Download Please read the article below. If is from ABC Clio. We will discuss

Please read the article below. If is from ABC Clio. We will discuss America’s involvement in World War II next
class and you begin brainstorming topics that interest you for an upcoming research paper.
America in World War II
World War II, the largest and most destructive conflict fought in human history, was the culmination of a process that saw
the United States emerge as a global power. The United States had begun playing a larger role in world affairs during
World War I, but after the war ended, Americans retreated into isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s, determined to
avoid foreign entanglements. In the 1940s, however, the second worldwide conflict of the century ended forever the idea
that Americans could withdraw from world events and decisively transformed the United States into a superpower with
interests and involvements in every corner of the globe. The war also wrought profound social changes in the United
States, and Americans knew even in the midst of the conflict that their world was changing forever.
As in World War I, the United States entered World War II quite some time after it had begun. In Europe, the war had
begun in September 1939, when German leader Adolf Hitler directed his army to invade Poland. In Asia, Japanese
military expansion in the Pacific began with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, with escalating violence in that area of the
world throughout the decade.
The United States watched these events with alarm but took no immediate action. President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt
strongly that his country could not avoid war, but he also knew that isolationist sentiment remained strong among both the
populace and members of Congress. Still, he did not follow the example of President Woodrow Wilson in World War I,
who had asked Americans to remain neutral in both their thoughts and their actions. Instead, following the German
invasion of Poland, Roosevelt told the American people, "This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that
every American remain neutral in thought as well."
Roosevelt's own thoughts were certainly anything but neutral. Watching as nations fell one by one under the German
onslaught, the American president began to take steps that would prepare the United States for the involvement he felt to
be inevitable. Throughout 1939, 1940, and 1941, the U.S. government took several initiatives to prepare the country for
war, forming the Uranium Committee, the National Defense Research Committee, and the Office of Scientific Research
and Development to investigate new resources and weapons. The Council of National Defense was formed to organize
industry, labor, finance, and transportation in the event of actual war. On September 16, 1940, Congress passed the
Selective Service Act, instituting conscription to expand the relatively small U.S. military force.
Most important were two events in 1941, both of which indicated very strongly the eventual course that the United States
would take. In March, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the U.S. government to lend or lease
armaments rather than selling them outright for cash. This measure was explicitly designed to help Great Britain, which
was broke and suffering under heavy German air and submarine attacks. It was also a way for Roosevelt to give aid to
those resisting what he regarded as Hitler's dangerous aggression without actually joining into any formal alliance.
In August 1941, Roosevelt moved his country one step closer to alignment with England by meeting with British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland. Although stopping short of an outright alliance, the
two issued a statement known as the Atlantic Charter, which outlined the common goals shared by their nations and
vowed to destroy Hitler's "Nazi tyranny."
Thus, by late 1941, the United States was clearly poised to participate in a war against Germany and its ally in Europe,
Italy. However, there was also trouble brewing on the other side of the world as well. Americans had watched warily as
Japan began to make moves in the Pacific that betrayed its ambitions to become a major world economic and military
power. Since the end of World War I, the United States had competed with Japan for influence in the Pacific region, and a
major clash became more and more likely as the Japanese began to expand militarily. The 1931 invasion of Manchuria
provoked great concern in America, and by 1941, Roosevelt had come to regard Japan as a serious threat to national
security.
On July 26 of that year, in response to the Japanese Army's invasion of Indochina, Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in
America, a maneuver that cut off all trade between the two nations and deprived Japan of crucial U.S. oil supplies.
Without oil, the Japanese military machine threatened to grind to a halt. In response, then, Japan's leaders decided to
wage a war against the United States. On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft carriers launched an air attack on the
U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The strike caught the Americans completely by surprise, and the U.S. Pacific fleet emerged from the attack severely
crippled. Without naval protection, American forces in the Philippines and other Pacific islands were quickly overrun. At
Roosevelt's request, Congress declared war on Japan the following day. On December 11, Japan's allies Germany and
Italy declared war on America as well. The United States was now fighting a war across two oceans, and victory in this
massive undertaking would require an enormous national effort.
In his address to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Japan, Roosevelt had declared that December 7 was "a
date which will live in infamy." The vast majority of Americans felt the same way, and the nation now pulled together to
produce the soldiers and weapons that would be needed to defeat the powerful armies of the Axis Powers (as the alliance
of Germany, Italy, and Japan was known).
The massive effort to mobilize for war finally ended the economic hardship of the Great Depression. With millions of men
in the military (16 million would serve by war's end) and the demand for armaments nearly insatiable, industrial production
skyrocketed. This economic revival was coordinated by government bodies like the War Production Board, formed in
January 1942 to oversee the rational organization of the mobilization effort, and the Office of Price Administration, formed
in October 1942 to set official prices and wages and to administer a rationing system for such consumer goods as food
and fuel.
Whereas only a few years earlier the country had been crippled by high unemployment, by early 1942, the economy was
flourishing to such an extent that there was a worker shortage. Factories in the North attracted African Americans from the
South, prompting hundreds of thousands of blacks to move to cities like Detroit and Chicago, changing permanently the
demographic complexion of the nation.
Industrial work also attracted women, who were necessary laborers with so many men in the military. The image of
women working in factories was popularized by "Rosie the Riveter," although most women took low-level service-sector
jobs and worked as secretaries and clerks for both businesses and the government rather than in heavy industry. In
addition to women and African-American laborers, the war also opened up opportunities for Mexican Americans, many of
whom took agricultural jobs.
New opportunities for minorities also opened up in the military, with African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native
Americans serving in substantial numbers. Among the most famous Native American servicemen were the Navajo Code
Talkers, who worked as communications officers on ships in the Pacific speaking their native language—a "code" the
enemy found impossible to crack. Many minorities in the military, however, served in segregated units. By the end of the
war, America's diversity was on increasing display in the labor force, in the military, and in everyday urban and rural life,
though low pay, discrimination, and hardship were still common for many.
Discrimination and hardship were also the lot of thousands of Japanese Americans during the war. As was the case in
World War I, both the government and the American people in general demonized their enemies. Though German and
Italian Americans did not face serious problems during World War II, Americans of Japanese descent endured popular
hostility and state-sponsored oppression.
In February 1942, Roosevelt permitted the army to intern more than 100,000 men, women, and children in camps in the
deserts of California, Utah, and other western states. Seen as a threat to national security, as their Japanese racial
identity marked them as potential spies or traitors, many of these people spent the rest of the war behind barbed wire.
Racial hatred was a salient characteristic of the war in the Pacific theater as well, with both sides committing atrocities
against an enemy they had come to view as less than human. Though racially motivated violence never reached the
paroxysm of industrialized killing and genocide that engulfed German-occupied areas of Europe, the vicious fighting in the
Pacific theater was made more ferocious by undercurrents of racial antipathy.
In the opening months of U.S. involvement in the war, much of the action occurred in the Pacific theater. When the
Japanese overran the American force stationed in the Philippines, the American commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,
was evacuated to Australia. From there, he immediately began preparations to make good his parting promise to his
troops, "I shall return." He moved first on New Guinea, then launched an invasion of Japanese outposts in the neighboring
Solomon Islands, taking Guadalcanal in the Battle of Guadalcanal in February 1943. Thus began the strategy of "island
hopping," by which the American forces took control of the many isolated Japanese outposts in the Pacific.
Making this task possible was the amazing recovery of the U.S. Navy from its debacle at Pearl Harbor. With the incredible
might of American industry producing ships, planes, and submarines at record rates and in record quantities, the navy
began the slow process of destroying the Japanese fleet. In May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Americans dealt
a severe blow to the Japanese. In June of the same year, the Battle of Midway again demonstrated growing U.S.
superiority in both weapons and in the tactics of carrier-based naval operations.
At the same time, the U.S. submarine fleet was wreaking havoc on Japanese military and commercial shipping, choking
off the island nation from vital supplies. The U.S. Navy also directed island-hopping land attacks with marine and army
troops, moving ever closer to mainland Japan by taking Guam and Saipan in the Mariana Islands in the summer of 1944.
In October of that year, MacArthur finally returned to the Philippines at the head of a powerful invasion force. There, off
the island of Leyte in what became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the navy dealt the Japanese fleet another, near-
fatal blow. The conquest of the Philippines was largely complete by March 1945, and in April, the marines took the island
of Okinawa, very near the Japanese coast. The stage was now set for a final, massive invasion of Japan itself.
Meanwhile, the United States was also undertaking an enormous effort in Europe against Hitler's war machine. The Nazis
had conquered much of Europe and huge stretches of the Soviet Union by the end of 1941. France had fallen in 1940,
and of the other two major Allied Powers opposed to Hitler, Great Britain was engaged in a desperate fight to fend off
relentless German air attacks, while the Soviet Union was reeling from the loss of thousands of square miles of territory,
millions of men, and much of its military and industrial resources.
The American effort would take some time to organize, so a direct contribution of military forces had to wait. In the
meantime, the lend-lease program provided much needed supplies to the beleaguered Allies. Stalin, the iron-willed Soviet
dictator, was nevertheless impatient for direct action in Western Europe on the part of the British and Americans, as his
nation was bearing the brunt of the Nazi fury.
Though bombing raids originating in England were damaging German industrial capacity, Roosevelt and Churchill did not
yet possess sufficient men or resources to launch an invasion of German-occupied France, so they decided to challenge
the German Army in North Africa first. Striking out from Casablanca in Morocco in November 1942, American and British
forces under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower conquered areas of Algeria held by the French Vichy regime (a puppet
government set up by Hitler after his conquest of France). Moving east, the Allied forces met the Germans in an important
engagement at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943, finally forcing a German surrender of all of Tunisia in May of that
same year.
Next, the Allies prepared to invade Italy and defeat Hitler's partner, the Fascist ruler Benito Mussolini. On July 9, 1943,
American and British parachute and amphibious landings in Sicily marked the beginning of the invasion. They moved on
to mainland Italy on September 3, and the Italians rebelled against Mussolini and surrendered five days later. However,
the Germans then invaded Rome and restored the fallen Italian dictator.
Fighting against German troops, the Allied advance slowed, but a risky landing behind German lines on a beach at Anzio
in January 1944 eventually succeeded, and American forces took Rome on June 4. The invasion had been more difficult
than the Allies had anticipated, but it bought them time while they prepared a decisive blow against Hitler in Germanoccupied France.
Stalin had not been mollified by British and American efforts in North Africa and southern Europe, rightly judging that a
really definitive result could only come from an invasion of France from across the England Channel. Under the supreme
command of Eisenhower, such an invasion finally happened on June 6, 1944, when Allied forces landed on the coast of
France in what became known as the D-Day invasion.
Fighting was brutal, but the Allies managed to take control of several beachheads, which they would expand in the
following months as they drove on to Germany and final victory. Many of the American soldiers were fighting for the first
time, against an enemy hardened by years of battle, and the combat proved fierce. Nonetheless, Free French forces,
fighting under resistance leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle, and American troops entered Paris on August 25 to the delirious
cheers of liberated Parisians.
While another invasion force entered France from the south and bombing raids from England continued to destroy homes
and industry in Germany, the Allies pushed on to the German frontier on the Rhine River. Here, on December 16, the
Germans mounted one final, desperate offensive through the Ardennes Forest against the relatively weak center of the
American lines. Known to Americans as the Battle of the Bulge, named for the bulge that attacking German forces caused
in American lines, it did not last long. Hitler's armies were running out of resources, including crucial fuel supplies, and
were throwing inexperienced boys and old men into their ranks to make up for increasing losses. Fighting in bitter cold,
the Americans pushed the Germans back for the last time.
Now all that remained was to push on into Germany toward the capital in Berlin. Earlier in the war, Roosevelt and
Churchill had agreed that they would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender from the Germans. Stalin was no
more likely to settle for anything less, as the Soviets had done the heaviest fighting of the entire war. The battles on the
Eastern Front were the biggest in human history, and losses were staggering, both in military personnel, equipment, and
civilian casualties.
The Soviets had also encountered the brunt of the Germans' extermination camps of Eastern Europe, including
Auschwitz, where Hitler had attempted to annihilate the Jewish race and any other "inferior" peoples who challenged Nazi
views of racial purity by murdering millions of people. Many of these victims had been Soviet citizens before the war, and
Soviet losses totaled as many as 25 million people killed over the course of the war.
By early 1945, the combined effect of Allied bombing, invading Americans and British troops from the West, and vengeful
Soviets in the East had reduced much of Germany to rubble. The Soviets carried out the attack on Berlin, capturing it by
the end of April. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath Berlin on April 30 as the Soviets closed in. On May 8,
remaining German forces finally surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
Instrument of Surrender
The war in Europe was over, but Japan still remained undefeated. The prospect of invading the island nation was
daunting, especially in the face of projected bitter resistance from the Japanese people. Roosevelt had died in April, and
when Vice President Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency, he learned that Roosevelt had kept from him the secret
of the newest and deadliest U.S. weapon. Earlier in the war, Roosevelt had approved funding for the Manhattan Project,
which gathered together hundreds of scientists and technicians to build the world's first atomic bomb before the Germans
could develop similar technology. The weapon was finished by the summer of 1945, and military leaders immediately
urged its use to force the Japanese into surrender.
Controversy has raged for decades over what caused Truman to decide to use the atomic bomb, but it is probable that he
regarded the weapon as a means to end the war rapidly with minimal loss of American life. Whatever his reasoning, he
gave the order to drop the bomb on the city of Hiroshima when the Japanese refused to surrender unconditionally. On
August 6, 1945, an American plane named the Enola Gay dropped the first of two bombs, killing 80,000 people and
causing unprecedented damage. Three days later, after the Japanese still did not surrender, the second bomb fell on the
city of Nagasaki, killing 100,000. Japan finally agreed to surrender on August 14, and on September 2, in Tokyo Bay
aboard the American battleship Missouri, members of the Japanese government signed articles of unconditional
surrender.
Thus ended the most destructive war in human history, one that has changed the face of the modern world. About 50
million people died during the war, half of them civilians, and the conflict consumed at least $2 trillion of the world's wealth.
Vast stretches of the earth lay devastated, cities lay in rubble, and millions were homeless. Europe was in ruins and would
never again be the center of global economic, political, or military power. Japan's empire was destroyed, and the nation
humiliated. Nazi death camps and the millions that died in them revealed the depths of human misery and evil.
American actions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the awesome destructive power of atomic weapons and
forever altered calculations about international relations and military power. Former allies, the United States and the
Soviet Union now faced each other in an increasingly hostile Cold War that pitted capitalism and communism against
each other. The world, and America with it, now faced the monumental task of rebuilding and recovering, and forging a
new world order.
Still, the United States was in many ways more fortunate than many of the other nations involved in the struggle. Although
more than 400,000 American soldiers were killed (nearly 300,000 in combat), these losses paled in comparison with those
of other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, Japan, and Germany. American civilians also suffered comparatively little.
No territory in the United States was destroyed, and the enormous productive capacity unleashed by the war quickly
replaced material damage to weapons, ships, and planes, and provided Americans with a high standard of living and the
ability to dominate international markets in the postwar world.
The end of the war saw the United States emerge as one of two dominant superpowers, while the nation's economy
solidified its place as the strongest in the world. Never again would Americans retreat into isolationism, as after World War
I. Moreover, the social changes wrought by the demands of war took root and forever altered American life. The world in
1945 was indeed different from that of 1939. The events of those years led directly to the global political, economic, and
cultural dominance of the United States, which has provoked many to label the 20th century "The American Century."
MLA Citation
"World War II." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2012. Web. 20 Jan. 2012.