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In August 1945, the US military used two atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Intended to show Allied military dominance and the futility of a continued war effort by the Japanese, the bombings leveled large parts of the cities and killed more than one hundred thousand people, military and civilian alike. By this time, US air raids had been dropping firebombs throughout much of Japan for months, and intense ground fighting was going on in parts of the Pacific. US leaders realized that defeating Japan would require immense human and economic resources from countries already exhausted by years of war. They hoped to use the devastating force of newly developed atomic weapons to force a rapid end to the war and avoid a lengthy invasion of Japan. Part of the process for achieving this aim, as described in this excerpt, was finding bombing targets that were both strategic and accessible.

In 1944, many communications passed among US and Allied officials and leaders of the Jewish community in Europe. These communications debated how to respond to the systemized extermination of European Jews in Nazi death camps. On June 26, 1944, Major General Thomas T. Handy, then US Army assistant chief of staff, issued a cable in which he advised the army's Civil Affairs Division (CAD) how to respond to requests that the Allies bomb Nazi rail lines from concentration camps in Hungary to death camps in Poland. In his cable, Handy scripts a message to be delivered to Henry Morgenthau, chair of the War Refugee Board. Handy's message declines action against the rail lines.

In the early years of World War II, before the United States formally entered the conflict, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had an unofficial policy of assisting Great Britain and the other nations fighting the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. This agreement prompted the establishment of a “shoot on sight” policy announced by Roosevelt on September 11, 1941.

When World War II began in Europe in 1939, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt realized that the United States had no agencies to handle propaganda. Such agencies would become necessary if the nation were to enter the war. To prepare for this eventuality, the president established several such agencies, as well as an office of censorship, a necessity in wartime, to suppress opposing views against the war effort. When war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt immediately mobilized for U.S. involvement in the European conflict as well. The president was a master propagandist, with considerable rhetorical skills, who realized that his mission as a wartime leader was to use those skills to provide leadership.

In September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, finally provoking Great Britain and France to declare war. Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany since 1933, had engaged in a series of aggressive actions, including the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s Italian ally, had invaded Ethiopia in 1935-1936. Both Hitler and Mussolini contributed significant weaponry and armed forces to Francisco Franco’s fascist takeover of Spain from 1936 to 1939. Japan, allied with Germany and Italy, had begun its invasion and occupation of large parts of China in 1937. Confronted with this alarming spread of militarism and fascism, President Roosevelt nevertheless proceeded cautiously, well aware that Americans wished to avoid involvement in another world war. Nonetheless, he was intent on aiding Great Britain and France—and later the Soviet Union when Germany invaded it in June, 1941.

The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 13, 1943, the two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth. Construction had begun in December of 1938. Since the dedication of the memorial took place during the midst of World War II, extensive security was in place for the event. Members of the Secret Service as well as military and local police lined the route taken by the president to the dedication site. In his dedication address, the president referred to the memorial as “a shrine of freedom” and made frequent references to the war currently being waged to preserve freedom. The large, nineteen-foot statue of Jefferson by sculptor Rudulph Evans, planned for the interior of the memorial, was originally cast in plaster and painted with bronze-colored paint. The final bronze version was not put in place until 1947, two years after the war ended.

Japan’s invasion of China began with an incident near Beijing in July, 1937. This was the beginning of a long-lasting conflict between Japan and China, the second Sino-Japanese War, although both counties did not declare the war until December, 1941. Japan soon occupied Shanghai, and this expansion became a great concern for countries of the West, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

In June, 1940, German forces overran France. U.S. industrial mobilization became necessary when large British orders for military supplies were received. European events also aided the Roosevelt administration in passing a number of military appropriations bills. Although more money was becoming available for war production, U.S. industry was reluctant to exploit this market. Conditioned by the static economic situation of the Depression, many capitalists expected such conditions to return after the war.

On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the governments of Germany and Italy issued declarations of war against the United States of America. Although both the Germans and the Italians had pledged Japan their aid in the event of a conflict between Japan and the United States, their declarations cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anti-Axis attitude and hostile U.S. actions as reasons for their decision to declare war. In response, Congress passed two joint resolutions affirming a state of war against Germany and Italy. With these events, the war in Europe and the war in the Far East merged to become World War II.

In September 1939, the rising threat against American allies in Europe and China prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rethink the perceived benefits of the so-called Neutrality Acts passed earlier in the decade. Roosevelt concluded that the language contained in the acts failed to distinguish between the aggressors and the victims of the aggressors in conflicts such as the one that was developing. Such vagueness, he argued, gave a passive form of aid to aggressors such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito. Therefore, Roosevelt delivered a message to a joint session of Congress, calling for the repeal of the Neutrality Acts and replacing them with a return to the much clearer tenets of international law. Such a move, he argued, would better position the United States and others to address the threats at hand and promote peace in the European and Pacific theaters.

In February 1942, during the opening months of America's involvement in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which specified that any persons or group of people that might be considered likely to commit acts of espionage could be relocated out of sensitive areas, mostly along the West Coast of the United States. Though general in wording, those who pushed for the order, such as General John L. DeWitt, were specific in their intent: the removal of all people from Japan or of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and their placement into internment camps for the duration of the war. By May 1942, the facilities were ready and the evacuation orders went up, giving the entire Japanese American community a few days in which to wrap up their affairs and report for relocation to internment camps, which were scattered across some of the most desolate areas of the American West.

This speech was given at the University of California at Berkeley by its vice president and provost, Dr. Monroe E. Deutsch. In January 1942, college campuses across the nation were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor the month before. The United States was at war with Japan, Germany, and their allies, and men of college age were aware that they could be called up to go to war at any moment. Many men and women had already left college to join the military or pursue other employment. In this speech, Deutsch encouraged students at the University of California not only to be ready to serve their country, but also to see their contributions to the nation broadly and not strictly in terms of soldiering and warfare. The nation would be unprepared for peace and democracy, he argued, if all of the energy of the nation were turned to war. He encouraged his students to take advantage of every opportunity they had to profit from their time at college, however long that would be.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered this speech to the American people as one of his fireside chats, which were relatively informal radio addresses intended to encourage Americans to feel as though the president was talking to them as a friend. The official name of this speech is “On Our National Economic Policy,” but it later became known as “A Call for Sacrifice” because it addressed the need of the American people to consider the widespread sacrifices they must make in order to win the war. Although the purpose of this speech was to discuss the economic situation in the United States, Roosevelt also gave a summary of the war abroad and shared his concerns about new leadership in Vichy France. The speech ended with stories of American heroism on the battlefield, a reminder to the listening public of why they should sacrifice to support the war effort.

During the 1930s, relations between Japan and the United States deteriorated dramatically, as the military became an increasingly dominant force in shaping Japan's expansionist foreign policy. As Japan invaded Manchuria in China and expanded into the Pacific, the United States, along with the rest of the world, became increasingly concerned. In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations over international criticism of its actions. The militarism of the expanding Japanese Empire and the growing likelihood of war between Japan and the United States caused fear among some Americans that Japanese Americans, who had been a significant presence in both the Hawaiian Islands and California since the 1870s, might be more loyal to Japan than to their adopted nation. In an effort to demonstrate the loyalty of the Japanese American population, Mike Masaoka (1915–1991), a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and national secretary and field executive of the Japanese American Citizens League, wrote the Japanese American Creed, which was read before the US Senate on May 9, 1941.

Bernadotte Everly Schmitt was a Pulitzer Prize–winning professor at the University of Chicago when he gave this speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Schmitt had been an advocate of assigning Germany responsibility for World War I and had written a strong denouncement of Germany's militaristic culture. In the years after World War I, historians debated whether Germany was solely responsible for the war or whether other nations had been equally culpable. Revisionist historians blamed international empire-building and militarism, as well as a deeply flawed tangle of alliances, for starting the war. Schmitt was best known for his firm belief in Germany's guilt, and when World War II broke out, he considered this proof of a deep-seated cultural propensity among the Germans to militarism, barbarity, and totalitarianism. In this speech, Schmitt urges an overwhelming military defeat of Germany along with drastic restrictions on its ability to make war in the future. Only by making Germany pay dearly for starting two world wars would its culture of militarism be changed, he believed.

US secretary of state Cordell Hull delivered this speech on all US radio networks on July 23, 1942, just weeks after the New York Times reported on the systematic mass murder of Jews in gas chambers at Chelmno, an extermination camp in Poland. The report was so shocking that at first many assumed the number of murdered Jews—seven hundred thousand—had been exaggerated or included those who had died of other causes. Though the murder of European Jews had been carried out fairly openly since the beginning of the war, the scale and nature of the killings—the systematic, state-supported murder of civilians—had not been widely known or reported. Hull's speech was one of many to look ahead to the world after the war and to advocate for international recognition, and protection, of human rights. All previous peacekeeping efforts had failed, he stated, and the world needed to ensure that once the brutal conflict was over, it would not be able to happen again. Winning the war was the most immediate concern, but for Hull and many others, the struggle was not between warring nations, but between good and evil, freedom and slavery. Though both German and Japanese leaders would be tried for crimes against humanity after the war, the Nazis' systematic slaughter of the Jews remains one of the most egregious violations of human rights in history.

Delivered one year after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II, professor Nick Aaron Ford's speech served as a ringing answer to a question he posed, “What are Negroes fighting for?” Ford acknowledged the racial discrimination inherent in US politics and society, but argued that the patriotism of African Americans was so great that they were willing to fight to the death to protect the democratic freedoms and ideals that their nation asserted as its purpose. The United States, Ford contended, was flawed but its laws sought equality, while its German and Japanese enemies stood against the personal liberties in which African Americans deeply believed. According to Ford's arguments, African Americans were willing to fight against racism because it was wrong, even if the nation they were fighting on behalf of was itself struggling to find its way toward ending racism within its own borders.

On December 11, four days after the attack by the Japanese on US naval installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and three days after the United States declared war on Japan, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States. Though he was bound by the terms of the Tripartite Pact of 1940 to defend Japan if the country was attacked, Hitler was not obligated to join in an attack. He believed, however, that Japan would reward his loyalty by coming to his aid in the Soviet Union, where the German army was hopelessly bogged down outside of Moscow. He also had a deep abiding hatred for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had provided material support to Great Britain and the Soviet Union against Germany while remaining nominally neutral. In addition, the US Navy hunted down and destroyed German U-boats that had attacked US ships providing support to the Allies. Hitler believed that Japan could cripple the United States fairly quickly and then together they would destroy Russia. This declaration of war turned the focus of American military attention to the defeat of Germany and gave Great Britain a much-needed ally in its fight against Germany.

Wendell Willkie addressed the annual dinner of the United States Conference of Mayors just over a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Willkie, a former Republican presidential candidate who had opposed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term in 1940, had become a surprise supporter of Roosevelt's war policy. Willkie was an early supporter of the idea of a draft to increase military preparedness, but during the 1940 campaign, when Roosevelt actually instituted one and the isolationist wing of the Republican Party objected, Willkie changed his position. However, after losing the election, Willkie joined his former rival in campaigning for increased material support to Great Britain and against isolationism. In the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Willkie was one of the strongest advocates of large-scale mobilization, arguing that the greatest victory for democracy would be to win on the battlefield.

After World War II began in Europe with Germany’s occupation of Poland in September, 1939, the U.S. government declared its neutrality, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that while the United States could be neutral in deed, it could not be neutral in thought. Washington was clearly on the side of the Allies—England and France—and opposed to Nazi Germany. The country was even more concerned with Japan, which had been at war in China since 1937. The war had a major impact on the American economy. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace believed that American farmers would suffer, but profits from business began to increase almost immediately.

At the beginning of World War II, the United States pursued a policy of neutrality in the conflict between Nazi Germany and the West. However, on November 4, 1939, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration passed the Neutrality Act of 1939, allowing the United States to carry out arms trades with nations at war on a cash-and-carry basis. This legislation favored trade with Great Britain and France in the war in Europe. As a result, German surface raiders attacked and sank British cargo ships transporting war goods from the United States to Britain. Throughout the early stages of the war, German attacks disrupted the vital supply lines to a point where, after the German invasion of France in May, 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill informed Roosevelt of the British need for American assistance in the war effort. He told Roosevelt that the immediate needs of Britain included a loan of forty to fifty old naval destroyers to provide protection for British ships crossing the Atlantic. Roosevelt appreciated Britain’s situation but had to consider American security in the Atlantic first, as well as congressional opposition from isolationists.

Aware of the importance of an army’s morale in the success of military missions, General George C. Marshall commissioned Samuel A. Stouffer and his associates to study factors influencing the commitment of American soldiers in World War II. Using written questionnaires, intensive interviews, and such behavioral outcomes as the numbers of promotions and soldiers absent without leave (AWOL), Stouffer and his associates studied how morale varied with the individual soldier’s background (such factors as race, education, and age), branch of the service, military assignment, length of time in the armed services, and the duration of exposure to combat. As a result of these studies, the military learned a great deal about what motivated commitment in its citizen army.

The Italian-American Internment refers to a time during World War II when Italian citizens in the United States were forced to live in internment camps. More than 3,000 Italian citizens were imprisoned in these camps and another 600,000 were forced to register as "enemy aliens."

Great Britain, being an island nation, has always depended on seafaring not only for its commerce but also its very survival. In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II, Adolf Hitler, mindful of the critical role played by German submarines in harassing British shipping during World War I, focused the Reichsmarine’s attention on the production of new submarines. Although German submarine production had been specifically forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles , Hitler managed to subvert the treaty by having German-manufactured submarine parts shipped to the Netherlands (ostensibly for sale there) and then covertly reshipped to Germany, where the parts were stockpiled until needed in warehouses of the Deutsche Werke engineering firm in Kiel. Likewise, crews for the new submarines were covertly trained at the Ubootsabwehrschule (antisubmarine warfare school), also located in Kiel.

Japan bashing, or extremely negative criticism of Japan and its people, occurred a number of times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often creating problems for Japanese Americans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, dislike for the Japanese eventually led to anti-Japanese land and immigration laws on the West Coast. During World War II, the Japanese were vilified as purveyors of international destruction. This distrust, combined with other factors, resulted in Japanese Americans being confined to internment camps for most of the war. In the 1970s and 1980s, in response to higher gasoline prices, Americans began to buy fuel-efficient compact cars made in Japan, causing a decline in the demand for large American cars and a subsequent decline in the US automobile industry. Many autoworkers lost their jobs, and resentment against the Japanese grew. In 1982, two Detroit men, one of whom was a laid-off autoworker, bludgeoned to death Vincent Chin, a Chinese American whom they mistakenly believed was Japanese.

At the end of World War I (1914-1918), there was no longer a balance of power in Europe. Britain and France had been physically devastated and were close to financial bankruptcy; Germany had been defeated and disarmed; Russia, by then the Soviet Union, had been excluded as a result of the Russian Revolution (1917-1921) and the spread of Communism. The United States had withdrawn from European affairs, devoting its attention to the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and leaving Britain and France as the only real powers in an unstable political and military system. France decided to strengthen its border defenses, known as the Maginot line, using the Treaty of Versailles (1919) to prevent the rearmament of Germany and entering into a series of security alliances. Great Britain, perceiving no serious threat, returned to the advancement of its imperial interests, relying upon its navy for defense. Although both Britain and France belonged to the League of Nations created at the end of World War I, neither saw this organization as a credible deterrent to war.

On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the governments of Germany and Italy issued declarations of war against the United States. Although both the Germans and the Italians had pledged Japan their aid in the event of a conflict between Japan and the United States, their declarations cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anti-Axis attitude and hostile U.S. actions as reasons for their decision to declare war. In response, the U.S. Congress passed two joint resolutions affirming a state of war against Germany and Italy. With these events, the war in Europe and the war in the Far East merged to become World War II.

During the first half of 1942, the Japanese achieved spectacular expansion and the Allies were in desperate straits in all theaters of World War II. The global strategic priority was Germany first, so Pacific resources were scarce. The Guadalcanal and larger Solomon Islands campaigns were fought under these challenging circumstances, and the Allied situation was reversed.

Throughout the 1930’s, a series of Japanese expansionist moves on the Asian continent created tension between Japan and the United States. In 1937, full-scale war broke out between Japan and China. The American government opposed Japan’s attempt to dominate China and was uneasy because of the Asian power’s increasingly close alliance with Nazi Germany. From mid-1941, the United States introduced a number of sanctions against Japan, including an oil embargo. Facing a quagmire-like conflict in China and an increasingly serious lack of strategic resources, the Japanese leadership decided to act.

In June, 1940, German forces overran France, and the British military placed large orders for military supplies from the United States. These orders helped spur U.S. industrial mobilization, but events in Europe also aided President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in passing a number of military appropriations bills. Although more money was becoming available for wartime production, U.S. industry was reluctant to exploit this market. Conditioned by the static economic situation of the Depression, many capitalists expected such conditions to return after the war.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was the US ambassador to Great Britain from 1938 through 1940. The first Irish American to serve in this capacity, he enjoyed the company of the British upper class, many of whom advocated a policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler's Germany. Kennedy believed compromise was possible with Germany, and that Jewish interests were driving the United States into war. As late as 1940, Kennedy attempted to meet and reason with Hitler, while his comments about the difficulties Great Britain faced in its efforts to defeat Germany made him extremely unpopular with the British and US governments. Amid a storm of criticism, Kennedy officially resigned in November of 1940. In this radio address, given upon his return to the United States in January of 1941, Kennedy explained why he believed that the United States should stay out of World War II. Although he was widely seen as a defeatist, the majority of Americans still opposed entering the war, and he appealed to them to support providing supplies to Great Britain—but only when it served US interests—and avoiding entering the war directly at almost any cost.

In the spring of 1940, Congress began debate over dramatically increasing, through compulsory service, the size of the American military. Time and Life editor Henry Luce, in a CBS radio broadcast, argued that it was time for the United States to acknowledge that the war in Europe represented a threat to the United States as well. If Americans valued their way of life, he advised, they should shed the country's declared neutrality and join the war against Nazi Germany, either by supporting Great Britain and other allies with supplies and aid or by getting directly involved. He commended those leaders who had already recognized the threat and spoken out in favor of joining in the war effort, and invited others—regardless of their political ideologies—to unify in the face of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler's belligerence.

In September 1939, the rising threat against American allies in Europe and China prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rethink the perceived benefits of the Neutrality Acts of the early to mid-1930s. Roosevelt concluded that the language contained in the acts failed to distinguish between the aggressors and the victims of aggression in situations like the developing conflict. Such vagueness, he argued, gave a passive form of aid to aggressors such as Germany's Adolf Hitler, Italy's Benito Mussolini, and Japan's Hirohito. Roosevelt, therefore, delivered a message to a joint session of Congress in which he called for the Neutrality Acts to be repealed in favor of the much clearer tenets of international law. Such a move, he argued, would better position the United States and others to address the threats at hand and promote peace in the European and Pacific theaters of conflict.

The continuing advance of Nazi Germany by the end of the 1930s prompted declarations of war across Europe. Although the United States was not yet directly threatened by Adolf Hitler's campaign, Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued in 1940 that there existed a “war emergency” that warranted American preparation. Speaking in Congress before the House Military Affairs Committee, Stimson argued that the best course of action was to raise a military force through compulsory service rather than a voluntary system. Time was of the essence, he warned: Great Britain, the last viable US military ally to remain unconquered by Germany, was not far from collapse. If Britain were to fall, Germany would control the Atlantic Ocean, while its ally Japan would control the Pacific. War, he said, was coming to North America, and the Axis would defeat America as it did Europe unless a suitable military force was formed in time to stop it.

In 1940, concerns that the growing war in Europe would eventually spread across the Atlantic prompted Congress to consider a bill that would raise a suitable military force via selective compulsory service. Dr. Harry Fosdick, pastor of the Riverside Church in Manhattan, addressed radio listeners in August to call for more thorough consideration of the bill, citing the haste with which it was being rushed through Congress. Absent a formal declaration of war, Fosdick said, the United States should not hastily draft citizens into the military. Fosdick strongly criticized comments from the Roosevelt administration that compulsory service was the most democratic and efficient manner by which to address the growing European crisis.

In the summer of 1940, recognizing the growing military threat from Germany, Congress passed a compulsory military service law. Signing the bill into law, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation outlining the new law's provisions. Upon receiving notification, every able-bodied male citizen would report to a designated location for duty, a system that Roosevelt argued was equitable and democratic. The purpose of the new law, Roosevelt said, was to prepare the nation for war in the event that it spilled from Europe across the Atlantic, threatening the United States. Once that threat had abated, Roosevelt said, American soldiers would return to their jobs and private lives.

With Adolf Hitler continuing his Nazi advance across Europe and threatening to topple Britain, Senator James F. Byrnes, a Democrat from South Carolina, took to the airwaves to join the debate over America's potential involvement in the war. Byrnes said that Britain stood on the brink of collapse at the hands of Germany. If defeat were to occur there, he said, the United States would be the last defender of democracy and an almost certain target for Hitler. He advocated a bill providing aid to Britain, arguing that this bill would help that nation continue its fight against Germany and keep the war in Europe. If England were to fall, he said, war would be upon the United States, whether its citizens wished it or not.

On December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's surprise attack on the United States naval installation at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress at 12:30 P.M. to report the events of the attack and request a declaration of war against Japan. The nation held its breath as citizens everywhere listened to the president's words over the radio. Retiring to their separate chambers, the two houses of Congress acted with unprecedented speed. The Senate adopted the war resolution at 1:00 P.M. and the House of Representatives approved it only ten minutes later. The document was signed by the president at 4:10 P.M.

The Tokyo Rose trial, one of only seven American treason trials following World War II, ended on September 29, 1949, with a verdict of guilty.

Charles A. Beard frames his indictment of Roosevelt in three parts: appearances, unveiling realities, and realities as described by the Pearl Harbor documents. He stresses Roosevelt’s pledge to the American people that troops were not going to be sent into foreign wars, but the United States would provide material aid to nations under attack. Thus, in his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941, Roosevelt announced a plan to send large quantities of munitions and supplies to the Allies. The resulting Lend-Lease program became the subject of great debate in Congress, with remarks by Senator Pat McCarran, a Democrat from Nevada, and Senator Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, typical of the bipartisan criticism that the program inflated the president’s power and would move America toward war.

On the morning of September 9, 1942, the Japanese submarine I-25 surfaced off the coast of Oregon to launch a collapsible Yokosuka E14Y floatplane using a catapult. Up until this time, such planes (which American authorities called “Glens”) had been used only for reconnaissance, but Chief Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita had received approval to carry two 170-pound incendiary bombs on the tiny plane with the objective of starting forest fires.

By the summer of 1940, Great Britain was the major European opponent of Nazi Germany’s conquest of Europe. The Soviet Union was allied to Germany by the August, 1939, nonaggression pact between the two totalitarian states. The United States was officially neutral, bound by several neutrality acts that forbade the export of arms and ammunition to foreign nations engaged in war. That prohibition had been modified in 1939, after the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, to allow the sale of war materials on a “cash and carry” basis, but with the stipulation that such items could not be carried on American ships.

Restriction of civilian access to food and critical materials during World War II due to the needs of the armed forces and the demands of war production. During World War II, the conflicting needs of the American civilian population and its military forces and industries gave rise to various systems for apportioning goods between the two spheres. Rationing of food and critical materials began almost immediately after U.S. entry into the war in 1941, and it became one of the defining aspects of everyday life on the home front. Industries, which were as deeply affected by rationing as were individuals, sometimes discontinued the manufacture of consumer goods due to having insufficient access to needed materials. Shortages also led some businesses to embrace programs of self-rationing in order to spread their limited goods as far as possible in an equitable manner.

Late in the nineteenth century, Justice Stephen J. Field declared, “War seems to create or leave unresolved at least as many problems as it settles.” Issues are raised when a nation is at war that would never be raised during times of peace. World peace was shattered by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on December 7, 1941, thrust the United States into its second world war within twenty-five years.

Norman Mailer burst upon the American literary scene with the May, 1948, publication of his first book, The Naked and the Dead, a fictional account of an attack by American troops on a Japanese-held island during World War II. For eleven weeks, Mailer’s book held the top position on The New York Times best-seller list, and it sold nearly 200,000 copies during its first year.

The National War Labor Board (NWLB), created in 1942 to address labor-management issues in industry during World War II, was modeled closely on its World War I predecessor. The first NWLB was intended to maintain industrial production during the war and to prevent labor unrest. Composed of ten representatives, evenly divided between labor and management, the first NWLB pioneered significant advances in labor-management relations, most of which were lost after the organization’s dissolution.

In the three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Philippine Islands were the scene of desperate defenses led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright. When Manila and Cavite fell to the Japanese on January 2, 1942, the American and Filipino forces withdrew to the Bataan Peninsula, where they resisted a siege for three months. Bataan fell on April 19 and the defenders retreated to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay. Finally, on May 6 Wainwright surrendered Corregidor and its garrison of 11,500 .