Download American History – A Survey

American History – A Survey
By Alan Brinkley
Chapter 28

American in a World at War
o War on Two Fronts
 Containing the Japanese
 After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American and British possessions
in the Pacific fell to the Japanese
 American strategists planned two broad offensives to turn the tide
against the Japanese
o One would come North from Australia (MacArthur), the other
west from Hawaii (Nimitz) and meet to defeat Japanese forces
 Battle of Coral Sea
o May 7-8, 1942
o American forces turned back the previously unstoppable
Japanese fleet
 Battle of Midway
o June 3-6, 1942
o The American navy destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers
while losing only one and regained control of the central
Pacific for the United States
 Solomon Islands
o August 1942
o American forces assaulted three of the islands: Gavutu,
Tulagi, and Guadalcanal
o The Japanese were forced to abandon the island and their last
chance of launching an effective offensive to the south
 Holding Off the Germans
 General George C. Marshall supported a plan for a major Allied
invasion of France across the English Channel in 1943
 But the Soviets and the British wanted to institute their own plans
 FDR decided to support the British plan
o A series of Allied offensives around the edges of the Nazi
empire before undertaking the major invasion of France
 The British opened a counteroffensive against Nazi forces in North
Africa under General Ervin Rommel and forced the Germans to retreat
from Egypt
 On November 8, Anglo-American forces landed at Oran and Algiers in
Algeria and at Casablanca and began moving east toward Rommel
 The Germans began to defeat the American forces
 But the American offensive finally drove the last Germans from Africa
in May 1943
 July 9, 1943 American and British armies landed in southeast Sicily
o 38 days later they had conquered the island and were moving
into the mainland
o Mussolini’s government collapsed and he fled
 Italy soon became committed to the Allies
 America and the Holocaust
 As early as 1942, high officials in Washington had incontrovertible
evident that Hitler’s forces were rounding up Jews and others from all
over Europe, transporting them to concentration camps in eastern
Germany and Poland, and systematically murdering them

o
Public pressure began to build for an Allied effort to end the killing or
at least to rescue some of the surviving Jews
 One ship, the St. Louis, had arrived off Miami in 1939 carrying nearly
1,000 escape German Jews, only to be refused entry and forced to
return to Europe
 There was a deliberate effort by officials in the State Department to
prevent Jews from entering the United States
The American People in Wartime
 Prosperity
 WWII had its most profound impact on American domestic life by at
last ending the Great Depression
 The most important agent of the new prosperity was federal spending
 The gross national product soared
 Personal incomes in some areas grew by as much as 100% or more
 The demands of wartime production created a shortage of consumer
goods, so many wage earners diverted much of their new affluence into
savings, which would later help keep the economic boom alive in the
postwar years
 The War and the West
 The impact of government spending was perhaps most dramatic in the
West
 Altogether the government made almost $40 billion worth of capital
investments in the West during the war
o Factories, military and transportation facilities, highways,
power plants
 The Pacific Coast had become the center of the growing American
aircraft industry and shipbuilding industry
 Once a lightly industrialized region, parts of the West were now among
the most important manufacturing areas in the country
 Labor and the War
 The war created a serious labor shortage
o The armed forces took more than 15 million men and women
out of the civilian work force at the same tie that the demand
for labor was rising rapidly
 The government was principally interested in preventing inflation and
in keeping production moving without disruption
 It managed to win important concessions from union leaders on both
scores
o Little Steel Formula
 Set a 15% limit on wartime wage increases
o “No-strike” pledge
 Unions agreed not to stop production in wartime
 In return, the government provided labor with a
“maintenance-of-membership” agreement
 Ensured the continued health of the union
organizations, but in return workers had to
give up the right to demand major economic
gains during the war
 When the United Mine Workers defied the government by striking in
May 1943, Congress reacted by passing the Smith-Connally Act (War
Labor Disputes Act)
o Required unions to wait thirty days before striking and
empowered the president to seize a struck war plant
 Stabilizing the Boom
 Anti-Inflation Act
o




Gave the administration authority to freeze agricultural prices,
wages, salaries, and rents throughout the country
o Enforcement was lead by the Office of Price Administration
 Revenue Act of 1942
o Established a 94% rate for the highest brackets and for the first
time imposed taxes on the lowest-income families as well
o To simplify collection, Congress enacted a withholding
system of payroll deductions in 1943
Mobilizing Production
 War Production Board
o The WPB was to be a “superagency” with broad powers over
the economy
 The WPB constantly found itself outmaneuvered and frustrated
o It was never able to win control over military purchases, never
able to satisfy the complaints of small businesses
 The president transferred much of the WPB’s authority to a new office
located within the White House
o The Office of War Mobilization
African Americans and the War
 As WWII approached blacks were determined to use the conflict to
improve their position in society
 In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters began to insist that the
government require companies receiving defense contracts to integrate
their work forces
o Led to the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices
Commission
 To investigate discrimination against blacks in war
industries
 The Congress of Racial Equality
o 1942
o Mobilized mass popular resistance to discrimination in a way
that the older, more conservative organizations had never done
 In 1944 they forced a Washington D. C. restaurant to agree to serve
blacks
 Pressure for change was also growing within the military
o By the end of the war, the number of black service men had
increased seven old
o Substantial discrimination survived in all the services until
well after the war
Native Americans and the War
 Approximately 25,000 Native Americans performed military service
during WWII
 The war had important effects on those Native Americans who
remained civilians
 Some young Native Americans took this chance to go out and work in
war plants
o This brought many Indians into intimate contact with white
society for the first time, and awakened in some of them a
taste for the material benefits of life in capitalist American that
they would retain after the war
 The wartime emphasis on national unity undermined support for the
revitalization of tribal autonomy that the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934 had launched
Mexican-American War Workers




Large numbers of Mexican workers entered the United States during
the war in response to labor shortages on the Pacific Coast, in the
Southwest and other places in the nation
 The American and Mexican governments agreed in 1942 to a program
by which contract laborers would be admitted to the United States for a
limited time to work at specific jobs, and American employers in some
parts of the Southwest began actively recruiting Hispanic workers
 The sudden expansion of Mexican-American neighborhoods created
tensions and occasionally conflict in some American cities
 Zoot suits became a symbol of rebellion against and defiance toward
conventional white, middle class society
 Zoot Suit Riots
o In 1943, animosity toward the zoot-suiters produced a fourday riot in LA
o Los Angeles passed a law prohibiting the wearing of zoot suits
Women and Children at War
 The number of women in the work force increased by nearly 60%
 Many women entered the industrial work force to replace male workers
serving in the military
 Many employers treated women in the war plants with a combination
of solicitude and patronization
 Women did make important inroads in industrial employment during
the war
o “Rosie the Riveter” symbolized the new importance of the
female industrial work force
 Above all, women worked for the government
 The new opportunities produced new problems
o Mothers had to leave their children while they worked
o Juvenile crime rose markedly in the war years
 The return of prosperity during the war helped increase the rate and
lower the age of marriage
o The divorce rate rose rapidly
 The increase in marriages lead to the “baby boom”
Wartime Life and Culture
 The abundance of the war years created a striking buoyancy in
American life that the conflict itself only partially subdued
 The book, theater, and movie industries did record business
o Magazines, Radios, Resort hotels, Casinos, Racetracks, Dance
halls
 Advertisers, and at times even the government, exhorted Americans to
support the war effort to ensure a future of material comfort and
consumer choice for themselves and their children
 For men at the front, the image of home was a powerful antidote to the
rigors of wartime
o The pinup became a source of one of the most popular icons
of the front
 For the servicemen who remained in America during the war, the
company of friendly women was critical to maintaining morale
 Schools, colleges, and universities experience major disruptions
because of the war
o With a lack of male teachers and students major universities
turned themselves into training camps for military officers
The Internment of Japanese Americans
 The government barred for the mails a few papers it considered
seditious, but there was no general censorship of dissident publications

o
A few Nazi agents and American fascist were jailed, but there was no
major assault on people suspected of sympathizing with the Axis
 But there was a glaring exception to the general rule of tolerance
 The treatment of the small, politically powerless group of Japanese
Americans
 There was some public pressure in California to remove the Japanese
“threat”
 The real impetus for taking action came from the government
 In February 1942, the president authorized the army to “intern” the
Japanese Americans
o He created the War Relocation Authority to oversee the
project
 The internment camps were more a target of white economic
aspirations than of missionary work
 The internment never produced significant popular opposition
 Korematsu v. United States (1944)
o The Supreme Court ruled that the relocation was
constitutionally permissible
 By the end of 1944 most of the internes had been released
 Chinese Americans and the War
 The American alliance with China during WWII significantly enhanced
both the legal and social status of Chinese Americans
 In 1943, Congress finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act
 Permanent residents of the United States of Chinese descent were
finally permitted to become citizens
 The Retreat from Reform
 The greatest assault on New Deal reform came from conservative sin
Congress, who seized on the war as an excuse to do what many had
wanted to do in peacetime
o Dismantle many of the achievement of the New Deal
 The president quietly accepted the defeat or erosion of New Deal
measures in order to win support for his war policies and peace plans
 1944 election
 Republicans – Thomas Dewey
 Democrats – FDR
o Democrats wanted FDR to change Vice Presidents again
 Harry S. Truman
 FDR wins, AGAIN!
o The conduct of the war was not an issue in the campaign
o Instead, the election revolved around domestic economic
issues
The Defeat of the Axis
 The Liberation of France
 June 6, 1944 D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent a vast armada
into action
o The landing was on the coast of Normandy
o Within a week, the German forces had been dislodged from
virtually the entire Normandy coast
 Battle of Saint-Lo
o Forces were able to drive into the heart of France
 August 25th, Free French forces arrived in Paris and liberated the city
from four years of German occupation
 Battle of the Bulge
o The battle ended serious German resistance in the west





On April 30, Adolph Hitler killed himself
On May 8, 1945 the remaining German forces surrendered
unconditionally
o V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day)
The Pacific Offensive
 In February 1944, American naval forces won a series of victories in
the Marshall Islands and cracked the outer perimeter of the Japanese
Empire
o The decisive battles of the Pacific war occurred in the Pacific
 In mid-June 1944, an enormous American armada struck the heavily
fortified Marian Islands and captured Tinian, Guam and Saipan
 Battle of Leyte Gulf
o The largest naval engagement in history
o The Japanese used virtually their entire fleet against the Allied
invaders in three major encounters
 In February 1945, American marines seized the tiny volcanic island of
Iwo Jima
 American forces captured Okinawa in June of 1945
 Moderate Japanese leaders were struggling for power within the
government and were looking for ways to bring the war to an end
The Manhattan Project
 From 1941 on, the government secretly poured nearly $2 billion into
the so-called Manhattan Project
 A massive scientific effort conducted at hidden laboratories
 The bomb was no longer a scientific project
o It was a weapon of war
Atomic Warfare
 Harry S. Truman issued an ultimatum to the Japanese demanding that
they surrender by August 3 or face complete devastation
 When the deadline passed with no surrender, Truman ordered the air
force to use the new atomic weapons against Japan
 On August 6, 1945 and American B-29, the Enola Gay, dropped an
atomic weapon on the Japanese industrial center at Hiroshima
 Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan
 The following day the United States sent another American plane to
drop another atomic weapon – Nagasaki
 On August 14 the government announced that it was ready to give up
 On September 2, 1945 Japanese officials signed the articles of
surrender