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Of all the various ways that American participation in World War II contributed to Allied victory, the most critical, and in the end the most decisive, was American industrial productivity, and particularly shipbuilding. United States ship construction between 1941 and 1945 dramatically outstripped both its own allies and all of its foes combined. The United States was not only the "arsenal of democracy" (Franklin Roosevelt's phrase) but also the Allies' shipbuilder, and superiority in shipping is what allowed the Allies to win the Battle of the Atlantic, conduct the DDay invasion, and mount a simultaneous offensive in the Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably the greatest self-inflicted catastrophe in human history, the Second World War resulted in an estimated 60 million dead. Unprepared when the war began, the United States quickly gathered momentum to become the decisive economic power, with an unprecedented ability to project that power through the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. While in the European theater the Soviet Union emerged as the preeminent killing power among the Allies, the United States demonstrated logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic preponderance that produced much more than the Axis powers, all while committing a smaller proportion of the country's gross domestic product to the war than any other major belligerent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) alumni who served on the United States War Department General Staff during World War II. The author discusses the roles of officers General George Catlett Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the army, General Leonard "Gee" Gerow, who served as assistant chief of staff and chief of the War Plans Division (WPD), and General Thomas Handy, who served as assistant chief of staff and chief of the Operations Division (OPD).

The article reviews the exhibition "Uprooted: Japanese American Farm Labor Camps during World War II" held at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center at Valley Library in Oregon State University on October 9, 2017 to January 5, 2018, on Japanese American detainees during World War II.

During World War II, several hundred Chinese Mexicans traveled north to the United States to work as cooks for the Threlkeld Commissary Company in a special exception to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Using archival sources as well as memoirs, this article traces the Chinese Mexican contribution to the Mexican Track Labor Program and the ways in which these workers became purveyors of Mexican culinary traditions in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Europe during and after World War II in May 1945 to July 1946. It analyzes statistical summaries of investigations and charges against American soldiers in the European Theater of Operations. It also discusses the important implications of a higher rate of American crimes, such as rape, for historical interpretation of Wester Europe's cultural and social transition from war to recovery.

Recovery from the Great Depression began in March 1933, simultaneous to Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. However, the pace of that recovery between that date and the Second World War was extremely uneven with some dramatic starts and stops. Between March and July 1933, manufacturing production rose 78%, production of durable goods was up 199%, total industrial production rose 57%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 71%. Then the economy contracted sharply again beginning in August 1933–the July 1933 level of industrial production was not reached again until August 1935. This paper addresses two questions. What factors were responsible for bringing about the sharp recovery in the spring of 1933 and what factors brought this short-lived economic surge to an end? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the role of German Jewish immigrants, or émigrés, to the U.S. in fighting against German Nazism during World War II, with a particular focus on the German graduates of the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The role that German Jewish graduates of Camp Ritchie's role in postwar Germany, including in increasing Holocaust awareness, is discussed.

This article reviews the military duties of a number of U.S. geographers during World War II. It divides those duties into three kinds: spies, teachers, and occupiers. In each case, a specific form of geographical expertise was deployed--instrumental to achieving a particular military end. In particular, the article examines the roles of geographers: first, in the analysis of military intelligence at the Office of Strategic Services; second, in the provision of geographical courses for the university-based Civil Affairs Training School and the Army Specialized Training Program; and, finally, as agents of occupation in Japan once World War II ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) Aircrew College Detachment Training Program in Buffalo, New York during World War II in 1939-1945.

A case study is presented that examines the establishment of a preparedness group known as the Victory Corps at Austin High School (AHS) in Austin, Texas, during World War II, particularly concerning changes in Austin Independent School District (AISD) policies regarding race, class equity, and gender. It discusses the democratization of school-supported groups and resistance to social change.

The article discusses the history of American Jews and name changing in New York City during the World War II era from 1939 to 1945. It builds on various scholarly interpretations emphasizing the insidious nature of anti-Semitism, which may have encouraged the resistance less grounded in civil rights protests than in personal identity and bureaucracy, and the complicated responses of Jews.

The article discusses the role that the 1941 U.S. Lend-Lease Act played in U.S. assistance and repair of British Royal Navy warships at American shipyards in 1941, including the U.S. Navy's willingness to divert resources towards the repair of British warships. An overview of the impact that Great Britain's participation in World War II had on its inability to provide maintenance and repair to its own warships, including in regard to the impact of German bombing of British warship and merchant ships, is provided.

This article explores the activities of the United States Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM), a non-sectarian rescue organization that operated throughout World War II. USCOM managed to bring to the US a total of approximately 1,300 children--both Jewish and non-Jewish--in two separate operations: the first from Britain in 1940, and the second from concentration camps in southern France between 1941 and 1944. In its effort to find suitable host families for the children in the United States, the committee cooperated mainly with Jewish organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-contextualising the industrial evolution of transmedia storytelling—itself typically branded a product of contemporary media convergence—this article examines the industrial role of transmedia storytelling during a period of Classical Hollywood. Exploring the roles of licensing, corporate authorship and cross-industrial relations amidst the cultural context of the Second World War, the article draws on Superman and the expansions of the character’s storyworld across multiple media during the 1940s and 1950s to assess how the media of comics, radio, cinema and television can be recognised during this period as convergent industry platforms where transmedia narratives unfolded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A reprint of the article "War, Depression, and the Presidency, 1933-50," by Clinton Rossiter, which appeared in volume 17, number 4 of the journal in December 1950. The article discusses the U.S.'s Great Depression, World War II in the U.S. and American executive, or presidential, and emergency powers from 1933 through 1950. An overview of the relationship between the U.S. Congress and the president, including the constitutional nature of the relationship and Congress's relationship with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is provided.

The article discusses the artwork of Japanese American artist Miné Okubo, focusing on the use of her drawings of Japanese people by the business magazine "Fortune" during and after World War II. Other topics include information on Okubo's memoir "Citizen 13660," how the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II influenced Okubo's work, and the use of Okubo's drawings in "Fortune" as propaganda for postwar recovery in Asia.

A voluntary army's quality exceeds or falls below a drafted army's average quality depending on whether selection is advantageous or adverse. Using a collection of data sets that cover the majority of the US Army soldiers during World War II, we test for adverse selection into the army. Rather, we find advantageous selection: volunteers and drafted men showed no significant difference in fatalities, but volunteers earned distinguished awards at a higher rate than drafted men, particularly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Analyses at the level of units concur with our findings based on enlistment records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between U.S. media outlets and the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II, focusing on the efforts of the U.S. Naval Women's Reserve public relations officers to incorporate positive war messages in the media. Other topics include the development of a media booklet with themes and important dates, information on the messages used in mass-market publications, and how the messages varied depending on the perceived audience.

The article discusses war bond posters produced by the U.S. government during World War I and World War II and their significance in fundraising and national cohesion. It examines posters within the collection of the U.S. National Air and Space Museum, the varying themes of the posters by artists such as Howard Chandler Christy, Joseph Pennell, and Boris Artzybasheff.

The article discusses data compiled by the U.S. government and the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also examines the U.S. Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), war powers asserted by the administration of then-U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and research concerning the involvement of the U.S. agency the Census Bureau in the Japanese American internment program.

A case study is presented on the traveling art exhibition titled "Art of New Zealand" to museums in North America in 1941 sponsored by the philanthropic trust the Carnegie Corporation of New York, including in regard to the exhibition's cancellation. The role that the exhibition played in U.S. and New Zealand's relations at the beginning of World War II, including in regard developing cultural relations between the countries, is discussed. An overview of the Director of the Yale University Art Gallery Theodore "Tubby" Sizer's role in curating the exhibition is provided.

Thirty years ago Lichtenstein, Stone, Lynd, et al. accused the National War Labor Board (NWLB) of pursuing policies that crushed worker militancy during World War II, with dreadful long-term consequences. Critiquing that view in this article, Ronald Schatz offers a new interpretation. First, the board contributed to the production of goods essential to the war by mediating between unions and corporations, which in turn helped forestall a “labor draft.” Second, it trained a corps of capable arbitrators acceptable to both unions and management who went on to become the principal intermediaries in American industries for decades. Third, the board required corporations and unions to accept binding-arbitration clauses that over time tended to be more beneficial to workers and unions than to stockholders and management. Finally, the system constructed in 1942–45 served as a model when government and service workers organized in the 1960s. The article is based on close examination of meetings of the NWLB and the regional war labor boards as well as the background and perspective of George Taylor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The militarization of women during the Second World War, unprecedented in both quantitative and qualitative terms, has been accounted for variously, though unsatisfactorily, with regard to the impact on the warring nations' gender order. Using national variations in the accessibility of combat functions to women, the degree of pressure exerted on a given war-time society's gender order is explored by comparing Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which differ markedly regarding both the military exigencies placed upon them and the degree of female militarization adopted. The comparative perspective reveals differences in what dimensions are perceived as problematic in the relation of gender and combat and what are the conditions shaping this perception. Secondly, the conditions become apparent under which combat functions are made available to women, and thirdly, the long-term effects of the reconfiguration of the gender order under war-time conditions can be explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates World War II-era newsreels in order to understand how journalistic discourses create the means for understanding emerging technologies within the practice of journalism. The essay lays out a theoretical rationale influenced by Walter Benjamin for looking at how emerging technologies are understood through public discourse. The analysis looks at newsreels as a form of visual storytelling that presaged television news, and we argue that the wartime press provided a milieu for understanding how newsreels, as a journalistic medium, could be critiqued and understood as a storytelling form and how this form of critique played an important part in characterizing their content as journalistically valid. By focusing on issues of production and censorship alongside the aesthetic and technical aspects of the newsreels, the press created the terms by which newsreels could be judged, evaluated, and eventually integrated into the broader production of journalism. Our analysis shows that while issues of production were important, newsreels gained their greatest legitimacy through the celebration and lionizing of the cameramen as courageous newsgatherers, equal in stature to the soldiers they filmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1943 to 1945 traveling photograph exhibition "Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War," organized the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, designed by designer Herbert Bayer. Topics include the role of Edward Steichen as curator of the exhibition, the relationship of Bayer to the National Socialist (Nazi) government and its propaganda before his exile from Austria, and American aspects of the "Road to Victory" exhibition. The display of the exhibition in London, England as "America Marches with the United Nations" is noted, along with the display of the exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The article discusses the political aspects of American modernist free verse within U.S. periodical culture during World War I, including in regard to American Bohemian culture and the periodical the "Saturday Evening Post." An overview of the conception of freedom within periodical culture is provided.

No lobby reacted with more hostility to Jewish refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe than did the medical profession, yet refugee physicians ultimately fared better than any other occupational group. The counter-campaign waged by a group of American doctors partly resolves this paradox. The National Committee for the Resettlement of Foreign Physicians helped immigrants pass licensing exams in the rapidly shrinking number of states that allowed them to take the tests, and to procure exemptions in the growing number of states that did not. It thus helped physicians to become the only refugees collectively to retain their professional status in their new country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan's "Yellow Peril" prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The article concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case studies are presented on the social impact of World War II defense industrial factories on white Appalachian people and African Americans in Cincinnati, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania through the 1960s. An overview of the social aspects regarding housing for factory workers in the aforementioned cities is provided.

The article discusses Spanish shipping agents in New York City and the power of the U.S. government in patrolling the borderlands of the Atlantic Ocean during World War II. It examines New York Spanish shipping brokers Marcelino Garcia Rubiera and Manuel Diaz Riestra and their role in World War II-era transatlantic shipping, their opposition to the Spanish Republic and support for Spanish military leader Francisco Franco, and their associations with the Axis powers. It also discusses U.S. government surveillance and investigation of the activities of Garcia and Diaz.

US Army Chaplains in World War II grappled with many problems associated with the moral welfare of their soldier congregations. One of the most troubling issues was the consumption of alcohol. Analysing the archival data from the Chief of Chaplains files and the first-person accounts of chaplains, this article focusses on the difficulties chaplains faced with their concerns about saving men's souls during a time of war. Alcohol consumption was high among both enlisted men and officers in the US Army and many chaplains worried about the impact that alcohol would have on the men's moral well-being. There were differences among chaplains relating to their denominations, which goes some way to explaining the different approaches taken by individual chaplains. Methodist chaplains did not approach the issue of alcohol consumption in the same way as many Catholic chaplains, for example. The Chief of Chaplains, as a Catholic and a regular army serviceman, had a more pragmatic view. This article explores those differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented that examines the communication breakdowns among several branches of the U.S. armed services and departments of the U.S. government that led to the surprise Japanese attack upon the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. It discusses the roles of former U.S. Army general and chief of staff George Marshall, U.S. Navy admiral Husband Kimmel, and U.S. Army lieutenant general Walter Short in protecting Pearl Harbor prior to the attack.

Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scale Second World War military spending as a source of economic growth, even though spending declined sharply after demobilization. We examine the relationship between war spending per capita and the changes in economic activity in US counties between 1939 before the war and a period several years after the war. In the longer term counties receiving more war spending per capita during the war experienced greater population growth, but growth in per capita measures of economic activity showed little relationship with per capita war spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of a study and presentation done at Michigan State University during 2002-03, titled "Uneasy Years: Michigan Jewry During the Depression and War Years." The objective of the study and exhibition mounted at the MSU Museum was to find answers to questions about how Michigan's Jews were regarded during the years 1930 through 1945, living in various locales across Michigan, how they felt as ethnic Americans, and how they responded to events at home and abroad during those difficult years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how a Japanese short-wave radio propaganda network, as known as "Radio Tokyo," commented on mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the first year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As the United States Army began to execute mass incarceration, so did Radio Tokyo begin its serial propaganda attacks. Japanese propagandists branded the policy as evidence of American hypocrisy revealing the hollow nature of the nation's "democratic" ideals. They used a variety of methods such as referring to famed political figures and issues in American history, citing neutral sources, and borrowing dissenting opinions from major American mass media. Radio Tokyo utilized flctitious programs, too. Japanese broadcasters proclaimed the moral superiority of Japan and even threatened to mistreat American captives, which certainly affected the minds and deeds of government officials in charge of mass incarceration. These findings demonstrate that mass incarceration was not only a serious violation of basic human rights, but also a problematic measure in terms of international propaganda warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American reaction to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 is always portrayed as one of shock and horror. Yet there has been no systematic study of the subject. This article examines American public at the time from the outbreak of war in August 1914 through the congressional elections of November 1914, through the medium of newspaper and journal writing. The picture that emerges is that the American population, far from being shocked and horrified, was excited and fascinated by the idea of a war in Europe. Moreover, the most widely shared sentiment was one of satisfaction at the economic opportunity presented by the war, as it was seen as being very much in American economic interest. This article also includes the present discussion among political scientists and strategic thinkers about the American public and its reaction to war in general, to provide different models by which to examine American behavior in 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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