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.