Research paper for history

World War II and the Cold War, Part 1

1. American Isolationism before World War II

In the 1930s the dominant American attitude toward world affairs could best be described as “isolationism”.

It was not only political separateness from European and global events, but also geographical separation by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Part of this was a response to dealing with the challenges of the Great Depression at home.

The other reason was because of Americans’ memory of the horrors of WW I.

Several things demonstrate this common attitude of isolationism in America at the time.

In 1935 Congress passed the first of five “Neutrality Acts” requiring the president to declare an embargo on munitions and weapons shipped to all nations engaged in war.

As late as 1937, nearly 70 percent of Americans responding to a Gallup poll stated that US involvement in WW I had been an error.

2. The Rise of Nazi Germany

Outside the United States many troublesome events were taking place.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were gradually rising to power in Germany. How did this happen ?

Many Germans felt cheated by the conditions under which the German empire had agreed to surrender in 1918 at the end of WW I.

For example, the German Kaiser (king) had been forced to give up his throne.

And the Allied Powers after WW I had forced Germany to surrender tens of thousands of miles of territory, reducing the empire’s size by more than half.

Throughout the 1920s Germany underwent a crushing depression that made German currency almost completely worthless.

In Germany during the 1920s the Communist party nearly won national elections on several occasions.

After WW I almost 4 million German men had been killed, and 1 million German children were left without a father.

By the middle 1920s, the National Socialist Worker’s Party (NAZI) exploited widespread frustration by blaming Jews, communists, and “outsiders” for the economic and political unrest in Germany.

Adolf Hitler, a veteran of WW I, was the leader of the Nazi Party.

By claiming racial superiority and the narrative of victimization at the hands of the Americans, English, and French after WW I, Hitler and the Nazis acquired support all over Germany.

The Nazis won Germany’s national elections in 1933 making Hitler the “chancellor” or head of the government.

Soon after Hitler have the order for the army to begin “re-armament,” manufacturing weapons and experimenting with tanks and airplanes, all under the guise of civilian manufacturing.

As the 1930s progressed, Hitler and the Nazis were openly expressing interest in acquiring more territory for Germany’s citizens in Europe.

They talked of spreading Germany’s superior racial and cultural influence all over the world, eliminating the Jews and communists, and reclaiming territory in Europe taken from Germany at the end of WW I.

In March of 1938 Austria, dominated by its own branch of the Nazi party, held popular elections and joined Nazi Germany (Anschluss).

In September of 1938 England and France agreed to give over to Germany some of the border regions of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), which had been removed from Germany in 1918.

This was called the “Munich Agreement” of 1938.

It emboldened Hitler and the Nazi government; by October Germany had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

3. Imperial Japan

In east Asia, Japan was a nation like Nazi Germany in that it was controlled by an extremist, militant government that sought to dominate all of Asia.

Since the first decade of the twentieth century Japan had steadily expanded throughout East Asia.

Between 1904-1905 Japan and Russia fought a war over ownership of ports in eastern China.

In 1910 Japan and Korea signed a treaty in which Japan officially annexed Korea.

In 1931 the Japanese army had invaded northeast China (Manchuria) and established a puppet state called “Manchukuo”.

(President Herbert Hoover had responded by declaring that the US would not recognize the “legality” of the occupation, but Japan ignored him.)

In 1937 Japan and Nazi Germany signed a military alliance promising to fight common enemies.

4. Evidence that President Roosevelt Expected Global Conflict

It seems clear that President Roosevelt and members of the military and civilian government in America expected to be drawn into a war soon.

How do we know this ?

In 1937 after Japan and Germany created a military alliance, FDR said in a public address that these countries were “bandit nations.”

Also In early 1940 FDR convinced Congress to repeal the last Neutrality Act.

In 1940 FDR convinced Congress to reinstate the draft for the military.

This measure passed in Congress by a very narrow margin, with a vote of 202-201.

Also by 1940 FDR had convinced Congress to set aside money to supply Soviet Russia with cargo trucks, food, and other supplies that would help in the event of a war with Germany, since Hitler had expressed interest in occupying parts of Russia.

5. World War II in Europe

In September of 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

This was a new type of war the Germans called “blitzkrieg” (lightning war).

In Blitzkrieg the German army applied the lessons learned from the defeat of World War I twenty years before.

Blitzkrieg was fast moving, with light mobile tanks and armored vehicles armed with cannons and machine guns, troops riding alongside in trucks and jeeps, and coordinated with bombers and fighter aircraft.

It was precisely the opposite of World War I, where slow, cumbersome armies had marched across western Europe entirely on foot or on horseback.

In 1940 Nazi Germany invaded France Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland.

Also, in 1940 the German air force began a prolonged bombing campaign of all major cities in England, like London.

Eventually the German army invaded Greece, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and parts of Italy and North Africa.

In most places they occupied the Nazis established governments drawn from the native population sympathetic to their aims.

(This helps explain why the Nazis were able to arrest, imprison, and execute millions of people, including many European Jews, who they viewed as “undesirables”.)

In 1941 Germany staged a surprise attack on Soviet Russia; millions of German troops and thousands of tanks and attack aircraft traveled east 900 miles into Russia before the Russian winter stopped them in the outskirts of Moscow (Russia’s capitol).

By the end of 1941 Germany was fighting a two-front war.

6. The Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces stages a surprise attack on the American naval base of Pearl Harbor at Hawaii.

Japanese forces also launched coordinated attacks on American military bases in Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and several other American naval bases in the Pacific Ocean.

It seems that the Japanese military leadership believed that a swift, violent, and massive surprise attack on American bases in the Pacific would destroy Americans’ will to fight.

Although the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor killed 3,000 American sailors, the tragedy united most Americans.

Congress declared war on Japan just a few days later.

When Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, heard about Pearl Harbor, he supposedly said, “Oh thank God” because he had asked Roosevelt to join the war earlier in 1940.

The United States entered the war on the side of the “Allied Powers”, alongside England, France, and Soviet Russia.

Nazi Germany and Japan comprised the “Axis Powers.”

7. The Cost of WW II in America

The war was not fought on American soil.

This mattered because it enabled American industry to remain intact; unlike the English and Russian wartime industry, which the Axis Powers continuously bombed and disrupted during the war.

During the war the American federal bureaucracy almost quadrupled, largely because of the creation of new organizations to oversee the wartime economy.

This assisted America to develop its greatest advantage during the war, which was the ability to produce material.

Americans produced twice as fast as German workers and five times as fast as Japanese workers.

What did they produce for the war ? he answer is everything.

After 1942, Americans could produce 4 tanks to every 1 tank produced by Nazi Germany.

During the war, Americans produced 300,000 planes, 53 million tons of shipping, 2.5 million trucks, and 50 million pairs of shoes; most of this was used to help supply the Allied Powers.

The massive increase in production ended the Great Depression.

Money, loans, stock, and credit was created or put back into circulation to fund wartime production.

es and the American government were spending about $250 million dollars a day to fund WWII.

(Much of this was money paid by the government to private companies.)

American industry was able to produce quickly because of mas production and assembly line labor.

By 1945, the government was spending $280 billion annually.

The government gave out $186 billion in war bonds by 1945.

War bonds were promises to repay private citizens, typically with interest, who volunteered to turn over their own funds to the government. (This means private citizens gave over large amounts of money to the government.)

For the first time, the American government paid for private and academic scientific research and development during the war, for things like the atomic bomb.

8. Combat

America’s entry into the war meant a massive increase in manpower on the side of the Allied Powers.

During 1942-1945, 16 million American men served in uniform.

By November of 1942 thousands of American troops were in North Africa fighting alongside the English military against the German army.

By July of 1943 the American army was fighting in Italy against the Germans, and other parts of Southern Europe.

And of course, in the summer of 1944, the Americans, English, and French landed at the Normandy beaches after crossing the English Channel, to expel the German army from occupied France.

Meanwhile all throughout these years Soviet Russia had recovered from the surprise attack staged by the German army in 1941.

Russia’s “Red Army” was pushing steadily toward Germany from the east with millions of troops in uniform and tens of thousands of tanks and attack aircraft.

By April of 1945, facing two massive forces from the west and the east (the Americans and Russia), Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin.

A few days later the German high command signed an unconditional surrender bringing the war in Europe to an end.

In the Pacific Ocean, American Army troops and the Marines were moving from island to island toward Japan, fighting mercilessly along the way.

At Iwo Jima 7,000 Americans and 19,000 Japanese troops were killed fighting for control of an island only a few square miles in size.

In Okinawa 15,000 Americans and 90,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were killed during April-June of 1945.

The fighting in the Pacific ended when the United States dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, in the hope that America would not have to carry out an invasion of mainland Japan.

After the two atomic bombs were dropped in August of 1945 Japan surrendered.

This was the end of WW II.
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