New Podcast: Making Masters of the Air
"To the Best of My Ability"
Click to follow the new podcast by The National WWII Museum: Making Masters of the Air. Masters of the Air is an Apple Original series from executive producers of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, streaming January 26 on Apple TV+. The series follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody Hundredth”) as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. Masters of the Air is based on the best-selling book by Donald Miller, and features a stellar cast led by...
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A Day of Infamy
"To the Best of My Ability"
President Franklin D. Roosevelt wins his third term bid for president, but a foreign crisis brews in the Pacific. Contending with an isolationist movement in America, he maneuvers policies and naval fleets in preparation for war, all the while convincing the US public the importance of becoming the “arsenal of democracy.”
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An Epidemic of World Lawlessness
"To the Best of My Ability"
In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt inherits a nation amidst The Great Depression, but around the world, fascist powers gain footholds. FDR begins to shape foreign policy through a series of addresses that connect the American people to the president in an unprecedented way, threading the needle between readying the nation for war and appeasing isolationists.
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33 Months
"To the Best of My Ability"
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, suspicions around Japanese American citizens began to grow. In February of 1942, FDR signed executive order 9066, which was used to justify the forced removal of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and incarcerated them in camps in California, Utah, New Mexico, Arkansas, and other states. Despite the lack of any evidence of wrongdoing, these Americans remained incarcerated through March 20, 1946. After 33 months, Japanese Americans could return home.
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The Temper of the Courts
"To the Best of My Ability"
In February 1946, a California Court heard arguments challenging the practice of segregating students of Mexican descent into “remedial schools for Mexicans.” Sylvia Mendez would ultimately prevail and the Court deemed the schools unconstitutional, thus ending legal segregation in California, but Sylvia was not permitted to attend the school near her home designated for white children until 1948. This case would later be used to justify the “separate is unequal” ruling of 1954’s Brown v. Board of
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A Dangerous, Costly and Heartbreaking Process
"To the Best of My Ability"
On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard, a decorated veteran of the Pacific theater, was arrested. What followed was one of the nation’s most heinous hate crimes. Two weeks later, James Stephenson was the victim of an attempted lynching. It wasn’t until figures like Orson Welles and Langston Hughes publicly called out these racist attacks committed by law enforcement that Truman finally began to address the racial injustices and violence, and ultimately the desegregation of the military in 1948.
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No Specific and Tangible Evidence
"To the Best of My Ability"
In a January 25, 1946 telegram, Gen. Douglas MacArthur recommended that Hirohito not face a war crimes trial. The IMT for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, tried Japanese military and political leaders on 55 counts. The defendants included former prime ministers, former foreign ministers, and former military commanders. To MacArthur, Hirohito was a valuable symbol of Japanese national unity. As long as he agreed to cooperate, he was useful to American occupation authorities.
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Strike Wave
"To the Best of My Ability"
The strike wave of 1945-1946 was a series of large-scale post-war labor strikes in the United States, spanning numerous industries and public utilities. In the year after V-J Day, more than five million American workers were involved in strikes. The strikes lasted on average four times longer than those during the war, and even today remain the largest “job actions” strikes in American labor history.
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Duck and Cover
"To the Best of My Ability"
By January 5, 1946, President Truman had had enough. In a letter to his Secretary of State, James, F. Byrnes, he declared “I’m sick of babying the Soviets.” This blunt statement set off a chain of events known as the Cold War. Fears over a new global war with the USSR cast a pallor over every aspect of American life. State-side, suspicions turned into targeting Jewish, Black, and gay Americans suspected of being involved in the Communist Party, setting the stage for an unprecedented era of domestic sp
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
"To the Best of My Ability"
After more than 20 years living abroad as an expatriate in Italy, poet and Nazi sympathizer Ezra Pound was charged with 19 counts of treason against the United States. During World War II, Pound broadcast pro-Facist propaganda into the United States. Pound was eventually found mentally unfit to stand trial and while institutionalized, he managed to befriend white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan, including John Kasper.
info_outlineApril 1945: In a war that changed the world, a month that changed the course of the war.