World War II

World War II. . , America Joins the War , On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland; two days later, Great Britain, France, and a number of other allies declared war on Germany. War already had been underway in Asia between Imperial Japan and China since 1937, leading to tensions between Japan and the U.S. Although it provided financial support to Great Britain, the U.S. maintained a position of military neutrality until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress, which then declared war., Arlington During the War , During the interwar years and through World War II (world war two), the growth of the Federal Government profoundly shaped the landscape of Arlington County through housing and military projects. The County's proximity to Washington, D.C., spurred rapid development, and between 1930 and 1940, the population more than doubled from 26,615 to 57,040 residents. New residential construction projects housed the growing number of Federal Government employees and families. Colonial Village, one such garden apartment development built in stages between 1936-1955, was the first of its scale in the nation to be insured by the Federal Housing Administration., In July 1941, the War Department chose Arlington as the location for its new and expanded headquarters. The construction of the Pentagon and its associated road network initiated eminent domain actions that destroyed all or portions of several historically black neighborhoods including East Arlington, Queen City, and part of Johnson's Hill (Arlington View). The destruction of these areas placed an economic burden on those African American families forced to move and scattered the formerly tight-knit communities. Although the Farm Security Administration (FSA) provided trailers in encampments for displaced residents, the Federal Government failed to provide adequate financial compensation to those forced to move., The U.S. military converted Arlington Hall Junior College for Women, now the present-day Foreign Service Institute, into the Army Signal Corps' covert cryptography center in 1942. This facility became an important generator of military intelligence during world war two. Mathematicians from around the country came to Arlington Hall to intercept and decrypt messages. Women served as radio intercept operators, cryptographers, traffic analysts, and clerks., The National Experience of Service , The Federal Government instituted peacetime conscription in 1940 and wartime conscription in 1942. By the end of world war two, 49 million men had registered with the armed forces, and 10 million had been accepted into service. world war two resulted in more than 400,000 U.S. deaths., Around 310,000 women joined the U.S. Armed Forces, serving in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and Women Accepted into Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), as well as the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Since the WASPS, who flew planes to active duty stations to free up men for other work, were not officially in the armed forces, they could not be buried at Arlington National Cemetery until such legislation passed in 2016., Despite their service in World War I and earlier conflicts, African American soldiers continued to be treated as inferior. Both volunteers and those drafted were relegated to non-combat support functions and largely served in all-black regiments. It was not until 1944 when some 50,000 of the 909,000 African American service members who had registered for the Army could finally enter combat. Prior to this time, select African American units such as the Tuskegee Airmen served with distinction in battle as early as 1942. However, the post-war process of military desegregation ordered by President Harry S. Truman in 1948 did not go into full effect until the end of the Korean War., Stories of Some Who Served , Sergeant Charles M. Noble came from a family of servicemen. The U.S. military declared him missing in action in 1942, and later discovered that he was killed by gunfire from low-flying aircraft while in a life raft in the Solomon Islands. He received a Distinguished Service Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Air Medal for bravery, as well as a Silver Star., Staff Sergeant Jerome Carl Kisseleff, born in 1920 and a graduate of Washington-Lee High School (renamed Washington-Liberty in 2019), was working from the Portsmouth Electric Co. when he enlisted in the Army in 1941 with three of his brothers. Kisseleff's immigrant Russian parents founded Kisseleff's Market in Lyon Village. In 1942, the B-17 bomber in which he served as a waist gunner crashed, and the Army declared him missing in action in 1943. His remains were located and interred in Arlington National Cemetery., Technician Richard A. Medlock lived in Arlington with his wife Juanita when he registered in the Army in 1943. He served as a Technician 5th Class in the segregated 3241st Quartermaster Service Company. Medlock died in the service on May 12, 1945, and the U.S. military interred his remains in the American military cemetery in Epinal, France., Aviation Cadet Elinor Frances (née Grainger) Nystrom was an American native born in 1915. Grainger was enlisted in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (predecessor of the WAC) as an Aviation Cadet on August 24, 1942, and served until the end of the war. In 1946, she married Frederick Nystrom and lived in the Bluemont neighborhood., [Caption:] , A man tending to a victory garden in an African American FSA encampment in Arlington County, 1942. Victory gardens were a means of supplementing domestic food consumption to conserve resources during wartime.