FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt): 32nd Retrospective

“Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” – Ellis, No Country for Old Men (2007)

FDR was intelligent but not brilliant. He was pampered as the only child of aristocrats. He was crippled by polio at age 39, but his political flexibility and infectious charisma made him perfectly suited to deal with the immense challenges of his presidency. He hired the first woman in cabinet, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.

FDR was the 5th cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt. He was a C student at Harvard, and a private man that brought an easy personality to the White House. He had enormous personal charm, but supposedly wore “an actor’s mask” of a face. Even those closest to him didn’t know what made him tick, and it’s said that no one really knew him.

FDR and Civil Rights

Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency of a nation in which white supremacy was a significant cultural and political force. Many states denied or severely restricted voting rights to African Americans and used their political power to further diminish their status and to deny them the benefits and opportunities of society. One consequence of this was to make African Americans potential victims of lynching, a kind of “people’s justice,” in which mobs of whites seized and murdered, often in gruesome fashion, African Americans suspected of crimes against whites. Bent on economic recovery and reform and having to work through powerful Southern congressmen, the president hesitated to place civil rights on his agenda.

Civil rights did emerge as an issue because of three related events:

• The movement of African Americans to northern states created a constituency that in some key states could hold a balance of power between the major parties.
• Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation’s first activist First Lady, championed equal rights and racial justice.
• Many persons and organizations, the most prominent of which was the NAACP, made federal anti-lynching legislation a major priority.

FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat and activist. She served as the first lady of the United States from March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Roosevelt served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. President Harry S. Truman later called her the “First Lady of the World” in tribute to her human rights achievements.

Roosevelt was a member of the prominent American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She had an unhappy childhood, having suffered the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers at a young age. At 15, she attended Allenswood Boarding Academy in London and was deeply influenced by its headmistress Marie Souvestre.

Returning to the U.S., she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905. The Roosevelts’ marriage was complicated from the beginning by Franklin’s controlling mother, Sara, and after Eleanor discovered her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, she resolved to seek fulfillment in leading a public life of her own. She persuaded Franklin to stay in politics after he was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, which cost him the normal use of his legs, and began giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in his place. Following Franklin’s election as Governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the remainder of Franklin’s public career in government, Roosevelt regularly made public appearances on his behalf; and as First Lady, while her husband served as president, she significantly reshaped and redefined the role of first lady.

Though widely respected in her later years, Roosevelt was a controversial first lady at the time for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights for African-Americans. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention. On a few occasions, she publicly disagreed with her husband’s policies.

She launched an experimental community at Arthurdale, West Virginia, for the families of unemployed miners, later widely regarded as a failure. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of World War II refugees.

Following her husband’s death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life. She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, she chaired the John F. Kennedy administration’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.

By the time of her death, Roosevelt was regarded as “one of the most esteemed women in the world”; The New York Times called her “the object of almost universal respect” in an obituary.In 1999, she was ranked ninth in the top ten of Gallup’s List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century.

FDR and the Office of Negro Affairs

The Black Cabinet, or Federal Council of Negro Affairs or Black Brain Trust, was the informal term for a group of African Americans who served as public policy advisors to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt in his terms in office from 1933 to 1945. Despite its name, it was not an official organization. The term was coined in 1936 by Mary McLeod Bethune and was occasionally used in the press. By mid-1935, there were 45 African Americans working in federal executive departments and New Deal agencies.

Mary Mcleod Bethune

Mary Jane McLeod Bethune (born Mary Jane McLeod; July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955) was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council for Negro Women in 1935, established the organization’s flagship journal Aframerican Women’s Journal, and resided as president or leader for myriad African American women’s organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration’s Negro Division. She also was appointed as a national adviser to president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on colored Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet.

She is well known for starting a private school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida; it later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman University. Bethune was the sole African American woman officially a part of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter, and she held a leadership position for the American Women’s Voluntary Services founded by Alice Throckmorton McLean. For her lifetime of activism, she was deemed “acknowledged First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine in July 1949 and was known by the Black Press as the “Female Booker T. Washington”. She was known as “The First Lady of The Struggle” because of her commitment to gain better lives for African Americans.

Born in Mayesville, South Carolina, to parents who had been slaves, she started working in fields with her family at age five. She took an early interest in becoming educated; with the help of benefactors, Bethune attended college hoping to become a missionary in Africa. She started a school for African-American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. It later merged with a private institute for African-American boys and was known as the Bethune-Cookman School. Bethune maintained high standards and promoted the school with tourists and donors to demonstrate what educated African Americans could do. She was president of the college from 1923 to 1942 and 1946 to 1947. She was one of the few women in the world to serve as a college president at that time.

Bethune was also active in women’s clubs, which were strong civic organizations supporting welfare and other needs, and became a national leader. Bethune wrote prolifically, publishing in National Notes from 1924–1928, Pittsburgh Courier from 1937–1938, Aframerican Women’s Journal from 1940–1949, and Chicago Defender from 1948–1955, among others.

After working on the presidential campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, she was invited as a member of his “Black Cabinet.” She advised him on concerns of African Americans and helped share Roosevelt’s message and achievements with blacks, who had historically been Republican voters since the Civil War. At the time, blacks had been largely disenfranchised in the South since the turn of the century, so she spoke to black voters across the North. Upon her death, columnist Louis E. Martin said, “She gave out faith and hope as if they were pills and she some sort of doctor.”

Honors include designation of her home in Daytona Beach as a National Historic Landmark, her house in Washington, D.C. as a National Historic Site, and the installation of a memorial sculpture of her in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. The 17 ft bronze statue, unveiled in 1974, “is the first monument to honor an African American and a woman in a public park in Washington, D.C.” The Legislature of Florida designated her in 2018 as the subject of one of Florida’s two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

FDR Signs the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934

The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of June 18, 1934, or the Wheeler–Howard Act, was U.S. federal legislation that dealt with the status of American Indians in the United States. It was the centerpiece of what has been often called the “Indian New Deal”. The major goal was to reverse the traditional goal of cultural assimilation of Native Americans into American society and to strengthen, encourage and perpetuate the tribes and their historic Native American cultures in the United States.

The Act also restored to Indians the management of their assets—land and mineral rights—and included provisions intended to create a sound economic foundation for the inhabitants of Indian reservations. The law did not apply to Hawaii; Alaska and Oklahoma were added under another law in 1936. (Indian tribes in Oklahoma had their land allotted and land title extinguished, and so did not have any reservations left.) The census counted 332,000 Indians in 1930 and 334,000 in 1940, including those on and off reservations. Total U.S. spending on Indians averaged $38 million a year in the late 1920s, dropping to an all time low of $23 million in 1933, and reaching $38 million in 1940.

The IRA was the most significant initiative of John Collier, who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from 1933 to 1945. He had long studied Indian issues and worked for change since the 1920s, particularly with the American Indian Defense Association. He intended to reverse the assimilationist policies that had resulted in considerable damage to American Indian cultures, and to provide a means for American Indians to re-establish sovereignty and self-government, to reduce the losses of reservation lands, and to build economic self-sufficiency.

Collier believed that Indian traditional culture was superior to that of modern America, and thought it worthy of emulation. His proposals were considered highly controversial, as numerous powerful interests had profited from the sale and management of Native lands. Congress revised Collier’s proposals and preserved oversight of tribes and reservations by the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of Interior.

The self-government provisions would automatically go into effect for a tribe unless a clear majority of the eligible Indians voted it down. When approved, a tribe would adopt a variation of the model constitution drafted by BIA lawyers.

Harlem Riot of 1935

The Harlem Riot of 1935 took place on March 19, 1935 during the Great Depression, in New York City, New York, in the United States. It has been described as the first “modern” race riot in Harlem, because it was committed primarily against property rather than persons. Harlem is a northern neighborhood on Manhattan Island in New York City whose population at the time was predominately African American.

The rioting was sparked by rumors that a black Puerto Rican teenage shoplifter was beaten by employees at an S. H. Kress “five and dime” store. That evening a demonstration was held outside the store and, after someone threw a rock through the window, more general destruction of the store and other white-owned properties ensued. Three people died, hundreds were wounded, and an estimated $2 million in damages was caused to properties throughout the district. African American-owned homes and businesses were spared the worst of the destruction.

FDR and Jesse Owens

After the 1936 Berlin Olympics, only the white athletes were invited to see and meet Roosevelt. No such invitation was made to the black athletes, such as Jesse Owens, who had won four gold medals. A widely believed myth about the 1936 games was that Hitler had snubbed Owens, something that never happened. Owens said that “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram”. However, Hitler had left after Owens won his first gold medal, and did not meet with him. Subsequently, Hitler did not meet with any of the gold medalists. Owens lamented his treatment by Roosevelt, saying that he “wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President”

FDR Blocks Anti-Lynching Legislation

Roosevelt condemned lynching as murder, but he did not support Republican proposals to make it a federal crime, although his wife Eleanor did so. Roosevelt told an advocate:

If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they [Southern Democratic senators] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.

FDR Nominates Hugo Black

Roosevelt nominated Hugo Black to the Supreme Court, knowing that Black had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The nomination was controversial because Black was an ardent New Dealer with almost no judicial experience. Senators did not know of the previous KKK membership.

FDR and the Holocaust

Beginning in the 1940s, Roosevelt was charged with not acting decisively enough to prevent or stop the Holocaust. Critics cite instances such as the 1939 episode in which 936 Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis were denied asylum and not allowed into the United States because of strict laws passed by Congress.

Historian David Wyman and others argue that the Roosevelt administration knew that the Nazis were systematically killing Jews, but nevertheless followed a policy of not rescuing them. According to Wyman, Roosevelt’s record on Jewish refugees and their rescue is very poor and one of the worst failures of his presidency. He has been criticized for failing to issue public statements or address the issue of European Jews in any of his 998 press conferences.

Defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert N. Rosen, argue that Roosevelt made numerous attempts to allow Jewish refugees to enter the United States and that at weaker periods of his presidency he simply did not have the political capital to wage these battles. Rosen argues that the mood in the country favored the strong desire to remain neutral regarding European affairs and distrust of anything that smacked of internationalism. On one point, Wyman and Rosen agree: that there were bitter divisions within the American Jewish community regarding whether to actively lobby for the rescue of their European counterparts from Nazi persecution, and that as a consequence, Roosevelt had limited political capital to initiate such an effort.

After the Allied conquest of North Africa in 1942, Roosevelt chose to retain the anti-Jewish Vichy French leadership in power there, with some Jews remaining held in concentration camps, and discriminatory laws against Jews remaining in effect. In private, Roosevelt argued that Jews did not need the right to vote since no elections were expected to be held soon, and that Jewish participation in the professions should be limited via a quota system. Only after an outcry from Jewish organizations in the US did Roosevelt change his policy regarding North African Jews, with anti-Jewish laws remaining in effect for 10 months after the US conquest.

FDR Issues Executive Order 8802

Executive Order 8802 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, to prohibit ethnic or racial discrimination in the nation’s defense industry. It also set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee. It was the first federal action, though not a law, to promote equal opportunity and prohibit employment discrimination in the United States.

Many citizens of Italian or German ethnicity were affected by World War II and this was impeding the war effort and lowering morale. This ethnic factor was a major motivation for Roosevelt. The President’s statement that accompanied the Order cited the war effort, saying that “the democratic way of life within the nation can be defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups,” and cited reports of discrimination:

There is evidence available that needed workers have been barred from industries engaged in defense production solely because of considerations of race, creed, color or national origin, to he detriment of workers’ morale and of national unity.

The executive order had also been demanded by civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, and others involved in the March on Washington Movement who had planned a march on Washington, D.C. in 1941 to protest racial discrimination in industry and the military. They suspended the march after Executive Order 8802 was issued.

The order required federal agencies and departments involved with defense production to ensure that vocational and training programs were administered without discrimination as to “race, creed, color, or national origin.” All defense contracts were to include provisions that barred private contractors from discrimination as well.

FDR Issues Executive Order 9066

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War, the War Department demanded that all enemy nationals and Japanese American citizens be removed from war zones on the West Coast. The question became how to imprison the estimated 120,000 people of Japanese and American citizenship living in California.

On February 11, 1942 Roosevelt met with Secretary of War Stimson, who persuaded him to approve an immediate forced evacuation. Roosevelt looked at the secret evidence available to him: the Japanese in the Philippines had collaborated with the Japanese invasion troops; the Japanese in California had been strong supporters of Japan in the war against China. There was evidence of espionage compiled by code-breakers that decrypted messages to Japan from agents in North America and Hawaii before and after Pearl Harbor. These MAGIC cables were kept secret from all but those with the highest clearance, such as Roosevelt, lest the Japanese discover the decryption and change their code.

On February 19, 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered Secretary of War, and military commanders to designate military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Roosevelt released the imprisoned Japanese in 1944. On February 1, 1943, when activating the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—a unit composed mostly of American citizens of Japanese descent living in Hawaii, he said, “No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”

Interior Secretary Ickes lobbied Roosevelt through 1944 to release the Japanese American internees, but Roosevelt did not act until after the November presidential election. A fight for Japanese American civil rights meant a fight with influential Democrats, the Army, and the Hearst press and would have endangered Roosevelt’s chances of winning California in 1944. Critics of Roosevelt’s actions believe they were motivated in part by racism.

In 1925 Roosevelt had written about Japanese immigration:

Californians have properly objected on the sound basic grounds that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population… Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.

In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of the executive order in the Korematsu v. United States case. The executive order remained in force until December of that year.

Zoot Suit Riots

The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of conflicts on June 3–8, 1943 in Los Angeles, California, United States, which pitted American servicemen stationed in Southern California against young Latino and Mexican American city residents. It was one of the dozen wartime industrial cities that suffered race-related riots in the summer of 1943, along with Mobile, Alabama; Beaumont, Texas; Detroit, Michigan; and New York City.

American servicemen and white Angelenos attacked and stripped children, teenagers, and youths who wore zoot suits, ostensibly because they considered the outfits, which were made from large amounts of fabric, to be unpatriotic during World War II. Rationing of fabrics and certain foods was required at the time for the war effort. While most of the violence was directed toward Mexican American youth, African American, Italian American, and Filipino American youths who were wearing zoot suits were also attacked.

The Zoot Suit Riots were related to fears and hostilities aroused by the coverage of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, following the killing of a young Latino man in what was then an unincorporated commercial area near Los Angeles. The riot appeared to trigger similar attacks that year against Latinos in Chicago, San Diego, Oakland, Evansville, Philadelphia, and New York City. The defiance of zoot suiters became inspirational for Chicanos during the Chicano Movement.

Beaumont Race Riot of 1943

The 1943 race riot in Beaumont, Texas, erupted on June 15 and ended two days later. It related to wartime tensions in the overcrowded city, which had been flooded by workers from across the South. The immediate catalyst to white workers from the Pennsylvania Shipyard in Beaumont attacking black people and their property was a rumor that a white woman had been raped by a black man. This was one of several riots in the summer of 1943 in which black people suffered disproportionately as victims and had the greatest losses in property damage. The first took place in the largest shipyard in Mobile, Alabama in late May; others took place in Detroit and Los Angeles in June (the latter was a different situation, in which white servicemen attacked Latinos in the Zoot Suit Riots), and Harlem in August.

Beaumont had become a destination for tens of thousands of workers in the defense industry; from 1940 to 1943 the city had grown from 59,000 to 80,000 persons, with African Americans maintaining a proportion of roughly one third of the total. Workers were attracted to the buildup of high-paying jobs in the defense industry, concentrated at the shipyard, as Beaumont was located on the Neches River northeast of Houston on the Gulf Coast.

A presidential Executive Order 8802 was issued to prohibit racial and religious discrimination among defense contractors, and African Americans sought a share of opportunities in the high-paying jobs. New residents in Beaumont competed for jobs and housing in the crowded town, where whites had imposed segregated facilities, as was common across the South. Racial riots erupted that summer in Detroit, Michigan; Mobile, Alabama; Los Angeles, California; and Harlem, New York relating to social competition and tensions arising from the wartime build-up. Some cities were struggling to accommodate the influx of black and white defense workers, dealing with shortages in housing and strained services.

Detroit Race Riot of 1943

The 1943 Detroit race riot took place in Detroit, Michigan, of the United States, from the evening of June 20 through to the early morning of June 22. It occurred in a period of dramatic population increase and social tensions associated with the military buildup of U.S. participation in World War II, as Detroit’s automotive industry was converted to the war effort.

Existing social tensions and housing shortages were exacerbated by racist feelings about the arrival of nearly 400,000 migrants, both African-American and White Southerners, from the Southeastern United States between 1941 and 1943. The new migrants competed for space and jobs, as well as against European immigrants and their descendants. The Detroit riots were one of five that summer; it followed ones in Beaumont, TX, Harlem, NY, Los Angeles, CA (the Zoot Suit Riot), and Mobile, AL.

The rioting in Detroit began among youths at Belle Isle Park on June 20, 1943; the unrest moved into the city proper and was exacerbated by false rumors of racial attacks in both the black and white communities. It continued until June 22. It was suppressed after 6,000 federal troops were ordered into the city to restore peace.

A total of 34 people were killed, 25 of them black and most at the hands of the white police force, while 433 were wounded (75 percent of them black), and property valued at $2 million ($30.4 million in 2020 US dollars) was destroyed. Most of the riot took place in the black area of Paradise Valley, the poorest neighborhood of the city.

At the time, white commissions attributed the cause of the riot to black people and youths, but the NAACP claimed deeper causes: a shortage of affordable housing, discrimination in employment, lack of minority representation in the police, and white police brutality. A late 20th-century analysis of the rioters showed that the white rioters were younger and often unemployed (characteristics that the riot commissions had falsely attributed to blacks, despite evidence in front of them).

If working, the whites often held semi-skilled or skilled positions. Whites traveled long distances across the city to join the first stage of the riot near the bridge to Belle Isle Park, and later some traveled in armed groups explicitly to attack the black neighborhood in Paradise Valley.

The black participants were often older, established city residents, who in many cases had lived in the city for more than a decade. Many were married working men and were defending their homes and neighborhood against police and white rioters. They also looted and destroyed white-owned property in their neighborhood.

Harlem Race Riot of 1943

A race riot took place in Harlem, New York City, on August 1 and 2 of 1943, after a white police officer, James Collins, shot and wounded Robert Bandy, an African-American soldier; and rumors circulated that the soldier had been killed. The riot was chiefly directed by black residents against white-owned property in Harlem. It was one of six riots in the nation that year related to black and white tensions during World War II. The others took place in Detroit; Beaumont, Texas; Mobile, Alabama; and Los Angeles.

In Harlem, Bandy had witnessed a black woman’s arrest for disorderly conduct in a hotel and sought to have her released. According to the police, Bandy hit the officer, who shot the soldier as he was trying to flee from the scene. A crowd of about 3,000 people gathered at police headquarters, after a smaller crowd had followed Bandy and the officer to a hospital for treatment. When someone in the crowd at police headquarters incorrectly stated that Bandy had been killed, a riot ensued in the community that lasted for two days and resulted in six deaths and hundreds injured, with nearly 600 arrests. The riot had a pattern mostly of vandalism, theft, and property destruction of white-owned businesses in Harlem, resulting in monetary damages, rather than attacks on persons.

New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia ultimately restored order in the borough on August 2 with the recruitment of several thousand officers and volunteer forces to contain the rioters. City units cleaned up and repaired buildings. The mayor also supplied food and goods afterward to compensate for the closed businesses.

The underlying causes of the riot stemmed from resentment among black residents of Harlem of the disparity between the vaunted values of American democracy and the social and economic conditions they were forced to live under, including brutality and discriminatory treatment by the mostly white city police force. They resented the segregation of black troops serving with the United States, and wartime shortages created more difficult conditions in Harlem housing and supplies. African Americans suffered discriminatory practices in civil and private employment, and city services, which created tension as they tried to improve their lives.

Bandy symbolized the Black soldiers who were segregated in the Army, even as the United States promoted the national fight for ‘freedom.’ Collins represented the white discrimination and suppression black residents had to deal with on a daily basis. The riot became a subject of art and literature: it inspired the “theatrical climax” of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, winner of the 1953 National Book Award, it frames the events recounted in James Baldwin’s memoirs Notes of a Native Son, and it appears in artist William Johnson’s painting Moon Over Harlem.

Agana Race Riot

The Agana Race Riot (December 24–26, 1944) took place in Agana, Guam, as the result of internal disputes between white and black United States Marines. The riot was one of the most serious incidents between African-American and European-American military personnel in the United States Armed Forces during World War II.

Constitutional Amendments Passed Under FDR

The Twenty-first Amendment (Amendment XXI) to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide prohibition on alcohol.

Paralytic Illness of FDR

The paralytic illness of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) began in 1921 when the future president of the United States was 39 years old. His main symptoms were fever; symmetric, ascending paralysis; facial paralysis; bowel and bladder dysfunction; numbness and hyperesthesia; and a descending pattern of recovery. Roosevelt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. He was diagnosed with poliomyelitis.

In 1926, Roosevelt’s belief in the benefits of hydrotherapy led him to found a rehabilitation center at Warm Springs, Georgia. He avoided being seen using his wheelchair in public, but his disability was well known and became a major part of his image. In 1938, he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, leading to the development of polio vaccines.

FDR and the Model Presidency

FDR’s management style was cluttered and chaotic. He pitted advisors against one another, and saw administrative chaos as necessary. He passed off fighting as creativity. FDR’s was not a perfect presidency by any means, but his messy management style allowing too many people in the room was seen as the building of a political house where all voices could be heard. It was a mixture of the styles of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

FDR and His Fireside Chats

The fireside chats were a series of evening radio addresses given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, between 1933 and 1944. Roosevelt spoke with familiarity to millions of Americans about recovery from the Great Depression, the promulgation of the Emergency Banking Act in response to the banking crisis, the 1936 recession, New Deal initiatives, and the course of World War II.

On radio, he was able to quell rumors, counter conservative-dominated newspapers and explain his policies directly to the American people. His tone and demeanor communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt was regarded as an effective communicator on radio, and the fireside chats kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. Their introduction was later described as a “revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform.”

The series of chats was among the first 50 recordings made part of the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, which noted it as “an influential series of radio broadcasts in which Roosevelt utilized the media to present his programs and ideas directly to the public and thereby redefined the relationship between President Roosevelt and the American people in 1933.

The First 100 Days of FDR

The first 100 days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency began on March 4, 1933, the day Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States. He had signaled his intention to move with unprecedented speed to address the problems facing the nation in his inaugural address, declaring:

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.

Roosevelt’s specific priorities at the outset of his presidency were getting Americans back to work, protecting their savings and creating prosperity, providing relief for the sick and elderly, and getting industry and agriculture back on their feet. He immediately summoned the United States Congress into a three-month (nearly 100-day) special session, during which he presented and was able to rapidly get passed a series of 15 major bills designed to counter the effects of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt passed 76 laws during his first 100 days as well, many directing towards reviving the economy of the United States through various public works projects. Following Roosevelt’s lengthy 3 terms in office, many other presidents also made significant decisions during their first 100 days.

The 100th day of his presidency was June 11, 1933. On July 24, 1933, Roosevelt gave a radio address in which he coined the term “first 100 days.” Looking back, he began, “we all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.” Since then, the first 100 days of a presidential term has taken on symbolic significance, and the period is considered a benchmark to measure the early success of a president.

FDR Presents A New Deal

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly.

The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The programs focused on what historians refer to as the “3 R’s”: relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in liberal ideas, the South, big city machines and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as hostile to business and economic growth and liberals in support. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal coalition that dominated presidential elections into the 1960s while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress in domestic affairs from 1937 to 1964

Emergency Banking Act

The Emergency Banking Act (EBA) (the official title of which was the Emergency Banking Relief Act) (March 9, 1933), was an act passed by the United States Congress in March 1933 in an attempt to stabilize the banking system.

Beginning on February 14, 1933, Michigan, an industrial state that had been hit particularly hard by the Great Depression in the United States, declared a four-day bank holiday. Fears of other bank closures spread from state to state as people rushed to withdraw their deposits while they still could do so. Within weeks, all other states held their own bank holidays in an attempt to stem the bank runs, with Delaware becoming the 48th and last state to close its banks March 4.

Bank Holiday

Following his inauguration on March 4, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt set out to rebuild confidence in the nation’s banking system and to stabilize America’s banking system. On March 6 he declared a four-day national banking holiday that kept all banks shut until Congress could act. During this time the federal government would inspect all banks, re-open those that were sufficiently solvent, re-organize those that could be saved, and close those that were beyond repair.

To inspire confidence about the reforms initiated FDR gave one of his first “fireside chats” explaining the alterations made by the federal government on the banking industry. Due to confidence in FDR and the proposed alterations Americans returned 1 billion dollars to bank vaults in the following week.

Glass-Steagall Act

The Glass–Steagall legislation describes four provisions of the United States Banking Act of 1933 separating commercial and investment banking. The article 1933 Banking Act describes the entire law, including the legislative history of the provisions covered herein.

As for the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932, the common name comes from the names of the Congressional sponsors, Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry B. Steagall. The separation of commercial and investment banking prevented securities firms and investment banks from taking deposits, and commercial Federal Reserve member banks from:

• dealing in non-governmental securities for customers,
• investing in non-investment grade securities for themselves,
• underwriting or distributing non-governmental securities,
• affiliating (or sharing employees) with companies involved in such activities.

Starting in the early 1960s, federal banking regulators’ interpretations of the Act permitted commercial banks, and especially commercial bank affiliates, to engage in an expanding list and volume of securities activities. Congressional efforts to “repeal the Glass–Steagall Act”, referring to those four provisions (and then usually to only the two provisions that restricted affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms), culminated in the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), which repealed the two provisions restricting affiliations between banks and securities firms.

By that time, many commentators argued Glass–Steagall was already “dead”. Most notably, Citibank’s 1998 affiliation with Salomon Smith Barney, one of the largest US securities firms, was permitted under the Federal Reserve Board’s then existing interpretation of the Glass–Steagall Act. In November 1999, President Bill Clinton publicly declared “the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate”.

Some commentators have stated that the GLBA’s repeal of the affiliation restrictions of the Glass–Steagall Act was an important cause of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz argued that the effect of the repeal was “indirect”: “[w]hen repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top”. Economists at the Federal Reserve, such as Chairman Ben Bernanke, have argued that the activities linked to the financial crisis were not prohibited (or, in most cases, even regulated) by the Glass–Steagall Act.

FDIC

President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself was dubious about insuring bank deposits, saying, “We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.” But public support was overwhelmingly in favor, and the number of bank failures dropped to near zero.

On June 16, 1933, Roosevelt signed the 1933 Banking Act into law, creating the FDIC. The initial plan set by Congress in 1934 was to insure deposits up to $2,500 ($48,364 today) adopting of a more generous, long-term plan after six months. However, the latter plan was abandoned for an increase of the insurance limit to $5,000 ($96,729 today).

The 1933 Banking Act:

• Established the FDIC as a temporary government corporation. The Banking Act of 1935 made the FDIC a permanent agency of the government and provided permanent deposit insurance maintained at the $5,000 level.
• Gave the FDIC authority to provide deposit insurance to banks
• Gave the FDIC the authority to regulate and supervise state non-member banks
• Funded the FDIC with initial loans of $289 million through the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, which were later paid back with interest
• Extended federal oversight to all commercial banks for the first time
• Separated commercial and investment banking (Glass–Steagall Act)
• Prohibited banks from paying interest on checking accounts
• Allowed national banks to branch statewide, if allowed by state law.

Banking Act of 1935

The Banking Act of 1935 passed on August 19, 1935 and was signed into law by the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, on August 23. The Act changed the structure and power distribution in the Federal Reserve System that began with the Banking Act of 1933. The Act contained three titles:

• Title I
  • Amended FDIC
• Title II
  • Changed Federal Reserve Board to Board of Governors
  • Created Federal Open Market Committee
  • Renewed the ability to make loans to member banks
• Title III
  • Included 46 sections of technical amendments that clarified banking legislation. These included but were not limited to the rules of stock ownership, elimination of double liability, surplus requirements, rules for loans to executives, rules of branch banking, rules of securities transactions and the rights of shareholders

Civilian Conservation Corps

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a voluntary public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. Robert Fechner was the first director of this agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner’s death. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that provided manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments.

The CCC was designed to provide jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States. Maximum enrollment at any one time was 300,000. Through the course of its nine years in operation, three million young men participated in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a wage of $30 (equivalent to $600 in 2020) per month ($25 of which had to be sent home to their families).

The American public made the CCC the most popular of all the New Deal programs. Sources written at the time claimed an individual’s enrollment in the CCC led to improved physical condition, heightened morale, and increased employability. The CCC also led to a greater public awareness and appreciation of the outdoors and the nation’s natural resources, and the continued need for a carefully planned, comprehensive national program for the protection and development of natural resources.

The CCC operated separate programs for veterans and Native Americans. Approximately 15,000 Native Americans participated in the program, helping them weather the Great Depression. By 1942, with World War II raging and the draft in effect, the need for work relief declined, and Congress voted to close the program.

Agricultural Adjustment Act

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land. The money for these subsidies was generated through an exclusive tax on companies which processed farm products.

The Act created a new agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to oversee the distribution of the subsidies. The Agriculture Marketing Act, which established the Federal Farm Board in 1929, was seen as an important precursor to this act. The AAA, along with other New Deal programs, represented the federal government’s first substantial effort to address economic welfare in the United States.

Federal Emergency Relief Administration

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was a program established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, building on the Hoover administration’s Emergency Relief and Construction Act. It was replaced in 1935 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Prior to 1933, the federal government gave loans to the states to operate relief programs. One of these, the New York state program TERA (Temporary Emergency Relief Administration), was set up in 1931 and headed by Harry Hopkins, a close adviser to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt asked Congress to set up FERA—which gave grants to the states for the same purpose—in May 1933, and appointed Hopkins to head it. Along with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) it was the first relief operation under the New Deal.

FERA’s main goal was to alleviate household unemployment by creating new unskilled jobs in local and state government. Jobs were more expensive than direct cash payments (called “the dole”), but were psychologically more beneficial to the unemployed, who wanted any sort of job, for self-esteem. From May 1933 until it closed in December 1935, FERA gave states and localities $3.1 billion (the equivalent of $55.4 billion in 2017).[1] FERA provided work for over 20 million people and developed facilities on public lands across the country.

Faced with continued high unemployment and concerns for public welfare during the coming winter of 1933–34, FERA instituted the Civil Works Administration (CWA) as a $400 million short-term measure to get people to work. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration was shut down in 1935 and its work taken over by two completely new federal agencies, the Works Progress Administration and the Social Security Administration.

Works Progress Administration

The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of job-seekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal.

The WPA’s initial appropriation in 1935 was for $4.9 billion (about 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP). Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks, schools and roads. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges, in addition to many airports and much housing. The largest single project of the WPA was the Tennessee Valley Authority.

At its peak in 1938, it provided paid jobs for three million unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA employed 8.5 million people. Hourly wages were typically set to the prevailing wages in each area. Full employment, which was reached in 1942 and emerged as a long-term national goal around 1944, was not the goal of the WPA; rather, it tried to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.

In one of its most famous projects, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. The five projects dedicated to these were: the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP).

In the Historical Records Survey, for instance, many former slaves in the South were interviewed; these documents are of great importance for American history. Theater and music groups toured throughout the United States, and gave more than 225,000 performances. Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the development of professional archaeology in the US.

The WPA was a federal program that operated its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments, which provided 10–30% of the costs. Usually the local sponsor provided land and often trucks and supplies, with the WPA responsible for wages (and for the salaries of supervisors, who were not on relief). WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration programs (FERA). It was liquidated on June 30, 1943, as a result of low unemployment during World War II. Robert D. Leighninger asserted: “millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance (the dole) because it maintained self-respect, reinforced the work ethic, and kept skills sharp

Tennessee Valley Authority

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter on May 18, 1933, to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression. Senator George W. Norris (R-Nebraska) was a strong sponsor of this project. TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and rural electrification to help modernize the rural region’s economy and society.

TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. It was the first large regional planning agency of the federal government and remains the largest. Under the leadership of David E. Lilienthal (“Mr. TVA”), the TVA became the global model for the United States’ later efforts to help modernize agrarian societies in the developing world. In later decades, hydropower’s share fell to 10% of TVA’s power production (2018).

National Youth Administration

The National Youth Administration (NYA) was a New Deal agency sponsored by the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the U.S. that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. It operated from June 26, 1935 to 1939 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and included a Division of Negro Affairs headed by Mary McLeod Bethune who worked at the agency from 1936 to 1943.

Following the passage of the Reorganization Act of 1939, the NYA was transferred from the WPA to the Federal Security Agency. In 1942, the NYA was transferred to the War Manpower Commission (WMC).The NYA was discontinued in 1943.

By 1938, college youth were paid from $306 to $400 a month for “work study” projects at their schools. Another 155,000 boys and girls from relief families were paid $10 to $25 a month for part-time work that included job training. Unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps, it included young women. The youth normally lived at home, and worked on construction or repair projects. Its annual budget was approximately $580 million.

The NYA was headed by Aubrey Willis Williams, a prominent liberal from Alabama who was close to Harry Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt. The head of the Texas division at one point was Lyndon B. Johnson, who was later to become president of the United States. The NYA operated several programs for out-of-school youth.

Federal Securities Act

The Securities Act of 1933, also known as the 1933 Act, the Securities Act, the Truth in Securities Act, the Federal Securities Act, and the ’33 Act, was enacted by the United States Congress on May 27, 1933, during the Great Depression and after the stock market crash of 1929. It is an integral part of United States securities regulation. It is legislated pursuant to the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

It requires every offer or sale of securities that uses the means and instrumentalities of interstate commerce to be registered with the SEC pursuant to the 1933 Act, unless an exemption from registration exists under the law. The term “means and instrumentalities of interstate commerce” is extremely broad and it is virtually impossible to avoid the operation of the statute by attempting to offer or sell a security without using an “instrumentality” of interstate commerce. Any use of a telephone, for example, or the mails would probably be enough to subject the transaction to the statute.

Securities Exchange Act of 1934

The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (also called the Exchange Act, ’34 Act, or 1934 Act) was enacted June 6, 1934 is a law governing the secondary trading of securities (stocks, bonds, and debentures) in the United States of America. A landmark of wide-ranging legislation, the Act of ’34 and related statutes form the basis of regulation of the financial markets and their participants in the United States. The 1934 Act also established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency primarily responsible for enforcement of United States federal securities law.

Companies raise billions of dollars by issuing securities in what is known as the primary market. Contrasted with the Securities Act of 1933, which regulates these original issues, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 regulates the secondary trading of those securities between persons often unrelated to the issuer, frequently through brokers or dealers. Trillions of dollars are made and lost each year through trading in the secondary market.

National Industrial Recovery Act

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) was a US labor law and consumer law passed by the 73rd US Congress to authorize the President to regulate industry for fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. It also established a national public works program known as the Public Works Administration (PWA), not to be confused with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of 1935.

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) portion was widely hailed in 1933, but by 1934 business’ opinion of the act had soured. By March 1934 the “NRA was engaged chiefly in drawing up these industrial codes for all industries to adopt.” However, the NIRA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935 and not replaced.

The legislation was enacted in June 1933 during the Great Depression in the United States as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislative program. Section 7(a) of the bill, which protected collective bargaining rights for unions, proved contentious (especially in the Senate), but both chambers eventually passed the legislation. President Roosevelt signed the bill into law on June 16, 1933.

The Act had two main sections (or “titles”). Title I was devoted to industrial recovery, authorizing the promulgation of industrial codes of fair competition, guaranteed trade union rights, permitted the regulation of working standards, and regulated the price of certain refined petroleum products and their transportation. Title II established the Public Works Administration, outlined the projects and funding opportunities it could engage in. Title II also provided funding for the Act.

The Act was implemented by the NRA and the Public Works Administration (PWA). Very large numbers of regulations were generated under the authority granted to the NRA by the Act, which led to a significant loss of political support for Roosevelt and the New Deal. The NIRA was set to expire in June 1935, but in a major constitutional ruling the U.S. Supreme Court held Title I of the Act unconstitutional on May 27, 1935, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935).

The National Industrial Recovery Act is widely considered a policy failure, both in the 1930s and by historians today. Disputes over the reasons for this failure continue. Among the suggested causes are that the Act promoted economically harmful monopolies, lacked critical support from the business community, and was poorly administered.

The Act encouraged union organizing, which led to significant labor unrest, had no mechanisms for handling these problems, which led Congress to pass the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. The Act was also a major force behind a major modification of the law criminalizing making false statements.

National Recovery Administration

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a prime agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal of the administration was to eliminate “cut throat competition” by bringing industry, labor, and government together to create codes of “fair practices” and set prices.

The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write “codes of fair competition.” The codes intended both to help workers set maximum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold. The NRA also had a two-year renewal charter and was set to expire in June 1935 if not renewed.

The NRA, symbolized by the Blue Eagle, was popular with workers. Businesses that supported the NRA put the symbol in their shop windows and on their packages, though they did not always go along with the regulations entailed. Though membership of the NRA was voluntary, businesses that did not display the eagle were very often boycotted, making it seem mandatory for survival to many.

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that the NRA law was unconstitutional, ruling that it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. The NRA quickly stopped operations, but many of its labor provisions reappeared in the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), passed later the same year. The long-term result was a surge in the growth and power of unions, which became a core of the New Deal Coalition that dominated national politics for the next three decades.

Public Works Administration

Public Works Administration (PWA), part of the New Deal of 1933, was a large-scale public works construction agency in the United States headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. It was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933 in response to the Great Depression. It built large-scale public works such as dams, bridges, hospitals, and schools with spending goals of $3.3 billion in the first year, and $6 billion in all, to provide employment, stabilize purchasing power, and help revive the economy. Most of the spending came in two waves in 1933–35, and again in 1938. Originally called the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, it was renamed the Public Works Administration in 1935 and shut down in 1944.

The PWA spent over $7 billion in contracts to private construction firms that did the actual work. It created an infrastructure that generated national and local pride in the 1930s and remains vital eight decades later. The PWA was much less controversial than its rival agency with a confusingly similar name, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), headed by Harry Hopkins, which focused on smaller projects and hired unemployed unskilled workers.

Gold Reserve Act

The United States Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. It also prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollar bills for gold, established the Exchange Stabilization Fund under control of the Treasury to control the dollar’s value without the assistance (or approval) of the Federal Reserve, and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation.

Immediately following passage of the Act, the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. This price change incentivized gold miners globally to expand production and foreigners to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously devaluing the U.S. dollar by increasing inflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, much of which was stored in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The increase in gold reserves increased the money supply, lowering real interest rates which in turn increased investment in durable goods.

A year earlier, in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector’s coins. These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964 – gold certificates were again allowed for private investors on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in gold specie would not be honored. By 1975 Americans could again freely own and trade gold.

FDR: Second New Deal

The Second New Deal is a term used by historians to characterize the second stage, 1935–36, of the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his address to Congress in January 1935, Roosevelt called for five major goals: improved use of national resources, security against old age, unemployment and illness, and slum clearance, national work relief program (the Works Progress Administration) to replace direct relief efforts.

It is usually dated 1935-36 and includes programs to redistribute wealth, income, and power in favor of the poor, the old, farmers and labor unions. The most important programs included Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act (“Wagner Act”), the Banking Act of 1935, rural electrification, and breaking up utility holding companies. The Undistributed profits tax was only short-lived, and liberals in Congress passed the Bonus Bill of $1.5 million to 3 million World War veterans over FDR’s veto.

Liberals strongly supported the new direction, and formed the New Deal Coalition of union members, big city machines, the white South, and ethnic minorities to support it; and conservatives—typified by the American Liberty League—were strongly opposed. Few liberal programs were enacted after 1936; Liberals generally lost control of Congress in 1938.

While programs continued for a while, many were ended during World War II because unemployment was no longer a problem. These included the WPA, NYA and the Resettlement Administration. Social Security and the Wagner Act, however, did survive.

Resettlement Administration

The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a New Deal U.S. federal agency created May 1, 1935. It relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government. On September 1, 1937, it was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration.

Farm Security Administration

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937).

The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935–44, that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. The photographs in the FSA/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937–1942), and the Office of War Information (1942–1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and nongovernmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations.

In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time. Color transparencies also made by the FSA/OWI are available in a separate section of the catalog: FSA/OWI Color Photographs.

The FSA stressed “rural rehabilitation” efforts to improve the lifestyle of very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming.

Reactionary critics, including the Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an alleged experiment in collectivizing agriculture—that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress, it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and that program continues to operate in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration.

National Labor Relations Act

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act) is a foundational statute of United States labor law that guarantees the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as strikes. Central to the act was a ban on company unions. The act was written by Senator Robert F. Wagner, passed by the 74th United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The National Labor Relations Act seeks to correct the “inequality of bargaining power” between employers and employees by promoting collective bargaining between trade unions and employers. The law established the National Labor Relations Board to prosecute violations of labor law and to oversee the process by which employees decide whether to be represented by a labor organization. It also established various rules concerning collective bargaining and defined a series of banned unfair labor practices, including interference with the formation or organization of labor unions by employers. The act does not apply to certain workers, including supervisors, agricultural employees, domestic workers, government employees, and independent contractors.

The NLRA was strongly opposed by conservatives and members of the Republican Party, but it was upheld in the Supreme Court case of NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act amended the NLRA, establishing a series of labor practices for unions and granting states the power to pass right-to-work laws.

Social Security Act

The Social Security Act of 1935 is a law enacted by the 74th United States Congress and signed into law by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The law created the Social Security program as well as insurance against unemployment. The law was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal domestic program.

By the 1930s, the United States was the only modern industrial country without any national system of social security. In the midst of the Great Depression, the physician Francis Townsend galvanized support behind a proposal to issue direct payments to the elderly. Responding to that movement, Roosevelt organized a committee led by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to develop a major social welfare program proposal. Roosevelt presented the plan in early 1935 and signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. The act was upheld by the Supreme Court in two major cases decided in 1937.

The law established the Social Security program. The old-age program is funded by payroll taxes, and over the ensuing decades, it contributed to a dramatic decline in poverty among the elderly, and spending on Social Security became a major part of the federal budget. The Social Security Act also established an unemployment insurance program administered by the states and the Aid to Dependent Children program, which provided aid to families headed by single mothers. The law was later amended by acts such as the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which established two major healthcare programs: Medicare and Medicaid.

FDR: Second Term

Americans believed happy days were here again in 1936 when FDR won a landslide with 61% of the popular vote. He felt invincible.

FDR Tries to Pack the Court

The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, frequently called the “court-packing plan”, was a legislative initiative proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to obtain favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation that the Court had ruled unconstitutional. The central provision of the bill would have granted the president power to appoint an additional justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of 70 years.

In the Judiciary Act of 1869, Congress had established that the Supreme Court would consist of the chief justice and eight associate justices. During Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down several New Deal measures as being unconstitutional. Roosevelt sought to reverse this by changing the makeup of the court through the appointment of new additional justices who he hoped would rule that his legislative initiatives did not exceed the constitutional authority of the government. Since the U.S. Constitution does not define the Supreme Court’s size, Roosevelt believed it was within the power of Congress to change it.

Members of both parties viewed the legislation as an attempt to stack the court, and many Democrats, including Vice President John Nance Garner, opposed it. The bill came to be known as Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan,” a phrase coined by Edward Rumely.

In November 1936, Roosevelt won a sweeping re-election victory. In the months following, he proposed to reorganize the federal judiciary by adding a new justice each time a justice reached age 70 and failed to retire. The legislation was unveiled on February 5, 1937, and was the subject of Roosevelt’s ninth Fireside chat on March 9, 1937. He asked, “Can it be said that full justice is achieved when a court is forced by the sheer necessity of its business to decline, without even an explanation, to hear 87% of the cases presented by private litigants?” Publicly denying the president’s statement, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reported, “There is no congestion of cases on our calendar. When we rose March 15 we had heard arguments in cases in which cert has been granted only four weeks before. This gratifying situation has obtained for several years”.

Three weeks after the radio address, the Supreme Court published an opinion upholding a Washington state minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. The 5–4 ruling was the result of the apparently sudden jurisprudential shift by Associate Justice Owen Roberts, who joined with the wing of the bench supportive to the New Deal legislation. Since Roberts had previously ruled against most New Deal legislation, his support here was seen as a result of the political pressure the president was exerting on the court. Some interpreted Roberts’ reversal as an effort to maintain the Court’s judicial independence by alleviating the political pressure to create a court more friendly to the New Deal. This reversal came to be known as “the switch in time that saved nine”; however, recent legal-historical scholarship has called that narrative into question as Roberts’ decision and vote in the Parrish case predated both the public announcement and introduction of the 1937 bill.

Roosevelt’s legislative initiative ultimately failed. Henry F. Ashurst, the Democratic chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held up the bill by delaying hearings in the committee, saying, “No haste, no hurry, no waste, no worry—that is the motto of this committee.” As a result of his delaying efforts, the bill was held in committee for 165 days, and opponents of the bill credited Ashurst as instrumental in its defeat. The bill was further undermined by the untimely death of its chief advocate in the U.S. Senate, Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson. Other reasons for its failure included members of Roosevelt’s own Democratic Party believing the bill to be unconstitutional, with the Judiciary Committee ultimately releasing a scathing report calling it “a needless, futile and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle … without precedent or justification”.

Contemporary observers broadly viewed Roosevelt’s initiative as political maneuvering. Its failure exposed the limits of Roosevelt’s abilities to push forward legislation through direct public appeal. Public perception of his efforts here was in stark contrast to the reception of his legislative efforts during his first term. Roosevelt ultimately prevailed in establishing a majority on the court friendly to his New Deal legislation, though some scholars view Roosevelt’s victory as pyrrhic.

FDR and the Election of 1940

The 1940 United States presidential election was the 39th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 5, 1940. The election was contested in the shadow of World War II in Europe, as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression. Incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican businessman Wendell Willkie to be reelected for an unprecedented third term in office.

Roosevelt did not want to campaign for a third term initially, but was driven by worsening conditions in Europe. He and his allies sought to defuse challenges from other party leaders such as James Farley and Vice President John Nance Garner. The 1940 Democratic National Convention re-nominated Roosevelt on the first ballot, while Garner was replaced on the ticket by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. Willkie, a dark horse candidate, defeated conservative Senator Robert A. Taft and prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey on the sixth presidential ballot of the 1940 Republican National Convention.

Roosevelt, acutely aware of strong isolationist and non-interventionism sentiment, promised there would be no involvement in foreign wars if he were re-elected. Willkie, who had not previously run for public office, conducted an energetic campaign and managed to revive Republican strength in areas of the Midwest and Northeast. He criticized perceived incompetence and waste in the New Deal, warned of the dangers of breaking the two-term tradition, and accused Roosevelt of secretly planning to take the country into World War II. Willkie was damaged by his association with big business, as many working class voters blamed corporations and business leaders for a large part of the onset of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt led in all pre-election polls and won a comfortable victory; his margins, though still significant, were less decisive than they had been in 1932 and 1936. He maintained his strong support from labor unions, urban political machines, ethnic minority voters, and the traditionally Democratic Solid South, allowing Roosevelt to win a third term. This later inspired the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the number of terms a person may be president.

The Four Freedoms of FDR

The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy:

1. Freedom of speech
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Roosevelt delivered his speech 11 months before the surprise Japanese attack on U.S. forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the Philippines that caused the United States to declare war on Japan, December 8, 1941. The State of the Union speech before Congress was largely about the national security of the United States and the threat to other democracies from world war that was being waged across the continents in the eastern hemisphere. In the speech, he made a break with the long-held tradition of United States non-interventionism. He outlined the U.S. role in helping allies already engaged in warfare.

In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values:

As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone.” In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which include economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of “adequate health care.

The first two freedoms, of speech and religion, are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the “human security” paradigm in social science and economic development. He also included the “freedom from fear” against national aggression and took it to the new United Nations he was setting up.

FDR: World War II

World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world’s countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers.

In a total war directly involving more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries, the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centers and the only two uses of nuclear weapons in war to this day.

World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history, and resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, a majority being civilians. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massacres, and disease. In the wake of the Axis defeat, Germany and Japan were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders.

World War II is generally considered to have begun September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. The United Kingdom and France subsequently declared war on Germany on the 3rd.

Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their “spheres of influence” across Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan (along with other countries later on).

Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, and the fall of France in mid-1940, the war continued primarily between the European Axis powers and the British Empire, with war in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz of the UK, and the Battle of the Atlantic. On June 22, 1941, Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theater of war in history and trapping the Axis powers, crucially the German Wehrmacht, in a war of attrition.

Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with the Republic of China by 1937. In December 1941, Japan attacked American and British territories with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, including an attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor which forced the US to declare war against Japan; the European Axis powers declared war on the US in solidarity. Japan soon captured much of the western Pacific, but its advances were halted in 1942 after losing the critical Battle of Midway; later, Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. Key setbacks in 1943—including a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Allied offensives in the Pacific—cost the Axis powers their initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts.

In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned towards Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945, Japan suffered reversals in mainland Asia, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key western Pacific islands.

The war in Europe concluded with the liberation of German-occupied territories, and the invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops, Hitler’s suicide and the German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on July 26, 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender on its terms, the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, on August 6th, and Nagasaki, on August 9th. Faced with an imminent invasion of the Japanese archipelago, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 15th, then signed the surrender document on September 2nd, 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies.

World War II changed the political alignment and social structure of the globe. The United Nations (UN) was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts, and the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—became the permanent members of its Security Council. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century-long Cold War.

In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonization of Africa and Asia. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery and expansion. Political integration, especially in Europe, began as an effort to forestall future hostilities, end pre-war enmities and forge a sense of common identity.

German Invasion of Poland

The Invasion of Poland (September 1 – October 6 1939), also known as the September campaign, 1939 defensive war, and Poland campaign, was an attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began September 1, 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, and one day after the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union had approved the pact. The Soviets invaded Poland on September 17. The campaign ended October 6 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty.

German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west the morning after the Gleiwitz incident. Slovak military forces advanced alongside the Germans in northern Slovakia. As the Wehrmacht advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the Germany–Poland border to more established defense lines to the east.

After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, the Germans gained an undisputed advantage. Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast where they prepared for a long defense of the Romanian Bridgehead and awaited expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom. Those two countries had pacts with Poland and had declared war on Germany on 3 September; in the end their aid to Poland was very limited, however France invaded a small part of Germany in the Saar Offensive.

On September 17, the Soviet Red Army invaded Eastern Poland, the territory beyond the Curzon Line that fell into the Soviet “sphere of influence” according to the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; this rendered the Polish plan of defense obsolete. Facing a second front, the Polish government concluded the defense of the Romanian Bridgehead was no longer feasible and ordered an emergency evacuation of all troops to neutral Romania.

On October 6, following the Polish defeat at the Battle of Kock, German and Soviet forces gained full control over Poland. The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, though Poland never formally surrendered.

On October 8th, after an initial period of military administration, Germany directly annexed western Poland and the former Free City of Danzig and placed the remaining block of territory under the administration of the newly established General Government. The Soviet Union incorporated its newly acquired areas into its constituent Byelorussian and Ukrainian republics, and immediately started a campaign of Sovietization.

In the aftermath of the invasion, a collective of underground resistance organizations formed the Polish Underground State within the territory of the former Polish state. Many of the military exiles who managed to escape Poland subsequently joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West, an armed force loyal to the Polish government-in-exile.

Soviet Invasion of Poland

The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on October 6, 1939 with the two-way division and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This division is sometimes called the Fourth Partition of Poland.

The Soviet (as well as German) invasion of Poland was indirectly indicated in the “secret protocol” of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939, which divided Poland into “spheres of influence” of the two powers and questioned the future existence of the Polish state.German and Soviet cooperation in the invasion of Poland has been described as co-belligerence.

The Red Army, which vastly outnumbered the Polish defenders, achieved its targets encountering only limited resistance. Some 320,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured. The campaign of mass persecution in the newly acquired areas began immediately.

In November 1939, the Soviet government annexed the entire Polish territory under its control. Some 13.5 million Polish citizens who fell under the military occupation were made into new Soviet subjects following show elections conducted by the NKVD secret police in the atmosphere of terror, the results of which were used to legitimize the use of force.

A Soviet campaign of political murders and other forms of repression, targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police and priests, began with a wave of arrests and summary executions. The Soviet NKVD sent hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941.

Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941, when they were driven out by the German army in the course of Operation Barbarossa. The area was under German occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944. An agreement at the Yalta Conference permitted the Soviet Union to annex almost all of their Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact portion of the Second Polish Republic, compensating the Polish People’s Republic with the greater southern part of East Prussia and territories east of the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet Union appended the annexed territories to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.

After the end of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union signed a Polish–Soviet border agreement with the new, internationally recognized Polish Provisional Government of National Unity on 16 August 1945. This agreement recognized the status quo as the new official border between the two countries with the exception of the region around Białystok and a minor part of Galicia east of the San River around Przemyśl, which were later returned to Poland.

Siege of Warsaw

The siege of Warsaw in 1939 was fought between the Polish Warsaw Army garrisoned and entrenched in Warsaw and the invading German Army. It began with huge aerial bombardments initiated by the Luftwaffe starting on September 1, 1939 following the Nazi invasion of Poland. Land fighting started on September 8, when the first German armored units reached the Wola district and south-western suburbs of the city. Despite German radio broadcasts claiming to have captured Warsaw, the initial enemy attack was repelled and soon afterwards Warsaw was placed under siege.

The siege lasted until September 28, when the Polish garrison, commanded under General Walerian Czuma, officially capitulated. The following day approximately 140,000 Polish troops left the city and were taken as prisoners of war. On October 1 the Wehrmacht entered Warsaw, which started a period of German occupation that lasted until the devastating Warsaw Uprising and later until January 17, 1945, when the Wehrmacht troops abandoned the city due to the advance of Soviet forces.

Around 18,000 civilians of Warsaw perished during the siege. As a result of the air bombardments, 10% of the city’s buildings were entirely destroyed and further 40% were heavily damaged. Under the international rules regarding aerial warfare in 1939 Warsaw was considered a legitimate military target as the city was on the front line during the fighting and it was heavily defended by the Polish army.

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on 3 September 1939, the day that the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany. He succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940 and held the post until July 26, 1945.

Out of office during the 1930s, Churchill had taken the lead in calling for British re-armament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. As prime minister, he oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers.

Churchill is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe’s liberal democracy against the spread of fascism, though some wartime events like the 1945 bombing of Dresden have generated controversy. He was the most important of the Allied leaders during the first half of the Second World War.

Battle of the River Plate

The Battle of the River Plate was fought in the South Atlantic December 13, 1939 as the first naval battle of the Second World War. The Kriegsmarine heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, commanded by Captain Hans Langsdorff, engaged a Royal Navy squadron, commanded by Commodore Henry Harwood, comprising the cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Achilles (on loan to the New Zealand Division) and HMS Exeter.

Graf Spee had sailed into the South Atlantic in August 1939, before the war began, and had begun commerce raiding after receiving appropriate authorisation on September 26, 1939. Harwood’s squadron was one of several search groups sent in pursuit by the British Admiralty. They sighted Graf Spee off the estuary of the River Plate near the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay.

In the ensuing battle, Exeter was severely damaged and forced to retire; Ajax and Achilles suffered moderate damage. Damage to Graf Spee, although not extensive, was critical because her fuel system was crippled. Ajax and Achilles shadowed the German ship until she entered the port of Montevideo, the capital city of neutral Uruguay, to effect urgent repairs. Langsdorff was told that his stay could not be extended beyond 72 hours. Apparently believing that the British had gathered a superior force to await his departure, he ordered the ship to be scuttled. Three days later, Langsdorff committed suicide.

German Invasion and Occupation of Norway

Operation Weserübung (April 9 – June 10, 1940) was Germany’s assault on Denmark and Norway during the Second World War and the opening operation of the Norwegian Campaign. In the early morning of April 9, 1940, Germany occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, ostensibly as a preventive maneuver against a planned, and openly discussed, French-British occupation of Norway known as Plan R 4 (actually developed as a response to any German aggression against Norway).

After the occupation of Denmark (the Danish military was ordered to stand down as Denmark did not declare war with Germany), envoys of the Germans informed the governments of Denmark and Norway that the Wehrmacht had come to protect the countries’ neutrality against Franco-British aggression. Significant differences in geography, location and climate between the two nations made the actual military operations very dissimilar.

The German occupation of neutral Scandinavian country of Norway during World War II began on April 9, 1940 after German forces invaded. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on June 10, 1940 and Nazi Germany controlled Norway until the capitulation of German forces in Europe on May 8-9, 1945. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht. Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen (Reich Commissariat of Norway), which acted in collaboration with a pro-German puppet government, the Quisling regime, while the Norwegian king Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they formed a government in exile. This period of military occupation is, in Norway, referred to as the “war years” or “occupation period”.

Battle of France

The Battle of France (May 10 – June 25 1940, French) also known as the Fall of France, was the German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands during the Second World War. On September 3, 1939, France had declared war on Germany, following the German invasion of Poland.

In early September 1939, France began the limited Saar Offensive. By mid-October, the French had withdrawn to their start lines. The Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands on May 10th, Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940 and German forces defeated the Allies on June 25th. France and the Low Countries were conquered, ending land operations on the Western Front until the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.

In Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), German armoured units made a surprise push through the Ardennes and then along the Somme valley, cutting off and surrounding the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium to meet the expected German invasion. British, Belgian and French forces were pushed back to the sea by the German armies and the British and French evacuated the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), French and Belgian troops from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo.

German forces began Fall Rot (Case Red) on June 5, 1940. The sixty remaining French divisions and the two British divisions in France made a determined stand on the Somme and Aisne but were defeated by the German combination of air superiority and armoured mobility. German tanks outflanked the Maginot Line and pushed deep into France, occupying Paris unopposed on June 14th. After the flight of the French government and the collapse of the French Army, German commanders met with French officials on 18 June to negotiate an end to hostilities.

On June 22, 1940, the Second Armistice at Compiègne was signed by France and Germany. The neutral Vichy government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain superseded the Third Republic and Germany occupied the North Sea and Atlantic coasts of France and their hinterlands.

The Italian invasion of France over the Alps took a small amount of ground and after the armistice, Italy occupied a small area in the south-east. The Vichy regime retained the unoccupied territory in the south (the zone libre). In November 1942, the Germans and Italians occupied the zone under Fall Anton (Case Anton) until the Allied liberation in 1944.

German Invasion of Belgium

The invasion of Belgium or Belgian campaign (May 10–28, 1940) often referred to within Belgium as the 18 Days’ Campaign, formed part of the greater Battle of France, an offensive campaign by Germany during the Second World War. It took place over 18 days in May 1940 and ended with the German occupation of Belgium following the surrender of the Belgian Army.

On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium under the operational plan Fall Gelb (Case Yellow). The Allied armies attempted to halt the German Army in Belgium, believing it to be the main German thrust.

After the French had fully committed the best of the Allied armies to Belgium between May 10-12, the Germans enacted the second phase of their operation, a break-through, or sickle cut, through the Ardennes, and advanced toward the English Channel. The German Army (Heer) reached the Channel after five days, encircling the Allied armies. The Germans gradually reduced the pocket of Allied forces, forcing them back to the sea. The Belgian Army surrendered May 28, 1940, ending the battle.

The Battle of Belgium included the first tank battle of the war, the Battle of Hannut. It was the largest tank battle in history at the time but was later surpassed by the battles of the North African Campaign and the Eastern Front. The battle also included the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael, the first strategic airborne operation using paratroopers ever attempted.

The German official history stated that in the 18 days of bitter fighting, the Belgian Army were tough opponents, and spoke of the “extraordinary bravery” of its soldiers. The Belgian collapse forced the Allied withdrawal from continental Europe. The British Royal Navy subsequently evacuated Belgian ports during Operation Dynamo, allowing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), along with many Belgian and French soldiers, to escape capture and continue military operations.

France reached its own armistice with Germany in June 1940. Belgium was occupied by the Germans until the autumn of 1944, when it was liberated by the Western Allies.

Dunkirk Evacuation

The Dunkirk evacuation, codenamed Operation Dynamo and also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, or just Dunkirk, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers during World War II from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between May 26 and June 4, 1940. The operation commenced after large numbers of Belgian, British, and French troops were cut off and surrounded by German troops during the six-week Battle of France.

In a speech to the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called this “a colossal military disaster”, saying “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army” had been stranded at Dunkirk and seemed about to perish or be captured. In his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech on June 4, he hailed their rescue as a “miracle of deliverance”.

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, France and the British Empire declared war on Germany and imposed an economic blockade. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was sent to help defend France.

After the Phoney War of October 1939 to April 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France May 10, 1940. Three panzer corps attacked through the Ardennes and drove northwest to the English Channel. By May 21, German forces had trapped the BEF, the remains of the Belgian forces, and three French field armies along the northern coast of France. BEF commander General Viscount Gort immediately saw evacuation across the Channel as the best course of action, and began planning a withdrawal to Dunkirk, the closest good port.

Late on May 23rd, a halt order was issued by Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A. Adolf Hitler approved this order the next day, and had the German High Command send confirmation to the front. Attacking the trapped BEF, French, and Belgian armies was left to the Luftwaffe until the order was rescinded on 26 May. This gave Allied forces time to construct defensive works and pull back large numbers of troops to fight the Battle of Dunkirk. From May 28 to 31, in the siege of Lille, the remaining 40,000 men of the French First Army fought a delaying action against seven German divisions, including three armoured divisions.

On the first day only 7,669 Allied soldiers were evacuated, but by the end of the eighth day, 338,226 had been rescued by a hastily assembled fleet of over 800 vessels. Many troops were able to embark from the harbor’s protective mole onto 39 British Royal Navy destroyers, four Royal Canadian Navy destroyers, at least three French Navy destroyers, and a variety of civilian merchant ships. Others had to wade out from the beaches, waiting for hours in shoulder-deep water. Some were ferried to the larger ships by what became known as the Little Ships of Dunkirk, a flotilla of hundreds of merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, and lifeboats called into service from Britain.

The BEF lost 68,000 soldiers during the French campaign and had to abandon nearly all of its tanks, vehicles, and equipment. In his June 4th speech, Churchill also reminded the country that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain (“the Air Battle for England”) was a military campaign of the Second World War, in which the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) of the Royal Navy defended the United Kingdom (UK) against large-scale attacks by Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe. It has been described as the first major military campaign fought entirely by air forces. The British officially recognize the battle’s duration as being from July 10 until October 31, 1940, which overlaps the period of large-scale night attacks known as the Blitz, that lasted from 7 September 7, 1940 to May 11, 1941. German historians do not accept this subdivision and regard the battle as a single campaign lasting from July 1940 to June 1941, including the Blitz.

The primary objective of the German forces was to compel Britain to agree to a negotiated peace settlement. In July 1940, the air and sea blockade began, with the Luftwaffe mainly targeting coastal-shipping convoys, as well as ports and shipping centers such as Portsmouth.

On August 1, the Luftwaffe was directed to achieve air superiority over the RAF, with the aim of incapacitating RAF Fighter Command; 12 days later, it shifted the attacks to RAF airfields and infrastructure. As the battle progressed, the Luftwaffe also targeted factories involved in aircraft production and strategic infrastructure. Eventually, it employed terror bombing on areas of political significance and on civilians.

The Germans had rapidly overwhelmed France and the Low Countries, leaving Britain to face the threat of invasion by sea. The German high command recognized the logistic difficulties of a seaborne attack, particularly while the Royal Navy controlled the English Channel and the North Sea.

On July 16, Hitler ordered the preparation of Operation Sea Lion as a potential amphibious and airborne assault on Britain, to follow once the Luftwaffe had air superiority over the Channel. In September, RAF Bomber Command night raids disrupted the German preparation of converted barges, and the Luftwaffe’s failure to overwhelm the RAF forced Hitler to postpone and eventually cancel Operation Sea Lion. The Luftwaffe proved unable to sustain daylight raids, but their continued night-bombing operations on Britain became known as the Blitz.

Historian Stephen Bungay cited Germany’s failure to destroy Britain’s air defenses to force an armistice (or even an outright surrender) as the first major German defeat in World War II and a crucial turning point in the conflict. The Battle of Britain takes its name from the speech given by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on 18 June: “What General Weygand called the ‘Battle of France’ is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.

Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor January 30, 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed “undesirable”, starting with Dachau March 22, 1933.

After the passing of the Enabling Act on March 24, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.

On November 9-10, 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria on what became known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”). After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Eventually thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe.

The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, discussed by senior government officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized.

Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany’s allies. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms from the summer of 1941.

By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were gassed, worked or beaten to death, or killed by disease, medical experiments, or during death marches. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.

The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era (1933–1945), in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of others, including ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the Roma, the disabled, political and religious dissidents, and gay men.

German Invasion of Soviet Union

Operation Barbarossa also known as the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and some of its Axis allies, which started Sunday June 22, 1941 during World War II. The operation put into action Nazi Germany’s ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with Germans.

The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as slave labor for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories. Their ultimate goal included the eventual extermination, enslavement, Germanization and mass deportation to Siberia of the Slavic peoples, and to create more Lebensraum (living space) for Germany.

In the two years leading up to the invasion, Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename Operation Otto), which Adolf Hitler authorized December 18, 1940.

Over the course of the operation, about three million personnel of the Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked a massive escalation of World War II, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition including the Soviet Union.

The operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in history. The area saw some of the world’s largest battles, most horrific atrocities, and highest casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which influenced the course of World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century.

The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet Red Army troops. The Nazis deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and a vast number of civilians, as the “Hunger Plan” worked to solve German food shortages and exterminate the Slavic population through starvation. Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by the Nazis or willing collaborators, murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.

The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich. Operationally, German forces achieved significant victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union (mainly in Ukraine) and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite these early successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow at the end of 1941, and the subsequent Soviet winter counteroffensive pushed German troops back.

The Germans had confidently expected a quick collapse of Soviet resistance as in Poland, but the Red Army absorbed the German Wehrmacht’s strongest blows and bogged it down in a war of attrition for which the Germans were unprepared. The Wehrmacht’s diminished forces could no longer attack along the entire Eastern Front, and subsequent operations to retake the initiative and drive deep into Soviet territory—such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943—eventually failed, which resulted in the Wehrmacht’s retreat and collapse.

British Invade North Africa

Operation Crusader (November 18 – December 30 1941) was a military operation of the Western Desert Campaign during World War II by the British Eighth Army (with British, Commonwealth, Indian and Allied contingents) against the Axis forces (German and Italian) in North Africa commanded by Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel. The operation was intended to bypass Axis defences on the Egyptian–Libyan frontier, to defeat the Axis armored forces and to relieve the 1941 Siege of Tobruk.

On November 18, 1941, the Eighth Army launched a surprise attack. From November 18-22, the dispersal of British armored units led to them suffering 530 tank losses and inflicted Axis losses of about 100 tanks. On November 23, the 5th South African Brigade was destroyed at Sidi Rezegh but inflicted many German tank casualties. On November 24, Rommel ordered the “dash to the wire” and caused chaos in the British rear echelons but allowed the British armored forces to recover. On November 27, the New Zealanders reached the Tobruk garrison and relieved the siege.

The battle continued into December, when supply shortages forced Rommel to narrow his front and to shorten his lines of communication. On December 7, 1941, Rommel withdrew the Axis forces to the Gazala position, and on December 15, he ordered a withdrawal to El Agheila. The 2nd South African Division captured Bardia on January 2, 1942, Sollum on January 12 and the fortified Halfaya position on January 17 and took about 13,800 prisoners.

On January 21, 1942, Rommel launched a surprise counterattack and drove the Eighth Army back to Gazala, where both sides regrouped. That was followed by the Battle of Gazala at the end of May 1942.

Attack on Pearl Harbor

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States (a neutral country at the time) against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 08:00, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States’ formal entry into World War II the next day.

The Japanese military leadership referred to the attack as the Hawaii Operation and Operation AI, and as Operation Z during its planning. Japan intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the course of seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

The attack commenced at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time. The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft (including fighters, level and dive bombers, and torpedo bombers) in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. Of the eight U.S. Navy battleships present, all were damaged, with four sunk. All but USS Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer.

A total of 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. Important base installations such as the power station, dry dock, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 64 servicemen killed. Kazuo Sakamaki, the commanding officer of one of the submarines, was captured.

Japan announced declarations of war on the United States and the British Empire later that day (December 8 in Tokyo), but the declarations were not delivered until the following day. The British government declared war on Japan immediately after learning that their territory had also been attacked, while the following day (December 8) the United States Congress declared war on Japan.

On December 11, despite the fact they had no formal obligation to do so under the Tripartite Pact with Japan, Germany and Italy each declared war on the U.S., which responded with a declaration of war against Germany and Italy. There were numerous historical precedents for the unannounced military action by Japan, but the lack of any formal warning, particularly while peace negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy”. Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was later judged in the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.

Battle of Singapore

The Battle of Singapore, also known as the Fall of Singapore, was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II when the Empire of Japan captured the British stronghold of Singapore—nicknamed the “Gibraltar of the East”. Singapore was the major British military base in South-East Asia and was the key to British imperial interwar defense planning for South-East Asia and the South-West Pacific. The fighting in Singapore lasted from February 8-15, 1942. The Japanese victory was decisive, resulting in the Japanese capture of Singapore and the largest British surrender in history.

The British had considered the jungle terrain impassable and had prepared few defenses. The 85,000 British were led by Arthur Percival, though many units were understrength, and most units were inexperienced.

Despite this, they enjoyed a significant numerical and positional advantage on the island of Singapore. In the lead up to the battle the British destroyed the causeway into the city, forcing the Japanese to embark on a naval crossing. The island was so important that Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Percival to fight bitterly to the last man.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita led a force of about 30,000 down the Malayan Peninsula in the two months leading up to the battle.The Japanese easily navigated the dense jungles and pushed through the peninsula quickly. Despite being outnumbered three to one, superior Japanese leadership, and numerous failings on the part of the British allowed the Japanese to establish and hold a beachhead starting February 8th.

Percival had grossly misallocated troops on the island, and the Japanese attacked the weakest part of the lines. Percival also failed to reinforce the attack in a timely fashion, allowing the Japanese to establish a beachhead. Numerous communication and leadership failures beset the British, and the poor pre-battle planning left few entrenchments or reserves near the beachhead.

As the week pushed on, the Japanese took more and more of the island, and the British supply became critical. By the 15th, nearly one million civilians in the city had fled into the remaining Allied held area, a mere 1% of the island. The civilian water supply had been bombed relentlessly by Japanese air attacks, and was expected to fail within days if the attack did not stop.

Unbeknownst to the British, by the 15th, the Japanese were also nearly at the end of their supplies with only hours of shells left. General Yamashita feared that Percival would discover the Japanese numerical inferiority, and engage in costly house-to-house fighting. In a desperate bluff, Yamashita demanded unconditional surrender.

In the afternoon of the 15th, Percival ignored orders and capitulated. About 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops in Singapore became prisoners of war, joining 50,000 taken by the Japanese in the earlier Malayan Campaign; many would die performing forced labor. Famously, about 40,000 mostly Indian soldiers would join the Indian National Army and fight alongside the Japanese.

Churchill was shocked, and called it the “worst disaster” in British military history. It greatly decreased confidence in the British army, and provided the Japanese with much needed resources, as well as an important strategic position. The city would stay in Japanese hands until the end of the war.

FDR and Japanese Internment

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in concentration camps in the western interior of the country of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific Coast. Approximately two-thirds of the internees were United States citizens. These actions were ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei and Sansei. The rest were Issei immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.

Japanese Americans were placed into concentration camps based on local population concentrations and regional politics. More than 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forced into interior camps. However, in Hawaii (which was under martial law), where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were also interned.

The internment is now considered to have been a manifestation of racism – though it was implemented to mitigate a security risk which was believed that Japanese Americans posed, the scale of internment in proportion to the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures taken against German and Italian Americans, who were mostly non-citizens. California defined anyone with 1/16th or more Japanese lineage as sufficient to be interned. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, the architect behind the program, went so far as saying anyone with “one drop of Japanese blood” qualified.

Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which allowed regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Although the executive order did not mention Japanese Americans, this authority was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were required to leave Alaska and the military exclusion zones from all of California and parts of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, except for those in government camps.

Internment was not limited to those of Japanese ancestry, but included a relatively smaller number—though still totalling well over ten thousand—of people of German and Italian ancestry and Germans deported from Latin America to the U.S. Approximately 5,000 Japanese Americans relocated outside the exclusion zone before March 1942, while some 5,500 community leaders had been arrested immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack and thus were already in custody.

The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing specific individual census data on Japanese Americans. The Bureau denied its role for decades despite scholarly evidence to the contrary, and its role became more widely acknowledged by 2007.

In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removal by ruling against Fred Korematsu’s appeal for violating an exclusion order. The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens without due process, but ruled on the same day in Ex parte Endo that a loyal citizen could not be detained, which began their release. The day before the Korematsu and Endo rulings were made public, the exclusion orders were rescinded.

In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the decision to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. The Commission’s report, titled Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and concluded that the incarceration had been the product of racism. It recommended that the government pay reparations to the internees.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $44,000 in 2020) to each former internee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $3,500,000,000 in 2020) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned.

Battle of Midway

The Battle of Midway was a major naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that took place June 4–7, 1942, six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea. The U.S. Navy under Admirals Chester W. Nimitz, Frank J. Fletcher, and Raymond A. Spruance defeated an attacking fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy under Admirals Isoroku Yamamoto, Chūichi Nagumo, and Nobutake Kondō near Midway Atoll, inflicting devastating damage on the Japanese fleet that rendered their aircraft carriers irreparable. Military historian John Keegan called it “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare”,[9] while naval historian Craig Symonds called it “one of the most consequential naval engagements in world history, ranking alongside Salamis, Trafalgar, and Tsushima Strait, as both tactically decisive and strategically influential”.

Luring the American aircraft carriers into a trap and occupying Midway was part of an overall “barrier” strategy to extend Japan’s defensive perimeter, in response to the Doolittle air raid on Tokyo. This operation was also considered preparatory for further attacks against Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii itself. The plan was undermined by faulty Japanese assumptions of the American reaction and poor initial dispositions. Most significantly, American cryptographers were able to determine the date and location of the planned attack, enabling the forewarned U.S. Navy to prepare its own ambush.

Four Japanese and three American aircraft carriers participated in the battle. The four Japanese fleet carriers—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū, part of the six-carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier—were sunk, as was the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, while the carriers USS Enterprise and USS Hornet survived the battle fully intact.

After Midway and the exhausting attrition of the Solomon Islands campaign, Japan’s capacity to replace its losses in materiel (particularly aircraft carriers) and men (especially well-trained pilots and maintenance crewmen) rapidly became insufficient to cope with mounting casualties, while the United States’ massive industrial and training capabilities made losses far easier to replace. The Battle of Midway, along with the Guadalcanal campaign, is widely considered a turning point in the Pacific War.

Battle of El Alamein

The First Battle of El Alamein (July 1–27, 1942) was a battle of the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War, fought in Egypt between Axis forces (Germany and Italy) of the Panzer Army Africa (which included the Afrika Korps under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel) and Allied (British Imperial and Commonwealth) forces (Britain, British India, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand) of the Eighth Army (General Claude Auchinleck).

The British prevented a second advance by the Axis forces into Egypt. Axis positions near El Alamein, only 66 mi (106 km) from Alexandria, were dangerously close to the ports and cities of Egypt, the base facilities of the Commonwealth forces and the Suez Canal. However, the Axis forces were too far from their base at Tripoli in Libya to remain at El Alamein indefinitely, which led both sides to accumulate supplies for more offensives, against the constraints of time and distance.

The Second Battle of El Alamein (October 23– November 11, 1942) was a battle of the Second World War that took place near the Egyptian railway halt of El Alamein. The First Battle of El Alamein and the Battle of Alam el Halfa had prevented the Axis from advancing further into Egypt.

In August 1942, General Claude Auchinleck had been relieved as Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command and his successor, Lieutenant-General William Gott was killed on his way to replace him as commander of the Eighth Army. Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery was appointed and led the Eighth Army offensive.

The Allied victory was the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign, eliminating the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields. The battle revived the morale of the Allies, being the first big success against the Axis since Operation Crusader in late 1941. The battle coincided with the Allied invasion of French North Africa in Operation Torch on November 8, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Guadalcanal Campaign.

Battle of Stalingrad

In the Battle of Stalingrad (August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943), Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia. Marked by fierce close-quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians in air raids, it is one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with an estimated 2 million total casualties. After their defeat at Stalingrad, the German High Command had to withdraw considerable military forces from other theaters of war to replace their losses.

The German offensive to capture Stalingrad, a major industrial and transport hub on the Volga River that ensured Soviet access to the Caucasus oil wells, began in August 1942, using the 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intense Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble. The battle degenerated into house-to-house fighting, as both sides poured reinforcements into the city. By mid-November, the Germans had pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones along the west bank of the river.

On November 19, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian armies protecting the 6th Army’s flanks. The Axis flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler was determined to hold the city at all costs and forbade the 6th Army from attempting a breakout; instead, attempts were made to supply it by air and to break the encirclement from the outside. Heavy fighting continued for another two months. At the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad, having exhausted their ammunition and food, surrendered after five months, one week and three days of fighting.

Allied Invasion of North Africa

Operation Torch (November 8, 1942 – November 16, 1942) was an Allied invasion of French North Africa during the Second World War. While the French colonies formally aligned with Germany via Vichy France, the loyalties of the population were mixed. Reports indicated that they might support the Allies. American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Mediterranean Theater of Operations, planned a three-pronged attack on Casablanca (Western), Oran (Center) and Algiers (Eastern), then a rapid move on Tunis to catch Axis forces in North Africa from the west in conjunction with Allied advance from east.

The Western Task Force encountered unexpected resistance and bad weather, but Casablanca, the principal French Atlantic naval base, was captured after a short siege. The Center Task Force suffered some damage to its ships when trying to land in shallow water but the French ships were sunk or driven off; Oran surrendered after bombardment by British battleships. The French Resistance had unsuccessfully attempted a coup in Algiers and, even though this raised alertness in the Vichy forces, the Eastern Task Force met less opposition and were able to push inland and compel surrender on the first day.

The success of Torch caused Admiral François Darlan, commander of the Vichy French forces to order co-operation with the Allies, in return for being installed as High Commissioner, with many other Vichy officials keeping their jobs. Darlan was assassinated soon after and the Free French gradually came to dominate the government.

Torch was a compromise operation that met the British objective of securing victory in North Africa while allowing American armed forces the opportunity to engage in the fight against Nazi Germany on a limited scale. It was the first mass involvement of US troops in the European–North African Theatre, and saw the first major airborne assault carried out by the United States.

Allied Invasion of Sicily

The Allied invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, was a major campaign of World War II, in which the Allies took the island of Sicily from the Axis powers (Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany). It began with a large amphibious and airborne operation, followed by a six-week land campaign, and initiated the Italian Campaign.

To divert some of the Axis forces to other areas, the Allies engaged in several deception operations, the most famous and successful of which was Operation Mincemeat. Husky began on the night of July 9–10, 1943, and ended on August 17.

Strategically, Husky achieved the goals set out for it by Allied planners; the Allies drove Axis air, land and naval forces from the island and the Mediterranean sea lanes were opened for Allied merchant ships for the first time since 1941. The Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, was toppled from power in Italy and the way was opened for the Allied invasion of Italy. The German leader, Adolf Hitler, “canceled a major offensive at Kursk after only a week, in part to divert forces to Italy”, resulting in a reduction of German strength on the Eastern Front. The collapse of Italy necessitated German troops replacing the Italians in Italy and to a lesser extent the Balkans, resulting in one fifth of the entire German army being diverted from the east to southern Europe, a proportion that would remain until near the end of the war.

Italian Civil War

The Italian Civil War was a civil war in Italy fought by the Italian Resistance and Italian Co-Belligerent Army against the Italian Fascists and Italian Social Republic from September 9, 1943 (the date of the Armistice of Cassibile) to May 2, 1945 (the date of the surrender of German forces in Italy). The Italian Resistance and the Co-Belligerent Army also simultaneously fought against the Nazi German Army, which began occupying Italy immediately prior to the armistice and then invaded and occupied Italy on a larger scale after the armistice.

During World War II, after Benito Mussolini was deposed and arrested on July 25, 1943 by King Victor Emmanuel III, Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile on September 8, 1943, ending its war with the Allies. However, German forces shortly succeeded in taking control of northern and central Italy, creating the Italian Social Republic (RSI), with Mussolini installed as leader after he was rescued by German paratroopers.

The Germans, sometimes helped by Fascists, committed several atrocities against Italian civilians and troops. As result, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army was created to fight against the RSI and its German allies, while other Italian troops, loyal to Mussolini, continued to fight alongside the Germans in the National Republican Army. In addition, a large Italian resistance movement started a guerrilla war against the German and Italian fascist forces. The anti-fascist victory led to the execution of Mussolini, the liberation of the country from dictatorship, and the birth of the Italian Republic.

Allied Invasion of Italy

The Allied invasion of Italy was the Allied amphibious landing on mainland Italy that took place on September 3, 1943 during the early stages of the Italian campaign of World War II. The operation was undertaken by General Sir Harold Alexander’s 15th Army Group (comprising General Mark W. Clark’s American Fifth Army and General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army) and followed the successful Allied Invasion of Sicily. The main invasion force landed around Salerno on September 9 on the western coast in Operation Avalanche, while two supporting operations took place in Calabria (Operation Baytown) and Taranto (Operation Slapstick).

Burma Campaign

The Burma campaign was a series of battles fought in the British colony of Burma. It was part of the South-East Asian theatre of World War II and primarily involved forces of the Allies; the British Empire and the Republic of China, with support from the United States. They faced against the invading forces of Imperial Japan, who were supported by the Thai Phayap Army, as well as two collaborationist independence movements and armies, the first being the Burma Independence Army, which spearheaded the initial attacks against the country.

Puppet states were established in the conquered areas and territories were annexed, while the international Allied force in British India launched several failed offensives. During the later 1944 offensive into India and subsequent Allied recapture of Burma the Indian National Army, led by revolutionary Subhas C. Bose and his “Free India”, were also fighting together with Japan. British Empire forces peaked at around 1,000,000 land and air forces, and were drawn primarily from British India, with British Army forces (equivalent to eight regular infantry divisions and six tank regiments), 100,000 East and West African colonial troops, and smaller numbers of land and air forces from several other Dominions and Colonies.

The campaign had a number of notable features. The geographical characteristics of the region meant that weather, disease and terrain had a major effect on operations. The lack of transport infrastructure placed an emphasis on military engineering and air transport to move and supply troops, and evacuate wounded. The campaign was also politically complex, with the British, the United States and the Chinese all having different strategic priorities.

It was also the only land campaign by the Western Allies in the Pacific Theatre which proceeded continuously from the start of hostilities to the end of the war. This was due to its geographical location. By extending from South East Asia to India, its area included some lands which the British lost at the outset of the war, but also included areas of India wherein the Japanese advance was eventually stopped.

The climate of the region is dominated by the seasonal monsoon rains, which allowed effective campaigning for only just over half of each year. This, together with other factors such as famine and disorder in British India and the priority given by the Allies to the defeat of Nazi Germany, prolonged the campaign and divided it into four phases: the Japanese invasion, which led to the expulsion of British, Indian and Chinese forces in 1942; failed attempts by the Allies to mount offensives into Burma, from late 1942 to early 1944; the 1944 Japanese invasion of India, which ultimately failed following the battles of Imphal and Kohima; and finally the successful Allied offensive which liberated Burma from late-1944 to mid-1945.

The campaign was also strongly affected from the political atmosphere which erupted in the South-East Asian regions occupied by Japan, who pursued the Pan-Asianist policy of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. These led to a Japanese-sponsored revolution during the initial invasion and the establishment of the State of Burma, in which the Provisional Government of Free India, with its Indian National Army, was headquartered. The dominating attitude of the Japanese militarist who commanded the army stationed in the country, which ultimately doomed the co-prosperity sphere as a whole, led to local hopes for real Independence fade and the war-time established Burma National Army revolted in 1945.

On the Allied side, political relations were mixed for much of the war. The China Burma India Theater American-trained Chinese X Force led to cooperation between the two countries, but the clashing strategies proposed by “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would lead to Stilwell’s eventual removal from his position as American Commander of the theater.

On the other hand, China–India relations were positive from the cooperative Burma Road, built to reach the Chinese Y Force and the Chinese war effort inside of China, as well as from the heroic missions over the extremely dangerous air route over the Himalayas, nicknamed “The Hump”. The campaign would have a great impact on the independence struggle of Burma and India in the post-war years.

FDR at the Cairo Conference

The Cairo Conference (codenamed Sextant) occurring November 22–26, 1943, held in Cairo, Egypt, outlined the Allied position against Japan during World War II and made decisions about postwar Asia. The meeting was attended by President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did not attend the conference as his meeting with Chiang could have caused friction between the Soviet Union and Japan. (The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941 was a five-year agreement of neutrality between the two nations; in 1943 the Soviet Union was not yet at war with Japan, whereas China, the U.K. and the U.S. were).

The Cairo meeting was held at a residence of the American ambassador to Egypt, Alexander Kirk, near the Giza Pyramid complex, about 8 miles from the city center of Cairo itself. Two days later Stalin met with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran, Iran for the Tehran Conference. The Americans, not wanting the French to return to Indochina, had offered Chiang Kai-Shek entire control of French Indochina, but Chiang Kai-Shek publicly declined.

The Cairo Declaration was issued on November 27, 1943 and released in a Cairo Communiqué through radio on December 1, 1943 stating the Allies’ intentions to continue deploying military force until Japan’s unconditional surrender. The main clauses of the Cairo Declaration are that the three great allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan, they covet no gain for themselves and won’t involve themselves in territorial expansion wars after the conflict, “Japan be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914“, “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, including Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China”, Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed and that “in due course Korea shall become free and independent”.

FDR at the Tehran Conference

The Tehran Conference (codenamed Eureka) was a strategy meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from November 28 to 1 December 1, 1943, after the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran. For neutrality reasons, the conference was held at the now-historic monument Mubarak Abbad or Eynoddowleh, which at the time belonged to the Heravi family in Heravi Square in Tehran, Iran (Persia). The building has since been declared a national monument and was donated to the Municipality of Tehran by its owner, Mrs. Shirin Heravi-Kaveh, and was reconstructed into a museum in 2007.

It was the first of the World War II conferences of the “Big Three” Allied leaders (the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom). It closely followed the Cairo Conference which had taken place on November 22–26, 1943, and preceded the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam conferences.

Although the three leaders arrived with differing objectives, the main outcome of the Tehran Conference was the Western Allies’ commitment to open a second front against Nazi Germany. The conference also addressed the ‘Big Three’ Allies’ relations with Turkey and Iran, operations in Yugoslavia and against Japan, and the envisaged post-war settlement. A separate protocol signed at the conference pledged the Big Three to recognize Iran’s independence.

Battle of Monte Cassino

The Battle of Monte Cassino (also known as the Battle for Rome and the Battle for Cassino) was a costly series of four assaults by the Allies against the Winter Line in Italy held by Axis forces during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The intention was a breakthrough to Rome.

At the beginning of 1944, the western half of the Winter Line was being anchored by Germans holding the Rapido-Gari, Liri and Garigliano valleys and some of the surrounding peaks and ridges. Together, these features formed the Gustav Line. Monte Cassino, a historic hilltop abbey founded in AD 529 by Benedict of Nursia, dominated the nearby town of Cassino and the entrances to the Liri and Rapido valleys. Lying in a protected historic zone, it had been left unoccupied by the Germans, although they manned some positions set into the steep slopes below the abbey’s walls.

Repeated pinpoint artillery attacks on Allied assault troops caused their leaders to conclude the abbey was being used by the Germans as an observation post, at the very least. Fears escalated along with casualties and in spite of a lack of clear evidence, it was marked for destruction. On February 15, American bombers dropped 1,400 tons of high explosives, creating widespread damage. The raid failed to achieve its objective, as German paratroopers then occupied the rubble and established excellent defensive positions amid the ruins.

Between January 17 and May 18, Monte Cassino and the Gustav defenses were assaulted four times by Allied troops. On May 16, soldiers from the Polish II Corps launched one of the final assaults on the German defensive position as part of a twenty-division assault along a twenty-mile front.

On May 18, a Polish flag followed by the British Union Jack were raised over the ruins. Following this Allied victory, the German Senger Line collapsed on May 25. The German defenders were finally driven from their positions, but at a high cost. The capture of Monte Cassino resulted in 55,000 Allied casualties, with German losses being far fewer, estimated at around 20,000 killed and wounded.

Battle of Anzio

The Battle of Anzio was a battle of the Italian Campaign of World War II that took place from January 22, 1944 (beginning with the Allied amphibious landing known as Operation Shingle) to June 5, 1944 (ending with the capture of Rome). The operation was opposed by German forces in the area of Anzio and Nettuno. The operation was initially commanded by Major General John P. Lucas, of the U.S. Army, commanding U.S. VI Corps with the intention being to outflank German forces at the Winter Line and enable an attack on Rome.

The success of an amphibious landing at that location, in a basin consisting substantially of reclaimed marshland and surrounded by mountains, depended on the element of surprise and the swiftness with which the invaders could build up strength and move inland relative to the reaction time and strength of the defenders. Any delay could result in the occupation of the mountains by the defenders and the consequent entrapment of the invaders. Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, understood that risk, but he did not pass on his appreciation of the situation to his subordinate, Lucas, who preferred to take time to entrench against an expected counterattack.

The initial landing achieved complete surprise with no opposition and a jeep patrol even made it as far as the outskirts of Rome. However, Lucas, who had little confidence in the operation as planned, failed to capitalize on the element of surprise and delayed his advance until he judged his position was sufficiently consolidated and he had sufficient strength.

While Lucas consolidated, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in the Italian theatre, moved every unit he could spare into a defensive ring around the beachhead. His artillery units had a clear view of every Allied position. The Germans also stopped the drainage pumps and flooded the reclaimed marsh with salt water, planning to entrap the Allies and destroy them by epidemic. For weeks a rain of shells fell on the beach, the marsh, the harbor, and on anything else observable from the hills, with little distinction between forward and rear positions.

After a month of heavy but inconclusive fighting, Lucas was relieved and sent home. His replacement was Major General Lucian Truscott, who had previously commanded the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division.

The Allies broke out in May but instead of striking inland to cut lines of communication of the German Tenth Army’s units fighting at Monte Cassino, Truscott, on Clark’s orders, reluctantly turned his forces north-west towards Rome, which was captured on June 4, 1944. As a result, the forces of the German Tenth Army fighting at Cassino were able to withdraw and rejoin the rest of Kesselring’s forces north of Rome, regroup, and make a fighting withdrawal to his next major prepared defensive position on the Gothic Line.

Soviet Offensive

Operation Bagration was the codename for the 1944 Soviet Byelorussian Strategic Offensive Operation, a military campaign fought between June 22 and August 19, 1944 in Soviet Belarus in the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviet Union destroyed 28 of 34 divisions of Army Group Centre and completely shattered the German front line. It was the biggest defeat in German military history and the fifth deadliest campaign in Europe, killing around 450,000 soldiers, while 300,000 others were cut off in the Courland Pocket.

On June 22, 1944, the Red Army attacked Army Group Centre in Byelorussia, with the objective of encircling and destroying its main component armies. By June 28, the German Fourth Army had been destroyed, along with most of the Third Panzer and Ninth Armies. The Red Army exploited the collapse of the German front line to encircle German formations in the vicinity of Minsk in the Minsk Offensive and destroy them, with Minsk liberated on 4 July. With the end of effective German resistance in Byelorussia, the Soviet offensive continued on to Lithuania, Poland and Romania over the course of July and August.

The Red Army successfully used the Soviet deep battle and maskirovka (deception) strategies for the first time to a full extent, albeit with continuing heavy losses. Operation Bagration diverted German mobile reserves to the central sectors, removing them from the Lublin-Brest and Lvov–Sandomierz areas, enabling the Soviets to undertake the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive and Lublin–Brest Offensive. This allowed the Red Army to reach the Vistula river and Warsaw, which in turn put Soviet forces within striking distance of Berlin, conforming to the concept of Soviet deep operations—striking into the enemy’s strategic depths.

D-Day

The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, June 6, 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of France (and later western Europe) and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.

Planning for the operation began in 1943, and in the months leading up to the invasion, the Allies conducted a substantial military deception, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, to mislead the Germans as to the date and location of the main Allied landings. The weather on D-Day was far from ideal, and the operation had to be delayed 24 hours; a further postponement would have meant a delay of at least two weeks, as the invasion planners had requirements for the phase of the moon, the tides, and the time of day that meant only a few days each month were deemed suitable.

Adolf Hitler placed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in command of German forces and of developing fortifications along the Atlantic Wall in anticipation of an Allied invasion. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Allied forces.

The amphibious landings were preceded by extensive aerial and naval bombardment and an airborne assault—the landing of 24,000 American, British, and Canadian airborne troops shortly after midnight. Allied infantry and armoured divisions began landing on the coast of France at 06:30. The target 50-mile (80 km) stretch of the Normandy coast was divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Strong winds blew the landing craft east of their intended positions, particularly at Utah and Omaha.

The men landed under heavy fire from gun emplacements overlooking the beaches, and the shore was mined and covered with obstacles such as wooden stakes, metal tripods, and barbed wire, making the work of the beach-clearing teams difficult and dangerous. Casualties were heaviest at Omaha, with its high cliffs. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, several fortified towns were cleared in house-to-house fighting, and two major gun emplacements at Gold were disabled using specialized tanks.

The Allies failed to achieve any of their goals on the first day. Carentan, St. Lô, and Bayeux remained in German hands, and Caen, a major objective, was not captured until July 21. Only two of the beaches (Juno and Gold) were linked on the first day, and all five beachheads were not connected until June 12; however, the operation gained a foothold that the Allies gradually expanded over the coming months.

German casualties on D-Day have been estimated at 4,000 to 9,000 men. Allied casualties were documented for at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead. Museums, memorials, and war cemeteries in the area now host many visitors each year.

Battle of Guam

The Battle of Guam (July 21–August 10, 1944) was the American recapture of the Japanese-held island of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Mariana Islands captured by the Japanese from the U.S. in the 1941 First Battle of Guam during the Pacific campaign of World War II. Guam, at 212 square miles (543 square kilometers), is the largest island of the Marianas, with a length of 32 miles (52 km) and a width ranging from 12 miles (19.31 km) to four miles (6.44 km) at different points of the island. It had been a United States possession since its capture from Spain in 1898 until it was captured by the Japanese on December 10, 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

During the Japanese occupation of Guam, it was not as heavily fortified as the other Mariana Islands such as Saipan that had been Japanese possessions since the end of World War I. By 1944, Guam had a large Japanese garrison.

The Allied plan for the invasion of the Marianas, Operation Forager, called for heavy preliminary bombardment, first by carrier aircraft and USAAF bombers based in the Marshall Islands to the east, then once air superiority was gained, close bombardment by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Saipan, Tinian, and Guam were chosen as the targets due to their size and suitability as a base for supporting the next stage of operations toward the Philippines, Taiwan, and the Ryukyu Islands. The seaport at Apra Harbor was suitable for the largest ships; and air bases for Boeing B-29 Superfortresses could be built from which to bomb Japan. B-24 Liberators from the Marianas could also bomb Iwo Jima and the Bonin Islands, such as Chichi Jima.

The invasion of Saipan was scheduled for June 15, 1944, with landings on Guam tentatively set for June 18. The original timetable was optimistic; however, a large Japanese carrier attack and stubborn resistance by the unexpectedly large Japanese garrison on Saipan led to the invasion of Guam being postponed for a month.

U.S. naval and air bombardments lasted from June 11-13, 1944, involving 216 carrier aircraft and land-based B-24 bombers from the Marshall Islands. On June 12-13, 12 Japanese cargo ships and several fishing vessels were sunk. On June 27, U.S. Navy battleships and cruisers started shelling the island, joined by a U.S. carrier group July 4, and two more on July 6.

Liberation of Concentration Camps

Major evacuations of the camps occurred in mid-1944 from the Baltics and eastern Poland, January 1945 from western Poland and Silesia, and in March 1945 from concentration camps in Germany. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners died in large numbers as a consequence of these death marches.

The camps were liberated by the Allied forces between 1944 and 1945. The first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23, 1944. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on January 27 1945; Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11; Bergen-Belsen by the British on April 15; Dachau by the Americans on April 29; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on the same day; and Mauthausen by the Americans on 5 May.

In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division, 13,000 corpses lay unburied around the camp, and another 13,000 inmates, too weak to recover, died after the camp was liberated. The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.

After the camp was cleared of both inmates and SS personnel, the British burned down the camp to prevent the spread of typhus. Many prisoners died after liberation due to their poor physical condition.

Liberation of Paris

The liberation of Paris was a military battle that took place during World War II from August 19, 1944 until the German garrison surrendered the French capital on August 25, 1944. Paris had been occupied by Nazi Germany since the signing of the Second Compiègne Armistice on June 22, 1940, after which the Wehrmacht occupied northern and western France. The liberation began when the French Forces of the Interior—the military structure of the French Resistance—staged an uprising against the German garrison upon the approach of the US Third Army, led by General George Patton.

On the night of August 24, elements of General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd French Armored Division made their way into Paris and arrived at the Hôtel de Ville shortly before midnight. The next morning, August 25, the bulk of the 2nd Armored Division and US 4th Infantry Division and other allied units entered the city. Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison and the military governor of Paris, surrendered to the French at the Hôtel Le Meurice, the newly established French headquarters. General Charles de Gaulle of the French Army arrived to assume control of the city as head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

FDR and the Election of 1944

The 1944 United States presidential election was the 40th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 7, 1944. The election took place during World War II. Incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Thomas E. Dewey to win an unprecedented fourth term. Until 1996, this would be the last time in which an incumbent Democratic president would win re-election after serving a full term in office.

Roosevelt had become the first president to win a third term with his victory in the 1940 presidential election, and there was little doubt that he would seek a fourth term. Unlike in 1940, Roosevelt faced little opposition within his own party, and he easily won the presidential nomination of the 1944 Democratic National Convention. Concerned that Roosevelt’s ill-health would mean the Vice President would likely become President, the convention dropped Roosevelt’s running mate Henry A. Wallace in favor of Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. Governor Dewey of New York emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination after his victory in the Wisconsin primary, and he defeated conservative Governor John W. Bricker at the 1944 Republican National Convention.

As World War II was going well for the United States and its Allies, Roosevelt remained popular despite his long tenure. Dewey campaigned against the New Deal and for a smaller government, but was ultimately unsuccessful in convincing the country to change course. The election was closer than Roosevelt’s other presidential campaigns, but Roosevelt still won by a comfortable margin in the popular vote and by a wide margin in the Electoral College. Rumors of Roosevelt’s ill health, though somewhat dispelled by his vigorous campaigning, proved to be prescient; Roosevelt died less than three months into his fourth term and was succeeded by Truman.

As of 2021, this is the most recent presidential election where the entire Southern region voted for the main Democratic ticket. In 1976, all Southern states except Oklahoma and Virginia voted for Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, who was from Georgia.

FDR at Yalta

The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference and codenamed Argonaut, held February 4–11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The three states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin, respectively. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov Palaces.

The aim of the conference was to shape a postwar peace that represented not only a collective security order but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of Europe. The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. However, within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, the conference became a subject of intense controversy.

Yalta was the second of three major wartime conferences among the Big Three. It was preceded by the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. It was also preceded by a conference in Moscow in October 1944, not attended by Roosevelt, in which Churchill and Stalin had spoken of European Western and Soviet spheres of influence.[1]

Battle of Iwo Jima

The Battle of Iwo Jima (February 19 – March 26, 1945) was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps and Navy landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during World War II. The American invasion, designated Operation Detachment, had the purpose of capturing the island with its two airfields: South Field and Central Field.

The IJA positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of tunnels. The American ground forces were supported by extensive naval artillery and had complete air supremacy provided by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators throughout the battle. The five-week battle saw some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War.

The Japanese combat deaths numbered three times the number of American deaths, but uniquely among Pacific War Marine battles, the American total casualties (dead and wounded) exceeded those of the Japanese. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner, some of whom were captured only because they had been knocked unconscious or otherwise disabled. Most of the remainder were killed in action, but it has been estimated that as many as 3,000 continued to resist within the various cave systems for many days afterwards until they eventually succumbed to their injuries or surrendered weeks later.

The strategic objectives were twofold. One was to provide an emergency landing strip for battle-damaged B-29s unable to make it back to US air bases in the Marianas, Tinian, Saipan, and Guam. The other was to provide air fields for fighter escorts, long-range P-51s to provide fighter coverage to the bombers. Lying roughly halfway between American Army Airforce bases in the Mariana Islands and the Japanese islands, the military base on Iwo Jima gave the Japanese an ability to send early air raid warnings to the Japanese mainland and launch fighters from its airfields to intercept raids.

The action was controversial, with retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt stating that the island was useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base. The Japanese continued to have early-warning radar from Rota island, which was never invaded,and the captured air field was barely used. Experiences with previous Pacific island battles suggested that the island would be well defended, and thus casualties would be significant.

Joe Rosenthal’s Associated Press photograph of the raising of the US flag at the top of the 169 m (554 ft) Mount Suribachi by six US Marines became an iconic image of the battle and the American war effort in the Pacific.

FDR

On April 12th, 1945 FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage ending the longest and greatest presidency ever. He handled a depression in the 1930’s and a global war in the 1940’s. He had the personal and political tools to excel in both of those crises, allowing him to change the presidency more than anyone before or after him in terms of types of policies and actions that the government would be willing to undertake, and in making the President himself a titanic figure in the minds of the public in a way that it had never been before.

FDR was an unusual alchemy of charm, arrogance, improvisation and political cunning. He changed the very idea of what it meant to be President, and all future Presidents have to reckon with his legacy.

Ultimately, FDR was a rich guy, protected by the press, who played to the poor by passing legislation that was ultimately ineffective in order to grow government. He was literally the first President to answer the “cares about people like me” question before it was even asked. His popularity in making cosmetic changes to the economy made him grab for more power as he tried to pack the Supreme Court. While the scheme itself did not work, the Supreme Court became full of his appointees anyway.

Additionally, FDR saw war as an opportunity politically to revive his presidency and his legacy long term. This meant subordinating the civil liberties of Japanese and ignoring the elimination of Jews in Europe. He then made a deal with a questionable ally to take the lead in international peacekeeping. A deal which the questionable actor would renege on.

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Harry Truman (1945 – 1952) would follow FDR

Herbert Hoover (1928-1932) would precede FDR

Woodrow Wilson (1913 – 1921) would guide the United States through World War I.

Grover Cleveland (1885 – 1889) and would assume the presidency again from 1893-1897

Andrew Johnson (1865 – 1869) would assume the presidency after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1861 – 1865)

Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) would assume the presidency after the Mexican War.

John Quincy Adams (1825 – 1829) was the first President who wasn’t a founding father and preceded the influential Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837)

It all started with George Washington (1789 – 1797).

Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1981) would be the only Democratic President for 25 years post Civil Rights.

George W. Bush (2000 – 2008) is the final President in our series.

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