World War II

World War II CausesMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic EffectsPostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
Causes Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawai'i on 7 December 1941 belatedly catapulted the United States into war, four years after Japan's full‐scale invasion of China and more than two years after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led to declarations of war by Great Britain and France two days later—the official beginning of World War II. Only gradually had Americans come to view Japanese and German aggression as a threat to their economic and strategic interests and as an affront to a humane world order.

Isolationist attitudes also shaped U.S. diplomacy prior to the war. In the mid‐1930s, as Germany, Italy, and Japan expanded, Congress passed neutrality legislation designed to prevent the kind of entanglements that had drawn the United States into World War I. These laws abandoned the claim that Americans had the right to travel on belligerent ships like the Lusitania, which had been sunk by a German U‐boat in 1915 with heavy loss of U.S. lives. The neutrality laws also banned loans to belligerents and the sale abroad of arms and munitions, put all other trade on a cash‐and‐carry basis, and barred American ships from war zones. These restrictions applied to the civil war in Spain, where fascists under General Francisco Franco triumphed by 1939. With public opinion strongly against U.S. involvement, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acquiesced, needing isolationists’ votes for his domestic legislation.

The spring and summer of 1940 changed American politics decisively. Adolf Hitler won quick blitzkreig victories over Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France; the British evacuated thousands of troops from Dunkirk (26 May–4 June); and Hitler launched massive bombing raids on England (the Battle of Britain). These developments created grave insecurities in America, including fears of a direct attack on the United States if Germany captured or destroyed the British navy.

Roosevelt responded by transferring to England fifty old destroyers in exchange for long‐term leases on eight British bases from Newfoundland to the Caribbean; in mid‐September he obtained passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draft in American history. Reelected to a third term after promising not to send American boys into foreign wars, FDR nonetheless inched toward intervention by “steps short of war,” including U.S. occupation of Greenland and Iceland in the name of hemispheric defense; secret contingency military plans with British and Canadians; Lend‐Lease aid to Britain, China, and Soviet Russia; and naval patrols, convoys, and economic embargoes. He gradually secured repeal of the neutrality legislation. According to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt promised to “wage war” against Germany, “but not declare it,” and to do “everything” to “force an incident.”

Despite clashes between American destroyers and German submarines in the Atlantic, war came via the Pacific. When Japan occupied French Indochina in July 1941, in apparent concert with Germany's invasion of Russian in June, Roosevelt froze all Japanese funds in the United States. U.S. officials also stopped all trade with Japan, including oil, of which Japan required twelve thousand tons each day. Viewing U.S. pressure as provocative and life‐strangling, Japan's military leaders formulated plans to attack the U.S. fleet and seize oil‐rich Dutch and British colonies unless Washington lifted its embargo. Negotiations between Japanese diplomats and Secretary of State Cordell Hull proved ineffective, in part because key U.S. officials, having cracked Tokyo's diplomatic code, knew that Japanese forces were massing to strike southward after mid‐November. Americans did not, however, learn about the huge Japanese task force, including six carriers, sailing westward across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor. After Congress declared war against Japan on 8 December, Hitler mistakenly believed that American forces would be preoccupied in the Pacific, and thus declared war against the United States, whereupon Congress voted unanimously for war against Germany. Pearl Harbor had “ended isolationism for any realist” (as Senator Arthur Vandenberg put it) and galvanized the country for a war against fascist and aggressive states.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Foreign Relations U.S. Relations with Asia; Isolationism; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Waldo Heinrichs , Threshold of War, 1988.
Jonathan Utley , Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941, 1985.

J. Garry Clifford

Military and Diplomatic Course Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 plunged America into a global conflict that had been raging since 1937 in Asia and since 1939 in Europe. Until final victory came in August 1945, World War II dominated all aspects of American life. While the United States and its allies pursued the war militarily in Asia, North Africa, and Europe, U.S. leaders also participated in a series of high‐level diplomatic conferences that had profound implications not only for the conduct of the war but for the shape of the postwar order.

Military Course of the War.

Following blitzkrieg victories over Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Benelux countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), France, Yugoslavia, and Greece, German armies had reached the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad by December 1941 and threatened the Suez Canal and Mideast oil fields; Nazi submarines ravaged the Atlantic, sinking 2.6 million tons of merchant shipping off American shores in the first four months of 1942. Meanwhile, Japan's destruction of U.S. battleships in Hawai'i enabled Japanese forces, over the next six months, to move beyond their four‐year war with China. Advancing into Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupied Thailand, Malaya, and Burma; seized the Dutch East Indies; conquered the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam; invaded New Guinea; and threatened both India and Australia. Only American naval victories at the Coral Sea and Midway in May–June 1942 halted the Japanese juggernaut.

U.S. and Soviet Feats of Production.

Two factors eventually tipped the scales in favor of the Allies: the enormous speed and scale of American rearmament, surpassing anything the Germans and Japanese had envisioned; and the unexpected revival of Soviet strength after its initial devastation in 1941. By 1943, America was outproducing the Axis powers combined, 47,000 planes to 27,000, 24,000 tanks to 11,000, and six times more heavy guns. U.S. shipyards turned out 8,000 warships and 87,000 landing craft in four years; for every naval vessel produced in Japan, the United States constructed sixteen. Similarly, the relocation of Russian factories and workers beyond the Ural Mountains enabled the Soviets, with only one‐fourth the steel available to Germany, to turn out more guns, planes, and tanks (including the famed T–34) than their enemy. Such production, augmented by $11 billion in Lend‐Lease materials from the United States, undergirded the great Russian counteroffensives that bled the Wehrmacht in 1943 and 1944.

Superior organization and technology also won the war at sea and in the air. By mid‐1943, through increased construction of merchant ships and escort carriers, as well as intelligence breakthroughs, the Anglo‐American struggle against nazi U‐boats turned in the Allies' favor. By war's end, some 29,000 German submarine crewmembers had been killed, almost three‐fourths of those who fought. Similarly, U.S. airmen, beginning in the summer of 1942, joined the Royal Air Force in strategic bombing raids against European targets. By 1944 the air offensive had disrupted Hitler's economy and worn down the German Luftwaffe sufficiently to permit the cross‐Channel invasion of France. By the spring of 1945, despite the loss of 21,000 bombers and 140,000 British and American air deaths, Allied bombs had pounded German industry into rubble. Firestorms caused by saturation bombing raids obliterated Hamburg, Dresden, and other German cities, causing massive civilian casualties.

German technology posed formidable threats, as evidenced by the deployment of jet fighter planes and long‐range V‐1 and V‐2 rockets, but intra‐service rivalries and misjudgments by Hitler prevented the decisive application of these new weapons. Ironically, it was a feat of German science that prompted the British and Americans to pool their scientific resources in a race to build atomic weapons. The Manhattan Project achieved success too late for the European war but in time to help end the Pacific war.

The War in North Africa and Europe.

The first major land offensive in the Atlantic theater began in November 1942 when Anglo‐American forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower invaded French North Africa. After belated assistance from Vichy French authorities, Eisenhower's forces moved eastward to link up with British armies pursuing General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps after the British victory at El Alamein in Egypt. German counterattacks in Tunisia, however, delayed Allied victory in North Africa until May 1943.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Anglo‐American planners agreed to invade Sicily and the Italian mainland and promised a second front in Europe that would engage enemy forces “as heavily as possible.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt also announced the Allied decision to demand the Axis forces' “unconditional surrender.” After U.S. and British troops assaulted Sicily in July, Italian officials ousted Benito Mussolini, formally surrendered on 8 September, and declared war against Germany, whose forces quickly occupied Italy. The ensuing Anglo‐American advance up the Italian boot proved slow and costly. Not until the eve of the invasion of France did Allied soldiers liberate Rome.

The cross‐Channel attack (D‐Day) came on 6 June 1944, under the overall command of General Eisenhower. Within six weeks, more than a million allied soldiers were fighting in Brittany and Normandy. Paris was liberated on 23–24 August and by October German forces had completely evacuated France. Meanwhile, after victories at Stalingrad (January 1943) and Kursk (July–August 1943), Soviet armies had pushed into Eastern Europe and occupied most of Poland and East Prussia. Hopes for early surrender faded, however, after a failed assassination plot by German dissidents against Hitler in July 1944 and the desperate German counteroffensive in Belgium (the Battle of the Bulge) in December. Finally, Anglo‐American armies crossed the Rhine in March 1945. A month later, G.I.s shook hands with Russian soldiers at the Elbe. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April and Germany surrendered on 7 May, celebrated as V‐E (victory in Europe) Day.

The War in the Pacific.

The U.S. counterattack in the Pacific had commenced in August 1942 with the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The ensuing struggle for the island climaxed in a major American naval victory in mid‐November, after which Japanese units quietly evacuated. The route to Tokyo now involved a vast network of fortified islands and atolls, bristling with air fields, stretching some 14,200 miles from the Dutch Indies across Micronesia to the Aleutians. Eventually a two‐prong strategy emerged: while U.S. Army and Australian forces under General Douglas MacArthur advanced northward from New Guinea to the Philippines, U.S. sailors and marines under Admiral Chester Nimitz “leap‐frogged” across the central Pacific by seizing key islands in the Gilbert, Marshall, and Mariana archipelagoes, thereby neutralizing or bypassing Japanese strongholds. President Roosevelt's expectation that China would figure decisively in defeating Japan and policing postwar Asia was undermined by China's military ineffectiveness and internal bickering between Nationalists and Communists.

The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 1944), which cost Japan three aircraft carriers and 345 planes, and an even more devastating defeat at Leyte Gulf in October, reduced the Japanese navy to impotence. MacArthur's troops liberated Luzon in February 1945; Iwo Jima fell in march; and Okinawa surrendered in June, after 12,500 American battle deaths. Meanwhile, B‐29 “Superfortresses” based in the Marianas blasted Japan's cities, killing as many as 100,000 in the fire‐bombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March. Allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference in July warned the Japanese to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.” U.S. authorities, having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, were aware of behind‐the‐scenes maneuvers within the Japanese government to end the war. But with no clear response from Tokyo to the Potsdam ultimatum, President Harry S. Truman (who had succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death on 12 April 1945), ordered an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August. Two days later the Soviet Union, fulfilling a pledge by Premier Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference, declared war against Japan and invaded Manchuria. A second atomic bomb immolated Nagasaki on 9 August. The Japanese inquired about peace terms, received assurance that the emperor would retain his throne, formally capitulated on 14 August triggering joyous V‐J Day celebrations across America. Formal surrender ceremonies took place on 2 September board the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor, with General MacArthur presiding.

U.S. battle deaths in World War II, as later tallied by the Department of Defense, totaled 292,131, with an additional 115,185 deaths from other causes. High as these numbers were, they were far surpassed by those of other nations. Total military and civilian deaths in the conflict have been estimated at fifty million

Diplomatic Course of the War.

America's wartime diplomacy had two main objectives: maintaining the Grand Alliance necessary to winning the war, and planning the postwar international order. President Roosevelt signaled his intentions early when he met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off Newfoundland in August 1941; proclaimed the Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter; and affirmed Woodrow Wilson's principles of collective security, national self‐determination, freedom of the seas, and liberal trading practices.

Wilsonian Visions and Wartime Realities.

Indeed, a Wilsonian outlook, tempered by a pragmatic determination to avoid Wilson's errors during World War I, infused American diplomacy during World War II. Germany would have to surrender unconditionally; no debts‐reparations tangle would arise, because Lend‐Lease would “eliminate the dollar sign”; and the United States would join a postwar international organization to maintain peace, even if it meant wooing isolationist Republican senators. Prominent, too, was the State Department's desire to promote American economic and commercial influence through multilateral economic arrangements. Reflecting Secretary of State Cordell Hull's Wilsonian belief that trade restrictions were the principal cause of wars, the effort led to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. So strong was Hull's Wilsonian faith that he could report after the Moscow Conference of 1943: “[There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.”

If total war inspired visions of total peace, military expediency sometimes required compromises that violated Wilsonian principles. Working arrangements with Vichy French collaborators in North Africa, peace negotiations with Mussolini's successors in Italy, support of Chiang Kai‐shek's authoritarian regime in China, even the failure to rescue victims of the Holocaust—all resulted from the effort to win the war quickly with the fewest possible casualties. With Roosevelt proclaiming that America's principal contribution to the war would be as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” the administration never fully mobilized the population for actual military service. With no threat of invasion and the bulk of Axis forces engaged in Russia and China, Roosevelt gambled that “an air war plus the Russians” would require only ninety U.S. divisions to achieve victory.

Such calculations increased allied dependence on the Soviet Union. With the Red Army “killing more Axis than all other twenty‐five United Nations put together” (as Roosevelt announced in November 1943 speech), Roosevelt gave the Soviets billions in Lend‐Lease assistance and placed a high priority on maintaining good relations with the Soviets at the wartime conferences at Tehran (November 1943) and Yalta (February 1945). The “Unconditional Surrender” demand assured Stalin that there would be no separate peace with Hitler or his underlings.

The insistence of unconditional surrender also underscored Roosevelt's determination to punish Germany for Hitler's crimes by such means as permanent partition, demilitarization, and dismantling of heavy industry, the president's postwar vision anticipated a disarmed, decentralized, and decolonized Europe policed by British and Soviet armies, while U.S. forces patrolled the Western Hemisphere and replaced Japanese power in the Pacific. Because Red Army victories guaranteed Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, Roosevelt urged “open” spheres and free elections in this region and hoped that increased contacts with the West would make the Russians “less barbarian.” Roosevelt's tactic of wooing the Soviets also reflected the view of his military advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff invariably opposed “get‐tough” policies toward Moscow on military grounds, including the need for Soviet help against Japan. “[In the big military matters,” insisted Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1945, “the Soviet Government have kept their word.” Only after the war did the military's perception of the Soviet Union become more hostile.

Roosevelt pursued his goals through summit diplomacy. Meeting with Churchill at Cairo, Casablanca, Quebec, and other venues produced unprecedented Anglo‐American cooperation but also disagreement over how best to defeat Hitler and over the postwar disposition of colonial empires. Roosevelt's military advisers suspected that Churchill's insistence on Mediterranean priorities indicated a desire to shore up Britain's imperial lifelines, and not, as the British claimed, a coherent strategy to weaken Germany on the periphery before launching a full‐scale invasion of France. Not until the Tehran Conference did the British finally commit to opening a cross‐Channel second front in 1944. As for decolonization, “hands off the British Empire” remained Churchill's maxim as he resisted Roosevelt's advice about independence for India and new arrangements for Hong Kong, Indochina, and other colonies overrun by Japan. Unwilling to jeopardize Great Power cooperation, Roosevelt eventually compromised by allowing the Europeans to reclaim their Asian empires but envisioned their becoming only trustees under United Nations auspices. He correctly anticipated that postwar momentum toward self‐determination would become irresistible.

The Tehran and Yalta Conferences.

The Big Three summits at Tehran, Iran, and Yalta, in the Crimea were the high points of wartime diplomacy. The former prefigured the more controversial results of the latter. At Tehran, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin tentatively agreed on a peace dictated by the great powers, an international organization dominated the victorious Allies, and a territorial settlement that partitioned Germany and conceded Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe. Stalin also promised Soviet help against Japan after Hitler's defeat. Although Roosevelt had previously refused to recognize prewar Soviet boundaries, Churchill proposed moving Poland's boundaries a considerable distance to the west, incorporating German lands. Polish territory in the east would be transferred to the Soviets to secure their western frontier. While avoiding formal endorsement of this arrangement lest he lose Polish‐American votes in the 1944 elections, Roosevelt indicated his general approval.

At Yalta the president compromised again on Poland by accepting a “more broadly based” version of the Soviet‐sponsored Communist Lublin Polish government, to be followed by “free and unfettered elections” as soon as possible. A “Declaration for Liberated Europe” called for similar elections in other countries occupied by Allied armies. Negotiations at Yalta over the United Nations organization also involved compromise. Because China and France had previously been added as permanent members of the Security Council, each possessing a veto, Stalin demanded membership for all sixteen Soviet republics in the General Assembly and insisted on an absolute veto in the Security Council on all issues, procedural and substantive. The Soviets eventually received three seats in the General Assembly, and Stalin agreed to limit the veto to substantive issues only. In a secret protocol at Yalta, Stalin reiterated his pledge to enter the war against Japan three months after Germany's surrender. He also agreed to sign a pact of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai‐shek's Kuomintang regime, not with Mao Tse‐tung's rival communists. In return, the Soviet Union obtained the Kurile islands, southern Sakhalin, Dairen as a free port, Port Arthur as a naval base, and joint operation (with China) of Manchurian railroads.

Strains in the Wartime Alliance.

Notwithstanding claims that Yalta marked the “dawn of a new day,” the Grand Alliance barely survived long enough to defeat Germany and Japan. Allied victories brought recriminations over the German surrender in northern Italy, quarrels over Poland, the abrupt cutoff of U.S. Lend‐Lease supplies to the Allies after Germany's surrender, peppery lectures to Soviet diplomats from President Truman, postponement of contentious issues at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, and even the belief among some U.S. officials that using atomic bombs against Japan might not only hasten the war's end, but also make the Russians more manageable in Europe. Such developments accelerated changes in American goals and attitudes. Still strong, especially in the public mind, was the Rooseveltian view that the postwar world would be Wilsonian: the United Nations would maintain collective security; that the most likely dangers would come from a defeated Japan or Germany and that America, while remaining militarily powerful, would confine itself to protecting the Western Hemisphere. However, a second worldview, held by those officials most familiar with the Soviets, pictured the postwar world more in terms of power, placed less faith in the United Nations, feared Soviet encroachments in Eastern Europe and Asia, and saw Moscow as the primary threat to peace. This viewpoint gained more adherents as the contradiction between “free elections” in Eastern Europe and Soviet security objectives became apparent. In short, the end of World War II ushered in the beginning of the Cold War.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Hopkins, Harry; King, Ernest J.; Marshall, George C.; Midway, Battle of; Military, The; Nuclear Weapons; Leahy, William D.; Patton, George S., Jr.; Stilwell, Joseph; Weaponry, Nonnuclear.

Bibliography

Samuel Eliot Morison , Strategy and Compromise, 1958.
Eric Larrabee , Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War, 1987.
Paul Fussell , Wartime, 1989.
Frank Freidel , Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny, 1990.
Lloyd Gardner , Spheres of Influence, 1993.
Gerhard Weinberg , A World at Arms, 1994.
Irwin Gellman , Secret Affairs, 1995.
Richard Overy , Why the Allies Won, 1995.
Warren F. Kimball , Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War, 1997.

J. Garry Clifford

Domestic Effects World War II had a large and lasting impact on the United States. But whether and in what ways the war's domestic effects amounted to a transformative historical “watershed” continues to be debated, especially since in many cases the war continued or reinforced long‐existing trends.

Perhaps the war's most obvious domestic impact was to restore prosperity after the Depression of the 1930s. As wartime mobilization made the United States the world's dominant economic power, the gross national product soared from $91 billion in 1939 to $214 billion in 1945, and unemployment plummeted from 15 percent in 1940 to just 1 percent by 1944. National income more than doubled, and both consumer spending and personal savings reached record levels. Although little income redistribution occurred, a general rise in living standards produced an inspiriting sense of personal and national possibilities.

Mobilizing for war had important consequences for the political economy as well. The federal government grew enormously in size, power, and cost as it oversaw production and labor, rationed goods and set prices, and taxed and spent at unprecedented levels. The evident connection between wartime deficit spending and the dramatic economic recovery confirmed Keynesian economics and made the use of fiscal policy to promote full‐employment prosperity central to liberal policy prescriptions for the postwar era. The government also sponsored major scientific, technological, and medical advances, not only in atomic energy but also in such areas as computers, synthetic materials, insecticides, and drugs.

Even after postwar retrenchment, the federal government remained significantly larger and more powerful than it had been before the war. So, too, did big business, which won a heavy share of defense contracts and rebuilt goodwill and political power lost in the Depression decade. Organized labor also grew—union membership rose by about 50 percent—but its power was secondary to that of business (and the military) in government councils. Continuing a pattern long in the making, the American political economy by 1945 was characterized by the “countervailing” powers of big government, big business, big labor, and big agriculture.

American politics changed surprisingly little in the new and much different circumstances of global war and domestic prosperity. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won decisive reelection victories in 1940 and 1944, and salient issues and voting patterns continued much as in the 1930s. Democrats remained the majority party, and the core of the New Deal remained essentially intact, though Republicans reduced Democratic control of Congress, and the wartime Congresses, dominated by Republicans and conservative Democrats, opposed new social programs (with the signal exception of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, or G.I. Bill of Rights). But this conservative trend, too, had started in the late 1930s.

The war had important and complex effects on American society. Wartime mobilization produced extraordinary geographic mobility; one of every five Americans made a significant move, as people headed to military bases and war plants especially in the West, South, and suburban areas of the large industrial centers. Yet the migration to the Sun Belt and the suburbs had begun well before the war and would vastly increase afterwards. In bringing a variety of people into contact, wartime mobility, paradoxically, both contributed to a sense of common cause and also produced tension and conflict, especially along longstanding class, racial, and cultural lines.

Ethnic groups generally experienced enhanced economic opportunity and increased social acceptance. Time and generational succession were already bringing such change, but especially for the “new immigrant” groups from southern and eastern Europe, the war's impact proved important. Prejudice nonetheless persisted against Italian Americans early in the war, for example, and against such other groups as Jews and Mexican Americans, target of the “zoot suit” riots in Los Angeles in 1943. In by far the worst wartime violation of civil liberties, Japanese Americans, citizens and non‐citizens alike, were removed from their homes and placed in internment camps.

African Americans encountered familiar prejudice and discrimination in the armed forces, employment, housing, and other aspects of life. On the home front, racial tensions exploded in violence in Harlem and Detroit in the summer of 1943. Yet the war also laid the groundwork for an end to racial segregation and sped black migration from the rural South to Northern cities, bringing gains in employment and income. The war years brought increased black activism and, with such initiatives as the 1941 Fair Employment Practice Committee, new attention from the federal government. Although gains were limited, World War II meant geographic and social mobility for many African Americans and helped catalyze the postwar civil rights movement.

The war's impact on American women was even more ambiguous. Employment increased by 50 percent, with particularly noticeable gains in the number and range of blue‐collar jobs, and many women emerged from their wartime experiences with increased self‐confidence and changed expectations. Policies barring married women from white‐collar employment were largely eliminated, an especially important development since by war's end more married than single women were working. But war work for women was cast as a temporary expedient to help win the war, and the wartime experience did not change the prevailing cultural norm, held by women as well as men, that women's primary roles should be as wives and homemakers. Partly because of layoffs among women factory workers resulting from re‐employment preferences given veterans, many women with industrial jobs returned, some willingly and some not, to more traditional employment or to the home after the war. In the long run, World War II made much less difference in changing gender roles and norms and in producing postwar feminism than did long‐term economic, social, and demographic trends.

While World War II clearly had a major impact on the United States prewar trends, values, and patterns of life and politics, it also continued to shape the postwar nation. The war's impact on the American home front, moreover, was relatively small compared to its consequences for other nations involved in the conflict. Depending upon their focus and angle of vision, historians will surely continue to reach diverse conclusions about the domestic effect of World War II.
See also Democratic Party; Depression, Economic; Hispanic Americans; Housing; Incarceration of Japanese Americans; Keynesianism; Labor Movements; New Deal Era, The; Productivity; Republican Party; Taxation; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

John Morton Blum , V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II, 1976.
Susan M. Hartmann , The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s, 1982.
Harold G. Vatter , The U.S. Economy in World War II, 1985.
Neil A. Wynn , The Afro‐American and the Second World War, rev. ed., 1993.
Alan Brinkley , The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, 1995.
John W. Jeffries , Wartime America: The World War II Home Front, 1996.
David M. Kennedy , Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1998.

John W. Jeffries

Postwar Impact World War II left the international system in complete disarray. Some 50 million people died during the conflict, and hungry, homeless survivors (“displaced persons”) struggled to live in the rubble. The war so weakened the French, British, and Dutch that they could no longer manage their colonies and traditional spheres of interest. In their retreat from empire, the British granted independence to India in 1947 and to Burma in 1948; the Dutch relinquished Indonesia the following year; and the French fought unsuccessfully to maintain their hold over Indochina and Algeria. Issues related to decolonization would dominate international politics for decades.

Prosperous America, untouched by enemy bombs or marauding armies, stood in stark contrast to Europe's receding power. The United States became a full‐fledged global power for the first time. The Gross National Product leaped from $90.5 billion in 1939 to $211.9 billion in 1945. Having produced fewer than 6,000 military and civilian aircraft in 1939, American factories turned out 300,000 military planes during the war, including 95,000 in 1944. By V‐J Day, U.S. forces controlled over 434 bases throughout the world, nearly half of them in Asia. Retained as trusteeships under United Nations auspices, some of these Pacific bases, together with the United States' position in occupied Japan, transformed the Pacific into an American lake. With a booming economy, the world's largest navy and air force, and a monopoly of nuclear weapons until 1949, Washington commanded first rank in world affairs.

The war began what historian Michael Sherry has labeled the “age of militarization” for Americans. Government agencies dealing with national security ballooned in size. The military establishment, symbolized by the new Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., grew in influence as the State Department, frequently bypassed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lost status. Roosevelt centralized decision‐making in the White House, while Congress relinquished its prerogatives in the name of bipartisanship. A vast espionage establishment arose, beginning with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942, succeeded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) five years later. Prewar American business executives had looked askance at full mobilization, fearing excess capacities, obsolete plants, and overexpansion. General Motors wanted to make cars, not tanks. By 1944, however, with war contracts flowing to the biggest corporations, the president of General Electric proposed a “permanent war economy” in which war production would assure prosperity as well as buttress military preparedness. Most notably in the Manhattan Project, academic experts also enlisted against the Axis; universities, once mobilized, were as reluctant to give up government contracts as the Navy was to scrap aircraft carriers after the war. These new arrangements would prompt President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn in his 1961 farewell message against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military‐industrial complex.”

Indeed, the war reshaped broad areas of American life, from politics to popular culture, economics to social relations. For example, wartime exigencies accelerated the government's impact on social change, as increased participation by women and African Americans in the armed services and war industries enhanced the status of both groups, although most women war workers were quickly displaced from the labor force once the war ended. Claims of equal rights, underscored by wartime service and rhetoric, spurred antidiscrimination and civil rights movements in the postwar decades. For sixteen million veterans, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, the “G.I. Bill of Rights” (1944), offered unemployment benefits, job preference, tuition and living expenses for education, and low‐interest housing loans. Memories of wartime sacrifices would long provide a metaphor for later “wars” against poliomyelitis, cancer, poverty, illicit drugs, crime, and other ills.

Internationally, World War II gave rise to a new global monetary system, hammered out at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, and a new international organization, the United Nations, crafted by the Allied leaders at a series of wartime conferences. But hopes for a more peaceful and cooperative world order were soon dashed by the war's most conspicuous legacy: the Cold War. In filling the vacuum created by the defeat of the Axis and a weakened colonial system, victorious America soon confronted its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, whose ghastly wartime losses included at least twenty million military and civilian deaths. In driving back the invading Nazi hordes, Russian troops had occupied Eastern Europe and thrust deep into Germany's heartland, and Soviet premier Josef Stalin had no intention of relinquishing power in this realm. Motivated by traditional Russian nationalism, communist ideology, and fears of a revived Germany, the Kremlin made the most of its limited power. Often cruel and ruthless, yet cautious and realistic, Stalin vowed that his country would never again be invaded through Eastern Europe. Rooted in World War II, the ensuing confrontation emerged from the different interests, ideologies, style, power, and historical experience of the two antagonists. Each saw the other, in mirror image, as the world's bully; each charged the other with perpetuating Adolf Hitler's aggressive designs. Characterized by a costly arms race, proxy wars, and military alliances and interventions, the Cold War lasted nearly fifty years, eventually ending in the Soviet Union's collapse.
See also Aviation Industry; Business Cycle; Foreign Relations; Global Economy, America and the; Nuclear Weapons; Productivity; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

John M. Blum , V Was for Victory, 1976.
Thomas McCormick , America's Half‐Century, 1989.
Thomas G. Paterson , On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War, 1992.
Michael S. Sherry , In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s, 1995.
Donald W. White , The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power, 1996.

J. Garry Clifford

Changing Interpretations Controversies surrounding World War II have involved the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies toward the Soviet Union, the administration's response to the Holocaust, and President Harry S. Truman's atomic‐bomb decision.

Some isolationists contended that Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor to silence domestic opponents of intervention and plunge America into the war. Most scholars, however, agree that while Washington knew in general of Japan's aggressive moves, the assault at Pearl Harbor was a surprise.

Some Cold War critics argued that Roosevelt naively relied on the Soviet Union to defeat Adolf Hitler, conceded too much to Stalin at the Yalta Conference to gain Soviet cooperation against Japan, and needlessly prolonged the war with his unconditional‐surrender policy, thus ensuring postwar communist control of eastern Europe. Most historians, however, emphasize the narrow choices available to U.S. planners. Not naïveté but necessity, including the Allies' reliance on the Russians to engage Hitler's Wehrmacht until the 1944 cross‐Channel invasion, they contend, dictated U.S. policy toward the Soviets.

On the U.S. response to the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews and other groups, some historians underscore the sketchy nature of wartime information about the extermination program and contend that the administration rightly gave highest priority to winning the war. The historian David Wyman and others, however, fault the administration for failing to admit more Jewish refugees in the 1930s and for not bombing the Nazi concentration camps and railroad lines leading to them during the war. Anti‐Semitism, they contend, influenced Washington's failure to act more aggressively to aid the victims of Nazi genocide.

On the atomic‐bomb decision, most historians, like most Americans, initially accepted Truman's explanation that the bombs were dropped solely to end the war and avoid an invasion of Japan. In the 1960s, however, Gar Alperovitz and other revisionist scholars argued that power calculations vis‐à‐vis the Soviet Union also influenced Truman's decision.
See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of.

Bibliography

David S. Wyman , The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1985.
Warren F. Kimball , The Juggler, 1991.
J. Samuel Walker , Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs against Japan, 1997.

J. Garry Clifford