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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 10 · pp. 300–337
World War II was the deadliest war in history, and it ended with the United States as the world's leading superpower. This chapter follows the collapse of the order that followed World War I, the rise of aggressive regimes in Europe and Asia, and America's slow move from neutrality to war. It then covers the major campaigns of the war, the Holocaust, the home front and the struggles of women and minority groups, and the postwar institutions the Allies built.
World War II killed perhaps eighty million people. It brought industrialized genocide and the most destructive weapons ever used. The United States entered after December 7, 1941. When the war ended, it had the strongest economy on Earth and was the leading world power (p. 300).
The peace after World War I was shaky from the start. The United States helped win the war but then stayed out of the League of Nations and never ratified the Treaty of Versailles. Without American participation, the system lacked a major supporter (p. 301).
The winners and losers both nursed grievances:
The 1930s global economic crisis then pushed this weak order over the edge. Germany's Weimar Republic collapsed along with its economy. The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler rose from the wreckage, and Hitler became chancellor in 1933. He rejected the Treaty of Versailles, rebuilt the army and navy, and sent troops into the Rhineland, a region along the French border that was supposed to stay demilitarized (p. 301).
Fascist aggression spread. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, defying the League of Nations. When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini both helped the Spanish fascists defeat the Republic. Britain and France began rebuilding their militaries because they feared Germany. They still did not want to risk another bloody European war (p. 301).
In Asia, the path to war began on September 18, 1931. A small explosion damaged tracks of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway near Shenyang (Mukden). Japan used it as an excuse to invade Manchuria, claiming it was protecting Japanese citizens and investments. China had no united army, so Japan beat isolated warlords quickly. By the end of February 1932, it controlled all of Manchuria and had turned it into a puppet state called Manchukuo. China calls the event the September 18 Incident, and Japan calls it the Manchurian Incident (p. 303).
Japan's reasons were tied to its economy. It had little in the way of natural resources, and its economy was stagnating. Politicians were divided over two solutions:
Political crises and assassinations followed. In the end, pro-war military leaders overpowered the moderate civilian government and committed Japan to conquest (pp. 303–304).
The Western response was mostly words. The United States announced the Stimson Doctrine in January 1932. It refused to recognize any state created by Japanese aggression. The League of Nations sent Victor Bulwer-Lytton to investigate. His commission blamed Japan and called for Manchuria to be returned to China. Japan answered by leaving the League in March 1933 (pp. 303–304).
This isolation helped the radicals. Military leaders pointed to their success in Manchuria and to the civilian government's failures. They took control of policy and argued that conquering China would supply Japanese industry and secure Japan's dominance in East Asia (p. 304).
Many Americans regretted entering World War I. Some believed business interests had pushed the country in, and others thought it had simply stumbled in. Congress tried to avoid the entanglements that had led to war in 1914–1917. In 1935 it passed the first neutrality act, which banned American businesses from selling war materials to nations at war. That same year the Senate refused to let the US join the World Court (p. 304).
Japan began a full-scale invasion of China in July 1937 after fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge. It took Beijing, Shanghai, and then Nanjing in December. In Nanjing, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands of women were raped (p. 304).
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists responded with a scorched-earth strategy of "trading space for time." They retreated inland, burning villages and destroying dams, and set up a new capital at Chongqing. The tactic slowed the Japanese. However, it angered Chinese civilians who lost their homes, and the Chinese Communist Party used that anger in its propaganda (pp. 304–305).
Japan was far stronger than China. Its army had about 4.1 million men plus 900,000 Chinese collaborators, with modern rifles, artillery, tanks, and aircraft. By 1940 its navy was the world's third largest (p. 305). Chiang's wife, Soong May-ling, known as Madame Chiang, lobbied Americans for help. She had grown up partly in the US and graduated from Wellesley College in 1917, so she knew how to appeal to American audiences. Still, the US lacked the will and the military power to act. It condemned Japan but did nothing in the 1930s (p. 305).
China was already fighting itself. In 1935 the Nationalists drove the Communists from the coast. Mao Zedong then recruited peasants in Shaanxi Province. His force grew from about 7,000 survivors of the Long March in 1935 to 1.2 million members by the war's end. The Nationalists and Communists set aside their civil war, though the truce was uneasy. China could not push Japan out, but it could slow Japan's advance, and the war became a stalemate (p. 305).
In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that Europe's German peoples should be united in one nation. He also said Germans needed Lebensraum, or "living space": land and resources in Eastern Europe. He saw Slavs and others as Untermenschen ("lesser humans") who would have to be removed (p. 305).
He expanded step by step:
Hitler then signed the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union. Germany and the USSR agreed to split Poland and not attack each other. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Britain and France declared war two days later. They had hoped Poland could last three or four months, but it fell in three weeks (p. 306).
The speed came from Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war." German planners wanted to avoid the slow, deadly trench stalemate of World War I. They combined tanks, aircraft, and motorized infantry (soldiers carried in trucks rather than marching). These forces massed at one point, broke the front line, and caused chaos behind the enemy's defenses (p. 306).
Germany's attack on Poland pushed more Americans away from isolationism. President Roosevelt introduced "cash and carry" in 1939. Under this policy, the Allies could buy American arms and supplies if they paid cash and carried the goods on their own ships. That kept American sailors and ships out of danger, a problem that had inflamed public feeling before World War I. Roosevelt still told Americans he hoped the country would stay out of the war (p. 306).
Before the US entered the war, its response to Nazi persecution of Jews was weak. Roosevelt spoke out against the persecution and recalled the US ambassador from Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. He also pushed for the Evian Conference in France that year, where leaders discussed the refugee problem and tried to raise immigration quotas. The conference accomplished nothing (p. 307).
Two more cases show the pattern. In 1939 the ocean liner St. Louis carried over 900 Jewish refugees, but no country would take them. The US quota system gave them no visas, and the president did not act on their plea. The ship returned to Europe, and hundreds of its passengers later died in the Holocaust (p. 307). Also, the Wagner-Rogers Bill would have let 20,000 German-Jewish children enter outside the quotas. Eleanor Roosevelt backed it, but the president said nothing in public. About two-thirds of Americans opposed it, and it never left committee. Historians suggest Roosevelt did not want to spend political capital on a cause that most Americans did not support, since he wanted to protect the New Deal and rearmament (p. 307).
At the same time, the US moved against the Axis economically. In 1939 it ended its trade treaties with Japan. In 1940 it embargoed oil, steel, rubber, and other key goods. The goal was to choke Japan's war machine (pp. 307–308). It backfired. Japan's military had few natural resources, so it invaded more of the Pacific to get them. It called its new empire the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and used the slogan "Asia for the Asians." The US demanded that Japan leave China, and Japan treated the oil embargo as a de facto declaration of war. Relations collapsed (p. 308).
After Poland fell, there was a quiet winter of 1939–1940. The fighting stayed mostly in small areas such as Norway, and people called it the Sitzkrieg ("sitting war"). In May 1940 Hitler attacked Western Europe. Germany went through the Netherlands and Belgium to avoid France's strong border defenses, copying the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. Poland had lasted three weeks, and France lasted only a few weeks more. By June Hitler was posing for photos at the Eiffel Tower. Germany occupied northern France and ruled the south through a puppet government at Vichy (p. 308).
Hitler then turned to Britain. His invasion plan, Operation Sea Lion, needed control of the air over the English Channel. From June to October the German Luftwaffe fought the Royal Air Force (RAF). The British had fewer planes but won the Battle of Britain, so no invasion came. Prime Minister Winston Churchill praised the pilots by saying so much was owed by so many to so few (p. 308).
Hitler's next step was the Blitz, a bombing campaign aimed at civilians. He hoped to crush British morale. From September 1940 to May 1941 the Luftwaffe bombed London, Liverpool, and Manchester nearly every night. Children were sent to live with strangers in the countryside. Adults hid in shelters and subway tunnels, then came out each morning to fight fires and bury the dead (p. 308).
American opinion moved from strong isolationism toward accepting that war might come. In fall 1940 Roosevelt signed the Selective Training Service Act, the nation's first peacetime draft. He also won an unprecedented third term, believing he was the one to lead the country through the crisis (pp. 308–309). He promised to build every factory and arsenal needed for defense (p. 310).
In January 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. The US could now send the Allies weapons and equipment, not only food. Roosevelt wanted America to be the "arsenal of democracy." The country was still officially neutral because no American soldiers were fighting, but it was giving direct material help (p. 310).
Not all opposition to this was the same. The America First Committee wanted a "Fortress America" and rejected intervention. Many members simply wanted to avoid another terrible war. But some, including spokesman Charles Lindbergh, spread antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that Jews were pushing the nation toward war. So the belief that all non-interventionists were only peace-seekers is wrong (p. 310).
On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke the 1939 nonaggression pact and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the largest land invasion in history. Hitler wanted farmland, oil fields, and an end to the Soviet threat. At first the Blitzkrieg worked, and Germany took huge areas and hundreds of thousands of prisoners (p. 310).
Then the advance stalled. Stalin moved factories east of the Urals, beyond the Luftwaffe's reach. He ordered retreating troops to destroy food, railways, and homes so the Germans could not use them. Germany's supply lines stretched thousands of miles, partisans attacked its lines, and the harsh winter arrived. The army split into three parts at the gates of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow. It besieged and starved Leningrad, fought a bloody battle in ruined Stalingrad, and fell back near Moscow (pp. 310–311).
This front decided much of the war. About 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died, and roughly 80 percent of German casualties happened in the east. At Stalingrad alone the Germans and their conscripts lost 850,000 (p. 311).
In August 1941, with new embargoes on Japan taking effect, Roosevelt and Churchill met on the USS Augusta off Newfoundland. They issued the Atlantic Charter, which promised "the final destruction of Nazi tyranny" and rejected territorial seizures. It also described a cooperative, economically connected postwar world (p. 311).
Japan expected the US to enter the Pacific war, so it planned a surprise strike. On December 7, 1941, it attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, hoping to destroy enough battleships and carriers to cripple the US Navy for years. It killed 2,400 Americans. Isolationism ended. Roosevelt called the date one "which will live in infamy," and Congress declared war within hours. Within a week the US was fighting the Axis in both Europe and Asia, joining separate wars into one world war (p. 311).
Almost 18 million Americans served, and over 10 million were drafted. Service members came from many backgrounds, including about half a million Latinos, thousands of Asian Americans, and over 20,000 Native Americans. For many, the military mixed people together. But more than a million Black service members served in segregated units, so the military stayed a Jim Crow institution (pp. 311–313).
By 1945 the Allies were closing in on both enemies, but the Pacific showed how hard the last stages would be. Iwo Jima was a tiny island of volcanic rock, only about eight square miles. Roughly 17,000 Japanese defenders held it against 70,000 Marines for more than a month. Nearly all the defenders died, yet they caused almost 30,000 American casualties. Many Japanese soldiers saw surrender as shameful, so they fought on, and this fed American fears about invading Japan itself (p. 317).
In Europe, Germany's last big gamble in the west, the Battle of the Bulge, did not push the Allies back to the English Channel. It did cost them the winter, which delayed the invasion of Germany. Meanwhile, Soviet armies kept advancing from the east, and German counterattacks failed to stop them (p. 317). The final steps came quickly:
At Potsdam, the Allied leaders agreed to split Germany into occupation zones based on where Allied armies stood, and to divide Berlin the same way, until elections could be held. Stalin also promised to enter the war against Japan three months after Germany's surrender (p. 318).
By February 1945, American bombers could reach the Japanese mainland. Precision raids on factories cost many crews. So planners switched to incendiary bombs, which also worked well against Japan's wooden cities. These weapons set off huge firestorms and spared crews from risky daylight missions. More than sixty cities were firebombed, and about 100,000 civilians died in Tokyo alone in March (p. 317).
After the 80-day battle for Okinawa in June, Japan's home islands lay open to invasion. Some officials guessed an invasion could cost half a million American casualties and possibly millions of Japanese civilian lives (p. 318).
The atomic bomb came out of the Manhattan Project, which the US began because it feared Germany would build such a weapon first. The first test, code-named Trinity, took place in New Mexico in July 1945. Then:
Why the bombs were used is still debated. Fear of invasion casualties mattered, but historians disagree about the full set of motives, and several American officials criticized the decision (p. 318).
War production did what the New Deal had not fully managed: it ended the Great Depression. In the 1930s about a quarter of workers had been unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, agencies such as the War Production Board directed industry, and employers struggled to find enough workers. Federal spending over the four war years was double all federal spending in earlier American history. The deficit rose sharply, but unemployment disappeared, just as Depression-era economists had urged (p. 319).
Civilian goods suffered. Factories that made cars and appliances switched to weapons and vehicles. Ration cards limited purchases of gasoline, coffee, meat, sugar, and other items (p. 321). To pay for the war without runaway prices, the government used three tools:
Labor shortages drew in new workers. Twenty million workers were in uniform, so Black southerners moved north, over 65,000 Native Americans left reservations for war jobs, and women entered the workforce in great numbers (p. 322). The Bracero Program, started in 1942, brought in Mexican workers for farms and railroads. It produced five million contracts in twenty-four states and lasted into the 1960s. Braceros often met harsh treatment, but some valued the good pay. The program revived Mexican migration after the Depression years (p. 322).
With men in the military, women took jobs in converted munitions plants. The image of Rosie the Riveter, with the slogan We Can Do It!, became a symbol of this change. Over a million government office jobs also shifted from men to women (p. 323). Many women volunteered instead, especially with the Red Cross. They shipped about half a million tons of medical supplies and packed 27 million care packages for prisoners of war (p. 323).
More than 350,000 women served in uniform, in the WAAC, the Navy's WAVES, the Coast Guard's SPARs, Marine units, and the Nurse Corps. The Nurse Corps Reserves alone commissioned 105,000 nurses (p. 323).
Black women faced Jim Crow within these opportunities. Factory supervisors gave them the lowest tasks and kept lunchrooms segregated. In the military, only the WAAC and the Nurse Corps Reserves took them, with a 10 percent cap, and their units were segregated (pp. 323, 325). After the war, most women left their jobs or were let go, and women veterans had trouble getting benefits (p. 325).
In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a march on Washington to protest discrimination in defense hiring. Roosevelt responded with Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense industries and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). The armed forces stayed segregated and the FEPC was weak, but the Black share of the defense workforce rose from 3 percent in 1942 to 9 percent in 1945 (p. 325).
Over a million African Americans served, mostly in segregated noncombat units. Still, the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-Black pilot group, flew over 1,500 missions and escorted bombers into Germany. Crews often asked for the Red Tail Angels by name. Some integration began near the war's end, and full integration of the armed forces was ordered in 1948 (pp. 325–326).
The Pittsburgh Courier launched the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racial inequality at home. It urged readers to enlist, volunteer, and oppose segregation (pp. 326–327). NAACP membership grew from 50,000 to 500,000, and CORE was founded in 1942 to use nonviolent direct action. About 1.5 million Black southerners moved north in the 1940s. Crowded wartime cities brought conflict, and riots broke out in 1943. The worst was in Detroit, where twenty-five Black and nine white Americans died (p. 327).
Over half a million Latinos served, including 350,000 Mexican Americans and 50,000 Puerto Ricans. At home they still met discrimination. Felix Longoria, killed in the Philippines, was refused burial in his Texas hometown, and in 1943 servicemen attacked Mexican American youth in the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots. Veterans later used their service to demand civil rights (p. 327).
Native Americans served in integrated units, and code talkers came from fourteen tribes, not only the Navajo. At home, wartime budgets cut money for tribes and the BIA. Policymakers pursued Termination and Relocation to save money by moving people off reservations and ending tribes' special relationship with the federal government. Those living on tribal lands could not use the GI Bill (pp. 327–328).
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, letting military commanders remove people from exclusion zones, which came to cover the whole West Coast. More than 110,000 people of Japanese descent were taken from their homes, and about 70,000 were US citizens. The War Relocation Authority ran the camps, and families lost their homes and jobs. Germans and Italians were interned too, but in smaller numbers and after individual review. Japanese Americans received no such review, even though 30,000 of them served in the US military (p. 328).
In 1982 the commission report Personal Justice Denied named race prejudice, war hysteria, and failed political leadership as the causes. The exclusion orders had been upheld as constitutional on national security grounds, but they were later seen as a grave injustice. In 1988 President Reagan signed a law that formally apologized and paid reparations to surviving internees (p. 328).
The Holocaust was the Nazi government's systematic murder of about eleven million civilians, including six million Jews. Victims died in a large network of camps built to imprison people, force them to work, and kill them. The Nazis targeted anyone they labeled racially, ideologically, or biologically "unfit." As Allied armies moved into Germany and Poland, they freed these camps and saw the full scale of the crime. But the killing had been going on for years (p. 329).
Why did the US act so slowly? Information arrived late, and some officials doubted the first reports of industrial death camps. Antisemitism, isolationism, and a wish to restrict immigration also worked against aid (p. 329).
Some Americans pushed back. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a strong supporter of Jewish refugees. He persuaded Roosevelt to speak out publicly against Nazi persecution. In 1944 he helped create the War Refugee Board, a civilian agency that saved over 100,000 lives in Europe (p. 329).
Later in 1944, the Board and the World Jewish Congress asked the government to bomb either the death camps or the railroads leading to them. Officials refused. They argued that bombing would not stop deportations, would pull resources from the war effort, and would kill prisoners. Historians still debate whether bombing would have saved lives. Officials of the time said that only defeating Germany could truly end the Holocaust (pp. 329–330).
The League of Nations had failed to stop German, Italian, and Japanese aggression, so many people doubted that any world body could keep peace. Roosevelt shared this doubt. He had seen the American people and the Senate reject the League while he served under Woodrow Wilson. In 1941 he preferred an informal arrangement among "Four Policemen": the US, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. Cordell Hull and Winston Churchill urged him to support a new global organization, and over time he agreed (p. 330).
Public opinion shifted too. Gallup polls showed that in 1937 only about a third of Americans supported joining such a group. Once war began in Europe, about half did. By 1945, 81 percent favored it. The failure of the League had made people skeptical, but the war itself made cooperation look necessary (p. 330).
The UN was built in stages:
After World War I the economy had collapsed, and leaders wanted to avoid a repeat. More than fifteen million service members, about 350,000 of them women, would soon return home. The G.I. Bill of 1944 was meant to ease them back into civilian life gradually and reward their service. Harry Colmery, a former head of the American Legion, came up with it, and both progressives and conservatives supported it (p. 331).
Its main benefits were:
The benefits were not shared equally. Women were a small part of the military, so fewer qualified, and colleges limited female applicants to save seats for male veterans. Segregation pushed Black veterans into crowded historically Black colleges, which turned away about 20,000 applicants. Housing segregation held back Black homeownership and the wealth it creates. Veterans accused of homosexuality could not claim benefits. The bill also did little about wages and working conditions: after price controls and wage supports were loosened, over five million Americans went on strike in the year after the war. Even so, the bill helped fuel the postwar boom and shaped the middle-class lifestyle (p. 332).
Europe and Asia lay in ruins, while the US was an industrial superpower. In July 1944, delegates from forty-four Allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. They created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and tied the world economy to the American dollar. Tariffs dropped, trade grew, and US banks financed much of the recovery. This put the US at the center of a "free world" linked by trade and finance (pp. 332–333).
The US entered the war during a deep depression and left it in an economic boom. The cost was high: over sixteen million Americans served and over 400,000 died. The country was more powerful than ever and trusted its new institutions to shape the world. Yet the war also created challenges. Americans who fought for democracy saw it denied to Black citizens at home through segregation, and colonial empires were re-established abroad. Both fed movements for change. A rivalry with the Soviet Union and the spread of nuclear weapons ended hopes for global harmony (p. 333).
