On one side, there was the oppression and subjugation of nations: In Japan, the imperialist, nationalist, and militarist leaders, headed by Tojo, controlled the nation, to the detriment of ordinary Japanese people. In Italy, Mussolini’s fascists imposed conformity on the Italian people. In Russia, Stalin’s Soviet Socialism extracted compliance from citizens by terrorizing them. Hitler’s National Socialism enslaved the entire German nation and forced it to obey decrees from the government and from the party.
The people of Japan, Italy, Russia, and Germany were tyrannized by, in the words of Howard Zinn, “imperialism, racism, totalitarianism,” and “militarism.” The ideologies inflicted “unspeakable evil” on their own people, and then proceeded to make other nations the victims of their aggression.
England and France, joined later by the United States, were “fighting against racist totalitarianism,” as historian Mary Grabar explains. In the United States, African-Americans read and heard about Japan’s vicious racial hatred toward the Koreans and the Chinese. Black people in America absorbed this information with mixed emotions: they knew only too well the pain of such oppression, and felt a kinship with the Chinese and Koreans; many African-Americans were eager to join the U.S. military and liberate the victims of racism.
But Black people in the United States also knew that their own journey to legal equality was not yet over. Although slavery had been gone for seventy-eight years, measuring the span from the Empancipation Proclamation to Pearl Harbor, the final fulfillment of civil rights for African-Americans had not arrived by 1941.
Black Americans had made gains in those seventy-eight years, and they wanted to help oppressed people in other nations acquire those same gains; but Black Americans also wanted to continue their advancement to complete the last few steps toward full legal equality. The service of African-Americans in the U.S. military would yield a double benefit: not only would Black soldiers help to liberate the victims of National Socialism, but they would advance toward a better status by means of their military service. It was in the U.S. Army that African-Americans would attain more civil rights.
Not simply capitalism, but rather specifically free-market capitalism defeated the forces of National Socialism, Soviet Socialism, and Fascism. The free enterprise system was more flexible, more efficient, and more productive than the economic systems of Axis powers. So it was that Allies, which by war’s end included more than a dozen other countries, had economic advantages which were as important as the military ones.
Both politically and economically, the Allies came out of a long-standing cultural tradition which embraced equality and liberty. Writing about the U.S. war effort, Howard Zinn notes that “it was a war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary” was the ordinary citizen. By contrast, in Japan and Soviet Russia, “a wealthy elite” benefited from, and controlled, the government.
Japan’s war effort was “fought to benefit plutocrats,” as Mary Grabar notes. The aim of colonized eastern Asia was built around the desire for raw materials: oil, iron, steel, coal, etc.
Because the U.S. economy was structured around opportunity, motivated workers were able to outperform and outproduce other nations. Once the debate between the isolationists and interventionists had been resolved, entrepreneurship, creativity, and inventiveness flourished in the American business world.
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, according to Victor Davis Hanson. The United States had “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.
Japan’s attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was a clarifying moment. The isolationists and interventionists united, and, as Howard Zinn writes, “almost all Americans were now in agreement — capitalists, Communists, Democrats, Republicans, poor, rich, and middle class — that this was indeed a people’s war.”
Because the Allies had not only superior military, technological, and economic resources, but rather also a cultural foundation of equality and liberty — admittedly not always perfectly fulfilled — the war’s end meant not only the defeat of the opposing countries, but rather also “a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world.”
Black people in the United States saw that the war effort, the effort to stop the aggression of National Socialism and Fascism, would not only contribute to the liberation of oppressed peoples in other countries, but it would also be instrumental in obtaining civil rights. As historian Mary Grabar writes, “African Americans were fighting for the right to fight.”
Years before the United States entered the war, black leaders were supporting bills by Congressman Hamilton Fish to expand the opportunities for African Americans in the military beyond the support services to which they were relegated. The exploits of black soldiers in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, and in the Philippines were the subjects of lectures by black leaders that boosted the pride and morale of African Americans and also provided arguments for equal rights. In World War II, Africans Americans would once again exhibit their fighting ability, beginning with Dorie Miller on the ship West Virginia in Pearl Harbor rushing to wield an anti-aircraft gun (in spite of having been denied combat training), to the Tuskegee Airmen and the 761st Tank Battalion, the original “Black Panthers.” During 183 days of combat in the last two years of the war, the 761st “captured or liberated more than 30 major towns and four airfields,” “pierced the Siegfried line into Germany and fought in the Battle of the Bulge,” and liberated “at least one concentration camp, the Gunskirchen camp in Austria.”
The 761st Tank Battalion received the Distinguished Unit Citation.
Hope for advancement were rewarded when General Eisenhower, defying the segregationist edicts of FDR and of FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. During the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and early 1945, Eisenhower needed maximum flexibility as he deployed and redeployed various units within the U.S. Army.
Roosevelt’s and Stimson’s segregation rules hampered Eisenhower’s ability to use his troops effectively. Violating the rules, Eisenhower assigned troops to various parts of the battle, regardless of their race. It was a major achievement in civil rights, as Black soldiers were able to fill new roles in the army, obtaining higher ranks and higher pay, and proving their skill and courage in combat.
After the war, African Americans voted enthusiastically for Eisenhower when he ran in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. Eisenhower, in turn, invited Martin Luther King to the White House.
Eisenhower worked with MLK and with Vice President Nixon to lobby Congress for the 1957 Civil Rights Act. They were successful, and together, the three of them also lobbied for the 1960 Civil Rights Act.
In WW2, the United States not only defeated the racism of Japan and of the Nazis, but they also advanced the cause of civil rights for African Americans.
