Transcript File

James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 25
The United States and the Second
World War,
1939-1945
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. Peacetime Dilemmas
A. Roosevelt and Reluctant Isolation
1. Seeking a balance between domestic and international priorities
2. The Soviet Union 1933
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3. Germany and Japan
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League of Nations condemned Japanese and German aggression,
Roosevelt did not support the League’s attempts to keep the peace
because he feared jeopardizing isolationists’ support for New Deal
measures; he looked the other way when Hitler began to arm Germany.
B. The Good Neighbor Policy
1. Latin America
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1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt announced that the United States
would pursue “the policy of the good neighbor” in international relations,
reversing the old policy of intervention in Latin America
commitment to military nonintervention did not indicate a U.S. retreat
from empire in Latin America
instead, it declared the United States would not depend on military force
in the region
honored the principle of self-determination, but it also permitted the rise
of brutal dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba, with private support from U.S. businesses.
2. Flexing economic muscles
I. Peacetime Dilemmas
C. The Price of Noninvolvement
1. Fascism in Europe, militarism in Japan
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Hitler plotted to avenge defeat in World War I by recapturing territories with
German inhabitants, all while accusing Jews of polluting the master race; in
Japan, a stridently militaristic government planned to follow the invasion of
Manchuria in 1931 with conquests extending throughout Southeast Asia.
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2. American neutrality
3. Cash and carry policy
Roosevelt and Congress worried that would hurt the economy; the Neutrality
Act of 1937 established the “cash-and-carry” policy, which sought to allow trade
but prevent foreign entanglements by requiring warring nations to pay cash for
nonmilitary goods and transport them in their own ships.
4. Undermining peace
this desire for peace in France, Britain, and the United States led
Germany, Italy, and Japan to launch offensives on the assumption that the
Western democracies lacked the will to oppose them; Hitler marched on
the Rhineland; Italy conquered Ethiopia; Japan instigated the deadly Rape
of Nanking.
5. The Spanish Civil War
6. Moderating isolationism
proposed that the United States “quarantine” aggressor nations; ignited a
storm of protests from isolationists; strength of isolationist sentiment
convinced Roosevelt that he needed to maneuver carefully if the United
States were to help prevent fascist aggressors from conquering Europe
and Asia and leaving America an isolated and imperiled island of
democracy.
II. The Onset of War
A. Nazi Aggression and War in Europe
1. Austrian Anschluss
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Americans passively watched Hitler’s relentless campaign to dominate Europe;
in 1838, he bullied Austria into accepting incorporation with the Nazi Third
Reich.
2. Appeasement
prime minister Neville Chamberlain went to Munich in September 1938 and
offered Hitler terms of appeasement, giving the Sudetenland to Germany if
Hitler agreed to leave the rest of Czechoslovakia alone; Hitler agreed, but he
never intended to honor his promise; in March 1939, he marched the German
army into Czechoslovakia and conquered it without firing a shot.
3. The Nazi-Soviet alliance
April 1939, Hitler demanded that Poland return the German territory it had
been awarded after World War I; Britain and France assured Poland they would
go to war with Germany if Hitler invaded the country; but Hitler negotiated with
his enemy, the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, offering concessions in exchange
for Stalin’s promise that he would refrain from joining Britain and France in
opposing Germany’s invasion of Poland.
4. Blitzkrieg
5. French surrender
•
mid-June 1940, France had surrendered the largest army in the world, signed
an armistice that gave Germany control of the entire French coastline and
nearly two-thirds of the countryside, and installed a collaborationist
government at Vichy in southern France headed by Philippe Pétain.
•
prime minister, Winston Churchill, vowed that Britain, unlike France, would
never surrender to Hitler; held off Germany at the Battle of Britain; but
Churchill knew he needed American help.
6. The Battle of Britain
II. The Onset of War
B. From Neutrality to the Arsenal of Democracy
1. Revising neutrality
2. Assisting Britain
3. Lend-Lease
• 1940, while Luftwaffe pilots bombed Britain, Roosevelt
decided to run for an unprecedented third term as
president; empowered by voters after being elected
president for another term, Roosevelt maneuvered to
support Britain in every way short of entering the war; in
January 1941, Roosevelt proposed the Lend-Lease Act,
which allowed the British to obtain arms from the United
States without paying cash, instead promising to reimburse
the United States when the war ended.
4. Hitler attacks the Soviets
5. The Atlantic Charter
• Hitler’s Wehrmacht raced across the Russian plains and
Nazi U-boats tried to choke off supplies to Britain and the
Soviet Union, Roosevelt met with Churchill and signed the
Atlantic Charter, which called for, among other things,
freedom of the seas and the right of national selfdetermination.
II. The Onset of War
C. Japan Attacks America
1. Japanese ambitions
2. The Tripartite Pact
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1940, Japan signaled a new phase of its imperial designs by
entering into a defensive alliance with Germany and Italy—the
Tripartite Pact.
3. The trade embargo
When the United States discovered that Japan planned to invade
the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, it announced a trade
embargo that denied Japan access to oil, scrap iron, and other
goods essential for its war machines; in October 1941, reacting to
the American embargo, Japanese militarists, led by General Hideki
Tojo, seized control of the government and persuaded Emperor
Hirohito that the swift destruction of American naval bases in the
Pacific would leave Japan free to follow its destiny.
4. Pearl Harbor
December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the American fleet
at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu and sank or
disabled eighteen ships, killing more than 2,400 Americans
the Japanese scored a stunning tactical success at Pearl Harbor,
but in the long run, the attack proved a colossal blunder; made
the Japanese overconfident; united Americans in their desire to
fight and avenge the attack.
III. Mobilizing for War
A. Home-Front Security
1. Reducing the threat in the Atlantic
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after declaring war against the United States, Hitler dispatched German submarines to
hunt for American ships along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida; by mid-1942, the
U.S. Navy had chased German submarines away from the East Coast, into the midAtlantic, reducing the direct threat to the nation’s homeland.
2. Internment camps
government worried constantly about espionage and internal subversion; campaign for
patriotic vigilance focused on German and Japanese foes, but Americans of Japanese
descent became targets of official and popular persecution; on February 19, 1942,
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized sending all Americans of
Japanese descent to makeshift internment camps, euphemistically called “relocation
centers,” located in remote areas of the West; the Supreme Court, in its 1944 Korematsu
decision, upheld the order’s blatant violation of constitutional rights as justified by
“military necessity.”
B. Building a Citizen Army
1. Selective Service
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1940, Roosevelt encouraged Congress to pass the Selective Service Act to register men
of military age, who would then be subject to draft into the armed forces if the need
arose; all in all, more than 16 million men and women served in uniform during the war,
two-thirds of them draftees, mostly young men.
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almost a million African American men and women donned uniforms, as did half a million
Mexican Americans, 25,000 Native Americans, and 13,000 Chinese Americans; black
Americans were segregated, and most were consigned to manual labor
2. Prohibiting discrimination
III. Mobilizing for War
C. Conversion to a War Economy
1. More jobs than workers
2. The War Production Board
• Roosevelt called upon business leaders to head
new government agencies such as the War
Production Board, which, among other things,
set production priorities and pushed for
maximum output.
3. Union membership
• to speed production, the government asked
unions to pledge not to strike; for the most
part, unions kept their no-strike pledge.
4. The arsenal of Democracy
• the United States produced more than double
the combined production of Germany, Japan,
and Italy.
IV. Fighting Back
A. Turning the Tide in the Pacific
1. Japan’s South Pacific offensive
• Pacific theater, Japan’s leading military strategist, Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto, ordered an all-out offensive throughout the southern
Pacific; the Japanese unleashed a withering assault against the
Philippines in January 1942 and by May 1942, Japanese forces had
defeated the American and Philippine defenders; by the summer of
1942, the Japanese war machine had swooped from its Philippine
successes to conquer the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and was poised
to strike Australia and New Zealand.
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2. A two-pronged U.S. counteroffensive
first General Douglas MacArthur moved north from Australia and
eventually attacked the Japanese in the Philippines; more
decisively, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz sailed from Hawaii to retake
islands in the South Pacific.
3. The Battle of Midway
• Nimitz maneuvered into the Central Pacific to surprise the
Japanese; victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 reversed
the balance of naval power in the Pacific in favor of the United
States and put the Japanese at a disadvantage for the rest of the
war.
IV. Fighting Back
B. The Campaign in Europe
1. The eastern front and the war in the Atlantic
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Hitler’s eastern-front armies marched deeper into the Soviet Union while his
western forces prepared to invade Britain; the war in the Atlantic remained
undecided, but the introduction of radar detectors and sufficient numbers of
destroyers escorts eventually drove the Nazi U-boats from the North Atlantic in
late May 1943.
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Stalin demanded that America and Britain mount a massive assault into
western France to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union; Roosevelt and Churchill
delayed opening a second front, allowing the Germans and Soviets to slug it
out.
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2. Delaying the second front
3. North Africa
4. Ruling out peace negotiations
January 1943, while the North African campaign was still underway, Roosevelt
and Churchill met in Casablanca and announced that they would accept nothing
less than the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers; ruled out peace
negotiations; they also concluded that they were not yet prepared for the
invasion of France, leaving Stalin to bear the brunt of the Nazi war machine for
another year.
5. Invading Italy
July 10, 1943, combined American and British amphibious forces landed
160,000 troops in Sicily; Italian government surrendered unconditionally, but
German troops dug into strong fortifications and fought to defend Italy for the
remainder of the war; Stalin denounced the Allies’ Italian campaign because it
left the Soviet Army “to do the job alone, almost single-handed.”
V. The Wartime Home Front
A. Women and Families, Guns and Butter
1. Women at work
2. The “Victory Line”
3. Married women support the war from home
4. American wartime abundance
V. The Wartime Home Front
B. The Double V Campaign
1. Victory at home and abroad
2. Integrating defense work
• 1941, black organizations demanded that the federal government
require companies receiving defense contracts to integrate their
workforces; A. Philip Randolph promised that 100,000 blacks
would march on Washington if the president did not eliminate
discrimination in defense industries; responding to this pressure,
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which authorized a
Committee on Fair Employment Practices to investigate and
prevent racial discrimination in employment.
3. Unequal job opportunities and wages
4. Racial violence
• summer of 1943 when 242 race riots erupted in 47 cities; included
the “zoot suit riots” in Los Angeles, where whites targeted
Mexicans.
5. Civil rights organizations
• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, organized
picketing and sit-ins against Jim Crow restaurants and theaters;
although membership in the NAACP greatly expanded, they
achieved only limited success against racial discrimination during
the war.
V. The Wartime Home Front
C. Wartime Politics and the 1944 Election
1. Conservative coalition’s gains
2. The GI Bill of Rights
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June 1944, Congress unanimously approved the landmark GI Bill of Rights, which promised veterans
government money for education, housing, and health care and made available low-interest loans so they could
start businesses and buy homes.
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3. Harry Truman
Roosevelt chose Harry S. Truman, a reliable party man from a southern border state.
4. The Democratic victory
Thomas E. Dewey, who had made his reputation as a tough crime fighter; Roosevelt’s failing health alarmed
many observers, but the majority of voters were unwilling to change presidents in the midst of the war and
dismissed Dewey’s charge that the New Deal was a creeping socialist menace; Roosevelt won a 53.5 percent
majority, his narrowest presidential victory.
D. Reaction to the Holocaust
1. Jews seek asylum
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1938, thousands of Austrian Jews sought to immigrate to the United States, but 82 percent of Americans
opposed admitting them, and they were turned away.
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2. Reports of the Holocaust
1942, numerous reports filtered out of German-occupied Europe that Hitler was implementing a “final
solution”: Jews and other “undesirables”—such as Gypsies, religious and political dissenters, and
homosexuals—were being sent to concentration camps.
3. Appeals to the Allies go unanswered
4. The Allies arrive at Auschwitz
Russian troops arrived at Auschwitz in Poland in February 1945, the truth about the Nazi Holocaust was
revealed; by the end of the war, Nazi troops had slaughtered 11 million civilian victims—mostly Jews.
VI. Toward Unconditional Surrender
A. From Bombing Raids to Berlin
1. Allied bombing missions
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2. Overlord
November 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Teheran, Iran, to plan the Allies’
next step; Roosevelt and Churchill promised that they would at last launch a massive
second-front assault in northern France; code-named Overlord, the offensive was
scheduled to begin in May 1944.
3. D Day
commanded by General Erwin Rommel, fortified the cliffs and mined the beaches of
northwestern France
but Germany had too many troops in the east trying to halt the Red Army’s westward
offensive, and the Luftwaffe had been decimated by Allied air raids; on June 6, 1944—D
Day—General Dwight Eisenhower launched the largest amphibious assault in world
history; within a week, Allied soldiers, tanks, and other military equipment were
sweeping east toward Germany.
Codenamed Operation Overlord, the battle began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, when some 156,000
American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified
coast of France’s Normandy region
4. The Yalta Conference
February 1945, while Allied armies relentlessly pushed German forces backward,
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met secretly at the Yalta Conference to discuss plans for
the postwar world; Roosevelt secured Stalin’s promise to permit votes of selfdetermination by people in eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army.
5. The United Nations
6. Victory in Europe
in April, the Soviets smashed into Berlin; Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and on
May 7, a provisional German government surrendered unconditionally.
7. A new president
VI. Toward Unconditional Surrender
B. The Defeat of Japan
1. Island hopping
2. Securing the South Pacific
3. Invading the Philippines
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Allies invaded the Philippines in the fall of 1944; Allies won there, and the American forces captured
the crucial islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
4. The failure of Kamikaze
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leaders ordered thousands of suicide pilots to defend Okinawa, but they only demolished the last
vestige of the Japanese air force; by June 1945, the Japanese were nearly defenseless on sea and in
the air but their leaders prepared to fight to the death for their homeland.
C. Atomic Warfare
1. The Manhattan Project
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mid-July 1945, as Allied forces were preparing for the final assault on Japan, American scientists
tested the atomic bomb near Los Alamos, New Mexico; called the Manhattan Project; sent a mushroom
cloud of debris eight miles into the atmosphere.
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2. Truman’s decision to drop the bomb
Truman heard about the successful bomb test at Los Alamos when he was in Potsdam, Germany,
negotiating with Stalin about postwar issues; he recognized that the bomb gave the United States an
atomic monopoly that could be used to counter Soviet ambitions and advance American interests in
the postwar world; also saw no reason not to use the atomic bomb against Japan if it would save
American lives.
3. Japanese surrender
Japan refused to surrender unconditionally by the deadline, Truman ordered that the bomb be dropped
without warning on Japanese cities not already heavily damaged by American raids; dropped the first
bomb in Hiroshima on August 6; incinerated 100,000 people in Hiroshima and nearly as many in
Nagasaki when the second bomb was dropped on August 9; Japan surrendered on August 14.