The most popular works of art in World War II were paintings of the Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell. In his State of the Union address before Congress in January 1941, President Roosevelt spoke of a future world order based on “essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. During the war, Roosevelt emphasized these freedoms as the Allies’ war aims, and he compared them to the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, and the Emancipation Proclamation. In his paintings, created in 1943, Rockwell portrayed ordinary Americans exercising these freedoms: a citizen speaking at a town meeting, members of different religious groups at prayer, a family enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner, and a mother and father standing over a sleeping child.

Though Rockwell presented images of small-town American life, the United States changed dramatically in the course of the war. Many postwar trends and social movements had wartime origins. As with World War I, but on a far greater scale, wartime mobilization expanded the size and reach of government and stimulated the economy. Industrial output skyrocketed and unemployment disappeared as war production finally ended the Depression. Demands for labor drew millions of women into the workforce and lured millions of migrants from rural America to industrial cities of the North and West, permanently changing the nation’s social geography.

The war also gave the United States a new and lasting international role and reinforced the idea that America’s security required the global dominance of American values and power. Government military spending unleashed rapid economic development in the South and West, laying the basis for the modern Sunbelt. The war created a close alliance between big business and a militarized federal government—what President Dwight D. Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex.”

And the war reshaped the boundaries of American nationality. The government recognized the contributions of America’s ethnic groups as loyal Americans. Black Americans’ second-class status attracted national attention. But toleration went only so far. The United States, at war with Japan, forced more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, including citizens, into internment camps.

The Four Freedoms thus produced a national unity that obscured divisions within America: divisions over whether free enterprise or the freedom of a global New Deal would dominate after the war, whether civil rights or white supremacy would define race relations, and whether women would return to traditional roles in the household or enter the labor market. The emphasis on freedom as an element of private life would become more and more prominent in postwar America.

World War II Posters

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

Part of a sheet of fifty miniature reproductions of World War II poster.

Lecture Preview

Fighting World War II

The Home Front

Visions of Postwar Freedom

The American Dilemma

The End of the War

The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen above.

Focus Question: Fighting World War II

Focus Question:

What steps led to American participation in World War II?

The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.

As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

FDR’s Foreign Policy

Good Neighbors

The Road to War

With the country facing economic crisis in the 1930s, international affairs garnered little public attention. But FDR innovated in foreign and domestic policy. In 1933, trying to encourage trade, he recognized the Soviet Union. Roosevelt also repudiated the right to intervene with military force in the internal affairs of Latin American nations, called the Good Neighbor policy. The United States withdrew troops from Haiti and Nicaragua and accepted Cuba’s repeal of the Platt Amendment, which had authorized U.S. intervention in that nation. But Roosevelt, like previous presidents, recognized undemocratic governments like that of Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Batista in Cuba. However, the United States also took steps to counteract German influence in Latin America by expanding trade and promoting American culture.

Events in Asia and Europe quickly took center stage as international order and the rule of law seemed to disintegrate. In 1931, seeking to expand its power in Asia, Japan invaded Manchuria, a northern province in China. In 1937, it pushed further, committing a massacre of 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians at Nanjing. In Europe, Hitler, after consolidating his rule within Germany, launched a campaign to dominate the continent. He violated the Versailles Treaty by pursuing a massive rearmament and, in 1936, by sending troops into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany. The failure of Britain, France, and the United States to oppose Hitler’s aggression convinced him that these democracies would not resist his aggressions. Benito Mussolini, the father of fascism in Italy, invaded and conquered Ethiopia. When General Francisco Franco in 1936 mounted a rebellion against the democratically elected government of Spain, Hitler and Mussolini sent men and arms to support him. In 1939, Franco won and established another fascist government in Europe. Hitler annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, a German area of Czechoslovakia, and soon thereafter invaded and annexed all of that nation too.

Roosevelt became more and more alarmed by Hitler’s actions in Germany and Europe, but in 1937 he called only for a quarantine of aggressors. Roosevelt had little choice but to follow the “appeasement” policy of France and Britain, who hoped that agreeing to Hitler’s demands could prevent war. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich conference of 1938, which awarded the Sudetenland to Hitler, promising “peace in our time.”

The Four Freedoms

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

The immensely popular Office of War Information poster reproducing Norman Rockwell’s painting of The Four Freedoms

American Neutrality

Isolationism

War in Europe

The threat posed by Germany and Japan seemed distant to most Americans, and, in fact, Hitler had many admirers in America, from those who praised his anticommunism to businessmen who profited from business with the Nazis, such as Henry Ford. Trade also continued with Japan, including shipments of American trucks, aircraft, and oil, which amounted to 80 percent of Japan’s oil supply. Many Americans now believed that American involvement in World War I had been a mistake and had benefited only international bankers and arms producers. Pacifism attracted supporters across America, from small towns to college campuses. Americans of German and Italian descent also sympathized with fascist governments in their homelands, and Irish-Americans remained staunchly anti-British. Isolationism dominated Congress, which in 1935 started enacting a series of Neutrality Acts banning travel on belligerent ships and arms shipments to warring nations. These were intended to prevent the United States from becoming embroiled in these conflicts by demanding freedom of the seas, just as it had in World War I. Even though the Spanish Civil War was a conflict between a democratic republic and a fascist dictator, the United States and other governments imposed an arms embargo on both sides, effectively allowing Germany and Italy to help Franco overwhelm Spanish government forces.

At Munich in 1938, Britain and France capitulated to Hitler’s aggression. In 1939, the Soviet Union proposed an international agreement to oppose further German demands for territory, but Britain and France, distrusting Stalin and seeing Germany as a fortress that would check communist power in Europe, declined. Stalin soon signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, his former enemy. Hitler immediately invaded Poland. Britain and France, allied with Poland, now declared war on Germany. Within a year, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) overran Poland and much of Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. By June 1940, German troops occupied Paris. Hitler now dominated Europe and North Africa, and in September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan formally created a military alliance known as the Axis.

For one year, Britain, led by a resolute prime minister, Winston Churchill, alone resisted Germany, heroically defending its skies from German planes and bombers in the Battle of Britain. The Germans’ bombs devastated London and other cities, but the German air campaign was eventually repelled. Churchill pointedly called on the New World to rescue the Old.

A European War

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

In a 1940 cartoon, war clouds engulf Europe.

Spring 1940 Newsreel

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

A newsreel theater in New York’s Times Square announces Hitler’s blitzkrieg.

Nearing War

Toward Intervention

Pearl Harbor

Though Roosevelt considered Hitler a direct threat to the United States, most Americans simply wanted to avoid war. After fierce debate, Congress in 1940 approved plans for military rearmament and agreed to sell arms to Britain on a “cash and carry” basis—Britain would pay in cash for arms and transport them in British ships. But Roosevelt, mindful of the presidential election, went no further. Opponents of American intervention mobilized; they included such prominent individuals as Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles A. Lindbergh. In that 1940 election, Roosevelt broke precedent by running for a third presidential term. The Republican candidate was Wendell Willkie, a Wall Street businessman, lawyer, and amateur politician. Little differentiated the two, as both supported the first peacetime draft law, passed in September 1940, and New Deal social legislation. FDR won the election by a decisive margin.

In 1941, the United States became closer to the nations fighting Germany and Japan, and Roosevelt declared that America would be a “great arsenal of democracy.” With Britain close to bankruptcy, Roosevelt had Congress pass the Lend-Lease Act, allowing military aid to countries who promised to repay it after the war. Under Lend-Lease, the United States funneled billions of dollars’ worth of arms to China and the Soviet Union. Some Americans, called interventionists, actively campaigned for American involvement in the war forming societies demanding declarations of war against Germany.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes launched a surprise attack from aircraft carriers, bombing the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The assault killed more than 2,000 American soldiers and destroyed much of the base and the U.S. Pacific Fleet—except for crucial U.S. aircraft carriers, which helped win critical subsequent victories. Roosevelt, calling December 7 a “date which will live in infamy,” asked Congress to declare war on Japan, which it did nearly unanimously. The next day Germany, in turn, declared war on America and the United States had finally entered the largest war in history.

West Virginia and Tennessee

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

This photograph shows the battleships West Virginia and Tennessee burning in Pearl Harbor.

Forced Surrender

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

This photograph shows 13,000 Americans forced to surrender to the Japanese in May 1942.

Military Engagement

The War in the Pacific

The War in Europe

Although in retrospect it seems that America’s robust industrial capacity assured its victory over the Axis, success was not sudden. The United States initially experienced a series of military disasters and watched Japan take more territory in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including Guam, the Philippines (capturing tens of thousands of U.S. troops, thousands of whom died on the way to and within prisoner camps), and other Pacific islands. The largest American surrender in American history, 78,000 American and Filipino troops, occurred in the Philippines. But the tide of the war changed in the late spring of 1942, with American naval victories at Midway Island and in the Coral Sea. These successes allowed the United States to begin a step-by-step “island-hopping” campaign to reclaim vital and strategic territories in the Pacific.

The “Grand Alliance” led by American Franklin Roosevelt, English Winston Churchill, and Soviet Joseph Stalin, banded together to stop Hitler at any cost. Each leader had different goals in mind, but Churchill’s plan to invade North Africa won out over other strategic considerations and Churchill maintained that the Allies needed to attack the “soft underbelly” of the Axis. In November 1942, British and American forces invaded North Africa and, by May 1943, forced the surrender of German forces there. By this time, the Allies had also gained an advantage in the fight in the Atlantic Ocean against German submarines. While Roosevelt wanted to liberate Europe, most American troops stayed in the Pacific. In July 1943, American and British forces invaded Sicily and began the liberation of Italy, whose government, led by Mussolini, was overthrown by popular revolt. Fighting continued against German forces there throughout 1944.

America’s fight in Europe began on June 6, 1944—D-Day. On this date, nearly 200,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower invaded Normandy in northern France. More than a million troops soon followed them, in the largest sea-land operation in history. The Germans resisted but retreated, and by August, Paris had been liberated. The most significant clashes, however, took place on the eastern front, where millions of Germans and Soviet troops faced each other in very costly battles, particularly at Stalingrad, where a German siege ended in a German surrender to the Soviets, a decisive defeat for Hitler. Other Russian victories marked the end of Hitler’s advance and the beginning of the end of the Nazi empire in eastern Europe. A full 10 million of Germany’s nearly 14 million casualties were inflicted on the eastern front, and millions of Poles and Russians, many of them civilians, perished.

Moreover, after 1941, Hitler embarked on his “final solution” to eliminate people and groups he deemed undesirable including Slavs, “gypsies,” homosexuals, and above all, Jews. By 1945, 6 million Jewish individuals had died in Nazi camps in the culmination of horrifying Nazi ideology known as the Holocaust.

World War II in the Pacific 1941 to 1945

Map 22.1 World War II in the Pacific, 1941 to 1945 Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

Map 22.1 World War II in the Pacific, 1941–1945

World War II in Europe, 1942 to 1945

Map 22.2 World War II in Europe, 1942 to 1945 Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

Map 22.2 World War II in Europe, 1942–1945

Island Hopping

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

Members of the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard taking part in an amphibious assault while “island hopping” in the Pacific theater.

German Prisoners of War

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

German prisoners of war guarded by an American soldier, June 1944

Liberated Prisoners

Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

This photograph shows prisoners of a German concentration camp liberated by Allied troops in 1945.

Focus Question: The Home Front

Focus Question:

How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort?

The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.

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