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36

America inWorld War II

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1941–1945

Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 1942

The United States was plunged into the inferno ofWorld War II with the most stupefying and

humiliating military defeat in its history. In the dis-mal months that ensued, the democratic worldteetered on the edge of disaster.

Japan’s fanatics forgot that whoever stabs a kingmust stab to kill. A wounded but still potent Ameri-can giant pulled itself out of the mud of Pearl Har-bor, grimly determined to avenge the bloodytreachery. “Get Japan first” was the cry that rosefrom millions of infuriated Americans, especially onthe Pacific Coast. These outraged souls regardedAmerica’s share in the global conflict as a privatewar of vengeance in the Pacific, with the Europeanfront a kind of holding operation.

But Washington, in the so-called ABC-1 agree-ment with the British, had earlier and wiselyadopted the grand strategy of “getting Germany

first.” If America diverted its main strength to thePacific, Hitler might crush both the Soviet Unionand Britain and then emerge unconquerable inFortress Europe. But if Germany was knocked outfirst, the combined Allied forces could be concen-trated on Japan, and its daring game of conquestwould be up. Meanwhile, just enough Americanstrength would be sent to the Pacific to preventJapan from digging in too deeply.

The get-Germany-first strategy was the solidfoundation on which all American military strategywas built. But it encountered much ignorant criti-cism from two-fisted Americans who thirsted forrevenge against Japan. Aggrieved protests were alsoregistered by shorthanded American commandersin the Pacific and by Chinese and Australian allies.But President Roosevelt, a competent strategist inhis own right, wisely resisted these pressures.

827

The Allies Trade Space for Time

Given time, the Allies seemed bound to triumph.But would they be given time? True, they had ontheir side the great mass of the world’s population,but the wolf is never intimidated by the number ofthe sheep. The United States was the mightiest mili-tary power on earth—potentially. But wars are wonwith bullets, not blueprints. Indeed America cameperilously close to losing the war to the well-armedaggressors before it could begin to throw its fullweight onto the scales.

Time, in a sense, was the most needed muni-tion. Expense was no limitation. The overpoweringproblem confronting America was to retool itself forall-out war production, while praying that the dicta-tors would not meanwhile crush the democracies.Haste was all the more imperative because thehighly skilled German scientists might turn up withunbeatable secret weapons, including rocket bombsand perhaps even atomic arms.

America’s task was far more complex and back-breaking than during World War I. It had to feed,clothe, and arm itself, as well as transport its forcesto regions as far separated as Britain and Burma.More than that, it had to send a vast amount of foodand munitions to its hard-pressed allies, whostretched all the way from the USSR to Australia.Could the American people, reputedly “gone soft,”measure up to this Herculean task? Was democracy“rotten” and “decadent,” as the dictators sneeringlyproclaimed?

The Shock of War

National unity was no worry, thanks to the electrify-ing blow by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. AmericanCommunists had denounced the Anglo-French“imperialist” war before Hitler attacked Stalin in1941, but they now clamored for an unmitigatedassault on the Axis powers. The handful of struttingpro-Hitlerites in the United States melted away,while millions of Italian-Americans and German-Americans loyally supported the nation’s war pro-gram. In contrast to World War I, when thepatriotism of millions of immigrants was hotlyquestioned, World War II actually speeded theassimilation of many ethnic groups into Americansociety. Immigration had been choked off for almosttwo decades before 1941, and America’s ethnic com-munities were now composed of well-settled mem-bers, whose votes were crucial to FranklinRoosevelt’s Democratic party. Consequently, therewas virtually no government witch-hunting ofminority groups, as had happened in World War I.

828 CHAPTER 36 America in World War II, 1941–1945

American song titles after Pearl Harborcombined nationalism with unabashedracism: “We Are the Sons of the Rising Guns,”“Oh, You Little Son of an Oriental,” “To BeSpecific, It’s Our Pacific,” “The Sun Will SoonBe Setting on the Land of the Rising Sun,”“The Japs Don’t Stand a Chinaman’s Chance,”and “We’re Gonna Find a Fellow Who IsYellow and Beat Him Red, White, and Blue.”

A painful exception was the plight of some110,000 Japanese-Americans, concentrated on thePacific Coast (see “Makers of America: The Japa-nese,” pp. 830–831). The Washington top command,fearing that they might act as saboteurs for Japan incase of invasion, forcibly herded them together inconcentration camps, though about two-thirds ofthem were American-born U.S. citizens. This brutalprecaution was both unnecessary and unfair, as theloyalty and combat record of Japanese-Americansproved to be admirable. But a wave of post–PearlHarbor hysteria, backed by the long historical swellof anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast, tem-porarily robbed many Americans of their goodsense—and their sense of justice. The internmentcamps deprived these uprooted Americans of dig-nity and basic rights; the internees also lost hun-dreds of millions of dollars in property and foregoneearnings. The wartime Supreme Court in 1944upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese reloca-tion in Korematsu v. U.S. But more than fourdecades later, in 1988, the U.S. government officiallyapologized for its actions and approved the pay-ment of reparations of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

The war prompted other changes in the Ameri-can mood. Many programs of the once-popularNew Deal—including the Civilian ConservationCorps, the Works Progress Administration, and theNational Youth Administration—were wiped out bythe conservative Congress elected in 1942. Roo-sevelt declared in 1943 that “Dr. New Deal” wasgoing into retirement, to be replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” His announcement acknowledged notonly the urgency of the war effort but the power ofthe revitalized conservative forces in the country.The era of New Deal reform was over.

World War II was no idealistic crusade, as WorldWar I had been. The Washington government didmake some effort to propagandize at home andabroad with the Atlantic Charter, but the accent wason action. Opinion polls in 1942 revealed that nineout of ten Americans could cite no provisions of theAtlantic Charter. A majority then, and a near-majority two years later, confessed to having “no

Anti-Japanese Action 829

Monica Sone (b. 1919), a college-ageJapanese-American woman in Seattle,recorded the shock she and her brother feltwhen they learned of Executive Order No.9066, which authorized the War Departmentto remove Japanese—aliens and citizensalike—from their homes:

“In anger, Henry and I read and reread theExecutive Order. Henry crumbled thenewspaper in his hand and threw it againstthe wall. ‘Doesn’t my citizenship mean asingle blessed thing to anyone? Why doesn’tsomebody make up my mind for me? Firstthey want me in the army. Now they’re goingto slap an alien 4-C on me because of myancestry. . . .’ Once more I felt like adespised, pathetic two-headed freak, aJapanese and an American, neither of whichseemed to be doing me any good.”

The Japanese

In 1853 the American commodore Matthew Perrysailed four gunboats into Japan’s Uraga Bay and

demanded that the nation open itself to diplomaticand commercial exchange with the United States.Perry’s arrival ended two centuries of Japan’s self-imposed isolation and eventually led to the over-throw of the last Japanese shogun (military ruler)and the restoration of the emperor. Within twodecades of Perry’s arrival, Japan’s new “Meiji” gov-ernment had launched the nation on an ambitiousprogram of industrialization and militarizationdesigned to make it the economic and politicalequal of the Western powers.

As Japan rapidly modernized, its citizensincreasingly took ship for America. A steep land taximposed by the Meiji government to pay for itsreforms drove more than 300,000 Japanese farmersoff their land. In 1884 the Meiji government permit-ted Hawaiian planters to recruit contract laborersfrom among this displaced population. By the 1890smany Japanese were sailing beyond Hawaii to theports of Long Beach, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Between 1885 and 1924, roughly 200,000 Japa-nese migrated to Hawaii, and around 180,000 moreventured to the U.S. mainland. They were a selectgroup: because the Meiji government saw overseasJapanese as representatives of their homeland, itstrictly regulated emigration. Thus Japanese immi-grants to America arrived with more money thantheir European counterparts. Also, because ofJapan’s system of compulsory education, Japaneseimmigrants on average were better educated andmore literate than European immigrants.

Women as well as men migrated. The Japanesegovernment, wanting to avoid the problems of anitinerant bachelor society that it observed amongthe Chinese in the United States, actively promotedwomen’s migration. Although most Japanese immi-grants were young men in their twenties and thir-ties, thousands of women also ventured to Hawaii

and the mainland as contract laborers or “picturebrides,” so called because their courtship had con-sisted exclusively of an exchange of photographswith their prospective husbands.

Like many Chinese and European immigrants,most Japanese who came to America expected tostay only temporarily. They planned to work hardfor wages that were high by Japanese standards andthen to return home and buy land. In Hawaii mostJapanese labored on the vast sugar cane planta-tions. On the mainland they initially found migra-tory work on the railroads or in fish, fruit, orvegetable canneries. A separate Japanese economyof restaurants, stores, and boardinghouses soonsprang up in cities to serve the immigrants’ needs.

From such humble beginnings, many Japa-nese—particularly those on the Pacific Coast—

830

quickly moved into farming. In the late nineteenthcentury, the spread of irrigation shifted Californiaagriculture from grain to fruits and vegetables, andthe invention of the refrigerated railcar openedhungry new markets in the East. The Japanese, withcenturies of experience in intensive farming, arrivedjust in time to take advantage of these develop-ments. As early as 1910, Japanese farmers produced70 percent of California’s strawberries, and by 1940they grew 95 percent of the state’s snap beans andmore than half of its tomatoes. One Japanesefarmer, known as the Potato King, sent his childrento Harvard and Stanford Universities and died in1926 with an estate valued at $15 million.

But the very success of the Japanese proved alightning rod for trouble. On the West Coast, Japa-nese immigrants had long endured racist barbs andsocial segregation. Increasingly, white workers andfarmers, jealous of Japanese success, pushed forimmigration restrictions. Bowing to this pressure,President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 negotiatedthe “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” under which the Jap-anese government voluntarily agreed to limit emi-gration. In 1913 the California legislature deniedJapanese immigrants already living in the UnitedStates the right to own land.

Legally barred from becoming citizens, Japa-nese immigrants (the “Issei,” from the Japaneseword for first) became more determined than ever

that their American-born children (the “Nissei,”from the Japanese word for second) would reap thefull benefits of their birthright. Japanese parentsencouraged their children to learn English, to excelin school, and to get a college education. Many Nis-sei grew up in two worlds, a fact they often recog-nized by Americanizing their Japanese names.Although education and acculturation did not pro-tect the Nissei from the hysteria of World War II,those assets did give them a springboard to successin the postwar era.

831

clear idea what the war is about.” All Americansknew was that they had a dirty job on their handsand that the only way out was forward. They wentabout their bloody task with astonishing efficiency.

Building the War Machine

The war crisis caused the drooping American econ-omy to snap to attention. Massive military orders—over $100 billion in 1942 alone—almost instantlysoaked up the idle industrial capacity of the still-lingering Great Depression. Orchestrated by the War

Production Board, American factories poured forthan avalanche of weaponry: 40 billion bullets,300,000 aircraft, 76,000 ships, 86,000 tanks, and 2.6million machine guns. Miracle-man shipbuilderHenry J. Kaiser was dubbed “Sir Launchalot” for hisprodigies of ship construction; one of his ships wasfully assembled in fourteen days, complete with lifejackets and coat hangers.

The War Production Board halted the manufac-ture of nonessential items such as passenger cars. Itassigned priorities for transportation and access toraw materials. When the Japanese invasion ofBritish Malaya and the Dutch East Indies snappedAmerica’s lifeline of natural rubber, the governmentimposed a national speed limit and gasolinerationing in order to conserve rubber and built fifty-one synthetic-rubber plants. By war’s end they werefar outproducing the prewar supply.

Farmers, too, rolled up their sleeves andincreased their output. The armed forces drainedthe farms of workers, but heavy new investment inagricultural machinery and improved fertilizersmore than made up the difference. In 1944 and1945, blue-jeaned farmers hauled in record-breaking billion-bushel wheat harvests.

These wonders of production also brought eco-nomic strains. Full employment and scarce con-sumer goods fueled a sharp inflationary surge in1942. The Office of Price Administration eventuallybrought ascending prices under control with exten-sive regulations. Rationing held down the consump-tion of critical goods such as meat and butter,though some “black marketeers” and “meatleggers”cheated the system. The War Labor Board (WLB)imposed ceilings on wage increases.

Labor unions, whose membership grew fromabout 10 million to more than 13 million workersduring the war, fiercely resented the government-dictated wage ceilings. Despite the no-strikepledges of most of the major unions, a rash of laborwalkouts plagued the war effort. Prominent amongthe strikers were the United Mine Workers, who sev-eral times were called off the job by their crusty andiron-willed chieftain, John L. Lewis.

Threats of lost production through strikesbecame so worrisome that Congress, in June 1943,passed the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act. This actauthorized the federal government to seize andoperate tied-up industries. Strikes against any government-operated industry were made a crimi-nal offense. Under the act, Washington took over thecoal mines and, for a brief period, the railroads. Yet


work stoppages, although dangerous, actually ac-counted for less than 1 percent of the total workinghours of the United States’ wartime laboring force—a record better than blockaded Britain’s. Americanworkers, on the whole, were commendably commit-ted to the war effort.

Manpower and Womanpower

The armed services enlisted nearly 15 million menin World War II and some 216,000 women, who wereemployed for noncombat duties. Best known ofthese “women in arms” were the WAACs (army),WAVES (navy), and SPARs (Coast Guard). As thedraft net was tightened after Pearl Harbor, millionsof young men were plucked from their homes andclothed in “GI” (government issue) outfits. As thearsenal of democracy, the United States exemptedcertain key categories of industrial and agriculturalworkers from the draft, in order to keep its mightyindustrial and food-producing machines humming.

But even with these exemptions, the draft leftthe nation’s farms and factories so short of person-nel that new workers had to be found. An agreementwith Mexico in 1942 brought thousands of Mexicanagricultural workers, called braceros, across the border to harvest the fruit and grain crops of theWest. The bracero program outlived the war by sometwenty years, becoming a fixed feature of the agri-cultural economy in many western states.

Economic Mobilization 833

Poster appeals and slogans urging women toenlist in the WAACs (Women’s Army AuxiliaryCorps) were “Speed Them Back, Join theWAAC,” “I’d Rather Be with Them—ThanWaiting for Them,” “Back the Attack, Be aWAAC! For America Is Calling,” and (a songthrowback to World War I) “The WAACs andWAVES Will Win the War, Parlez Vous.”

Even more dramatic was the march of womenonto the factory floor. More than 6 million womentook up jobs outside the home; over half of themhad never before worked for wages. Many of themwere mothers, and the government was obliged toset up some 3,000 day-care centers to care for “Rosiethe Riveter’s” children while she drilled the fuselageof a heavy bomber or joined the links of a tank track.When the war ended, Rosie and many of her sisterswere in no hurry to put down their tools. Theywanted to keep on working and often did. The warthus foreshadowed an eventual revolution in theroles of women in American society.

Yet the war’s immediate impact on women’slives has frequently been exaggerated. The greatmajority of American women—especially thosewith husbands present in the home or with smallchildren to care for—did not work for wages in thewartime economy but continued in their traditionalroles. In both Britain and the Soviet Union, a fargreater percentage of women, including mothers,

were pressed into industrial employment as thegods of war laid a much heavier hand on those soci-eties than they did on the United States. A poll in1943 revealed that a majority of American womenwould not take a job in a war plant if it were offered.

At war’s end, two-thirds of women war workersleft the labor force. Many of these were forced out oftheir jobs by employers and unions eager to re-employ returning servicemen. But half of them toldcensus takers that they quit their jobs voluntarilybecause of family obligations. The immediate post-war period witnessed not a permanent widening ofwomen’s employment opportunities, but a wide-spread rush into suburban domesticity and themothering of the “baby boomers” who were born bythe tens of millions in the decade and a half after1945. America was destined to experience a thoroughgoing revolution in women’s status later inthe postwar period, but that epochal change wasonly beginning to gather momentum in the waryears.


260,000

910,000

650,000140,000

640,000

980,

000

New York

Mobile

Denver

Dallas

Washington, D.C.

DetroitNORTH

WEST

SOUTH

Houston

Los Angeles

San Diego

San Francisco

Memphis

Fort Worth

BatonRougeAverage population increase of

fast-growing cities, 1940-1950

Over 400,000

200,000–400,000

100,000–200,00050,000–100,000

Internal Migration in the United States During World War II Few events in American history have moved the American people about so massively as World War II. The West and the South boomed, and several war-industry cities grew explosively. A majority of migrants from the South were blacks; 1.6 million African-Americans left the region in the 1940s. (Source: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Wartime Migrations

The war also proved to be a demographic cauldron,churning and shifting the American population.Many of the 15 million men and women in uniform,having seen new sights and glimpsed new horizons,chose not to go home again at war’s end. War indus-tries sucked people into boomtowns like Los Ange-les, Detroit, Seattle, and Baton Rouge. California’spopulation grew by nearly 2 million. The Southexperienced especially dramatic changes. FranklinRoosevelt had called the South “the nation’s numberone economic problem” in 1938; when war came, heseized the opportunity to accelerate the region’seconomic development. The states of the old Confederacy received a disproportionate share ofdefense contracts, including nearly $6 billion of fed-erally financed industrial facilities. Here were theseeds of the postwar blossoming of the “Sunbelt.”

Despite this economic stimulus in the South,some 1.6 million blacks left the land of their ancientenslavement to seek jobs in the war plants of theWest and North. Forever after, race relations consti-tuted a national, not a regional, issue. Explosive ten-sions developed over employment, housing, andsegregated facilities. Black leader A. Philip Ran-dolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping CarPorters, threatened a massive “Negro March on

Washington” in 1941 to demand equal opportuni-ties for blacks in war jobs and in the armed forces.Roosevelt’s response was to issue an executive orderforbidding discrimination in defense industries. Inaddition, the president established the Fair Employ-ment Practices Commission (FEPC) to monitorcompliance with his edict. Blacks were also draftedinto the armed forces, though they were still gener-ally assigned to service branches rather than com-bat units and subjected to petty degradations such

Population Shifts 835

An African-American soldier angrilycomplained about segregation in the armedforces during World War II:

“Why is it we Negro soldiers who are as mucha part of Uncle Sam’s great military machineas any cannot be treated with equality andthe respect due us? The same respect whichwhite soldiers expect and demand from us? . . . There is great need for drastic change inthis man’s Army! How can we be trained toprotect America, which is called a free nation,when all around us rears the ugly head ofsegregation?’”

as segregated blood banks for the wounded. But ingeneral the war helped to embolden blacks in theirlong struggle for equality. They rallied behind theslogan “Double V”—victory over the dictatorsabroad and over racism at home. Membership inthe National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) shot up almost to the half-million mark, and a new militant organization, theCongress of Racial Equality (CORE), was founded in1942.

The northward migration of African-Americansaccelerated after the war, thanks to the advent of themechanical cotton picker—an invention whoseimpact rivaled that of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.Introduced in 1944, this new mechanical marvel didthe work of fifty people at about one-eighth the cost.Overnight, the Cotton South’s historic need forcheap labor disappeared. Their muscle no longerrequired in Dixie, some 5 million black tenant farmers and sharecroppers headed north in thethree decades after the war. Theirs was one of thegreat migrations in American history, comparable insize to the immigrant floods from Ireland, Italy, andPoland. Within a single generation, a near majorityof African-Americans gave up their historic home-

land and their rural way of life. By 1970 half of all blacks lived outside of the South, and urbanhad become almost a synonym for black. The speedand scale of these changes jolted the migrants and sometimes convulsed the communities thatreceived them.

The war also prompted an exodus of NativeAmericans from the reservations. Thousands ofIndian men and women found war work in themajor cities, and thousands more answered UncleSam’s call to arms. More than 90 percent of Indiansresided on reservations in 1940; six decades latermore than half lived in cities, with a large concen-tration in southern California.

Some twenty-five thousand Native Americanmen served in the armed forces. Comanches inEurope and Navajos in the Pacific made especiallyvaluable contributions as “code talkers.” They trans-mitted radio messages in their native languages,which were incomprehensible to the Germans andthe Japanese.

The sudden rubbing against one another of unfa-miliar peoples produced some distressingly violentfriction. In 1943 young “zoot-suit”–clad Mexicans andMexican-Americans in Los Angeles were viciouslyattacked by Anglo sailors who cruised the streets intaxicabs, searching for victims. Order was restored


only after the Mexican ambassador made an emo-tional plea, pointing out that such outbreaks weregrist for Nazi propaganda mills. At almost the sametime, an even more brutal race riot that killed twenty-five blacks and nine whites erupted in Detroit.

Holding the Home Front

Despite these ugly episodes, Americans on thehome front suffered little from the war, compared tothe peoples of the other fighting nations. By war’send much of the planet was a smoking ruin. But inAmerica the war invigorated the economy and liftedthe country out of a decade-long depression. Thegross national product vaulted from less than $100billion in 1940 to more than $200 billion in 1945.Corporate profits rose from about $6 billion in 1940to almost twice that amount four years later. (“If youare going to try to go to war in a capitalist country,”said Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “you have tolet business make money out of the process, or busi-ness won’t work.”) Despite wage ceilings, overtimepay fattened pay envelopes. Disposable personalincome, even after payment of wartime taxes, morethan doubled. On December 7, 1944, the thirdanniversary of Pearl Harbor, Macy’s departmentstore rang up the biggest sales day in its history.Americans had never had it so good—and theywanted it a lot better. When price controls were

finally lifted in 1946, America’s pent-up lust to con-sume pushed prices up 33 percent in less than twoyears. The rest of the world, meanwhile, was stillclawing its way out from under the rubble of war.

The hand of government touched more Ameri-can lives more intimately during the war than everbefore. The war, perhaps even more than the NewDeal, pointed the way to the post-1945 era of big-government interventionism. Every household feltthe constraints of the rationing system. Millions ofmen and women worked for Uncle Sam in thearmed forces. Millions more worked for him in the defense industries, where their employers andunions were monitored by the FEPC and the WLB,and their personal needs were cared for by govern-ment-sponsored housing projects, day-care facili-ties, and health plans. The Office of ScientificResearch and Development channeled hundreds ofmillions of dollars into university-based scientificresearch, establishing the partnership between thegovernment and universities that underwroteAmerica’s technological and economic leadership inthe postwar era.

The flood of war dollars—not the relativelymodest rivulet of New Deal spending—at last sweptthe plague of unemployment from the land. War,not enlightened social policy, cured the depression.As the postwar economy continued to depend dan-gerously on military spending for its health, manyobservers looked back to the years 1941–1945 as theorigins of a “warfare-welfare state.”

Economics on the Home Front 837

300

250

200

150

50

01932

$16b

Billions of dollars

1934

$19b

1936

$27b

1938

$33b

1940

$37b

1942

$42b

1944

$72b

1946

$201b

1948

$269b

1950

$252b

1930

$257b

The National Debt, 1930–1950Contrary to much popularmythology, it was World War II,not the New Deal, that firstballooned the national debt. Thedebt accumulated to still greateramounts in the 1980s and 1990s(see table, p. 986). (Source:Historical Statistics of theUnited States.)

The conflict was phenomenally expensive. Thewartime bill amounted to more than $330 billion—ten times the direct cost of World War I and twice asmuch as all previous federal spending since 1776.Roosevelt would have preferred to follow a pay-as-you-go policy to finance the war, but the costs weresimply too gigantic. The income-tax net wasexpanded to catch about four times as many peopleas before, and maximum tax rates rose as high as 90percent. But despite such drastic measures, onlyabout two-fifths of the war costs were paid fromcurrent revenues. The remainder was borrowed. Thenational debt skyrocketed from $49 billion in 1941to $259 billion in 1945. When production finallyslipped into high gear, the war was costing about$10 million an hour. This was the price of victoryover such implacable enemies.

The Rising Sun in the Pacific

Early successes of the efficient Japanese militaristswere breathtaking: they realized that they wouldhave to win quickly or lose slowly. Seldom, if ever,has so much territory been conquered so rapidlywith so little loss.

Simultaneously with the assault on Pearl Har-bor, the Japanese launched widespread and uni-formly successful attacks on various Far Easternbastions. These included the American outposts ofGuam, Wake, and the Philippines. In a dismayinglyshort time, the Japanese invader seized not only theBritish-Chinese port of Hong Kong but also BritishMalaya, with its critically important supplies of rub-ber and tin.

Nor did the Japanese tide stop there. The over-ambitious soldiers of the emperor, plunging into thesnake-infested jungles of Burma, cut the famedBurma Road. This was the route over which theUnited States had been trucking a trickle of muni-tions to the armies of the Chinese generalissimoJiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), who was still resist-ing the Japanese invader in China. Thereafter, intre-pid American aviators were forced to fly a handful ofwar supplies to Jiang “over the hump” of the tower-ing Himalaya mountains from the India-Burma theater. Meanwhile, the Japanese had lunged south-ward against the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The jungle-matted islands speedily fell to the assailantsafter the combined British, Australian, Dutch, and

American naval and air forces had been smashed atan early date by their numerically superior foe.

Better news came from the Philippines, whichsucceeded dramatically in slowing down themikado’s warriors for five months. The Japanesepromptly landed a small but effective army, andGeneral Douglas MacArthur, the eloquent and ego-tistical American commander, withdrew to a strongdefensive position at Bataan, not far from Manila.There about twenty thousand American troops,supported by a much larger force of ill-trained Fil-ipinos, held off violent Japanese attacks until April 9,1942. The defenders, reduced to eating mules andmonkeys, heroically traded their lives for time in theface of hopeless odds. They grimly joked whilevainly hoping for reinforcements:

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan;No Mamma, no Papa, no Uncle Sam. . . .

Before the inevitable American surrender, Gen-eral MacArthur was ordered by Washington todepart secretly for Australia, there to head the resis-tance against the Japanese. Leaving by motorboatand airplane, he proclaimed, “I shall return.” Afterthe battered remnants of his army had hoisted thewhite flag, they were treated with vicious cruelty inthe infamous eighty-mile Bataan Death March toprisoner-of-war camps. The island fortress of Cor-regidor, in Manila harbor, held out until May 6,


�

LUZON

MINDORO

PHILIPPINES

BATAANPENINSULA

CORREGIDORISLAND

Manila

Mariveles

San FernandoRoute of Bataan

Death March,April, 1942

ManilaBay

LamonBay

Corregidor and Bataan

1942, when it too surrendered and left Japaneseforces in complete control of the Philippine archipelago.

Japan’s High Tide at Midway

The aggressive warriors from Japan, making haywhile the Rising Sun shone, pushed relentlesslysouthward. They invaded the turtle-shaped islandof New Guinea, north of Australia, and landed onthe Solomon Islands, from which they threatenedAustralia itself. Their onrush was finally checked bya crucial naval battle fought in the Coral Sea, in May1942. An American carrier task force, with Aus-

tralian support, inflicted heavy losses on the vic-tory-flushed Japanese. For the first time in history,the fighting was all done by carrier-based aircraft,and neither fleet saw or fired a shot directly at theother.

Japan next undertook to seize Midway Island,more than a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu.From this strategic base, it could launch devastatingassaults on Pearl Harbor and perhaps force theweakened American Pacific fleet into destructivecombat—possibly even compel the United States tonegotiate a cease-fire in the Pacific. An epochalnaval battle was fought near Midway on June 3–6,1942. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, a high-grade navalstrategist, directed a smaller but skillfully maneu-vered carrier force, under Admiral Raymond A.Spruance, against the powerful invading fleet. Thefighting was all done by aircraft, and the Japanesebroke off action after losing four vitally importantcarriers.

Midway was a pivotal victory. Combined withthe Battle of the Coral Sea, the U.S. success at Mid-way halted Japan’s juggernaut. But the thrust of theJapanese into the eastern Pacific did net themAmerica’s fog-girt islands of Kiska and Attu, in theAleutian archipelago, off Alaska. This easy conquestaroused fear of an invasion of the United Statesfrom the northwest. Much American strength wasconsequently diverted to the defense of Alaska,including the construction of the “Alcan” Highwaythrough Canada.

Yet the Japanese imperialists, overextended in1942, suffered from “victory disease.” Theirappetites were bigger than their stomachs. If theyhad only dug in and consolidated their gains, theywould have been much more difficult to dislodgeonce the tide turned.

American Leapfrogging Toward Tokyo

Following the heartening victory at Midway, theUnited States for the first time was able to seize theinitiative in the Pacific. In August 1942 Americanground forces gained a toehold on GuadalcanalIsland, in the Solomons, in an effort to protect thelifeline from America to Australia through theSouthwest Pacific. An early naval defeat inflicted bythe Japanese shortened American supplies danger-ously, and for weeks the U.S. troops held on to the

The Pacific Theater 839

malarial island only by their fingernails. After sev-eral desperate sea battles for naval control, the Japa-nese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in February1943. Japanese losses were 20,000, compared to1,700 for the Americans. That casualty ratio of morethan ten to one, Japanese to American, persistedthroughout the Pacific war.

American and Australian forces, under GeneralMacArthur, meanwhile had been hanging on coura-geously to the southeastern tip of New Guinea, thelast buffer protecting Australia. The scales of wargradually began to tip as the American navy, includ-ing submarines, inflicted lethal losses on Japanesesupply ships and troop carriers. Conquest of thenorth coast of New Guinea was completed byAugust 1944, after General MacArthur had foughthis way westward through tropical jungle hells. Thishard-won victory was the first leg on his long returnjourney to the Philippines.

The U.S. Navy, with marines and army divisionsdoing the meat-grinder fighting, had meanwhilebeen “leapfrogging” the Japanese-held islands inthe Pacific. Old-fashioned strategy dictated that theAmerican forces, as they drove toward Tokyo, shouldreduce the fortified Japanese outposts on theirflank. This course would have taken many blood-stained months, for the holed-in defenders wereprepared to die to the last man in their caves. Thenew strategy of island hopping called for bypassingsome of the most heavily fortified Japanese posts,capturing nearby islands, setting up airfields onthem, and then neutralizing the enemy basesthrough heavy bombing. Deprived of essential sup-plies from the homeland, Japan’s outposts wouldslowly wither on the vine—as they did.

Brilliant success crowned the American attackson the Japanese island strongholds in the Pacific,where Admiral Nimitz skillfully coordinated the


United States Thrusts in the Pacific, 1942–1945American strategists had to choose among four proposed plans for waging the war against Japan:1. Defeating the Japanese in China by funneling supplies over the Himalayan “hump” from India.2. Carrying the war into Southeast Asia (a proposal much favored by the British, who could thus regain Singapore).3. Heavy bombing of Japan from Chinese air bases.4. “Island hopping” from the South Pacific to within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. This strategy, favored by General Douglas MacArthur, was the one finally emphasized.

efforts of naval, air, and ground units. In May andAugust of 1943, Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians wereeasily retaken. In November 1943 “bloody Tarawa”and Makin, both in the Gilbert Islands, fell after sui-cidal resistance. In January and February 1944, thekey outposts of the Marshall Islands group suc-cumbed after savage fighting.

Especially prized were the Marianas, includingAmerica’s conquered Guam. From bases in the Mar-ianas, the United States’ new B-29 superbomberscould carry out round-trip bombing raids on Japan’shome islands. The assault on the Marianas openedon June 19, 1944, with what American pilots calledthe “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” A combinationof the combat superiority of the recently developedAmerican “Hellcat” fighter plane and the new tech-nology of the antiaircraft proximity fuse destroyednearly 250 Japanese aircraft, with a loss of only 29American planes. The following day, in the Battle ofthe Philippine Sea, U.S. naval forces sank severalJapanese carriers. The Japanese navy never recov-ered from these massive losses of planes, pilots, andships.

After fanatical resistance, including a mass sui-cide leap of surviving Japanese soldiers and civiliansfrom “Suicide Cliff” on Saipan, the major islands ofthe Marianas fell to the U.S. attackers in July andAugust 1944. With these unsinkable aircraft carriersnow available, virtual round-the-clock bombing ofJapan began in November 1944.

The Allied Halting of Hitler

Early setbacks for America in the Pacific were paral-leled in the Atlantic. Hitler had entered the war witha formidable fleet of ultramodern submarines,which ultimately operated in “wolf packs” withfrightful effect, especially in the North Atlantic, theCaribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. During tenmonths of 1942 more than 500 merchant ships werereported lost—111 in June alone—as ship destruc-tion far outran construction.

The tide of subsea battle turned with agonizingslowness. Old techniques, such as escorting convoysof merchant vessels and dropping depth bombsfrom destroyers, were strengthened by air patrol,the newly invented technology of radar, and thebombing of submarine bases. “Keep ’Em Sailing”was the motto of oil-begrimed merchant seamen,

hundreds of whom perished as unsung heroes in icyseas. Eventually Allied antisubmarine tactics im-proved substantially, thanks especially to Britishcode-breakers, who had cracked the Germans’“Enigma” codes and could therefore pinpoint thelocations of the U-boats lurking in the NorthAtlantic.

Not until the spring of 1943 did the Allies clearlyhave the upper hand against the U-boat. If they hadnot won the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain wouldhave been forced under, and a second front couldnot have been launched from its island spring-board. Victory over the undersea raiders was nerve-rackingly narrow. When the war ended, Hitler wasabout to mass-produce a fearsome new submarine—one that could remain underwater indefinitelyand cruise at seventeen knots when submerged.

Meanwhile, the turning point of the land-airwar against Hitler had come late in 1942. The Britishhad launched a thousand-plane raid on Cologne inMay. In August 1942 they were joined by the Ameri-can air force and were cascading bombs on Germancities. The Germans under Marshal Erwin Rom-mel—the “Desert Fox”—had driven eastward acrossthe hot sands of North Africa into Egypt, perilouslyclose to the Suez Canal. A breakthrough would havespelled disaster for the Allies. But late in October1942, British general Bernard Montgomery deliv-ered a withering attack at El Alamein, west of Cairo.With the aid of several hundred hastily shippedAmerican Sherman tanks, he speedily drove theenemy back to Tunisia, more than a thousand milesaway.

On the Soviet front, the unexpected successes ofthe red army gave a new lift to the Allied cause. InSeptember 1942 the Russians stalled the Germansteamroller at rubble-strewn Stalingrad, graveyard

Battles Above and Below the Sea 841

British prime minister Winston Churchill(1874–1965) observed in a speech (May1943),

“The proud German Army has by its suddencollapse, sudden crumbling and breaking up . . . once again proved the truth of thesaying, ‘The Hun [German] is always either at your throat or at your feet.’”

of Hitler’s hopes. More than a score of invading divi-sions, caught in an icy noose, later surrendered orwere “mopped up.” In November 1942 the resilientRussians unleashed a crushing counteroffensive,which was never seriously reversed. A year laterStalin had regained about two-thirds of the blood-soaked Soviet motherland wrested from him by theGerman invader.

A Second Front from North Africa to Rome

Soviet losses were already staggering in 1942: mil-lions of soldiers and civilians lay dead, and Hitler’sarmies had overrun most of the western USSR.Anglo-American losses at this time could becounted only in the thousands. By war’s end, thegrave had closed over some 20 million Soviets, and agreat swath of their country, equivalent in theUnited States to the area from Chicago to theAtlantic seaboard, had been laid waste. Small won-der that Kremlin leaders clamored for a secondfront to divert the German strength westward.

Many Americans, including FDR, were eager tobegin a diversionary invasion of France in 1942 or1943. They feared that the Soviets, unable to holdout forever against Germany, might make a separatepeace as they had in 1918 and leave the WesternAllies to face Hitler’s fury alone.

But British military planners, rememberingtheir appalling losses in 1914–1918, were not enthu-siastic about a frontal assault on German-heldFrance. It might end in disaster. They preferred toattack Hitler’s Fortress Europe through the “softunderbelly” of the Mediterranean. Faced withBritish boot-dragging and a woeful lack of re-sources, the Americans reluctantly agreed to post-pone a massive invasion of Europe.

An assault on French-held North Africa was acompromise second front. The highly secret attack,launched in November 1942, was headed by a giftedand easy-smiling American general, Dwight D.(“Ike”) Eisenhower, a master of organization andconciliation. As a joint Allied operation ultimatelyinvolving some 400,000 men (British, Canadian,French, and chiefly American) and about 850 ships,the invasion was the mightiest waterborne effort upto that time in history. After savage fighting, the

remnants of the German-Italian army were finallytrapped in Tunisia and surrendered in May 1943.

New blows were now planned by the Allies. AtCasablanca, in newly occupied French Morocco,President Roosevelt, who had boldly flown theAtlantic, met in a historic conference with WinstonChurchill in January 1943. The Big Two agreed tostep up the Pacific war, invade Sicily, increase pres-sure on Italy, and insist upon an “unconditional sur-render” of the enemy, a phrase earlier popularizedby General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War.Such an unyielding policy would presumablyhearten the ultrasuspicious Soviets, who professedto fear separate Allied peace negotiations. It wouldalso forestall charges of broken armistice terms,such as had come after 1918. Paradoxically, thetough-sounding unconditional surrender declara-tion was an admission of the weakness of the West-ern Allies. Still unable in 1943 to mount the kind ofsecond front their Soviet partner desperatelydemanded, the British and the Americans had littlebut words to offer Stalin.

“Unconditional surrender” proved to be one ofthe most controversial moves of the war. The main


criticism was that it steeled the enemy to fight to alast-bunker resistance, while discouraging antiwargroups in Germany from revolting. Although therewas some truth in these charges, no one can provethat “unconditional surrender” either shortened orlengthened the war. But by helping to destroy theGerman government utterly, the harsh policyimmensely complicated the problems of postwarreconstruction.

The Allied forces, victorious in Africa, nowturned against the not-so-soft underbelly of Europe.Sicily fell in August 1943 after sporadic but some-times bitter resistance. Shortly before the conquestof the island, Mussolini was deposed, and Italy sur-rendered unconditionally soon thereafter, in Sep-tember 1943. President Roosevelt, referring to thethree original Axis countries—Germany, Italy, andJapan—joked grimly that it was now one down andtwo to go.

But if Italy dropped out of the war, the Germansdid not drop out of Italy. Hitler’s well-trained troopsstubbornly resisted the Allied invaders now pouringinto the toe of the Italian boot. They also unleashedtheir fury against the Italians, who had turned theircoats and declared war on Germany in October1943. “Sunny Italy” proceeded to belie its name, forin the snow-covered and mud-caked mountains ofits elongated peninsula occurred some of the filthi-est, bloodiest, and most frustrating fighting of thewar.

For many months Italy appeared to be a deadend, as the Allied advance was halted by a seeminglyimpregnable German defense centered on theancient monastery of Monte Cassino. After a touch-and-go assault on the Anzio beachhead, Rome wasfinally taken on June 4, 1944. The tremendous cross-channel invasion of France begun two days laterturned Italy into a kind of sideshow, but the Allies,limited in manpower, continued to fight their wayslowly and painfully into northern Italy. On May 2,1945, only five days before Germany’s official sur-render, several hundred thousand Axis troops inItaly laid down their arms and became prisoners ofwar. While the Italian second front opened theMediterranean and diverted some German divi-sions from the blazing Soviet and French battlelines, it also may have delayed the main Allied inva-sion of Europe, from England across the EnglishChannel to France, by many months—allowingmore time for the Soviet army to advance into East-ern Europe.

D-Day: June 6, 1944

The Soviets had never ceased their clamor for an all-out second front, and the time rapidly approachedfor Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to meet in per-son to coordinate the promised effort. MarshalJoseph Stalin, with a careful eye on Soviet militaryoperations, balked at leaving Moscow. PresidentRoosevelt, who jauntily remarked in private, “I canhandle that old buzzard,” was eager to confer withhim. The president seemed confident that Roo-seveltian charm could woo the hardened conspira-tor of the Kremlin from his nasty communist ways.

Teheran, the capital of Iran (Persia), was finallychosen as the meeting place. To this ancient cityRoosevelt riskily flew, after a stopover conference in

North Africa and Italy 843

Cairo with Britain’s Churchill and China’s JiangJieshi regarding the war against Japan. At Teheranthe discussions among Stalin, Roosevelt, andChurchill—from November 28 to December 1,1943—progressed smoothly. Perhaps the mostimportant achievement was agreement on broadplans, especially those for launching Soviet attackson Germany from the east simultaneously with theprospective Allied assault from the west.

Preparations for the cross-channel invasion ofFrance were gigantic. Britain’s fast-anchored isle vir-tually groaned with munitions, supplies, andtroops, as nearly 3 million fighting men were read-ied. Because the United States was to provide mostof the Allied warriors, the overall command wasentrusted to an American, General Eisenhower. He

had already distinguished himself in the NorthAfrican and Mediterranean Campaigns, not only forhis military capacity but also for his gifts as a concil-iator of clashing Allied interests.

French Normandy, less heavily defended thanother parts of the European coast, was pinpointedfor the invasion assault. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, theenormous operation, which involved some forty-sixhundred vessels, unwound. Stiff resistance wasencountered from the Germans, who had been mis-led by a feint into expecting the blow to fall farthernorth. The Allies had already achieved mastery ofthe air over France. They were thus able to blockreinforcements by crippling the railroads, whileworsening German fuel shortages by bombing gaso-line-producing plants.


World War II in Europe and North Africa, 1939–1945

Franklin Roosevelt at Teheran, 1943 In late 1943the “Big Three” wartime leaders—Britain’s primeminister Winston Churchill, American presidentFranklin Roosevelt, and Soviet leader MarshalJoseph Stalin—gathered together for the first time.They met amidst growing Soviet frustration withthe British and the Americans for their failure thusfar to open a “second front” against Germany inwestern Europe, while the Soviets continued tosuffer horrendous losses in the savage fighting ineastern Europe. American military planners wereeager to open a second front as soon as possible,but the British, who would necessarily have tosupply most of the troops until America was fullymobilized, balked. Tension among the three lead-ers over the second front plan—code-namedOVERLORD, the operation that resulted in theAnglo-American invasion of Normandy on “D-Day,” June 6, 1944—is evident in this transcript of

their discussions in the Iranian city of Teheran onNovember 28, 1943. The excerpts printed here areactually taken from two separate accounts: onecomposed by the American diplomat and Roo-sevelt’s official translator Charles Bohlen, the otherwritten by a military officer on behalf of the UnitedStates Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both versions are pub-lished in Foreign Relations of the United States, acompilation of American diplomatic records since1861. The Soviets and the British also kept theirown records of the Teheran meetings, giving histo-rians remarkably rich sources with which to recon-struct the crucial negotiations and decisions thatshaped wartime diplomacy. Why might the historyof diplomacy be so lavishly documented? At thismeeting, what were the principal objectives thateach leader pursued? How did each man addresshis task? In what ways was the future of the war—and the post-war world—here foreshadowed?

FIRST PLENARY MEETING, NOVEMBER 28, 1943, 4 P. M., CONFERENCE

ROOM, SOVIET EMBASSY

Bohlen MinutesSECRET

THE PRESIDENT said as the youngest of the threepresent he ventured to welcome his elders. He saidhe wished to welcome the new members to thefamily circle and tell them that meetings of thischaracter were conducted as between friends withcomplete frankness on all sides with nothing thatwas said to be made public. . . .

Chief of Staff Minutes

MARSHAL STALIN asked who will be the comman-der in this Operation Overlord. (THE PRESIDENT andPRIME MINISTER interpolated this was not yetdecided.) MARSHAL STALIN continued, “Then nothingwill come out of these operations.” . . .

THE PRESIDENT said we again come back to theproblem of the timing for OVERLORD. It was believedthat it would be good for OVERLORD to take placeabout 1 May, or certainly not later than 15 Mayor 20 May, if possible.

THE PRIME MINISTER said that he could not agreeto that. . . .

. . . He said he (the Prime Minister) was goingto do everything in the power of His Majesty’sGovernment to begin OVERLORD at the earliest possi-ble moment. However, he did not think that the

many great possibilities in the Mediterraneanshould be ruthlessly cast aside as valueless merelyon the question of a month’s delay in OVERLORD.

MARSHAL STALIN said all the Mediterranean oper-ations are diversions, . . .

THE PRESIDENT said he found that his staff placesemphasis on OVERLORD. While on the other hand thePrime Minister and his staff also emphasize OVER-LORD, nevertheless the United States does not feelthat OVERLORD should be put off.

THE PRESIDENT questioned whether it would not bepossible for the ad hoc committee to go ahead withtheir deliberations without any further directiveand to produce an answer by tomorrow morning.

MARSHAL STALIN questioned, “What can such acommittee do?” He said, “We Chiefs of State havemore power and more authority than a committee.General Brooke cannot force our opinions andthere are many questions which can be decidedonly by us.” He said he would like to ask if theBritish are thinking seriously of OVERLORD only inorder to satisfy the U.S.S.R.

THE PRIME MINISTER replied that if the conditionsspecified at Moscow regarding OVERLORD shouldexist, he firmly believed it would be England’sduty to hurl every ounce of strength she hadacross the Channel at the Germans.

THE PRESIDENT observed that in an hour a verygood dinner would be awaiting all and peoplewould be very hungry. He suggested that thestaffs should meet tomorrow morning and discussthe matter. . . .

Examining the Evidence 845


The Allied beachhead, at first clung to with fin-gertips, was gradually enlarged, consolidated, andreinforced. After desperate fighting, the invadersfinally broke out of the German iron ring thatenclosed the Normandy landing zone. Most spec-tacular were the lunges across France by Americanarmored divisions, brilliantly commanded by blus-tery and profane General George S. (“Blood ’n’Guts”) Patton. The retreat of the German defenderswas hastened when an American-French forcelanded in August 1944 on the southern coast ofFrance and swept northward. With the assistance ofthe French “underground,” Paris was liberated inAugust 1944, amid exuberant manifestations of joyand gratitude.

Allied forces rolled irresistibly toward Germany,and many of the Americans encountered places,like Château-Thierry, familiar to their fathers in

1918. “Lafayette, we are here again,” quipped someof the American soldiers. The first important Ger-man city (Aachen) fell to the Americans in October1944, and the days of Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich”were numbered.

FDR: The Fourth-Termite of 1944

The presidential campaign of 1944, which wasbound to divert energy from the war program, camemost awkwardly as the awful conflict roared to itsclimax. But the normal electoral processes contin-ued to function, despite some loose talk of suspend-ing them “for the duration.”

Victory-starved Republicans met in Chicagowith hopeful enthusiasm. They quickly nominated

the short, mustachioed, and dapper Thomas E.Dewey, popular vote-getting governor of New York.Regarded as a liberal, he had already made anational reputation as a prosecutor of grafters andracketeers in New York City. His shortness andyouth—he was only forty-two—had caused one vet-eran New Dealer to sneer that the candidate hadcast his diaper into the ring. To offset Dewey’s mildinternationalism, the convention nominated for thevice presidency a strong isolationist, handsome andwhite-maned Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio. Yetthe platform called for an unstinted prosecution ofthe war and for the creation of a new internationalorganization to maintain peace.

FDR, aging under the strain, was the “indis-pensable man” of the Democrats. No other majorfigure was available, and the war was apparentlygrinding to its finale. He was nominated at Chicagoon the first ballot by acclamation. But in a sense hewas the “forgotten man” of the convention, for in

view of his age, an unusual amount of attention wasfocused on the vice presidency.

The scramble for the vice-presidential plumturned into something of a free-for-all. Henry A.Wallace, onetime “plow ’em under” secretary ofagriculture, had served four years as vice presidentand desired a renomination. But conservativeDemocrats distrusted him as an ill-balanced andunpredictable liberal. A “ditch Wallace” move devel-oped tremendous momentum, despite the popular-ity of Wallace with large numbers of voters andmany of the delegates. With Roosevelt’s blessing, thevice-presidential nomination finally went to smilingand self-assured Senator Harry S Truman of Mis-souri (“the new Missouri Compromise”). Hithertoinconspicuous, he had recently attained nationalvisibility as the efficient chairman of a Senate com-mittee conducting an investigation of wasteful warexpenditures. Nobody had much against him or on him.

Roosevelt Wins a Fourth Term 847

Roosevelt Defeats Dewey

A dynamic Dewey took the offensive, for Rooseveltwas too consumed with directing the war to sparemuch time for speechmaking. The vigorous young“crime buster,” with his beautiful baritone voice andpolished diction, denounced the tired and quarrel-some “old men” in Washington. He proclaimedrepeatedly that after “twelve long years” of NewDealism, it was “time for a change.” As for the war,Dewey would not alter the basic strategy but wouldfight it better—a type of “me-tooism” ridiculed bythe Democrats. The fourth-term issue did not figureprominently, now that the ice had been broken byRoosevelt’s third term. But “Dewey-eyed” Republi-cans half-humorously professed to fear fifth andsixth terms by the “lifer” in the White House.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Rooseveltleft his desk for the stump. He was stung by certainRepublican charges, including criticism that he hadsent a U.S. Navy destroyer to retrieve his pet Scottiedog, Fala. He was also eager to show himself, even inchilling rains, to spike well-founded rumors of fail-ing health.

Substantial assistance came from the new polit-ical action committee of the CIO, which was organ-ized to get around the law banning the direct use ofunion funds for political purposes. Zealous CIOmembers, branded as communists by the Republi-cans, rang countless doorbells and asked, withpointed reference to the recent depression, “Whatwere you doing in 1932?” At times Roosevelt seemedto be running again against Hoover. As in every oneof his previous three campaigns, FDR was opposedby a majority of the newspapers, which were ownedchiefly by Republicans. Roosevelt, as customary,won a sweeping victory: 432 to 99 in the ElectoralCollege; 25,606,585 to 22,014,745 in the popularvote. Elated, he quipped that “the first twelve yearsare the hardest.”

Roosevelt won primarily because the war wasgoing well. A winning pitcher is not ordinarily pulledfrom the game. Foreign policy was a decisive factorwith untold thousands of voters, who concluded thatRoosevelt’s experienced hand was needed in fash-ioning a future organization for world peace. Thedapper Dewey, cruelly dubbed “the little man on topof the wedding cake,” had spoken smoothly of inter-national cooperation, but his isolationist runningmate, Bricker, had implanted serious doubts. The

Republican party was still suffering from the taint ofisolationism fastened on it by the Hardingites.

The Last Days of Hitler

By mid-December 1944, the month after Roosevelt’sfourth-term victory, Germany seemed to be wob-bling on its last legs. The Soviet surge had pene-trated eastern Germany. Allied aerial “blockbuster”bombs, making the “rubble bounce” with around-the-clock attacks, were falling like giant explosivehailstones on cities, factories, and transportationarteries. The German western front seemed about tobuckle under the sledgehammer blows of theUnited States and its Allies.

Hitler then staked everything on one last throwof his reserves. Secretly concentrating a powerfulforce, he hurled it, on December 16, 1944, againstthe thinly held American lines in the heavilybefogged and snow-shrouded Ardennes Forest. Hisobjective was the Belgian port of Antwerp, key to theAllied supply operation. Caught off guard, the out-manned Americans were driven back, creating adeep “bulge” in the Allied line. The ten-day penetra-tion was finally halted after the 101st Airborne Divi-sion had stood firm at the vital bastion of Bastogne.The commander, Brigadier General A. C. McAuliffe,defiantly answered the German demand for surren-der with one word: “Nuts.” Reinforcements wererushed up, and the last-gasp Hitlerian offensive wasat length bloodily stemmed in the Battle of theBulge.

In March 1945, forward-driving Americantroops reached Germany’s Rhine River, where, byincredibly good luck, they found one strategicbridge undemolished. Pressing their advantage,


During the bitter campaign of 1944,Roosevelt’s pre–Pearl Harbor policies cameunder sharp attack from CongresswomanClare Boothe Luce (1903–1987) (the “BlondeBombshell”), who violently blasted Roosevelt:

“[He] lied us into war because he did not havethe political courage to lead us into it.”

General Eisenhower’s troops reached the Elbe Riverin April 1945. There, a short distance south of Berlin,American and Soviet advance guards dramaticallyclasped hands amid cries of “Amerikanskie tovar-ishchi” (American comrades). The conqueringAmericans were horrified to find blood-spatteredand still-stinking concentration camps, where theGerman Nazis had engaged in scientific mass mur-der of “undesirables,” including an estimated 6 mil-lion Jews. The Washington government had longbeen informed about Hitler’s campaign of genocideagainst the Jews and had been reprehensibly slow totake steps against it. Roosevelt’s administration hadbolted the door against large numbers of Jewishrefugees, and his military commanders declinedeven to bomb the rail lines that carried the victimsto the camps. But until the war’s end, the full dimen-sions of the “Holocaust” had not been known. Whenthe details were revealed, the whole world wasaghast.

The vengeful Soviets, clawing their way forwardfrom the east, reached Berlin in April 1945. Afterdesperate house-to-house fighting, followed by an

orgy of pillage and rape, they captured the bomb-shattered city. Adolf Hitler, after a hasty marriage tohis mistress, committed suicide in an undergroundbunker on April 30, 1945.

Tragedy had meanwhile struck the UnitedStates. President Roosevelt, while relaxing at WarmSprings, Georgia, suddenly died from a massivecerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. The crush-ing burden of twelve depression and war years inthe White House had finally taken its toll. Knots ofconfused, leaderless citizens gathered to discuss thefuture anxiously, as a bewildered, unbriefed VicePresident Truman took the helm.

On May 7, 1945, what was left of the Germangovernment surrendered unconditionally. May 8was officially proclaimed V-E (Victory in Europe)Day and was greeted with frenzied rejoicing in theAllied countries.

Japan Dies Hard

Japan’s rickety bamboo empire meanwhile was tot-tering to its fall. American submarines—“the silentservice”—were sending the Japanese merchant

German Defeat 849

Battle of the Bulge, December 1944–January 1945

marine to the bottom so fast they were running outof prey. All told, these undersea craft destroyed1,042 ships, or about 50 percent of Japan’s entirelife-sustaining merchant fleet.

Giant bomber attacks were more spectacular.Launched from Saipan and other captured Marianaislands, they were reducing the enemy’s fragile citiesto cinders. The massive fire-bomb raid on Tokyo,March 9–10, 1945, was annihilating. It destroyedover 250,000 buildings, gutted a quarter of the city,and killed an estimated 83,000 people—a loss com-parable to that later inflicted by atomic bombs.

General MacArthur was also on the move. Com-pleting the conquest of jungle-draped New Guinea,he headed northwest for the Philippines, en route toJapan, with 600 ships and 250,000 men. In a scenewell staged for the photographers, he splashedashore at Leyte Island on October 20, 1944, with thesummons, “People of the Philippines, I havereturned. . . . Rally to me.”

Japan’s navy—still menacing—now made onelast-chance effort to destroy MacArthur by wipingout his transports and supply ships. A gigantic clashat Leyte Gulf, fought on the sea and in the air, wasactually three battles (October 23–26, 1944). TheAmericans won all of them, though the crucial

engagement was almost lost when Admiral WilliamF. (“Bull”) Halsey was decoyed away by a feint.

Japan was through as a sea power: it had lostabout sixty ships in the greatest naval battle of alltime. American fleets, numbering more than fourthousand vessels, now commanded the western Pa-cific. Several battleships, raised from the mud ofPearl Harbor, were exacting belated but sweetrevenge.

Overrunning Leyte, MacArthur next landed onthe main Philippine island of Luzon in January1945. Manila was his major objective; the ravagedcity fell in March, but the Philippines were not con-quered until July. Victory was purchased only afterbitter fighting against holed-in Japanese, who took atoll of over sixty thousand American casualties.

America’s steel vise was tightening mercilesslyaround Japan. The tiny island of Iwo Jima, neededas a haven for damaged American bombers return-ing from Japan, was captured in March 1945. Thisdesperate twenty-five-day assault cost over fourthousand American dead.

Okinawa, a well-defended Japanese island, wasnext on the list: it was needed for closer bases fromwhich to blast and burn enemy cities and indus-tries. Fighting dragged on from April to June of 1945.


Japanese soldiers, fighting with incredible couragefrom their caves, finally sold Okinawa for fifty thou-sand American casualties, while suffering far heav-ier losses themselves.

The American navy, which covered the invasionof Okinawa, sustained severe damage. Japanese sui-cide pilots (“kamikazes”) in an exhibition of masshara-kiri for their god-emperor, crashed theirbomb-laden planes onto the decks of the invadingfleet. All told, the death squads sank over thirtyships and badly damaged scores more.

The Atomic Bombs

Strategists in Washington were meanwhile planningan all-out invasion of the main islands of Japan—aninvasion that presumably would cost hundreds ofthousands of American (and even more Japanese)casualties. Tokyo, recognizing imminent defeat, hadsecretly sent peace feelers to Moscow, which hadnot yet entered the Far Eastern war. The Americans,having broken the secret Japanese radio codes,

knew of these feelers. But bomb-scorched Japan stillshowed no outward willingness to surrender uncon-ditionally to the Allies.

The Potsdam conference, held near Berlin inJuly 1945, sounded the death knell of the Japanese.There President Truman, still new on his job, met ina seventeen-day parley with Joseph Stalin and theBritish leaders. The conferees issued a stern ultima-tum to Japan: surrender or be destroyed. Americanbombers showered the dire warning on Japan intens of thousands of leaflets, but no encouragingresponse was forthcoming.

America had a fantastic ace up its sleeve. Earlyin 1940, after Hitler’s wanton assault on Poland,Roosevelt was persuaded by American and exiledscientists, notably German-born Albert Einstein, topush ahead with preparations for unlocking thesecret of an atomic bomb. Congress, at Roosevelt’sblank-check request, blindly made available nearly$2 billion. Many military minds were skeptical ofthis “damned professor’s nonsense,” but fears thatthe Germans might first acquire such an awesomeweapon provided a powerful spur to action. Ironi-cally, Germany eventually abandoned its own

The Atomic Ace 851

atomic project as too costly. And as it happened, thewar against Germany ended before the Americanweapon was ready. In a cruel twist of fate, Japan—not Germany, the original target—suffered the fateof being the first nation subjected to atomic bombardment.

The huge atomic project was pushed feverishlyforward, as American know-how and industrialpower were combined with the most advanced sci-entific knowledge. Much technical skill was pro-vided by British and refugee scientists, who had fledto America to escape the torture chambers of thedictators. Finally, in the desert near Alamogordo,New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the experts detonatedthe first awesome and devastating atomic device.

With Japan still refusing to surrender, the Pots-dam threat was fulfilled. On August 6, 1945, a loneAmerican bomber dropped one atomic bomb onthe city of Hiroshima, Japan. In a blinding flash ofdeath, followed by a funnel-shaped cloud, about180,000 people were left killed, wounded, or miss-ing. Some 70,000 of them died instantaneously.Sixty thousand more soon perished from burns andradiation disease.

Two days later, on August 8, Stalin entered thewar against Japan, exactly on the deadline date pre-

viously agreed upon with his allies. Soviet armiesspeedily overran the depleted Japanese defenses inManchuria and Korea in a six-day “victory parade”that involved several thousand Russian casualties.Stalin was evidently determined to be in on the kill,lest he lose a voice in the final division of Japan’sholdings.

Fanatically resisting Japanese, though facingatomization, still did not surrender. American avia-tors, on August 9, dropped a second atomic bombon the city of Nagasaki. The explosion took a horri-ble toll of about eighty thousand people killed ormissing.

The Japanese nation could endure no more. OnAugust 10, 1945, Tokyo sued for peace on one condi-tion: that Hirohito, the bespectacled Son of Heaven,be allowed to remain on his ancestral throne asnominal emperor. Despite their “unconditional sur-render” policy, the Allies accepted this condition onAugust 14, 1945. The Japanese, though losing face,were able to save both their exalted ruler and whatwas left of their native land.

The formal end came, with dramatic force, onSeptember 2, 1945. Official surrender ceremonieswere conducted by General MacArthur on the bat-tleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At the same time,


Americans at home hysterically celebrated V-JDay—Victory in Japan Day—after the most horriblewar in history had ended in mushrooming atomicclouds.

The Allies Triumphant

World War II proved to be terribly costly. Americanforces suffered some 1 million casualties, aboutone-third of which were deaths. Compared withother wars, the proportion killed by wounds anddisease was sharply reduced, owing in part to theuse of blood plasma and “miracle” drugs, notablypenicillin. Yet heavy though American losses were,the Soviet allies suffered casualties many timesgreater—perhaps 20 million people killed.

America was fortunate in emerging with itsmainland virtually unscathed. Two Japanese sub-marines, using shells and bombers, had ratherharmlessly attacked the California and Oregoncoast, and a few balloons, incendiary and otherwise,had drifted across the Pacific. But that was about all.

Much of the rest of the world was utterly destroyedand destitute. America alone was untouched andhealthy—oiled and muscled like a prize bull, stand-ing astride the world’s ruined landscape.

This complex conflict was the best-fought warin America’s history. Though unprepared for it at theoutset, the nation was better prepared than for theothers, partly because it had begun to buckle on itsarmor about a year and a half before the war offi-cially began. It was actually fighting German sub-marines in the Atlantic months before the explosionin the Pacific at Pearl Harbor. In the end the UnitedStates showed itself to be resourceful, tough, adapt-able—able to accommodate itself to the tactics of anenemy who was relentless and ruthless.

American military leadership proved to be ofthe highest order. A new crop of war heroesemerged in brilliant generals like Eisenhower,MacArthur, and Marshall (chief of staff) and inimaginative admirals like Nimitz and Spruance.President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill,as kindred spirits, collaborated closely in planningstrategy. “It is fun to be in the same decade withyou,” FDR once cabled Churchill.

The End of War 853

Industrial leaders were no less skilled, for mar-vels of production were performed almost daily.Assembly lines proved as important as battle lines,and victory went again to the side with the mostsmokestacks. The enemy was almost literallysmothered by bayonets, bullets, bazookas, andbombs. Hitler and his Axis coconspirators had cho-sen to make war with machines, and the ingeniousYankees could ask for nothing better. They demon-strated again, as they had in World War I, that the American way of war was simply more—moremen, more weapons, more machines, more tech-nology, and more money than any enemy couldhope to match. From 1940 to 1945, the output ofAmerican factories was simply phenomenal. AsWinston Churchill remarked, “Nothing succeedslike excess.”

Hermann Goering, a Nazi leader, had sneered,“The Americans can’t build planes—only electriciceboxes and razor blades.” Democracy had givenits answer, as the dictators, despite long prepara-tion, were overthrown and discredited. It is true thatan unusual amount of direct control was exercisedover the individual by the Washington authoritiesduring the war emergency. But the American peoplepreserved their precious liberties without seriousimpairment.


Chronology

1941 United States declares war on JapanGermany declares war on United StatesRandolph plans black march on WashingtonFair Employment Practices Commission

(FEPC) established

1942 Japanese-Americans sent to internmentcamps

Japan conquers the PhilippinesBattle of the Coral SeaBattle of MidwayUnited States invades North AfricaCongress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded

1943 Allies hold Casablanca conferenceAllies invade ItalySmith-Connally Anti-Strike Act“Zoot-suit” riots in Los AngelesRace riot in Detroit

1943 Japanese driven from GuadalcanalTeheran conference

1944 Korematsu v. U.S.D-Day invasion of FranceBattle of MarianasRoosevelt defeats Dewey for presidency

1944-1945 Battle of the Bulge

1945 Roosevelt dies; Truman assumes presidencyGermany surrendersBattles of Iwo Jima and OkinawaPotsdam conferenceAtomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and

NagasakiJapan surrenders

VARYING VIEWPOINTS

World War II: Triumph or Tragedy?

After World War II ended in 1945, many historianswere convinced that the tragedy could have

been averted if only the United States had awak-ened earlier from its isolationist illusions. Thesescholars condemned the policies and attitudes ofthe 1930s as a “retreat from responsibility.” Much ofthe historical writing in the postwar period con-tained the strong flavor of medicine to ward offanother infection by the isolationist virus.

This approach fell into disfavor during the Viet-nam War in the 1960s, when many U.S. policymak-ers defended their actions in Southeast Asia bymaking dubious comparisons to the decade beforeWorld War II. Some scholars responded by arguingthat the “lessons” of the 1930s—especially about theneed to avoid “appeasement” and to take quick anddecisive action against “aggressors”—could notproperly be applied to any and all subsequent situa-tions. Ho Chi Minh, they pointed out, was not Hitler,and Vietnam was not Nazi Germany. One controver-sial product of this line of thinking was Bruce Rus-sett’s No Clear and Present Danger (1972), whichargued that the United States had no clearly definednational interests at stake in 1941, and that both thenation and the world might have been better offwithout U.S. intervention. This analysis paralleled“revisionist” commentaries written in the 1930sabout U.S. participation in World World I.

Although few scholars fully accept Russett’s con-clusions, more recently writing on American entryinto World War II has tended to avoid finding in thatepisode lessons for posterity. Attention has focused,rather, on the wisdom or folly of specific policies,such as Washington’s hard line toward Tokyothroughout 1941, when the possibility of a negoti-ated settlement perhaps existed. P. W. Schroeder’sThe Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations,1941 (1958) makes that point with particular force.Other issues include Franklin Roosevelt’s diplomaticrole. Was the president a bold internationalist strug-gling heroically against an isolationist Congress andpublic opinion, or did he share much of the tradi-tional isolationist credo? Robert Dallek’s encyclope-dic study of Roosevelt’s foreign policy portraysRoosevelt as a shrewd and calculating international-

ist, whereas Donald Cameron Watt’s How War Came(1989) depicts him as a myopic and ill-informedleader who overestimated his own peacemakingabilities and, like most other Americans, only belat-edly awakened to the menace of totalitarianism.

No decision of the war era has provoked sharpercontroversy than the atomic bombings of Japan inAugust 1945. Lingering moral questions about thenuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki havelong threatened to tarnish the crown of military vic-tory. America is the only nation ever to have used anatomic weapon in war, and some critics have evenclaimed to find elements of racism in the fact that thebombs were dropped on people of a nonwhite race.The fact is, however, that Germany surrenderedbefore the bombs were ready; had the war in Europelasted just a few months longer, some German citywould probably have suffered the fate of Hiroshima.

Some scholars, notably Gar Alperovitz, have further charged that the atomic holocausts atHiroshima and Nagasaki were not the last shots ofWorld War II, but the first salvos in the emergingCold War. Alperovitz argues that the Japanese werealready defeated in the summer of 1945 and were infact attempting to arrange a conditional surrender.President Truman ignored those attempts andunleashed his horrible new weapons, so the argu-ment goes, not simply to defeat Japan but tofrighten the Soviets into submission to America’swill, and to keep them out of the final stages of thewar—and postwar reconstruction—in Asia.

Could the use of the atomic bombs have beenavoided? As Martin J. Shewin’s studies have shown,few policymakers at the time seriously asked thatquestion. American leaders wanted to end the waras quickly as possible. Intimidating the Sovietsmight have been a “bonus” to using the bombagainst Japan, but influencing Soviet behavior wasnever the primary reason for the fateful decision.American military strategists had always assumedthe atomic bomb would be dropped as soon as itwas available. That moment came on August 6,1945. Yet misgivings and remorse about the atomicconclusion of World War II have plagued the Ameri-can conscience ever since.

For further reading, see page A24 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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