by Hugh Brogan
President Roosevelt called it all ‘a day that will live in infamy’, and so it is remembered. It was also one of history’s most spectacular misjudgements. In the first place, the Japanese hit the wrong targets. Most of the ships could be and were made serviceable again; had the bombers attacked the oil tanks and other onshore facilities, the effect of their raid might have been felt much longer. Second, although the aircraft carrier was already known to be the key to naval success in modern warfare, Yamamoto had attacked Pearl Harbor and a moment when all the carriers of the Pacific fleet were absent. Third, the fleet posed no immediate threat to Japan: it could have done nothing to impede her simultaneous swoop upon the Philippines, Singapore and the East Indies, and might as well have been left alone, if only to save supplies. Fourth and finally, nothing, not even the attack on Fort Sumter, has ever aroused the American people to wrath like this episode. The isolationism and pacifism of so many, the hesitations of so many more, were swept aside by this unprovoked attack of an aggressor power (for the Americans stuck stubbornly to the view that they had done nothing wrong in opposing Japanese incursions into Manchuria and China). ‘Lick the hell out of them,’ advised one isolationist Senator. He spoke for the country. America First dissolved overnight. It became the settled purpose of the mightiest nation in the world to destroy the Japanese Empire root, trunk, branch and twig. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler, after some last-minute hesitation, honoured his promise to his ally by declaring war on the United States, thus clearing the last obstacle from Roosevelt’s way. ‘We are going to win,’ said the President in a Fireside Chat, ‘and we are going to win the peace that follows.’ The new crusade to make the world safe for democracy could now officially be launched.
To us it is known as the Second World War. It is such a huge and familiar subject that a certain amount of omission is desirable and possible. For the purposes of this history it is necessary only to isolate the significance of the war for the American people, in terms of their experiences, achievements and hopes.
The war achieved what the New Deal had so falteringly attempted. The need to produce ships, planes, tanks, guns, bullets and bombs did what the need to rescue the unemployed could not. Roosevelt announced that the time for ‘Doctor New Deal’ was over; now it was the time for ‘Doctor Win-the-War’; but the distinction was largely false. For the war brought its own new deal – a deal based on very different values and calculations from the peacetime one, but perhaps all the more effective for that. The democratic, capitalist nation of abundance suddenly began to show what it could do when put to it, and surprised even itself.
It was another period of migration. In four years twenty million Americans moved house as the needs of the wartime economy dictated; twelve million more left home to join the armed forces. Of all the states and regions California was the greatest gainer, for it was there that the shipbuilding and aerospace industries expanded most rapidly, and many of the millions who passed through the Golden State on their way to the Pacific war liked the climate so much that they promised themselves to return for good when the war was over. Perhaps this sort of alteration in the outlook of individual Americans was the most important of the immediate social consequences of the war. The men in uniform who served overseas had a doubly revolutionary experience, especially if they saw action; but even the stay-at-homes did not stay at home. The United States became a nation of transients again; the structure of the economy became fluid, obeying new forces which would soon transform it almost out of recognition (especially when, after victory, freedom of consumer choice was restored and the production of automobiles was resumed); soon social, political and cultural patterns would alter in response.
The war replaced the Depression with a boom to dwarf the twenties. Like all booms it was unevenly experienced: thirty-five states actually lost population during the war, as their inhabitants went off, either to join the armed forces or to find war-work; half a million small businesses failed, because they could not get essential supplies, which were mopped up by the war industries; the demand for farm produce soared, but emigration from rural areas created a severe labour shortage which led to an amendment of the Selective Service Act: farm workers were no longer to be liable to conscription while they stayed on the farm. The production of bricks slumped, reflecting the fact that wartime housing, factory and office-building used materials that could be produced more cheaply and be more quickly erected. But the production of raw steel increased by roughly 20 per cent between 1940 and 1945; that of rayon and acetate yarn by 55 per cent; that of fuel oils by 44 per cent; that of wheat flour by 27 per cent. Only 560 locomotives were manufactured in 1940; in 1945, 3,213 were – the largest number since 1923. Prices went up by 28 per cent in the same period, which was good news for manufacturers; but it was not particularly bad news for the workers, whose average annual earnings increased, in real terms, by 40 per cent.
Indeed, these were good years for labour, and crowned the achievements of the New Deal. The power and influence of the unions reached their brief zenith. Total membership rose from 8,944,000 in 1940 to 14,796,000 in 1945, the increase being fairly equally shared between the AFL and the CIO. It was the unions more than anyone else that found the money and the campaign workers for Roosevelt’s fourth Presidential campaign in 1944; and FDR, who drew great comfort from his rapport with the workers of America, was happy to bear their interests in mind: besides, he needed their co-operation for the war-effort. But the very strength of the unions, and their success in extending organization to industries and plants from which they had formerly been kept out, aroused their enemies. Much was made of the strikes that occurred, and it was true that, after falling in 1942 and 1943, the number of work stoppages rose rapidly in 1944 and 1945; but the impressive thing about this set of statistics is that in terms of working days lost, or duration of stoppages, the war years showed really substantial reductions, warranting Roosevelt’s observation that the common cold did more than strikes to delay the invasion of Germany. Working men were as eager as anyone else to help the war-effort. But the conservatives were sufficiently alarmed and sufficiently powerful to put the Smith-Connolly Act through Congress in 1944, the first of many attempted interferences with the right to strike.
The impact of the war on African-Americans will be discussed in Chapter 25: suffice to say here that it was complex and far-reaching, and occasionally involved disgraceful violence. However, the worst episode of racial oppression to dishonour the American cause during the war involved not the African- but the Japanese-Americans. In 1940 about 129,000 of these lived on the West Coast, chiefly in California. First-generation Japanese (known among themselves as the Issei) were debarred by law from obtaining US citizenship, but their children, the Nisei, having been born in the United States, were automatically citizens and were beginning to bring forth a third generation, the Sansei. They were a blameless people, hard-working and peaceable, farmers and market gardeners for the most part. They had always suffered from the racial hostility of the white Californians, and after Pearl Harbor this burst into flame. The Nisei, it was contended, simply because of their race, were not to be trusted; they were probably all Japanese spies, and if a Japanese army ever landed would no doubt flock to join it (in actuality, 33,000 Japanese-Americans joined the US army, and their units were the most-decorated in American history). Feeling grew so intense that President Roosevelt, callously calculating that such action would help Californian morale, ordered the removal of the Issei and the Nisei to what he unblushingly called ‘concentration camps’ in Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas and the Californian deserts. A strong resemblance to Indian removal and the Trail of Tears emerged when the Japanese-Americans’ land was seized as soon as the owners had been rounded up. Except for Attorney-General Biddle, who protested at the blatant unconstitutionality of the policy, none of the men or institutions of American government come out of this story well: not Roosevelt, or the Governor of California, Earl Warren, or the US Supreme Court, which initially up
held the deportation and did not repudiate it until 1944. The last of the Nisei were not allowed to return to their homes, or what was left of them, until 1946.
About the only agreeable thing to record of this episode is that as a result of the abandonment and destruction of the Japanese farms and gardens the price of fresh fruit and vegetables soared on the West Coast, leading to bitter complaints from the white citizenry.
Yet such discreditable episodes must not be allowed to obscure the main point, which is the enormous energy and ability displayed by the American people in their pursuit of victory. It was a great creative, innovative period. The evolution of the federal government was sharply accelerated. The alphabet agencies of the New Deal were superseded or outnumbered by the bodies brought into being by the war: for example, the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board; the War Production Board; the War Manpower Commission; the National War Labor Board; the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare; the Office of Price Administration; the Office of Production Management; the War Shipping Administration; the Office of War Mobilization; the Office of Scientific Research and Development; the Federal Public Housing Authority; the Office of Defense Transportation; the War Food Administration. The RFC took on a new importance as it played a central part in organizing American finance and industry for war purposes through such subordinate bodies as the War Insurance Corporation, the Defense Plant Corporation, the Defense Supplies Corporation and the Rubber Reserve Corporation. Of course a great many of these agencies would be abolished after 1945; but meantime they broke down resistance to ‘big government’ in many quarters (especially conservative ones) which the New Deal had never been able to reach, at any rate since the collapse of the NRA. In part this resulted from a fundamental decision which Roosevelt took early in the war. He did not dismiss his New Dealers; indeed many of them, notably Harry Hopkins, Jesse Jones and Henry Morgenthau, gave distinguished service during the war; so did Mrs Roosevelt; but the Commander-in-Chief did not propose to rely exclusively on their abilities. In effect, he created a coalition government – a government which coalesced not simply Democrats and Republicans, but New Dealers and big businessmen, members of the executive and members of Congress. He tried to enlist the services of Alfred Landon, the 1936 Republican Presidential candidate; he succeeded in enlisting those of Wendell Willkie. Businessmen were found who could organize the war industries (which included such novelties as the large-scale manufacture of penicillin). Above all, the Congressional leaders were brought into the centre of power. It was inevitable: both before and after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had a vast agenda of tricky, war-related business to get through Congress. Besides, everybody remembered what a nuisance Congress had been to Abraham Lincoln and Wood-row Wilson: it must not happen again. So gestures of reconciliation were made from both sides, and accepted. On the whole all went well. True, the conservative Republicans and Democrats who had dominated Congress since the 1938 elections used their new-found power to cut down some of the New Deal agencies, especially those which helped the poor: WPA, C C C, the Farm Security Administration; but it is hard to see those agencies surviving the outbreak of war and return of prosperity anyway; and on the whole the conservatives gave good service. Their role was well symbolized by James Byrnes, a racist reactionary of South Carolina, formerly a justice of the US Supreme Court, and before that a Senator: Roosevelt made him head of the Office of War Mobilization, with headquarters in the White House. Byrnes performed competently enough his important job, which consisted largely of persuading all the great home-front agencies to work smoothly together; but even though he was known unofficially as ‘the Assistant President’ the future lay elsewhere, with Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Programme. Truman, though he came from a Border state with strong Southern sympathies, had always been a loyal Roosevelt Democrat; he carried out his wartime job, of checking wasteful expenditure as much as possible, with conspicuous efficiency and good sense; it was said that he saved the country $15,000,000,000; and he earned gratitude in important quarters by accepting advice that he ought not to look into the use being made of certain huge appropriations which, voted by an ignorant Congress on the vaguest terms, were secretly being employed to build the first nuclear weapons.
Yet had he pursued his investigation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at Hanford, Washington, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico, he would not only have discovered the biggest threat to man’s future ever yet evolved, indeed the force which was going to dominate that future; he would not only have found out where $2,000,000,000 of public money went; he would have seen the perfect microcosm of how the United States made war, and what the social and economic impact of its efforts would be. It was the colossal industrial power and skill of America that enabled her to do what none of the other belligerents could contrive: to build practicable atomic weapons in time for use in the war. She thereby created a whole new industry that by 1950 would be the biggest in the country. It entailed the uprooting of 45,000 workmen to build Hanford, and as many to build Oak Ridge – to create new cities in the wilderness. It entailed the use of material resources on the largest scale: at one moment General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, as it was code-named, indented for more copper than was to be had in the whole United States. It exploited the achievements of the New Deal: power generated by the great dams of the TVA system was put to use at Oak Ridge. It created boom conditions (for instance in the uranium industry) and foreshadowed a new wave of general prosperity. Life at the great laboratories parodied, echoed or foretold conditions elsewhere during the war and during the Cold War which followed it. Security was extremely tight for the civilians involved in the Project, whether scientists who built the bombs or workmen who built facilities for they knew not what;4 General Groves kept them all under strict quasi-military discipline. Within the confines, there was a certain democratic camaraderie and a distant approximation to social equality, arising not merely from the traditions of the scientific profession but also from the fact that housing was provided, in standard units, by the federal government, and there was little to spend money on, so that pay differentials could not create significant stratification. And in the innermost circle of the scientists a crushing sense of their awesome responsibilities to the race and to the future began to grow.
Elsewhere even a strictly rationed, wartime America gave an impression of renewed energy, hope and confidence, while the deployment of her prodigious strength began rapidly to change the configuration of world politics. Before long both Germany and Japan had reason to regret their rashness in challenging Uncle Sam. Churchill’s reaction to the news of Pearl Harbor had been simple: ‘So we have won after all!’ This meant many things at various stages of the war. Early in 1942 it meant, perhaps crucially, overwhelming material aid to Britain and Russia in their struggle. The US navy and air force could now be used without restraint to safeguard supplies on their way to Britain and Murmansk; in both cases, as Churchill and Stalin were to acknowledge, the result, which probably could not have been achieved by any other means, was that the German attack now began to break, East, West and South, on invincible walls. In the Pacific, the Japanese at first carried all before them: the Philippines fell, and General Mac Arthur, after leading a heroic defence of his base at Corregidor outside Manila, was forced to flee to Australia. (He was under orders to take up the supreme command of America’s land forces in the Pacific theatre.) The men he left behind had to surrender, and were atrociously treated by their conquerors. Not only the Philippines, but the East Indies, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore and Burma fell to the Japanese; they threatened Australia; they stood on the borders of India. But they were on the brink, not just of the greatest naval war in their history or in the history of the US navy, but of the greatest naval war in the history of the world: a war which they lacked the resources either to win or, contrary to their cherished hopes, to sustain for more than a few years. Admiral Chester Nimitz was now in command of the whole
Pacific Ocean area. When the Japanese tried to continue their advance down New Guinea and into the Solomon Islands, they were checked by Nimitz at the Battle of the Coral Sea (7–8 May 1942); their advance in the central Pacific was arrested at the Battle of Midway (3–4 June), where operational command was brilliantly exercised by Admiral Raymond Spruance. The Battle of the Coral Sea saved Australia; that of Midway saved the Hawaiian Islands; together they stopped the Japanese advance in the Pacific for good. Both battles exemplified something new in naval warfare: for the first time all the fighting involved planes; the ships of the two fleets never saw each other. Midway was a fitting first instalment of revenge for Pearl Harbor: it was a battle deliberately sought by Admiral Yamamoto, and American skill at naval warfare showed itself superior to his. After Midway nothing lay before the Japanese for three years but hard fighting and irreversible retreat, inch by inch, to their own shores, there to await final defeat.
First, however, America had to save the rest of the world. The matter of supplies was absolutely crucial: without them there could be no assurance that Britain and Russia would hold out. At one moment it seemed as if the Battle of the Atlantic had been lost at last, for the Germans were sinking Allied ships of all kinds faster than they were replaced. By the end of November 1942 the U-boats had destroyed eight million tons of shipping, while the Allies had only been able to launch approximately six million. Gradually, however, as sailors and airmen gained experience, and as the huge American industrial machine swung into action (soon it would be delivering ships at the rate of more than one a day to the impatient navy), the Allies got the upper hand; the Battle of the Atlantic was won, though not ended, by the summer of 1943. Thenceforward supplies and troops could move eastward in comparative safety.