Alan Brinkley American History: A Survey, 10th edition Chapter 28

1. America in a World at War

2.  War on Two Fronts
 Asia & Europe
 The American People in Wartime
 Retreat from Reform
 Prosperity & Production
 African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican
Americans, Women & Children, Japanese Americans,
and Chinese Americans
 Defeat of the Axis
 Liberation of France
 The Pacific Offensive
 Atomic Warfare

3. What was the relationship like between Italy and France?

4.  December 7, 1941:
Pearl Harbor attacked
 MacArthur offensive
from the South
 Nimitz offensive from
Hawaii
 June 1942: Battle of
Midway; US gains
control in the Pacific

5.  Patton offensive
in Africa
 October 1942:
Counter-offensive
in Northern Africa
 Winter 1942 -
1943: Soviets won
at Stalingrad
 July 1943:
Patton’s invasion
of Sicily

6.  1942: News of the Holocaust reached America
 Genocide of not only Jews but of Romani, Polish and
Soviet citizens, homosexuals, the disabled,
Jehovah’s Witnesses and political and religious
opponents.
 U.S. resisted military aid
 The State Department refused to let Jews enter the U.S.
 St. Louis and its mostly Jewish passengers sailed
from Germany to Cuba in 1939; while the US sought
to find refuge for the passengers the St. Louis
ultimately sailed back to Europe (Belgium)

8.  Retreat & Reform
 FDR shifted priorities
from reform to the
war effort and victory
 Congress dismantled
relief and other New
Deal programs
 1944 Presidential
election saw
Roosevelt re-
nominated but with a
less liberal Vice
President Harry
Truman

9.  Prosperity & Production
 WWII ended the Great Depressions problems of
unemployment, deflation, and production
 1942: the War Production Board was created to
mobilize production
 By 1944, the U.S.’s output was two times that of all
Axis nations combined

10.  Chinese Americans
 US allied with China; helped advance Chinese American’s
legal and social position
 1943: Chinese Exclusion Act repealed
 Many took jobs in industry or were drafted into the
military
 Japanese Americans
 Many felt that Japanese-Americans had aided Japan in the
Pearl Harbor attacks
 1942: Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority to
move Japanese citizens to “relocation camps” for
monitoring
 Korematsu v. U.S. (1944) declared relocation constitutional

11.  African-Americans
 Many wanted to use the war to improve conditions
 A. Philip Randolph sought to integrate the workforce
 FDR created FEPC; later CORE would combat
discrimination using popular resistance
 Native Americans
 Some served in the military as “Code Talkers”
 Some left the reservation for work
 Mexican Americans
 Labor shortages saw a large influx of Mexican
immigration
 1943: “Zoot-suit riots” in Los Angeles

12.  Women & Children
 Women began to work in
factories as men wen to
war; inequalities still
existed
 Some worked in the
service sector, others
worked in heavy industry
 Over 1/3 of teenagers
began to work

13.  Liberation of France
 1944: Allies bombed Germans; reduced their
production and complicated their transportation
 June 6, 1944: Eisenhower ordered invasion of
Normandy (D-Day)
 May 8, 1945: Germans fully surrendered (V-E Day)
 The Pacific Offensive
 June 1944: US defeated Japanese navy
 The Japanese continued to fight in February 1945
(Iwo Jima) and in June 1945 (Okinawa)

14.  Atomic Warfare
 Manhattan Project: the discovery of uranium
radioactivity by Enrico Fermi in the 1930s and the
evacuated Jewish physicist Albert Einstein’s theory
of relativity helped America beat the Nazis in the
race to create an atomic weapon
 July 16, 1945: the plutonium bomb Trinity created by
Robert Oppenheimer was successfully tested
 President Truman issued an ultimatum for Japanese
“unconditional surrender” by August 3
 August 6, 1945: Hiroshima; 80,000 killed
 August 8, 1945: Nagasaki; 100,000 were killed
 September 2, 1945 Japan surrendered (V-J Day); end
of WWII