Week 11: WW2 Reflection

The topic for this week is a highly discussed area of U.S. history, and it had a profound effect on the way wen are as a nation today. World War 2 killed more people and involved more countries than any other war in history. About 70 nations took part in combat, and about 52 million people lost their lives, only 17 million being combatants in the war. This means that 35 million innocent civilians and jews were killed amidst the turmoil of the war. The war began when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Germany was economically ruined following World War 1 and was forced to pay $33 billion in reparations by the treaty of Versailles. This caused violent, anti-democratic, ant-Semitic groups to flourish and embark on a campaign to invade and control all of Europe. The nazi party became the most powerful and Germany and led by the one and only Adolf Hitler. Japan and Italy, along with Germany, were denied a favorable balance of world trade after the first world war, and they all believed that the great depression proved that democracy was a failure. These countries looked fir non-democratic solutions (like communism, socialism, fascism) and war to save them from economic distress. Germany, Italy, and Japan banded together to form an alliance called the axis powers.
On the other hand, back at home in the United States, we were mostly against getting involved in the war and believed getting involved in the first world war was a mistake. The president, FDR, pursued an interventionalist policy and passed the lend-lease act in 1941, which froze Japanese assets in the United States. Shortly following this, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and America officially entered the war. American forces joined British, French, and Russians in 1942. On May 5 8, 1945, about three years later, Nazi Germany was defeated, and the war combat comes to an end.

The United States Army needed people to join in the fighting, so they began recruiting African Americans, my Grandpa (16 at the time) being included. Black Americans were apart of the effort to prevent Nazism from returning, yet these men were segregated from their white counterparts. Blacks were still discriminated against even when they were overseas fighting for their country against the Nazi's. Many people began to point out the hypocrisy of being against Nazism, but still justifying segregation and racial discrimination back home as okay. Towards the end of the war in 1945, I do think I saw a shift in racial attitudes because many African Americans began to campaign against discrimination and segregation. This proved to be effective because two years later, in 1947, President Truman passed the Executive order 9981, which ordered the desegregation of the military.

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African American Soldiers during World War 2

https://progressive.org/dispatches/how-african-american-wwii-veterans-were-scorned-by-the-g-i-b/
https://jcsu.instructure.com/courses/31401/pages/world-war-ii-introduction
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-was-black-americas-double-war/