Mobilizing for Victory
Organizing the Economy
• The war effort gave Americans a common
purpose that softened the divisions of region,
class, and national origin while calling attention
to continuing inequalities of race.
• War Manpower Commission: allocated workers
among vital industries and the military
• War Production Board: invested $17 billion for
new factories, $181 billion in war supply
contracts
Organizing the Economy
• Office of Price Administration (OPA) – fought
inflation with price controls and rationing of
vital war materials. This convinced Americans
to buy war bonds that financed half the war
spending
• Federal budget grew to $98 billion by 1945
and increased the national debt
Organizing the Economy
• Major industries transitioned from producing
consumer goods to building war machines
• These mass production techniques used to
build thousands of warplanes and tanks
• War-boom cities: developed due to war
production (e.g. San Diego)
The Enlistment of Science
• Office of Scientific Research and
Development: Vannevar Bush guided
spending on research and development which
set the pattern of massive federal support for
science that continued after the war.
• Manhattan Project: U.S. program to develop
an atomic bomb
The Enlistment of Science
• Physicist Robert Oppenheimer directed the
project to design a nuclear fission bomb at Los
Alamos
• 1st nuclear explosion on July 16,1945 –
Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico
• Oppenheimer “Now I am become death,
destroyer of worlds”
Men & Women in the Military
• By 1945, 8.3 million men and women were on
active duty in the army and army air forces and
3.4 million in the Navy & Marine Corps.
• Total 350,000 women / 16 million men served:
292,000 killed / 100,000 prisoners / 671,000
wounded
• 25,000 Native Americans served (racially
integrated forces)
• Code talkers – Navajo Indians who’s language
was unknown to the Axis powers
African Americans
• Approximately 1 million served in the armed
services during the war
• Served in segregated (separate from white
soldiers) units – usually in in non-combat, menial
jobs
• Faced discrimination on and off the base
• All black units (761st tank battalion & 99th
pursuit squadron) earned distinguished records
for combat action.
• The war experience helped to invigorate postwar
efforts to achieve equal rights.
Japanese Americans
• Japanese Americans, unfairly suspected of being
possible traitors, in Hawaii and on the west coast
are rounded up and shipped to internment
camps.
• Despite severe prejudice back home, the 442nd
Infantry Regiment becomes the highest
decorated infantry regiment in the history of the
U.S. Army
• 8 Presidential Unit Citations
• 21 Medal of Honor winners
Women in the military
• Received mixed reactions by Americans
• Armed services tried to not change
established gender roles (primarily worked in
clerical jobs)
• Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) –
civilian auxiliary of U.S. Army Air Forces
• Women pilots ferried military aircraft across
the U.S., towed targets for anti-aircraft target
practice, tested new planes.