Who Did Americans Think They Were Fighting in World War II?

Today when we think of the Second World War in the United States we are likely to think first and foremost of the part of the war the U.S. waged against Nazi Germany. This can seem only natural. Germany's military-industrial capacity and geo-strategic location, especially after its conquest of Europe and consequent mortal threat to both Britain and the Soviet Union, made its defeat the logical first priority of the Allied Big Three and their partners, who accordingly determined upon a "Germany first" strategy. Reflecting the strategy, and its necessity, whether one goes by the expenditure of economic resources, the deployments of forces, or the casualties suffered, the U.S. devoted two-thirds to three-quarters of its military effort to the European, as against the Pacific, theater. All of this can thus seem to have simply had its reflection in recent cultural commemoration of the war--those major products of that '90s-era memorialization of the Greatest Generation LINK] the film Saving Private Ryan, and Stephen Ambrose's book and its adaptation for television Band of Brothers, both about the war in Europe, while the heroes of latterday fiction about the war from Captain America to Indiana Jones are generally seen battling the Nazis, not the Japanese.

Yet it can seem that during the war, and even after the war for quite some time, Japan was at least as much as Germany on the public's mind, if not more so, and indeed the war as Americans tended to think of it then the "war with Japan"--again, naturally. However incorrectly, Americans tend to think of the war, or at least America's part in it, as having begun with Pearl Harbor and ended with V-J (Victory-Japan) Day--begun with Japan's attack on America, and ended with Japan's surrender to America. Even apart from that the events of the Pacific War seems to have had more purchase on their minds from a simple dramatic--and nationalistic—perspective. Simply compare the opening phase of the war in the Pacific that saw American forces the underdogs in the face of Japanese assaults on the American empire across the South Seas on the Day that Will Live In Infamy, and the fall of the Philippines, and the march of U.S. prisoners into captivity in Bataan and Douglas MacArthur's declaration that "I shall return"; the unprecedented, colossal, sea-fights in which American forces turned the tide at Midway; the epic carrier battles and amphibious assaults push the enemy back through the central Pacific, through Papua and the Philippines, through the concentrated hell of the battles of Manila and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, toward the Japanese Home Islands; with the shapeless attritional grind that was the Battle of the Atlantic, the Combined Bomber Offensive, the slog up the Italian peninsula. That this part of the war was so much an American war, that the American part of the war could seem the decisive portion of the war, only reinforced that. (As in the war with Germany the war with Japan was undeniably an Allied effort, one that had seen others fight longer and sacrifice unimaginably more than America ever would, but the Chinese and other peoples whose lands Japan invaded fought on their home territory, the British Empire largely fought its own war out in southern Asia, the Soviets entered Manchuria only very near the end--and so where in Europe the primacy of the Nazi-Soviet war is indisputable, in the Pacific it was America that took on and destroyed the Japanese fleet, America that dismembered the maritime Japanese empire, America that took the war to the Japanese homeland as the others did not do and could not have done.)

At the same time it seems undeniable that race and racism factored into the situation as well, with Japan's challenge to feelings of Western superiority as the first non-Western/non-European power to play the West's own game (and for a time, beat the West at it), the "Yellow Peril" hysteria, the "victory culture" mentality, all making Americans see the Japanese as latterday Indians in a latterday frontier war as described by John Dower and Tom Engelhardt, imbuing Japan with an "enemyness," and antagonism toward it an edge, simply not present in the case of Germany. Such feeling would also seem to have had the more scope insofar as Americans of the interwar period regarded themselves as "done" with Europe after World War I but not necessarily Asia; that some in America saw entry into World War II as a matter of rescuing a Britain for which some not unimportant groups (as with some Irish-Americans) had little sympathy; that Japanese-Americans were such a small and marginalized minority in America compared with a German-American population at least a hundred times as numerous, with all that meant for its sympathies; making it far easier to produce a consensus of intense anti-Japanese than anti-German feeling among the population as a whole. And while I have yet to encounter an historian who flatly said so, it seems nearly certain that opinion-makers, from government propagandists looking to rally support for the bigger war, to a sensationalist press anxious to foreground what will "sell," took the fullest advantage of all of this for their purposes by emphasizing the war with Japan--with consequences for perceptions well after the end of the war. For if, again, the works about World War Two we make today tend to depict the war with Germany first and foremost, the most significant works of the time emphasized the war with Japan, certainly to go by such novels as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, James Jones' From Here to Eternity and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (the last two the top-selling novels of 1951, major prize winners, and shortly hugely successful Oscar-winning motion pictures).

However, things changed that way, especially from the standpoint of portrayal of World War Two as "the good war" in which America and the Allies clearly stood on the side of right. A war in which Americans put people into concentration camps out of racist paranoia and vindictiveness, atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fought to uphold American, British, French and Dutch colonial rule in Asia came to seem less consistent with a "good war" in an age that regarded the internment of Japanese-Americans as a crime, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japanese cities as another crime that made the nightmare of nuclear war all too real, and Western colonialism as illegitimate--and the efforts to uphold it in Asia in World War Two containing the seeds of later horrors that killed tens of millions from Pusan to Pretoria. Amid all that it is preferable to remember a World War Two in which Americans were liberating concentration camps rather than rounding up people to put into them, in which Americans did not drop atom bombs, in which Western colonialism and its horrors could seem remote--indeed, in which such acts were crimes that America helped stop in defeating an enemy perpetrating a Holocaust, preventing Hitler from getting the Bomb, and (even if one ought not elide the power politics and outright imperialism involved) restoring the sovereignty of conquered nations, which is, of course, the war in Europe. And so in America we remember the war very differently in 2025 than we did in 1945--though not always more clearly for that.