The Home Front More than 16 million Americans served in the military during WWII Large numbers of...
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Transcript of The Home Front More than 16 million Americans served in the military during WWII Large numbers of...
The Home Front More than 16 million
Americans served in the military during WWII
Large numbers of minority groups served, including one million African Americans and 350,000 women
The Home Front
January, 1942, the government set up the War Production Board (WPB) to convert peacetime industry to war industry
Massive defense spending ended the Great Depression- unemployment dropped to 2%
By 1944, American production was double that of all the Axis powers combined
The Home Front
Increased production demanded an increase in workers
Executive Order 8802 assured fair hiring practices in any job funded by the government
More and more people moved from rural areas to cities to find work, leading to racial conflicts between whites and minority workers
The Home Front
Japanese Americans faced extreme prejudice in the US during the War
Executive Order 9066 allowed the internment, or temporary imprisonment of Japanese Americans
Supreme Court even upheld the internment of over 100,000 citizens for “security reasons”
The Home Front
Eventually, WWII cost the United States $330 billion- DOUBLE federal spending of our entire history!
National debt went from $42 billion to $269 billionPaid by war bondsPaid by taxes taken from paychecks
The Home Front
Office of War Information was created to encourage support of the war effort
Government distributed coupon books that allowed a certain number of purchases of vital war time product
Simply put- American life during WWII was WWII
Effects of WWII
Before the war ended, the Big Three met several times to pre-determine post-war EuropeYalta Conference (Feb, 1945)- free elections
for much of Eastern Europe (last for Churchill and FDR)
Potsdam Conference (July, 1945)- Germany would be divided into 4 zones (British, French, US, USSR), borders and elections for Poland, and USSR would declare war on Japan
Effects of WWII
After the war, clashes took place between communists and non-communists in Eastern Europe and China
Japan went under American military occupation
Set the stage for independence of European/Japanese colonial possessions
Effects of WWII
The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the worlds superpowersUS: largely untouched by war, booming
industry, powerful military with atomic bombUSSR: suffered terribly during war, but Red
Army was largest in the world, controlled most of Eastern Europe
Effects of WWII US led the way for
sharping the postwar economy, including the World Bank
United Nations was formed (UN), based on the cooperation of world powersUS, China, Britain,
France, and USSR most powerful
Effects of WWII
During the war, the Axis powers violated the Geneva Convention over and over again
More than 1,000 Japanese were tried, with hundreds executed for war crimes
In Europe, the Nuremberg Trials condemned Nazi leaders for their crimes during the war
Effects of WWII
At home, American life would never be the same after the war:Americans felt that they represented
democracy, tolerance, and peaceAmerica’s national security was tied to world
securityAfrican Americans were reenergized in the
fight for civil rightsDecades of economic growth, South and
West gained more population and wealth, expanded the role of the government in the American economy