Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, you know how we're always talking about war and patriotism and all that stuff? Well, something that often gets kinda overlooked is how much dissent there actually was, even during times like, uh, World War II, which is usually portrayed as, like, this super unified effort.
I mean, sure, there was a lot of, you know, flag-waving and everybody saying they were totally dedicated to winning. And, um, even the big labor unions, the AFL and the CTO, they made these "no-strike pledges." But, like, underneath all that, a lot of workers were really ticked off. Wages were frozen, but business profits were, like, skyrocketing. So, you know, people got frustrated, and they went on strike. A lot.
During the war, there were something like, uh, fourteen thousand strikes, with like, six point seven million workers involved. That's more than, like, any other period in American history you can compare it to. And in just one year, 1944, a million workers were on strike. In the mines, in the steel mills, in the auto industries, everything.
And, uh, get this, after the war ended, the strikes kept going. In the first half of 1946 alone, like, three million people were on strike. There's this author, Jeremy Brecher, who wrote a book called "Strike!" He argues that, without the unions kind of keeping things in check, there might have been, like, a full-blown confrontation between workers and the government. Pretty wild, huh?
You know, it's interesting to look at specific examples. Take Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance. There's this manuscript by Marc Miller... he pointed out that they had as many strikes in 1943 and 1944 as they did back in 1937. So, yeah, it might have been a "people's war," but, like, people were still unhappy. Especially when they saw textile mill profits jump by, like, 600 percent between 1940 and 1946, while wages in cotton goods only went up, what, 36 percent? That doesn’t exactly seem fair, right?
And it wasn't just about wages. Women war workers with kids, uh, in Lowell, only five percent could find childcare through nursery schools. Everyone else had to figure it out on their own. So, you know, the war didn't exactly change everything for the better, especially for women.
So, like, even beneath all the noise about patriotism, there were a lot of people who just thought war was wrong. You know? Even against something like Fascist aggression. Out of ten million people drafted in WWII, only about 43,000 refused to fight. But that's still three times more conscientious objectors than in WWI. And about 6,000 of those went to prison... which, proportionally, is four times the number who went to prison in World War I. One out of every six men in federal prison was a conscientious objector.
And it’s probably even a bigger number than that. Way more than 43,000 just didn't even show up for the draft. The government lists about 350,000 cases of draft evasion, which includes all sorts of violations, but also desertion. So it's hard to say exactly, but it's possible that the number of men who didn't show up or claimed C.O. status was in the hundreds of thousands. And this, like I said, in a country where pretty much everyone was for the war.
And even among the soldiers who did fight, you know, who seemed willing... you have to wonder how much resentment there was towards authority, towards fighting in a war with unclear aims, inside a military system that was, like, really undemocratic. Nobody really recorded how bitter the enlisted men were about the special treatment the officers got. Like, imagine this: Air Force combat crews in Europe, going to the movies between bombing missions. Two lines: a short line for officers, and a really, really long line for enlisted men. And two different mess halls with better food for officers. Even when they were all about to go into combat.
That kind of anger, I think, started to show up in the literature that came out after the war. Books like "From Here to Eternity," "Catch-22," "The Naked and the Dead". In "The Naked and the Dead," one of the soldiers says, "The only thing wrong with this Army is it never lost a war." Another soldier is shocked! But then, he keeps going: "What have I against the goddam Japs? You think I care if they keep this fuggin' jungle? What's it to me if Cummings gets another star?"
There was even this widespread feeling of indifference, or even hostility, within the Black community, despite the efforts of Black newspapers and leaders to get Black people on board with the war. One Black journalist said: "The Negro... is angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the war. 'Fight for what?' he is asking. 'This war doesn't mean a thing to me. If we win I lose, so what?'" And this Black army officer home on leave, he told his friends in Harlem that he'd been in tons of bull sessions with Black soldiers, and they just weren't interested.
There was this student at a Black college who said: "The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?" And when NAACP leader Walter White repeated that to a Black audience in the Midwest, thinking they'd disapprove, they actually burst into applause.
There wasn't any organized Black opposition to the war, though. And really, not a whole lot of organized opposition from anywhere. The Communist Party was totally on board. The Socialist Party was, uh, divided.
There were just a few small anarchist and pacifist groups who refused to support the war. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom said that war can't permanently settle conflicts. And the Catholic Worker wrote, "We are still pacifists..."
But it was difficult to just call for "peace" in a world with capitalism, Fascism, Communism, all these aggressive forces. Some pacifists started talking about "revolutionary nonviolence." A.J. Muste said he wasn't impressed with the easygoing pacifism of the early 20th century. He realized the world was in a revolution and people against violence had to take revolutionary action, but without violence.
Only one organized socialist group opposed the war completely – the Socialist Workers Party. But, you know, the government made things pretty tough for them. There was the Espionage Act from World War I, and then they passed the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government or even joining any group that did. In Minneapolis, they convicted eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party, just for belonging to a party with those ideas. They were sent to prison, and the Supreme Court refused to even look at the case.
A few people kept insisting that the real war was, like, within each nation. Simone Weil said that whatever label you put on it, "our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military."
Still, most Americans were mobilized to fight, and the atmosphere of war just kept getting more intense. Polls showed a lot of soldiers wanted the draft to continue after the war. There was widespread hatred against the enemy, especially the Japanese. It was, like, really racist. Time magazine, reporting on the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing... indicates it."
And that's kind of what led to this huge support for the bombing of German and Japanese cities. Some people might argue that made it a "people's war." But if a "people's war" means a war of people against attack, or a war for humane reasons... if it means a war against the few, not the many... then the bombing campaigns kinda destroy that idea.
Before World War II, Italy bombed cities in the Ethiopian war, and Italy and Germany bombed civilians in Spain. And then, at the start of World War II, German planes bombed Rotterdam and Coventry. And Roosevelt called those bombings "inhuman barbarism."
But, you know, those German bombings were small compared to what the British and Americans did to German cities. The Allies decided on these massive air attacks to destroy the German military, industrial, and economic system, and to undermine the morale of the German people. That's how the bombing of German cities started. Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg... these were all hit with thousands of planes.
The English bombed at night, not even pretending to aim at military targets. The Americans bombed in the daytime and pretended to be precise, but, you know, bombing from high altitudes… it wasn't possible. The worst of it was the bombing of Dresden. The heat created this vacuum, and fire just spread through the city. Over 100,000 died. And in his memoirs, Winston Churchill just said, "We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communication of Germany's Eastern Front."
They kept up the same thing in Japan, trying to break civilian morale. One fire-bombing of Tokyo killed 80,000 people. And then came Hiroshima, and the atomic bomb. Maybe 100,000 dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. And three days later, Nagasaki. 50,000 killed.
The justification for all of this was that it would end the war quickly. That an invasion of Japan would cost a million lives, according to Secretary of State Byrnes. Half a million, Truman claimed was the number given to him by General Marshall. But those numbers weren't realistic. Japan was in terrible shape by August 1945 and was ready to surrender.
One military analyst wrote: "The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made." So, like, did we really need to do it? Maybe not.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interviewed tons of Japanese leaders after the war, and they said that Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, even if Russia hadn't entered the war, and even if there hadn't been any invasion planned.
But, you know, could American leaders have known that at the time? Well, the Japanese code had been broken. They knew the Japanese were trying to negotiate peace. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrender for a year before that. On July 13, Foreign Minister Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace..."
So, if the Americans hadn't insisted on unconditional surrender, if they'd just agreed to let the emperor stay in place, the Japanese probably would have surrendered.
So why didn't the U.S. take that step? Was it because they'd invested too much in the atomic bomb not to use it? Or, like this British scientist suggested, was it that the U.S. wanted to drop the bomb before the Russians got into the war?
The Russians were supposed to declare war on Japan after the end of the European war, which was May 8th. So that meant August 8th. But by then, the bomb had been dropped, and the next day, the second one would be dropped on Nagasaki. So the Japanese would surrender to the U.S., not the Russians. And the U.S. would get to occupy postwar Japan. In other words, dropping the bomb was the "first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."
Truman said the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base, because they wanted to avoid killing civilians. But, you know, that's ridiculous. Almost everyone killed in Hiroshima was a civilian. The Strategic Bombing Survey said Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because of their population and activities.
And the second bomb on Nagasaki... nobody's ever really explained why that one was dropped. Were they testing a different kind of bomb? Were the dead and irradiated victims of a scientific experiment? There were probably American prisoners of war in Nagasaki, too.
True, the war ended quickly. But, you know, what about fascism as an idea? Were its essential elements – militarism, racism, imperialism – gone? Or were they absorbed into the victors? A.J. Muste said that the problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he's proven that war and violence pay.
The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States. Both countries went to work carving out their own empires. Building military machines bigger than the Fascist countries had built. Controlling more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had. And controlling their own people with their own techniques, crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States.
The war put the U.S. in a position to dominate much of the world, and it created conditions for control at home. The unemployment and the turmoil of the '30s, that had been threatening the system… the war pacified all of that. It brought higher prices for farmers, higher wages, enough prosperity to stop those rebellions. As one historian writes, "The war rejuvenated American capitalism." Corporate profits went up huge. Workers and farmers felt the system was doing well for them.
It was an old lesson: that war solves problems of control. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric, suggested a permanent alliance between business and the military, for "a permanent war economy."
And that's what happened. Right after the war, the American public wanted demobilization and disarmament. But the Truman administration created an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. The rivalry with the Soviet Union was real, but Truman made it sound like an immediate threat.
And, you know, with that climate of fear, that hysteria about Communism… it steeply escalated the military budget and stimulated the economy. All of this allowed for more aggressive actions abroad, and more repressive actions at home. That’s something to think about…