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The Causes and Consequences of World War Two Cause and Effect Essay

Introduction, consequences of world war two, causes of world war two, european war, pacific war, works cited.

World War Two, which started in 1939 and ended in 1945, caused more deaths, several countries got involved and a lot of money was used than any other war in global history. Above 60 million army men participated in the war and about 18,000 soldiers died during the war.

Around 20,000 million soviet people, seven million Jews in European, and 11 million Chinese were killed in World War Two (Nash & Graves 67). This war was actually an international war since around 75 nations participated in the war and this conflict happened on Europe, Asia, and Africa continents.

It also took place on the high seas. The war is believed to have been motivated by Germany and Japan and it came with severe consequences which, to some extent, exist. This paper discusses the causes and consequences of World War Two.

Geopolitical

As shown above, around 50,000 deaths were reported, which represented 3% of the world population. Some studies reported that the war caused around 62 to 80 million deaths, and this made it the deadliest fighting in the global history in terms of reported number of deaths compared with the world population (Foner 947).

World War Two showed a huge fault in the international power structure and when this structure was unsuccessful, the outcomes were severe and disastrous. The inconceivable degrees of devastation in the war made several countries to decline a balance of power system.

Alternatively, the successful nations launched a system of collective security through the League of Nations where assault by any nation would cause other nations to react. However, after World War Two, this process did not work since each nation had different views and ideologies.

The British Empire decolonization was not actually caused by World War Two but relatively due to several continuous practices like increase of anti-colonist movements which upset the way of colonization by British Empire.

Thus, irrespective of the timing of the World War Two, the British Empire could have been caused to undergo decolonization afterward but the fighting aided to accelerate the process. Europe’s supremacy was damaged and new institutions assisted in weakening the colonization of Europeans in Africa.

The Soviet Union and United States became more powerful and both were against colonization of Europeans in Africa. Some of the European powers, such as France and Britain, faced hard time sustaining their domains both economically and physiologically (Hill 56).

The course of European integration which facilitated the creation of European Union (EU) started immediately after World War Two and it was partially motivated by the occurrence of that disastrous war.

Some heads of Europe like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman decided that any war would not be allowed to demolish the European nations. The best way to protect this promise was to unite all the European nations that they would not fight one another.

The Cold war was established after World War Two and was intended to control global affairs for decades and several major crises happened such as Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crisis.

Several people and nations were worried about the developments of mass destruction. Most theories claim that as the USSR and USA was in same position during Second World War (Nash and Graves 65), their association after the fight was predicted to be strong and sociable but this never actually occurred and any emergence that both were allies in the war seems misleading.

Holocausts particularly aimed Jews and most people did not understand or were not bothered with that. Before the war, some nations which allowed fleeing Jews had firm quotas, and in the war several other persons except Jews were killed also.

Actually, several people furtively followed the Nazi strategy and expected that they would be killed like vermin, and this was mostly due to established anti-Semitism in Europe.

Domestically

Huge legacy was left by the depression and New Deal made people to depend on government for assistance instead of Private donations. After the Second World War, every government tried to prevent the reoccurrence of the Great Depression and economic plans was created to be firm and more inflationary.

Having the gold standards vanished, governments had increased liberty to customize their economies with growth of credit and money. The protectionism of 1930s facilitated the post-war attempts to decrease tariffs and other business blockades.

Lastly, the inconsistence of exchange rates which happened after countries left gold standards prompted the formation of the Breton Woods structure of fixed exchange rates in 1945. This system stated that all currencies were to sustain fixed exchange rates relative to U.S. currency, but this arrangement collapsed in 1970s (Hill 68).

After the end of Second World War, the GI Bill facilitated the formation of so-called middle class in United States, permitting people who served an opportunity for schooling. The legacy of GI Bill is exist, but currently the aid, if provides, hardly attain veterans’ costs.

Governmental influence of science at the course of the Second World War shows the government administration on growth of technology which offers several benefits to the communities, economies, and armed forces in their plans during the fighting.

After the United States got involved in the war, taxation became directly linked with national survival and top rate attained 90% (Nash and Graves 121). In 1944, the government enforced a maintenance system on income tax payers, creating process simpler and increasing the country’s income in the same year which was an essential aid in the wartime.

After the war, the income taxes somewhat decreased, simply the increase after the some times. Japanese were put into internment sites and this internment happened although they had been registered citizens of America and even through they did not create any threat.

Before their displacement, they had experienced several issues, for instance Japanese bank accounts in United States had been frozen. Some of the political leaders were relocated or arrested and their relatives were not informed about their whereabouts. Most Japanese lost their homes or sold them with a loss.

The Gathering Storm (1930s), German and Japan Ambitions

In the Gathering Storm, written by Sir Winston Churchill Book, stated that Second World War was motivated by unhealthy ambitions of Adolf Hitler who was reluctantly helped gutless and unreliable French and British leaders who chose conciliation above resistance (Nash and Graves, 121).

In the start of 1950s, roughly all diplomatic history on the causes of Second World War went with Churchill’s aim in reproving French and British leaders for pacification in the 1930s (Foner 948). Hitler’s intentions to expand it boundaries was one main cause of the war.

The German participation on the war did not actually influenced America to get involved in the war, but Japanese made them participate after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Relatively, this attack accelerated the motive for United States to respond and declared total war against Germany since several Americans considered that Germany was either a partner or the director of Japan.

This made Hitler to be guilty just like Japan for the assault on Pearl Harbor. The assault on Pearl Harbor was the crucial point for United States to participate in Second World War (Hill, 2003, p. 2).

US Isolationism

Poland was attacked by Germany, and this caused France and Britain to go for war against Germany. United States was considered to be in a state of Isolationism and did not wish to participate in the war. After America was attacked, they declared war against Japan and Germany.

If Germany could not have declared war, people would have not supported Roosevelt government for the decision to participate in war. Hill (5) stated that there is no more explanations of the intentions for the new United States policy of European attacks are provided and United States revenge to German participation in war is projected to be patently obvious.

Soviet Manpower-Economic Revival

The World War Two was very severe and all the countries which participated were led to the moral and physical survival, where most of them faced huge impact of their economy and labor. Soviet countries were forced to experience very depths of moral and physical survival.

Most countries experienced manpower shortage and no other war had brought these sufferings in the world history. It took sometimes for countries to revive to their usual position. Civilians and fighters participated in this war and both parties were victims or died.

American Economy and Air supremacy

The impacts of war were varied and extensive and it determinedly finished the depression itself. The federal government appeared from the war to act as a possible economic player where there had a capacity to control economic actions and to, in part, manage economy through expenditure and consumption (Nash and Graves 129).

American industry was regenerated by Second World War and several industries were, by 1946, either piercingly willing to protect their assets or fully reliant on them (Atomic energy).

To be effective and stronger, some means have to be enforced and use of air planes act as effective methods to provide a major impact as an air supremacy fighter.

For instance, the Me-262 jet fighter was debatably the preeminent fighter plane of Second World War, especially against United States heavy bombers, but was implemented late in the war and it merely had a smallest influence.

American theater commandants went for the options for planes and they created their plans around the necessity for strategic air superiority. In 1943 in Pacific, the allies won the battleground air superiority (Foner 58). This showed that the Allies would enforce their strike forces anywhere they content and overpower the opponent with a prevalence of weapons.

In mid 1942, Japanese Admiral wanted to take the United States pacific Fleet into a fight where they would overpower and demolish it. They positioned themselves in Midway Island so that they could plan effectively the attack on Hawaii.

Through the application of decrypted Japanese radio intercepts, they were capable of offsetting the insult. After a month, United States aircraft attacked and ruined four Japanese shippers, making Yamamoto to surrender and the battle of Midway reported the defining moment of Second World War in the Pacific.

Firebombing and A-Bombing

Firebombing is a way of bombing intended to destroy a target place by using fire which is produced by inflammable devices, instead of blast effects of huge bombs.

Japanese firebombing caused more death and demolition than the A-bombs and probably powerful firebombing of bordering regions and all plants could perhaps have permitted the United States arm forces ultimately to overpower Japan, but the number of deaths would have been nearly unthinkable. It might have led U.S. not to use A-bombing (Nash and Graves 125).

After the Battle of Midway, it was a clear indication to the American people and soldiers from both sides that Japan would not win the war. Just through strategic standards, Americans had more benefits.

Superior industry and several options to fuel its industry permitted it to extend it naval resources more than Japanese would ever expect to challenge. In order for the war to end, there were orders to attack Japan with a nuclear weapon. It was first dropped in Hiroshima.

Upon bomb explosion, around 80,000 people were killed instantly from the extensive heat produced from the explosion. About 60,000 more civilians died from the radiation-related diseases which accompanied the explosion. Another atomic bomb were dropped in Nagasaki and caused additional deaths (Hill 79).

Second World War cost all countries several casualties and more than 60 million deaths were reported. In United States alone, 400,000 people died and in both international and domestic affairs, its outcomes were extensive and some are still being felt currently (Hill 79).

Depression ended because of Second World War and caused several married women to enter labor force, radically extended existence of Government in United States citizens, and started wide changes in the lives of the country’s minority people.

Foner, Eric. Give me liberty!: an American history. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. Print.

Hill, Richard. Hitler Attacks. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. Print.

Nash, Roderick and Gregory Graves. From these beginnings: a biographical approach to American history, Volume 2. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 4). The Causes and Consequences of World War Two. https://ivypanda.com/essays/second-world-war-2/

"The Causes and Consequences of World War Two." IvyPanda , 4 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/second-world-war-2/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'The Causes and Consequences of World War Two'. 4 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "The Causes and Consequences of World War Two." April 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/second-world-war-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Causes and Consequences of World War Two." April 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/second-world-war-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Causes and Consequences of World War Two." April 4, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/second-world-war-2/.

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World War II Research Essay Topics

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Students are often required to write a paper on a topic as broad as World War II , but you should know that the instructor will expect you to narrow your focus to a specific thesis. This is especially true if you are in high school or college. Narrow your focus by making a list of words, much like the list of words and phrases that are presented in bold type below. Then begin to explore related questions and come up with your own cool WWII topics. The answer to questions like these can become a good starting point for a thesis statement .

Culture and People

When the U.S. entered into war, everyday life across the country changed drastically. From civil rights, racism, and resistance movements to basic human needs like food, clothing, and medicine, the aspects of how life was impacted are immense.

African-Americans and civil rights. What impact did the war years have on the rights of African-Americans? What were they allowed or not allowed to do?
Animals. How were horses, dogs, birds, or other animals used? Did they play a special role?
Art. What art movements were inspired by wartime events? Is there one specific work of art that tells a story about the war?
Clothing. How was fashion impacted? How did clothing save lives or hinder movement? What materials were used or not used?
Domestic violence. Was there an increase or decrease in cases?
Families. Did new family customs develop? What was the impact on children of soldiers?
Fashion. Did fashion change significantly for civilians? What changes had to be made during wartime?
Food preservation. What new preservation and packaging methods were used during and after the war? How were these helpful?
Food rationing. How did rationing impact families? Were rations the same for different groups of people? Were soldiers affected by rations?
Love letters. What do letters tell us about relationships, families, and friendships? What about gender roles?
New words. What new vocabulary words emerged during and after WWII?
Nutrition. Were there battles that were lost or won because of the foods available? How did nutrition change at home during the war because of the availability of certain products?
Penicillin and other medicine. How was penicillin used? What medical developments occurred during and after the war?
Resistance movements. How did families deal with living in an occupied territory?
Sacrifices. How did family life change for the worse?
Women's work at home. How did women's work change at home during the war? What about after the war ended?

Economy and Workforce

For a nation that was still recovering from the Great Depression, World War II had a major impact on the economy and workforce. When the war began, the fate of the workforce changed overnight, American factories were repurposed to produce goods to support the war effort and women took jobs that were traditionally held by men, who were now off to war.

Advertising. How did food packaging change during the war? How did advertisements change in general? What were advertisements for?
Occupations. What new jobs were created? Who filled these new roles? Who filled the roles that were previously held by many of the men who went off to war?
Propaganda. How did society respond to the war? Do you know why?
Toys. How did the war impact the toys that were manufactured?
New products. What products were invented and became a part of popular culture? Were these products present only during war times, or did they exist after?

Military, Government, and War

Americans were mostly against entering the war up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which support for the war grew, as did armed forces. Before the war, the US didn't have the large military forces it soon became known for, with the war resulting in over 16 million Americans in service. The role the military played in the war, and the impacts of the war itself, were vast.

America's entry into the war. How is the timing significant? What factors are not so well known?
Churchill, Winston. What role did this leader play that interests you most? How did his background prepare him for his role?
Clandestine operations. Governments went to great lengths to hide the true date, time, and place of their actions.
Destruction. Many historic cities and sites were destroyed in the U.K.—Liverpool, Manchester, London, and Coventry—and in other nations.
Hawaii. How did events impact families or society in general?
The Holocaust. Do you have access to any personal stories?
Italy. What special circumstances were in effect?
" Kilroy was here ." Why was this phrase important to soldiers?
Nationalist Socialist movement in America. What impact has this movement had on society and the government since WWII?
Political impact. How was your local town impacted politically and socially?
POW camps after the war. Where were they and what happened to them after the war? Here's a starting point: Some were turned into race tracks after the war!
Prisoners of war. How many POWs were there? How many made it home safely? What were some long-lasting effects?
Spies. Who were the spies? Were they men or women? What side were they on? What happened to spies that were caught?
Submarines. Were there enemy submarines on a coast near you? What role did submarines play in the war?
Surviving an attack. How were military units attacked? How did it feel to jump from a plane that was disabled?
Troop logistics. How were troop movements kept secret? What were some challenges of troop logistics?
Views on freedom. How was freedom curtailed or expanded?
Views on government's role. Where was the government's role expanded? What about governments elsewhere?
War crime trials. How were trials conducted? What were the political challenges or consequences? Who was or wasn't tried?
Weather. Were there battles that were lost or won because of the weather conditions? Were there places where people suffered more because of the weather?
Women in warfare. What roles did women play during the war? What surprises you about women's work in World War II?

Technology and Transportation

With the war came advancements in technology and transportation, impacting communications capabilities, the spread of news, and even entertainment.

Bridges and roads. What transportation-related developments came from wartime or postwar policies?
Communication. How did radio or other types of communication impact key events?
Motorcycles. What needs led to the development of folding motorcycles? Why was there widespread use of military motorcycles by the government?
Technology. What technology came from the war and how was it used after the war?
TV technology. When did televisions start to appear in homes and what is significant about the timing? What TV shows were inspired by the war and how realistic were they? How long did World War II affect TV programming?
Jet engine technology. What advances can be traced to WWII needs?
Radar. What role did radar play, if any?
Rockets. How important was rocket technology?
Shipbuilding achievements. The achievements were quite remarkable during the war. Why and how did they happen?

"America's Wars Fact Sheet." U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, May 2017.

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The Second World War in literature : eight essays

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Many Wars in One

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By Richard Toye

Sept. 7, 2012

Toward the end of this powerful narrative of World War II, Antony Beevor quotes a report, by the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden, of an encounter with some American troops who had just been released from German P.O.W. camps. They had been in Europe only a few months, thrown into combat and almost instantly captured during the Ardennes offensive, Hitler’s last big throw of the dice. The men now had “xylophone ribs” and “gangling arms.” Some of their fellow prisoners had been beaten to death by their guards for attempting to take sugar beets from fields. Blunden wrote: “They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.”

Did anyone else? Even today, the meaning of this horrible, epic war remains elusive. In “The Second World War,” Beevor calls it “the greatest man-made disaster in history.” That description is very plausible; less so is his idea that it was part of an “international civil war between left and right.” In 1941 the veteran anti-Communist Winston Churchill allied himself with Joseph Stalin, frustrating the efforts of the Nazis to turn the war into an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Nor were the Japanese much concerned that President Roosevelt was (relatively speaking) a man of the left; they attacked Pearl Harbor because of American threats to their interests, not to their ideology. On the other hand, ideological slogans could be strong motivators. Men clung to the idea of fighting for the Führer, or for the emperor, to keep them going in the face of certain defeat. Russians, for their part, were encouraged to fight for the motherland, rather than for the ideals of international socialism, in what was labeled the Great Patriotic War.

In the West, national values were wrapped up with the concept of freedom — more so, perhaps, than with democracy, which seemed to many people a rather less tangible concept. But whether the outcome of the war was experienced as a victory for freedom depended very much on who you were and where in the world you happened to live. The Soviet advance into Eastern Europe created new types of suffering, including for Russian P.O.W.’s who, after their supposed liberation, met persecution at the hands of their own government. “Abandoned by incompetent or terrified superiors in 1941, Soviet soldiers had starved in the indescribable horrors of German camps,” Beevor writes. “Now they found themselves treated as ‘traitors of the motherland’ because they had failed to kill themselves.”

Beevor does not spare us the details of such cruelties; the book is a grueling but gripping account. It is filled with stories of drowning, sickness (notably dysentery), starvation, massacre, mass rape, looting, ethnic cleansing and experiments with napalm, as well as the staggering statistics of death and injury through aerial bombing and the normal course of combat. Beevor’s trademark — which he has deployed in previous books like “Stalingrad” and “D-Day” — is the use of eyewitness testimony to deliver haunting particulars. He quotes, for example, a Red Army soldier writing to his mother in the spring of 1945: “One walks on corpses, sits down to rest on corpses, one has one’s meals on corpses. For about 10 kilometers there are two corpses of Fritzes on each square meter.”

This was not the worst. Beevor also quotes postwar investigators who found that the “widespread practice of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers in the Asia-Pacific war was something more than merely random incidents perpetrated by individuals or small groups subject to extreme conditions. The testimonies indicate that cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy.” The horror is occasionally leavened by black comedy. Marrying shortly before their joint suicide, Hitler and Eva Braun are asked by the registrar, in line with Nazi eugenic law, whether they are of pure Aryan descent.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is the attention it gives to the Sino-Japanese war, which broke out in 1937 and then merged into the larger conflict. For Beevor, this is “a missing section in the jigsaw,” and it certainly will not be well known to most Western readers. He shows us the relationships between Japan’s activities in China and the wider war elsewhere. He notes that the Soviet victory over Japan on the Mongolian-Manchurian border in August 1939 “not only contributed to the Japanese decision to attack south, and bring the United States into the war, it also meant Stalin could move his Siberian divisions west to defeat Hitler’s attempt to take Moscow.”

Another of the book’s virtues is its clearsightedness on military issues. Beevor is no respecter of reputations. He finds both the British general Bernard Montgomery and his German adversary Erwin Rommel to be seriously overrated. Rommel “refused to accept personal responsibility” for his failures in the desert in 1942, while the escape of what was left of his forces after the battle of El Alamein was possible only because of “Montgomery’s slow reactions and excessive caution.”

Eisenhower is one figure who comes out of the book relatively well. He was a good handler of men, able to put the insufferable Monty in his place with a gentle but firm reminder of who was boss. Ike may have been politically naïve, but his April 1945 decision to halt his troops on the Elbe rather than race the Russians to Berlin, Beevor plausibly suggests, was defensible on pragmatic grounds. Beevor is also a scathing critic of Allied bombing policy, although he ducks the question of whether it was morally equivalent to the Luftwaffe’s own attacks on civilian areas.

In certain ways, this is an old-fashioned book. Over 30 years ago, the economic historian Alan Milward poured scorn on “the seemingly countless works on military history in which armies and navies come and go, commanded by greater or lesser figures deciding momentous historical issues, and nothing is said of the real productive forces which alone give such events meaning.” But Beevor is resolutely a diplomacy-and-battles man — and even the diplomatic bargaining generally takes a back seat to the bloodshed. In some respects, the focus on the carnage is salutary, as a reminder of war’s true human cost. But it is as well to remember too that there were acts of kindness and heroism alongside the folly and the murder. Almost by way of relief, we are told the story of Dr. Ara Jerezian, who helped save Hungarian Jews from death, though he was a member of the fascist Arrow Cross movement.

Beevor might have recounted more such episodes, without in the least risking the charge of taking too sunny an approach. It is instructive to read of unimaginable slaughter; it is equally instructive to read of efforts to transcend it.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

By Antony Beevor

Illustrated. 863 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $35.

Richard Toye’s most recent book is “Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.”

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The United States’ Entry into World War II: Causes and Impacts

This essay about the United States’ entry into World War II explores the complex factors that influenced this pivotal decision. Despite initial isolationist sentiment and the aftermath of World War I, events such as the Lend-Lease Act and the attack on Pearl Harbor compelled America to join the global conflict. Geopolitical tensions, economic interests, and ideological differences with fascist regimes all played a role. The essay highlights how America’s involvement reshaped the course of the war, ultimately leading to the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan.

How it works

The ingress of the United States into the maelstrom of World War II delineated a pivotal juncture that wielded a profound impact on the denouement of the conflict. However, the rationale underlying this momentous decision proved far from simplistic. Despite the cataclysm engulfing Europe and Asia in the waning years of the 1930s, the U.S. hesitated to intervene. Numerous factors contributed to this hesitancy, encompassing prevalent isolationist sentiment and the specter of World War I. Nonetheless, the unfolding events in the early 1940s precipitated a shift in both public sentiment and governmental policy, propelling the United States into the global fray.

A paramount rationale for the initial abstention of the U.S. from World War II stemmed from the prevailing isolationist ethos that permeated the nation. The aftermath of the First World War, merely two decades prior, imbued Americans with a wariness of entanglements abroad. A substantial segment advocated for the avoidance of European and Asian conflicts altogether. This conviction found reinforcement in the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, which sought to forestall American entanglement in external wars by proscribing arms sales and loans to belligerent nations.

Notwithstanding these constraints, President Franklin D. Roosevelt discerned the looming threat posed by the Axis powers, particularly after Germany’s incursion into Poland in 1939, which precipitated the outbreak of hostilities. He cautiously sought avenues to bolster Allied nations while officially preserving U.S. neutrality. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 facilitated the provision of military assistance to Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies without the direct involvement of American troops, marking a significant stride towards involvement while ostensibly upholding the veneer of neutrality.

The tide turned decisively on December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise assault on the U.S. naval bastion at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This audacious attack, resulting in the loss of over 2,400 American lives and the decimation of a substantial portion of the Pacific Fleet, served as a catalytic force that galvanized the American populace against the Axis powers. It obliterated any vestiges of lingering isolationism and prompted Roosevelt to petition Congress for a declaration of war against Japan the ensuing day. In response, Germany and Italy, as Japan’s allies, reciprocally declared war on the U.S., thus entangling America fully in the maelstrom of World War II.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor constituted the immediate impetus for American entry into the conflict, underlying factors had been inexorably nudging the United States towards involvement for a considerable duration. The expansionist aspirations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan imperiled the global balance of power and America’s economic interests. By 1941, Germany had already annexed the lion’s share of Western Europe and posed a looming threat to the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, Japan aggressively expanded in Asia, annexing territories in China and Southeast Asia. These belligerent actions jeopardized crucial trade routes, resources, and American allies.

Moreover, the ideological chasm between democracies and fascist states rendered cooperation increasingly untenable. Nazi Germany’s expansionist agenda, disregard for international norms, and egregious violations of human rights stood in stark contrast to American values. For Roosevelt and other policymakers, supporting the Allies constituted not merely a strategic calculation but also a moral imperative aimed at thwarting the hegemony of totalitarian regimes.

America’s ingress into World War II wrought a seismic transformation in the trajectory of the conflict. Its vast industrial capacity and human resources played a pivotal role in buttressing and fortifying the Allied war effort. The United States played an instrumental role in tilting the scales in Europe, ultimately culminating in the defeat of Nazi Germany, and extending decisive support in the Pacific theater, culminating in Japan’s capitulation following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In conclusion, while the assault on Pearl Harbor served as the proximate trigger for American entry into World War II, a confluence of geopolitical, economic, and ideological considerations had been exerting a gravitational pull on United States policy for an extended duration. The amalgamation of national imperatives and global exigencies compelled the United States to align itself with the Allies in combatting the Axis powers. The ramifications of American ingress were profound, irrevocably shaping the outcome of the war and laying the groundwork for the post-war geopolitical landscape.

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World War Two: Notes for UPSC World History

World War Two, also known as World War II, was a devastating global conflict that began in 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved 100 million people from over 30 countries.

World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), premeditated death from starvation, massacres, and disease. To this date, it remains the deadliest conflict in human history.

World War II is an important topic covered in the world history segment of the Civil Services Examination.

Origin of World War II

The causes of World War II are many and varied but in the end, it all boils down to the aggressive and expansionist policies of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Plus, the harsh Treaty of Versailles years before only laid the foundation of future conflicts.

Other events such as the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese invasion of China only served to highlight the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations that had been created following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Both the conflicts saw the involvement of these future Axis powers and it showed that they could carry out their imperialistic whims with no consequences to be faced from other nations. As a result, the conflict became inevitable.

To know more in detail about other causes of World War II , visit the linked article.

Beginning of World War II

World War II began on September 3, 1939, two days after Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. Poland’s sovereignty was guaranteed by Britain and France. When the protests by the two fell on Hitler’s deaf years, they declared war. The war would be fought between the Axis Powers consisting of Germany, Italy and Japan and the Allies – Britain, France, the Commonwealth countries, the United States and the Soviet Union.

To know more about the differences between Axis and Central Powers , visit the linked article

Initially, Hitler had signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union launched an invasion of Poland from the east. It also took over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and launched campaigns against Finland. Nazi Germany followed up its invasion of Poland with the conquest of Denmark, Norway, and Belgium in the Spring of 1940. The invasion of France later lasted from 10 May 1940 – 25 June 1940. It was the pinnacle of the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ campaign. Only Britain stood against the full might of Germany. Italy joined the war in June 1940.

To invade Britain, it was necessary to achieve total air superiority. Thus the German air force, the Luftwaffe, attacked southeast England and London in daylight raids. In August and September, the battle of Britain was fought over its skies in which the numerically inferior British Royal air force defeated the German air force. It shelved any future plans of the Germans to invade Britain, but it did not stop bombing campaigns that saw the devastation of many British cities and towns in the following months.

Expansion of the Conflict

A new battlefront opened in September 1940 when Italian troops invaded Egypt. They clashed with the British troops stationed there. By February 1941, the British managed to defeat the Italian army and even managed to push into Italian held-Libya. By February 1941, the Italians had been defeated, but German troops, commanded by Field-Marshal Rommel, then arrived and managed to push back British troops back to the Egyptian border.

Buoyed by his success in Europe, Hitler declared war on his former ally, the Soviet Union in June 1941 invading the country with the help of Finland, Hungary and Romania. By the end of 1941, however, Allied fortunes were about to change as the United States joined the war, following the unprovoked attack on its navy at Pearl harbour in Hawaii, by the Japanese air force.

The attack on the Pearl harbour marked the start of the war in the Pacific and by May 1942, Japan had taken control of Southeast Asia including Burma, Singapore, the Philippines and New Guinea, from where they threatened the coast of Australia. The Japanese also took control of many islands in the Pacific, but by August 1942, the US Navy had defeated the Japanese at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway Island and Guadalcanal and stopped them from invading any more territory. More victory followed in which several pacific islands held by the Japanese fell. This gave them bases from which they could bomb Japan.

The Tide turns against the Axis

In Africa, British troops led by Field-Marshal Montogomery won a decisive battle at El Alamein in October and November 1942. Montgomery quickly advanced across Libya to meet allied forces in Morocco and Algeria. The Axis armies trapped between the Allies were forced to surrender in May 1943.

German troops fighting in Russia fared no better. Although they had been within sight of Moscow by November 1941, the Russians had begun to fight back and they had defeated the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad. It took until August 1944 to expel the last German troops from the Soviet Union, by which time they were needed in the west to defend Germany itself from an Allied invasion.

The Allied invasion of Europe started on June 6, 1944, and by July 2 one million troops had landed in Normandy, France and started to advance towards Germany via Belgium and via the Netherlands. Reinforced by troops coming from the Soviet Union, launched a last-ditch counter-attack to reverse their fortunes in December 1944. But by January 1945, the offensive had failed. In March 1945 Allied troops had crossed the Rhine and reached the Ruhr valley, the heartland of Germany’s manufacturing production. At the same time, the Soviet army pushed in from the East

Realizing that the war was lost, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945. On May 2nd Soviet Troops captured Berlin. On May 7th, 1945 World War 2 came to an end with the surrender of Nazi Germany at Reims in France. This became official when the surrender documents were signed on May 9th in Berlin.

World War II UPSC Notes – Download PDF Here

End of World War II and aftermath

Although the war ended in Europe the fighting in Asia still raged on. In September 1944, US troops began to recapture the Philippines and the British troops had begun a push into Burman following the battle of Imphal and Kohima. An Allied invasion of Japan was planned for late 1945, but dogged Japanese resistance led to Allied commanders looking for alternatives. The alternative came in the form of an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 . It was followed by the bombing of August 9th, 1945 on Nagasaki. The casualties that resulted from these two events prompted the Japanese government to surrender on August 14. The war was over.

The wide-scale destruction had caused massive military and civilian casualties on both sides, but none suffered more than the Jewish population of Europe. Out of the 9 million Jews that lived in Europe in 1939, 6 million would perish in concentration camps set up by the NAzis through Germany and occupied Poland.

After the war, Allied troops occupied the Western half of Europe while the Soviets occupied eastern Germany. The fragile alliance between the two would evolve into the Cold war .

Find out the details regarding the IAS Syllabus by visiting the linked article. For more UPSC-related preparation materials refer to the links given in the table below:

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Women, gender, and world war ii.

Melissa A. McEuen Melissa A. McEuen Department of History, Transylvania University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.55
Published online: 09 June 2016

The Second World War changed the United States for women, and women in turn transformed their nation. Over three hundred fifty thousand women volunteered for military service, while twenty times as many stepped into civilian jobs, including positions previously closed to them. More than seven million women who had not been wage earners before the war joined eleven million women already in the American work force. Between 1941 and 1945, an untold number moved away from their hometowns to take advantage of wartime opportunities, but many more remained in place, organizing home front initiatives to conserve resources, to build morale, to raise funds, and to fill jobs left by men who entered military service.

The U.S. government, together with the nation’s private sector, instructed women on many fronts and carefully scrutinized their responses to the wartime emergency. The foremost message to women—that their activities and sacrifices would be needed only “for the duration” of the war—was both a promise and an order, suggesting that the war and the opportunities it created would end simultaneously. Social mores were tested by the demands of war, allowing women to benefit from the shifts and make alterations of their own. Yet dominant gender norms provided ways to maintain social order amidst fast-paced change, and when some women challenged these norms, they faced harsh criticism. Race, class, sexuality, age, religion, education, and region of birth, among other factors, combined to limit opportunities for some women while expanding them for others.

However temporary and unprecedented the wartime crisis, American women would find that their individual and collective experiences from 1941 to 1945 prevented them from stepping back into a prewar social and economic structure. By stretching and reshaping gender norms and roles, World War II and the women who lived it laid solid foundations for the various civil rights movements that would sweep the United States and grip the American imagination in the second half of the 20th century.

masculinity
opportunities
World War II

The wartime arenas where American women witnessed—and often helped to generate—crucial changes and challenges were wage-based employment, volunteer work, military service, and sexual expression. In each of these arenas, women exercised initiative, autonomy, circumspection, caution, or discretion according to their individual needs and the dictates of patriotic duty.

Wage Work and Opportunity

Economic opportunities abounded for women willing and able to seize them. Wage work in war industries offered hourly pay rates much higher than those to which most women had been accustomed, with the best wages paid in munitions plants and the aircraft industry. Women were encouraged to apply for “war work” after President Franklin Roosevelt created the U.S. War Manpower Commission (WMC) to mobilize Americans in various venues for a total war effort. In August 1942 , the WMC organized a Women’s Advisory Committee to consider how female employees could be used most effectively toward this end. Late in 1942 , the WMC announced a new campaign to recruit women workers after estimating that “the great majority” of some five million new employees in 1943 would have to be women. The WMC also identified one hundred U.S. cities as “Critical War Areas,” with intent to marshal the “widely dispersed” womanpower reserves in these cities. The main targets were local married women who already lived in the designated metropolitan areas, including middle-aged and older individuals who had never worked outside their homes or whose experience was limited to domestic work. A major challenge would be “to remove social stigma attached to the idea of women working,” the WMC literature noted. 1 Since the employment of married women had been a long-standing practice in working-class families and in the middle-class African American community, the WMC propaganda implicitly targeted white middle-class women who had not typically worked for wages.

Madison Avenue advertising agencies designed and produced a variety of propaganda campaigns for the U.S. government, including the WMC’s bold declaration and appeal late in 1942 : “Women Workers Will Win the War.” Local U.S. Employment Service offices coordinated efforts to place women in jobs best suited to their skills and family needs. Mothers with children under fourteen were encouraged not to seek employment outside their homes unless other family members or trusted neighbors could offer reliable childcare. 2 The propaganda campaigns generated posters, billboards, films, and radio announcements urging women to join the work force; some touted their domestic skills as advantageous for carrying out defense work, since women were thought to excel at repetitive tasks requiring small operations with fine details. While the images overwhelmingly featured young, white, married women, an occasional entreaty announced, “Grandma’s got her gun,” referring to an elderly worker’s riveting tool. Several corporations with U.S. government contracts proudly sponsored chapters of the War Working Grandmothers of America. In Washington war agencies, the demographic defined as “older” meant “women over 35.” 3 Women of color rarely appeared in advertisements for industrial work, although their accomplishments and workplace awards were widely reviewed in African American newspapers and journals, including the NAACP’s principal publication, The Crisis , and the National Urban League’s Opportunity . Such coverage constituted a vital part of the “Double V” campaign, an effort launched by the black press to defeat racism at home while troops fought fascism abroad. 4

American women became artillery inspectors, aircraft welders, sheet metal assemblers, gear cutters, lathe operators, chemical analysts, and mechanics of all kinds. Length and depth of training varied according to industry, with many forced to learn quickly if not “on the job” itself. By 1944 , skilled female workers earned an average weekly wage of $31.21. In spite of federal regulations requiring equitable pay for similar work, their male counterparts in similar positions earned $54.65 weekly. 5 Years of experience in specific jobs accounted for some wage disparity between men and women but could not account for aggregate discrimination during the war years. However unequal their wages compared with men’s, women in defense industries out-earned most “pink collar” employees who held retail, service, or clerical jobs. Constance Bowman, a schoolteacher who spent the summer of 1943 working in a San Diego B-24 bomber factory, earned 68 cents an hour. A beginning sales clerk at the upscale Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store in Los Angeles earned about $20 week, two thirds of a factory worker’s salary. 6 If women were able to cross boundaries into the “masculinized” workplaces of heavy industry, they would be remunerated more handsomely than women who remained in safely “feminized” spheres of employment; but they would not always see paychecks matching those of their male co-workers, even when they faced the same workplace challenges and hazards.

The Women’s Bureau (WB) at the U.S. Department of Labor sent field representatives to factories throughout the country to scrutinize working conditions. Among the WB administrators’ gravest concerns were endangered female bodies on factory floors, where safety seemed subordinate to management’s production quotas and workers’ personal style preferences. An alarming New York Times story announced in January 1944 that American “industry deaths” since the attack on Pearl Harbor had exceeded the “number killed in war” by 7,500. 7 The Labor Department tried to convince American women to prioritize safety when choosing work apparel: to wear safety shoes or boots rather than ordinary footwear and to don protective caps or helmets rather than bandanas and scarves. A WB analyst reported that “the most distressing accident” in war industry resulted from long hair catching in machinery. In Rhode Island a woman was “completely scalped” after her hair coiled on an assembly line belt. The Office of War Information (OWI), the U.S. government’s chief propaganda agency, produced documents illustrating proper and improper ways to style and wear hair in industrial jobs. The WB urged factories to adopt rules about head coverings as well as safety shoes and slacks. The Labor Department even designed “fashionable” caps and hats in a variety of shapes and colors, since their research concluded that women did not wish to look exactly like one another in the workplace. 8

More shocking than minimal head protection was the use of substandard footwear, which led U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to sound a warning bell at a 1943 “Women in War Industries” conference. In her opening address, Perkins noted that most industrial accidents among women were in the “slip, fall, and stumble categories,” leading her to recommend that work uniforms include “shoes devised particularly to help women prevent” such accidents. 9 Perkins and others concerned about occupational safety had to contend with American shoe retailers—and their representatives in Washington—who insisted that women would want to wear their sandals, moccasins, and espadrilles to work. 10 Retail store managers were told they could assist in recruitment and retention of female defense workers by displaying attractive work clothes that promoted safety, neatness, and good health. 11 In spite of U.S. government war agencies’ directives to defense plants to enforce safety standards on all fronts, some Labor Department inspectors found that corporate managers would not comply until threatened with prosecution. 12

Munitions makers and retailers alike were encouraged to take women employees’ “health and beauty” needs seriously, providing them with cosmetics, soaps, and sanitary supplies to use in workplace restrooms and lounges. Such comfort packages would not merely attract employees but also keep them content and more likely to stay after they had been hired. 13 The Labor Department recommended a sufficient number of showers and lockers on site for particular industries, such as shipbuilding, where women preferred to travel to and from work in their “street clothes.” 14 Working women saw magazine advertisements instructing them to pay particularly close attention to skincare and personal hygiene, lest they lose their “femininity” in the much-altered economic and social landscape of wartime America. 15

Job opportunities and steady wages could not offset for many the hardships of fulltime employment: shift work, long commutes, limited childcare options, and inconvenient shopping hours for food and other necessities. Very few grocery and department store owners chose to accommodate women who needed to do their shopping in the late evening or night hours. That women workers got sick more often than men was attributed to the fact that they were doing, “in effect, two fulltime jobs.” 16 U.S. government promises to organize day care centers in war boom areas went largely unfulfilled, meeting the needs of a mere fraction of the large population of working mothers; the public childcare project was not funded until 1943 , and “even then, the centers provided care for only 10 percent of the children who needed it.” 17

While limited training, sore muscles, and exhaustion from the home/work double shift discouraged many women, added burdens for women of color included workplace discrimination and harassment. They endured racial slurs and physical attacks in factories, and disproportionately filled the lowest-paid and least appealing jobs, including janitorial work. The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC)—created by Executive Order 8802 in 1941 to address racial discrimination in industry—lacked the funds to handle the wave of complaints engendered by rapid wartime mobilization. When FEPC cases faced delays, black women searching for work or seeking promotions in their current jobs suffered the most. But women of color, like all American women, found their greatest challenge to be reconciling home life and work life during the war years. Opportunity magazine noted that black women in defense jobs grew “much more irritated than men by periods of standing around and doing nothing,” since they knew they could use the down time running errands for their second shift duties at home. One commentator suggested release of workers in factory down periods in order to promote “better morale” and to stem the tide of absenteeism, a significant problem among female employees eighteen months into the war. 18

American women were encouraged to consider every job a war job, however irrelevant a particular position might seem with regard to the military effort. Beyond riveting and welding, other tasks required even more hands and minds nationwide. The United States needed farm laborers, telephone operators, laundry workers, food servers, and bus drivers. Three million women cultivated crops in the federal agriculture program known as the Women’s Land Army. And while women had filled clerical positions for nearly half a century in the United States, the war accelerated the trend. Women took certain places as men vacated them, with the U.S. government offering hundreds of thousands of desk jobs to anyone who could file, type, and take dictation. The expanding bureaucratic structure of war was matched by private sector growth, where American businesses were forced to open their doors and offices to female employees. With the military draft taking its share of male, middle-class clerks and salesmen, openings for women abounded in the consumer economy. Radio stations, insurance firms, and advertising agencies hired more women than ever before. Banking, in particular, saw “feminization” in its employment ranks; at the beginning of the war, some sixty-five thousand women worked in banking but by the end of 1944 , approximately one hundred thirty thousand women were bank employees, constituting nearly one half of the industry’s total personnel. 19

Volunteer Work

Beyond those who earned wages, millions of women donated their time, money, or both, especially in the realm of morale work. Those who cultivated a genuine spirit of volunteerism saw their work bear fruit, even though some groups were criticized for their “charity bazaar” approach. Images circulated of the rich snob who sat at a booth for a few hours a week but remained oblivious to real sacrifice. 20 A government handbook for the American Women’s Voluntary Service (AWVS) clarified the organization’s purpose as well its diverse membership in many states, where women carried out “real hard work.” They took classes on home repair and first aid, helped children, and learned practical wartime skills such as map reading, convoy driving, clinical photography, and Morse code. The AWVS affected every aspect of wartime culture, sending its members to assist military personnel, distribute ration books, sell war bonds, and collect salvage, as well as to recruit blood donors, nurses, farm workers, and child care workers, and to knit, sew, and recondition clothes for military families and relief agencies. 21

AWVS chapters took pride in their “non-sectarian, non-political, non-profit-making” status to encourage women from many backgrounds to join their ranks. Across the country the AWVS made strides in several socially sensitive areas including interracial cooperation. Indeed, African American women urged others to support the organization, because it “transcend[ed] any consideration of race, or color, or class, or caste.” The AWVS became a place where, through their work together, women could understand “each other’s problems and shortcomings and consciously or unconsciously, [develop] an appreciation of each other’s virtues,” one member reported. Interracial volunteer activities among women spurred optimism for a more inclusive postwar America while stimulating the growth of similar organizations where women could meet and serve a larger cause. 22

In the realm of “morale,” the presumed purview of women, one group enjoyed the spotlight above all others—the United Service Organizations (USO). In assisting and entertaining U.S. military troops, USO volunteers were asked to consider their work the female equivalent of military service. Through gender-defined actions and activities, USO volunteers were expected to assume particular mental and emotional postures when dealing with soldiers and sailors. The ideal USO junior hostess’s femininity quotient was determined in part by her ability to yield to a serviceman’s wishes within the boundaries of middle-class American womanhood. How she presented herself would determine the reactions of soldiers and sailors, she was instructed. Patience, general optimism, and good listening skills were a good hostess’s requisite qualities. Since many USO sites provided games, women played table tennis, checkers, and cards, and often allowed their male opponents to win. Such “gendered emotional work” meant women were not to appear too smart or too competitive; to challenge a serviceman’s masculinity undermined the organization’s purpose of supporting male service members’ morale. As historian Meghan Winchell argues, “If a hostess made a serviceman happy, then she had done her job, and this, not meeting her own interests, theoretically provided her with satisfaction.” Her selflessness would presumably reinforce cultural gender norms and uphold social order in the midst of wartime crisis. 23

This requisite “cheerful selflessness” was matched by the initiative of women who chose to relocate near their spouses’ military installations. In packed trains and buses, often with young children in tow, they made their way cross-country to visit or live near their husbands. One observer called them “the saddest and most predictable feature of the crowded train stations and bus terminals.” 24 War brides on the move could easily identify each other and found comfort in their shared condition. 25 African American army wives who accompanied their husbands to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, lived in a squalid “unconverted barrack” outside the camp’s gates; during the day they served the base as secretaries, janitors, cooks, food servers, launderers, and maids in white officers’ homes. But their main priority, according to a reporter for The Crisis , was “the morale of their menfolk.” 26

Military Service

Women who volunteered for military service posed a great challenge to the collective consciousness about gender and sexual norms and clear gender divisions, especially regarding who could be considered a soldier, sailor, or marine. The women in uniform closest to the front lines were nurses, government-sanctioned “angels of mercy” whose work Americans more readily accepted because it reflected expectations that women were natural caregivers. Precedent also helped to secure the public’s approval of women serving in this capacity; both the army nurse corps and navy nurse corps had existed since the early 20th century, with more than twenty thousand military nurses serving during the First World War, half of them in overseas duty. But female volunteers in military organizations founded during World War II faced tougher scrutiny than nurses; their womanhood and femininity were questioned by many detractors, even though the idea of national service for women was not new. As early as 1940 , First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had recommended a required service responsibility (although not specifically a military duty) for all young American women. 27 Roosevelt did not get her peacetime wish, but after the U.S. declared war in December 1941 , the mobilization of women as assistants in the army seemed not merely plausible but imperative. U.S. Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers’ bill to that effect had languished since May 1941 , but in May 1942 , Congress approved it and President Roosevelt signed it, creating the all-volunteer Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Three additional military units followed the creation of a women’s army. The women’s naval organization, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), was founded in July of 1942 ; the women’s coast guard, Semper Paratus Always Ready (SPAR), followed in November; and finally, the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (USMCWR) was established in February 1943 . All four of the women’s military groups were designed to release men who held military desk jobs and other stateside responsibilities for combat duty, something many men resented. In addition, because of the expansive mobilization of the military for the war, thousands of new clerical positions emerged in all branches of the armed services and this too inspired calls for female military personnel. As one colorful recruitment poster directed at women commanded, “Be A Marine. Free A Marine to Fight.” Recruiters had to proceed cautiously with a message whose logic told women that joining a military service organization would send more men to their deaths. Even so, the message reinforced gender differences—women might wear uniforms, march in formation, and be promoted, but only men could face enemy forces at battle sites. Thus, men continued to dominate the most masculine of human activities—warfare—which was further masculinized by U.S. government propaganda in the 1940s. 28

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) did not receive military status during World War II, but members participated in the American war effort by ferrying planes from factory sites to defense camps and embarkation points. These female aviators also tested new aircraft, hauled cargo, and assisted male pilots in training exercises. In 1944 , U.S. Army Air Corps General Henry “Hap” Arnold publicly declared WASP pilots as capable as their male counterparts. Thirty-eight women died serving in the WASP during its two-year existence ( 1942–44 ), yet none of the pilots’ families received government support for their funerals because the organization was not officially militarized. 29

Propaganda aimed at enticing women to join one of the military forces touted substantial base pay in addition to food, lodging, clothing, and medical and dental care. But the Office of War Information (OWI) insisted that recruitment messages refrain from appealing “entirely to the self-interest approach.” Women were not supposed to entertain individual needs or wishes, but instead to join for higher, nobler reasons: “patriotism and the desire to help our fighting men,” the OWI instructed. 30 Even so, years later, many female soldiers, sailors, marines, and pilots admitted to volunteering because they wanted an adventure or independence or both. 31

Figure 1. Recruitment poster created by the Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information-Domestic Operations Branch, Bureau of Special Services, 1944 . U.S. National Archives (44-PA-260A).

In 1943 , the women’s army group discarded its “auxiliary” status to become an integral part of the U.S. Army and was renamed the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a move that generated an outpouring of criticism, concern, and derision. Male GIs carried out a smear campaign against the organization. They spread rumors that WAC volunteers served as prostitutes for male soldiers, reinforcing a notion that army life encouraged promiscuity. Some wondered whether incorporating the WAC into the regular army meant that its members would—like their male counterparts—be issued condoms. Would army life encourage sexual activity among female volunteers? 32 Viewed not simply in ethical terms, women’s sexual autonomy was considered transgressive behavior that aligned them too closely with men in uniform, whose masculinity was often measured by their sexual prowess and emphasized during the war years. 33 The blurring or crossing of gender and sexual lines in this realm implied a social disorder that many Americans could not abide.

Worries about women’s sexual independence also inspired rumors of a “lesbian threat” in the WAC. In the 1940s, both American medical opinion and public opinion associated female sexual “deviance” as much with a woman’s appearance as her actions. Androgyny or, in wartime language, a “mannish” way, could mark a woman as suspect since she challenged the rules of femininity that grounded heterosexuality and secured a traditional social order. As women stepped into previously all-male venues during the war years, gender “disguise” could be interpreted as dangerous. Acutely aware of this, WAC director Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby ordered army women “to avoid rough or masculine appearance which would cause unfavorable public comment.” 34 In the spring of 1944 , female mechanics at Ellington Air Base, Texas, attended lectures about “proper dress for work” with a warning not to “roll up” the legs or sleeves of their coveralls. One Ellington mechanic wrote to her parents, “We are now buttoned and covered from tip to toe.” The OWI instructed advertisers and illustrators to show female soldiers in “complete G. I. uniform” and never “smoking or drinking alcoholic beverages,” concerns not voiced about men in uniform. These rules of propriety indicated the preeminent role that clothing played in assigning gender and sexual identities during the war. Even the appearance of impropriety could be grounds for dismissal and a dishonorable discharge. 35

Beyond the role of patriotic duty, the U.S. government’s preeminent recruitment message emphasized gender, declaring: “Women in uniform are no less feminine than before they enlisted.” In fact, officials hoped to appeal to women’s sartorial interests by using fashion plate graphic designs in recruitment literature. Illustrations of female soldiers posing as atelier models and department store mannequins displayed the numerous stylish items in a military wardrobe—from foundations to outerwear—together worth about $250. The idea was not only to recruit women but also to counter critics who railed against the idea of women’s military organizations in the United States. The tactics worked; many volunteers admitted joining one organization or another because they liked the uniforms. 36

Enlistment criteria, training, and job assignments varied widely by organization. The WAC accepted volunteers with a minimum of two years of high school, while the WAVES required a high school diploma, with college “strongly recommended.” Female marines in the women’s reserve (WRs) needed at least two years of college credit. Their respective training models also bespoke their differences. While WAC recruits trained, lived, and worked at army camps, WAVES and WRs took instruction on college campuses. As a result of the varying minimum standards for enlistment in the women’s services, the WAC became home to a more ethnically and racially diverse population, and it enlisted women from a wider range of socio-economic backgrounds, including those who could not afford to attend college. More age-diverse as well, the WAC welcomed women between the ages of 20 and 50 who had no children under 14 years, whereas the WAVES, SPAR, and USMCWR limited their volunteer base to women between the ages of 20 and 36 who had no children under 18. Of the four women’s military services, only the WAC allowed its members to serve overseas. 37

To alert women to the army’s variety of needs and encourage them to volunteer, the WAC advertised “239 kinds of jobs.” Many recruits received specialized army training in radio, chemistry, mechanics, and other fields, while others brought previously honed skills, such as foreign language training, into the army. Bilingual Latinas, for example, were recruited specifically for cryptology and interpretation; a special unit comprised of two hundred Puerto Rican WAC volunteers served at the New York Port of Embarkation and other locations dedicated to the shipment of U.S. troops. Nevertheless, some female soldiers were given tasks considered “women’s work” rather than jobs they had been promised or trained to do. WAC officer Betty Bandel discovered low morale among troops whose expectations about their roles were not met. The army had given them domestic tasks, similar to those they had held in civilian life, or it had failed to utilize the professional expertise they brought with them into service. Disappointed at what she and her colleagues interpreted as gender discrimination, Bandel confided to her mother that some Army Air Force units had even requested that Wacs do the pilots’ laundry and provide “troop entertainment.” 38

Women of color who wished to join military units faced steep discrimination. Excluded from the WAVES and SPAR until November 1944 , and excluded from the wartime marines or WASP, sixty-five hundred African Americans joined a segregated women’s army. As one of the first female African American army officers, Charity Adams experienced vicious discrimination at Ft. Des Moines on several occasions. Early in her training, a higher-ranking white male officer—a fellow South Carolinian—excoriated Adams for appearing at the officers’ club one evening. In his lengthy peroration, Adams stood silently at attention while the colonel reminded her about segregation laws, the southern past, racialized slavery, and her “place” in this scheme. 39 Adams persevered at the Iowa base, rising in the ranks to major and commanding an all-black battalion of eight hundred fifty women assigned to a postal unit in Great Britain and France in 1945 . But she spent many hours at Ft. Des Moines tending to “extra” duties that fellow soldiers expected of her because she was black; one of those tasks was cultivating the small Victory Garden at their barracks. Other women of color in uniform were assaulted at southern railway stations, denied access to facilities and dining cars on trains, and treated with disdain in towns near their bases and well beyond. 40

Japanese American women, initially barred from joining the Women’s Army Corps, were admitted beginning in November 1943 , but organization officials preferred that news outlets not publicize the inductions of Nisei women. 41 The WAVES, the second largest women’s military organization, did not accept Japanese American volunteers during the war. The pervasiveness of anti-Japanese sentiment adversely affected U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, many of whom strove to prove their loyalty in the face of embedded racism and a nationwide hatred that took even deeper root among white supremacists as the 1940s wore on. 42

Sex, Marriage, and Motherhood

Loosening sexual mores, skyrocketing marriage rates, and a burgeoning baby boom characterized the war years. Casual sexual relations among the unmarried startled many Americans, who blamed young women—especially those who worked outside their homes—for shifting standards. Government propaganda associated the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis and gonorrhea, with women rather than men by casting disease carriers as female. 43 Among the most vulnerable to infected women, official media suggested, were America’s men in uniform. Posters warned: “She May Look Clean—But” and, in 1941 , before the United States entered the war, the May Act declared prostitution near U.S. defense camps a federal crime. Yet the vast wartime mobilization effort combined with the cultural politics of the early 1940s provided American women a wide berth to express and enjoy sexual intimacy in the name of patriotism. Many who migrated to war boom cities and military installments left behind constraints on sexual behavior that had guided them in their home communities. As circumstances “opened up new sexual possibilities,” women more freely explored their erotic desires. 44 For example, lesbians socialized, fell in love, and “began to name and talk about who they were,” contributing to one of the war’s significant legacies, the establishment and reinforcement of lesbian and gay communities. 45 At the same time, shifting social standards made more women open targets for sexual innuendo and unwelcome invitations from strangers; San Diego factory worker Constance Bowman wrote about cat calls and whistles and, on one occasion, a marine stalking her down a street with the persistent entreaty, “How about a little war work, Sister?” 46 The intersections of rapid defense mobilization, loosened social constraints, and greater female sexual autonomy created a home front where women became a “suspect category, subject to surveillance for the duration of the war,” Marilyn Hegarty argues. 47

Paradoxically, in the midst of wartime fear and surveillance of women’s sexuality, female allure and glamour were used to sell everything from laundry detergent to soda pop to troop morale. The World War II years marked the heyday of the “pin up girl,” and an unprecedented display of American women’s bodies; movie stars such as Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner posed seductively for photographers and other artists, whose prints, posters, and calendars were reproduced in the millions and circulated widely. Ordinary American women copied these poses in photographs that they sent stateside to military camps and overseas to battlefronts. 48 And many women took the next logical step by literally offering their bodies—out of patriotic duty, to cap a brief encounter, or to seal a romantic relationship. 49

High U.S. marriage rates during World War II created a “Wartime Marriage Boom.” Between 1940 and 1943 , some 6,579,000 marriages took place, yielding over 1.1 million more marriages than rates in the 1920s and 1930s would have predicted. 50 A “bridal terror” had emerged soon after the Selective Service Act of 1940 initiated the United States’ first peacetime draft, and a rumored “man shortage” took hold of the American imagination midway through the war. Early on it was unclear how marriage and parenthood might affect military deferments, leading couples to tie the knot with expectations of securing extra time. In addition, with the wartime draft extending to males between the ages of 18 and 45, the pool of eligible men for marriage had presumably shrunk. By 1944 , rising U.S. casualty figures also contributed to the alarm. In large cities and defense camp areas, where soldiers and sailors congregated before deployment, “the urge to send men away happy meant numerous intimate liaisons, quick marriages, or both.” Many couples barely knew each other before taking their vows. A 1944 U.S. Census Bureau survey revealed that more than 2.7 million young, married women had husbands away in the armed services. The following year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that more marriages had occurred “in each of the past four years than in any prior year in the history of the United States.” 51 War mobilization encouraged many couples to marry sooner than they had planned and others to marry soon after meeting each other. Many of these long distance relationships unraveled over the war years, with the high wartime marriage rates resulting in the highest divorce rates in U.S. history. 52

A baby boom accompanied the marriage boom, and many young mothers were left alone to care for their children and make ends meet. The more resourceful of them pooled their funds by “tripling up” in apartments, splitting the rent and food costs, and sharing childcare and housekeeping responsibilities. 53 Others found childcare where they could in order to take advantage of defense industry jobs. These working mothers received limited assistance from federally sponsored childcare facilities that had been authorized under the 1940 Lanham Act, an extension of the Depression-era public works projects. Underfunded and concentrated primarily in war boom areas, federal childcare centers served some six hundred thousand children during the war years; yet at their greatest use, they served only 13 percent of children who needed them. Americans’ steadfast belief in a mother’s responsibility to remain at home with her children persisted during World War II; even the war emergency failed to temper this deeply entrenched, middle class standard. 54 The notable exception to otherwise meager organized childcare assistance came on the west coast, where the Kaiser Shipbuilding Company provided its female employees in Washington, Oregon, and California with reliable, well-staffed facilities. The Richmond shipyards in the San Francisco Bay area oversaw approximately fourteen hundred children daily. 55

Figure 2. Josie Lucille Owens, Kaiser Shipyards, Richmond, California.

Working mothers were forced to make difficult choices during the war years. Some chose second shifts or night shifts, so they could be with their children during the day and work while they were sleeping. Others who worked day shifts were criticized for leaving their children. In several defense boom areas, social workers and school staff speculated that women entering the work force were spurred by “additional income and a too great readiness to evade full responsibility for their children” rather than “patriotic motives.” 56 Pressure on mothers to assume full responsibility for their children intensified during the war years, as reports of increasing juvenile delinquency appeared in magazines and newspapers. In A Generation of Vipers ( 1942 ), Philip Wylie criticized “Mom” for many “social discomforts and ills,” particularly the problems of American youth. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover instructed mothers to stop “the drift of normal youth toward immorality and crime,” telling them not to take war jobs if their employment meant “the hiring of another woman to come in and take care of [their] children.” American society, in spite of the wartime emergency, barely budged on its expectations of working mothers. 57

Figure 3. “And then in my spare time . . .” Bob Barnes for the Office of War Information, ca. 1943. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-97636), digital ID: cph 3b43729.

Mobility, Sacrifice, and Patriotic Duty

Women’s growing independence during World War II was visibly characterized by their mobility. The cities, towns, and camps attracting them were located on both coasts and everywhere in between—Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland, Mobile, Detroit, St. Louis, and numerous other places where the prospects of war work, steady wages, or other opportunities beckoned. Some traveled occasionally to see their sweethearts, sons, and husbands, while others took to the road daily or weekly to punch time clocks in defense factories. Extending and expanding the Great Migration from the rural south to urban, industrial America, black women entered shipyards, ordnance plants, and bomber factories in unprecedented numbers.

Industrial growth and military mobilization allowed women to crisscross the nation in trains and buses, but their new mobility caused many Americans a sense of uneasiness and discontent. Women who traveled or lived alone were viewed with suspicion, while those who crowded into teeming defense areas, with or without their families, were often treated with scorn by local residents. In Portland, Oregon, community women criticized female shipyard workers who came into town “dirty and tired” at the end of their shifts. In Mobile, Alabama, a woman berated newcomers as “the lowest type of poor whites, these workers flocking in from the backwoods. They prefer to live in shacks and go barefoot . . . Give them a good home and they wouldn’t know what to do with it.” Many were met with the Depression-era epithet, “Okies.” In addition to the contempt they endured, migrants had to tolerate conditions that posed health risks: overcrowded boarding houses, makeshift accommodations, brimming sewers, limited water supplies and hard-pressed local schools. 58

In the nation’s capital, thousands of women who answered the persistent calls for office workers—a “Girls for Washington Jobs” campaign—created a “spectacle” that “staggered the imagination.” The women arrived in the city to find substandard lodging, if they found it at all. Construction on U.S. government residence halls that had been promised to unmarried female workers lagged months behind schedule, forcing women to find rooms in boardinghouses run by mercenary landlords or strict matrons. 59

Testing a woman’s conscience about her full participation in the war effort was commonplace in home front propaganda. She was supposed to want to undertake defense work, volunteer positions, or join a women’s military organization in order to support combat troops and out of a sense of patriotic duty. To use such positions to launch personal independence of any kind—especially financial—could be viewed as selfish or even reckless. African American sociologist Walter Chivers observed, in 1943 , that black women who thought they had left domestic work behind by seizing defense jobs would once again “have to seek employment in the white woman’s home.” An appeal for more military nurses late in the war asked: “Is Your Comfort as Important as the Lives of 15 Wounded Soldiers?” 60

Women were advised to spend their extra coins and dollars on war bonds or other U.S. government initiatives. The 1942 handbook Calling All Women advised that a ten-cent war stamp would purchase “a set of insignia for the Army” or “five .45 cartridges for the Marine Corps.” The 6th War Bond Drive in 1944 included a “Pin Money War Bond” promotion for women who previously had been unable to afford to buy bonds; whether unemployed or underemployed, they could spend pennies and nickels to fill a “stamp” album that would eventually convert to a war bond. Eleanor Sewall, a Lockheed Aircraft employee whose husband was captured on Bataan, was heralded by the company for her decision to contribute 50 percent of her salary in payroll deductions toward war bonds. Beyond such an investment’s practical value in assisting the government, less disposable income for women would limit paths to financial independence that could be viewed as self-serving. Sacrifice in the cause of patriotic duty would temper desires for—and achievement of—personal autonomy. 61

Among many American women who sacrificed during the war were those who served near the front lines or had family members in military service. The sixty-six nurses who were captured by the Japanese on Corregidor spent three years in Santo Tomas prison camp in Manila. Besides sharing scarce food and limited supplies with three thousand other American and British prisoners, they shared three showers and five toilets with the five hundred other women there. 62 American mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts together lost more than four hundred thousand loved ones—the U.S. death casualty count—during the war. The writer Zelda Popkin noted that some women became “widows before they were really wives.” 63

Lasting Changes

Amidst sacrifice and loss, many American women clung to the opportunities extended to them during World War II. Prewar gender expectations had been tested and found wanting. Susan B. Anthony II, great-niece and namesake of the women’s suffrage fighter, argued in 1944 that women had proven their abilities in every field and therefore deserved “equal pay for equal work, a right grudgingly acceded” them during the war. Having worked all three shifts as a grinder in the Washington Navy Yard machine shop, while her fifty-six-year-old mother worked at a Pennsylvania radar factory, Anthony was confident that war’s end would “mark a turning point in women’s road to full equality.” 64

If the Allies’ fight for “freedom” meant personal independence, then American women had embraced it in the early 1940s. Of the “Four Freedoms” articulated by President Roosevelt in 1940 , “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” went a long way in explaining why some American women enjoyed the financial, social, and emotional rewards of the war years. The large number of those who developed skills and carried out new work, who put on military uniforms, married quickly, engaged in sexual activity freely, or moved several hundred miles away from home—or all of these—did so inside the grander framework of national and global crisis. Out of crisis, the most meaningful transformations emanated from the confidence they developed and the independence they felt and exercised. Many feared these would fade or be retracted after the war, and their fears were justified. From popular culture to social commentary to political leadership, powerful voices urged women to “go back home to provide jobs for service men,” despite the fact that the jobs many held were not available to servicemen before the war and that many returning servicemen had not worked for wages regularly in the 1930s. 65 Numerous surveys and polls of female workers found that most wanted to remain in the work force rather than return to their prewar employment conditions. 66 Efforts to “contain” women during the late 1940s and convince them to embrace a middle-class dream where they would play starring roles as domestic goddesses in their own homes eventually backfired. 67 Their wartime experiences combined with collective memory not only affected their daughters, sisters, and friends directly, but also reinforced the deep foundations of the equality crusades—from civil rights to women’s rights to workers’ rights to gay and lesbian rights—that would take center stage in the postwar generations.

Discussion of the Literature

Women featured in a few early histories of the Second World War, but they did not receive much scholarly notice as a group until the late 1970s, after the women’s movement and the field of women’s history had gained traction. The simultaneous influence of social sciences on history contributed to the heightened interest in women as subjects—they could be counted, plotted on graphs, and studied in the aggregate, especially as war workers. Thus the earliest scholarship highlighted women’s contributions to U.S. success in World War II, particularly through their work as builders and inspectors of military equipment. Leila J. Rupp’s book Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 ( 1978 ) focused on the U.S. government propaganda campaigns to get women into the factories and other places of employment and to keep them there for the duration. 68

In the 1980s, four landmark works appeared, establishing the vital role of American women in the Second World War and positing an essential question: How did women’s work for wages affect their abilities as wives, mothers, and homemakers? In Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II ( 1981 ), Karen Anderson focused on three of the fastest-growing industrial areas for war production: Detroit, Baltimore, and Seattle. Anderson unveiled the underside of these burgeoning urban workplaces, with their racial tensions and violence, age discrimination, and unfulfilled government promises to working homemakers who needed assistance with shopping, meal preparation, and child care. Susan Hartmann’s The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s ( 1982 ) launched Twayne’s American Women in the Twentieth Century series, a chronological history organized by decade. That Hartmann analyzed the 1940s, whole and entire, allowed readers to see the social and political forces operating to encourage the maintenance of traditional, clearly defined gender duties in postwar America ( 1945–1949 ), namely homemaking and motherhood for women. 69

In 1984 , D’Ann Campbell published the cleverly titled Women At War With America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era , a work that approached various groups of American women in terms of their roles and resources. Using the rich material produced by social scientists and their organizations during the war, Campbell combined the techniques of both a social scientist and humanist to show that military women, homemakers, stateside service wives, and female industrial laborers, among others, fared much worse on all fronts than one group singled out and heralded because their work fit within acceptable gender parameters: nurses. All of these groups had gone to war, many answering the numerous calls to assist however they could, but Campbell demonstrated that American women remained at war with a nation that extended opportunities to them while simultaneously reining them in. 70

The fourth significant book published in the 1980s, Maureen Honey’s Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II ( 1984 ), revealed how high-circulation magazines aimed at particular audiences sought to appeal to women on the basis of class status and values. In addition to these four important works, Alice Kessler-Harris and Ruth Milkman also conducted studies in the 1980s on the challenges women faced during World War II as laborers. By the end of the decade these historians and other scholars generally agreed that the war had offered myriad and measurable opportunities to women of all races and at all socioeconomic levels, but the options proved temporary, resulting in little significant redefinition of cultural gender norms that had cast women primarily as wives and mothers. 71

This early scholarship was enriched by oral history projects begun in earnest in the 1980s, notably Sherna Berger Gluck’s interviews of southern California war workers in Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change ( 1987 ), a collection that encouraged scholars to follow Gluck’s lead in focusing on personal narratives of women who now seemed comfortable talking candidly about their wartime experiences. Oral history projects would flourish in the 1990s, as fiftieth anniversary commemorations of U.S. involvement in World War II not only marked specific events but also prompted an urgency to record aging participants’ stories. Scholars’ concentration on particular locales or geographic regions, as well as specific groups of women or the jobs they carried out became organizing principles for a succession of oral history collections, some available online and others in print, such as Cindy Weigand’s Texas Women in World War II ( 2003 ) and Jeffrey S. Suchanek’s Star Spangled Hearts: American Women Veterans of World War II ( 2011 ). 72

While oral history projects flourished in the 1990s and beyond, Judy Barrett Litoff and David Smith began soliciting, collecting, and publishing as many wartime letters as possible. Their quest, begun in 1990 , continues a generation later, with an amassed total of over 30,000 letters written by women. Litoff and Smith’s edited collections remain a starting point for any scholar pursuing the voices of ordinary American women who corresponded during the war. 73

The emerging field of cultural studies influenced scholarship from the 1990s forward, bringing gender and sexuality to the fore. The questions raised by cultural studies required scholars to consider the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality as central elements in how women were viewed and what they experienced as a result. In Abiding Courage , Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo surveyed African American women who had migrated to northern California’s East Bay area, where employment in the shipyards and auxiliary industries offered economic opportunities unavailable in the Jim Crow south. Leisa D. Meyer’s Creating GI Jane revealed the myriad challenges, both real and imaginary, posed by a women’s army—notably Americans’ views on who could and should be a soldier and what that meant for a social order dependent on clear-cut gender norms; Meyer was one of the first to analyze lesbian Wacs during WWII. Maureen Honey’s edited collection of primary sources, Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II ( 1999 ), investigated how women of color were depicted in popular culture, including the African American press, and how they negotiated these characterizations in addition to the challenges of wartime mobility, displacement, and opportunity. 74

In recent years, scholars examining American women during World War II have synthesized and built on the foundations laid by the previous generation, taking further the equations linking gender, sexuality, personal autonomy, and the media’s role in guiding individual and collective self-awareness, behavior, and cultural values. The historians’ titles reveal not only the characterizations of wartime women but also the pressures brought to bear on them during the crisis: Marilyn Hegarty’s Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II ( 2008 ), Meghan K. Winchell’s Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II ( 2008 ), and Melissa A. McEuen’s Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941–1945 ( 2011 ), all pose research questions that uncover uneasy truths about the measured oversight and careful management of American women during a U.S. war inspired by and fought to defend “freedom.” Similar questions remain today as historians still seek to understand how U.S. propaganda agencies, and American media in general, depicted women during the war, and what this meant to them, to those conducting the war effort, and to the nation at large. 75

Primary Sources

Primary sources depicting or targeting American women during World War II—including photographs, posters, cartoons, advertisements, letters, government documents, and oral history interviews—are available in several major collections, most notably at the Library of Congress, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and Duke University’s Rubenstein Library.

A good place to initiate any study of women on the home front is with “ Rosie Pictures ,” a selection of images of wartime workers from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. The representative sampling in “Rosie Pictures” hints at what may be found among the library’s vast holdings of visual images, including the invaluable Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection, comprised of 175,000 photographs taken by U.S. government photographers who traveled throughout the nation between 1935 and 1944 . The collection has been carefully curated, with each item fully described and contextualized, and nearly all of them digitized.

The National Archives Library Information Center (ALIC) has organized information on women topically, so that the subject of war may be pursued from several angles and according to themes such as “women in the military” or “African American women.” Links to a variety of websites containing women’s history materials—though not necessarily items housed in the National Archives—may be found at the ALIC’s reference hub on Women . Millions of the U.S. government’s paper records not yet digitized are available at the College Park research facility, including documents produced by federal agencies created during the Second World War for specific objectives, such as the Office of War Information, the War Manpower Commission, and the War Production Board. At the U.S. Department of Labor, the Women’s Bureau generated countless pages of reports during the war, and all are available to researchers who visit the National Archives.

Duke University’s Rubenstein Library houses a variety of primary source materials in several major collections, including the War Effort Mobilization Campaigns Poster Collection, 1942‐1945 , and the extensive Guide to the J. Walter Thompson Company. World War II Advertising Collection, 1940‐1948 . Additional collections located in the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at the Rubenstein Library offer such resources as roadside billboard advertisements and department store window displays, designed to appeal to female consumers in the 1940s. Finally, among Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections is Ad Access , a database of magazine and newspaper advertisements that features over 1,700 items from the war years, including official propaganda and many promotions directed specifically at women.

Three other significant primary sources collections deserve attention and offer scholars insight into women’s lives and experiences during World War II. Interview transcripts and video excerpts of interviews conducted for the “ Rosie the Riveter WWII American Home Front Project ” by the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley, are available at the Bancroft Library site. Northwestern University Library’s World War II Poster Collection contains 338 items, thoroughly identified and contextualized and at a high resolution to facilitate close analysis, many of them featuring women. Images are available as high-resolution files for close analysis. For wartime correspondence, there is no better starting point than the U.S. Women and World War II Letter Writing Project , developed by Professor Judy Barrett Litoff at Bryant University, and housed there in 175 boxes. Several hundred letters are available as PDFs on the project site, along with a helpful Finding Aid to the entire collection, prepared by Litoff.

A number of museums and special exhibits devoted to American women’s roles and contributions in World War II contain valuable primary sources and historical analysis. These include: The Farm Labor Project: Brooklyn College Oral Histories on World War II and the McCarthy Era , Brooklyn College; “ Focus on: Women at War ,” See & Hear Collections, The National World War II Museum, New Orleans; National WASP World War II Museum, Sweetwater, Texas; “ Partners in Winning the War: American Women in World War II , National Women’s History Museum, Alexandria, Virginia; “ Women Come to the Front ,” Library of Congress; “ WAVES, World War II, Establishment of Women’s Reserve ,” Naval History and Heritage Command; and “ World War II: Women and the War ,” Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, Arlington, Virginia.

Second World War and its impact, 1939-1948

South africa enters the war.

In September 1939, World War II broke out. In South Africa, people were divided as to whether or not they should join the war, and if so, on whose side they should fight. Although South Africa was still a British territory many Afrikaners felt closer to the Germans. Many of them were of German descent and identified with Germany's fight against Britain. The issue caused a split in South African politics. At that point, the country was led by the United Party, a coalition of the National Party (NP) of J B M Hertzog and the South African Party (SAP) of J C Smuts. Hertzog preferred that South Africa remain neutral in World War Two, while Smuts wanted to fight on the side of the Allies. Hertzog resigned as Prime Minister of the country, and was succeeded by Smuts. South Africa then joined the war on the Allies' side, and fought major battles in North Africa, Ethiopia, Madagascar and Italy.

At the time of the coalition, a group within the National Party, opposed to the United Party, broke away from the NP. They formed the Reunited National Party or Herenigde Nationale Party (HNP) led by DF Malan. When Hertzog left the United Party in 1939, he joined the HNP. This party would play an enormous role after the War.

For more on South Africa's role in World War II, see our Grade 12 lesson, 1924-1948: South Africa's Foreign Relations.

Post-war problems

The war had a huge social and economic effect on South Africa. Gold and mining remained the biggest industry in the country, but manufacturing had begun to expand significantly as a result of the war and the need for various supplies. The number of people employed in the manufacturing industry, especially Black men and White women increased by 60% between 1939 and 1945.

The financial costs of the war were met by taxes and loans. The cost of the war effort was approximately around 600 million pounds. At the end of the war South Africa experienced supply shortages as a result of the return of thousands of soldiers. After the war, the ruling party, the United Party (UP) under Smuts, lost a lot of support. People believed that it was incapable of dealing with the post-war problems. Many white people felt that Smuts lacked a clear policy on how to deal with black people and segregation.

Resistance and campaigns

The 1940s in South Africa were characterised by political and social resistance campaigns. These were spearheaded by Blacks, Indians and Coloureds. The various campaigns are mentioned below, but not mentioned, and of significance was the formation of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), which was launched in 1943.

Changes within the ANC and the formation of the ANCYL

In the face of oppression, liberation movements such as the African National Congress, Communist Party of South Africa and labour organisations emerged in opposition to the white government, but the question then arose: Were all liberation movements well equipped to challenge the government and its repressive laws? Although the African National Congress took the leading role in the struggle, it had suffered internal problems and becoming stagnant.

However, in 1940, Dr Alfred Xuma was elected President of the ANC and he begun to rejuvenate the organization. Xuma gave the go ahead for the formation of the ANC Youth League, when young members like Anton Lembede , Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela called for the immediate revival of the party if it hoped to deliver the African majority into a free land. These young members felt that the ANC was far too moderate and ineffective to challenge the government. As a result of the mounting pressure from

these young members in the ANC, the Congress Youth League was formed in 1944. The ANC Youth League added impetus to the ANC. The Youth League wanted a more proactive approach to be adopted. These changes stimulated a shift in tactics and a stronger articulation of African identities and demands, evident in the ANC’s 1943 Africans’ Claims, an African Bill of Rights that was inspired in part by the Atlantic Charter.

Freedom in our lifetime, the collected writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, with a section on the ANC's Youth League and its activities

Challenges, against the government, also came from the Women's section of the ANC in the 1940s. In 1943, women were allowed to become full ANC members. In 1948, the ANC Women's League was formed under the leadership of Ida Mntwana . Apart from the ANC Women's League, other community-based organisations like the Alexandra Women's Council were set up.

Alexander Bus Boycotts

The first campaign in the 1940s took place in Alexandra Township. There were two bus boycotts in Alexandra, in 1940 and 1944. The residents of Alexandra responded positively to the call by their leaders after several threats were made by the bus company operating in the township to raise its fares from 4 pence to 5 pence. These boycotts spilled over into other parts of the country.

There are a number of reasons for these resistance campaigns. People lived under very poor socio-economic conditions. Unemployment and poverty levels were very high in Alexandra and the people reacted angrily to the bus company's proposed new fares. The residents simply could not afford the higher fares. Committees such as the Alexandra People's Transport Committee (APTC) and the Evaton People's Transport Council (EPTC) were set up to engage in talks with the bus company's management and organise the campaigns. Apart from these committees, the African National Congress (ANC) and Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) played a pivotal role in the mobilisation process, and the most prominent leaders of these campaigns were Alexandra C.S. Ramahanoe (ANC) and Gaur Radebe (CPSA and ANC), who were both on the Transport Committee.

Another reason for the dissatisfaction of Alexandra commuters was the unavailability of cheaper alternative transport to get to work. They felt that the bus company's intentions were tantamount to preventing them from going to work, as they could not afford the new prices. When the situation grew worse the government and other business institutions like the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce became involved and attempted to remedy the situation.

These campaigns received support from other parts of the country and more than 20 000 people rallied behind the protests. As a result the bus company was unable to implement its envisaged fare hike.

The 1946 Indian Passive Resistance Campaign

Following the bus boycotts, the Indian community launched a Passive Resistance campaign from 1946 to 1948. The campaign was in reaction to the introduction of the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill, later the Ghetto Act. The Bill was enacted despite the opposition of the Indian community. The Natal Indian Congress and Transvaal Indian Congress reacted to this arrogance by setting up a Passive Resistance Council to organise the campaign. The Council comprised of Dr Naicker , President of Natal Indian Congress, and Dr Yusuf Dadoo , President of Transvaal Indian Congress.

The resistance was launched on 13 June 1946, ten days after the Bill was passed into law. This campaign received sympathetic support from the international community. At an international level, the United Nations served as a platform for the Indian community at large to raise their objection to the Act and other similarly repressive laws. Many African countries and liberation movements in South Africa used this platform to raise their objections to apartheid. As a result, race surfaced as an international issue.

South Africa and the United Nations during Apartheid The 1946 Indian Passive Resistance Campaign

The 1946 African Mine Workers Strike

The number of African people living in towns nearly doubled in the 1940s, eventually outnumbering White residents. Most of these migrant workers had to live in shantytowns or townships on the outskirts of the cities, and living and working conditions were appalling. Many new trade unions were born during the 1940’s. As a result, workers wanted higher wages and better working conditions. By 1946, there were 119 unions with about 158 000 members demanding to be heard. The African Mineworkers Union (AMWU) went on strike in 1946 and 60 000 men stopped work in demanding higher pay. The police crushed the protest, shooting 12 people dead, but the workers had achieved their purpose in exposing and challenging the system of cheap labour.

State repression and the build up to the 1948 election

In 1947, the Native Representative Council (NRC) demanded the removal of all discriminatory laws. Little did the NRC know that after the 1948 elections, these laws would become even more discriminatory under the policy of Apartheid.

The UP based its 1948 election campaign on a report by the Natives Law or Fagan Commission . It was appointed in 1947 to look into Pass Laws to control the movement of African people in urban areas.

The Fagan Commission reported that "the trend to urbanisation is irreversible and the Pass Laws should be eased". The Commission said it would be unlikely that black people could be prevented from coming to the cities where there were more jobs. They depended on this to survive as the reserves in the rural areas where they were supposed to live held few options for a livelihood. In other words, total segregation would be impossible. The report did not encourage social or political mingling of races but did suggest that urban labour should be stabilised, as workers were needed for industries and other businesses.

Contrary to this, the HNP felt that complete segregation could be achieved. They encouraged the creation of a migrant labour pool with black people being allowed temporary stays in cities for the purpose of work only. In this way, there would be a cheap labour reservoir for industries without black families actually living in towns. The HNP also supported the existence of political organisations within the African reserves, so long as they had no representation in parliament. Malan called for discriminatory legislation, like the prohibition of mixed marriages, the banning of black trade unions and reserving jobs for white people, further oppressing black people.

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How Did World War II End?

By: Christopher Klein

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: August 11, 2020

World War II ended six years and one day after Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, sparked the 20th century’s second global conflict. By the time it concluded on the deck of an American warship on September 2, 1945, World War II had claimed the lives of an estimated 60-80 million people, approximately 3 percent of the world’s population. The vast majority of those who died in history’s deadliest war were civilians, including 6 million Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust .

Germany employed its “blitzkrieg” (“lightning war”) strategy to sweep across the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the war’s opening months and force more than 300,000 British and other Allied troops to evacuate continental Europe from Dunkirk . In June 1941, German dictator Adolf Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and launched Operation Barbarossa , which brought Nazi troops to the gates of Moscow.

By the time the United States entered World War II following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor , German forces occupied much of Europe from the Black Sea to the English Channel. The Allies, however, turned the tide of the conflict, and the following major events brought World War II to an end.

1. The Battle of Stalingrad and Allied Invasions Shaped the End of WWII

After storming across Europe in the first three years of the war, overextended Axis forces were put on the defensive after the Soviet Red Army rebuffed them in the brutal Battle of Stalingrad , which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943. The fierce battle for the city named after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin resulted in nearly two million casualties, including the deaths of tens of thousands of Stalingrad residents.

As Soviet troops began to advance on the Eastern Front , the Western Allies invaded Sicily and southern Italy , causing the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s government in July 1943. The Allies then opened a Western Front with the amphibious D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. After gaining a foothold in northern France, Allied troops liberated Paris on August 25 followed by Brussels less than two weeks later.

2. The Battle of the Bulge Marks Germany's Last Stand

Germany found itself squeezed on both sides as Soviet troops advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania while the Western Allies continued to push eastward. Forced to fight a two-front war with dwindling resources, an increasingly desperate Hitler authorized a last-ditch offensive on the Western Front in hopes of splitting the Allied lines. The Nazis launched a surprise attack along an 80-mile, densely wooded stretch of the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg on December 16, 1944.

The German onslaught caused the Allied line to bulge, but it would not break during six weeks of fighting in subzero conditions that left soldiers suffering from hypothermia, frostbite and trench foot. American forces withstood the full might of what was left of Germany’s power but lost approximately 20,000 men in what was their deadliest single battle in World War II. What became known as the Battle of the Bulge would turn out to be Germany’s last gasp as the Soviet Red Army launched a winter offensive on the Eastern Front that would have them at the Oder River, less than 50 miles from the German capital of Berlin, by the spring.

3. The Liberation of Concentration Camps and Hitler's Suicide

After the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities that killed tens of thousands of civilians, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine River and moved eastward toward Berlin . As they closed in on the capital, Allied troops discovered the horror of the Holocaust as they liberated concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Dachau . With both fronts collapsing and defeat inevitable, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker deep below the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945.

Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, started peace negotiations and on May 7 authorized General Alfred Jodl to sign an unconditional surrender of all German forces to take effect the following day. Stalin, however, refused to accept the surrender agreement inked at the headquarters of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Reims, France, and forced the Germans to sign another one the following day in Soviet-occupied Berlin.

4. Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Even after the Allied victory in Europe , World War II continued to rage in the Pacific Theater. American forces had made a slow, but steady push toward Japan after turning the course of the war with victory at the June 1942 Battle of the Midway . The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the winter and spring of 1945 were among the bloodiest of the war, and the American military projected that as many as 1 million casualties would accompany any invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Weeks after the first successful test of the atomic bomb occurred in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, President Harry Truman , who had ascended to the presidency less than four months earlier after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt , authorized its use against Japan in the hopes of bringing a swift end to the war. On August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the manufacturing city of Hiroshima, immediately killing an estimated 80,000 people. Tens of thousands later died of radiation exposure. When Japan failed to immediately surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima , the United States detonated an even more powerful atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later that killed 35,000 instantly and another 50,000 in its aftermath.

5. The End of World War II: Soviets Declare War and Japan Surrenders

In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan came under increasing pressure when the Soviet Union formally declared war on August 8 and invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in northeastern China. With his Imperial Council deadlocked, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito broke the tie and decided that his country must surrender. At noon on August 15 (Japanese time), the emperor announced Japan’s surrender in his first-ever radio broadcast.

On September 2, World War II ended when U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay along with a flotilla of more than 250 Allied warships.

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At the signing of the agreement that brought an end to 2,194 days of global war, MacArthur told the world in a radio broadcast, “Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”

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Published: September 2001
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‘Morale’, the willingness to work harder, accept sacrifices, or take risks to help win the war, came mainly from two sources: a sense that the war was worth winning and a feeling of membership of a community, together with the desire to have the respect of others within it.

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World War II: [Essay Example], 1360 words GradesFixer
World War II also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945. The war conflicts began earlier, it involved the vast majority of the world's countries. They formed two opposing military alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved ...
World War II
World War II had begun. World War II was a conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during 1939-45. The main combatants were the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the Allies (France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China). It was the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in human ...
World War II: Summary, Combatants & Facts
World War II was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. Rising to power in an unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi Party) rearmed the nation and signed treaties ...
Causes, events, and casualties of World War II
World War II, or Second World War, (1939-45) International conflict principally between the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allied powers—France, Britain, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China.. Political and economic instability in Germany, combined with bitterness over its defeat in World War I and the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, allowed Adolf Hitler ...
World War 2 Essay
World War 2 Essay: World War 2 or the Second World War is the most extensive known global human warfare to date that lasted from the year 1939 to 1945. The war was waged between two opposing military alliances: Allies and Axis, involving the majority of the Global powers and many participating countries from across Europe and the world. ...
The Causes of WWII
The origins of the Second World War (1939-45) may be traced back to the harsh peace settlement of the First World War (1914-18) and the economic crisis of the 1930s, while more immediate causes were the aggressive invasions of their neighbours by Germany, Italy, and Japan.A weak and divided Europe, an isolationist USA, and an opportunistic USSR were all intent on peace, but the policy of ...
The World War II: Impact and Consequences Essay
World War II had a great impact on social order and international relations between the nations and continents. A major influence on international policies was the relations between the two opposite camps, the Allies and the Axis, and the views each held of the other. The Allies and the Axis were reluctant to follow any line that risked running ...
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 - 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two major alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers.The vast majority of the world's countries, including all the great powers, fought as part of these military alliances.Many participating countries invested all available economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities into the war ...
World War II Guide: Bibliographical Essay
Bibliographical Essay. World War II caused greater destruction than any other war in history. The war took the lives of about 17 million soldiers and an even greater number of civilians, who died as a result of bombings, starvation, and deliberate campaigns of mass murder. ... The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995); John Ellis ...
World War II: A Very Short Introduction
The 'Conclusion' shows how the world was changed forever by World War II, during which around sixty million people had been killed, the majority of them civilians. There were huge losses in the Soviet Union and China, but the country most damaged was Poland. Massive destruction and economic dislocation characterized much of Europe, East ...
The Causes and Consequences of World War Two
World War Two, which started in 1939 and ended in 1945, caused more deaths, several countries got involved and a lot of money was used than any other war in global history. Above 60 million army men participated in the war and about 18,000 soldiers died during the war. We will write a custom essay on your topic. 809 writers online.
Introduction to the Second World War
Updated on May 24, 2018. The bloodiest conflict in history, World War II consumed the globe from 1939 to 1945. World war II was fought predominantly in Europe and across the Pacific and eastern Asia, and pitted the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan against the Allied nations of Great Britain, France, China, the United States ...
World War II Research Essay Topics
Economy and Workforce. For a nation that was still recovering from the Great Depression, World War II had a major impact on the economy and workforce. When the war began, the fate of the workforce changed overnight, American factories were repurposed to produce goods to support the war effort and women took jobs that were traditionally held by ...
The Second World War in literature : eight essays
The Second World War in literature : eight essays ... The Second World War in official and unofficial Russian prose / Arnold McMillin -- [3] The American war novel and the defeated liberal / Eric Homberger -- [4] Tradition and myth in French Resistence poetry / Ian Higgins -- [5] Defeat, May 1940 / Anthony Cheal Pugh -- [6] Attacks on the ...
World War II: A Very Short Introduction
Abstract. World War II: A Very Short Introduction examines the origins, course, and impact of the Second World War on those who fought and the ordinary citizens who lived through it. Starting with the inter-war years and the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, it examines how the war progressed by examining a number of key events: the war in the West in 1940, Barbarossa, the German ...
'The Second World War,' by Antony Beevor
Toward the end of this powerful narrative of World War II, Antony Beevor quotes a report, by the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden, of an encounter with some American troops who had ...
The United States' Entry into World War II: Causes and Impacts
This essay about the United States' entry into World War II explores the complex factors that influenced this pivotal decision. Despite initial isolationist sentiment and the aftermath of World War I, events such as the Lend-Lease Act and the attack on Pearl Harbor compelled America to join the global conflict.
World War II [1939
World War Two, also known as World War II, was a devastating global conflict that began in 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved 100 million people from over 30 countries. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust ...
Women, Gender, and World War II
Summary. The Second World War changed the United States for women, and women in turn transformed their nation. Over three hundred fifty thousand women volunteered for military service, while twenty times as many stepped into civilian jobs, including positions previously closed to them. More than seven million women who had not been wage earners ...
Second World War and its impact, 1939-1948
Source: P. Joyce (2000), Suid-Afrika in die 20ste eeu Kaapstad: Struik, p.107. In September 1939, World War II broke out. In South Africa, people were divided as to whether or not they should join the war, and if so, on whose side they should fight. Although South Africa was still a British territory many Afrikaners felt closer to the Germans.
How Did World War II End?
World War II ended six years and one day after Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, sparked the 20th century's second global conflict. By the time it concluded on the deck of an ...
Morale
Abstract. 'Morale', the willingness to work harder, accept sacrifices, or take risks to help win the war, came mainly from two sources: a sense that the war was worth winning and a feeling of membership of a community, together with the desire to have the respect of others within it. Keywords: willingness, community, membership, feeling ...