TURNING THE TIDE

From 1939-1941, the Axis forces advanced triumphantly across the globe. Nazi armies had reached the gates of Moscow by December of 1941. In Asia, Japan had used the defeat of France to occupy French Indochina and threatened the Dutch East Indies as well as British possessions in the Far East. Between December 1941 and the end of 1942, however, the war turned dramatically. The United States entered the war, bringing the world’s greatest manufacturing capacity to bear against the Axis. Slowly, and on every front in 1942, the war began to turn in the Allies’ favor. The Japanese advance in the Pacific was halted at Midway and by the end of the year the Japanese were on the defensive. The Germans suffered their first major land defeat at El Alamein in the North African desert and late in the year met disaster at Stalingrad. Whereas in early 1942 the Allied armies were in retreat everywhere, by 1943 it was the Axis whose power was receding.

American Neutrality

· Describe President Roosevelt’s view of the war in Europe. Explain why many Americans opposed this view.

· How were the Neutrality Acts modified in 1939?

· Describe the steps that the United States took after the fall of France to prepare for war and to aid Britain.

· What role did the debate over aid to Britain play in the 1940 presidential election campaign?

Following the Treaty of Versailles, most Americans concluded that the United States’ participation in the First World War had been a mistake. President Wilson’s idealistic calls to “make the world safe for democracy” seemed ludicrous as democratic governments repeatedly fell during the Twenties and Thirties. When a second world war broke out in the fall of 1939, the vast majority of the American people were determined to stay neutral, and most showed little concern for either side. One American who did not share this opinion was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt had warned in the late Thirties of the dangers that the aggressor states presented the world. His warnings had been met with either indifference or hostility from most of the country, which remained solidly isolationist.

“This nation will remain a neutral nation,” the president declared shortly after the hostilities began in Europe, “but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.” This statement stood in stark and deliberate contrast to Woodrow Wilson's 1914 plea that the nation remain neutral in both deed and thought; and it was clear from the start that among those whose opinions were decidedly unneutral in 1939 was the president himself. There was never any question that he favored Britain, France, and the other Allied nations in the contest. The question was how much the people of the United States would allow their president to assist them.

At the very least, Roosevelt believed that the United States should make armaments available to the Allied armies to help them counteract the powerful German munitions industry. As a result, in September 1939, he asked Congress for a revision of the Neutrality Acts. The original measures had forbidden the sale of American weapons to any nation engaged in war. Now, Roosevelt wanted the arms embargo lifted. Powerful isolationist opposition forced him to accept a weaker revision than he would have liked; as passed by Congress, the 1939 measure maintained the ban on American ships entering war zones. It did, however, permit countries at war to purchase arms on the same cash-and-carry basis that the earlier Neutrality Acts had established for the sale of nonmilitary materials. This measure, although neutral in wording, clearly benefited only the Allies. Germany’s surface fleet was still unable to challenge the British navy and therefore the only countries capable of carrying supplies from America would be Britain and France.

For a time, it was possible to believe that little more U.S. action would be necessary. After the German armies had quickly subdued Poland, the war in Europe settled into a long, quiet lull that became known as the Phony War. The only action that the United States took was to place a “moral embargo” on the shipment of armaments to the Soviet Union in response to its attack on Finland. The American sanctions had had no effect, and by March the Finns had capitulated.

The German victories in the spring of 1940 stunned the United States. Americans had never imagined that the Nazi armies could sweep through France, and the fall of France forced many Americans to re-evaluate their opinion of the war. By July, with France defeated and Britain threatened, more than 66% of the public believed that Germany posed a direct threat to the United States. Britain’s gallant stand in the Battle of Britain evoked widespread support in America, but few advocated anything stronger than mere admiration for Britain’s cause.

Despite public opinion, in the spring of 1940, Roosevelt began to prepare the United States for war. He asked Congress for an additional $13 billion for defense (much of it for the construction of an enormous new fleet of warplanes) and received it quickly. With France tottering, a few weeks later he proclaimed that the United States would “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.” After France’s fall, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made reference to a time when “the New World, with all its power and might” would step forward “to the rescue and the liberation of the Old” and sent Roosevelt the first of many long lists of requests for ships, armaments, and other assistance without which, he insisted, England could not survive. Many Americans, including the United States ambassador to London Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of future president John F. Kennedy), argued that the British plight was already hopeless and that any aid to the English was a wasted effort. The president, however, disagreed and made every effort to make war materials available to Churchill. He even circumvented (went around) the intent of the cash-and-carry provisions of the Neutrality Act by trading fifty American destroyers (most of them left over from World War I) to England in return for the right to build American bases on British territory in the Western Hemisphere. He also returned to the factories a number of new airplanes purchased by the American government so that the British could buy them instead.

Roosevelt’s desire to aid Britain was tempered by the fact that 1940 was a presidential election year. Convinced that his stepping down might lead to the election of an isolationist president, Roosevelt decided to seek an unprecedented third term. Roosevelt knew that many Americans feared that aid to Britain would eventually entangle the United States in the war. Two days after the destroyer deal was signed, the Committee to Defend America First was created. The America First Committee, led by former General Robert A. Wood, strongly opposed any aid to Britain. Henry Ford and Charles A. Lindbergh were among the committee’s strongest supporters. During the battle for France, Lindbergh had said:

We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere in America, but because we Americans have attempted to interfere in the internal affairs of Europe. Our danger in America is an internal danger. We need not fear a foreign invasion unless American people bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.

In less than six months, the America First Committee had over 60,000 members and the editorial support of the Hearst chain and other influential newspapers. A large proportion of the Republican Party strongly supported the isolationists. Roosevelt feared that any strong action to aid Britain would doom his controversial reelection chances.

Not all Americans, however, were isolationists. Journalist William Allen White responded to the America First Committee by forming the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. The White Committee advocated preparation for war and aid to Britain as the best way to deter German aggression. It strongly supported a bill in Congress that would institute the country’s first ever peacetime draft. This conscription (military draft) bill was hotly debated in Congress. Meanwhile, events in Europe were rapidly changing American opinion. Prior to the fall of France, a slim majority of the people had opposed conscription, but by the time of the Battle of Britain, over 70% favored it. In September, Congress passed a one-year Selective Service Act requiring the registration of all men between the ages of 21 and 35. Of these, 800,000 were actually drafted into service.

The summer and fall of 1940 saw a spirited, and frequently nasty, debate between American isolationists and interventionists. Many Republicans and the American First Committee insisted that Roosevelt was trying to drag America into the war on Britain’s side. Republican Senator Burton Wheeler contended that Roosevelt’s new AAA plan was to “plow under every fourth American boy.” On the other side, many interventionists labeled the isolationists Nazi-sympathizers and called Lindbergh “Herr von Lindbergh.” In truth, few American Firsters were sympathetic to the Nazis, but Hitler did have some supporters in America. A German immigrant, Fritz Kuhn, had organized the German-American Bund in 1936. Reaching a membership of 20,000, the Bund supported Nazi policies and alleged that a Jewish conspiracy controlled the New Deal. The Bund held several rallies in New York’s Madison Square Garden and ran summer camps for teenagers on Long Island and in New Jersey.[1]

Roosevelt avoided any attempt to campaign for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination, but he let the party’s convention know that he was willing to seek a third term. He was unanimously renominated. Rejecting pressure from the isolationists, the Republicans nominated a politically inexperienced Indiana businessman, Wendell Willkie, who had only recently switched from the Democrats to become a Republican. Willkie’s positions differed little from Roosevelt’s. Although the Republican National Committee ran radio ads blasting the president’s position (one stated: “When your boy is dying on some battlefield in Europe … and he’s crying out, ‘Mother! Mother!—don’t blame Franklin D. Roosevelt because he sent your boy to war—blame yourself because you sent Franklin D. Roosevelt back to the White House.”), Willkie refused to attack aid to Britain. He strongly advocated keeping the country out of war but was also willing to offer assistance to the Allies. Still, isolationist sentiment clearly worried FDR. Willkie was an appealing figure and a vigorous campaigner who managed to evoke more public enthusiasm than any other Republican opponent of FDR’s. Despite his knowledge of the dark situation in Europe, the president pledged to a crowd in Boston “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” In the end, however, the Republicans were no match for the president. The election was closer than in either 1932 or 1936, but Roosevelt nevertheless won decisively. He received 55% of the popular vote to Willkie's 45%, and won 449 electoral votes to Willkie's 82.[2]

Abandoning Neutrality

· What was the purpose of the Lend-Lease Program? Describe the other steps that Roosevelt took to aid the Allies.

· What was the “undeclared naval war”?

· Describe how American attitudes toward the war changed between 1940-1941.

With the election behind him and with the situation in Europe getting worse, Roosevelt began in the last months of 1940 to make profound changes in the American role in the war. To the public he claimed that he was simply continuing the now established policy of providing aid to embattled Britain, but in fact embarked on a path to abandon any pretense of neutrality. The American public still strongly opposed intervention (a late 1940 Gallup Poll showed only 13% favored going to war to aid Britain), but Roosevelt was determined not to allow Britain to fall.

By December 1940, Great Britain was virtually bankrupt. It could no longer afford the cash-and-carry requirements imposed by the Neutrality Acts; yet Britain’s needs, Churchill insisted, were greater than ever. Roosevelt, therefore, suggested a method that would “eliminate the dollar sign” from all arms transactions while still, he hoped, pacifying those who opposed blatant American intervention in the war. The new system was labeled “Lend-Lease.” It would allow the government not only to sell, but also to lend or lease, armaments. In other words, America could funnel weapons to England on the basis of no more than Britain's promise to return them when the war was over. The president drew a clever analogy to explain the plan to the American people:

Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose. If I can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.” What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.[3]

The bill was called “A Bill to Further Promote the Defense of the United States, and For Other Purposes,” and proposed to give the president greater power than any chief executive in history. Everyone realized that most of the war material would never be returned undamaged or replaced in kind. Lend-Lease would give Roosevelt the power to send “any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the United States” almost unlimited aid.

Isolationists bitterly attacked the measure. Congressman Hamilton Fish argued that the passage of the bill would leave Congress, “with no more authority than the German Reichstag,” and another Senator called it “a war bill.” As always, Roosevelt was able to explain himself clearly to the American people. In a December 29 radio address he said: “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war … which will enable them to fight for their liberty and our security.” Later in the speech, Roosevelt told the American people that the country must become an “arsenal of democracy” and that “we have furnished the British great material support and we will furnish far more in the future.”[4] Public opinion had clearly turned. When Senator Warren Austin stated: “I say that a world enslaved to Hitler is worse than war, and worse than death,” the Senate galleries loudly cheered him. The Lend-Lease Act passed in March of 1941, and Congress granted the president an immediate nine billion dollars to spend (The U.S. eventually spent over fifty billion dollars on Lend-Lease, with $31b. going to Britain and $11b. to the Soviet Union).

With Lend-Lease established, Roosevelt soon faced another serious problem, ensuring that the American supplies would actually reach Great Britain. Shipping lanes in the Atlantic had become extremely dangerous, as German submarines destroyed as much as a half-million tons of shipping each month. The British navy was losing ships more rapidly than it could replace them and was finding it difficult to transport materials across the Atlantic from America. Secretary of War Henry Stimson (a Republican who had been Hoover's secretary of state) argued that the United States should itself convoy vessels to England; but Roosevelt feared the consequences of such a bold action. Instead, the American Navy began to patrol the ocean as far east as Iceland, escorting convoys of merchant ships, and radioing information to British vessels about the location of Nazi submarines. In April 1941, the U.S. also began to repair damaged British ships in American ports. These actions were all accomplished by presidential order, not congressional action. Many in Congress still were unwilling to admit that war was near. In the summer of 1941, a bill to extend conscription another year passed by only one vote.

After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to extend Lend-Lease privileges to them, the first step toward creating a new relationship with Stalin that would ultimately lead to a formal Soviet-American alliance. Now American industry was providing the lifeblood to Hitler's foes on two fronts, and the navy was playing a more active role than ever in protecting the flow of goods to Europe. By mid 1941, Nazi submarines had begun a concerted campaign against American vessels. In May, the Germans sank a U.S merchant ship, the Robin Moor. Early in September, a German U-boat fired on the American destroyer Greer (which was radioing the U-boat's position to the British at the time). Roosevelt responded by ordering American ships to fire on German submarines “on sight.” In October, Nazi submarines actually hit two destroyers and sank one of them, the Reuben James, killing over 100 American sailors in the process. An enraged Congress now voted approval of a measure allowing the United States to arm its merchant vessels and to sail all the way into belligerent ports. The United States had, in effect, launched an undeclared naval war against Germany.

At the same time, a series of meetings, some private and one public, tied the United States and Great Britain ever more closely together. In April 1941, senior military officers of the two nations had met in secret and agreed on the joint strategy that they would follow if the U.S. were to enter the war. In August, Roosevelt met with Churchill aboard a British vessel anchored off the coast of Newfoundland. The president made no military commitments, but he did join with Churchill in releasing a document that became known as The Atlantic Charter in which the two nations set out “certain common principles” on which to base “a better future for the world.” It was, in only vaguely disguised form, a statement of war aims that called openly for, among other things, “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.”

By the fall of 1941 Roosevelt remained convinced that public opinion would support a declaration of war only in the event of an actual enemy attack. It was clear that it would take more than small-scale naval skirmishes to bring the U.S. into the war. Between 1940-1941 Americans had, however, undergone a radical change in attitude. Most Americans still did not want to enter the war, but they overwhelmingly supported every form of aid against the Nazis short of war. Many would not have been shocked to believe that 1942 would bring an increase in tension and perhaps even war to America. When the war came, however, it came suddenly and from an unexpected source—Japan.

Pearl Harbor

· What effect did the war in Europe have on Japan’s actions in the Pacific?

· Describe the conflicts between the U.S. and Japan that led to Pearl Harbor.

· Explain why the attack on Pearl Harbor was so successful.

· Why does historian Barbara Tuchman believe that Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor was a mistake?

· Summarize the main interpretations of the attack on Pearl Harbor by historians Charles Beard, Richard Current, Robert Wohlstetter, Gordon Prange, and John Toland. What are the main points of contention?

In 1939 Japan was still involved in its invasion of China. Militarists dominated the Tokyo government and were insistent on following a path of conquest in order to establish Japan’s New Order in Asia. Despite capturing most of the coastal areas, the Japanese had failed to defeat the Chinese armies. The beleaguered (troubled) Chinese had merely fled further inland where they continued to harass the Japanese army in a conflict that Japan was unable to bring to a conclusion. Japanese troops had also clashed with Soviet troops in Manchuria during the late 1930s and faced the danger of war with the USSR.

The outbreak of war in Europe presented the Japanese a new opportunity. With France and the Netherlands defeated and occupied by the Germans, and Britain involved in a desperate struggle for its survival, the European empires in Asia were suddenly open to Japanese conquest. In September 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a loose defensive alliance with Germany and Italy that extended the Axis into Asia.

In September 1940, Japan forced the Vichy officials in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) to allow a Japanese landing in northern Vietnam. The U.S., who had already condemned the Japanese invasion of China, retaliated by prohibiting the exportation of steel, scrap iron, and aviation gasoline to Japan. When the Japanese occupied the rest of Indochina in July of 1941, the United States and Britain froze all Japanese assets. The effect of this action was to prevent Japan from purchasing oil, which would, in time, cripple its military efforts and force it to back down from its ambitious plans of conquest.

Tokyo now faced a choice. It would either have to repair relations with the United States to restore the flow of supplies, or it would have to find those supplies elsewhere, most notably by seizing the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). At first those in the Tokyo government who favored compromise seemed to have the upper hand. Prime Minister Konoye had begun negotiations with the United States even before the freezing of his country's assets; and in August he requested a personal meeting with President Roosevelt. FDR replied that he would meet with the Prime Minister only if Japan would give guarantees in advance that it would withdraw from China. Konoye, fearful of the power of the militarists in his government, knew he could give no such assurances and the negotiations collapsed. In October, the militants in Tokyo forced Konoye out of office and replaced him with the leader of the war party, General Hideki Tojo. There seemed little alternative now to increased tension between the two countries

The problem that Japan faced in gaining the supplies it needed by seizing the Dutch East Indies was the risk of war with the United States (see map on p. 16). The U.S. navy in the Philippines, and most likely the British fleet based in Singapore, could still intercept Japanese supplies from the East Indies on their way back to Japan. The commander in chief of the Japanese navy, Admiral Yamamoto, believed that a strike at the East Indies would “lead to an early commencement of war with America,” a prolonged war that Yamamoto was convinced Japan would lose. In January 1941, Yamamoto began to plan a bold gamble designed to allow Japan both to seize the resources it needed and avoid the risk of a long war with the U.S.. He proposed that Japan should begin its conquests with a plan by which it would “fiercely attack and destroy the United States’ main fleet at the outset of the war so that the morale of the United States Navy and her people [would] sink to an extent that it could not be recovered.” Yamamoto’s plan seemed to offer a way to achieve both of Japan’s goals: the conquest of Southeast Asia and the avoidance of a long war with the United States.[5]

After assuming power, the Tojo government maintained for several weeks a pretense of wanting to continue negotiations with the United States. On November 20, 1941, Japanese diplomats arrived in Washington to discuss ways to reduce Japanese-American tensions. But Tokyo had already decided that it would not yield its gains in China and Indochina, and Washington was determined to accept nothing less than a reversal of that policy. American intelligence had already decoded Japanese messages which made clear that war was imminent and that, after November 29, an attack would be only a matter of days.

What Washington did not know was where the attack would take place. Most officials were convinced that the Japanese would move first, not against American territory, but against British or Dutch possessions to the south. American intelligence did note a Japanese naval task force that began sailing east from the Kurile Islands in the general direction of Hawaii on November 25; and a routine warning was sent to the United States naval facility at Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu. Officials were paying far more attention, however, to a large Japanese convoy moving southward through the China Sea. A combination of confusion and miscalculation caused the government to overlook indications that Japan intended a direct attack on American forces.

At 7:55 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a wave of 183 Japanese bombers attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor. The planes had been spotted on radar 139 miles away, but the two privates who were operating the base’s radar were told by a lieutenant, who was on his first day of duty at the information center, to “forget it” and that the planes could not possibly be hostile.[6] A second wave came an hour later. Because the military commanders in Hawaii had taken no precautions against such an attack, allowing ships to remain bunched up defenselessly in the harbor and airplanes to remain parked in rows on airstrips, the results of the raid were catastrophic. Within two hours the United States lost 5 of its 9 battleships, 3 cruisers, 11 other vessels, 177 airplanes, and several vital shore installations. More than 2,400 soldiers, sailors, and civilians died, and another 1,000 were injured. Only by sheer accident were the fleet’s four aircraft carriers out at sea and thus spared the Japanese attack. As Time reported:

The U.S. Navy was caught with its pants down. Within one tragic hour—before the war had really begun—the U.S. appeared to have suffered greater naval losses than in the whole of World War I.

Days may pass before the full facts become known, but in the scanty news that came through from Hawaii in the first 36 hours of the war was every indication that the Navy had been taken completely by surprise in the early part of a lazy Sunday morning. Although the Japanese attackers had certainly been approaching for several days, the Navy apparently had no news of either airplane carriers sneaking up or of submarines fanning out around Hawaii. Not till the first bombs began to fall was an alarm given. And when the blow fell the air force at Pearl Harbor was apparently not ready to offer effective opposition to the attackers.

In Army posts all over Oahu, soldiers were dawdling into a typical idle Sunday. Aboard the ships of the Fleet at Pearl Harbor, life was going along at a saunter. Downtown nothing stirred save an occasional bus. The clock on the Aloha Tower read 7:55. The Japs came in from the southeast over Diamond Head. They could have been U.S. planes shuttling westward from San Diego. Civilians' estimates of their numbers ranged from 50 to 150. They whined over Waikiki, over the candy-pink bulk of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Some were (it was reported) big four-motored jobs, some dive-bombers, some pursuits. All that they met as they came in was a tiny private plane in which Lawyer Ray Buduick was out for a Sunday morning ride. They riddled the lawyer's plane with machine-gun bullets, but the lawyer succeeded in making a safe landing. By the time he did, bombs were thudding all around the city. The first reported casualty was Robert Tyce, operator of a civilian airport near Honolulu, who was machine-gunned as he started to spin the propeller of a plane.

Torpedoes launched from bombers tore at the dreadnoughts in Pearl Harbor. Dive-bombers swooped down on the Army's Hickam and Wheeler Fields. Shortly after the attack began, radio warnings were broadcast. But people who heard them were skeptical until explosions wrenched the guts of Honolulu. All the way from Pacific Heights down to the center of town the planes soared, leaving a wake of destruction.

With anti-aircraft guns popping and U.S. pursuits headed aloft, pajama-clad citizens piled out of bed to dash downtown or head for the hills where they could get a good view. Few of them were panicky, many were nonchalant. Shouted one man as he dashed past a CBS observer: “The mainland papers will exaggerate this.”

Obvious to onlookers on the Honolulu hills was the fact that Pearl Harbor was being hit hard. From the Navy's plane base on Ford Island (also known as Luke Field), in the middle of the harbor, clouds of smoke ascended. One citizen who was driving past the naval base saw the first bomb fall on Ford Island. Said he: “It must have been a big one. I saw two planes dive over the mountains and down to the water and let loose torpedoes at a naval ship. This warship was attacked again & again. I also saw what looked like dive-bombers coming over in single file.”

When the first ghastly day was over Honolulu began to reckon up the score. It was one to make the U.S. Navy and Army shudder. Of the 200,000 inhabitants of Oahu, 1,500 were dead, 1,500 others injured. Not all the civilian casualties occurred in Honolulu. The raiders plunged upon the town of Wahiawa, where there is a large island reservoir, sprayed bullets on people in the streets. Behind the Wahiawa courthouse a Japanese plane crashed in flames.

Washington called the naval damage “serious,” admitted at least one “old” battleship and a destroyer had been sunk, other ships of war damaged at base. Meanwhile Japan took to the radio to boast that the U.S. Navy had suffered an “annihilating blow.” Crowed the Japs: “With the two battleships [sunk], and two other capital ships and four large cruisers heavily damaged by Japanese bombing attacks on Hawaii, the U.S. Pacific Fleet has now only two battleships, six 10,000-ton cruisers, and only one aircraft carrier.”

Perhaps more important than the loss of ships was damage to the naval base, some of whose oil depots may have gone up in flames. Heaviest military toll was at Hickam Field, where hundreds were killed and injured when bombs hit the great barracks and bombs were reported to have destroyed several hangars full of planes.

These reports may have been inaccurate—most of them came through in the first excitement of the attack and could not be confirmed. Thereafter virtually the only news about Hawaii came through a few bare communiqués from the White House. It was all too likely that there was serious damage, which was not reported.

But the curtain of censorship settled down. The Fleet units, which were fit for action, put to sea. The White House said that several Jap airplanes and submarines were downed, but what happened in the next grim stage of the deadly serious battle was hidden for the time being by the curtain.[7]

Despite the apparent success of the Pearl Harbor raid, American historian Barbara Tuchman believes that Japan had made a critical error:

Fundamentally the reason Japan took the risk [of starting a war with the U.S.] was that she had either to go forward or content herself with the status quo (current situation), which no one was willing or could politically afford to suggest. Over a generation, pressure from the aggressive army in China and from its [supporters] at home had fused Japan to a goal of an impossible empire from which she could not now retreat. She had become a prisoner of her oversize ambitions.

An alternative strategy would have been to proceed against the Netherlands Indies while leaving the United States untouched. While this would have left an unknown quantity at Japan’s rear, an unknown quantity would have been preferable to a certain enemy, especially one of potential vastly superior to her own.

Here was a strange miscalculation. At a time when at least half the United States was strongly isolationist, the Japanese did the one thing that could have united the American people and motivated the whole nation for war…. The fact is that Japan could have seized the Indies without any risk of American belligerency; no attack on Dutch, British,, or French colonial territory would have brought the United States into the war. Attack on American territory was just the thing—the only thing—that could. Japan never seemed to have considered that the effect of an attack on Pearl Harbor might be not crush morale but to unite the nation for combat. This curious vacuum of understanding came from what might be called cultural ignorance [although Admiral Yamamoto the architect of the plan had attended Harvard University and lived in the United States for several years]…. Judging America by themselves, the Japanese assumed that the American government could take the nation into war whenever it wished, as Japan would have done and indeed did.[8]

While Tuchman believes that Pearl Harbor was a critical error for Japan, some historians alleged that Roosevelt actually welcomed the attack because it allowed the U.S. to enter the war, a course that Roosevelt believed was the only way to prevent an Axis victory.

The Question of Pearl Harbor: Where Historians Disagree:

The phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor!” became a rallying cry during World War II reminding Americans of the surprise Japanese attack on the American naval base in Hawaii, and arousing the nation to even greater efforts to exact revenge. But within a few years of the end of hostilities, some Americans remembered Pearl Harbor for different reasons and began to challenge the official version of the attack on December 7, 1941. Their charges sparked a debate that has never fully subsided. Was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor unprovoked, and did it come without warning, as the Roosevelt administration claimed at the time? Or was it part of a deliberate

plan by the president to have the Japanese force a reluctant United States into the war? Most controversial of all, did the administration know of the attack in advance? Did Roosevelt deliberately refrain from warning the commanders in Hawaii so that the air raid's effect on the American public would be more profound?

Among the first to challenge the official version of Pearl Harbor was the historian Charles A. Beard, who maintained in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948) that the United States had deliberately forced the Japanese into a position where they had no choice but to attack. By cutting off Japan's access to the raw materials it needed for its military adventure in China, by stubbornly refusing to compromise, the United States ensured that the Japanese would strike out into the southwest Pacific to take the needed supplies by force even at the risk of war with the United States. Not only was American policy provocative in effect, Beard suggested that it was also deliberately provocative. More than that, the administration, which had some time before cracked the Japanese code, must have known weeks in advance of Japan's plans to attack. Beard supported his argument by citing Secretary of War Henry Stimson's comment in his diary: “The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot.”

A partial refutation of the Beard argument appeared in 1950 in Basic Rauch's Roosevelt from Munich to Pearl Harbor. The administration did not know in advance of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor, he argued. It did, however, expect an attack somewhere; and it made subtle efforts to “maneuver” Japan into firing the first shot in the conflict. Richard N. Current, in Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (1954), offered an even stronger challenge to Beard. Secretary of War Stimson did indeed anticipate an attack, Current argued, but not an attack on American territory; he anticipated, rather, an assault on British or Dutch possessions in the Pacific. The problem confronting the administration was not how to maneuver the Japanese into attacking the United States, but how to find a way to make a Japanese attack on British or Dutch territory appear to be an attack on America. Only thus, he believed, could Congress be persuaded to approve a declaration of war.

Roberta Wohlstetter took a different approach to the question, in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), the most thorough scholarly study to appear to that point. De-emphasizing the question of whether the American government wanted a Japanese attack, she undertook to answer the question of whether the administration knew of the attack in advance. Wohlstetter concluded that the United States had ample warning of Japanese intentions and should have realized that the Pearl Harbor raid was imminent. Government officials failed to interpret the evidence correctly, largely because their preconceptions about Japanese intentions were at odds with the evidence they confronted. Admiral Edwin T. Layton, who had been a staff officer at Pearl Harbor in 1941, also blames political and bureaucratic failures for the absence of advance warning of the attack. In a 1985 memoir, And I Was There, he argued that the Japanese attack was not only a result of “audacious planning and skillful execution” by the Japanese, but of “a dramatic breakdown in our intelligence process . . . related directly to feuding among high-level naval officers in Washington.”

Probably the most thorough study of Pearl Harbor appeared in 1981 in the form of Gordon W. Prange's At Dawn We Slept. Like Wohlstetter, Prange concluded that

the Roosevelt administration was guilty of a series of disastrous blunders in interpreting Japanese strategy; the American government had possession of enough information to predict the attack, but failed to do so. Prange dismissed the arguments of the “revisionists” (Beard and his successors), however, that the president had deliberately maneuvered the nation into the war by permitting the Japanese to attack. Instead, he emphasized the enormous daring and great skill with which the Japanese orchestrated an ambitious operation that few Americans believed possible.

The revisionist claims have not been laid to rest. John Toland revived the charge of a Roosevelt betrayal in 1982, in Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, claiming to have discovered new evidence (the testimony of an unidentified seaman) that proves the navy knew at least five days in advance that Japanese aircraft carriers were heading toward Hawaii. From that, Toland concluded that Roosevelt must have known that an attack was forthcoming and that he allowed it to occur in the belief that a surprise attack would arouse the nation. Warning the commanders in Hawaii in advance, Roosevelt feared, might cause the Japanese to cancel their plans. The president was gambling that American defenses would be sufficient to repel the attack; but his gamble failed and resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 people and the crippling of the American Pacific fleet. But like the many previous writers who have made the same argument, Toland was unable to produce any direct evidence of Roosevelt's knowledge of the planned attack [9]

The raid on Pearl Harbor did overnight what more than two years of effort by President Roosevelt had been unable to do: It unified the American people in a fervent commitment to war. On December 8, the president traveled to Capitol Hill, where he grimly addressed a joint session of Congress:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace….

Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Within four hours, the Senate unanimously and the House 388 to 1 (the lone dissenter being Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who had voted against war in 1917 as well) approved a declaration of war against Japan. Three days later, Germany and Italy, Japan's European allies, declared war on the United States; on the same day Congress reciprocated (replied in kind) without a dissenting vote. For the second time in less than twenty-five years, the United States had joined in a world war.

Banzai

· Describe Japan’s two major goals in the Pacific.

· Describe the Japanese conquests that followed Pearl Harbor.

· Explain the significance of the Doolittle Raid.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan had two major goals: to capture the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies and to establish a defensive perimeter capable of protecting their conquests. Ten hours after the strike at Pearl Harbor, Japanese airplanes attacked the American airfields in the Philippines, destroying much of America's remaining air power in the Pacific. Three days later, Guam, another American possession, fell to the Japanese, followed by Wake Island on December 23. On Christmas Day, the British colony of Hong Kong also surrendered to the Japanese.

Japan’s top objective was the capture of the Dutch East Indies. The islands contained valuable stores of oil, tin, rubber, sugar, rice, and quinine (an important drug for controlling malaria). Japan’s conquest of the islands had begun on December 20 with an attack on Borneo and Sumatra. By late January, most of the oil fields were in Japanese hands. In March, the 93,000 Dutch defenders on Java surrendered, and most of the islands were under Japanese control.

The greatest Japanese accomplishment, however, came in Malaysia with the capture of the British fortress of Singapore. Singapore guarded the vital sea routes through the Orient and Dutch East Indies as well as India to the west and Australia to the south. Extending into the South China Sea, Singapore’s sea approaches were guarded by five huge 15-inch guns. To the north, 200 miles of dense jungle that the British considered impassable to an invading army protected its land approaches. Churchill himself believed that any Japanese effort to attack Singapore would be a “mad enterprise.”[10] Two days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse. Churchill had dispatched these ships to protect the Singapore garrison, but both were sunk before the battle had even begun. Moving south through the jungle on bicycles, a 35,000 man Japanese invading force, well supported by tanks and planes, closed in on the British. Singapore was totally unprepared for a land-based attack. Most of its heavy guns faced the sea and could not be turned toward the invaders from the north. Cutoff by the Japanese invasion, low on water, and without hope of help from the sea, the British surrendered on February 15. Over 60,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops were taken prisoner. The Japanese followed up their success at Singapore with an attack on the British bases in Ceylon where, although unable to defeat the British fleet, they sank the aircraft carrier Hermes.

After the fall of Singapore, the only remaining Allied outpost in Southeast Asia was the Philippines. The Japanese attack on the islands had begun with an air attack on the American base Clark Field early on December 8. Eighteen B-17 bombers and eighty other aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Without air cover, the islands were defenseless when the Japanese invasion began on December 22. After two weeks of hard fighting the American troops, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula on the west side of Manila Bay. President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines on March 12 to take over the defense of Australia. Prior to leaving the hopeless situation, MacArthur defiantly promised, “I shall return.” His men were not so fortunate as the following poem indicates:

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan;

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam;

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces;

No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces;

And nobody gives a damn.

MacArthur’s successor, General Wainwright, had no choice but to surrender the Bataan garrison on April 8. The 78,000 starving U.S. and Filipino survivors of Bataan were forced by the Japanese to march 100 miles north to prison camps. Along the way they were beaten, clubbed, bayoneted, and denied water by their captors. Over 20,000 died on the Bataan Death March, and another 22,000 died in the first two months in Japanese prisoner of war camps. Finally, on May 6, the last American troops in the Philippines surrendered at Corregidor:

Toward the end there was no sleep on Corregidor.

The ammunition was about gone, the food had run out. The wounded, crowded into the catacombs of The Rock, cried out for help that no one could give. Malaria had seized the garrison; gaunt cannoneers, flushed with fever, stood at their stations beside pieces that had to be served with telltale economy.

Corregidor was through. Five months after Jap's first attack, the last island of formal resistance in the Philippines was going. An army of more than 10,000 crack troops, wasted by want, without hope of relief, was going to its end.

Thirteen Raids. In the last few days, the Jap hit the defenders with everything he had. For four days in a row The Rock and its three satellite forts took 13 bombing raids a day….the Jap poured in a merciless artillery fire, 24 hours a day.

Dashing Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew (“Skinny”) Wainwright…was finally forced to the greatest tragedy in a soldier's life. He surrendered, and walked off through the dead and dying to discuss with fat, able General Yamashita the terms of his capitulation.[11]

The American surrender in the Philippines, along with the British loss of Burma in April of 1942, marked the end of the five-month campaign that began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Japan had succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. Not only had the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies been captured largely intact, but American, British, and Dutch power in Asia had been smashed. Japan now controlled 450,000,000 people and, more importantly, many of the world’s most important natural resources. The Japanese conquests had given them control of 95% of the world’s rubber and 75% of the world’s tin.

The months following Pearl Harbor saw U.S. forces in the Pacific suffer defeat after defeat. One bold and daring act, however, gave Americans a tremendous morale boost. Soon after Pearl Harbor, American aviators began training for a bombing mission to take the war directly to Japan. The only way that this could be accomplished was to launch long-range bombers from aircraft carriers. The carriers were not designed to carry heavy planes, and just getting the planes to take-off was a considerable feat. On April 18, 1942, commanded by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, 16 B-25 bombers took off from the carrier Hornet 700 miles away from Japan. All of the planes reached Japan and twelve dropped their bombs on the capital of Tokyo. Returning to the carriers was impossible (due to the distance and the impossibility of landing the large planes), so the planes flew on past Japan to China. Most of the eighty pilots survived, either crash landing or bailing out of their planes as they ran out of fuel. Eleven of the pilots were not so lucky and fell into the hands of Japanese occupation forces in China. The Japanese executed three of the pilots after a show trial where they were condemned as war criminals for bombing civilian targets. Little damage was done in the Doolittle Raid, but it showed the Japanese that their homeland was not immune from attack and provided a tremendous morale boost to Americans who had so far in the war witnessed only humiliating defeat.

America at War

· Describe the effect that the war had on the U.S. economy.

· What effect did the war have on women and African-Americans?

· Explain how the war increased the government’s regulation of the economy.

· Describe the measures that the government used to fight inflation.

· Describe the internment of Japanese Americans during the war.

“War is no longer simply a battle between armed forces in the field,” an American government report of 1939 concluded. “It is a struggle in which each side strives to bring to bear against the enemy the coordinated power of every individual and of every material resource at its command. The conflict extends from the soldier in the front line to the citizen in the remotest hamlet in the rear.” The United States had experienced the demands of “total war” a century before. But never had the nation experienced so consuming a military experience as World War II. American armed forces were engaged in combat around the globe not just for a few months, as during World War I, but for nearly four years. American society, in the meantime, experienced changes that reached into virtually every corner of the nation.

World War II had its most profound impact on American domestic life by finally ending the Great Depression. Even before Pearl Harbor, the economic problems of the 1930s (unemployment, deflation, industrial sluggishness) had virtually vanished before the great wave of wartime industrial expansion.

The most important agent of the new prosperity was federal military spending, which after 1939 was pumping more money into the economy each year than all the New Deal relief agencies combined had done. In 1939, the federal budget had been $9 billion; by 1945, it had risen to $100 billion. Largely as a result of this spending, the gross national product soared: from $91 billion in 1939 to $166 billion in 1945. The index of industrial production doubled. Seventeen million new jobs were created.

Perhaps most striking was the increase in personal incomes. In New York, the average family income in 1938 had been $2,760; by 1942, it had risen to $4,044. In Boston, the increase was from $2,455 to $3,618; in Washington, D.C., from $2,227 to $5,316. There were limits on what the recipients of these expanded incomes could do with their money. Most consumer goods automobiles—radios, and appliances, even many types of food and clothing—were in short supply. The production of these items had been curtailed or completely stopped in favor of military production. Wage earners diverted much of their new affluence into savings, which would later help keep the economic boom alive in the postwar years.

The war years not only increased the total wealth of the nation, it produced the only significant change of the century in the distribution of wealth among the population. Almost everyone's income grew during the war, but the incomes of the poorest fifth of the population rose by nearly 70%. This was a substantially greater than the 20% increase experienced by the wealthiest fifth of the population. Farmers, whose earnings had risen very slightly if at all during the previous two decades, saw their incomes rise by 400%. Industrial workers enjoyed somewhat less substantial gains; union leaders agreed to limit wage increases to 15% during the war. But workers who had been unemployed or underemployed in the 1930s were now fully employed, often working substantial overtime.

Instead of the prolonged unemployment that had been the most troubling feature of the Depression economy, the war created a serious labor shortage. The armed forces diverted over 15 million men and women from the civilian work force at the same time that the demand for labor was rising rapidly. Nevertheless, the civilian work force jumped from 46.5 million at the beginning of the war to over 53 million at the end. The 7 million who had previously been unemployed accounted for some of the increase; the employment of many people previously considered inappropriate for the work force—the very young (more than a third of all teen-agers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen were employed late in the war), the elderly, and perhaps most important, several million women—accounted for the rest of it.

The fear of deflation (dropping prices), which had been the central concern of most American economists in the 1930s, gave way during the war to a serious fear of inflation. Increasing wages coupled with a shortage of consumer goods was a recipe for economic disaster. In response to growing public concern, the Office of Price Administration (the war agency charged with stabilizing prices) began freezing prices and rents in certain areas of particularly rapid economic growth. But with farm prices still rising rapidly, the OPA's policies failed to reduce pressure from workers for further wage increases. In October 1942, therefore, Congress grudgingly responded to the president's request and passed the Anti-Inflation Act, which gave the administration authority to freeze agricultural prices, wages, salaries, and rents throughout the country. After the passage of the Act, the increase in living costs during the next two years was held to only 1.4%. As a result, inflation was a much less serious problem during World War II than it had been during World War I.

Despite this success, the OPA was never popular. There was widespread resentment of its “meddlesome” controls over wages and prices. And there was only grudging acquiescence (consent) in its complicated system of rationing scarce consumer goods, such as coffee, sugar, meat, butter, canned goods, shoes, tires, gasoline, and fuel oil. Black-marketing and overcharging grew in proportions far beyond OPA policing capacity. The most unpopular measures dealt with automobiles:

This week 10,000,000 Eastern Seaboard motorists lined up to get gasoline-ration books and the terrible truth. Things were not just as bad as they looked; they were worse. A third of the 10,000,000, who did not need their cars for business or to get to work, got “A” cards: three gallons a week. The rest got a little more. Even these rations were good only until July 1; then the amounts may be revised.

It was the same with rubber. When Washington announced that there would be no new tires, it had softened the blow with quick talk of recaps. When it took away recaps, it talked about synthetics.[12]

Among the most important methods of controlling inflation were the government's revenue-raising programs: borrowing and taxation. The government borrowed about half the revenues it needed from the American people by selling $100 billion worth of war bonds. The sale of these bonds not only raised money for the government but also reduced inflationary pressures by taking money out of circulation. In addition, there were ever increasing taxes on incomes. The Revenue Act of 1942 levied a 94% tax on the highest incomes; and for the first time, the income tax fell as well on those in lower income brackets. To simplify payment for these new millions of taxpayers, Congress enacted the first withholding system of payroll deductions in 1943.

From 1941 to 1945 the federal government spent a total of $321 billion. This was twice as much as it had spent in the entire 150 years of its existence to that point, and ten times as much as the cost of World War I. The national debt rose from $49 billion in 1941 to $259 billion in 1945, yet the conservative warnings of national bankruptcy that had punctuated the early New Deal years were almost entirely overcome by the patriotism of the war effort.

America's great industrial capacity was its most important weapon in the fight against the Axis and ultimately a decisive factor in the Allied victory. Enormous new factory complexes were constructed in the space of a few months, many of them funded by the federal government's Defense Plants Corporation. An entire new industry producing synthetic rubber was created to make up for the loss of access to natural rubber in the Pacific. By the beginning of 1944, American factories were producing more than twice that of all the Axis countries combined.

The war was an important event in the modern history of American women who found themselves, because of social and economic necessity, suddenly thrust into roles long considered inappropriate for them. With so many men serving in the military, women became even more crucial to the successful operation of industry. The number of women in the work force increased by over 6 million, or by nearly 60%, in the course of the war. The new working women were far more likely to be married and were on the whole considerably older than those who had entered the work force in the past. They were also more likely to work in heavy industrial jobs that had previously been reserved for men. The famous wartime image of “Rosie the Riveter” symbolized the new importance of the female industrial work force, but most women workers during the war were employed not in factories but in service-sector jobs. Above all, they worked for the government, whose bureaucratic needs expanded dramatically alongside its military and industrial needs. This wartime work experience had a profound impact on American women that lasted well beyond the war years. Late in the war, when married women with children who worked outside the home were asked if they were happier working than they would be staying at home, an astounding 79% replied “yes.”

Similarly, the war created important new opportunities for African-Americans as well. As Americans began to prepare for war in 1940, African-Americans were excluded from service in the Marines and Army Air Corps and only eligible to serve as galley (kitchen) mates in the Navy. During the war, most of these restrictions were gradually lifted. Blacks became eligible to serve in all branches of the military, although units were still segregated. Black pilots, trained at the Tuskegee Institute, flew missions in North Africa and Europe. Usually, however, Blacks tended to get assigned the least attractive and most dangerous jobs in the service. In July 1944, 202 black sailors were killed while loading munitions at the U.S. Navy loading depot at Port Chicago. Later, fifty black sailors were court-martialed for refusing to resume the loading without additional safety procedures. The greatest impact of the war on Black Americans came from increased employment opportunities. By threatening a wartime March on Washington in 1941, labor leader A. Phillip Randolph was able to convince President Roosevelt to issue an executive order banning discrimination in hiring by companies who held federal defense contracts. The creation of the Federal Employees Practices Commission (FEPC) did not totally end discrimination (the commission had no power to impose fines against violators), but it was a significant step toward providing equal employment opportunities. The availability of high-paying factory jobs led to a second Great Migration as rural blacks moved to northern cities, 50,000 to Detroit alone.

One minority did not experience greater opportunity during the war—Japanese-Americans. Following Pearl Harbor a general hysteria swept the West Coast. Would there be another Japanese attack? Blackouts and civil defense procedures were instituted. A major concern was the loyalty of Japanese-Americans living in the west. There were only about 127,000 Japanese-Americans in the United States, most of them concentrated in a few areas in California. About a third of them were unnaturalized (non-citizens), first-generation immigrants (Issei), and two-thirds were naturalized or native-born citizens of the United States (Nisei). Because they generally kept to themselves and preserved traditional Japanese cultural patterns, it was easy for others to imagine that the Japanese-Americans were engaged in conspiracies on behalf of their ancestral homeland. Wild stories circulated about sabotage at Pearl Harbor and plots to aid a Japanese landing on the coast of California, all later shown to be entirely without foundation. Public pressure to remove the “threat” grew steadily. From the beginning, Americans adopted a different attitude toward their Asian enemy than they did toward their European foes. They attributed to the Japanese people certain racial and cultural characteristics that made it easier to hold them in contempt. The Japanese, both government and private propaganda encouraged Americans to believe, were a devious and cruel people. The infamous sneak attack on Pearl Harbor seemed to many to confirm that assessment.

In February 1942, in response to pressure from military officials and political leaders on the West Coast and recommendations from the War Department, the president authorized the army to “intern” the Japanese-Americans. In arguing for the policy, General John L. DeWitt, the West Coast army commander told Congress: “A Jap’s a Jap, it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” More than 110,000 people (Issei and Nisei alike) were rounded up, told to dispose of their property however they could (which often meant simply abandoning it), and taken to what the government euphemistically (phrased in obscure and misleading terms) termed “relocation centers” in the “interior.” In fact, they were facilities little different from prisons, many of them located in the inhospitable California desert. Conditions in the internment camps were not brutal, but they were harsh and uncomfortable. The internees were forced to spend up to three years in grim, debilitating isolation, barred from employment, provided with only minimal medical care, and deprived of decent schools for their children:

They were U.S. citizens who had spent their lives on U.S. soil—farmers who tilled the rich brown loam in the Santa Clara Valley, fishermen riding the slow swells off San Diego, humble shopkeepers in the little stores of San Francisco. But they learned last week that, in nation's hour of peril, having been a citizen is not enough. So they began to pack their keepsakes, lift their slanteyed children on their arms, and start on the long migration east across the Sierra Nevadas, to dreary inland country far from the blue sea. They were some of the West Coast's 70,000-odd Nisei. Their honorable ancestors were Japanese.

This was martial law, in effect. Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command, marked off a strip of land curving some 2,000 miles along the Pacific, along the Mexican border, from Canada to New Mexico. Out of this coastal region all the thousands on thousands of enemy aliens and all Nisei must go.

From strategic military areas all racial Japanese including Nisei, must go first. From less important zones, evacuation will be gradual, and voluntary-for a while.[13]

Pasadena's Rose Bowl looked like a second-hand auto park. In the chill dawn, 140 battered cars and sagging trucks huddled, piled high with furniture, bundles, gardening tools. At 6:30 a.m. they chuffed and spluttered, wheeled into line, and started rolling. Led by a goggled policeman on a motorcycle, a jeep, and three command cars full of newsmen, they headed for the dark, towering mountains to the east.

Thus, last week, the first compulsory migration in U.S. history set out for Manzanar, in California's desolate Owens Valley. In the cavalcade were some 300 Japanese aliens and Nisei—U.S. citizens of Japanese blood. They were part of the first mass evacuation from the forbidden strip of West Coast land which Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt has made a military zone.

At the Army “reception center,” nine miles beyond Lone Pine, the Japs piled out. They were greeted by 88 Japanese men and girls who went ahead to put the camp in order. In the unfinished, tar-papered dormitories where they will live until the war ends, they made their beds on mattress ticking filled with straw, dined on rice and meat, prunes and coffee, dished out by Japanese cooks.

At Manzanar, General DeWitt may settle as many as 50,000 of the Coast's 112,353 Jap aliens and Nisei. Another 20,000 will be placed on the Colorado River Indian Reservation at Parker, Ariz.

The first emigrants to Manzanar were Japanese plumbers, carpenters, mechanics who will help build the desert city. Wives and children will follow later.

What kind of people were Japs and Nisei? Said 23-year-old Takeshi Suchiya, a premed at Compton District Junior College when the FBI rounded up his family:

“When we stop to think it over, most of us understand the necessity for evacuation. But the immediate reaction is, we have got some rights as Americans...I know my parents are as Americans...I know my parents are loyal, yet they have been picked up. Anyhow, the whole thing's a mess and we'll just have to take it....”

Said gardener Isamu Horino: “Why should we support anything in this country with a whole heart? I don't mean any of us give a damn about Japan. We hope they get licked. But...nobody ever let us become a real part of this country...If they want to take away all we've got and dump us out in the desert, we've got no choice. But we don't like it...And we're expected to buy bonds, too. Not me!”[14]

At the same time, some young men in the internment camps were encouraged to join a Nisei army unit, which fought with distinction in Europe. The Supreme Court upheld the evacuation in a 1944 decision; and although most of the Japanese-Americans were released later that year (after the reelection of the president), they were largely unable to win any compensation for their losses until Congress finally acted to redress the wrongs in the late 1980s.

Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal

· Describe the American strategy in the Pacific. Why were these goals secondary to the war effort in Europe?

· Explain the importance of the battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal.

Alone among the warring nations, the United States was committed to major military efforts in both Europe and the Pacific. Despite the early setbacks in the struggle with Japan, American policymakers remained committed to a decision they had made in discussions with the British prior to Pearl Harbor. The defeat of the Germans would be the nation's first priority, primarily because they were seen as the greater threat. Nevertheless, American strategists planned two broad offensives against the Japanese after the fall of the Philippines. One, under the command of General MacArthur, would move north from Australia, through New Guinea, and eventually back to the Philippines. The other, under Admiral Chester Nimitz, would move west from Hawaii toward major Japanese island outposts in the central Pacific. Ultimately, the two offensives would come together to invade Japan itself.

The first test of this strategy came just northwest of Australia, which in mid-1942 stood almost undefended as only weak outposts in southern New Guinea stood between the Australian mainland and the Japanese forces. In May 1942, the Japanese moved east from their conquests in the Dutch East Indies in an effort to seize Port Moresby, an Australian holding in New Guinea. If they were successful, the Japanese would then be able attack Australia directly by air. Acting on information from intercepted Japanese cables, Admiral Nimitz assembled a task force led by the carriers Yorktown and Lexington to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet. What resulted was the Battle of Coral Sea, the first naval battle fought exclusively in the air as the ships of the two fleets never came into contact with each other. On May 7, aircraft from the Lexington sank a Japanese carrier and forced the invasion ships to halt, awaiting the result of the naval battle. The next day, the two sides launched an all-out air attack on each other. The Lexington and Yorktown were badly damaged (the Lexington had to be sunk after the battle, but its crew and planes were salvaged). 33 American and 43 Japanese planes were lost. A second Japanese carrier was also badly damaged, and the Japanese fleet withdrew, abandoning its plans to attack Port Moresby. Although America’s losses were greater than Japan’s, for the first time in the war a Japanese invasion had been turned back.

A month later there was an even more important turning point northwest of Hawaii. Confident that the American fleet had not recovered from Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto hoped to draw the Americans into a decisive battle. Yamamoto’s forces had eleven battleships and five aircraft carriers. The Americans had no battleships and only three carriers. Yamamoto dispatched four of his carriers to attack Midway Island, the westernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago (chain of islands). The American navy, having broken the Japanese codes, knew that an enormous enemy offensive was taking shape there and rushed every available airplane and vessel into the area. The Japanese launched their air attack on Midway unaware that the three American carriers were in the vicinity. On June 4, 1942, planes from the three American carriers attacked the Japanese strike force. The first wave of torpedo bombers was unsuccessful as 35 of 41 were shot down. The second wave of dive-bombers, however, succeeded spectacularly, sinking three of the Japanese carriers. Later in the day, after the Japanese had launched a successful attack on the American carrier Yorktown, the remaining Japanese carrier was sunk. Both sides suffered great losses, but the encounter proved to be a significant American victory, which turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. In the Battle of Midway, Nimitz's forces had prevented the Japanese from securing their original objectives, the capture of Midway, and the destruction of what was left of American naval power in the Pacific. They had also destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers (the United States lost only the Yorktown) and regained control of the central Pacific for the United States.

The Americans took the offensive for the first time several months later in the southern Solomon Islands, to the east of New Guinea, where the Japanese were establishing a base for air raids against American communications with Australia. In August 1942, American forces assaulted three of the islands: Gavutu, Tulagi, and Guadalcanal. A struggle of unprecedented ferocity (and, before it was over, terrible savagery) developed at Guadalcanal and continued for six months, inflicting heavy losses on both sides:

How could it be so important to battle for a three-by-eight-mile patch of meadow, jungle, and coconut grove in an economically worthless island just across the way from nowhere?

In the first place, the Marines' beachhead on Guadalcanal is important by the mere fact of its having been the first offensive U.S. battlefield against the Japs. It has become the vortex of a naval whirlpool, which may easily engulf either adversary. But beyond that it is a geographic key. If the U.S. loses Guadalcanal, the Japanese can press on with relative ease, take the whole chain of islands down through the New Hebrides to New Caledonia, and then have only the narrow moat of the Coral Sea between them and Australia. But if the U.S. holds Guadalcanal, and can force its way up the chain as far as Rabaul, then the Allies will have a series of bases from which to build a major offensive against the Japs.[15]

The Americans lost 1,598 men on Guadalcanal while Japanese losses exceeded 20,000. An additional 20,000 sailors died as the two navies dueled off the coasts of the island. The waters around the island had so many ships sunk in them that they were nicknamed “Ironbottom Sound.” In the end, however, the Japanese were forced to abandon the island and with it their last chance of launching an effective offensive to the south.

In both the southern and central Pacific the initiative had shifted to the United States by mid-1942. The Japanese advance had been halted. The Americans, with aid from the Australians and the New Zealanders, now began the slow, arduous (difficult) process of moving toward the Philippines and Japan itself.

El Alamein

· What was the ULTRA secret?

· Describe the major problems and tactics of desert warfare.

· Explain the importance of the Battle of El Alamein.

1941 had been the pivotal year of the war for the British. For the first five months she stood alone against the Nazis. The German attack on the Soviet Union in June had provided a glimmer of hope for the beleaguered island as the bulk of Nazi resources were hurled against Russia. In December, the United States joined the war. Without waiting for a declaration of war on Germany by the U.S., Churchill immediately declared war on Japan. A confident Churchill stood before the House of Commons and exclaimed: “In the past our light has flickered. Today it flames. In the future there will be a light that shines over all lands and seas.”

An additional reason for Churchill’s confidence was that the Battle of the Atlantic had slowly begun to turn in Britain’s favor. The British had adopted a convoy system to protect against U-boat attacks. Large groups of 20-80 ships sailed together, protected by destroyers and long-range aircraft. In response, the Germans began to hunt in large U-boat groups called wolf packs. A significant key to the eventual Allied victory at sea was that the Allies had the advantage of being able to track the movement of the German submarines through intercepted German cables. Early in the war Britain had acquired a copy of the top-secret German coding device known as Enigma. Classified under the code name ULTRA, the Allies gained an invaluable advantage from this intelligence throughout the war.[16] The Germans sank a record amount of Allied shipping during 1942, but with improved tactics this amount dropped dramatically in 1943 as U-boat casualties rose. By the end of the war, service on a German U-boat became a virtual death sentence as Allied sinkings increased. Overall, 68% of the U-boats put into service during the war were sunk.

Prior to 1942, Britain had experienced her only victories in the North African desert. British, German, and Italian armies had pushed each other back and forth across the desert in 1940-1941. In early 1941, the British had driven the Germans and Italians far back into Libya, capturing Tobruk and Benghazi. This had prompted Hitler to dispatch General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Corps to halt the British advance. Rommel did more than stop the British. In three months he won back nearly all that the British had gained before running out of supplies. In November, the British counterattack, under General Auchinleck, pushed the Germans back, relieved the siege of Tobruk, and recaptured Benghazi for the second time in the year.

Desert warfare presented special problems for the combatants. The most obvious was the lack of water. Men were limited to one cup per day for washing. In addition to the lack of water, flies and dysentery plagued the men of both sides. Sandstorms made fighting impossible at times, and men were required to carry their compasses with them to the latrines, so that they could find their way back to their tents during a sandstorm. Land mines also presented a deadly hazard for the soldiers of the desert. Easily buried and concealed, they were detected only by the tedious prodding of bayonets. Despite the difficulties, the desert was ideal for tank warfare as there were few obstacles to obstruct the movement of the armies.

Rommel began a second massive attack on British positions in January of 1942. Repeatedly outflanking British defenses, he once again drove toward the Suez Canal. In June, once again Tobruk again changed hands:

For the British it was utter, humiliating defeat. Tobruk, the same battle-scarred port that last year held out for eight months against the Axis besiegers, succumbed to one day's attack. Tobruk fell quickly, squashily, to the planes, tanks, and guns of Germany's Erwin Rommel. The Axis announced that it took 28,000 Allied prisoners in the garrison, including “several generals.”

Rommel apparently let the British exhaust themselves winning their victories, then threw in his reserves to take the real victory. Moreover, he changed the pattern of desert warfare by stepping up the role of artillery. Before Tobruk's fall, when the British, confident of equal armor and equal or greater air strength, attacked Rommel's line south of the port, the German surprised them with a massive assembly of 88-mm. anti-tank guns and the British tanks took a dismal mauling—suffering losses which were at least partially responsible for the British defeat.[17]

After the fall of Tobruk, Auchinleck then fired his deputy, General Ritchie, and took personal command of the British defenses. His forces finally stopped Rommel 150 miles short of the canal in July at El Alamein. More than anything else, geography foiled Rommel. The success of the Afrika Corps had always been its speed and ability to outflank its opponents. In the desert there were few natural obstacles to inhibit wide thrusts around the enemy’s defenses. At El Alamein it was different. To the north was the Mediterranean Sea and forty miles to the south stood the Qattara Depression, a mass of salt marshes and quicksand impassable to tanks. Here there was no exposed flank for Rommel to exploit.

Rommel pounded the British Eighth Army’s defenses in early July, but was unable to break through. For three months the armies sat deadlocked. In August the British replaced Auchinleck with General Bernard Montgomery. After blunting another German attack, Montgomery began to prepare a counteroffensive for the fall code-named “Operation Lightfoot:”

“We are preparing now for the next round,” So spoke Lieut. General Bernard Law Montgomery, field chief of General Sir Harold Alexander.

“We did not advance into Egypt merely to be thrown out again.” So spoke Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

There were incidents to bear out the interpretation that the British had become offensive-minded, Rommel defensive. The British advanced. In a short, fierce infantry attack they nipped off a small wedge which Rommel was holding near the center of the El Alamein line. This was Montgomery's first round. His troops were ready. Their victory a month ago, when they hurled Rommel back, hurt and bloody, had bucked up the sick, sore, tired Imperials. The Eighth Army wanted to get moving.[18]

Using information from Ultra, the British were able to destroy much of the Afrika Corps’ supplies as they crossed the Mediterranean, reducing Rommel’s gasoline supplies to one week’s supply. Lightfoot began on October 23 and, after twelve days of pounding, Montgomery broke through Rommel’s defenses. Once again the armies raced across the desert retracing ground that had been fought for and captured several times over. This time, however, strategic points changed hands for the last time. Tobruk fell to Montgomery (the fifth and last time it would be passed by one of the armies during the war) on November 13, and Benghazi a week later. Unlike earlier campaigns, Montgomery was not forced to halt from a lack of supplies. The Afrika Corps was now in full-scale retreat as the Eighth Army pressed onwards toward Tripoli. The British victory in the Battle of El Alamein was the turning point in the desert and the greatest British victory of the war.

By the late fall, Montgomery’s army was not the lone Allied force in North Africa. A joint British-American force under U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in French North Africa on November 8, 1942. Within a week the Americans had captured Casablanca and Algiers. Now Rommel was trapped between two Allied armies bearing down on him.

Stalingrad

· Describe the success of Germany’s 1941 Russian campaign.

· Explain the German plans for 1942.

· Explain the factors that led to the German defeat at Stalingrad. Why was this the key turning point of the war?

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union unleashed greater suffering than any other military engagement in history. At least three million Soviets had died in the first year of the invasion. In several areas, most notably the Baltic Republics and the Ukraine, the Nazis had been initially greeted as liberators from communism and given the traditional gifts of bread and salt (it was these areas that most enthusiastically supported the Nazi atrocities against the Jews). Nazi racial policies soon destroyed this goodwill. Urged to fight ruthlessly against Slavic “Untermenschen” (sub-humans), the Nazis brutally attempted to wipe out all resistance, executing intellectuals, communist officials, and suspected partisans. All natives were to be exterminated or reduced to slave laborers. When resistance occurred, brutal reprisals ensued as villages were burned and civilians slaughtered. Hitler’s campaign gave Stalin the opportunity to wrap himself in the flag of Russian patriotism. He replaced appeals based on communist ideology with those appealing to Russian nationalism. For the first and perhaps the only time, the Communist Party and the Soviet people were truly united in a joint enterprise.

The 1942 German offensive on the eastern front was to be concentrated in the south. The Nazis hoped to drive east to the Volga River, capture the city of Stalingrad, and cut off the Caucasus Region from the rest of the USSR. By capturing the Caucasuses the Germans would cut-off 2/3 of the Soviet oil supplies. The German attack began in late June and at first it appeared to be a repeat of the rapid German advances of the previous summer. Soviet armies disappeared in the face of the German assault. In early July, Sevastopol in the Crimea was captured. Hitler then altered his plans. Instead of driving east to Stalingrad to totally cut off the Soviet armies in the Caucasuses, he diverted the bulk of his forces south to capture the oil fields. The city of Rostov, gateway to the Caucasuses, was captured on July 23, but most of the Soviet armies were able to escape eastward. When the Germans arrived at the oil fields they either found them aflame or with their machinery so dismantled that they were useless to the invaders.

Stripped of many of its men and supplies, the German Sixth Army, commanded by General Friedrich von Paulus, still reached the western banks of the Volga outside of Stalingrad in late August. Here Stalin decided to stand. Stalingrad was a key Soviet industrial center and beyond the city lay little to stop the German armies. The Soviets had already lost a quarter of a million troops in the German offensive, but resistance stiffened on the Volga. Soviet citizens were not evacuated as Stalin was convinced that his soldiers would fight harder for a living city than for a deserted one. The Soviet commander moved his troops as close to the German front lines as possible to deny the Germans the ability to use their air force to bomb the front. Throughout the fall, the two armies fought hand to hand in a grim dance of death. For the Nazis, progress was made building by building. German losses ran at 20,000 per week and von Paulus stripped his flanks to pour more and more of his forces into the center of the Soviet defenses. On November 8, Hitler proclaimed that Stalingrad had been taken, but the reality was far different. Stalin sent General Zhukov, the hero of the defense of Moscow the previous year, to mount a counter offensive against the German invasion. Throughout the summer and early fall the Soviets had been reinforcing their armies as a hundred fresh divisions and five tank armies of 700 tanks apiece were moved to the front. Instead of attacking the Sixth Army head on, Zhukov concentrated his forces north and south of the Nazis. Here at its flanks the German army was weakest. On November 19, the Russian counterattack began:

As the attack started from the south, Soviet troops north of Stalingrad also launched an assault, moving in a great arc toward Serafimovich. From Serafimovich prongs spread out like the curving tines of a peasant's pitchfork. In Stalingrad itself the 13th Division began to bend the stubborn German head backward.

Inside the contracting area the battle became a melee. Distracted Axis troops faced in all directions at once. Panzer divisions dug in, using their tanks as pillboxes. Across the steppes galloped Cossacks in their black capes. Around gutted villages roared Russian tanks, swift motor-borne Siberian infantry.

Axis troops in suddenly hopeless positions gave up. Across the steppes plodded long lines of Axis prisoners hobbling to Russian bases, some to have frozen limbs amputated, stumbling toward the Volga in a Drang nach Osten (march to the east) such as der Fuhrer never pictured. According to Moscow communiqués, 66,000 were seized in ten days of fighting.[19]

Hammering at von Paulus’s flanks, which were defended by Romanians, the Soviets broke through. Five days later the two Soviet pincer movements met near Kalach thirty miles behind the main German forces. Trapped, von Paulus asked permission to breakout. Hitler refused and ordered the Sixth Army to hold its ground and promised to resupply them by air. Although the Germans were able to airlift up to 120 tons a day, von Paulus’s 250,000 men were still trapped in a pocket forty miles wide and thirty miles deep. During December and January the Soviets pressed their advantage. Starving and without supplies, von Paulus asked permission to surrender. Hitler refused, instead promoting him to field marshal, reminding him that no German field marshal had ever been captured alive. It was futile. On February 2, 1943, the Sixth Army surrendered.

The German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad was the largest of the war. 150,000 Germans had died. The Soviets took almost 100,000 prisoners, including 24 German generals. In addition, a quarter of the German army’s total supplies were lost. Previous German brutality was replayed in kind as half of the German prisoners died within weeks (Only 6,000 survived to return to Germany). Never again would the Nazis dictate the offensive in the east.

The Soviet Counterattack

· Describe the Battle of Kursk.

· Why did the Soviets have the upper hand on the eastern front by 1943?

Before the winter fighting on the eastern front ended in March 1943, the Germans had been forced to abandon their conquests in the Caucasuses. To the north, the Germans had been pushed back to Kursk where their 1942 summer offensive had begun. The Soviet advance toward Kursk had, however, created a liability. A Soviet salient (protruding area) had developed 100 miles deep and 150 miles wide. Determined to reverse his fortunes, Hitler ordered his generals to attack the salient. “The victory at Kursk,” Hitler said, “must shine like a beacon to the world.” A German victory could reopen the road to Moscow.

On July 4, 1943 the Germans, using newly developed tanks, struck at the Kursk salient. Hitler committed more than 1,000 planes against the Red Army's enormous concentration of troops, artillery pieces, and tanks. The Battle of Kursk developed into the largest armor battle ever fought. More than 4,000 tanks were engaged on the Russian steppe. But unlike the first two years of the Soviet-German war, the Soviets now held the advantage in both men and machinery. On July 12 the Soviets, favored by a seemingly endless supply of troops and tanks, moved in fresh divisions, and the advantage finally swung to the Russians. The Germans, having lost 70,000 men, half their tanks, and more than 1,000 planes, were forced to withdraw. In the war's greatest tank battle, the Russians had fought the Germans to a standstill. Hitler finally called off the offensive because the Americans and British had landed in Sicily, and he needed to transfer divisions to Italy. With this action, the strategic initiative in the east passed to the Soviet forces permanently.

By 1943, Soviet industry was giving the Red Army the tools to smash the German invaders. Factories were producing 24,000 tanks and 9,000 planes per month. By the fall, Russian troops outnumbered the Germans 2:1 and had a 3:1 advantage in tanks. After Kursk the Germans were in retreat. As they retreated, the Soviets launched a new offensive northward toward Orel, which they captured on Aug. 4, 1943. Smolensk was recaptured on September 25, and Kiev was liberated in early November.

The Soviet advance halted temporarily as winter set in, but once the roads and waterways were firmly frozen, an enormous Soviet offensive began along the entire eastern front. In mid-January 1944, the 900-day siege of Leningrad was relieved after Soviet troops reestablished land communications with the city. Since September 1941, the people of Leningrad had withstood German artillery and air bombardment. More than 200,000 of them had been killed in the siege and more than half million more died from cold, starvation, and exhaustion.

By the spring of 1944, the Soviets had driven close to their 1939 border with Poland. The Nazi invasion had failed. Although events in the west and the long-awaited D-Day invasion would overshadow the Soviet advance, there can be little doubt that Germany’s hopes of victory were smashed on the eastern front. Of the 675 German divisions mobilized during the war, 500 were defeated in combat with the Soviets.[20]

Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The Sycamore School, 1996. Revised 2001.

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[1] Kuhn was eventually convicted of embezzling the group’s funds in 1939. The organization collapsed after the U.S. entered the war in 1941.

[2] An excellent description of American internal division over intervention is contained in William Manchester The Glory and the Dream (Boston: Little Brown, 1973) pp. 246-287.

[3] Manchester The Glory and the Dream, p. 278.

[4] Franklin D. Roosevelt Fireside Chats (New York: Penguin Books, 1995) pp. 57-63.

[5] American historian Barbara Tuchman offers a detailed analysis of the Japanese decision-making process in The March of Folly (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), pp. 29-32.

[6] Mark Arnold-Forster The World At War (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), p. 158-159.

[7] Time 15 December 1941.

[8] Tuchman, The March of Folly, pp. 31-32.

^[9]Excerpted from Compton's Encyclopedia of American History. Compton's NewMedia, Inc., 1994.

[10] Quoted in Arnold-Forester The World at War, pp. 163-164.

[11] Time 18 May 1942.

[12] Time 18 May 1942.

[13] Time 16 March 1942.

[14] Time 6 April 1942.

[15] Time 2 November 1942.

[16] By 1943, Britain employed 6,000 people to decode German messages.

[17] Time 29 June 1942.

[18] Time 12 October 1942.

[19] Time 7 December 1942.

[20] Parts of this section have been adapted from Compton’s Encyclopedia of American History, Compton’s New Media Inc., 1994.