The Home Front

How did people cope with America at war.

Topics

• Minority participation• Wartime production• Rationing• Paying for the war• American propaganda• Japanese Internment• Manhattan Project

The Armed Services

• Recall: the New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the US; mobilizing for war ended the Great Depression.

• 1940: Roosevelt reinstated the draft & expanded it after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

• About 16 million Americans would serve in the armed forces during World War II.

• Troops would continue to be segregated & women were not allowed to enter active duty.

• Since women were not allowed active participation many volunteered for a variety of vital roles in the military.

• WAVES: Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (Navy); women did necessary clerical work that would have been performed by men.

• WASP: Women Air-force Service Pilots; tested & delivered aircraft; nearly 40 women died in official capacity.

• WAC: Women’s Army Corps; 150,000 volunteers; repaired equipment, worked as electricians & performed other vital jobs.

• Most black Americans served in non-combat roles in the military

• The Tuskegee Airmen was an all-black unit of fighter pilots (mostly from Tuskegee Institute.)

• These young college men provided air support in both North Africa, Italy, & Germany.

• They completed 15,500 missions & were the only US escort group that had not lost a single bomber to enemy planes.

• As more men went off to war, women & other minorities would find good paying jobs in factories producing war supplies.

Wartime Production

• Factories that produced consumer goods were quickly converted to the production of war supplies.

• The federal government created several new agencies to help ensure that American industry would be able to meet the needs of the military.

• These agencies regulated what would be produced, prices charged & how raw materials would be used.

• 2 examples: Office of Production Management & War Production Board.

• Production goals for war supplies were met & exceeded the expectations of government leaders.

• The US produced more war supplies than Germany, Italy & Japan combined.

• Production increases caused unemployment to drop to 1.9%.

• Wages for most workers went up & demand for the limited consumer goods increased.

• Farmers also benefited from increased demand.

• With young men going off to war, women would become the main source of labor in the war production factories.

• Over 6.5 million women found jobs outside the home in positions never before open to them.

• Working women were represented by the iconic figure of “Rosie the Riveter.”

• They were not only contributing to economic recovery but they were also contributing to the war effort.

• Of course, there were incidents of discrimination, harassment, & racism

• Black workers were often forced to take the lowest-paying jobs, regardless of their skills or experience.

• Union leader A. Philip Randolph called for black workers to strike to call attention to the working conditions of black Americans.

• The protest was called off after FDR issued an order outlawing discrimination in government or defense jobs (Executive Order 9066)

• This was the first time a president issued an executive order against discrimination in the workplace.

Rationing

• This program allowed for a fixed amount of a particular item to be produced & sold to the general public.

• This was done to manage the nation’s supply & demand of these products.

• Tires, gasoline, sugar, butter, coffee, meat.• Military needs took top priority• People were issued “ration books” which

entitled each person in a family to a certain amount of certain foods.

• There were penalties for breaking the rationing rules.

• People accepted the program as part of their patriotic duty.

• Many Americans also had “scrap drives” where people collected waste materials to help the war effort.

• Tin cans, glass, scrap rubber, even women’s silk & nylon stockings were recycled for the war effort.

• To decrease demand for food, the government encouraged Americans to plant “Victory gardens.”

• In small towns & large cities, any piece of green-space was turned into a garden.

• This helped cut down on the fuel usage for harvesting & transporting these crops.

• The crops were shared among the people of an area or could be sold in the neighborhood.

• The victory gardens helped unite communities & were a popular expression of patriotism.

• During the war, all Americans were expected to sacrifice for the war effort.

• Defeating the Axis powers was the goal of all Americans.

Paying for the War

• The federal government sold “War Bonds” to help raise money for war equipment.

• People were encouraged to invest in these war bonds to pay for the vast quantities of shipping, air craft, & other weapons being produced.

• Magazines, newspapers, & celebrities got people to buy the bonds.

• By the end of the war, 85 million Americans had bought bonds (over ½ of the population.)

• The total raised was $185 billion, twice the amount the federal government spent in 1945.

• Of course, many Americans paid the ultimate cost of the war by dying in combat or combat-related activities.

American Propaganda

• Designed to raise public support for the war effort.

• The government went to great lengths to shape public attitudes & beliefs about the war.

• FDR called the fight against the Axis powers a fight to protect the “four freedoms.”

• Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, & freedom from fear

• The Office of War Information was responsible for spreading propaganda

• Propaganda = ideas or information designed to promote a cause.

• Poster, films, advertising• Positive vision of the US: men join the fighting

forces & women take jobs in war industries.• Support for government programs: saving

gasoline, conserving food & other products.• OWI also issued warnings about a world

controlled by the Axis powers.• Drawings of Nazi or Japanese soldiers

threatening small children were meant to inspire fear in people.

• Posters also showed harmful outcomes of improper actions & attitudes, like talking about sensitive military information.

• “Loose lips sink ships.”• Hollywood was also drafted to spread the anti-

Axis message & promote right attitudes about the war.

• 90 million Americans went to the movies each week.

• Hollywood produced many patriotic films that featured soldiers & workers on the home front.

• Leading stars devoted time & energy to the war cause.

Japanese Internment

• After Pearl Harbor, government officials began to fear that people of German, Italian, & Japanese descent would help the enemy.

• Italian & German immigrants were forced to carry identification cards.

• Japanese Americans were treated most harshly.

• Japanese Americans on the West Coast were particularly targeted & investigated as spies.

• Executive Order 9066 gave the armed forces the power to establish military zones.

• It also gave the military the power to force people or groups to leave these zones.

• The goal was to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the US.

• Areas affected were in Washington, Oregon, California & parts of Arizona.

• 2/3s of the people were American citizens.• No hearings or trials were held to determine if

an individual was a real threat.• They were forced to live in camps.

• Many of the camps were located in the barren desert areas of the southwest.

• The people forced to these camps were allowed to bring only what they could carry; everything else had to be sold or left behind.

• Living conditions were horrible: cramp quarters, inadequate health care, very few schools.

• This situation affected 110,000 people of Japanese descent.

• Racial profiling at its worse.

Manhattan Project

• Code name for the building of atomic weapons• German scientists had already split the atom,

but that’s as far as they had gotten when Hitler came to power.

• Hitler’s anti-Semitic message caused many German scientists to leave the country & come to the US.

• Once here they were put to work on this top secret assignment: build a bomb before Hitler.

• Laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico provided the most secure area to work on the project.

• In charge of the project was physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

• The first explosion took place in the desert at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in July, 1945.

• At the Potsdam Conference (July-August, 1945) Japan was given the ultimatum, “the alternative to surrender is prompt & utter destruction.”

• When the Japs did not respond, Truman ordered the bombs dropped.

• 1st bomb dropped on Hiroshima.• 2nd bomb dropped on Nagasaki.• Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945.• The war was finally over.