Birth of a Superpower — The Second World War and the Cold War

In the previous episode we watched America trying to recover from the abyss of the Great Depression through the New Deal. But that recovery was only half-finished, and the country still turned inward, trying to keep its distance from the world’s flames of war. As the footsteps of war grew louder in both Europe and Asia, many Americans did not wish to be drawn once again into that maelstrom.

That balance was shattered by a single surprise attack. In the winter of 1941, at Pearl Harbor in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor and Entry into the War — The Sleeping Giant Stirs

On the morning of December 7, 1941—Hawaii time—carrier aircraft of the Japanese Navy struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Battleships were engulfed in flames, and many sailors lost their lives. The American mainland itself had not been directly attacked, but the shock of seeing its own fleet struck down all at once shook the whole nation.

The next day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress and is said to have declared that this day would ‘live in infamy forever.’ Public opinion, which had been reluctant to enter the war, reversed in an instant with this single blow. Congress passed a declaration of war against Japan by an overwhelming majority, and within days the country entered a state of war with Germany and Italy as well. The giant that had long shut itself in its shell of neutrality had at last risen as a leading actor in the Second World War.

The war brought America another great change: total war. While men went off to the battlefield, it was women who filled the empty places they left. The figure of women working in factories, driving rivets, and making munitions would cast its shadow over the shape of postwar society as well. Also, that Japanese Americans were regarded as enemy nationals and many were forcibly sent to internment camps would later become the object of a formal apology, as a deep wrong committed by the land of liberty in wartime. There is no war made only of light.

Wartime Production and the Atomic Bomb — Grasping the Ultimate Power

The true strength America showed in the war lay not so much on the battlefield as in the factory.

This country, whose homeland was never scorched by war, turned its enormous industrial power toward munitions all at once. Tanks, warships, and aircraft were sent off the production lines at a speed and in a quantity never seen before. The labor and equipment left idle by the Great Depression ran at full capacity on wartime demand, and ironically the economy completely came back to life. America supplied not only its own military but, as the ‘arsenal’ of the entire Allied side, vast quantities of materiel to fronts around the world. This overwhelming productive power is said to have been a great pillar supporting the Allied victory.

And there was one more thing: America brought forth the ultimate weapon. Under a top-secret national undertaking called the Manhattan Project, scientists gathered from around the world and enormous sums of money were poured in, and the atomic bomb was developed. In July 1945, a test in the desert succeeded.

In Europe, Germany had already surrendered. Against the remaining foe, Japan, President Truman decided to use the bomb. On August 6, 1945, on Hiroshima, and on August 9, on Nagasaki, atomic bombs were dropped. A single bomb burned an entire city to the ground, and within that year a number of people on the scale of well over a hundred thousand are said to have died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki together. The aftereffects of radiation continued to torment people for long afterward.

The rights and wrongs of the atomic bombings remain sharply divided in judgment even now. There is the view that it avoided the enormous casualties on both sides that a battle for the mainland would have brought, and so ended the war sooner; on the other hand, the criticism that its use against a Japan already clearly heading for defeat was unnecessary runs deep. There is, further, a theory that there was an aim of checking the Soviet Union with an eye to the postwar world. Even among America’s own historical figures of high standing, voices questioning its use remain on record. The ultimate power humanity had grasped left an unending question to later ages, over the very way it was first used.

Postwar Hegemony and the Cold War — Toward an Age of Two Poles

In 1945, the Second World War closed with an Allied victory. In contrast to a devastated Europe and Japan, America met the postwar world as an overwhelming economic power, its homeland unharmed and holding a considerable part of the world’s wealth. The dollar became the world’s key currency, and in military might too it kept all others at bay. America had become, in name and in fact, a superpower bearing hegemony over the world.

But the joy of victory did not last long. A deep rift began to run between America and the Soviet Union, who were supposed to have fought fascism together. America, holding up capitalism and liberal democracy, and the Soviet Union, holding up communism. The two great powers glared at each other, each trying to draw the world into its own camp. This long confrontation, without a direct exchange of fire, is called the ‘Cold War.’

What decided the shape of the Cold War were two policies of 1947. President Truman set out a policy of ‘containment’ to halt the spread of communism. This is the Truman Doctrine. Furthermore, Secretary of State Marshall announced a plan to give large-scale support to the recovery of a Europe worn out by war—later called the Marshall Plan. This is said to have aimed both at putting Europe’s economy back on its feet and at preventing the seepage of communism, which bred in poverty. Before long, in 1949, NATO, a military alliance of the Western nations, was also born, and the world divided sharply into two camps.

Whether to see the Marshall Plan and the policy of containment as a legitimate strategy to defend the free world, or as a means of hegemony to spread America’s influence across the globe, is judged differently depending on one’s standpoint. What is certain is that in this period America decisively changed its appearance—from the country that had once preferred isolation, into a country that sought to lead the order of the world.

And so, through the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, America climbed to become the one and only superpower. Yet at the very feet of that nation, which held up freedom and democracy toward the outside world, there were still people at home left behind by those ideals. Inside the superpower that had gained wealth and might, another voice—one crying out for freedom—begins to rise.