The Second World War was a total war. Governments mobilized workers, farms, science and imagination as fully as soldiers, and home fronts were not safe rear areas. Bombing, hunger, occupation and new laws reshaped daily life from Coventry to Osaka.

Economies at war

The United States, its cities untouched by bombs, became the great workshop of the Allies. American factories built around 300,000 military aircraft between 1940 and 1945, and the number of working women rose by more than six million. Britain introduced food rationing in January 1940 and directed labor more tightly than any other democracy. In 1942 the government's Beveridge Report proposed social insurance for every citizen against sickness, unemployment and old age, the blueprint for Britain's postwar welfare state. Nazi leaders, haunted by the home front collapse of 1918, were slower to demand sacrifices. Germany's war economy came to rest on millions of forced foreign laborers, who by 1944 made up about a quarter of its workforce, many of them seized from Poland and the Soviet Union and treated brutally.

In Japan, food grew scarce, students were sent to work in factories, and from late 1944 American bombing drove millions from the cities. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were brought to Japan to work in mines and factories, many of them under coercion. Every government also fought with propaganda: posters, films and radio taught citizens whom to hate, what to sacrifice and why their cause was just.

Rights under pressure

War tests civil liberties. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which led to the removal of about 120,000 Japanese Americans to camps, about two-thirds of them US citizens. No comparable mass removal targeted German or Italian Americans. Black Americans, meanwhile, pressed a campaign for a double victory, over fascism abroad and racism at home, and the threat of a march on Washington in 1941 pushed Roosevelt to bar racial discrimination in defense industries. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion order. In 1988 Congress formally apologized and paid surviving internees $20,000 each, and in 2018 the Court stated that Korematsu had been wrongly decided.

In British-ruled Bengal, a famine in 1943 killed about three million people. Its causes are debated: a cyclone and crop disease, the loss of rice imports from Burma, wartime inflation, hoarding, and official policies that put the army and Calcutta first. The economist Amartya Sen argued that the famine struck because poor people lost the means to buy food: purchasing power collapsed as prices soared beyond what rural laborers could pay, so the problem was not simply a shortage of food.

Occupation and collaboration

Occupation in western Europe was harsh; in Poland and the occupied Soviet Union it aimed at destruction. Collaboration ran from whole governments to individuals. Vidkun Quisling, who tried to seize power in Norway in 1940 and later headed its puppet government, gave English a word for a traitor who serves an occupier. In France, the historian Robert Paxton showed in 1972 that Vichy sought collaboration on its own initiative, not only under German pressure; French police carried out the roundup of about 13,000 Jews in Paris in July 1942. Japan also found partners, such as the Wang Jingwei government in occupied China.

Resistance

Resistance took many forms. Yugoslav partisans under Josip Broz Tito and Soviet partisans fought large guerrilla wars. The Polish Home Army rose in Warsaw in August 1944 and fought for two months while Soviet forces nearby gave little help; German forces killed perhaps 150,000 civilians and then razed the city. Norwegian saboteurs damaged the Vemork plant that made heavy water for German nuclear research. In 1942 thousands of Norwegian teachers refused to join a Nazi-controlled union; hundreds were sent to an Arctic labor camp, but the regime backed down. In Germany, students of the White Rose spread leaflets against the regime, and Hans and Sophie Scholl were executed in February 1943. On 20 July 1944 army officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a bomb at his headquarters, but he survived and the plotters were executed.

Worked example: the reprisal dilemma

In May 1942 Czech and Slovak parachutists trained in Britain mortally wounded Reinhard Heydrich, a chief organizer of the Holocaust, in Prague. In revenge, German forces destroyed the village of Lidice, shooting its 173 men and deporting its women and children; most of the children were murdered. Was the attack worth it? One side argues that striking a leader of genocide had moral and political value and showed the world that Czechs were still fighting. The other notes that occupiers made civilians pay for every act of resistance. Weighing this means asking who decided, who bore the cost, and whether the alternative, staying quiet, would have saved anyone. People at the time disagreed, and a fair reader can understand both sides.