World War II

By: Mark Arcara and Angelia Centuori

•The United States joined the war not only to stop the Japanese and Hitler for persecuting people.

• The US was trying to regain their business in Europe and also had some imperialist tendencies.

•They took over these countries Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam and fought a brutal war in the Filipinos killing 100,000 men.

© Textbook: Other countries thought that the U.S. was isolationist. Since they felt so strong towards this they didn’t want to fight a European war.

©Zinn: Zinn felt that it wasn’t in U.S. interest to stop Fascism. The U.S. only wanted to benefit themselves and make themselves stronger. All they wanted was to get national power. The reason the U.S. came into the war is because Japan threatened their imperialist actions.

∂ The U.S. promised that French sovereignty would be re-established as soon as possible throughout all the territory, metropolitan or colonial, over which flew the French flag in 1939.

∂ Sumner Welles assured the French government that they could keep their empire in tact after the end of the war.

∂ If WWII wanted to bring democracy after the war then why did the U.S. promise that the French can keep their colonies on Africa etc.

Saudia Arabian King Ibn Saud was a guest of Roosevelt on a U.S. cruiser in 1945.

Roosevelt then to wrote to the King that the U.S. wouldn’t change its Palestine policy without consulting the Arabs.

In later years the concern for oil would constantly compete with political concern in the middle east, but the U.S. is more concerned with obtaining oil.

The U.N. was dominated by the Unites States, England, and the Soviet Union.

Originally the United Nations was presented to the world as international cooperation to prevent future wars.

•Roosevelt failed to see that his main priority was the annihilation of the Jews and left it to the State Department.

•In the State Department, anti- Semitism and bureaucracy became obstacles to action.

∆During WWII women started to replace men in the working force.

∆Men developed an attitude of militancy or a crusading spirit because of women taking over their jobs.

∆Women were starting to get a larger role in society which angered the men because they were taking over.

₣The strikes began with the Japanese being brought into U.S. concentration camps.

₣They remained in the camps for over three years, which started to anger U.S. workers.

₣The workers responded with strikes petitions, mass meetings, refusal to sign loyalty oaths, and riots against camp authorities.

o The African Americans were unsupportive of the war because there was hostility towards the negro community.

o The reason that the African Americans didn’t want to fight in the war was because they didn’t want to help the Jews. They didn’t want to because they wanted to help themselves because they were being discriminated against.

oThe Jim Crow laws were established, the navy only let them serve mess men, the Red Cross refused their blood.

Earlier bombings in other countries led to the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thousands of people in these Japanese cities were killed or slowly died of radiation poisoning.

The reason the U.S. did this was to quickly end the war.

The U.S. didn’t have an accurate justification to drop the atomic bomb on these cities.

This could have been prevented if the U.S. surrendered and agreed to let the Japanese keep their emperor and Japan would have ended the war.