07 World War II and the Home Front

From neutrality to global war

Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, began the war in Europe. The United States initially remained formally neutral, but increasingly supported countries fighting the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan. Through the Lend-Lease program, the United States supplied military goods to nations whose defense it considered vital.

Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Congress declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany and Italy soon declared war on the United States. The country entered a conflict fought in two major theaters: Europe and North Africa against Germany and Italy, and the Pacific against Japan.

Allied victories in Europe culminated in Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945. After the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, Japan announced its surrender on August 15. The formal surrender was signed on September 2, 1945.

Mobilizing the economy and home front

The war required a sweeping reorganization of the economy. Federal agencies coordinated production, labor, prices, and supplies, while factories shifted from consumer goods to weapons, ships, aircraft, vehicles, and other military equipment. The government paid for the effort through taxes and war bonds.

Rationing and price controls directed scarce goods—including gasoline, rubber, and some foods—to military needs and helped limit inflation. Families adapted by reusing materials, growing “victory gardens,” and accepting limits on consumer purchases.

Work, opportunity, and discrimination

With millions of men serving in the armed forces, women entered defense industries and other jobs in large numbers. African Americans also moved into industrial employment, including through the Second Great Migration from the South to northern and western cities. These changes in employment opportunities took place alongside persistent unequal pay, discrimination, and segregated workplaces.

A. Philip Randolph campaigned against discrimination in defense employment. His campaign helped prompt President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries and creating a federal Fair Employment Practices Committee.

Japanese American incarceration

After Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 authorized military exclusion zones on the West Coast. The government forcibly removed and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, without individual evidence that they posed a threat. The policy reflected wartime fear and racism and caused profound losses of liberty, homes, and property.

Japanese Americans also served in the U.S. military, including in the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

The Holocaust and Nazi persecution

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Nazi persecution escalated before the war and became mass murder during it. Jews were forced into ghettos, deported, subjected to forced labor, shot in mass executions, and murdered in killing centers.

The Nazis and their collaborators also persecuted and killed millions of other people, including Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, and political opponents. These crimes were part of Nazi racial persecution and mass violence.

Allied forces and camp liberation

The United States fought Nazi Germany as an Allied power, but rescuing Europe’s Jews was not a primary military objective of the Allies. As Allied armies advanced in 1944 and 1945, soldiers encountered concentration camps and surviving prisoners.

Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. U.S. forces liberated camps including Buchenwald and Dachau later that spring. The liberation of the camps exposed evidence of Nazi crimes to the world and made the scale of the genocide undeniable.

A new global role

The war left the United States with immense industrial capacity, a large military, and global influence. The country also possessed atomic weapons at the war’s end, ushering in the nuclear age. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain consequential and debated events, raising enduring questions about military necessity, civilian suffering, and the use of nuclear weapons.

U.S. leaders helped shape postwar institutions intended to support international cooperation. The United States joined other nations in founding the United Nations in 1945. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, delegates from 44 nations agreed to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, helping establish a framework for postwar economic cooperation.

These commitments, together with American military and economic strength, marked the country’s emergence as a global power. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union soon gave way to rivalry, setting the stage for the Cold War.