Mobilizing for Victory
Organizing the Economy
• The war effort gave Americans a common purpose that softened the divisions of region, class, and national origin while calling attention to continuing inequalities of race.
• War Manpower Commission: allocated workers among vital industries and the military
• War Production Board: invested $17 billion for new factories, $181 billion in war supply contracts
Organizing the Economy
• Office of Price Administration (OPA) – fought inflation with price controls and rationing of vital war materials. This convinced Americans to buy war bonds that financed half the war spending
• Federal budget grew to $98 billion by 1945 and increased the national debt
Organizing the Economy
• Major industries transitioned from producing consumer goods to building war machines
• These mass production techniques used to build thousands of warplanes and tanks
• War-boom cities: developed due to war production (e.g. San Diego)
The Enlistment of Science
• Office of Scientific Research and Development: Vannevar Bush guided spending on research and development which set the pattern of massive federal support for science that continued after the war.
• Manhattan Project: U.S. program to develop an atomic bomb
The Enlistment of Science
• Physicist Robert Oppenheimer directed the project to design a nuclear fission bomb at Los Alamos
• 1st nuclear explosion on July 16,1945 – Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico
• Oppenheimer “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”
Men & Women in the Military
• By 1945, 8.3 million men and women were on active duty in the army and army air forces and 3.4 million in the Navy & Marine Corps.
• Total 350,000 women / 16 million men served: 292,000 killed / 100,000 prisoners / 671,000 wounded
• 25,000 Native Americans served (racially integrated forces)
• Code talkers – Navajo Indians who’s language was unknown to the Axis powers
African Americans
• Approximately 1 million served in the armed services during the war
• Served in segregated (separate from white soldiers) units – usually in in non-combat, menial jobs
• Faced discrimination on and off the base• All black units (761st tank battalion & 99th pursuit
squadron) earned distinguished records for combat action.
• The war experience helped to invigorate postwar efforts to achieve equal rights.
Japanese Americans
• Japanese Americans, unfairly suspected of being possible traitors, in Hawaii and on the west coast are rounded up and shipped to internment camps.
• Despite severe prejudice back home, the 442nd Infantry Regiment becomes the highest decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army
• 8 Presidential Unit Citations• 21 Medal of Honor winners
Women in the military
• Received mixed reactions by Americans• Armed services tried to not change established
gender roles (primarily worked in clerical jobs)• Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) –
civilian auxiliary of U.S. Army Air Forces• Women pilots ferried military aircraft across the
U.S., towed targets for anti-aircraft target practice, tested new planes.
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