Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508110076
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HAYNES JOHNSON THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For America, the energy unleashed by the war ended the lingering Great Depression of the 1930s and created an unmatched economic and techological colossus.
It set in motion new laws that transformed the way we lived, bought homes, went to college. It changed the future for women and blacks at home, and produced both benevolence and arrogance abroad. It engendered decades of belief in authority and official assumptions about the rightness of our course.
Out of the war came a flow of inventions that enabled Americans to explore space, possess the power that could destroy civilization, share labor-saving gadgets that made possible greater leisure time, and enjoy the comforts of the most expansive consumer society in history. The war changed America's attitudes about itself, its leaders, its political system, its place in the world and in history.
\ ADM. Isoroku Yamamoto was one of the great commanders of World War II. Impassive in manner, deep in intellect, with broad shoulders and a thick chest, a man of practical sensibility and high sensitivity, he was both daring and prudent.
No one among the Japanese high command was held in more esteem by those who served under him. None could claim to know the United States better than this officer who had studied at Harvard, served as a naval attache in Washington, then planned the brilliant and stunningly successful attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Yet even as his fleet steamed away from that victorious mission, Yamamoto had a premonition. ``I fear,'' he said, ``we have only succeeded in awakening a sleeping giant.''
The giant to which he referred was then held in contempt by Adolf Hitler, his Nazi commanders and most of the Japanese warlords. America was a weak, divided democracy, so they believed, a racially inferior ``mongrel nation'' incapable of uniting for full-scale global war and hopelessly ill-matched when confronted by incomparable German forces or fanatically determined Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Sixteen months after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto was dead, shot down April 18, 1943, by U.S. P-38s dispatched to intercept him. American intelligence had broken the Japanese codes and knew in advance not only his movements but those of the fleet he commanded, a fleet then in the process of being systematically destroyed by American naval and air forces. In two more years, Germany was in ruins, Hitler on the verge of committing suicide in his Berlin bunker.
Yamamoto's fears about the sleeping giant had been realized.
\ It is Tuesday, Aug. 14, 1945. On the East Coast, the day is hot, humid and sunny, threatening thunderstorms. From Tokyo, the coded cables flash into the Japanese legation in neutral Bern, Switz., where the Allied peace emissaries tensely await a reply to their unconditional surrender ultimatum.
That answer doesn't come officially for another seven hours, producing even greater anxiety and expectation, but an unofficial Japanese news-agency report is already triggering spontaneous outpourings around the world. In New York and London, Paris and Moscow, Melbourne and Peking, millions upon millions of people pour forth from homes and offices, whether in daylight or in darkness, in mass eruptions of joy.
As the victory news bulletins clatter into newspaper and radio offices around the nation, 12 million of the 16.3 million Americans who served in World War II are in uniform, 7 million of them overseas. Nearly 300,000 will never come home; theirs are the battle deaths of the war.
Another 115,185 Americans are dead from other causes, equally victims of war, while 670,846 have been wounded, many gravely.
Buried in the news that day are other items that reflect some of the extraordinary changes the war has meant for America's military and scientific capabilities. Two deal with the most tightly held secrets of the war, the development of radar and the atomic bomb.
In a public briefing that afternoon, the War Department reveals that radar, which ``sees through the heaviest fog and the blackest night,'' played a great and hitherto unknown role in winning the crucial Battle of the Atlantic by detecting German submarines, and by helping severely outnumbered British fighter squadrons win the decisive Battle of Britain by pinpointing waves of attacking Nazi warplanes long before they reached their targets.
At the same time, the Navy discloses the grim news its heavy cruiser, the USS Indianapolis, was sunk by a submarine two weeks before on July 30 with 1,196 casualties - every man aboard - after transporting atomic-bomb materials from San Francisco to Tinian that, when assembled, enabled two atomic bombs to be dropped on the Japanese homeland.
The first bomb to be exploded, ``Little Boy,'' came eight days before on Aug. 6 over Hiroshima from the U.S. bomber Enola Gay; the second came three days later, Aug. 9, over Nagasaki.
Those billowing mushroom clouds provide the horrifying convulsive end to the most horrifying of all wars. Fittingly, the fearsome birth of the atomic age coincides with the death of the Axis forces.
One other news item that afternoon testifies to the savagery of a war that has taken 55 million lives across the globe, left cities and countrysides in ruins worldwide, produced suffering and mass murder on a scale never before experienced. Even as the world awaits the Japanese emperor's answer to Allied surrender demands, wire-service teletype machines are clicking out the news that 1,000 U.S. Superfortress bombers and fighters have launched waves of attacks on Japanese industrial war targets. They drop 6,000 tons of bombs, leaving behind more desolation and destruction.
This, from an America whose standing army of only 188,000 ranked 17th in the world a mere five years before, whose isolationist sentiments were so strong that even after Nazi legions swept across Europe, Congress passed the first peacetime draft in U.S. history by only a single vote, and whose armed forces were so short of weaponry its recruits were forced to train with wooden rifles.
\ Out of the war also came the use of computers to guide the new rocketry that later would put Americans on the moon, the development of jet engines, the discovery of miracle drugs such as sulfathiazole and streptomycin, the ever-more-intricate production of electronic and sensing devices. But even greater than the many stunning scientific and technological advances was the extraordinary change in American society itself.
World War II began Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and ended Sept. 2, 1945, with the signing of peace accords aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The America that emerged after those six years was different in every respect from the America that preceded it.
Foremost was the economic revolution caused by the war.
Despite all the efforts of the New Deal, by 1940 America was still locked in a deep depression. The unemployment rate stood just below 15 percent, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt was far from realizing his stated goal of dramatically alleviating the suffering of the one-third of a nation that was ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed.
Costs of consumer goods were only one indication of the state of the economy. In 1940, you could buy a woman's suit for $15, a refrigerator for $119.95, a new six-cylinder car for under $800, and a bottle of gin for 99 cents.
By 1945, unemployment had virtually disappeared; the official rate was 1.2 percent of the U.S. work force. This was achieved by total mobilization from civilian to defense production.
America not only became the ``arsenal of democracy,'' as FDR proclaimed its national goal to be. It exceeded even that most optimistic president's dreams of what the U.S. economy and its people could achieve when fully engaged.
By war's end, U.S. plants were turning out 60,000 warplanes and a thousand cargo ships a year. Bombers were coming off Ford's Willow Run assembly line at the rate of one every 63 minutes. By 1944, the Vancouver, Wash., shipyard operated by Henry J. Kaiser was launching an escort carrier each week. From Jan. 1, 1942, to the end of July 1945, American shipyards produced 6,500 naval vessels, 64,500 landing craft, 5,400 cargo ships.
In all, the U.S. war effort produced 296,601 aircraft, 71,060 ships, 86,388 tanks.
This miracle of production, as much as the manpower using the weapons coming off the lines, won the war. And it could not have happened without another dramatic societal change - the entry of women fully into the workplace.
Sixteen million women worked on assembly lines during World War II. Another 300,000 women wore uniforms in the armed forces.
``Rosie the Riveter,'' as the popular song dubbed her, would never stay home after the war was over. Neither would those women who drove the trucks in combat zones or who trained and tested male fighter pilots at U.S. bases. The women's movement was a direct outgrowth of the demonstrated ability of women to perform superbly what had been ``men's work.''
One vivid statistical comparison: In 1940, 186,500 Americans graduated from college; 58.7 percent of them were men. In 1990, 1.4 million Americans received undergraduate degrees; 53.5 percent of them were women.
A similar transformation occurred in civil rights, and even more dramatically.
America was a totally segregated society - by law in the South, by practice in the North - when the war began and ended. Here was the great stain on American democracy, the historic conflict between its stated ideals of freedom and equality and its record of slavery and racism.
Blacks fought and died in the segregated armed forces; in 1948 Harry S. Truman, by executive order, integrated the military and set America on a path that, despite future bloodshed and conflict, led to a freer, more-equitable society.
\ Other far-reaching changes came immediately after the war.
To assist servicemen returning home with no jobs, and with the housing market in a deep postwar slump, the federal government initiated programs that revolutionized America as profoundly as did the women's and civil-rights movements. Foremost was the GI Bill of Rights, passed by Congress in 1944. With the total expenditure of $14.5 billion, the GI Bill of Rights enabled more than half of the World War II veterans to attend college or technical school.
``This was a remarkable event,'' said former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine, one of many beneficiaries of this program. ``The GI Bill launched the federal government into post-secondary education in a way that people who lived in this country prior to the second World War would not have recognized,'' Mitchell said. ``It became a major undertaking of our society to make a higher level of education available to every person in a way that in almost all other societies was associated only with elementary and secondary education. It's been a great thing. It's one of the most noble functions performed by the government and has had a great effect, a positive effect, on our society. I went to law school at night at Georgetown on the GI Bill. I'm a great believer in the GI Bill. Go through our society and see how many people are in that position.''
The GI Bill had another, largely unappreciated, major impact on American life. That was in the housing market.
Americans who came home from the war were determined to achieve the elusive American Dream of providing a better life for themselves and their families. Part of the dream was having their own ``dream house'' for the families they began raising in unprecedented numbers after the war; the ``baby boom,'' the result of an exploding birth rate without parallel in American history with one baby being born every seven seconds, produced 75 million members of this new generation between 1946 and 1964.
The best example of how veterans achieved this dream lies in what used to be potato fields in Long Island's Nassau County. There, in 1947, a developer named William J. Levitt bought 6,000 acres and began turning out low-cost homes much as wartime assembly lines turned out tanks and planes.
Levittown, it was called. The prefabricated houses that sprang up on those old farming fields became a boon to veterans. They were priced at $7,990, with a $90 down payment required. Demand was so great that people camped out for days in order to sign up for them. Within four years after the first shovels of dirt were turned, 82,000 people were living in Levittown's 17,447 new homes.
These homes were financed through low-cost loans provided to veterans through the GI Bill.
Levittown-like developments began sprouting across America. Suburbia became America's new Mecca. Of the 13 million homes built in the 1950s, 11 million were constructed outside city limits.
As only one example of a stunning demographic shift, the population of Orange County in Southern California tripled in that same decade. Along with this came a flood of Americans moving by the millions upon millions - over the new interstate highway system built by the federal government - to what came to be called the Sun Belt. They were pursuing the oldest American Dream, a better life.
And a better life it was, materially at least, for many decades as the economy boomed, enabling Americans to double their standard of living in a generation, vastly expanding the middle class and making the United States the greatest consumer society in history.
Less tangibly, the war powerfully affected American politics and public attitudes about leaders and government. It strongly shaped American cultural values and myths, even its language - the Blitz, GI (Government Issue), Sad Sack, snafu (for ``situation normal, all [expletive] up'') - and its folklore. ``We'll always have Paris,'' says Bogie to Bergman in ``Casablanca,'' the most enduring of the World War II romantic films, fable and propaganda alike, that Hollywood produced.
The impact on the presidency has been especially profound.
Bill Clinton is the 41st man to serve as president of the United States. The 10 presidents who immediately preceded him in the White House - a fourth of our chief executives - were all directly identified with and shaped by World War II.
The first three - Roosevelt, Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower - were great commanders of the war. The next seven were in uniform during the war: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush. Kennedy and Bush had distinguished combat records that aided them considerably in their subsequent public careers.
They all carried into office values and views stemming from America's experience in the war. These ranged from remembering the cost of appeasement at Munich - the ``peace in our time'' deal that Britain's Neville Chamberlain struck with Hitler just a year before the war began - to a shared belief that the United States had a historic mission to perform in the postwar world.
This meant willingness to commit American blood and treasure to the new Cold War struggle; to create the largest peacetime military force in U.S. history; to take the lead in forming the United Nations and not turn America's back on an international organization as with the League of Nations after World War I; and to garrison U.S. troops around the world, especially on the soil of its erstwhile enemies, Germany and Japan, whose towns and cities were rebuilt along with the rest of war-torn Europe through U.S. Marshall Plan aid.
The war also greatly accelerated the powers of the presidency, leading to fears about an imperial presidency and a national-security state in which secrecy and covert operations flourished in ways unimaginable before Pearl Harbor.
Eisenhower's famous warning about a permanent military-industrial, scientific-technological national elite have been realized in postwar America. Perhaps inevitably, the war later became a vehicle for demagoguery. Divisive debates - who's a patriot, who's not - at worst resulted in the character assassination of the McCarthy period, and fueled the always-present tendency of Americans to believe in conspiracy theories. Even now, dark suspicions are popularized that FDR had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Clinton's 1992 election brought to power the first president born after the war, a man who reflects many of the generational ambiguities and doubts of other baby boomers.
Like Clinton, millions of them came to maturity protesting the policies of their government over the bitterly divisive Vietnam War, a war in which Clinton and countless others did not serve. But the long reach of World War II - the ``good,'' or right war, certainly the popular war when contrasted with the immensely unpopular Vietnam experience - will continue even into the last presidential election of the century in 1996.
The current leading Republican presidential contender, Sen. Robert J. Dole, suffered severe battle wounds 50 years ago with American forces in Italy. He campaigns by offering voters one last chance to entrust national leadership to a World War II veteran - and to recapture, if possible, the spirit of a time when the country completely believed in itself, and in its leaders.
\ Half a century is nothing on history's clock, and all veterans of all wars understandably romanticize their actions and exaggerate their exploits. There was nothing romantic about World War II. It was horrific, ghastly, outrageous - pick the adjective; it will not do justice to that most calamitous event of this bloodiest of all centuries.
The war was won, but at terrible cost, and a cost that continues to this day. It did not resolve all problems, end all national, ethnic, racial or religious conflicts, stem the human capacity for slaughter and for committing acts of terror. Look at Bosnia, look at Somalia, look at the impotence of the United Nations. But there are lessons to be learned.
For America, one stands out: The war proved what our nation can achieve when it has a clearly understood purpose and sense of unified effort. That lesson becomes even more pertinent today amid a pervasive and destructive climate of cynicism. The danger is that the present disbelief in leaders and institutions and government has become so strong. It could obliterate the memory of how much the government and the American people won for all its GIs - citizen soldiers and civilians alike.
What Churchill said about England in the war applies as well to us. It was our finest hour.
by CNB