World War II

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World War II represented the death rattle of an old order — the imperialist model of development. While several old empires — Austria, Russia, Prussia, and the Ottoman Empire — expired after World War I, others, such as Britain and France, expanded their influence. Angered by this outcome, as well as the war's settlement which affected them adversely, Japan, Germany, and Italy refashioned and expanded their own empires in the 1930s. This imperialistic surge created the threatening scenario that would eventually propel the United States into World War II.

The first nation to expand was Japan, which invaded Manchuria in 1931. Italy then took over Ethiopia in 1935. At the same time, Germany began building up its military and soon invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. The limited US response to these developments has long been called "isolationist," yet American cultural and commercial ties with the world abounded in those years. Indeed, the US would use its trade as a weapon, cutting off sales to the warring powers with its Neutrality Acts. Only in 1939, when Germany declared war on Britain and France, could President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorize the sale of arms to Hitler's enemies.

As the Nazi threat expanded in 1940, with the fall of Norway, Denmark, and France, the US offered help to Britain with old destroyers, and later the Lend-Lease program, which was extended to Russia too after the Nazi invasion of June 1941. FDR also permitted US military convoys to assist shipments to Britain. He could do little more with the prevailing antiwar sentiment at home; in August, a bill to extend the draft passed by only one vote.

Meanwhile, Washington refused to recognize the expansion of Japan into China, and FDR authorized the sale of arms to that beleaguered country as well. Even so, it was not until 1940 that Washington ended aviation fuel and scrap metal sales to Japan. After the US cut off oil in mid-1941, the Japanese looked to the petroleum fields of the British and Dutch East Indies. Americans soon broke the Japanese diplomatic code, but could only guess where Japan would go next.

Image of Franklin Roosevelt signing the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941.

By then, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, and FDR had met face to face on board the HMS Prince of Wales in Newfoundland and agreed to a broader goal for a war that the United States had not yet entered. This Atlantic Charter offered a vision that eschewed territorial expansion and called for four freedoms: speech, religion, and freedom from want and fear. The sailors and their leaders sang English hymns like "Onward Christian Soldiers" in unison, cementing their "special relationship."

Four months later, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Almost 2,400 Americans died and half as many more were wounded on battleships and aircraft in the early morning hours. On the USS Arizona alone, 1,100 went to a watery grave. On this "day of infamy," as Roosevelt called it, the US declared war on Japan, and two days later, after Germany also declared war on the United States, the US declared war in return. Three days after Pearl Harbor, the HMS Prince of Wales was also sunk off Singapore.

Now allies, Churchill and Roosevelt met later that month at the Arcadia Conference, where another two dozen nations signed the Atlantic Charter, lending an overriding mission to the Allied military enterprise. The US and British leaders chose a strategy to focus their energies on Germany first. Washington, however, did not forget the Pacific. After a difficult winter and spring, Americans saw their first successful victory in Asia at Midway Atoll in June 1942, inflicting major damage on the Japanese navy. Later that year, Americans had their first significant deployment against German troops in North Africa. Meanwhile, Lend-Lease funneled aid to Britain, the Soviet Union, and China — a total of $50 billion, including 120,000 ships and over 300,000 military aircraft.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill Sign the Atlantic Charter on the Prince of Wales, 1941
Two images, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sign the Atlantic Charter.

Before the end of 1942, the State Department had also learned of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. Two years later, appalled at their colleagues’ lethargic response, staff at the Treasury Department published a report, “[O]n the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews." Publicity about the report led to the creation of a War Refugee Board, which saved some 200,000 Jews through the efforts of people like Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. In part as a reaction to the Holocaust and the deaths of six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and others, after the war former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt drafted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948.

At home, the war offered a more emancipatory picture, especially for African Americans, who saw job opportunities expand with the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1942. This put a stop to the efforts of such malingerers as the white transit workers who struck in Philadelphia in 1944 rather than integrate their workforce. African Americans also embraced the symbol of the Double V — victory against racism abroad and at home — a campaign that set the stage for the civil rights movement that followed in the 1950s.

Women, too, benefited from the new war jobs; "Rosie the Riveter" was in demand. The percentage of women in the workforce jumped by more than a third; another 300,00 went into military service. These developments had long-term consequences, despite postwar retrenchment in war industry jobs. By 1960, 40 percent of women worked outside the home.

Double V Protest, Philadelphia, 1944; Turret Lathe Operator, 1942
Two images, double V protestors with signs and Rose the Riveter, a female mechanic.

World War II had insidious consequences, too, such as the expansion of the surveillance state. FDR authorized wiretapping despite earlier Supreme Court rulings against it, and intelligence agents used this technology to conduct surveillance on those considered disloyal. In so doing, they discovered Soviet attempts to spy on facilities developing the atomic bomb.

At the same time, the Army interned more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom had lived in the US for generations, on trumped-up charges of potential disloyalty and also out of hatred toward Japan, fanned by the atrocious race war in the Pacific. In particular, Americans were appalled when they heard about early Japanese atrocities in some of the first battles in the Philippines. In the 80-mile Bataan Death March (April 1941), Japanese captors marched 75,000 Philippine and American prisoners of war through the sweltering Philippine countryside, murdering, starving, and torturing the captives along the way.

Japanese Assembly Center and Internment Camp, 1942; Bataan Death March, 1942
Two images of a Japanese assembly center and internment center and two images of the Bataan Death March.

In Europe, however, the Soviets were doing most of the fighting and dying. In early 1943 they lost 400,000 men — the equal of all American dead in the entire war — at the Battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in the war which saw 22 German divisions surrender. Frustrated at the slow pace of the long-promised second front to relieve such slaughter, Stalin pressed hard for it at the Allied wartime conferences, including the November 1943 meeting at Tehran.

By then Americans and British had already launched a stepped-up bombing campaign using B-17s, the famous "Flying Fortresses," to weaken Germany in preparation for the planned assault on the Western Front. The US had long been running a "second front" in Asia, airlifting supplies daily from India over the Himalayas to China. Stalin's distrust of the slower response in Europe was heightened by his awareness that Britain and the US were constructing an atomic device without sharing their research.

In June 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his men at last carried out the cross-channel invasion of Normandy. It was a smashing success, and two months later, Americans liberated Paris. It was thus a nasty shock when German troops struck back with a devastating offensive in December 1944, the Battle of the Bulge. The US lost more soldiers there than in any other battle of World War II — nearly 20,000.

Chart detailing the direct casualties of major allied powers from 1937-1945 with Russia and China leading with the highest numbers followed by the US and Britain.

The Nazi regime, however, was now on its last legs, and the Allies opened the Yalta Conference in February 1945 to discuss the postwar order. With the Red Army already occupying much of Eastern Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill pressed Stalin, futilely as it turned out, to assure freedoms there. Churchill worried especially about Poland's future, but FDR more readily accepted the situation. After FDR died on April 12, his successor, Harry S. Truman, would be less tolerant of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

Germany began to surrender that April as well (Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945). It provided the site for the last big meeting of the war at Potsdam in July. Here Truman learned of the first successful atomic bomb test, and he threatened Japan, which was carrying on the fight in the Pacific, with "prompt and utter destruction."

The final struggle in Asia had been arduous for the United States. In the two-month assault on Okinawa that spring, the US had suffered 82,000 casualties, including 12,500 dead. Military planners anticipated at a minimum, 25,000 casualties in an invasion of Japan, though some gloomy forecasts suggested 800,000 American fatalities.

Yalta Conference, February, 1945; Potsdam Conference, August, 1945
Two images from the Yalta Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin and the Potsdam Conference with the Truman, Attlee, and Stalin.

But there would be no invasion. Instead, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit by atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, respectively; in between, Russia declared war on Japan, sending more than 1.5 million troops into Manchuria. Emperor Hirohito intervened to orchestrate a surrender on the 10th, insisting only that the imperial system remain, and the Japanese sued for peace.

It is estimated that 150,000 to 240,000 Japanese died in the atomic blasts, and many suffered long-term damage from radiation. While the decision to use the bomb has remained highly controversial, at the time American officials did not greatly agonize over it, just as they had not over conventional bombing, which in one night in March 1945 killed more than 100,000 in Tokyo.

World War II's destruction dwarfed previous wars, with some 60 million dead (by contrast, 16 million lives were lost in World War I). In the United States at the time, reactions to the bomb ranged from shock to jingoistic euphoria. Some also hoped that the blast might prove an incentive to set up a world government to control the use of nuclear power. With the onset of the Cold War, however, the chief consequence of this weapon was an arms race that continued unabated until détente in the early 1970s.

The Ruins of Hiroshima, 1946
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