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Date Posted: 15:48:35 02/27/03 Thu
Author: jo-dan
Subject: All My Ch28 Sections

I. America and the Holocaust
A. US Knowledge
i. b 1942, high officials in Washington had solid evidence that Hitler’s forces were rounding up Jews, non-Jewish Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists and killing them in concentration camps
a. the public was slowly gaining this knowledge as well
- the public pushed for an allied effort to end the killing or at least save some surviving Jews
b. the US mostly resisted these plights
B. Official Anti-Semitism
i. the US resisted letting Jews into America
a. one ship, the St. Louis, was turned away from Cuba and America and eventually forced back to Europe
- that year, the US used only 10% of their visa quota for immigrants
- Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, a gentile anti-Semite, was a leader in preventing Jews from entering the US in large numbers
- one after another, America refused to assist imperiled Jews
C. after 1941, there was little America could do short of defeating Germany
- they maintained that bombing railroads leading to death camps and the death camps themselves would have little effect
- they insisted that the most effective thing to do was to concentrate their attention on the larger goal of winning the war


I. Mobilizing Production
A. War Production Board (WPB)
i. Jan. 1942, the WPB was created to effectivel mobilized the economy for was
a. the director was former Sears-Roebuck executive Donald Nelson
b. in theory, the WPB was to be a super agency w/ broad powers over the economy
- in reality, it never had much authority, just like its WWI counterpart the War Industries Board
- Donald Nelson never displayed the strength of his WWI counterpart, Bernard Baruch
ii. throughout its troubled history, the WPB was constantly outmaneuvered and frustrated
a. it could never win control of military purchases
- it was always outmaneuvered by the army and navy
b. it could never satisfy small business complaints
- small business complained (correctly) that most contracts were going to larger corporations
iii. despite the administrative problems, the war economy managed to meet almost all the nation’s critical war needs
a. new factories sprang up
- funded b the federal government’s Defense Plants Corporation
b. an entirely new synthetic rubber producing industry emerged
- b/c of the loss of the access to natural rubber in the pacific
c. by 1944, factories were producing more than needed
- their output was twice that of the Axis countries combined


I. Women and Children at War
A. Dramatic increase in female employment
i. the war enabled the amount of women in the work force to increase 60%
- women accounted for 1/3 of paid workers in 1945
ii. women entered the work force to replace men at war
a. sadly, gender generalization kept them back
- b/c of this, many factories used assembly lines to replace heavy labor
- domestic analogies were also used to motivate women: cutting airplane wings was like making a dress; and mixing chemicals was like making a cake
b. the image of Rosie the Riveter helped to erode some prejudice of women in the workplace
iii. most women during war were not employed in factories, but in service-sector jobs and the government
a. “government girls” were young women who worked in the government as clerks, secretaries, and typists
- this led to high concentrations of women in areas depleted of young men
b. limited child care was also a problem for mothers with husbands at war
- this led to many mothers having to leave children at home or in cars while they worked
c. b/c of these family dislocations, juvenile crime rose significantly
- crime, however, was not the distinctive war experience, labor was
- more than 1/3 of teens ages 14 to 18 were employed by the late war, reducing high school enrollment
d. the return of prosperity during the war helped increase young marriages
- with this, divorce rates raised significantly, as did the number of babies being born, leading to the beginnings of the postwar baby-boom


I. The Manhattan Project
A. the nuclear arms race begins
i. America learned that Germany was on its way to creating the atomic bomb
a. these ideas of a nuclear weapon came mostly form Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity
- the creation of the a-bomb was centered around uranium and its atomic structure, capable of making a nuclear chain reaction
ii. the beginnings of the atomic bomb
a. Enrico Fermi, discovers radium in the 1930s
b. 1939, word gets to America via Danish physicist Neils Bohr that Germany is conducting experiments in radioactivity, as a result, US experiments began immediately in 1940 at Columbia
c. 1941, the experiments move to Berkeley and Univ. of Chicago where Enrico Fermi, now living in the US, achieved the first controlled fission chain reaction in 1942
B. the birth of the Manhattan project
i. reorganized by general Leslie Groves
- it was called the Manhattan project b/c it was devised in the Manhattan Engineer District Office of the Army Corps of Engineers
a. over the next 3 years, the government poured nearly $2 bil into the project
b. secret facilities for the bomb’s construction sprang up, one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; another in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and another in Hanford, Washington
c. scientists at Berkeley found that plutonium had better fuel capabilities than uranium
d. at Los Alamos, scientists under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer were charged w/ the construction of the atomic bomb
e. the government pushed almost $1 bil/year into the Manhattan Project
f. despite unforeseen problems, the scientists were moving a lot faster than predicted
g. even so, the war ended before the bomb could be tested
C. The Trinity Bomb
i. using a weapon named Trinity, on July 16, 1945; scientists near Alamogordo, New Mexico witnessed the first nuclear explosion in history

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