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War and Peace
Introduction
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While Roosevelt saw Hitler as a more dangerous enemy, the United States and Japan stumbled on a more direct path toward confrontation. In 1937 the Japanese resumed war against China and hostilities in Asia; in early 1941 Secretary of State Hull demanded Japan withdraw from China and not occupy French and Dutch holdings in Asia, a proposal that was overwhelmingly unacceptable to the Japanese. When the Japanese occupied Indochina in July 1941, the United States froze Japanese assets and placed an embargo on petroleum. The Japanese attacked the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December, drawing the United States into the war. Roosevelt, granted wide emergency powers by Congress, mobilized the home front through the Office of War Mobilization and the National War Labor Board; the United States financed the war with taxes. Wartime industry offered great opportunities to women, blacks, and American Indians, but was not so kind to Hispanics and Mexicans; meanwhile industry and the armed forces contributed to population mobility and an increase in marriages and births. And although German and Italian Americans did not suffer form prejudice, Japanese Americans were interned in a blatant and racist disregard for their civil rights. In the conduct of the war, the Allies chose to concentrate on defeating Hitler first; the Japanese threat remained rather remote. Stalin and Roosevelt argued for opening up a western front in France to alleviate Nazi pressure on the Soviet Union, but Churchill’s preference to bomb German cities and attack through North Africa and then Italy prevailed. Eventually, after the Soviets had turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad and the Allies were moving through Italy, the western front in France was opened in June 1944. Germany’s last gasp came with the Battle of the Bulge, but it surrendered in May 1945. Meanwhile, the United States in the Pacific got the upper hand on the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, and conducted a campaign of island hopping on the way to a planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. The tenacity of Japanese forces convinced President Truman that an invasion of Japan would result in huge casualties, and with that, and a desire to end the Pacific war before the Soviets could play a part in it and thus the peace, in mind, he decided to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inducing a Japanese surrender in August 1945. The war ended with a new hope for international cooperation embodied in the United Nations, but the Soviets and their Western allies soon had a falling out. Stalin was determined to secure his western boundary and install friendly governments on his borders, which came into conflict with Western commitments to self-determination and a perceived need to check the spread of communism. Conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam were increasingly contentious and set the stage for postwar Soviet-American rivalry.
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