Never had a greater proportion of the country participated in a war: 18 million served in the armed forces, 10 million overseas; 25 million workers gave of their pay envelope regularly for war bonds.
The ideologies of WWII represented a spectrum of political doctrines. The Western Allies spoke of freedom and liberty, of governments composed of freely-elected representatives, and of the equal dignity and value of each and every human life. The Axis powers demonstrated through their actions an opposing ideology, as Zinn notes:
It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler's Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced.
Between the Axis and the Western Allies were the ambiguous Soviet Socialists. In the late 1930s, until June 1941, they joined forces with the Axis powers and had gleefully invaded Poland. They pivoted instantly to the Allied side of the war after Hitler’s Nazis betrayed and attacked them.
What was the difference between Hitler’s “National Socialism” and Stalin’s “Soviet Socialism” — or was there a difference? The reader will recall that the word ‘Nazi’ is simply an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism.’
The war effort to stop the Axis powers, an effort put forth by the English, French, and American governments, representated “something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world,” as Zinn phrases it. It is no mere coincidence that questions about civil rights would come to the fore in the United States during WW2.
By means of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and its predecessor, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), women were integrated into the armed services to a degree never before experienced. Women rose to officer rank, and were entrusted with classified secrets of military intelligence.
Although President Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of War Henry Stimson insisted on a policy of segregation among troops, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower decided to integrate Black and White soldiers. As historian Evan Andrews writes about the Allied military commanders, the “situation during the Battle of the Bulge inspired them to turn to African American G.I.s on more than one occasion.”
Black soldiers served in large numbers. Eisenhower took a risk, contradicting Roosevelt’s demand for a segregated army. The Roosevelt administration also did not want Black troops in combat; it wanted them in support roles. But Black infantrymen were eager to prove themselves in combat, and Eisenhower gave them that opportunity. Combat soldiers also often received higher pay, as Evan Andrews reports:
Some 2,500 black troops participated in the engagement, with many fighting side by side with their white counterparts. The all black 333rd and 969th Field Artillery Battalions both sustained heavy casualties assisting the 101st Airborne in the defense of Bastogne, and the 969th was later awarded a Distinguished Unit Citation — the first ever presented to a black outfit. Elsewhere on the battlefield, troops from the segregated 578th Field Artillery picked up rifles to support the 106th Golden Lions Division, and an outfit called the 761st “Black Panthers” became the first black tank unit to roll into combat under the command of General George S. Patton.
Creating a milestone event in the history of civil rights, “Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and John C.H. Lee called on black troops to” move to the front and take on important combat roles. Responding to an opportunity never given to them before, “several thousand had volunteered by the time the engagement ended.”
In general, America’s “wartime policies” were designed to “respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” in Zinn’s words. Did America do this perfectly? Of course not. But America made progress, and made more progress than had ever been made before, in matters of civil rights and racial equality. Again, it is no simple accident that the “civil rights era” and the “civil rights movement” emerged in the 1950s, fueled by veterans who’d returned home from the battlefields of WW2. The civil rights era began as soon as the nation had recovered from the war, normalized, and placed itself onto a peacetime footing.
Eisenhower’s wartime decisions to advance the cause of civil rights translated into how “postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas,” would “exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought.”
America had been an effective member of the Western Allies, working with England, France, and other nations to oppose an “enemy of unspeakable evil” as Zinn calls combination of European National Socialism and Japan’s militaristic imperialism.
The Allies were “fighting against racist totalitarianism,” as historian Mary Grabar writes. The fight was economic as well as military:
Fortunately, once the order was given to increase production for armaments and other military supplies, American factories were able to get close enough to meeting President Roosevelt’s “seemingly impossible yearly production goals” to vaunt the Allies to victory.
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had stated the foundational principles for the Allies, including the intent to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin agreed to abide by these principles, but secretly had already planned to subject the nations of Eastern Europe to the type of oppression which Nazis had imposed upon them. For Poland and Czechoslovakia to be “liberated” from Nazi domination by the Soviet Socialist army meant merely to be immediately placed under a similar domination imposed by the Soviet Union.
The high ethical standard set, and largely met, by the Western Allies was made into a practical reality by the free enterprise system and the industrial power which it created and unleashed, as Mary Grabar reports:
The United States has “over twelve million in uniform,” but “suffered only about 416,000 combat casualties,” which was just slightly above “3 percent of those enrolled in the military” and was “proportionally the fewest combat casualties of the major powers.” American industries might have helped save American lives and win the war.
The Western Allies fought a physical, military war. But they also fought an ideological battle of ethics. The Western Allies did not succeed in offering a perfect example of civil rights, but they understood civil rights to be the goal, and made significant and large amounts of progress toward this goal. Because the civil rights era began immediately after the war, it can be seen as an extension of the war’s ideology. During WWII and during the first postwar decade, the progress in civil rights was greater and more significant than any before or after. The efforts and achievements in the field of civil rights were better than any previous or since: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the founding of the SCLC, The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions, the Little Rock Nine, and lunch counter sit-ins, etc.
Eisenhower, decisive in WWII desegregation decisions, continued to promote civil rights during the 1950s.
The postwar understanding of justice and civil rights is largely a product of WW2. The questions about ‘justice’ and ‘civil rights’ being asked in the first quarter of the twenty-first century would not be possible or imaginable without the foundational ideas, found in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which constituted and composed the essence of the Western Allies.
