Chapter 26 Flashcards
Battle of Midway
important turning point northwest of Hawaii. An enormous battle raged for 4 days, June 3-6 1942, near the small American outpost at Midway Island at the end of which the US, despite great losses, was clearly victorious. The American navy destroyed 4 Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only 1, and regained control of the central Pacific for the US
Battle of Stalingrad
During the Winter of 1942-1943, the Red Army had successfully held off a major German assault at Stalingrad in southern Russia. Hitler had committed such enormous forces to the battle and had suffered such appalling losses, that he could not Connie his eastern offensive.
Victory came at a terrible cost. Stalingrad decimated the civilian population of the city and devastated the surrounding countryside.
George C. Marshall
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second front dispute
Invasion of Italy postponed the invasion of France by as much as a year, deeply embittering the Soviet Union, many of whose leaders believed that the US and Britain were deliberately delaying the cross channel invasion in order to allow the Russians to absorb the brunt of the fighting. The postponement also gave the Soviets time to begin moving toward the countries of eastern Europe
America & the Holocaust
As early as 1942, the leaders in Washington had incontrovertible evidence that Hitler’s forces were rounding up JEws and others from all over Europe, transporting them to concentration camps in eastern Germany and Poland, and systematically murdering them. (about 6 million jews and 4 million others were killed). News of the atrocities was reaching the public as well, and pressure began to build for an Allied effort to end the killing or at least to rescue some of the surviving Jews.
American government consistently resisted against all such requests. Although allied bombers were flying mission within a few miles of Auschwitz, pleas that the planes try to destroy the crematoria at the camp were rejected as militarily unfeasible. So were similar requests that the Allies try to destroy railroad lines leading to the camps. The uS also resisted requests to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees attempting to escape Europe. One ship, the St Louis, had arrived carrying nearly 1,000 escaped German Jews, only to be refused entry and forced to return to Europe. Both before and during the war, the State Department did not even use up the number of visas permitted by law ; almost 90 percent of this quota remained untouched.
THis disgraceful record was not a result of inadvertance, there was an effort by officials in state Dept. to prevent Jews from entering the US in large numbers
WWII & The Depression
WWII had its most profound impact on American domestic life by at last ending the Great Depression. Economic problems virtually vanished before the great wave of wartime industrial expansion.
Most important agent of the new prosperity was federal spending, which was pumping more money into the economy each year than all the New Deal relief agencies combined had done. Gross national product soared; Personal incomes in some area grew by as much as 100% or more. Demands of wartime production created a shortage of consumer goods. so many wage earners diverted much of their new affluence into savings which would help keep the economic boom alive in the postwar years.
California & the war
Impact of spending was most dramatic in the West, which had long relied on federal largesse more than other regions. The West Coast became the launching point for most naval war against Japan and the gov. created large manufacturing facilities in California and elsewhere to serve the needs of its military. Gov. made almost $40 billion worth of capital investments in the West, more than any other region. Ten percent of the money the government spent went to california between 1940 and 1945/
By the end of the war,the economy of the Pacific Coast had transformed. Had become the center of growing American aircraft industry. New yards made the West a center of the shipbuilding industry. Los Angeles became a major industrial center as well.
labor & the war
The war created a serious labor shortage. The armed forces took more than 15 million men and women out of the civilian workforce at the same time that the demand for labor was rising rapidly. Nevertheless, the civilian workforce increased by almost 20% during the war. The 7 million people who had been unemployed accounted for some of the increase; the employment of many people previously considered inappropriate for the workforce (young, elderly, and SEVERAL MILLION WOMEN) accounted for the rest.
The war gave an enormous boost to union membership. Also created important new restrictions on the ability of unions to fight for their members’ demands. The gov. was primarily interested in preventing inflation
wages, prices, & rations
fear of deflation gave way during the war to a fear of inflation, particularly after prices rose 25% in the two years before Pearl Harbor. Congress responded to FDR’s request and passed the Anti-Inflation Act, which gave the administration authority to freeze agricultural prices, wages, salaries, and rents throughout the country. Enforcement of these provisions was the task of the Office of Price Administration. In part because of its success, inflation was a much less serious problem during WWII than it had been in WWI
Even so, the OPA was never popular. There was widespread resentment of its controls over wages and prices. And there was only grudging acquiescence in its complicated system of rationing scarce consumer goods: coffee, sugar, meat, butter, canned goods, shoes, tires, gasoline, and fuel oil.
War Production Board
One failed agency after another attempted to bring order to the mobilization effort. Finally, the president responded to widespread criticism by creating the War Production Board under the direction of former Sears Roebuck executive Donald Nelson. In theory, the WPB was to be super agency with broad powers over the economy. In fact, it never had as much authority as its WWI equivalent, the War Industries Board, and Nelson never had the same political or administrative strength as Bernard Baruch.
WPB was never able to win control over military purchases; the army and navy often circumvented the board entirely in negotiating contracts with producers, never able to satisfy the complaints of small businesses. Gradually, the pres. transferred much of the WPB’s authority to a new office, the Office of War mobilization. Which was only a bit more successful.
Allied advantages in technological decelopment
In the first years of war, all the technological advantages seemed to lie with the Germans and Japanese.
But Britain and America had advantages of their own, which quickly helped redress these imbalances. American techniques of mass production–the great automotive assembly lines in particular–were converted efficiently to military production in 1941 and 1942 and soon began producing airplanes, ships, tanks, and other armaments in greater numbers than the Germans and Japanese. Allied scientists and engineers moved quickly as well to improve aviation and naval technology. Particularly, they worked to improve the performance of submarines and tanks. By late 1942, Allied weaponry was t least as advanced as that of the enemy.
technological advances in WWII
American and British physicists made rapid advances in improving radar and sonar technology, which helped naval forces decimate German U boats and effectively end their effectiveness in the naval war. “centrimetric radar” used narrow beams of short wavelength that made radar more efficient and effective than ever before.
antiaircraft technology also improved, though not to the point where it could stop bombing raids. Germany made substancial advances in the development of rocket technology.
improvements in gathering of intelligence (Ultra-Britains project, Magic-America’s)
efforts of cryptologists helped allies decipher coded message
Fair Employment Practices Commission
Roosevelt promised to establish an investigation of discrimination in war industries in exchange for Randolph to agree not to march on Washington. The FEPC’s enforcement powers/effectiveness were limited but its creation was a rare symbolic victory for African Americans making demands in government.
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
organized in 1942, mobilized mass popular resistance to discrimination in a way that the older, more conservative organizations had never done. In 1944, CORE won a publicized victory by forcing a Washington DC restaurant to agree to serve African Americans. CORE’s defiant spirit would survive into the 1950s and help produce the civil rights movement.
code-talkers
approx. 25,000 native americans performed military service during WWII. Many of them served in combat (among them ira Hayes, one of the men who memorably raised the American flag at Iwo Jima). Others worked as “code-talkers,” working in military communications and speaking their own language (which enemy forces would be unlikely to understand) over the radio and the telephones.
