The United States in the War1941-1945

Wartime Diplomacy• The Big Three

▫ The Big Three referred to Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

▫ The Big Three first met in November 1943 at Tehran, Iran.

▫ confirmed that the United States and Great Britain would open a second front by invading France.

▫ reaffirmed their demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany and Italy.

▫ The Big Three held their second and final meeting at Yalta in February 1945.

▫ Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to a temporary division of Germany.

▫ Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan three months after the Nazis surrendered.

The Home Front•The African

American experience▫About one million

African Americans served in the armed forces during World War II. These black soldiers and sailors continued to serve in segregated units.

The Home Front• The African American experience

▫ over one million southern blacks moved to industrial cities in the North and West Coast.

▫ In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, organized a March on Washington Movement to protest discrimination.

▫ Roosevelt wanted to prevent a highly visible and divisive protest march.

▫ the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and government agencies.

▫ established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to monitor and enforce the presidential directive.

▫ Blacks supported a “Double V” campaign to win victory over fascism in Europe and victory over discrimination in the United States.

▫ sparked the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

The Home Front• The zoot suit riots

▫By the late 1930s about 3 million Mexican Americans lived in the United States.

▫Young Latinos in Los Angeles enjoyed a youth culture that included a distinctive zoot suit featuring a long coat and baggy trousers fitted snugly at the ankles.

The Home Front• The zoot suit riots

▫ The armed forces’ demand for textiles led to shortages of wool and rayon.

▫ The War Production Board issued ration orders restricting the yardage in clothes.

▫ the regulation effectively forbade the manufacture of zoot suits, bootleg tailors continued to manufacture the popular garments.

▫ Sailors and soldiers stationed in Los Angeles resented the baggy zoot suits.

▫ They accused Mexican American youth of being unpatriotic by deliberately flouting the rationing regulations.

▫ In 1943, a series of incidents between young Mexican Americans and off-duty servicemen escalated into riots that lasted a week.

The Home Front

• The internment of Japanese Americans▫ Fred Korematsu was a Japanese

American who knowingly violated the internment order. In Korematsu v. United States he argued that Executive Order 9066 deprived Japanese Americans of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.

▫ In a controversial decision the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the government’s evacuation policy citing the existence of “the gravest imminent danger to the public safety.”

▫ The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the U.S. government during World War II. The Act granted each surviving internee about $20,000 in compensation.

The Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb

• The Manhattan Project▫FDR approved a $2 billion top

secret Manhattan Project.▫Nuclear scientists constructed

three atomic bombs in a laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

▫The scientists tested the first bomb on July 16, 1945 at a desolate stretch of desert called Alamogordo. The blast created a fireball with a core temperature three times hotter than the sun.

The Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb

• The decision to use the atomic bomb▫ Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12,

1945. Two weeks later Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed President Truman about the new atomic bomb.

▫ generals warned that an invasion of Japan would be a struggle that would inflict heavy casualties on both the American forces and Japanese civilians.

▫ On July 26, 1945 Truman, Churchill, and Stalin issued the Potsdam Declaration calling upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or suffer “the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.”

▫ The Japanese government ignored the warning as “unworthy of public notice.”

The Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb

• The decision to use the atomic bomb▫ President Truman authorized the use of the atomic bomb on the cities of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ▫ :Why?▫ 1-, he wanted to avoid a costly invasion of Japan. ▫ 2-he wanted to shock the Japanese government into an immediate

surrender. ▫ 3-he wanted to end the war before the Soviet Union could gain any

influence over the postwar settlement with Japan. ▫ 4 -he wanted to convince Stalin to be more cooperative in formulating

postwar plans.▫ The atomic bombs destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ▫ The formal surrender ceremony took

place on September 2, 1945 on the deck of the American battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay..

Enola Gay and crew members. Paul Tibbets in the middle.

Hiroshima

Little Boy

• August 6th

• Population: 350,000• 4.7 square miles of the

city were destroyed• 69% of the buildings were

destroyed• Another 6-7% damaged• 70,000–80,000 people, or

some 30% of the population of Hiroshima were killed immediately

• Another 70,000 were injured

• Over 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses in Hiroshima were killed or injured

• Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects.

The Bockscar and its crew

Nagasaki

Fat Man

• August 9th

• Population: 240,000 • The radius of total

destruction was about 1 mile, followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to 2 miles south of the bomb

• Immediate deaths range from 40,000 to 75,000

• Total deaths by the end of 1945 may have reached 80,000