Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
David J Ulbrich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Pacific Basin ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.

The Melting Pot of the Pacific

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Asian Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Racial Harmony

This chapter deals with the concept of Hawaiʻi as a racial paradise. In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals began to tout the islands' ethnically diverse composition—including the indigenous population, white settler colonists, and imported labor from Asia and other locales—as a Pacific melting pot free of the mainland's social taboos on intermingling. After World War II, the association of Hawaiʻi with racial harmony and tolerance received unprecedented national attention as Americans heatedly debated the question of whether or not the territory, annexed to the United States in 1898, should become a state. Statehood enthusiasts tagged the islands' majority Asian population, with its demonstrated capability of assimilation, as a forceful rationale for admission.

8. The Two-Ocean Navy

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-96
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Central Pacific ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The U.S

Europe went back to war in 1939 and on July 19 1940, the U.S. Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act, the largest naval appropriation in American history, which expanded the U.S. Navy by more than seventy per cent in preparation for the United States entry into the war. ‘The two-ocean navy: the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939–1945)’ outlines the key battles fought by the U.S. Navy: in the Pacific from 1941–43, in the Mediterranean from 1943–44, the Central Pacific drive from 1943–44, the D-Day landings in 1944, and the ferocious battles with the Japanese at Iwo Jima and Okinawa that ended the war.

The Eagle has Landed: Groping for a Korean Role in the Pacific War

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Mark E. Caprio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Southern Korea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Support ◽  
First Americans

The first Americans to arrive in Korea following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II brought with them a quartet of Korean soldiers that U.S. officials had recruited for the Eagle Project, the most ambitious American effort to use Koreans in the Pacific War that punctuated a long wartime effort to enlist Allied diplomatic and military support for overseas Koreans. In response, U.S. officials had insisted that Korean exiles in the United States unify their efforts. This condition referenced squabbles among Korean groups in general, with the most transparent being those between Syngman Rhee and Haan Kilsoo. While Korean combatants on the Asian mainland managed to gain some U.S. support for their cause, recognition of their potential came too late in the war for them to help liberate their country. Ultimately, the United States turned to the Japanese and Japanese-trained Koreans to assist in this occupation. Reviewing the history of both Korean lobbying and U.S. response to it provides the opportunity to ask whether better handling of the Korean issue during World War II could have provided U.S. occupation forces with better circumstances to prepare southern Korea for a swift, and unified, independence.

How American Are We?

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
War Mobilization

This chapter illustrates how the experience of World War II was very different for Japanese and Chinese Americans. Configured as enemy aliens, Nikkei endured mass removal, internment, the effective nullification of their citizenship, and a coercive dispersal. Whereas the Chinese enjoyed sounder social footing as a result of their real and presumed ties to China, the United States' partner in the Pacific War against Japan. For all these disparities, however, war mobilization impacted Japanese and Chinese American lives in comparable ways. Most fundamentally for both groups, geopolitical forces opened up novel opportunities for national belonging. Encouraged by the outpouring of wartime racial liberal sentiment, Chinese Americans, especially the native-born cohorts just coming of age, asked new questions and desired new answers about life in the United States.

No Mercy

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-241
Author(s):  
Dominic D. P. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Complex Roots ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
At Home

This chapter argues that the United States was able to persist and prevail in the long and brutal Pacific campaign against the Japanese in World War II because of the in-group/out-group bias. It recounts how the group prejudice helped boost support for the war effort among citizens at home, the cohesion of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the field, and the commitment and determination of leaders. It also describes the Pacific campaign of World War II that had a strong overtone of clashing Western and Eastern cultures, with vastly different worldviews and conceptions of themselves and each other. The chapter analyses the complex roots and widespread expressions of prejudice and racism on both sides. It refers to John Dower, who emphasized that group biases are ever present, but are directed at whoever becomes the most salient rival of the day.

scholarly journals Political Relations of Australia with the United States: 2000–2017

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Sprengel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
World War ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Mutual Relations

Relations between Australia and the United States have developed for long time notably during World War II. Over the following decades, cooperation has become more intense as Australians adopt many cultural patterns from the Americans. Australia declared and supported US presidents in military operations, which is why some have called Australia, America’s sheriff for working to stabilize this part of the world. One cannot overlook the personal arrangements between leaders that help shape the dynamic of deepening the mutual relations these two nations. Donald Trump’s personal interactions’ with the Prime Ministers of Australia play a significant role in this regard.

Japan-US Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
World War ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
National Power

Over the past 150 years, the United States and Japan have developed one of the United States’ most significant international relationships, marked by a potent mix of cooperation and rivalry. After a devastating war, these two states built a lasting alliance that stands at the center of US diplomacy, security, and economic policy in the Pacific and beyond. Yet this relationship is not simply the product of economic or strategic calculations. Japan has repeatedly shaped American understandings of empire, hegemony, race, democracy, and globalization, because these two states have often developed in remarkable parallel with one another. From the edges of the international order in the 1850s and 1860s, both entered a period of intense state-building at home and imperial expansion abroad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These imperial ambitions violently collided in the 1940s in an epic contest to determine the Pacific geopolitical order. After its victory in World War II, the United States embarked on an unprecedented occupation designed to transform Japan into a stable and internationally cooperative democracy. The two countries also forged a diplomatic and security alliance that offered crucial logistical, political, and economic support to the United States’ Cold War quest to prevent the spread of communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japan’s rise as the globe’s second-largest economy caused significant tension in this relationship and forced Americans to confront the changing nature of national power and economic growth in a globalizing world. However, in recent decades, rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific have served to focus this alliance on the construction of a stable trans-Pacific economic and geopolitical order.

Australia, New Zealand, and the United States since World War II

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
Rise Of China

The war against Japan (1941–1945) gave rise to a uniquely enduring alliance between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Rooted in overlapping geopolitical interests and shared Western traditions, tripartite relationships forged in the struggles against fascism in World War II deepened as Cold War conflicts erupted in East and Southeast Asia. War in Korea drew the three Pacific democracies into a formal alliance, ANZUS. In the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, however, American hegemony confronted new challenges, regionally and globally. A more fluid geopolitical environment replaced the alliance certainties of the early Cold War. ANZUS splintered but was not permanently broken. Thus the ebb and flow of tripartite relationships from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the first decades of the “Pacific Century” shifted as the “war on terror” and, in a very different way, the “rise of China,” revitalized trilateral cooperation and resuscitated the ANZUS agreement.

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