Militarism and Fascism Abroad

• Japan's Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere
• Chiang Kai-shek
• Benito Mussolini, Ethiopia, Haile Selassie
• Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, Axis
• Rhineland, Sudetenland, Munich conference
• Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact
• Eve of War 1939

From Isolationism to Internationalism

• Neutrality Acts, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Quarantine speech
• Atlantic Charter, John J. McCloy, Cordell Hull
• America First Committee, Wendell Willkie, Charles Lindbergh
• Philip Murray, Sidney Hillman supported FDR
• Edward R. Murrow

End of the New Deal

• Henry Stimson, Frank Knox
• River Rouge strike won by UAW, but defense first
• National Defense Mediation Board
• North American Aviation strike in Inglewood failed

War in the Pacific and Europe

• Coral Sea, Midway, MacArthur, Nimitz, Guadalcanal
• Stalingrad, Second Front, Molotov, Churchill, Sicily
• "Air combat gripped the imagination of both military planners and the public, for it promised to substitute advanced technology and industrial capacity for the blood and mud of ground fighting."
• But "precision bombing" was a failure
• War in the Air

Life in the Armed Forces

• 16 million Americans served in armed forces
• the war "broadened the horizons of almost all soldiers."
• "The draft was egalitarian, touching men from all classes and regions."
• Soldiers "quickly formed bonds" and "a special sense of kinship"
• Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe
• "blue discharges" and anti-lesbian purges as the military "for the first time began to act not just against homosexual acts but also against gays as a group"
• 700,000 blacks in segregated units
• Tuskegee Airmen, Co. Benjamin Davis
• 350,000 Hispanics drafted, 25,000 Indians enlisted
• Navajo code-talkers
Autobiography of a Jeep

Mobilizing the Home Front

• "dollar-a-year-men" of Donald Nelson, WPB
• WLB, OPA, WMC, Selective Service
• Brehon Somervell at Fort Leavenworth, military-industrial complex
• 43% of workers were blue-collar, "the highest proportion in U. S. history."
• "the big winner was California"
• exodus from rural South for urban California and Michigan
• "an unprecedented rise in their standard of living"
• life expectancy increased 3 years, infant mortality decline a third
• immigrant institutions declined, rise of cultural pluralism
• Mobilization of the Home Front

Women in the Workforce

• Rosie the Riveter, women able to socialize, wear pants
• working women increased from 11 to 20 million
• but "the war did not generate a radical transformation"
• sexism, prejudice, segregation, denied training and union leadership
• "new social phenomenon" of juvenile delinquency

Limits of Pluralism

• Chinese Americans joined military, shipyard jobs
• 1943 repeal of Chinese Exclusion Act allowed small quota
• Jehovah's Witnesses, Japanese-Americans
• 442nd Regiment "the most decorated unit in the U. S. Army"
• Japanese Relocation

Origins of Civil Rights Movement

• NAACP lawyers Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall
• outlawed white-only primaries, increased voter registration
• double-V campaign. CIO as "lamp of democracy"
• Randolph's march, FEPC, Phil. transit strike
• "Detroit was a center of rights-conscious activism" and racism, 1943 Belle Isle riot
• zoot suit riots in California

Labor's War at Home

• WLB "maintenance of membership" policy increased unions to 15 million
• John L. Lewis opposed Little Steel formula of 15% set by WLB
• 1943 Smith-Connally War Labor Disputes Act

Victory in Europe

• Eisenhower, D-Day, Battle of the Bulge
• "concentration camps that stretched from Buchenwald in Germany to Auschwitz in Poland"
• Truman followed unconditional surrender policy

Japan's Surrender

• B-29 bombers from Saipan and Guam
• Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Burma
• Hiroshima Aug. 6 and Nagasaki Aug. 8
• prestige of scientists "reached extraordinary heights"
• atomic bombs dropped "less for military that for political reasons, it seems."
• Grand Alliance at Yalta and Potsdam, but Stalin won sphere of influence
OSRD and A-Bomb

Conversion

• Labour Party won in England
• Walter Reuther wanted higher wages, lower prices, housing
• "The fate of the OPA was central to the success of an orderly and progressive conversion of the war economy to a peacetime footing."
• 300,000 voluntary OPA housewife price-checkers "as American as baseball"
• but "a massive postwar strike wave" in late 1945 and 1946
• Truman allowed steel price increase with wage increase
• postwar contracts included "management security" clause to allow company to maintain production standards
• Republicans won 1946 elections with "Had Enough?"
• New Deal and unionism was over
• "perhaps the most profound transformation of all was the evolution of the United States from an isolationist nation into a global power"
• The Good War

World War II Timeline and articles