce inflation byselling war bonds and by increasing taxes. The Rev-enue Act of 1942 raised tax rates, broadened the taxbase, increased corporate taxes to 40 percent, andraised the excess-profits tax to 90 percent. In addi-tion, the government initiated a payroll deductionfor income taxes. The war made the income tax a re-ality for most Americans for the first time.

Despite some unfairness and much confusion,the American economy responded to the wartimecrisis and produced the equipment and supplies

that eventually won the war. Americanindustries built 300,000 airplanes, 88,140tanks, and 3,000 merchant ships. In 1944alone, American factories produced800,000 tons of synthetic rub-ber to replace the supply of nat-ural rubber captured by theJapanese. Although the national

debt grew from about $143 billion in 1943to $260 billion in 1945, the governmentpolicy of taxation paid for about 40 per-cent of the war’s cost. At the same time,full employment and the increase in two-income families, together with forced sav-ings, helped provide capital for postwarexpansion. In a limited way, the tax policyalso tended to redistribute wealth, whichthe New Deal had failed to do. The top 5percent income bracket, which controlled23 percent of the disposable income in1939, accounted for only 17 percent in1945.

The war stimulated the growth of thefederal bureaucracy and accelerated thetrend, begun during World War I and ex-tended in the 1920s and 1930s, toward thegovernment’s central role in the economy.The war also increased the cooperationbetween industry and government, creat-ing what would later be called a military-industrial complex. But for most Ameri-cans, despite anger at the OPA and theincome tax, the war meant the end of theDepression.

Patriotic FervorThe war, so horrible elsewhere, was re-mote in the United States—except for thefamilies that received the official telegraminforming them that a loved one had beenkilled. The government tried to keep theconflict alive in the minds of Americans

and to keep the country united behind the war ef-fort. The Office of War Information controlled thenews the American public received about the warand promoted patriotism. The government also soldwar bonds, not only to help pay for thewar and reduce inflation but also to sellthe war to the American people. School-children purchased war stamps and faith-fully pasted them in an album until theyhad accumulated stamps worth $18.75,enough to buy a $25 bond (redeemable 10years later). Their bonds, they were told, would pur-chase bullets or a part for an airplane to kill “Japs”and Germans and defend the American way of life.“For Freedom’s Sake, Buy War Bonds,” one posterannounced. Working men and women purchased

Women in anAirplaneFactory

The Enemy During the war American magazines and newspapers oftendepicted the Japanese as monkeys, insects, or rodents. Germans were rarelypictured this way. This December 12, 1942, issue of Collier’s magazine picturesJapanese prime minister Hideki Tojo as a vampire bat carrying a bomb to dropon the United States. The Japanese, on the other hand, often picturedAmericans and British as bloated capitalists and imperialists. What effect, doyou suppose, did these caricatures have on attitudes and actions during thewar? (akg-images)

“Buy VictoryBonds” Poster






bonds through payroll deduction plans and lookedforward to spending the money on consumer goodsafter the war. In the end, the government sold morethan $135 billion in war bonds. While the bond drives did help control inflation, they were most im-portant in making millions of Americans feel thatthey were contributing to the war effort.

Those too old or too young to join the armedforces became air raid wardens or civilian defense

and Red Cross volunteers. They raised vic-tory gardens and took part in scrap drives.Even small children could join the war ef-fort by collecting old rubber, wastepaper,and kitchen fats. Some items, includinggasoline, sugar, butter, and meat, were ra-tioned, but few people complained. Evenhorsemeat hamburgers seemed edible if

they helped win the war. Newspaper and magazineadvertising characterized ordinary actions as eitherspeeding victory or impeding the war effort.

Internment of Japanese AmericansWartime campaigns not only stimulated patrio-tism but also promoted hatred for the enemy. TheNazis, especially Hitler and his Gestapo, had

become synonymous with evil even before 1941. Atthe beginning of the war there was little animositytoward the German people, but before long mostAmericans ceased to make distinctions. All Ger-mans seemed evil, although the anti-German hys-teria that had swept the country during World WarI never developed.

The Japanese were easier to hate than the Ger-mans. The attack on Pearl Harbor created a specialanimosity toward the Japanese, but the depiction ofthe Japanese as warlike and subhuman owed some-thing to a long tradition of fear of the so-called yel-low peril and a distrust of all Asians. Movies, maga-zine articles, cartoons, and posters added to theimage of the Japanese soldier or pilot with a toothygrin murdering innocent women and children orshooting down helpless Americans. Two weeks afterPearl Harbor, Time magazine explained to Ameri-cans how they could distinguish our Asian friendsthe Chinese “from the Japs.” “Virtually all Japaneseare short, Japanese are seldom fat; they often dry upwith age,” Time declared. “Most Chinese avoidhorn-rimmed spectacles. Japanese walk stiffly erect,hard-heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easygait. The Chinese expression is likely to be morekindly, placid, open; the Japanese more positive,

Tule Lake

Manzanar

Minidoka

Topaz

Poston

Gila River

Granada(Amache)

RohwerJerome

Heart Mountain

WASHINGTON14,565

OREGON4,071

CALIFORNIA93,717

NEVADA

IDAHO1,191

MONTANA

WYOMING

UTAH2,210

ARIZONA

COLORADO2,734

NEWMEXICO

NORTHDAKOTA

SOUTHDAKOTA

NEBRASKA

KANSAS

OKLAHOMA

TEXAS

LOUISIANA

ARK.

MISSOURI

IOWA

MINN.

WISCONSIN

ILLINOISIND.

MICHIGAN

OHIO

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE

MISS. ALA. GEORGIA

FLORIDA

SOUTHCAROLINA

NORTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIAW.V.

PENN.

NEW YORK2,538

N.J.

MD. DEL.

CONN.R.I.

MASS.

VT.N.H.

MAINE

Relocation camp

States with more than1,000 Japanese residents

Relocation Camps

Early in 1942, responding to the hysterical fear that Japanese Americans living on the West Coast might engage insabotage, the government ordered more than 100,000 Japanese Americans (many of them citizens) into reloca-tion camps. A larger group of Japanese Americans living in Hawaii did not have their lives disrupted or theirproperty confiscated. How do you explain the pattern of Japanese relocation?

“Get in theScrap” Poster,1941-1945





dogmatic, arrogant.” But Americans were not verygood at distinguishing one Asian face from another.The Chinese and the Koreans tried to help byputting up signs that read, “We Are Not Japs,” or“This Is a Chinese Shop.”

The racial stereotype of the Japanese played arole in the treatment of Japanese Americans duringthe war. Some prejudice was shown against Germanand Italian Americans and some were relocated, butJapanese Americans were the only group confinedin internment camps in large numbers and for theduration of the war. It was the greatest mass abridg-ment of civil liberties in American history.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, about 127,000 Japan-ese Americans lived in the United States, most onthe West Coast. About 80,000 were nisei (Japaneseborn in the United States and holding American cit-izenship) and sansei (the sons and daughters of ni-sei); the rest were issei (aliens born in Japan whowere ineligible for U.S. citizenship). The Japanesehad long suffered from racial discrimination and

prejudice in the United States. They were barredfrom intermarriage with other groups and excludedfrom many clubs, restaurants, and recreation facili-ties. Many worked as tenant farmers, fishermen,and small-business owners. Others made up a smallprofessional class of lawyers, teachers, and doctorsand a large number of landowning farmers.

Although many retained cultural and linguisticties to Japan, they posed no more threat to thecountry than did the much larger groups of ItalianAmericans and German Americans. But their ap-pearance made them stand out as the others didnot. After Pearl Harbor, an anti-Japanese panicseized the West Coast. A Los Angeles newspaper re-ported that armed Japanese were in Baja, California,ready to attack. Rumors suggested that Japanesefishermen were preparing to mine the harbor, blowup tunnels, and poison the water supply.

West Coast politicians and ordinary citizensurged the War Department and the president toevacuate the Japanese. The president ca-pitulated and issued Executive Order9066 authorizing the evacuation in Feb-ruary 1942. “The continued pressure of alargely unassimilated, tightly knit racialgroup, bound to an enemy nation bystrong ties of race, culture, custom andreligion, constituted a menace which hadto be dealt with,” General John De Wittargued, justifying the removal on military grounds.But racial fear and animosity, not military necessity,stood behind the order.

Eventually, the government built the “relocationcenters” in remote, often arid, sections of the West.“The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act likerats. We don’t want them,” the governor of Idaho an-nounced. The camps were primitive and unattrac-tive. “When I first entered our room, I became sickto my stomach,” a Japanese American woman re-membered. “There were seven beds in the room andno furniture nor any partitions to separate themales and the females of the family. I just sat on thebed, staring at the bare wall.”

The government evacuated about 110,000 Japan-ese, including about 60,000 American citizens.Those who were forced to leave their homes, farms,and businesses lost almost all their property andpossessions. Farmers left their crops to beharvested by their American neighbors.Store owners sold out for a small percent-age of what their goods were worth. Veryfew personal items or household goodscould be transported. The JapaneseAmericans lost their worldly possessions,and something more—their pride and

Relocation Japanese American children on their way to a “relo-cation center.” For many Japanese Americans, but especially for thechildren, the nightmare of the relocation camp experience would staywith them all their lives. Was the relocation of Japanese Americansnecessary? (Library of Congress)

JapaneseAmericans atSanta AnitaRacetrack in

1942

A Young Niseiand HerFamily’s

Belongings






respect. One 6-year-old kept asking his mother to“take him back to America.” He thought his reloca-tion center was in Japan.

The evacuation of the Japanese Americans wasunjustified. Even in Hawaii, where a much largerJapanese population existed, the government evac-uated only a few (in part because the Japanese wereso vital to the economy of the Islands), and no sabo-tage and little disloyalty occurred. The governmentallowed Japanese American men to volunteer formilitary service, and many served bravely in Eu-rope. The 442nd Infantry Combat Team, made upentirely of nisei, became the most decorated unit inall the military service—another indication of theloyalty and patriotism of most Japanese Americans.

After January 1944, the United States governmentbegan drafting nisei men who were being retained

in the relocation centers, but a few, asmany as 10 percent in some camps, re-fused and became draft resisters andwere sent to prison. They appreciated theirony and the injustice of being asked toregister for the draft as citizens while be-ing deprived of the rights of citizenship inrelocation centers. At the same time thatJapanese American citizens were con-fined to relocation centers, more than

400,000 German prisoners were confined to prisoncamps, usually in small towns across America. Insome cases, they were treated better than JapaneseAmerican citizens. In 1988, Congress belatedlyvoted limited compensation for the Japanese Amer-icans relocated during World War II.

Asian, African, and HispanicAmericans at WarThe Pacific War made China an ally of the UnitedStates, but Congress did not repeal the Chinese Ex-clusion Act until 1943, and then only 105 Chinese ayear were allowed to enter the United States legally.Despite this affront, Chinese communities in theUnited States joined the war effort enthusiastically.They bought war bonds, collected scrap metal, andin other ways tried to show that they were loyal citi-zens. Almost 13,500 Chinese men enlisted or weredrafted into the army. Many others took jobs in warindustries. Formerly restricted to jobs in laundriesor restaurants, they eagerly sought employment infactories. In fact, so many waiters left their jobs thatfour restaurants in New York’s Chinatown had toclose in 1942.

The Korean, Filipino, and Asian Indian popula-tion also contributed to the war effort. In California,16,000 Filipinos registered for the first draft, and

many served behind enemy lines in the battle to re-capture the Philippine Islands. As members of theUnited States Armed Forces, they were allowed tobecome citizens, but the Koreans were classified asenemy aliens. Still, many served in the army andproved valuable because they often could speakJapanese. The 1923 Supreme Court decision thathad denied citizenship to Asian Indians was alteredduring the war in part because the United Statesneeded India as an ally in the Pacific War. Despiteincreased acceptance during the war, Asians stillfaced prejudice and were often denied service inrestaurants or refused admittance to theaters. ManyAmericans hated the Japanese; to them, all Asianslooked like the enemy.

Even in much of the North, the United States re-mained a segregated society in 1941. African Ameri-cans could not live, eat, travel, work, or go to schoolwith the same freedom that whites en-joyed. Black Americans profited littlefrom the revival of prosperity and the ex-pansion of jobs early in the war. Thosewho joined the military were usually as-signed to menial jobs as cooks or laborersand were always assigned to segregatedunits with whites as the high-ranking offi-cers. The myth that black soldiers had failed to per-form well in World War I persisted. “Leadership isnot embedded in the negro race yet,” Secretary ofWar Henry Stimson wrote, “and to try to make com-missioned officers . . . lead men into battle—coloredmen—is only to work a disaster to both.”

Some black leaders found it especially ironic thatas the country prepared to fight Hitler and his racistpolicies, the United States persisted in its own brandof racism. “A jim crow Army cannot fight for a freeworld,” announced The Crisis, the journal of theNAACP. A. Philip Randolph decided to act ratherthan talk. The son of a Methodist minister, Ran-dolph had worked with the first wave of AfricanAmericans migrating from the South to the north-ern cities during and just after World War I. He spentyears trying “to carry the gospel of unionism to thecolored world.” He organized and led the Brother-hood of Sleeping Car Porters, and in 1937, he finallywon grudging recognition of the union from thePullman Company.

Respected and admired by black leaders of all po-litical persuasions, Randolph convinced many ofthem in 1941 to join him in a march on Washingtonto demand equal rights. The threat of as many as100,000 African Americans marching in protest inthe nation’s capital alarmed Roosevelt. At first, hesent his assistants, including his wife, Eleanor (whowas greatly admired in the black community), to

JapaneseAmericanFamily in

InternmentCamp

Sterling A.Brown, “Out ofTheir Mouths”

(1942)






“Rosie the Riveter” Many African Americans moved north,lured by jobs in war industries. Prejudice remained even in the North,and some blacks were denied employment or were given the most me-nial tasks. Others, like these welders, found good jobs, improved theirlives, and helped change the dynamics of race relations in the UnitedStates. What other developments resulted from the wartime employ-ment of women and minorities? (Library of Congress, [LCUSW3-34282-CC])

dissuade Randolph from such drastic action. Fi-nally, he talked to Randolph in person on June 18,

1941. Randolph and Roosevelt struck abargain. Roosevelt refused to desegregatethe armed forces, but in return for Ran-dolph’s calling off the march, the presi-dent issued Executive Order 8802, whichstated that it was the policy of the UnitedStates that “there shall be no discrimina-tion in the employment of workers in de-fense industries or government because

of race, creed, color or national origin.” He also es-tablished the Fair Employment Practices Commis-sion (FEPC) to enforce the order.

By threatening militant action, the black leaderswrested a major concession from the president. Butthe executive order did not end prejudice, and theFEPC, which its chairman described as the “mosthated agency in Washington,” had limited successin erasing the color line. Many black soldiers wereangered and humiliated throughout the war by be-ing made to sit in the back of buses and being

barred from hotels and restaurants. Years later, oneformer black soldier recalled being refused servicein a restaurant in Salina, Kansas, while the samerestaurant served German prisoners from a campnearby. “We continued to stare,” he recalled. “Thiswas really happening. . . . The people of Salinawould serve these enemy soldiers and turn awayblack American G.I.’s.”

Jobs in war industries helped many African Ameri-cans improve their economic conditions. Continuingthe migration that had begun during World War I,about 1 million southern blacks moved to northernand western cities. The new arrivals increased pres-sure on overcrowded housing, aggravating tensionamong all hard-pressed groups. In Detroit, a race riotbroke out in the summer of 1943 after Polish Ameri-cans protested a public housing development thatpromised to bring blacks into the neighborhood. Be-fore federal and state troops could restore order, 25blacks and 9 whites had been killed and more than $2million worth of property was destroyed. Groups ofwhite men roamed the city attacking blacks, over-turning cars and setting fires. Other riots broke out inMobile, Los Angeles, New York, and Beaumont, Texas.In all these cities, and in others, the legacy of hatelasted long after the war.

Mexican Americans, like most minority groups,profited during the war from the increased job op-portunities provided by wartime industry, but they,too, faced racial prejudice. In California and in manyparts of the Southwest, Mexicans could not use pub-lic swimming pools. Often lumped together withblacks, they were excluded from certain restaurants.Usually they were limited to menial jobs and wereconstantly harassed by the police, picked up for mi-nor offenses, and jailed on the smallest excuse.

In Los Angeles, anti-Mexican prejudice flaredinto violence. The increased migration of Mexicansinto the city as well as old hatreds created a volatilesituation. Most of the hostility and anger focused onMexican gang members, or pachuchos, especiallythose wearing zoot suits. The suits consisted of long,loose coats with padded shoulders, ballooned pantspegged at the ankles, and a wide-brimmed hat. Awatch chain and a ducktail haircut completed theuniform. The zoot suit had originated in the blacksections of northern cities and became a nationalcraze during the war. It was a look some teenagemales adopted to call attention to themselves andshock conventional society.

The zoot-suiters especially angered soldiers andsailors who were stationed in or on leave in Los An-geles. After a number of provocative incidents, vio-lence broke out between the Mexican Americanyouths and the servicemen in the spring of 1943.

A. PhilipRandolph,

“Why ShouldWe March”

(1942)





The servicemen, joined by others, beat up the Mexi-cans, stripped them of their offensive clothes, andthen gave them haircuts. The police, both civilianand military, looked the other way, and when theydid move in, they arrested the victims rather thantheir attackers.




SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE WARModern wars have been incredibly destructive ofhuman lives and property, but they have social re-sults as well. The Civil War ended slavery and en-sured the triumph of the industrial North for yearsto come; in so doing, it left a legacy of bitterness andtransformed the race question from a sectional to anational problem. World War I ensured the successof woman suffrage and prohibition, caused a migra-tion of blacks to northern cities, and ushered in atime of intolerance. World War II also had many so-cial results. It altered patterns of work, leisure, edu-cation, and family life; caused a massive migrationof people; created jobs; and changed lifestyles. It isdifficult to overemphasize the impact of the war onthe generation that lived through it.

Wartime OpportunitiesMore than 15 million American civilians movedduring the war. Like the Momadays, many left hometo find better jobs. In fact, for many Native Ameri-cans, wartime opportunities led to a migration fromrural areas and reservations into cities. Americansmoved off farms and away from small towns, flock-ing to cities, where defense jobs were readily avail-able. They moved west: California alone gainedmore than 2 million people during the war. But theyalso moved out of the South into northern cities,while a smaller number moved from the North tothe South. Late in the war, when a shortage of farmlabor developed, some reversed the trend andmoved back onto the farms. But a great many peo-ple moved somewhere. One observer, noticing theheavily packed cars heading west, decided that itwas just like The Grapes of Wrath, without thepoverty and the hopelessness.

The World War II migrants poured into indus-trial centers: 200,000 came to the Detroit area,nearly half a million to Los Angeles, and about100,000 to Mobile, Alabama. They put pressure onschools, housing, and other services. Often theyhad to live in new Hoovervilles, trailer parks, ortemporary housing. In San Pablo, California, afamily of four adults and seven children lived in an8-by-10-foot shack.

Nowhere was the change more dramatic than inthe West, and especially in California, where thewartime boom transformed the region more dra-matically than any development since the nine-teenth-century economic revolution created by therailroads and mining. The federal government spentmore than $70 billion in the state (one-tenth of thetotal for the entire country) to build army bases,shipyards, supply depots, and testing sites. In addi-tion, private industry constructed so many facilitiesthat the region became the center of a growing mili-tary-industrial complex. San Diego, for example,was transformed from a sleepy port and naval baseinto a sprawling metropolis. The population grew by147 percent between 1941 and 1945, from 202,000 to380,000. Vallezo, a small city near Oakland, grewfrom 20,000 to more than 100,000 in just two years.The U.S. Navy’s Mare Island Shipyard, which wasnearby, increased its workforce from 5,000 to 45,000.Vanport, just north of Portland, Oregon, was anempty mud flat in 1940; three years later, it was abustling city of more than 40,000. Almost everyonein the new town worked for the Kaiser Ship Yards.

This spectacular growth created problems. Therewas a housing shortage, schools were overcrowded,and hospitals and municipal services could notkeep up with the demand. Crime and prostitutionincreased as did racial tensions. Some migrants hadnever lived in a city and were homesick. On one oc-casion in a Willow Grove, Michigan, school, the chil-dren were all instructed to sing “Michigan, MyMichigan”; no one knew the words because they allcame from other states.

For the first time in years, many families hadmoney to spend, but they had nothing to spend it on.The last new car rolled off the assembly line in Febru-ary 1942. There were no washing machines, refrigera-tors, or radios in the stores, no gasoline and no tiresto permit weekend trips. Even when people had timeoff, they tended to stay at home or in the neighbor-hood. Some of the new housing developments hadthe atmosphere of a mining camp, complete withdrinking, prostitution, and barroom brawls.

The war required major adjustments in Americanfamily life. With several million men in the serviceand others far away working at defense jobs, thenumber of households headed by a woman in-creased dramatically. The number of marriages alsorose sharply. Early in the war, a young man could bedeferred if he had a dependent, and a wife qualifiedas a dependent. Later, many servicemen got mar-ried, often to women they barely knew, becausethey wanted a little excitement and perhaps some-one to come home to. The birthrate also began torise in 1940, as young couples started families as fast




as they could. The number of births outside mar-riage also rose, and from the outset of the war, thedivorce rate began to climb sharply. Yet most of thewartime marriages survived, and many of thewomen left at home looked ahead to a time after thewar when they could settle down to a normal life.

Women Workers for VictoryThousands of women took jobs in heavy industrythat formerly would have been considered unlady-like. They built tanks, airplanes, and ships, but theystill earned less than men. At first, women wererarely hired because as the war in Europe pulledAmerican industry out of its long slump, unem-

ployed men snapped up the newly avail-able positions. But by 1943, with manymen drafted and male unemploymentvirtually nonexistent, the governmentwas quick to suggest that it was women’spatriotic duty to take their place on theassembly line. Nearly 3 million womenserved in the Women’s Land Army to re-

place farm laborers who were in the army, but it wasthe woman factory worker who captured the pub-lic’s imagination. A popular song was “Rosie the Riv-eter,” who was “making history working for victory.”She also helped her marine boyfriend by “workingovertime on the riveting machine.”

At the end of the war, the labor force included19.5 million women, but three-fourths of them hadbeen working before the conflict, and some of theadditional ones might have sought work in normal

times. The new women war workerstended to be older, and they were moreoften married than single. Some workedfor patriotic reasons. “Every time I test abatch of rubber, I know it’s going to helpbring my three sons home quicker,” awoman worker in a rubber plant re-

marked. But others worked for the money or to havesomething useful to do. Yet in 1944, women’s weeklywages averaged $31.21, compared with $54.65 formen, reflecting women’s more menial tasks andtheir low seniority as well as outright discrimina-tion. Still, many women enjoyed factory work. “Boyhave the men been getting away with murder allthese years,” exclaimed a Pittsburgh housewife.“Why I worked twice as hard selling in a departmentstore and got half the pay.”

Black women faced the most difficult situationduring the war, and often when they applied for work,they were told, “We have not yet installed separate toi-let facilities” or “We can’t put a Negro in the front of-fice.” Not until 1944 did the telephone company in

New York City hire a black telephone operator. Still,some black women moved during the war from do-mestic jobs to higher-paying factory work. Marriedwomen with young children also found it difficult toobtain work. There were few day-care facilities, andwomen were often informed that they should behome with their children.

Women workers often had to endure catcalls,whistles, and more overt sexual harassment on thejob. Still, most persisted, and they tried to look femi-nine despite the heavy work clothes. In one Bostonfactory, a woman was hooted at for carrying a lunchbox. Only men, it seemed, carried lunch boxes;women brought their lunch in a paper bag.

Many women war workers quickly left their jobsafter the war ended. Some left by choice, but dis-missals ran twice as high for women as for men. Thewar had barely shaken the notion that a woman’splace was at home. Some women would have pre-ferred to keep working. But most women, and aneven larger percentage of men, agreed at the end ofthe war that women did not deserve an “equalchance with men” for jobs. For most Americans, awoman’s place was still in the home.

Entertaining the PeopleAccording to one survey, Americans listened to theradio an average of 41/2 hours a day during the war.The major networks increased their news programsfrom less than 4 percent to nearly 30 percent ofbroadcasting time. Americans heard Edward R.Murrow broadcasting from London during the Ger-man air blitz with the sound of the air raid sirens inthe background. They listened to Eric Sevareid coverthe battle of Burma and describe the sensation ofjumping out of an airplane. Often the signal fadedout and the static made listening difficult, but thelive broadcasts had drama and authenticity neverbefore possible.

Even more than the reporters, the commentatorsbecame celebrities on whom the American peopledepended to explain what was going on around theworld. Millions listened to the clipped, authoritativevoice of H. V. Kaltenborn or to Gabriel Heatter,whose trademark was “Ah, there’s good newstonight.” But the war also intruded on almost allother programming. Music, which took up a largeproportion of radio programming, also conveyed awar theme. There were “Goodbye, Mama (I’m Off toYokohama)” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Am-munition,” but more numerous were songs of ro-mance and love, songs about separation and hopefor a better time after the war. The danceable tunesof Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey became just as

Rosie theRiveter

“Women inWar” Poster






much a part of wartime memories as ration booksand far-off battlefields.

For many Americans, the motion picture becamethe most important leisure activity and a part oftheir fantasy life during the war. Attendance at themovies averaged about 100 million viewers a week.There might not be gasoline for weekend trips orSunday drives, but the whole family could go to themovies. Even those in the military service couldwatch American movies on board ship or at a re-mote outpost. “Pinup” photographs of Hollywoodstars decorated the barracks and even tanks andplanes wherever American troops were stationed.

Musical comedies, cowboy movies, and historicalromances remained popular during the war, but theconflict intruded even on Hollywood. Newsreels thatoffered a visual synopsis of the war news, always withan upbeat message and a touch of human interest,preceded most movies. Their theme was that theAmericans were winning the war, even if early in theconflict there was little evidence to that effect. Manyfeature films also had a wartime theme, picturing thewar in the Pacific complete with grinning, viciousJapanese villains (usually played by Chinese or Ko-rean character actors). In the beginning of thesefilms, the Japanese were always victorious, but in theend, they always got “what they deserved.”

The movies set in Europe differed from those de-picting the Far Eastern war. British and Americans,sometimes spies, sometimes downed airmen, coulddress up like Germans and get away with it. Theyoutwitted the Germans at every turn, sabotagingimportant installations, and made daring escapesfrom prison camps. Many wartime movies featureda multicultural platoon led by a veteran sergeantwith a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, a black, a farmer,and a city resident. In several movies, the army wasintegrated, but in the real army, blacks served insegregated platoons.

Religion in Time of WarOne of the four freedoms threatened by Germanand Japanese aggression was the “freedom to wor-ship,” and Roosevelt continually emphasized thatthe enemy was opposed to all religion. According toone estimate in 1940, 65 million Americans be-longed to 250,000 churches and other religious in-stitutions. There were about 23 million Catholicsand 5 million Jews, and the rest were of one Protes-tant denomination or another. Most Americansthought of the United States as a Christian nation,and by that they usually meant a Protestant nation.While the war did lead to a measure of religious tol-erance, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism did not

disappear. According to one poll, although 18 per-cent of Americans never went to church, more than30 percent said that the war had strengthened theirreligious faith.

Those who joined the armed forces were giventhree choices under religion: They were asked tocheck Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, and their “dog tags”were marked P, C, or H (for Hebrew). There was noroom for Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or atheist. Somemen refused to fight on religious grounds. DuringWorld War I, only members of the traditional peacechurches (Quaker, Brethren, and Mennonite) weredeferred from military service as conscientious objec-tors. In World War II, the criterion was broadened toinclude those who opposed war because of “religioustraining and belief.” More than 70,000 claimed ex-emption on those grounds, and the government hon-ored about half those claims. Twenty-five thousandwere assigned to noncombat military service.

A few clergymen remained pacifists and opposedthe war, but far fewer than in World War I. A greatmany more volunteered to serve as chaplains, andlike the men, they were categorized as Protestant,Catholic, or Jew. One of the most influential of theministers who supported the use of force to combatevil was the Protestant theologian and clergymanReinhold Niebuhr. In a series of books includingMoral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and Childrenof Light and Children of Darkness (1944), he struckout against what he saw as a naive faith in the good-ness of men, a faith that permeated the Social Gospelmovement, the Progressive movement, and the NewDeal. In a world gone mad, he interpreted all men assinful, and he stressed the “evil that good men do.”He argued for the use of force against evil. Neibhur’sChristian Realism had little impact on most Ameri-cans, but he influenced the continuing debate in the1930s, 1940s, and 1950s over the proper American re-sponse to evil around the world.

The GIs’ WarGI, the abbreviation for government issue, becamethe affectionate designation for the ordinary soldierin World War II. The GIs came from every back-ground and ethnic group. Some served reluctantly,some eagerly. A few became genuine heroes. Allwere turned into heroes by the press and the public,who seemed to believe that one American couldeasily defeat at least 20 Japanese or Germans. ErniePyle, one of the war correspondents who chronicledthe authentic story of the ordinary GI, wrote of sol-diers “just toiling from day to day in a world full ofinsecurity, discomfort, homesickness, and a dulledsense of danger.”




In the midst of battle, the war was nofun, but only one soldier in eight whoserved ever saw combat, and even formany of those, the war was a great adven-ture (just as World War I had been). “WhenWorld War II broke out I was delighted,”Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, re-membered. “There is no other word, terri-ble as it may sound. My country called. Iwas delivered from my mother, my family,and delivered without guilt.” World War IIcatapulted young men and women out oftheir small towns and urban neighbor-hoods into exotic places, where they metnew people and did new things.

The war was important for MexicanAmericans, who were drafted and volun-teered in great numbers. One-third of amillion served in all branches of the mili-tary, a larger percentage than for manyother ethnic groups. Although they en-countered prejudice, they probably foundless in the armed forces than they had athome, and many returned to civilian lifewith new ambitions and a new sense ofself-esteem.

Many Native Americans also served. Infact, many were recruited for special ser-

vice in the Marine Signal Corps.One group of Navajo completelybefuddled the Japanese with acode based on their native lan-guage. But the Navajo code talk-ers and all other Native Ameri-cans who chose to return to thereservations after the war wereineligible for veterans’ loans,

hospitalization, and other benefits. Theylived on federal land, and that, accordingto the law, canceled all the advantages thatother veterans enjoyed after the war.

For African Americans, who served throughoutthe war in segregated units and faced prejudice

wherever they went, the military experi-ence also had much to teach. Fewerblacks were sent overseas (about 79,000of 504,000 blacks in the service in 1943),and fewer were in combat outfits, so thepercentage of black soldiers killed andwounded was low. Many illiterate blacks,especially from the South, learned to readand write in the service. Blacks who went

overseas began to realize that not everyone viewedthem as inferior. One black army officer said, “Whatthe hell do we want to fight the Japs for anyhow?

They couldn’t possibly treat us any worse than these‘crackers’ right here at home.” Most realized theparadox of fighting for freedom when they them-selves had little freedom; they hoped things wouldimprove after the war.

Because the war lasted longer than World War I,its impact was greater. In all, more than 16 millionmen and women served in some branch of the mil-itary service. About 322,000 were killed in the war,and more than 800,000 were wounded. The 12,000listed as missing just disappeared. The war claimedmany more lives than World War I and was the na-tion’s costliest after the Civil War. But because ofpenicillin, blood plasma, sulfa drugs, and rapid

Willie and Joe Sergeant Bill Mauldin’s biting cartoons published in Stars andStripes, the army newspaper, depicted two GIs, Willie and Joe, as they sloggedtheir way across Europe. Willie and Joe, sloppy, unshaven, and often insubordinateand cynical, contrasted sharply with the image of the American soldier promotedby the war department. General George S. Patton accused Mauldin of “undermin-ing the morale of the army,” but troops loved Willie and Joe. In this cartoon drysocks are more important to the soldier than patriotism and honor. Why didMauldin anger the top army officers so much? (Copyright 1944 by Bill Mauldin.Reprinted courtesy of the WIlliam Mauldin Estate.)

Navajo IndiansAiding the U.S.

War Effort

AfricanAmerican

Fighter Pilots






battlefield evacuation, the wounded in World WarII were twice as likely to survive as those woundedin World War I. Penicillin also minimized the threatof venereal disease, but all men who served saw ananti-VD film, just as their predecessors had inWorld War I.

Women in UniformWomen had served in all wars as nurses and cooksand in other support capacities, and during World

War II many continued in these tradi-tional roles. A few nurses landed inFrance just days after the Normandy in-vasion. Nurses served with the army andthe marines in the Pacific. They dug theirown foxholes and treated men under en-emy fire. Sixty-six nurses spent the entire

war in the Philippines as prisoners ofthe Japanese. Most nurses, however,served far behind the lines tendingthe sick and wounded. Army nurseswho were given officer rank were for-bidden to date enlisted men. “Notpermitting nurses and enlisted men tobe seen together is certainly notAmerican,” one soldier decided.

Though nobody objected towomen’s serving as nurses, not untilApril 1943 did women physicians winthe right to join the Army and NavyMedical Corps. Some people ques-tioned whether it was right for womento serve in other capacities, but Con-gress authorized full military partici-pation for women (except for combat)because of the military emergencyand the argument that women couldfree men for combat duty. About350,000 women joined the militaryservice, most in the Women’s ArmyCorps (WAC) and the women’s branchof the Navy (WAVES), but othersserved in the coast guard and themarines. More than 1,000 womentrained as pilots. As members ofWomen’s Airforce Service Pilots(WASP), they flew bombers from thefactories to landing fields in GreatBritain.

Many recruiting posters suggestedthat the services needed women “forthe precision work at which womenare so adept” or for work in hospitalsto comfort and attend to the

wounded “as only women can do.” Most womenserved in traditional female roles, doing office work,cooking, and cleaning. But others were engineersand pilots. Still, men and women were not treatedequally. Women were explicitly kept out of combatsituations and were often underused by male offi-cers who found it difficult to view women in nontra-ditional roles.

Men were informed about contraceptives andencouraged to use them, but information aboutbirth control was explicitly prohibited for women.Rumors charged many servicewomen with sexualpromiscuity. On one occasion, the secretary of wardefended the morality and the loyalty of the womenin the service, but the rumors continued, spreadapparently by men made uncomfortable bywomen’s invasion of the male military domain. Onecause for immediate discharge was pregnancy; yet

American Dead More than 300,000 American servicemen died during the war,but the government tried to protect the American people from learning the real cost ofthe battles. This photograph, published in 1943, was the first to show dead Americansoldiers. Why did the government protect the American people from seeing deadAmerican soldiers? (Time/Life Pictures/Getty Images.)

“It’s aWoman’s War,

Too” Poster




846

AMERICAN VOICESPFC Robert Kotlowitz Faces Battle

Robert Kotlowitz, of Polish-Jewish background, grew up inBaltimore. After high school he started college at theJohns Hopkins University, but in 1943 at age 18 hedropped out and was drafted into the army.“I believed inthe war,” he wrote.“It seemed just and righteous to me.”The war didn’t seem so righteous on October 12, 1944,when Kotlowitz’s platoon, led by Lieutenant FrancisGallagher, not much older than his men, was ordered toattack a hill in Northeastern France.

Within a few moments, . . . a lot had happened.Lieutenant Gallagher, for one, was already dead.We saw him die, quickly. A bullet pierced hisscrawny boy’s neck . . . as he moved forward aheadof us, just over the top of the rise. . . . Someoneyelled Kaputt! as though it was an order. Gallagherstood there, upright and motionless, his ferret’sface full of surprise, when the German’s began tofire their Maussers. At the same moment, per-fectly synchronized, a 180-degree sweep of ma-chine-gun fire, which at first I mistook for ourown, took us from right to left . . . dropping theplatoon where it stood. It then came around in asecond sweep.

I saw a hole open up in the back of LieutenantGallagher’s neck, when the bullet passed throughthe front—surprised at how large and black it was,

clean, too, as though it had been drilled by a me-chanic’s precision tool. There was a surge of sur-face blood at first, then a gurgle, like a tap beingturned on, then a sudden torrent as he fell withouta sound. Both of his carotid arteries must havepoured in one stream through the wound. All ofthis took perhaps a dozen seconds: Gallagher’sdeath, the machine-gun assault, and the paralysis ofthe third platoon.

We lay on the ground without moving. It wasno light. . . . The sounds. . . . never before heard,swelling over the noise of small-arms and machine-gun fire, of boys’ voices calling for help or scream-ing in pain or terror—our own boys’ voices, un-recognizable at first, weird in pitch and timbre.

. . . There was no response from the rest of CCompany behind us, no answering artillery orheavy weapons fire, and no supporting troops tohelp us slip out of the . . . rise that we had trappedourselves in. . . . Slowly then, as the morning woreon, and the knowledge began to sink in, I came torealize that for us there was nothing to do butwait, flat out as we were, for our own deaths.

■ Did the brutal reality of war cancel out the patriotismand the idealism that made many young men join thearmy?

the pregnancy rate for both married and unmarriedwomen remained low.

Thus, despite difficulties, women played impor-tant roles during the war, and when they left the ser-vice (unlike the women who had served in otherwars), they had the same rights and privileges as themale veterans. The women in the service did not per-manently alter the military or the public’s perceptionof women’s proper role, but they did change a fewminds, and many of the women who served had theirlives changed and their horizons broadened.



846

A WAR OF DIPLOMATS AND GENERALSPearl Harbor catapulted the country into war withJapan, and on December 11, 1941, Hitler declared

war on the United States. Why he did so has neverbeen fully explained; he was perhaps impressed bythe apparent weakness of America that was demon-strated at Pearl Harbor. He was not required by histreaty with Japan to go to war with the United States,and without his declaration, the United States mighthave concentrated on the war against Japan. ButHitler forced the United States into the war againstthe Axis powers in both Europe and Asia.

War AimsWhy was the United States fighting the war? What didit hope to accomplish in a peace settlement once thewar was over? Roosevelt and the other American lead-ers never really decided. In a speech before Congressin January 1941, Roosevelt had mentioned the fourfreedoms: freedom of speech and expression,




freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedomfrom fear. For many Americans, especially after Nor-man Rockwell expressed those freedoms in four senti-mental paintings, this was what they were fighting for.Roosevelt spoke vaguely of the need to extenddemocracy and to establish a peacekeeping organiza-tion, but in direct contrast to Woodrow Wilson’s Four-teen Points, he never spelled out in any detail the po-litical purposes for fighting. There were some otherimplied reasons for going to war. Henry Luce, the edi-tor of Life magazine, made those reasons explicit in aneditorial written nine months before Pearl Harbor. Hecalled his essay “The American Century,” and he ar-gued that the United States had the responsibility tospread the American way of life around the world.

Roosevelt and his advisers, realizing that it wouldbe impossible to mount an all-out war against bothJapan and Germany, decided to fight a holding actionin the Pacific while concentrating efforts against Hitlerin Europe, where the immediate danger seemedgreater. But the United States was not fighting alone. It

joined the Soviet Union and Great Britain inwhat became a difficult, but ultimately ef-fective alliance to defeat Nazi Germany.Churchill and Roosevelt got along well, al-though they often disagreed on strategyand tactics. Roosevelt’s relationship withStalin was much more strained, but he of-ten agreed with the Russian leader about

the way to fight the war. Stalin, a ruthless leader whohad maintained his position of power only after elimi-nating hundreds of thousands of opponents, dis-trusted both the British and the Americans, but heneeded them, just as they depended on him. Withoutthe tremendous sacrifices of the Russian army and theRussian people in 1941 and 1942, Germany wouldhave won the war before the vast American militaryand industrial might could be mobilized.

A Year of DisasterThe first half of 1942 was disastrous for the Alliedcause. In the Pacific, the Japanese captured the DutchEast Indies with their vast riches in rubber, oil, andother resources. They swept into Burma, took WakeIsland and Guam, and invaded the Aleutian Islands ofAlaska. They pushed the American garrison on thePhilippines onto the Bataan peninsula and finallyonto the tiny island of Corregidor, where U.S. GeneralJonathan Wainwright surrendered more than 11,000men to the Japanese. American reporters tried to playdown the disasters, concentrating their stories on thefew American victories and tales of American heroismagainst overwhelming odds. One of the soldiers on a

Pacific island picked up an American broadcast onenight. “The news commentators in the States had usall winning the war,” he discovered, “their buoyantcheerful voices talking of victory. We were out herewhere we would see these victories. They were allJapanese.”

In Europe, the Germans pushed deep into Russia,threatening to capture all the industrial centers andthe valuable oil fields. For a time, it appeared that theywould even take Moscow. In North Africa, General Er-win Rommel and his mechanized divisions, the AfrikaKorps, drove the British forces almost to Cairo in Egyptand threatened the Suez Canal. In contrast to WorldWar I, which had been a war of stalemate, the openingphase of World War II was marked by air strikes andtroops supported by trucks and tanks covering manymiles each day. In the Atlantic, German submarinessank British and American ships more rapidly thanthey could be replaced. For a few dark months in 1942,it seemed that the Berlin–Tokyo Axis would win thewar before the United States was ready to fight.

The Allies could not agree on the proper militarystrategy in Europe. Churchill advocated tighteningthe ring around Germany, using bombing raids toweaken the enemy and encouraging resistanceamong the occupied countries but avoiding any di-rect assault on the continent until success was en-sured. Remembering the vast loss of British livesduring World War I, he was determined to avoidsimilar casualties in this conflict. Stalindemanded a second front, an invasion ofEurope in 1942, to relieve the pressure onthe Russian army, which faced 200 Ger-man divisions along a 2,000-mile front.Roosevelt agreed to an offensive in 1942.But in the end, the invasion in 1942 camenot in France but in North Africa. The de-cision was probably right from a militarypoint of view; it would have been impossible tolaunch an invasion of France in 1942, and landing inMorocco helped relieve the pressure on the Britisharmy, which was fighting desperately to keep Cairoand the Suez Canal out of German hands. But Stalinnever forgave Churchill and Roosevelt for not com-ing to the aid of the beleaguered Soviet troops.

Attacking in North Africa in November 1942,American and British troops tried to link up with abeleaguered British army. The American army, en-thusiastic but inexperienced, met little resistance inthe beginning. At Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the Ger-mans counterattacked and destroyed a large Ameri-can force, inflicting 5,000 casualties. Roosevelt, wholaunched the invasion in part to give the Americanpeople a victory to relieve the dreary news from the

Eisenhowerand

Paratroopers inWorld War II

FDR, “The FourFreedoms”

(1941)






Far East, learned that victories often came with longcasualty lists.

He also learned the necessity of political compro-mise. To gain a cease-fire in conquered French terri-tory in North Africa, the United States recognizedAdmiral Jean Darlan as head of its provisional gov-ernment. Darlan persecuted the Jews, exploited theArabs, imprisoned his opponents, and collaboratedwith the Nazis. He seemed diametrically opposed tothe principles the Americans said they were fightingfor. Did the Darlan deal mean the United Stateswould negotiate with Mussolini? Or with Hitler? TheDarlan compromise reinforced Soviet distrust of theAmericans and angered many Americans as well.

Roosevelt never compromised or made a deal withHitler, but he did aid General Francisco Franco, theFascist dictator in Spain, in return for safe passage ofAmerican shipping into the Mediterranean. But theUnited States did not aid only right-wing dictators. Italso supplied arms to the left-wing resistance inFrance, to the Communist Tito in Yugoslavia, and toHo Chi Minh, the anti-French resistance leader in In-dochina. Roosevelt also authorized large-scale lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union. Although liberals criti-cized his support of dictators, Roosevelt was willingto do almost anything to win the war. Military expe-diency often dictated his political decisions.

Even on one of the most sensitive issues of thewar, the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe, Roo-sevelt’s solution was to win the war as quickly as

possible. By November 1942, confirmed informa-tion had reached the United States that the Naziswere systematically exterminating Jews,but that evidence got little attention inthe United States. The Roosevelt adminis-tration did nothing for more than a year,and even then it did scandalously little torescue European Jews from the gas cham-bers. Only 21,000 refugees were allowedto enter the United States over a period of 31/2 years,just 10 percent of those who could have been admit-ted under immigration quotas.

The U.S. War Department rejected suggestionsthat the gas chambers and railway lines be bombed.That might not have worked, but anti-Semitic feel-ings in the United States in the 1940s and the fear ofmassive Jewish immigration help explain the failureof the Roosevelt administration to act. The fact thatthe mass media, Christian leaders, and even Ameri-can Jews failed to mount effective pressure on thegovernment does not excuse the president for hisindifference to the systematic murder of millions ofpeople. Roosevelt could not have prevented theHolocaust, but vigorous action on his part mighthave saved many thousands of lives during the war.

A Strategy for Ending the WarThe commanding general of the Allied armies in theNorth African campaign emerged as a genuine

Buchenwald Only at theend of the war did mostAmericans learn about thehorrors of Nazi concentrationcamps and gas chambers. Sena-tor Alben Barkley of Kentuckylooks in disbelief at dead Jewsstacked like wood at Buchen-wald on April 24, 1945. Whydidn’t Americans learn aboutthe Holocaust sooner?(National Archives [RG-111-SC-204745, Box 63])

Nazi MurderMills





leader. Born in Texas, Dwight D. Eisenhower spenthis boyhood in Abilene, Kansas. His small-townbackground made it easy for biographers and news-paper reporters to make him into an American hero.Eisenhower, however, had not come to hero statuseasily. In World War I, he trained soldiers in Texasand never got to France. He was only a lieutenantcolonel when World War II erupted. George Mar-shall, the army’s top general, had discovered Eisen-hower’s talents even before the war began. Eisen-hower was quickly promoted to general andachieved a reputation as an expert planner and

organizer. Gregarious and outgoing, he had a broadsmile that made most people like him instantly. Hewas not a brilliant field commander and made manymistakes in the African campaign, but he had theability to get diverse people to work together, whichwas crucial in situations in which British and Ameri-can units had to cooperate.

The American army moved slowly across NorthAfrica, linked up with the British, invaded Sicily inJuly 1943, and finally stormed ashore in Italy in Sep-tember. The Italian campaign proved long and bit-ter. Although the Italians overthrew Mussolini and

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Soviet Union declares warAugust 8, 1945, theninvades Manchuria

Okinawa

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Formosa

SakhalinIsland

Coral Sea

New Guinea

Guadalcanal

GilbertIslands

Coral Sea(May 7–9, 1942)

Midway(June 3–6, 1942)

Pearl Harbor(Dec. 7, 1941)

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INDIANOCEAN

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HongKong

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Hiroshima(Aug. 6, 1945)

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Greatest extent of Japanesecontrol, August 1942

Major Allied air operations

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Atomic bombs

World War II: Pacific Theater

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese extended their control in the Pacific from Burma to the Aleutian Islandsand almost to Australia. But after American naval and air victories at Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, the Japanese were increas-ingly on the defensive. Reflecting on the Past How did the great distances in the Pacific influence military plans for both sides?Why was the aircraft carrier more important than the battleship in the Pacific War? Was there any alternative to the Americanstrategy of moving slowly from one Japanese-occupied island to another? Why did China play such a crucial role in the waragainst Japan?




surrendered in September 1943, the Germans occu-pied the peninsula and gave ground only afterbloody fighting. The whole American army seemedbogged down for months. The Allies did not reachRome until June 1944, and they never controlled allof Italy.

Despite the decision to make the war in Europethe first priority, American ships and planes haltedthe Japanese advance in the spring of 1942. In theBattle of Coral Sea in May 1942, American carrier-based planes inflicted heavy damage on the Japanesefleet and prevented the invasion of the southern tipof New Guinea and probably of Australia as well. Itwas the first naval battle in history in which no gunswere fired from one surface ship against another; air-planes caused all the damage. In World War II, theaircraft carrier proved more important than the bat-tleship. A month later, at the Battle of Midway, Amer-ican planes sank four Japanese aircraft carriers anddestroyed nearly 300 planes. This was the first majorJapanese defeat; it restored some balance of power inthe Pacific and ended the threat to Hawaii.

In 1943, the American sea and land forcesleapfrogged from island to island, gradually retakingterritory from the Japanese and building bases to at-tack the Philippines and eventually Japan itself.Progress often had terrible costs, however. In No-

vember 1943, about 5,000 marineslanded on the coral beaches of the tiny is-land of Tarawa. Despite heavy naval bom-bardment and the support of hundreds ofplanes, the marines met fierce opposi-tion. The four-day battle left more than1,000 Americans dead and more than

3,000 wounded. One marine general thought it wasall wasted effort and believed that the island shouldhave been bypassed. Others disagreed. And no oneasked the marines who stormed the beaches; lessthan half of the first wave survived.

The Pacific War was often brutal and dehumaniz-ing. American soldiers often collected Japaneseears, skulls, and other body parts as souvenirs,something unheard of on the European battle-grounds. “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horri-ble and deadly as they were, were still people,” ErniePyle, the American war correspondent, remarked.“But out here I soon gathered that the Japanesewere looked upon as something subhuman or re-pulsive, the way some people feel about cock-roaches or mice.”

The Invasion of FranceOperation Overlord, the code name for the largestamphibious invasion in history, the invasion Stalin

had wanted in 1942, finally began on June6, 1944. It was, according to Churchill,“the most difficult and complicated oper-ation that has ever taken place.” The ini-tial assault along a 60-mile stretch of theNormandy coast was conducted with175,000 men supported by 600 warshipsand 11,000 planes. Within a month, morethan a million troops and more than 170,000 vehi-cles had landed. Such an invasion would have beenimpossible during World War I.

British and American forces, with some unitsfrom other countries, worked together, but Overlordwas made possible by American industry, which, bythe war’s end, was turning out an astonishing 50percent of all the world’s goods. During the first fewhours of the invasion, there seemed to be too manysupplies. “Everything was confusing,” one soldierremembered. It cost 2,245 killed and 1,670 woundedto secure the beachhead. “It was much lighter thananybody expected,” one observer remarked. “But ifyou saw faces instead of numbers on the casualtylist, it wasn’t light at all.”

For months before the invasion, American andBritish planes had bombed German transportationlines, industrial plants, and even cities. In all, morethan 1.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on Eu-rope. The massive bombing raids helped make theinvasion a success, but evidence gathered after thewar suggests that the bombs did not disrupt Ger-man war production as seriously as Allied strategistsbelieved at the time. Often a factory or a rail centerwould be back in operation within a matter of days,sometimes within hours, after an attack. In the end,the bombing of the cities, rather than destroyingmorale, may have strengthened the resolve of theGerman people to fight to the bitter end. And thedestruction of German cities did not come cheaply.German fighters and antiaircraft guns shot down 22of 60 B-17s on June 23, 1943, and in July 1943, 100planes and 1,000 airmen were lost and an additional75 men had mental breakdowns.

The most destructive bombing raid of the war,carried out against Dresden on the nights of Febru-ary 13 and 14, 1945, had no strategic purpose. It waslaunched by the British and Americans to helpdemonstrate to Stalin that they were aiding theRussian offensive. Dresden, a city of 630,000, was acommunications center. Three waves of 1,200planes dropped more than 4,000 tons of bombs,causing a firestorm that swept over eight squaremiles, destroyed everything in its path, and killed anestimated 25,000 to 40,000 civilians. One of theAmerican pilots remarked, “For the first time I feltsorry for the population below.” The fire-bombing

World War II inthe Pacific

OperationOverlord,

Normandy,1944






Normandyinvasion

June 6, 1944

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Bal

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Farthest extent ofAxis control, 1942

Allied advances

Allied air operations, 1942–1945

World War II: European and North African Theaters

The German war machine swept across Europe and North Africa and almost captured Cairo and Moscow, but after major defeatsat Stalingrad and El Alamein in 1943, the Axis powers were in retreat. Many lives were lost on both sides before the Allied victoryin 1945. Reflecting on the Past How was the African campaign important to the Allies’ strategy to defeat Germany and Italy?Why was the invasion of France necessary even after the capture of North Africa and a portion of Italy? Why was the SovietUnion crucial to the war in Europe? Why was the war in Europe very different from the war in the Pacific?

of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, also killed an estimated100,000 people. The massive “strategic” bombing ofEuropean and Asian cities for the purpose of break-ing the morale of the civilian population introducedterror as a strategy and eventually made the deci-sion to drop the atomic bomb on two Japanesecities easier.

With the dashing and eccentric General GeorgePatton leading the charge and the more staid Gen-eral Omar Bradley in command, the American armybroke out of the Normandy beachhead in July 1944.Led by the tank battalions, it swept across France.American productive capacity and the ability tosupply a mobile and motorized army eventually

brought victory. But not all American equipmentwas superior. The American fighter plane, the P-40,could not compete early in the war with the GermanME-109. The United States was also far behind Ger-many in the development of rockets, but that wasnot as important in the actual fighting as was the in-ability of the United States, until the end of the war,to develop a tank that could compete in armamentor firepower with the German tanks. But the Ameri-can army made up for the deficiency of its tanks inpart by having superior artillery. Perhaps even moreimportant, most of the American soldiers hadgrown up tinkering with cars and radios. Children ofthe machine age, they managed to make repairs and




to keep tanks, trucks, and guns functioning underdifficult circumstances. They helped give the Ameri-can army the superior mobility that eventually ledto the defeat of Germany.

By late 1944, the American and British armieshad swept across France, while the Russians hadpushed the German forces out of much of easternEurope. The war seemed nearly over. However, justbefore Christmas in 1944, the Germans launched amassive counterattack along an 80-mile front, muchof it held by thinly dispersed and inexperiencedAmerican troops. The Germans drove 50 miles in-side the American lines before they were checked.

During the Battle of the Bulge, as it wascalled, Eisenhower was so desperate foradditional infantry that he offered to par-don any military prisoners in Europe whowould take up a rifle and go into battle.Most of the prisoners, who were servingshort sentences, declined the opportunity

to clear their record. Eisenhower also promised anyblack soldiers in the service and supply outfits anopportunity to become infantrymen in the whiteunits, though usually with a lower rank. However,his chief of staff, pointed out that this was againstWar Department regulations and was the “mostdangerous thing I have seen in regard to race rela-tions.” Eisenhower recanted, not wishing to start asocial revolution. Black soldiers who volunteered tojoin the battle fought in segregated platoons com-manded by white officers.

The Politics of VictoryAs the American and British armies raced acrossFrance into Germany in the winter and spring of1945, the political and diplomatic aspects of the warbegan to overshadow military concerns. It became amatter not only of defeating Germany but also ofdetermining who was going to control Germanyand the rest of Europe once Hitler fell. The relation-ship between the Soviet Union and the other Allieshad been badly strained during the war; with victoryin sight, the tension became even greater. Althoughthe American press pictured Stalin as a wise and de-mocratic leader and the Russian people as quaintand heroic, a number of high-level American diplo-mats and presidential advisers distrusted the Rus-sians and looked ahead to a confrontation with So-viet communism after the war. These men urgedRoosevelt to make military decisions with the post-war political situation in mind.

The most pressing concern in the spring of 1945was who should capture Berlin. The British wanted tobeat the Russians to the capital city. Eisenhower,

however, fearing that the Germans might barricadethemselves in the Austrian Alps and hold out indefi-nitely, ordered the armies south ratherthan toward Berlin. He also wanted toavoid unnecessary American casualties,and he planned to meet the Russian armyat an easily marked spot to avoid any un-fortunate incidents. The British and Amer-ican forces could probably not have ar-rived in Berlin before the Russians in anycase, but Eisenhower’s decision generatedcontroversy after the war. Russian and Americantroops met on April 25, 1945, at the Elbe River. OnMay 2, the Russians took Berlin. Hitler committedsuicide. The long war in Europe finally came to anend on May 8, 1945, but political problems remained.

In 1944, the United States continued to tightenthe noose on Japan. American long-range B-29bombers began sustained strikes on the Japanesemainland in June 1944. In a series of naval and airengagements, especially at the Battle of Leyte Gulf,American planes destroyed most of the remainingJapanese navy. By the end of 1944, an American vic-tory in the Pacific was all but ensured. Americanforces recaptured the Philippines early the nextyear, yet it might take years to conquer the Japaneseon their home islands.

While the military campaigns reached a criticalstage in both Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt tooktime off to run for an unprecedented fourth term. Heagreed to drop Vice President Henry Wallace from theticket because some thought him too radical and im-petuous. To replace him, the Democratic conventionselected a relatively unknown senator from Missouri.Harry S Truman, a World War I veteran, had been ajudge in Kansas City before being elected to the Sen-ate in 1934. His only fame came when, as chairmanof the Senate Committee to Investigate the NationalDefense Program, he had insisted on honesty and ef-ficiency in war contracts. He got some publicity forsaving the taxpayers’ dollars.

The Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, thecolorless and politically moderate governor of NewYork, who had a difficult time criticizing Rooseveltwithout appearing unpatriotic. Roosevelt seemedhaggard and ill during much of the campaign, but hewon the election easily. He would need all his strengthto deal with the difficult political problems of endingthe war and constructing a peace settlement.

The Big Three at YaltaRoosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, together with many oftheir advisers, met at Yalta in the Crimea in February1945 to discuss the problems of the peace settlements.

World War II inEurope

Truman on theEnd of World

War II inEurope






Most of the agreements reached at Yalta were secret,and in the atmosphere of the subsequent Cold War,

many would become controversial. Roo-sevelt wanted the help of the Soviet Unionin ending the war in the Pacific to avoid theneedless slaughter of American men in aninvasion of the Japanese mainland. In re-turn for a promise to enter the war withinthree months after the war in Europe was

over, the Soviet Union was granted the Kurile Islands,the southern half of Sakhalin, and railroads and portfacilities in North Korea, Manchuria, and Outer Mon-golia. Later that seemed like a heavy price to pay forthe promise, but realistically the Soviet Union con-trolled most of this territory and could not have beendislodged short of going to war.

When the provisions of the secret treaties wererevealed much later, many people would accuse

Roosevelt of trusting the Russians toomuch. But Roosevelt wanted to retain aworking relationship with the SovietUnion. If the peace was to be preserved,the major powers of the Grand Alliancewould have to work together. Moreover,Roosevelt hoped to get the Soviet Union’s

agreement to cooperate with a new peace-preserv-ing United Nations organization after the war.

The European section of the Yalta agreementproved even more controversial. The diplomats de-cided to partition Germany and to divide the city ofBerlin. The Polish agreements were even more diffi-cult to swallow, in part because the invasion ofPoland in 1939 had precipitated the war. The Polishgovernment in exile in London was militantly anti-Communist and looked forward to returning toPoland after the war. Stalin demanded that the east-ern half of Poland be given to the Soviet Union.Churchill and Roosevelt finally agreed to the Russ-ian demands with the proviso that Poland be com-pensated with German territory on its western bor-der. Stalin also agreed to include some members ofthe London-based Polish group in the new Polishgovernment. He also promised to carry out “freeand unfettered elections as soon as possible.”

The Polish settlement would prove divisive afterthe war, and it quickly became clear that what theBritish and Americans wanted in eastern Europecontrasted with what the Soviet Union intended. Yetat the time it seemed imperative that Russia enter thewar in the Pacific, and the reality was that in 1945 theSoviet army occupied most of eastern Europe.

The most potentially valuable accomplishmentat Yalta was Stalin’s agreement to join Roosevelt andChurchill in calling a conference in San Francisco inApril 1945 to draft a United Nations charter. The

charter gave primary responsibility for keepingglobal peace to the Security Council, composed offive permanent members (the United States, the So-viet Union, Great Britain, France, and China) and sixother nations elected for two-year terms.

Perhaps just as important as Yalta for structuringthe postwar world was the Bretton Woods Confer-ence, held at a resort hotel in the White Mountains ofNew Hampshire in the summer of 1944 and attendedby delegates from 44 nations (the Soviet Union re-fused to participate). The economists and politiciansestablished a Bank for Reconstruction and Develop-ment (the World Bank) and the International Mone-tary Fund. They also decided on a fixed rate of ex-change among the world’s currencies using the dollarrather than the pound as the standard. The BrettonWoods agreement lasted for 25 years and establishedthat the United States, not Great Britain, would bethe dominant economic power in the postwar world.

The Atomic Age BeginsTwo months after Yalta, on April 12, 1945, as theUnited Nations charter was being drafted, Rooseveltdied suddenly of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.Hated and loved to the end, he was replaced byHarry Truman, who was both more difficult to hateand harder to love. In the beginning, Trumanseemed tentative and unsure of himself. Yet it fell tothe new president to make some of the most diffi-cult decisions of all time. The most momentous ofall was the decision to drop the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project, first organized in 1941,was one of the best-kept secrets of the war. A distin-guished group of scientists, whose work on the pro-ject was centered in Los Alamos, New Mexico, setout to perfect and manufacture an atomic bomb be-fore Germany did. But by the time the bomb wassuccessfully tested in the New Mexico desert on July16, 1945, the war in Europe had ended. The scien-tists working on the bomb assumed that they wereperfecting a military weapon. Yet when they saw theghastly power of that first bomb, J. Robert Oppen-heimer, a leading scientist on the project, remem-bered that “some wept, a few cheered. Most stoodsilently.” Some opposed the military use of thebomb. They realized its revolutionary power andworried about the future reputation of the UnitedStates if it unleashed this new force. But a presiden-tial committee made up of scientists, military lead-ers, and politicians recommended that it be used ona military target in Japan as soon as possible.

“The final decision of where and when to use theatomic bomb was up to me,” Truman later remem-bered. “Let there be no doubt about it. I regarded

The Big Threeat Yalta

The YaltaConference





In recent years, historians have been studying collectivememory—the stories people tell about the past. Col-lective memory is closely related to national regionalidentity and is often associated with patriotism andwar. But memory is usually selective and often con-tested.The generation that lived through World War IIis getting older, and often these people fear that fewremember or care about their war. One veteran of theItalian campaign recently remarked: “Today they don’teven know what Anzio was. Most people aren’t inter-ested.” The collective memory of World War II may in-clude letters, photos, old uniforms, and stories told tograndchildren (oral history), but the collective memoryof war often includes monuments as well.

Almost every small town and city in the North-east, the Midwest, and the South has monuments tothe soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War; of-ten it is a statue of a common soldier with rifle atrest. In the South, a statue of Robert E. Lee on horse-back came to symbolize the “Lost Cause.” Usuallymonuments to war symbolize triumph or fighting fora just cause, even in defeat.

A large monument to World War II veterans finallyopened on the mall in Washington in 2004 after yearsof controversy.There have been many other attemptsto honor the World War II generation. The Air andSpace Museum of the Smithsonian Institution inWashington, D.C., planned a major exhibit for 1995 to

commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the droppingof the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the end ofWorld War II. The Enola Gay, the B-29 that droppedthe bomb, was to be the centerpiece of the exhibit,but the historians and curators who organized theexhibit also planned to raise a number of questionsthat historians had been debating for years.Would thewar have ended in days or weeks without the bomb?How was the decision to drop the bomb made? Wasthere a racial component to the decision? Would theUnited States have dropped the bomb on Germany?Was the bomb dropped more to impress the SovietUnion than to force the Japanese to surrender? Whatwas the impact of the bomb on the ground? What im-plications did dropping the bomb have on the worldafter 1945?

The exhibit (except in greatly modified form)never took place. Many veterans of World War II andother Americans denounced it as traitorous and un-American. For these critics the decision to drop thebomb was not something to debate. For them,WorldWar II was a contest between good and evil, and thebomb was simply a way to defeat the evil empire andsave American lives. The controversy over the EnolaGay exhibit demonstrated that 50 years later, memoryand history were at odds and that the memory of thewar was still contested. The main reason the exhibitdid not satisfy those who remembered the war was

RECOVERING THE PAST

History, Memory, and Monuments

854

Dedication of the IwoJima Memorial Monu-ment in Washington,D.C., November 10,1954. (National Archives[127-GRA-A409861])



symbol of the country pulling together to defeat theenemy.

In November 1954, a giant statue of the flag raising,designed by Felix De Weldon, was dedicated as amemorial to the U.S. Marine Corps on the edge of Ar-lington National Cemetery. Vice President RichardNixon, speaking at the dedication, said that the statuesymbolized “the hopes and dreams of the Americanpeople and the real purpose of our foreign policy.”The flag-raising image played an important role in twomovies: The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), starring JohnWayne, and The Outsider (1960), starring Tony Curtis.During the 1988 presidential campaign, George H.W.Bush chose to make a speech in front of the marinemonument urging a constitutional amendment to banthe desecration of the flag.The image of the flag rais-ing in photograph, drawing, film, and cartoon remainspart of the collective memory of World War II.

REFLECTING ON THE PAST Why did the Iwo Jimamonument mean so much to the World War II gener-ation? Was the monument more important than thephotograph? What makes a monument meaningful? Isit the size? The accuracy? The ability to arouse emo-tion? Why do some monuments and symbols becomepart of collective memory, while others become con-troversial or forgotten? There are more than 15,000outdoor sculptures and monuments in the country,most created since the Civil War. What monumentscan you locate in your community? What collectivememory do they symbolize?

that it did not commemorate triumph but insteadseemed to question the motives of those who foughtand died.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial erected in Wash-ington in 1982 was initially controversial for similarreasons. Designed by Maya Lin, a young artist andsculptor, it consists of a wall of polished granite in-scribed with the names of 58,000 dead.There are nosoldiers on horseback; in fact, there are no figures atall, not even a flag. Critics called it a “black gash ofshame.” Even the addition of a sculpture of three“fighting men” did not satisfy many. But to almosteveryone’s surprise, hundreds of thousands of veter-ans and friends of veterans found the monumentdeeply moving, and they left photos, flowers, poems,and other objects. For them, the memorial success-fully represented collective memory. Still the criticswere dissatisfied; they wanted something more likethe Iwo Jima monument.

Iwo Jima was a tiny, desolate island 640 miles fromTokyo, important only because it was a base for Japan-ese fighters to attack American bombers on their wayto the Japanese mainland.The Fourth and Fifth MarineDivisions invaded the island on February 17, 1945.Af-ter bitter fighting, the marines captured Mt. Suribachi,the highest point on the island, on February 23 andcompleted the conquest of the island on March 17.But it was a costly victory—there were 4,189 Ameri-cans killed, 15,000 wounded, and 419 missing.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal wasone of several journalists who went ashore with themarines and one of three photographers assigned torecord the raising of the American flag on top of Mt.Suribachi.A group of marines raised the flag twice sothe photographers could get their pictures. It wasRosenthal’s photograph of the second flag raising thatbecame famous. On February 25, 1945, his photo-graph of the five marines and a navy corpsman raisingthe flag was on the front page of Sunday newspapersacross the country. “Stars and Stripes on Iwo,” “OldGlory over Volcano,” the captions read. Withinmonths, the image of the flag raising appeared on aWar Bond poster with the caption: “Now All To-gether” and also on a postage stamp.Three of the sixflag raisers were killed in the battle for Iwo Jima, butthose who survived became heroes, and their imageswere used to sell war bonds. Clearly, the flag-raisingimage had touched American emotions and quicklybecame part of the collective memory of the war, a

855

Official poster for the 1945 war bond drive using the imageof the Iwo Jima flag raising. (Courtesy of the Virginia War Museum)



856

the bomb as a military weapon and never had anydoubt that it should be used.” But the decision hadboth military and political ramifications. Eventhough Japan had lost most of its empire by thesummer of 1945, it still had a military force of sev-eral million men and thousands of kamikaze planesthat had already wreaked havoc on the Americanfleet. The kamikaze pilots gave up their own lives tomake sure that their planes, heavily laden withbombs, crashed on American ships. In the Battle ofOkinawa, kamikaze pilots destroyed or disabled 28American ships and killed 5,000 American sailors.There was little defense against such fanaticism.

Even with the Russian promise to enter the war, itappeared that an amphibious landing on the Japan-ese mainland would be necessary to end the war.

The monthlong battle for Iwo Jima, only 750 milesfrom Tokyo, had resulted in more than 4,000 Ameri-can dead and 15,000 wounded, and the battle forOkinawa was even more costly. An invasion of theJapanese mainland would presumably be evenmore expensive in human lives. The bomb, manythought, could end the war without an invasion. Butsome people involved in the decision wanted to re-taliate for Pearl Harbor, and still others needed tojustify spending more than $2 billion on the projectin the first place. The timing of the first bomb, how-ever, indicates to some that the decision was in-tended to impress the Russians and ensure that theyhad little to do with the peace settlement in the FarEast. One British scientist later charged that the de-cision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was the “first

HOW OTHERS SEE USYamaoka Michiko,on the Ground at Hiroshima

Yamaoka Michiko, a young Japanese high school student,was 15 on August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay droppedthe first atomic bomb. She survived, but she was horriblyburned and disfigured. After the war she was one of 25 vic-tims brought to the United States to receive treatment andplastic surgery.

That morning I left the house at about sevenforty-five. I heard that the B-29s had already gonehome. Mom told me,“Watch out, the B-29s mightcome again.” My house was one point three kilo-meters from hypocenter. . . . I heard the faintsound of planes as I approached the river. Theplanes were tricky. Sometimes they only pre-tended to leave. I could still hear the very faintsound of planes.Today, I have no hearing in my leftear because of the blast. I thought, how strange, soI put my right hand above my eyes and looked upto see if I could spot them.The sun was dazzling.That was the moment. . . .

They say temperatures of seven thousand de-grees centigrade hit me. You can’t really say itwashed over me. It is hard to describe. I simplyfainted. I remember my body floating in the air.That was probably the blast, but I don’t know howfar I was blown. When I came to my senses, mysurroundings were silent. . . .

The only medicine was tempura oil, I put it on mybody myself. I lay on the concrete for hours. My skinwas now flat, not puffed up anymore.A scorching skywas overhead.The flies swarmed over me and cov-ered my wounds, which were already festering. Peo-ple were simply left lying around. When their faintbreathing became silent, they’d say,“This one’s dead,”and put the body in a pile of corpses. Some called forwater, and if they got it, they died immediately. . . .

When I went to America I had a deep hatredtoward America. I asked myself why they endedthe war by means which destroyed human beings.When I talked about how I suffered, I was told,“Well, you attacked Pearl Harbor!” I didn’t under-stand much English then, and it’s probably just aswell. From the American point of view, theydropped that bomb in order to end the war faster,in order to create more damage faster. But it’s in-excusable to harm human beings in this way. Iwonder what kind of education there is now inAmerica about atomic bombs.They’re still makingthem, aren’t they?

■ Can you answer Yamaoka Michiko’s question?

■ Does the plastic surgery she received in America makeup for her pain and suffering?




Total War Even before the destruction ofHiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, Amer-ican fire-bombing raids destroyed many Japanesecities. A raid on Tokyo on March 9, 1945 (shownhere a few days later), killed at least 100,000 peo-ple and left more than a million homeless. Wasthis kind of destruction of civilians justifiable evenin a brutal war? (National Archives [80-G-490421])

Lend-Lease ActGermany attacks RussiaJapanese assets in United States frozenJapanese attack Pearl Harbor; United States

declares war on JapanGermany declares war on United States

1942 Internment of Japanese AmericansSecond Allied front in Africa launched

1943 Invasion of SicilyItalian campaign; Italy surrendersRace riots in Detroit and other cities

1944 Normandy invasion (Operation Overlord)Roosevelt elected for a fourth term

1945 Yalta ConferenceRoosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes presidentGermany surrendersSuccessful test of atomic bombHiroshima and Nagasaki bombed; Japan

surrenders

T I M E L I N E

1931–1932 Japan seizes Manchuria

1933 Hitler becomes German chancellorUnited States recognizes the Soviet UnionRoosevelt extends Good Neighbor policy

1934 Germany begins rearmament

1935 Italy invades EthiopiaFirst Neutrality Act

1936 Spanish civil war beginsSecond Neutrality ActRoosevelt re-elected

1938 Hitler annexes Austria, occupies SudetenlandGerman persecution of Jews intensifies

1939 Nazi–Soviet PactGerman invasion of Poland; World War II begins

1940 Roosevelt elected for a third termSelective Service Act

1941 FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speechProposed black march on WashingtonExecutive Order 8802 outlaws discrimination in

defense industries




major operation of the cold diplomatic war withRussia.”

Historians still debate whether the use of theatomic bomb on the Japanese cities was necessaryto end the war, but for the hundreds of thousands ofAmerican troops waiting on board ships and on is-land bases (even in Europe) to invade the Japanesemainland, there was no question about the right-ness of the decision. They believed that the bombsended the war and saved their lives. On August 6,1945, two days before the Soviet Union hadpromised to enter the war against Japan, a B-29bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a single atomic

bomb over Hiroshima. It killed or severely wounded160,000 civilians and destroyed four square miles ofthe city. One of the men on the plane sawthe thick cloud of smoke and thought thatthey had missed their target. “It lookedlike it had landed on a forest. I didn’t seeany sign of the city.” The Soviet Union en-tered the war on August 8. When Japan re-fused to surrender, a bomb was droppedon Nagasaki on August 9. The Japanesesurrendered five days later. The war was finally over.The problems of the atomic age and the postwarworld were just beginning.

Conclusion

Peace, Prosperity, and International Responsibilities

The United States emerged from World War II with anenhanced reputation as the world’s most powerful in-dustrial and military nation. The war had finallyended the Great Depression and brought prosperityto most Americans. Even N. Scott Momaday’s familysecured better jobs because of the war, but, like manyAmericans, they had to move to take those jobs. Thewar also increased the power of the federal govern-ment. The payroll deduction of federal income taxes,begun during the war, symbolized the growth of afederal bureaucracy that affected the lives of allAmericans. Ironically the war to preserve liberty andfreedom was fought with segregated armed forces,and some American citizens, including many Japan-ese Americans, were deprived of their freedom. Thewar had also ended American isolationism and madethe United States into the dominant global power. Ofall the nations that fought in the war, the UnitedStates had suffered the least. No bombs weredropped on American factories, and no cities weredestroyed. Although more than 300,000 Americanslost their lives, even this carnage seemed minimal

when compared with more than 20 million Russiansoldiers and civilians who died or the 6 million Jewsand millions of others systematically exterminated byHitler.

Americans greeted the end of the war with joy andrelief. But those who lived through the war years,even those too young to fight, like N. Scott Momaday,recalled the war as a time when all Americans wereunited to achieve victory. They looked forward to thepeace and prosperity for which they had fought. Yetwithin two years, the peace would be jeopardized bythe Cold War, and the United States would be rearm-ing its former enemies, Japan and Germany, to op-pose its former friend, the Soviet Union. The irony ofthat situation reduced the joy of the hard-won peaceand made the American people more suspicious oftheir government and its foreign policy. Yet the mem-ory of World War II and the perception that the coun-try was united against evil enemies, indeed thatWorld War II was a “good war,” would have an impacton American foreign policy, and even on Americans’perception of themselves, for decades to come.

1. Trace the series of international events that led to theUnited States’ entry into World War II. Could theUnited States have stayed neutral?

2. Explain why and how the United States internedJapanese Americans in the aftermath of the attack onPearl Harbor. Was the internment justified?

3. How did the war change the lives of women, AfricanAmericans, and Hispanic Americans?

Questions for Review and Reflection

4. What were the war aims of the United States, andhow were they achieved?

5. What led the United States to develop the atomicbomb? What were the consequences of this newweapon for the Japanese, for Americans, and for theoutcome of World War II?

NagasakiAtomic BombAttack, August

1945





In The Dollmaker (1954), Harriette Arnow tells thefictionalized story of a young woman from Ken-tucky who finds herself in wartime Detroit. Twopowerful novels that tell the story of the battlefieldexperience are Norman Mailer’s The Naked and theDead (1948) and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions(1948). Alan Furst has written a series of novels in-cluding Night Soldiers (1996) and Red Gold (1999)that capture the look and feel of Europe in the earlydays of the war. Pearl Harbor (2001) is a blockbusterfilm worth seeing for the special effects, but moreinteresting is Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a film that tellsthe story of the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the

American and the Japanese points of view. It is com-pelling even as it oversimplifies history. Saving Pri-vate Ryan (1998), a film about one platoon’s adven-tures on D-Day and after, is sentimental andromantic in spots but contains some graphic and vi-olent scenes of the invasion of Normandy. MemphisBelle (1990) tells the story of one bomber crew.Schindler’s List (1993) uses the Holocaust as back-ground and subject. It is important to sample someof the movies produced during the war even thoughthey are often filled with propaganda. Bataan (1943)was the first movie featuring an ethnic platoon.Casablanca (1943) and Lifeboat (1944) are classics.

Recommended ReadingRecommended Readings are posted on the Web site for this textbook. Visit www.ablongman.com/nash

Fiction and Film

Discovering U.S. History Online

World War II Timelinehttp://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/start.htmlThis interactive timeline includes the years prior to Amer-ican involvement in World War II.

Resource Listing for World War IIwww.sunsite.unc.edu/pha/index.htmlThis site presents an extensive, categorized listing ofWorld War II primary documents available on the Web.

World War II Museumwww.thedropzone.orgA virtual museum of World War II, this site covers the Eu-ropean and Pacific theaters, training, Axis accounts, andan innovative collection of oral histories.

Remembering Pearl Harborwww.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/This site includes a detailed account of the attack, illus-trated with maps and photographs, as well as a searchablearchive of survivors’ stories.

A People at Warwww.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/a_people_at_war/a_people_at_war.htmlThis National Archives exhibit takes a close look at thecontributions that millions of Americans made to the wareffort.

Poster Art of World War IIwww.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/powers_of_persuasion/powers_of_persuasion_home.htmlThese powerful posters at the National Archives were partof the battle for the hearts and minds of the Americanpeople during World War II.

Fighters on the Farm Fronthttp://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/osu/osuhomepage.htmlThis site offers an illustrated presentation of the effortsto replace the labor force lost by men going into militaryservice.

Tuskegee Airmenwww.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/prewwii/ta.htmThe Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Basemaintains this site about the African American pilots ofWorld War II.

African Americans in World War IIwww.coax.net/people/lwf/ww2.htmThis site presents an extensive compilation of links to es-says, some internal and some external to the site, whichdetail the experience of African Americans during WorldWar II.

A. Philip Randolphwww.georgemeany.org/archives/apr.htmlA biography of Randolph, emphasizing his beliefs and hiswork in civil and labor rights.




Japanese Americanswww.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/harmonyThis site deals with all aspects of the Japanese wartime in-ternment, relocation centers, and the human stories be-hind the massive removal of Japanese Americans from theWest Coast.

Japanese Relocation Siteswww.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anthropology74/This book describes every relocation site used during thewar and includes photographs, architectural drawings,and personal accounts. The full text is presented online.

Japanese American Relocation Photographswww.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc/digarchives/jardaThis site presents a searchable archive of photos takenfrom the Los Angeles Examiner. The photos document “therelocation of Japanese Americans in California principallyduring the period 1941–1946. Many of the photographsshow daily life in the camps.”

Latinos and Latinas & World War IIwww.utexas.edu/projects/latinoarchivesThis site presents a background of Hispanic involvementin World War II as well as reprints of its publication,Narratives, with individual accounts of Hispanic servicesin the war and on the home front.

An Oral History of Rhode Island Women During WorldWar IIwww.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/tocCS.htmlThis site presents oral histories by students in the HonorsEnglish Program at South Kingstown High School as well

as an explanation of oral history, essays on women andthe war, and a timeline of World War II.

“Flygirls”www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flygirlsThis site presents the “largely unknown story of theWomen Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)” with photos,sound clips, essays, profiles, a timeline, and a transcript ofthe companion film with a teacher’s guide.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museumwww.ushmm.orgThis official Web site of the Holocaust Museum in Wash-ington, D.C., includes more than 15 online exhibitions.

A-Bombhttp://www.csi.ad.jp/ABOMBThis site offers information about the impact of the firstatomic bomb as well as the background and context ofweapons of total destruction.

Fifty Years from Trinityhttp://seattletimes.nwsource.com/trinity/A complete reprint of an anniversary special section of thenewspaper that “detailed the history, impacts and futureof atomic weapons and nuclear power.” The site also in-cludes teaching and discussion materials.

The U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II: Normandywww.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htmAn online version of a 45-page brochure covering the as-sault, including maps and photographs.



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