A World at Arms (97 page)

As the tide of war changed visibly in favor of the Allies, both government and people turned increasingly to consideration of the post-war world. There was the converse of the official domestic political truce. The last general election, that of 1935, receded into an ever more distant past; there would have to be one when the war ended, and that idea by itself pointed both to the future and to the last post-war period. There had then been the hope for a new England, a “land fit for heroes” as the slogan had put it.
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But those hopes had been disappointed, and the England of the interwar years had been a place of long-term unemployment, of class strife, of desperation. Statistical analysts could argue with some degree of accuracy that the country eventually had made a better economic recovery from the depression of the 1930s, which had followed the difficult 1920S, than most industrial countries, but many ordinary people did not see it that way. The nation’s leaders looked cold and hard to them, and it was this image that hovered over the future.

There was a sense within government circles that plans needed to be made for the country’s future, and Churchill himself had a certain sympathy for this. He paid very little attention to domestic affairs during the war-other than pushing for more production of military supplies, ship construction and repairs, and other war-related activities.
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He did, however, push for some post-war planning beyond schemes for demobilization, and of those made, certainly the most famous was the proposal of William Beveridge for reorganizing the bits and pieces of earlier welfare
state legislation into a comprehensive system of social insurance, often referred to as “cradle to grave.”
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Something of a milestone in British history, the report became the subject of much public discussion.

Although Churchill had become the focus of popular attention in the great crisis of 1940 and was increasingly identified with Britain’s role as a member of a victorious alliance, it was only in that role that many people saw him. If he was seen as a leader in war, not peace, that was in part his own doing. That was where his own interests were focused, and he could hardly complain if others took him at his word. Thus, in June 1943 he had stipulated that, in addition to his role as Minister of Defence, he would personally deal with important army and air force business whenever the Secretaries of State for War and Air were away.
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When the coalition government dissolved in the acid of renewed party strife as the end of war in Europe came near, a caretaker government replaced it. The elections which followed produced a landslide for the Labor Party, and Britain would take part in the final stage of World War II and enter the post-war world under a new government.
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Its leaders had acquired vast experience in the affairs of state in the preceding five years; they would direct Britain’s affairs into new channels both at home and in its relations with its colonial empire.

In the British Commonwealth and empire, the war brought massive changes. Canada, the largest of the Dominions, played a significant role in the war on land, sea, and in the air. On land, she contributed major troop contingents, primarily in the European theater. At sea, her forces played a key role in the Battle of the Atlantic. In the air, Canada not only built up a substantial air force of her own but provided the training arrangement for thousands of air crew members for the Royal Air Force. In the process, the country changed internally as well. The economy was greatly stimulated by the massive investment in new factories and means of transportation and communication. Although questions were at times raised about the role of United States personnel and institutions in such projects as the construction of the Alaska Highway, the result of it all was that the facilities built were in Canada and under Canadian control when the war was over. Whatever the frictions of wartime, no one in Washington thought of Canada as other than an ally, Roosevelt least of all, and her position vis-à-vis the United States was strengthened, not weakened, by the war.

The relocation of Canadians of Japanese ancestry was handled in a
manner even more shameful than the analogous policy in the United States. The most difficult internal problem of the country, that of relations between its English and its French speaking inhabitants, was dealt with by Prime Minister Mackenzie King with extreme care. He could no more avoid some difficulties in this field than his World War I predecessors, but it was clearly a subject very much always on his mind. If Canada did not emerge from the war more united, it certainly did not come out bitterly divided. Perhaps the most important change was a far greater sense of national independence; a self–perception which called for a more independent foreign policy in the future with a more elaborate foreign service of its own. A sentimental tie to England—or France—might remain, but it was only one element of a self–confident independent actor on the world scene.
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In both Australia and New Zealand, the war had somewhat similar repercussions. Both felt deserted by the home country in their hour of greatest danger; it may be an exaggeration, but not a completely unjustified one, that a major recent study of Australia’s defense position in World War II is entitled “The Great Betrayal.”
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Both looked more to the United States for their defense in the face of any future threat. In the meantime, the war had placed very heavy burdens on the two Dominions. The mobilization of manpower interfered with economic development, especially in Australia; but in other ways, the war also hastened the process of building up home industries while the former trading ties with England were largely in abeyance. Like Canada, Australia in particular would benefit from the disruption that war caused in Europe by receiving the post-war immigration of many thousands uprooted during the great upheaval.
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The Union of South Africa, as it was then called, provided important raw materials as well as troops to the Allied cause, but the initial division about entering the war had continuing implications for the Union. The extreme Afrikaaner nationalists sympathized with Nazi Germany and hoped for a compromise peace, if not a German victory. At the same time as soldiers from South Africa helped to defeat the advocates of extreme racism in the fighting, the supporters of similar views grew in strength among the white population in the Union. They would win the election of 1948 and set the country on a new course which imitated that of those whom South African troops had helped defeat in 1945.
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In all of Britain’s colonial possessions the war stirred nationalist sentiments. The war for the independence of small nations against German and Italian aggression could only invigorate those elements in Britain’s African empire which resented foreign rule. This issue has already been discussed in connection with the largest and most important British
possession, India. The stabilization there in the fall of 1942 and the defeat of the attempted Japanese invasion of 1944 in no way silenced the continued agitation for change. The force of this agitation was dramatically enhanced by a horrendous famine. Caused by the disruption of trade, shipping shortages, and the extraordinary incompetence of the British administration, the 1943 famine in Bengal cost about 1.5 million lives and in a way destroyed what legitimacy British rule might have had in the eyes of the survivors.

It was in this regard that the contrast between Churchill and the Labor opposition was most dramatic. As Lord Halifax, whose willingness to deal with Gandhi had once aroused Churchill’s ire, wrote in July 1940, the Prime Minister’s reluctance on according Dominion status to India was “not a matter of argument but instinct, which, in turn, is affected a good deal by his own past on the subject...”
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The demands for independence from India would be met under Clement Attlee, Churchill’s successor, who had once served on the Simon Commission, which developed the new home–rule procedures for India which Churchill had fought all during the 1930S. Partition, accompanied by terribly bloody communal rioting, would divide the Indian sub-continent into separate states, but the turn-of-the-century world in which Churchill in some ways still lived was not coming back.
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In Burma, the local collaborators turned against the Japanese in the final stages of the fighting. There, as elsewhere in their newly conquered empire, the Japanese had made some appeal to anti-Western and anti-colonial sentiment; but their own behavior showed the population that they could not expect any real independence under Japanese control. After the colossal defeat Britain had suffered in Southeast Asia in the winter of 1941–42, however, there could be no easy return to the pre-war situation. The prestige of the Europeans had suffered a devastating blow, and, as will be discussed later in this chapter, could not recover.

The United States was transformed by World War II in ways of which some were recognized at the time but others only came under scrutiny
decades later. Whatever the confusions attending the beginnings of military and economic mobilization, there was a rapid and drastic economic expansion which quickly absorbed the remaining unemployed workers and unused factories still left idle by the depression. Massive government investments added enormously to the nation’s industrial plant. Some existing plant capacity was converted from peacetime functions to war production, but much of the vast industrial system was new. Some of the installations, such as the Maritime Commission’s shipyards, the synthetic rubber factories, and the complex of works for the production of atomic materials and weapons, were built directly with government funds. The vast majority were, instead, constructed by private contractors operating for industries which had been awarded huge contracts for the delivery of everything from airplanes to combat boots.

Many of the expanded and new plants were in the old industrial centers of the American East and Middle West, but a substantial number were placed in new locations in California, the Northwest, and parts of the South. Their placement, followed by a massive influx of new workers and their families, dramatically altered not merely the immediately affected cities but the whole economic and demographic pattern of the United States.
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It was in this context that the growth of aircraft industries in California and Washington, of shipyards in the latter state and on the Gulf Coast, and the new air bases in Arizona and Texas altered the demographic and economic landscape of the United States. An important factor in the selection of Arizona and Texas for training of air crews had been the weather; this also influenced the War Department’s decision to place many of the army training camps in the southeast where it was far easier to carry on basic training procedures on a year–round basis. The effort to create and arm huge military forces as speedily as possible changed the country in ways that remained after the new plants and training centers had served their original purpose.

In some ways the war effort also made a beginning in social changes. The political energies of the New Deal had been largely spent by the time the 1938 elections brought conservative victories, and the coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats controlled the Congress during the war. Public attention was in any case increasingly diverted from domestic to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, some changes in American society did take place, or at least begin, which would greatly alter the country in later years.

In a negative way, the anxiety over the war with Japan led to the forced evacuation of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent from California and the western portions of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Deprived of their rights and their property, these victims of fears
aroused by Japanese actions, war hysteria and racial prejudice were herded into camps, called “relocation centers,” from which they were not released until late in the war. One unanticipated by-product of this policy was to be a far more even distribution of Japanese-Americans across the United States where, in the post-war years, their educational and professional advances would create one of the great success stories of the American scene.

The impact of war on the nation’s Afro-American population was in some ways reminiscent of the World War I experience. Many more moved to the urban areas of the North and Midwest from the rural and small–town South. Some new job opportunities opened up for them, but it took the threat of a mass march on Washington to produce an Executive Order banning discrimination in the employment of Blacks in war industries working on government contracts. More honored in the breach than in reality, such measures hardly altered the pattern of discrimination; but they heralded a new role for the federal government which would become the focus of debate in American society in the last years of the war and has remained so ever since.
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The country drew in a limited and segregated way on its Black men and women for the armed forces. Accompanied by endless debate inside and outside the military, this process simultaneously offered some new opportunities for Afro-Americans even as it presented them with many new frustrations.
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The limitations and restrictions which remained a formal part of the life of Blacks in the American armed forces would not be ended until the Korean War, but the service of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, airmen, and sailors made a far greater impact on American society than had been the case in World War I. A major element in this was a pair of changes which complemented each other. Civil rights organizations were far stronger and political awareness substantially greater in the Black community than earlier. At the same time, there were at least some people in the government who were sympathetic to the struggle of Blacks for their rights, a group of which the President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was the most prominent. This segment of the white community would have its views of the need for American reality to resemble the theoretical promises of the constitution greatly affected by the publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s widely discussed work,
An American Dilemma,
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a searching analysis of the central issue of race in American society. At a time when the country was fighting a racist society in Europe, the persistence of racism at home was all the more incongruous.