For the Common Defense
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The manpower mobilization forced the armed services under political pressure to drop or modify their policies on the admission and assignment of ethnic minority males, who could be drafted, and women, all volunteers. The largest minority in service was African-American. Before the war’s end, 650,000 African-Americans had joined the air and ground armies. Another 167,000 black men became sailors (and thirteen naval line officers), and 19,000 joined the Marine Corps. Americans of Latino descent served throughout the armed forces, including senior officers, and numbered an estimated 350,000. Mexican migrant workers added 125,000 men to the ranks. Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos of American citizenship joined all the services and often joined special forces and intelligence units.
Americans of Japanese ancestry born in the mainland states and Hawaii (Nisei) prized their citizenship and bristled at accusations of disloyalty, accusations that sent 110,000 family members (about 62 percent citizens) to barren relocation camps in 1942. Hawaiian Japanese in 1943 rushed to join a token unit, the 100th Infantry Battalion, raised in part to send young, dissident Nisei to the mainland. The battalion grew to become the 442d Regimental Combat Team, which won unparalleled honors in the war against Germany. The “Go For Broke” Nisei provided an estimated 10,000 officers and men for a unit of 4,500 authorized billets. The regiment suffered 717 combat deaths and collected almost 10,000 Purple Hearts for wounds. Many GIs bore more than one wound and hospital trips, which explains some of the soft statistics. (A monument to all Nisei service personnel lists 16,163 individual names, including 37 women.) Members of the regiment received over 5,000 decorations for valor, and the 442nd RCT received eight unit citations.
For multiculturalism, the 298th Infantry Regiment, Hawaiian National Guard, set the standard. It included prewar Guardsmen and new soldiers from the Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Mexican, Polynesian, haoli (white) and hapa (mixed race) communities of the islands. The regiment served on security duties in the South Pacific during 1943–1944.
Between 1906 and 1935 more than 150,000 Filipinos came to the United States, principally to serve as farm workers in Hawaii and California. Ineligible for naturalization under the existing laws, Filipinos could not join the armed forces unless born in the United States. Ironically, Filipinos could enlist in the Philippine Scouts, part of the American colonial army. The valiant service of the Scouts in a losing cause convinced Congress to change the law in 1942 and allow Filipino “aliens” to enlist and in 1943 to use service as a path to citizenship. Although the Army created an infantry regiment, separate infantry battalion, and airborne reconnaissance battalion, between 1943 and 1945 Filipino soldiers could be found throughout the Sixth and Eighth Armies in the southwest Pacific. They performed valuable service in the liberation of the Philippines, 1944–1945. An estimated 400,000 Filipinos served in the U.S. armed forces, the Army of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, in the Philippine Scouts, and in the guerrilla units formed by the U.S. Army Forces Far East.
Federal personnel planners urged the services to recruit women for an estimated 400,000 jobs that would free males for combat service. Before the war ended an estimated 350,000 women had donned uniforms for temporary, noncombat jobs. About half of them served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the only service units other than nurses to go overseas. More than 6,500 WAACs were black women. The Army and Navy expanded their nursing corps to 14,000, who served in all overseas theaters. The Navy and Marine Corps enlisted almost 100,000 women auxiliaries. Although not technically military, the 1,900 female aviators of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) ferried USAAF aircraft between stateside bases, and thirty-eight died in crashes.
Native Americans, most of them volunteers from reservations, added 25,000 warriors to the services, with 22,000 going to the Army. One-fifth of the 45th Infantry Division, Oklahoma National Guard, came from residents of the former Indian Territory, populated by the displaced “civilized tribes” from east of the Mississippi. Texas and southwestern National Guard units included Pimas, Kiowas, Apaches, Comanches, and Navajo. The 32nd Infantry Division, Wisconsin National Guard, included hundreds of Great Lakes tribal members.
In theory, the armed forces assigned members on the basis of character, education, trainability, aptitude, and physical qualifications. African-Americans faced racial prejudices that limited assignments. These racial assumptions held that blacks could not and should not command whites. Blacks lacked technical aptitudes. Either because of slavery or racial characteristics, blacks would not fight and die for the United States, which ignored a good deal of history. Educated blacks served only to challenge Jim Crow barriers, which was partially true. Most blacks could serve usefully in labor units. The war put a lie to all these assumptions, although it is also true that in 1941–1945 black enlisted personnel, mostly drafted, came from the undereducated south.
Only one-third of black GIs served abroad, the largest number (132,000) in Europe, 1944–1945. About 50,000 black soldiers served in 22 combat units in Europe, the bulk of them in the 92d Infantry Division in Italy, 1943–1945, with uneven success and poisoned by interracial friction among its officers. The most notable service came from all-black tank, tank destroyer, artillery, and truck battalions of the “Red Ball Express.” In the infantry replacement crisis of 1944–1945, 4,500 black GIs volunteered to serve as replacement infantry platoons in white companies in ten different divisions. The experience did not test real integration, which would have been the color-blind assignment of black officers and NCOs.
The most telling experience was the formation of the four-squadron 332d Fighter Group (“The Red Tails”) and the 477th Medium Bomber Group. Both groups came from the USAAF pilot-training school at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. The USAAF did not welcome this “experiment,” but it faced stubborn pressure from white, urban northern Democrats and black civil rights leaders. A handful of white officers, notably Colonel Noel Parrish, supported the mission. Eventually, 450 Tuskegee fighter pilots flew 15,000 sorties against the Luftwaffe. Sixty-six died in aerial combat over Germany and Italy. The 332nd group commander, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (USMA 1936) became the first black general in the U.S. Air Force.
The Navy and Marine Corps made more limited steps in opening their ranks to ethnic minorities, but blacks faced the greater challenges toward integration. In principle, the Navy could assign black sailors to any billet, not just as stewards, but in reality the majority of black sailors served in shore depot, construction, and base service units. They also suffered the greatest casualties ashore: 202 sailors killed and more than 300 injured in the 1944 ammunition dump explosion at Port Chicago, California. Nevertheless, pressured by Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, the Navy created all-black crews for a destroyer escort, a patrol craft, and twenty-five service ships, to demonstrate the broad skills of black sailors. The Marine Corps organized two defense battalions and sixty-two depot and ammunition companies, many of which saw rear area combat on Pacific islands during 1944–1945.
The armed forces exploited cultural diversity against foes that worshiped “purity.” One innovation by the Marine Corps was to use Navajo tribesmen to send rapid, secure tactical radio voice messages. The U.S. Army had experimented in World War I using Choctaw “codetalkers” and employed Comanches in the same role in the European war, 1944–1945. The Marine Corps created its “codetalkers” after Japanese and Navajo linguists, most of them missionaries, convinced Navy-Marine Corps communications security officers that no Japanese could understand or duplicate Navajo, an archaic tonal language with no alphabet. Some Japanese, however, could speak some variety of American English. Eventually, 429 Navajo “codetalkers” directed air and artillery strikes and made urgent position reports in the Pacific war. The U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service recruited and trained more than 6,000 Americans of Japanese and Chinese descent to serve as interpreters and translators for the war with Japan. All the services benefited from their courage and imaginative missions from Burma to New Guinea.
Placing the right numbers of people with the right skills in war work taxed the Roosevelt administration, however, since it and Congress refused to conscript war workers. The government, instead, depended upon wage incentives to attract workers. Uncontrolled, this approach did not work well, for war industries bid against one another for skilled workers, and worker turnover early in the war damaged productivity in critical industries. The strongest element of compulsion in mobilizing civilian labor was the provision for the Selective Service System to grant occupational deferments, and in the course of the war it provided deferments for over 5 million workers. The inefficiency of wage incentives, however, convinced the government to take greater direct control of manpower policy, and in early 1942 two new agencies, the War Manpower Commission and the National War Labor Board, assumed responsibility for coordinating government-industrial relationships and policies. Both agencies established programs to train, attract, and keep war workers on the job, but neither succeeded in injecting any substantial compulsion into the labor supply system.
The government rejected “work or fight” programs and refused to approve laws to outlaw strikes or the right of individual workers to choose their own jobs. Labor unions and the farm lobby proved powerful influences upon national policy; for example, the tobacco industry managed to have itself labeled “critical” to the war effort, thus securing deferments for 2 million workers. The civilian labor managers enjoyed two limited successes, curbing military demands for more men and bringing some uniformity to wage policies, which dampened labor pirating. They were more successful in establishing training programs for undermanned trades (e.g., metalworking) and in securing better working conditions. Fortunately, the unmobilized labor force of 1941 and the wage incentive policy combined to provide the “Arsenal of Democracy” with adequate war workers. World War II provided a boon for the American worker, whose wages during the war increased 68 percent while the cost of living increased only 23 percent. On the basis of income distribution changes within the population during the war, fully one-third of Americans moved into the middle class, and their reborn optimism, new skills, and unspent savings provided the foundation of postwar prosperity.
Mobilizing labor for war provided ample challenges for the Roosevelt administration, but industrial mobilization and the production of war materiel made labor problems pale by comparison. Nevertheless, the government hammered out its basic policies by 1943. Many of the technical problems of military procurement were well known from the World War I experience. The barriers to effective mobilization were more political than technical, although shortages of both raw materials and industrial plants slowed mobilization. The war did not end the deeply held beliefs about the American economy that had characterized the New Deal years and shaped national politics in the 1930s. Economic planners, farmers, labor and consumer groups, and the intellectual coalition of government administrators and academics feared that America’s corporate and financial leaders would use the war to curb the federal government’s power to push the economy toward full employment and a wider distribution of wealth. Some business leaders and their Republican allies did indeed see the war as such an opportunity, but the majority of business leaders simply did not want the wartime emergency to be an excuse for extending permanent government control, which they thought would ruin their postwar ability to do business as market-oriented, profit-making corporations. The War and Navy Departments tended to favor the business point of view, since they wanted industry to provide the weapons of war as quickly as possible in enormous quantities, and they believed that reform of the American economy would inhibit the war effort. Civilian analysts estimated that the Army’s “Victory Program” would cost $150 billion. The Navy’s early wartime estimates were no less breathtaking. FDR himself changed his own appreciation of the military’s needs. Before the fall of France he saw no need for urgency, but in January 1942 he told Congress that the United States would need to produce in the next two years 185,000 aircraft, 110,000 tanks, and 55,000 antiaircraft guns. Lend-Lease produced additional demands upon the “Arsenal of Democracy,” and before the war’s end the United States had provided its allies with 37,000 tanks, 792,000 trucks, 43,000 aircraft, and 1.8 million rifles.
Amid much political bargaining the government established its basic policy for industrial mobilization before Pearl Harbor. That policy assumed that the war effort would depend upon the profit motive and corporate leadership to spur industrial expansion. Government regulation would be minimal and come only when political pressure or business uncooperativeness demanded action. Certainly the military would not determine economic policy, since such an approach was politically unacceptable and neglected the importance of national interests beyond victory in World War II. Instead, nonmilitary agencies would determine the relationship between immediate military requirements (American and Allied), domestic needs, the available resources, and the structure of the economy. Tested in 1940–1941, when munitions production doubled, the government thought it had found a formula for spurring the conversion of an expanded industrial plant to war production. Essentially, the government promised to relieve war industries of financial risk by buying weapons on a cost-plus-fixed-profit basis, with additional incentives to exceed time and quantity goals. It provided attractive tax write-offs for plant expansion and modernization, purchased and leased factories to private companies, provided scarce raw materials, and helped recruit and train labor. Large industries also could assume freedom from antitrust prosecution. Despite numerous problems, the World War II industrial mobilization proceeded without the degree of inefficiency and waste that had characterized World War I, and corporate profits during the war mounted from $6.4 billion to $10.8 billion, which kept business cooperative. Industrial productivity drove the gross national product up from $91 billion in 1941 to $166 billion in 1945.
The federal government, however, could not surrender economic mobilization to American business, since the war was too important to be left to management. Before Pearl Harbor the Roosevelt administration followed a modus operandi it had developed in the 1930s. When an economic problem cried for government intervention, the administration created a special agency to deal with the problem, but the agency seldom had clear power or authority, sharing its mission with others. This system (or lack thereof) drove politicians and bureaucrats to distraction, but it preserved FDR’s power and allowed all the competing political interests to seek accommodation or annihilation. They usually compromised, as the president wanted. In January 1942 the administration finally decided that its current way of doing business would not suffice and created the War Production Board (WPB), headed by retailing executive Donald M. Nelson.
FDR could have granted Nelson a “czar’s” powers, since in March 1942 Congress in a second War Powers Act gave the president the authority to allocate materials an
d facilities to war production, an implied charge to centralize economic mobilization. He did not do so. Temperamentally, Nelson was no Bernard Baruch, and he faced powerful competitors in the Army and Navy (who coordinated their own plans through the Joint Munitions Board), the Lend-Lease Administration, the Maritime Commission, the Office of Civilian Supply, the Office of Price Administration, and five different Anglo-American supply coordination boards. Without a clear political mandate from FDR and nearly friendless in Congress, Nelson had little success in controlling military orders or pressuring industry to cut domestic production. Unsettled strategic plans and unresolved conflicts over scarce raw materials brought increased demands for central control by somebody. The military departments did not relish the role, but they would have taken it since equipment scarcities were still epidemic. In May 1943, FDR finally created the Office of War Mobilization and persuaded James F. Byrnes, an astute former senator and Supreme Court justice, to take the job. With increased authority, expanded production, and clear strategic plans, Byrnes made OWM the central coordinator of a mobilization kingdom that continued to be peopled by fractious bureaucratic barons and political interests.
Selected Items, American War Production July 1940–August 1945
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Tanks
86,000
Artillery pieces
120,000
Shoulder weapons
14 million
Trucks and jeeps
2.4 million
Combatant vessels