Those Who Have Borne the Battle (19 page)

The United States, particularly California, at the beginning of the war already had a record of more than a half century of discrimination against
Asian immigrants. In 1924 Congress prohibited Japanese immigration, following a long period of heavy restrictions. With this heritage, the attack on Pearl Harbor dredged up existing racist and paranoid reactions. Residents on the West Coast expressed their fear of additional Japanese attacks there—attacks that would be enabled and abetted by the Japanese Americans living in the area.

There was not a single act of sabotage or espionage by Japanese Americans during the war. Nevertheless, in February 1942 President Roosevelt signed an executive order that provided finally for the 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to be removed to internment camps. It was a remarkable decision, indefensible strategically and surely morally.

Of course, people tried to justify the internment of American citizens. As the mayor of Los Angeles, Fletcher Bowron, argued, “If we can send our own young men to war, it is nothing less than sickly sentimentality to say that we will do injustice to American-born Japanese to merely put them in a place of safety” so they cannot harm anyone. After all, the citizens of his city would be “the human sacrifices if the perfidy that characterized the attack on Pearl Harbor is ever duplicated on the American continent.”
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Early in the war the United States disagreed with the British strategic bombing policy. The British Royal Air Force had engaged in some “area” bombing attacks against German cities, accepting the inevitable civilian casualties in seeking to defeat and demoralize German support for the war. This obviously was part of a retaliatory cycle responding to and inciting German Luftwaffe bombing of London and other English cities. At the time, Americans insisted upon a policy of “precision” bombing of targets, but it would not be long before the United States did engage in some “blind bombing” of its own.
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The United States joined in the horrible firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 even though the city was of limited strategic value. And from the outset, there were fewer constraints on bombing of Japanese cities. By war's end, there were none. In fact, by the last several months of the war, some 75 percent of the bombs dropped on Japan were incendiary bombs—aimed at destroying cities and demoralizing the civilian population.
As many as 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo in the spring of 1945, “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” quipped General Curtis LeMay, the commander of strategic air operations over the Japanese home islands.
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The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aimed at destroying morale rather than military installations.

 

 

Those on the American home front mirrored the soldiers in their practical view of the conflict. The period following the First World War had been marked by a great deal of cynicism, a belief that propaganda had led the United States into a presumed fight for democracy that proved illusory. There was little disposition to jump on this bandwagon again. The war theme was that the United States had been attacked: let us defeat the enemy and get this over with so that the troops can come home. Early in the war the Office of War Information did stress the need to defend democracy, but most political and military leaders did not pick up this expressed objective. One study during the war concluded, “There is much cynicism to overcome. Most men of military age grew up in the midst of disillusionment about the Great Crusade of a generation ago.”
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Nonetheless, at home at least, the positive themes were part of the narrative. In 1942 some 63 percent of Americans agreed that the country was fighting for an “ideal.” Franklin Roosevelt told Congress in January 1942 that “only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and faith.” Roosevelt spoke often of the “Four Freedoms,” goals he had set as universal in January 1941. These were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In the late winter of 1943 Norman Rockwell did four covers for the
Saturday Evening Post
that evoked these four freedoms. These covers became postage stamps and illustrated the posters for bond drives.

These themes never quite made it to the front. Army surveys found that only 13 percent of soldiers could name three of the four freedoms. James Jones said no one wanted to die for a “cause,” because “after you are dead there is no such a thing as Liberty, or Democracy or Freedom.”
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Life
reporter George Biddle wrote in January 1944 that folks back home might do better not to think of the troops as combat heroes: “They might
better visualize them as miners trapped underground. They are always frightened and they are always homesick. Their one dream and ambition is not to march on Berlin, as propaganda stories say, but to go home.”
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Most citizens joined the servicemen and -women in avoiding celebration. This low-key approach ironically left a vacuum in such a major national effort. The
Infantry Journal
wondered about the absence of parades and crowds sending the boys off: “There has not been much of this in the present war.” And columnist Raymond Moley criticized the absence of patriotic sendoffs: the United States had become a place where its soldiers going to war “pass silently through drowsy stations in the night; tank, plane, gun production is veiled in the smokescreen of censorship; flags are seemingly rationed; and there are no more parades.”
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On the home front the official reports of the war were sanitized and censored. It was only in the fall of 1943 that the government censors allowed photos of dead Americans. Even these pictures were often bloodless—to protect the public from the horror and reality of war.
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Censors restricted any mention or photos of men maimed in combat or any indication of racial or other tensions on the American bases. There were to be no photos that indicated a “shell-shocked” GI. The military censors “kept emotionally wounded Americans out of sight throughout the war and after.” Their “efforts went into presenting the war in simple terms of good versus evil.” General Eisenhower ruled that the only photos of casualties permitted would be those who “are walking wounded or are obviously cheerful.” He made clear that “photographs of a horrific nature are always stopped.”
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It turns out that wars without drumbeats and parades, lacking pep talks and speeches stressing national destiny and moral purpose, and cleansed of all signs of combat, are hard to sustain. As late as March 1944 a Gallup survey determined that only 60 percent of Americans acknowledged understanding what the war was really about. There had already been a movement to allow more public glimpses at the war, at least some parts of it. In 1942 the Office of War Information told the Advertising Council that their copy should avoid images of Americans suffering. But within a year, in order to avoid public complacency, the federal agency told the council they could introduce a “grim note” to their promotional
advertising—and in war loan ads that year, the first dead American was shown. Following this the photos and illustrations showed more graphic images of war, and by the last year of the war there was a government poster “showing the crumpled, torn, dirt-splattered body of a dead American soldier.”
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Despite these real images, “for the most part Americans at home saw photos and films of the GIs as jaunty heroes or gaunt but unbowed warriors. They read in the dispatches of war correspondents like Ernie Pyle, John Steinbeck, or John Hersey about young men who were wholesome, all-American boys, soft-hearted suckers for needy kids, summer soldiers who wanted nothing more than to come home, as one of them famously told Hersey, “for a piece of blueberry pie.” Steinbeck later reflected that it was not that the correspondents lied, but that “it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.” He acknowledged, “Since our Army and Navy, like all armies and navies, were composed of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the cruel, the gentle, the brutal, the kindly, the strong, and the weak, this convention of general nobility might seem to have been a little hard to maintain, but it was not. We were all a part of the War Effort.”
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It is this that makes this war so complex and difficult to describe. It was a war whose public face was scrubbed of blood, yet even if practical it was not passionless since it was always marked by a profound sense of anger and resentment toward at least one of the enemies. And those on the home front felt driven to sacrifice, or to claim sacrifice, in support of “our boys.”

 

 

If the concept of sacrifice was a source of public pride, the act of sacrifice could be more complicated. Some resisted taxes, regulations, and rationing. President Roosevelt expressed his frustration with “the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.”
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Surely, the president's rhetoric involved some politically advantageous posturing—political figures in American history have seldom been punished for siding with the troops in the field—but it also represented some genuine frustration with wealthy
Americans who were becoming wealthier as a result of the wartime economy.

World War II costs were eight times those of the First World War. Early in the war, Americans stressed themes of shared sacrifice. These continued to mark public affirmations. Following Pearl Harbor, Americans recognized the need for more revenue to pay for the massive mobilization that would be required. Some proposed a national sales tax, but President Roosevelt and his administration and congressional allies made clear that this was a nonstarter because it would place a greater burden on poorer families.

President Roosevelt proposed a total tax on all salaries greater than $25,000 (or $50,000 for families). There were then about one in fifty thousand who were at this income level. Congress defeated the plan with a veto-proof vote, Democrats joining Republicans. It was a good move on Roosevelt's part, making it easier to demand sacrifices as well from labor and signaling that his administration would not tolerate “war profiteering.” As a defensive move, advertisers formed the War Advertising Council to administer “public service” advertisements on the part of business and industry. The council organized more than one hundred campaigns underlining sacrifice and patriotism, seeking “to push war bonds, blood drives, food conservation, labor recruitment, and other mobilization demands deemed worthy of advertising support,” which they estimated at a value of $1 billion.
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Beginning in 1942, with subsequent adjustments throughout the war, the government moved to the income tax as the major source of federal revenue. It provided 13.6 percent of revenue in 1940, and this figure grew to 40.7 percent by the end of the war. During the war, Congress raised the tax rates regularly and reduced exemptions. Millions of Americans who had not paid any taxes in 1940 became taxpayers.
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More and more Americans were subject to the income tax under the wartime legislation. There was a major effort to remind people that this too was a cost of war. One radio announcement put it this way: “Well nobody says filling out these forms is fun. But it's more fun than sitting down in a foxhole, and its more fun than being shot down in a plane. And it's more fun than waiting for a torpedo to hit.” And the Treasury Department
even commissioned Irving Berlin to write a song for the radio, “I Paid My Income Tax Today” as a way to rally support.
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Increasingly higher rates on high-income groups did create resistance from some. Early on President Roosevelt ratcheted up the pressure on the wealthiest Americans, frustrated with their effort to cushion their tax burden. In a September 1942 fireside chat he said, “Battles are not won by soldiers or sailors who think first of their own safety, and wars are not won by people who are concerned primarily with their own comfort, their own convenience, and their own pocketbooks.”
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In 1943 Congress approved a withholding system, a necessary step in the minds of many if there was going to be an effective income tax involving most wage earners. Securing approval of this required a compromise that forgave some taxes that were due, a bonus particularly for the wealthiest taxpayers. Roosevelt vetoed a later bill that would have shifted more of the tax burden onto lower-income Americans. The president insisted that it was a relief bill for the “greedy.” Congress overrode his veto. In 1939 there were fewer than 4 million Americans who paid income taxes. In 1945, 42 million people paid. Federal taxes took 4 percent of gross domestic product in 1941 and by 1943 30 percent.
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Citizens engaged in support and sacrifice in addition to taxes. All Americans had to join in the rationing of most food, gasoline, and rubber products. They joined in scrap drives to recycle needed products, and they engaged in seven major Treasury Department bond drives. Roosevelt and the administration wanted all citizens to share in making loans to the government. It was a way to encourage support for the war effort, and it would be a way to avoid having people taxed after the war to repay debt to only wealthy investors. The United States sold twenty-five-dollar bonds and even ten-cent stamps to schoolchildren. By the end of the war some 85 million Americans had bought war bonds. This came to be an important sign of shared commitment.

 

 

On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe ended. Americans, along with other Western troops, joined the Russian army in Berlin, drinking vodka together in the rubble of the Thousand-Year Reich. On August 15, following the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, with final documents signed on the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay on September 2. The planned assault on the home islands with extremely high casualty projections never had to take place. When US troops on Okinawa learned of the Japanese surrender, they fired all of the weapons they had into the air. Seven were killed by the raining bullets, and scores were wounded, the last casualties of a long war.