No End Save Victory by David Kaiser

Author:David Kaiser [Kaiser, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-03-30T11:02:10.528113+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Enlisting the Nation, January–June 1941

At least since the late nineteenth century when the Missionary generation reached adulthood, the nations of the world had been developing their economic strength to increase their military power—a process now reaching its climax in the Second World War. Both Germany and Japan were fighting that war to create self-sufficient economic empires that could fight any nation on earth, while the British and French tried to hold on to their own. The Soviet Union, which from its inception in 1917 saw itself at war with a hostile capitalist world, had carried out perhaps the most dramatic expansion of industrial capacity in world history during the 1930s and emerged after 1941 as the world’s leading producer of the critical weapons of land warfare. The United States, meanwhile, had the largest industrial economy in the world but in 1940 undoubtedly devoted the smallest proportion of its industrial capacity to military purposes of any of the major warring states.

The problem of what and how much to build on the sea, in the air, and on land continued to preoccupy senior leaders during the first half of 1941. It was intimately related to a second and even more important question: whether the United States would confine itself to hemispheric defense or prepare for a world war with all available resources. While that question was not resolved at least until July, Roosevelt and the War Department moved slowly toward all-out war in the first half of the year. Meanwhile, however, the attempt to mobilize U.S. resources for war also raised critical questions of domestic politics—questions that might determine the political future of much of the world.

Could the United States—a democracy—organize for war as effectively as totalitarian dictatorships? The answer turned out to be yes, largely because of the institutions and the spirit that FDR and the New Deal had created over the previous eight years. Roosevelt from 1933 onward had set the nation to work on a succession of enormous tasks, including economic recovery, the revival of agriculture, the organization of the industrial working class, and the reshaping of the American landscape. He had specifically given labor and minority groups the chance to play a greater and more equal role in national life. The war effort built on and expanded that effort. The preparation for the Second World War was the greatest enterprise on which the United States had ever embarked, and every social class and ethnic group wanted a piece of the action. Business, labor, and the emerging civil rights movement all joined in and benefited from the rearmament effort in the first half of 1941.

* * *

Having begun rearmament in May of 1940, American authorities were still struggling with critical production problems in the first half of 1941. More importantly, they had not decided in the first half of 1941 what kind of war they were preparing to fight. Hemispheric defense remained the basis not only of American objectives as stated by the President, but of America’s war plans and rearmament programs.

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