American citizens consistently resisted spending large sums of public money on their armed forces during peacetime.
The military remained divided between separate Departments of War-Army and Navy-and the United States had few foreign bases and almost no serious intelligence services. Vann Woodward called their traditional “free security.” After previous wars before World War II, Americans had demobilized rapidly, maintaining a very small and inexpensive peacetime military. What observers called a “ Cold War” emerged as the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to rebuild the places destroyed by the war.Īs a consequence, Americans could not return to what the historian C. No one wanted war, but the power vacuums in defeated countries and the struggle to control their future made peace hard to maintain. In 1946 former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill vividly described an “ Iron Curtain” separating West and East, with both sides on the precipice of another massive conflict, now including atomic weapons. The division of Germany and Austria into Soviet and allied (American, British, and French) sectors symbolized how the devastation of the war sparked new points of conflict. His communist government had helped to defeat fascism, and he appeared poised to promote communism as an alternative to the democratic and capitalistic values that Americans had fought so hard to defend. Soviet leader Josef Stalin had been an American ally in the war, but he now threatened to exploit the difficult conditions of the postwar period by force and infiltration. The Soviet Union, in particular, had grown more dominant in the Eastern half of Europe with the defeat of Germany. These children of the Depression recognized that economic difficulties had contributed to the appeal of violent dictatorships abroad, and they feared a return to similar difficulties and the rise of new dictatorships after the war. The generation of men and women who served abroad and at home (later called, somewhat nostalgically, “the greatest generation”) had lived through the deepest decline in the world economy during the decade before the war when more than a quarter of Americans lost their jobs and millions lost their farms. The end of the war was little cause for celebration, even among the victors.įor Americans, in particular, World War II merged in their memories with the Great Depression. In the abnormally frigid winter of 1945-46, once prosperous citizens starved those fortunate enough to survive confronted a future of suffering and fear. Every industrial country, except the United States, came out of the war with its resources, agriculture, and manufacturing largely destroyed. Many of the world’s wealthiest cities-including Berlin, Prague, Dresden, and Tokyo-were reduced to rubble. To say that life was very hard at the end of the war-even for those born wealthy-is an understatement. Absenteeism from work and family duties was rampant, just as the necessary effort for survival increased. They had fewer clothes, less shelter, and more recurring ailments. In England, Germany, Russia, Poland, Japan, China, Korea, and other nations, large numbers of citizens remained undernourished for almost a decade after 1939. Struggling to re-settle, people around the world consumed less. They struggled to rebuild their lives in South America, Mexico, the United States, and Palestine-part of which became the state of Israel in 1948. Hundreds of thousands of European Jews who survived the Holocaust faced exile from their historic communities. They were “ displaced persons” who became refugees, often unwelcome, even in immigrant societies like the United States.
Expelled from their former nations, many were unable to return. Millions of people did not have a home or a country after the war. The luckiest ones did not lose a loved one, but they still experienced dislocation and deprivation. Nearly every human family felt scarred in some way by the war. The majority of those killed were civilians, and they lived on all continents. Sixty million people died in the Second World War-more than in any other war before. Top image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, 540139
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