Soviet agent Harry Dexter White was appointed by President Truman to be the American representative to the International Monetary fund despite a warning from the FBI that White had passed secret information to the Soviet Union.
He'd later be exposed by Whitaker Chambers.
The Soviets managed to place an impressive number of operatives into the U.S. government during the 1930s and into the 1940s. This was in part because the Roosevelt Administration simply didn't take the matter seriously, even though its now very clear that there were warnings, probably mostly from the FBI. There's fairly good reason to believe that McCarthy's "lists" of Soviet agents, which later proved to be quite accurate, probably came from the FBI which had grown frustrated with successive administrations ignoring what it was learning. The Army likewise had a list of Soviet agents that it closely held, in part out of the reasonable fear that it wouldn't be taken seriously and that if too much was revealed, it'd be leaked.
FWIW, there's every reason to believe that the Soviets continued to attempt to penetrate Western governments after the McCarthy era and also inserted sleeper agents into the U.S. The great American mini series The Americans is based on this widely known effort, as well as the movie Little Nikita. While known, it isn't particularly paid attention to, today. As has been noted recently, and not without good reason, there are questions as to whether or not Donald Trump may be a Russian asset of the captive type today, which would explain some of his actions. He's definitely a Russian asset, but it may be because he simply has a weak 19th Century mind.
The USS Brevard rescued 4,296 Japanese civilians from the ship Enoshima Maru as it sank near Shanghai. The event retains the record for being the largest number of civilians rescued at sea.
The nationwide strike wave had spread to packing plants.
The Army was looking for a way to recruit men into the post war service.
Out Our Way had a cartoon about medical advice, which would still be good advice today.
Ad from the Sheridan newspaper, December 31, 1945.
December 31, 1945, marked the first peacetime New Years in much of the world, although not all of the world was at peace.
1945 marked the end of what we consider the oddly nostalgically recalled, but undeniably bloody, 1940s. It's the operation of Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History, which provides:
1945 was the end of World War Two, and the beginning of the post war era, and era which we still live in. It was the penultimate year of the 1940s, and to some degree, the penultimate year of the long 20th Century.1 It was the year that the Second World War ended with a massive technological nuclear flash, but it was also the year that featured the bloodiest fighting in a unified war that began as a series of wars in 1937 and 1939.
The end of the Second World War determined, or seemed to determine, questions that had arisen with the end of the Great War in 1918. World War One had caused the death of the old order in much of Europe, an order that saw aristocracies dominate in varying degrees in many of the European, and indeed international, states. The strain on the old order was obvious even before World War One, but it remained strong nonetheless. The Great War killed it.
The death of the old order did not answer the question of what would replace it. Every nation that fought in the war, however, would see immediate political evolution due to the war, with all of it reflecting forces that had been at work before the war. In functioning democratic countries with stable governments, that resulted in an expanded franchise. The UK extended the vote to entire classes that had not had it before the war, allowed Ireland to go independent, more or less, allowed its dominions to be actually independent, and extended the vote to women. The US extended the vote to women and soon made Native Americans citizens, with new states being admitted to the union prior to the Second World War. Canada and Australia obtained true political independence.
In countries that had strong aristocracies that opposed democracy, however, radical elements of the far left that had been underground to some degree leaped forward, the prime example being Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union. As forces of the far left advanced, finding a great deal of support in in the formerly disenfranchised working class, forces of the far right appealed to the same base and to conservative aristocratic classes, crushing democratic forces in between, as in Germany, where the Nazis gained power. In unstable democracies without long histories of democratic behavior, forces of the left and the right contested for total control, as in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Mexico, with democracy faltering in many to some degree, sometimes totally.
World War Two was not, as some like to claim, a continuation of World War One, but rather a violent sorting out of the democratic, anti democratic, and populist forces it had unleashed. Starting in the late 1920s it seemed that the question the world was faced with was whether the future was democratic, fascist or communist. The Second World War determined, at least it seemed, that the world would not be fascist, but left the question of whether it would be communists or democratic undetermined.
Determining the question was bloody on a scale that we can no longer even imagine, although in terms of human history it was not all that long ago. The expenditure of lives in the war by all contestants was enormous, with the fascist and the communists states freely willing to waste the lives of men, and the democratic ones emphasizing technology where they could. All the combatants, however, acclimated themselves to conduct that at least the democratic ones would not have tolerated prior to the war, with mass bombing of urban targets being the most notable. By 1945 the US, arguably the most moralistic of the combatants, was willing to engage in fire bombing and ultimately the atomic bomb to bring the war to a conclusion.
Truman as Time's Man of the Year, posted under fair use exception.
The significance of the atomic age, contrary to the way things are currently remembered, was appreciated immediately. Truman was Time magazine's Man of the Year, pictured in front of a fist grasping nuclear firebolts. Newspapers, even by late 1945, were pondering what atomic warfare would mean.
We've argued it here before, but the Second World War created the modern United States, and more than that, modern American culture, in both good, and bad, ways.
Tire rationing came to an end on this day in 1945.
The most oblivious, at first was the change to the economy, which was little understood. Pent up consumer demand dating back to the start of the Great Depression meant that the country did not slide back into the depression as nearly all Western economist had feared. Adding to this, however, was the fact that none of the European industrial powers, along with Japan, had not suffered some level of industrial destruction. The U.S.'s industrial base was not only left intact, it had expanded. Only Canada could claim to enjoy the same situation, although its economy was much smaller. American workers took advantage of the situation nearly immediately with a wave of strikes demanding higher wages, strikes that were in fact largely successful. The economic golden age that current Republican populists imagine to have existed in the past reached its most pronounced form in the 1950s which is still looked back upon fondly, if inaccurately, in the same way that singer Billy Joel imagined it to have been in his lamet Allentown
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we're living here in Allentown
The obliteration of European industry created the illusion of some sort of American economic uniqueness that remains to this day and which the country is presently attempting to sort out by restoring it, which will not and cannot work. Part of that also involves an imagined domestic perfection that doesn't' reflect what was going on in reality either.
Prior to the Second World War the domestic culture of the United States was different in nearly every fashion. Even the horrors of World War One had not changes that. Most Americans lived closer to the poverty line than they do today, even if most Americans lived in families. Most Americans did not attend college or university, and most men didn't graduate from high school. There was a minimum of surplus wealth on the part of the average, although that had started to change by imd 1920s, only to be retarded by the Great Depression. Most people did not move far from home. Most men and women married people who grew up near them and were part of the same class and religion, although a surprisingly large lifelong bachelor class existed, particularly in certain occupations.
The war changed nearly all of that, and even during the war itself.
The first peacetime Federal draft in the nation's history took thousands of young men away from their homes starting in 1940 and 41, and of course became the major wartime draft that continued on until after the war, and with some hiatus, basically until 1973. The country would not have tolerated a peacetime draft prior to 1940, and barely did in 1940 and 1941. The country's views on the military, which prior to the war was sort of a type of disdain but acceptance of it as necessary, as long as it was small, completely changed during the war so that by the war's end the concept of a large peacetime military was fully accepted, and even admired, although that would be disrupted again due to the Vietnam War for a time.
Prior to the war, soldiering was, for enlisted men and junior officers, a bachelor occupation with servicemen largely looked down upon as lazy. The enlisted ranks often contained large numbers of immigrants, although that is still true. After the war, the view of servicemen, many of whom for decades were conscripts on relatively short enlistments changed radically.
The expectation of marriage changed as well, even at a time that wartime marriages came into periods of great stress. Prior to the war a fair number of blue collar workers and nearly all non owner agricultural workers were lifelong bachelors.
Cowboys Out Our Way from December 31, 1945. The two working hands are discussing "Sugar", their former ranch cook, who just married a rich widow, and Stiffy, the oldest cowhand on the ranch.
This ended after the war for a variety of reasons, one simple one being that entire classes of men who had never really lived any other life now had seen at least much of the country, and some large sections of the globe. Men who had planned on a life of working on the farm or ranch and living in a bunkhouse no longer found that appealing and no longer believed they had to do that. For those who returned to their states of origin, and huge number of them did not, this often meant taking up a job in towns and cities, rather than in fields. Quite a few used the GI Bill to advance an education that benefited them at a time in which a university education guaranteed a white collar job. Regions that had large reservations found that many returning Native American veterans chose to live in towns and cities near the reservations they were from, rather than on them where living conditions remained comparatively primitive. Lots of men married who would not have otherwise. The average marriage age notably dropped for the first time in decades and remained depressed in the 1950s.
Lots of couples got divorced in fairly quick order as well.
This was because of a "marry in haste" situation that had broken out during the war. Couples who figured that the male's chances of surviving the great blood letting were fairly slim and were willing to accordingly gamble, where as previously they would not have been. Moreover, many of the couples that married were of different backgrounds and different regions of the country, and not the literal "girl next door" so often portrayed. A really good portrayal of the this sort of situation was given in the brilliant 1946 film The Best Years of Their Lives, which gave a dramatic, but fairly accurate, examination of the domestic situation of the post war years. Of note, 1946 also gave the country It's a Wonderful Life, which really portrayed the prewar, not the wartime or postwar, domestic ideal.
The amazing film The Best Years of Our Lives which captured the immediate impact of World War Two on Americans.
It's a Wonderful Life, also released in 1946, but which really portrayed the nature of American life from the 1910s until the late 1930s, although it was set in 1946. It's gone on to be a sentimental Christmas classic.
The Best Years of Their Lives also depicts fairly heavy drinking, and not in an accepting fashion, but in a relatively realistic one .That was also something that the war really brought in. Returning veterans were often very broken men, and alcohol abuse was an enduring feature of their lives, along with chronic cigarette smoking. This bled over into the culture in general and an increased acceptance of heavy alcohol use became common, and indeed is something often featured in post war films in a routine fashion. Men who had endured killing on a mass scale often never really adjusted back to a normal life, and resorted to the bottle in varying degrees.
At least by my observation, some of these men became downright mean. We hate to say that about "The Greatest Generation", but it's an enduring theme of the recollections of many of their children. Alcoholic fathers who were extremely demanding on their male children seems to have been routine. Again, by my observation, many of the same children, who went on to rebel during the 1960s, returned to their childhood roots and became mean demanding fathers to their own children, making World War Two the domestic abuse gift that keeps on giving.
While certainly most returning veterans did not become mean, or abusive, it has to be noted that the Second World War started the country off on a destruction of the natural relationship between men and women we're also still dealing with.
Not since the American Civil War had so many young men been taken away from their homes and never in the country's history had so many young men been kept in the company of young men overseas. War involves the ultimate vice, the killing of other human beings, and all other vices naturally come along with it, in varying degrees by personality, and by military culture.
All wars involve the abuse of women, the most spectacular example during the Second World War being the mass rapes, often accompanied by murder of the victims, by the Red Army late in the Second World War. There are some examples by Western armies as well, but they are much smaller in scale. Also notable, however, was the largescale outbreak of prostitution in Europe, some of which was conducted nearly publicly in places that would never have tolerated it before the war. Economic desperation caused much of it in some areas, which included underaged European women prostituting themselves in some instances and the military simply accepting it.2
Bill Mauldin in 1945. The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph. Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enough, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI. Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service. She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school. While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy. In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.
Even where not completely sordid, plenty of misconduct occurred in all of the ranks. This is depicted in the recent series Master of the Air with at least one of the affairs depicted actually having occurred. In fictional form, it's portrayed in 1956's The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.
The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit from 1956, but which starts off in World War Two and the moral failings in combat of the central character, including the violation of his marital vows.
This was bound to have some impact on the wider culture, and we've argued that it lead to the wider acceptance of the objectification of women. Indeed, thousands of men became acclimated to the centerfolds in Yank during the war, making the introduction of Playboy in 1953 not all that much of the big leap as its claimed to be.
Playboy often gets credit for firing the open shots of the disastrous Sexual Revolution, but it can be argued that Yank did. At any rate, by the wars end, millions of men had served in places were morality of all types was at a low ebb, and had ogled the girls in Yank, and perhaps painted topless or nude figures on government aircraft. That this would have some effect, particularly later when bogus sex studies were released as scientific texts, isn't too surprising. The major erosion of the natural order between men and women that came into full fruition after the late 1960s had some roots that went at least as far back as the 1910s, but World War Two gave it a major boost.
The war also gave a major boost to automobiles.
Prior to the war, and during it, the US relied on rail transportation. But new types of automobiles, notably 4x4s, were introduced during the war, and cars overall simply improved. By 1950 it was clear that road building and automobiles had become a major American obsession, spawned in part by the heavy road use, in spite of automobiles, that occurred during the war. 4x4s, which were strictly an industrial vehicle, were introduced into civilian use shortly after the war, with pickup truck variants ending the need for ranches to have cowboys in the high country during the winter, and allowing any part of the country to be accessed to some degree by sportsmen or agriculturalist year around.
1947 Sheridan newspaper advertisement for what was probably a surplus Dodge WC.
Reliance on equine transportation, in contrast, started to decline markedly.
December 31, 1945 brought the news that Hirohito had renounced claims to divinity, with the nature of the Japanese monarchical claim on that point never understood by Westerners in the first place. He did not ever claim to have been a god, and it was soon learned that the majority of the Japanese had never believed in the imperial family's claim to a unique divine status in the first place.
The war ended, seemingly for good, Japanese militarism. It also seems to have ended German militarism as well, something assisted by the fact that the Soviets ended up with Prussia, it's source.
The war, of course, also advanced the frontiers of Soviet domination beyond its 1940 status, something the Soviets had been working on since 1917. This would prove to be temporary, as would the Soviet Union itself, but that could not be foreseen in 1945. A world that had worried about whether fascism, communism, or democracy would prevail, now worried over whether communism or democracy would be the ultimate victors.
In China, where on this day an unsuccessful treaty between the Nationalist and the Communists would be signed, a contest more resembling the pre World War Two one was going on, revived from its 1927 start and temporary hiatus during the Second World War.
1945 was a fateful year. For Americans it started with American troops fighting the Germans in Bulge in Operation Wachts am Rhein and in Alsatia in Operation Nordwind. For the Soviets, January 1945 would be the bloodiest month of the war, as it would be for the Germans. For the Japanese, it marked pitched resistance to Allied advances everywhere, and a desperate effort to advance in China. It all came to an end in August, 1945, and by December 31, 1945, the world was trying to sort out where it was going. Much of it could be anticipated, but much could not be.
*I had typed out a very long and detailed look at the 1940s, and 1945, for the December 31, 1945 entry, before some computer glitch entirely wiped it out. It's completely gone.
I may try to reconstruct it a bit, but the fact that I started working on it some time ago is a deterrent to that. And even if I do, a reconstructed post is never as good as the original.
1. Like decades, centuries don't really track the calendar precisely either. The 20th Century arguably began around 1898 or so, and continued on, perhaps, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
2. An interesting sympathetic depiction of a woman engaging in prostitution due to economic desperation in found in the 1946 Italian film Paisa'.
TO THE UNITED STATES OF CERTAIN DISPLACED PERSONS AND REFUGEES IN EUROPE
Memorandum to: Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Attorney General, War Shipping Administrator, Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, Director General of UNRRA:
The grave dislocation of populations in Europe resulting from the war has produced human suffering that the people of the United States cannot and will not ignore. This Government should take every possible measure to facilitate full immigration to the United States under existing quota laws.
The war has most seriously disrupted our normal facilities for handling immigration matters in many parts of the world. At the same time, the demands upon those facilities have increased many-fold. It is, therefore, necessary that immigration under the quotas be resumed initially in the areas of greatest need. I, therefore, direct the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Attorney General, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, the War Shipping Administrator, and other appropriate officials to take the following action:
The Secretary of State is directed to establish with the utmost despatch consular facilities at or near displaced person and refugee assembly center areas in the American zones of occupation. It shall be the responsibility of these consular officers, in conjunction with the Immigrant Inspectors, to determine as quickly as possible the eligibility of the applicants for visas and admission to the United States. For this purpose the Secretary will, if necessary, divert the personnel and funds of his Department from other functions in order to insure the most expeditious handling of this operation. In cooperation with the Attorney General, he shall appoint as temporary vice-consuls, authorized to issue visas, such officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service as can be made available for this program. Within the limits of administrative discretion, the officers of the Department of State assigned to this program shall make every effort to simplify and to hasten the process of issuing visas. If necessary, blocs of visa numbers may be assigned to each of the emergency consular establishments. Each such bloc may be used to meet the applications filed at the consular establishment to which the bloc is assigned. It is not intended however entirely to exclude the issuance of visas in other parts of the world.
Visas should be distributed fairly among persons of all faiths, creeds and nationalities. I desire that special attention be devoted to orphaned children to whom it is hoped the majority of visas will be issued.
With respect to the requirement of law that visas may not be issued to applicants likely to become public charges after admission to the United States, the Secretary of State shall cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in perfecting appropriate arrangements with welfare organizations in the United States which may be prepared to guarantee financial support to successful applicants. This may be accomplished by corporate affidavit or by any means deemed appropriate and practicable.
The Secretary of War, subject to limitations imposed by the Congress on War Department appropriations, will give such help as is practicable in:
(a) Furnishing information to appropriate consular officers and Immigrant Inspectors to facilitate in the selection of applicants for visas; and
(b) Assisting until other facilities suffice in: (1) transporting immigrants to a European port; (2) feeding, housing and providing medical care to such immigrants until embarked; and
(c) Making available office facilities, billets, messes, and transportation for Department of State, Department of Justice, and United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration personnel connected with this work, where practicable and requiring no out-of-pocket expenditure by the War Department and when other suitable facilities are not available.
The Attorney General, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, will assign personnel to duty in the American zones of occupation to make the immigration inspections, to assist consular officers of the Department of State in connection with the issuance of visas, and to take the necessary steps to settle the cases of those aliens presently interned at Oswego through appropriate statutory and administrative processes.
The Administrator of the War Shipping Administration will make the necessary arrangements for water transportation from the port of embarkation in Europe to the United States subject to the provision that the movement of immigrants will in no way interfere with the scheduled return of service personnel and their spouses and children from the European theater.
The Surgeon General of the Public Health Service will assign to duty in the American zones of occupation the necessary personnel to conduct the mental and physical examinations of prospective immigrants prescribed in the immigration laws.
The Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration will be requested to provide all possible aid to the United States authorities in preparing these people for transportation to the United States and to assist in their care, particularly in the cases of children in transit and others needing special attention.
In order to insure the effective execution of this program, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Attorney General, War Shipping Administrator and the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service shall appoint representatives to serve as members of an interdepartmental committee under the Chairmanship of the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
The United States and the United Kingdom recognized the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The Catholic People's Party was founded in the Netherlands.
President Truman starts down a road that would turn out like poking a bear:
This is a bit confusing, historically, as what it resulted in is the current Department of Defense, replacing the Department of War (which is further confused by the illegitimate Trump interregnum pretending the Department of Defense is the Department of War), but it had real consequences. The War Department had effectively been the Department of the Army, as a second Department of the Navy had been created shortly after the War Department and it largely did not oversee the Navy. The problems associated with that became clear during World War Two, and therefore the desire to bring them under one roof made sense, although the Armed Forces did not like it.
The result was the current Department of Defense and its current, albeit evolved, structure.
U.S. Navy Captain Charles B. McVay III, the commander of the USS Indianapolis, was found guilty in his court-martial for failing to zigzag but not for failure to order abandon ship in a timely manner. He was sentenced The court sentenced McVay to lose 100 numbers in his temporary rank of Captain and 100 numbers in his permanent rank of Commander. In 1946, at the behest of Admiral Nimitz, Chief of Naval Operations, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal remitted McVay's sentence and restored him to duty. He committed suicide in 1968.
Regarding the Second World War, John Ford's They Were Expendable was released. I always think of this as a film that was released during World War Two, but it wasn't. It's director, John Ford, has been in the Navy, and Robert Montgomery, one of the actors in the film, also had been after having also been an ambulance driver in France up until Dunkirk. Montgomery would direct part of the film due to Ford breaking his leg, and prove so good at it that his career thereafter evolved in that direction.
The Swiss Parliament passed a law permitting the immediate expulsion of all foreigners with pro-Nazi or fascist views.
British fascist and founder of the British Free Corps John Amery was executed for treason at age 33. Amery's tragicatory in life is interesting in that it somewhat reminds people of some of the far right incels around now.
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