ap u.s. history ch. 26 america in a world at war...

AP U.S. History Ch. 26 America in a World at War Notes

Main Ideas Details

War on Two Fronts The war was going very badly for the Allies. Britain was on the verge of collapse; the Soviet Union was staggering; Allied strongholds in the Pacific were falling to Japanese forces; the United States first task was not to achieve victory but to hold off defeat.

Containing the Japanese Beginning with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese next attacked American airfields in the Philippines destroying much of the remaining United States air power in the Pacific.

Three days later Guam fell, followed by Wake Island and the British colony of Hong Kong.

February 1942 the British fortress of Singapore surrenderedMarch 1942 – the Dutch East IndiesApril 1942– Burma (British)May 6 1942 American and Filipino forces gave up the defense of the Philippine Islands

U.S. strategy: two broad offensives

Gen. Douglas McArthur would move north from Australia thru New Guinea and eventually back to the Philippines

Admiral Chester Nimitz would move west from Hawaii toward major Japanese island outposts in the Central Pacific

The plan was that ultimately MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s forces would come together and invade Japan

May 7-8, 1942 The Battle of the Coral Sea

Significant because for the first time American forces turned back the previously unstoppable Japanese fleet just northwest of Australia

June 3-6, 1942 The Battle of Midway

An enormous naval battle northwest of Hawaii raged on for four days. Despite great losses, the U.S. was victorious. The American navy destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only one, and regained control of the Central Pacific for the United States


Guadalcanal August, 1942 American forces took the offensive for the first time in the southern Solomon Islands, east of New Guinea

U.S. forces assaulted three of the islands: Gavutu, Tulagi, and Guadalcanal

The struggle of terrible ferocity and savagery developed and continued for six months, inflicting heavy losses on both sides.

The Japanese were forced to abandon the island and with it their last chance of launching an effective offensive to the south. Australia would be safe.

By mid-1943, the Japanese advance had come to a halt and with aid from Australians, New Zealanders; the Americans began the slow process of moving towards the Philippines and Japan itself.

Holding Off the Germans In the European war, the U.S. had less control over military operations.

It was fighting in cooperation with the British and the exiled ‘Free French’ forces. It was also trying to conciliate its new ally, the Soviet Union.

Chief of Staff George C. Marshall supported an Allied invasion of France across the English Channel in 1943.

However, the British wanted to first launch a series of Allied offensives around the edge of the Nazi empire in northern Africa and southern Europe

Roosevelt was torn between supporting the Soviets or supporting the British; over the objections of some of his most important advisors, he decided to support the British plan.

October 1942 – Britain opened a counter-offensive against Nazi forces in North Africa under Gen. Erwin Rommel. Nazi forces were threatening the Suez Canal at El Alamein; the British forced the Germans to retreat from Egypt.

November 1942 – Anglo-American forces land in Algeria and Morocco, areas under the Nazi-controlled French government and began moving east toward Rommel.


The Germans threw their full force against the inexperienced Americans and inflicted a serious defeat on them in Tunisia.

General George S. Patton regrouped the American troops and began an effective counter-offensive.

With the help of Allied air and naval power and of British forces attacking from the east under Gen. Bernard Montgomery the American offensive finally drove the last Germans from Africa in May 1943.

The North African campaign had tied up resources and contributed to the postponement of the planned May 1943 cross-channel invasion of France.

This produced angry complaints from the Soviet Union. However, during the winter of 1942-1943 the Red Army had successfully held off a major German assault at Stalingrad in southern Russia.

Hitler had committed so many forces to this battle and had suffered such appalling losses that he could not continue his Eastern offensive.

The Soviet victory at Stalingrad came at a terrible cost (Enemy at the Gates)The German siege decimated the civilian population of the city and devastated the surrounding countryside.

The Soviet Union sustained the most casualties of any other warring nation (20 million +) a fact that affected Soviet policy generations later.

The Soviet success persuaded Roosevelt to agree in a January, 1943 meeting with Churchill in Casablanca, Morocco to an Allied invasion of Sicily.

General Marshall opposed the plan, arguing it would further delay the vital invasion of France; but Churchill prevailed with the argument that the operation in Sicily might knock Italy out of the war and tie up German divisions that might otherwise be stationed in France.


July 9, 1943 – American and British armies landed in southeast Sicily; 38 days later they had conquered the island and moved onto the Italian mainland.

Mussolini’s government collapsed and the deposed dictator fled to Germany.

Mussolini’s successor, Pietro Badoglio, quickly committed Italy to the Allies

However, Germany moved eight divisions into the country and established a powerful defensive line south of Rome.

September 3, 1943 – The Allied offensive began and quickly bogged down, especially after a serious setback at Monte Casino.

May, 1944 – Allied forces resumed their forward advance and on June 4 they captured Rome

The invasion of Italy contributed to the Allied war effort but it postponed the invasion of France by as much as a year, deeply embittering the Soviet Union.

Their leaders believed the United States and Britain were deliberately delaying the cross-channel invasion in order to allow the Russian to absorb the brunt of the fighting.

The postponement did allow the Russians time to begin moving toward the countries of eastern Europe.

America and the Holocaust

As early as 1942, high officials in Washington had incontrovertible evidence that Hitler’s forces were rounding up Jews, non-Jewish Poles, gypsies, homosexuals and communists from all over Europe and transporting them to concentration camps in eastern Germany and Poland and systematically murdering them.

The American government consistently resisted all entreaties to end the killing or at least rescue some of the survivors.

Although Allied bombers were flying missions within a few miles of the most notorious death camp, Auschwitz, pleas for them to destroy the crematoriums at the camp were rejected.


So were similar requests to destroy the railroad lines leading to the camps.

The United States also resisted requests to admit large numbers of the Jewish refugees attempting to escape Europe, a pattern well established long before Pearl Harbor.

The German passenger liner St. Louis, arrived off the coast of Miami in 1939, after being turned away from Havana, Cuba.

Nearly 1,000 German Jews who managed to escape were refused entry into the United States and forced to return to Germany where almost all ended up in concentration camps.

Almost 90% of the quota was unused and this was on purpose.

Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, an anti-Semite, ignored or rejected one opportunity after another to assist imperiled Jews.

Policymakers at the time justified their inaction by arguing that most of their proposed actions would have had little effect. They insisted that the most effective thing they could do for victims of the Holocaust was to concentrate their attention on the larger goal of winning the war.

The American People in Wartime

Not since the Civil War had the nation undergone so consuming a military experience as World War II.

American armed forces engaged in combat around the globe for nearly four years.American society, in the meantime, underwent changes that reached virtually every corner of the nation.


Prosperity The most profound effect World War II had on American domestic life was at last ending the Great Depression.

By mid-1941, the problems of unemployment, deflation and industrial sluggishness virtually vanished.

The most important agent of this new prosperity was government spending which after 1939 pumped more money into the economy each year than all the New Deal relief agencies combined.

1939 – The federal budget reached $9 billion

1945 - $100 billion

As a result the GNP soared from $91 B in 1939 to $166 B in 1945

Personal incomes in some areas grew by 100% or more.

The demands of wartime production created a shortage of consumer goods, so many wage earners converted much of their new affluence to savings.

This trend would help keep the economic boom alive in the postwar years

The War and the West The government made almost $40 billion of capital investments in the West, factories, military and transportation facilities, highways and power plants.

This was more spending than in any other region in the United States, much of it because California was the launching point for most of the naval war against Japan.

By the end of the war, the economy of the Pacific Coast and other areas in the West had been transformed.

The Pacific Coast became the center of the growing aircraft industry.

New yards in California and Washington state made the West a center of the shipbuilding industry.


Los Angeles, a formerly mid-sized city noted chiefly for its film industry, now became a major industrial center as well

The West stood poised to become the fastest growing region in the nation after the war.

Labor and the War The war created a serious labor shortage.

The armed forces took nearly 15 million men and women out of the civilian workforce at a time when the demand for labor was rapidly rising.

Nevertheless, the civilian workforce increase by almost 20%

The war gave an enormous boost to union membership but it also created new restrictions on unions’ ability to fight for members’ demands.

The government was interested in preventing inflation and keeping production moving without disruptions.

The ‘Little Steel’ formula set a 15% limit on wartime wage increases.

The ‘no-strike’ pledge was rewarded with a ‘maintenance of membership’ agreement which insisted that the thousands of new workers had to give up the right to demand major economic gains during the war.

Many union members resented the imposed restrictions.

Despite the no-strike pledge there were nearly 15,000 work stoppages, mostly ‘wildcat’ (unauthorized) strikes

When the United Mine Workers defied the government by striking in 1943, Congress reacted by passing the Smith-Connelly Act (war Labor Dispute Act) over FDR’s veto.

This required unions to wait 30 days before striking and empowered the president to seize a struck plant.

Public support for unions decreased and many states passed laws to limit union power.


Stabilizing the Boom The 1930’s fear of deflation gave way in the 1940’s to the fear of inflation

October 1942 - Congress passed the Anti-Inflation Act, which gave the government authority to freeze agricultural prices, wages, salaries and rents throughout the country.

The Office of Price Administration (OPA) was charged with enforcing this act.

The OPA was never popular as there was widespread resentment of its controls over wages and prices and only grudging acquiescence to its system of rationing scarce consumer goods such as coffee, sugar, meat, butter, canned goods, shoes, tires, gasoline, and fuel oil.

Black-marketing and overcharging grew far beyond OPA policing capacity.

1941-1945 The U.S. government spent $321billion, twice as much as in the entire 150 years of the nation’s existence

The national debt rose from $49 B in 1941 to $259 B in 1945

The government borrowed about half the revenues needed by selling war bonds, but most of those were bought not by individual citizens but rather by financial institutions.

Much of the rest was raised by radically increasing taxes.

1942 – The Revenue Act of 1942 established a 94% tax bracket for the highest earners in the nation and for the first time imposed taxes on the lowest-income families as well.

To simplify collection, Congress enacted a withholding system of payroll deductions in 1943

Mobilizing Production January 1942 – War Production Board (WPB) – created was a “Super Agency” with broad powers over the economy.

It was never as the WWI War Industries Board.


The WPB was never able to win control over military purchases

It left small companies unsatisfied as they complained all the big contracts went to large corporations

Gradually the president transferred much of the WPB’s authority to a new office, the Office of War Mobilization; however, it was only slightly more successful than the WPB.

Despite problems, the war economy managed to meet almost all of the nation’s critical war needs.

Enormous new factory complexes sprang up in the space of a few months, many funded by the federal government.

By 1944, American factories were producing more goods than the government needed; there were limited complaints from some officials that military production was becoming excessive and that a limited resumption of civilian production should begin before the war ended.

The military staunchly and successfully opposed almost all such demands.

Wartime Science and Technology

National Defense Research Committee – headed by Vannevar Bush, MIT scientist and pioneer of early computer development.

By the end of the war, the agency had spent over $100 million on research

In the first years of the war, all the technological advances seemed to lie with the Germans and Japanese.

Germany with tanks and other mechanized armor, advanced submarine technology

Japan developed extraordinary capacity in its naval-air technology with highly sophisticated fighter planes launched from aircraft carriersBritain and the United States had their own advantages.

American assembly line techniques were efficiently converted to wartime production.


By late 1942, Allied weaponry was at least as advanced as that of the enemy.

American and British physicists made rapid advances in improving radar and sonar technology.

British and American forces began producing powerful four-engine bombers and a new navigation system making them much more accurate targeting.

Code breaking was also an vital part of the war effort

Ultra – Britain’s top-secret code-breaking project. Advances in computer technology helped the Allies decipher coded messages from the Germans and the Japanese.

Enigma – The German code-machine was cracked and with the help of the Poles, who developed an electro-mechanical machine called ‘Bombe’, and British scientist Alan Turing, German codes were broken within hours of their interception, unknown to the Germans until the end of the war.

Magic – The Americans also had intelligence breakthroughs deciphering Japanese codes using a machine called ‘Purple.’

African Americans and the War

Summer, 1941 – A. Philip Randolph., president of the Sleeping Car Porters, began to insist that the government require companies that received government contracts begin integrating their workforce.

Randolph planned a massive march on Washington, D.C. in which he promised 100,000 demonstrators.

FDR was afraid of the possibility of violence as well as political embarrassment.

He persuaded Randolph to call off the march in return for a Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate discrimination in war industries.

The FEPC’ power was limited as was its effectiveness but it was at least a rare symbolic victory for African Americans


The demands for labor in war plants greatly increased the migration of African Americans from the rural South to industrial cities and brought even more of them into the North than the Great Migration of 1914-1919.

The migration improved the economic condition of many but also created urban tensions.

Detroit – July, 1943 a series of altercations between blacks and whites led to two days of racial violence in which 34 died, twenty-five of them black.

CORE – The Congress of Racial Equality organized in 1942.

They mobilized mass resistance to discrimination in a way that older, more conservative organizations had never done.

They held sit-ins and demonstrations in segregated theaters and restaurants.

1944 – CORE won a much-publicized victory as a restaurant agreed to serve African Americans.

CORE’s defiant spirit would survive into the 1960’s Civil Rights movement

Pressure was also growing within the military; at first blacks were limited to menial assignments, kept in segregated training camps and units and barred them entirely from the USMC and Army Air Force.

Gradually, military leaders were forced to make adjustments as they realized they were wasting valuable manpower.

African Americans began serving on ships with white sailors but tensions remained.

Fort Dix, New Jersey – Riots broke out when African Americans protested having to serve in segregated units.

However, with pressure from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the traditional pattern of race relations in the military was slowly eroding.


Native Americans and the War

Approximately 25,000 Native Americans served in World War II

Many served in combat and others worked as ‘code-talkers.’ Speaking in their native language enemy forces were unable to break the ‘code’ and helped keep the Japanese unaware of U.S. plans

Little war work reached the tribes and government subsidies dwindled.

Many talented young people left the reservations, some to serve in the military and others to work in war plants.

This brought many Native Americans in close contact with white society for the first time.

This awakened in some of them a desire for the material benefits of life in capitalistic America. Some never returned to the reservation.

Others found that after the war, employment opportunities available to then during the war disappeared when the war was over.

The wartime emphasis on unity undermined support for tribal authority that the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 had launched.

New pressures emerged to eliminate the reservation system and require tribes to assimilate.

The pressures were so severe that John Collier, the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who had done so much to promote the reinvigoration of the reservations, resigned.

Mexican American War Workers

Large numbers of Mexican workers entered the United states during the war in response to the labor shortage in the West Coast.

American and Mexican governments agreed in 1942 to a program in which braceros would be admitted to the U.S. for a limited time to work at specific jobs and U.S. companies began actively recruiting Hispanic workers.

During the Great Depression, many migrant workers had been deported to make room for displaced white labor.


This time, Mexican workers were able to find work in significant numbers in factories.

The sudden expansion of Mexican American neighborhoods created tensions and occasionally conflict.

In Los Angeles, white resident became alarmed at the activities of Mexican-American teenagers, pachucos.

The pachucos were distinctive in their style of dress, wearing ‘zoot-suits’, long chain watches, baggy pants tied at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats and ‘ducktail’ hairstyles.

June, 1943 Animosity toward zoot-suiters and white sailors produced a four-day riot in Los Angeles. They grabbed the teen-agers, ripped off their clothes and burned them, cut off their ducktails and beat them.

When the teen-agers tried to fight back, the police moved in and arrested them.

In the aftermath of the ‘zoot-suit’ riots, Los Angeles passed a law prohibiting the wearing of zoot-suits

Women and Children at War

The number of women in the workforce increased by nearly 60%, more likely to be married and older than most women who entered the workforce in the past

Many women helped replace men serving in the military by obstacles remained.

Jobs were often categorized by gender & race; black women, lower pay, more menial jobs than white women

Some women began taking on heavy industrial jobs, like “Rosie the Riveter” which symbolized the importance of the female industrial workforce

However, most women workers during the war were employed in service-sector jobs, especially working for the newly expanded federal government.

Washington, D.C. was flooded with young female clerks.


Even within the military, most female work was clerical.

Many working mothers needed help caring for their children and help was scarce.

Some children became “latch-key” children or “eight-hour orphans, left at home alone.

Juvenile crime rose during the war years.

More than a third of all teenagers between the ages of 14 to 18 were employed in the later war years, causing reduction in high-school enrollments

After the war, the return of prosperity helped increase the rate and lower the age of marriage after the Depression, but many war-time marriages were unable to survive and the divorce rate rose rapidly.

The increase in the birth rate in 1946 was the first sign of what would become the great post-war ‘baby boom.’

Wartime Life and Culture

Families worried about loved ones at the battlefront, struggled to adjust to the absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and sons as well as the new mobility of women.

Businesses and communities struggled to compensate for shortages of goods and the absence of men.

People did have money to spend, despite the shortage of goods.

Almost half of all Americans attended the movies each week, magazines reached the peak of their popularity to supply readers hungry for information about the war. Radio ownership & listening also increased for the same reasons.

Advertising and journalists helped to justify America’s wartime efforts. Writer John Hersey once wrote from Guadalcanal, “Home is where the good things are – the generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie.”

For men fighting, the image of home was a powerful antidote to the rigors of wartime.


The Internment of Japanese Americans

While WWI produced widespread hated, vindictiveness and hysteria in America as well as widespread and flagrant violations of civil liberties, WWII did not produce a comparable era of repression.

There was not much of the ethnic or cultural animosity that shaped the social climate during WWI.

The ‘zoot-suit riots’ in Los Angeles and occasional racial conflicts in U.S. cities and military bases made it clear that traditional racial and ethnic hostilities had not disappeared.

On the whole, Americans tended to believe that Germans and Italians were the victims of vicious political systems. In popular culture, ethnicity became less a source of menacing difference and more an evidence of a healthy diversity.

The participation and frequent heroism of American soldiers of many ethnic backgrounds encourages this change.

The one glaring exception to this was the treatment of Japanese-Americans.

American adopted a different attitude toward their Asian enemy than to their European foes.

The Japanese-American population was small, about 127,000 and mostly limited to a few areas in California. About a third were Issei and two-thirds were Nisei.

Because of prejudice, they chose to live in close-knit communities, reinforcing the erroneous belief that they were a potential menace.

Although there was some pressure in California to remove the Japanese ‘threat,’ the real impetus for taking action came from the U.S. government.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, believed Japanese-Americans responsible for sabotage in Hawaii, which later proved to be entirely false.

In February, 1942, FDR authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans. The WRA was created to oversee the removal of J-A to ‘relocation centers.’


These centers, located in the western mountains and deserts were harsh and uncomfortable.

The internment never produced significant popular opposition and once the Japanese were in the camps people largely forgot about them.

1944 Korematsu v. U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the relocation was constitutionally permissible, however, by the end of 1944 most of the internees had been released.

When they returned to the West coast they faced continuing harassment and persecution and many found their property and businesses irretrievably lost.

In 1988, they won some compensation for their losses, when after years of agitation by survivors of the camps and their descendants, Congress voted to award them reparations.

Chinese Americans and the War

The American alliance with China during WWII significantly enhanced both the legal and social status of Chinese Americans.

1943 Congress finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

The new quota for Chinese immigration was tiny (105 per year)But a substantial number of Chinese women gained entry through provisions for war brides and fiancées

A higher proportion of Chinese Americans were drafted (22%) and Chinese communities in most cities worked hard for the war effort.

The Retreat from Reform Late in 1943, FDR publicly suggested that the New Deal had served its purpose and it should give way to a ‘Win-the-War effort.”

Liberals in government found it hard to enact new programs, much less protect the ones in place.

They had been displaced by new managers of wartime agencies who came overwhelmingly from large corporations and Wall Street law firms.


The greatest assault on the New Deal came from conservatives in Congress who wanted to dismantle many of the achievments of the New Deal.

Full employment decreased the need for programs such as the CCC and the WPA.

Republicans gained strength in both the House and Senate

Increasingly, FDR accepted quietly the erosion or defeat of New Deal measures in order to win support for his war policies and peace plans. He also accepted the changes because he realized his chances of reelection in 1944 depended on his ability to identify himself less with domestic issues than with world peace.

The Defeat of the Axis/The Liberation of France

Strategic BombingD-DayBattle of the BulgeGermany defeated

The Pacific Offensive Battle of Leyte Gulf

Okinawa

The Manhattan Project The Trinity Bomb

Atomic Warfare Debating the Bomb’s Use

Hiroshima

Nagasaki

ap u.s. history ch. 26 america in a world at war...

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