Section 13: The Second World War and the Americas (1933–1945)

During the 1930s, Europe underwent a profound political transformation as fascist and authoritarian movements seized power in several states, most significantly in Germany and Italy. These regimes rejected the liberal-democratic and internationalist principles that had underpinned the post-1919 order, replacing them with aggressive nationalism, militarism, and territorial expansionism. This shift, occurring alongside Japanese expansion in Asia, represented a direct challenge to the fragile international system that had emerged after the First World War.

For students of the History of the Americas, the rise of European fascism matters not as an event to be studied in its own right, but as the external shock that reshaped inter-American diplomacy. Fascist aggression in Europe, and the corresponding fear of Axis subversion in the Western Hemisphere, is the backdrop against which the United States redefined its relationship with Latin America in the 1930s. As the source material makes clear, the rise of fascism in Europe and Japanese expansion in Asia together "challenged the international order and tested the political unity of the Americas." This challenge is the reason the U.S., recovering from the Great Depression, sought closer diplomatic ties with Latin America rather than continuing its earlier pattern of military intervention.

Three interconnected developments defined this challenge to the international order in the 1930s:

1. Fascist consolidation in Europe — authoritarian, militarist governments abandoned collective security arrangements and pursued expansionist foreign policy, undermining norms of international cooperation.
2. Japanese expansion in Asia — a parallel challenge to the international order occurring simultaneously in the Pacific, reinforcing global instability.
3. American recalibration — the United States, still emerging from the Great Depression, recognized that a divided or resentful Latin America would be vulnerable to Axis influence, and that hemispheric unity was now a matter of strategic necessity, not just goodwill.

It is this third point — the American diplomatic response — that forms the substantive, examinable core of this section of the syllabus. The rise of fascism itself is essential background for understanding why U.S. policy in the Americas changed during the 1930s and 1940s, but the fascist regimes' internal development in Europe falls outside the History of the Americas syllabus content and should be treated as context rather than something to be analysed in detail for its own sake.

By the 1930s, southern Brazil (especially the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina) and Argentina held some of the largest German immigrant communities in Latin America, many of whom retained German language schools, clubs, and cultural associations. As Nazi Germany expanded its influence in Europe, U.S. policymakers grew alarmed that these communities might form a fifth column -- a term for sympathizers who could act as spies, saboteurs, or propagandists for a foreign power from within a host nation. The fear was that Nazi diplomatic and cultural agencies could use these ethnic-German networks to gather intelligence, spread propaganda, or eventually assist an Axis military presence near the Panama Canal and Atlantic shipping lanes.

These fears were not confined to rhetoric. The U.S. government pressed Latin American states to monitor, restrict, or deport residents of German ancestry, treating ethnic-German communities as a potential security risk regardless of individual loyalty. This pressure intersected with the broader pattern of U.S.-driven internment across the hemisphere: just as the United States pushed Peru and other nations to detain and deport people of Japanese descent as suspected Axis assets, similar suspicion fell on German communities in southern Brazil and Argentina. Vargas's Brazil, initially balancing ties with both the U.S. and Germany, faced mounting U.S. concern that German-Brazilian communities could support Axis submarine operations along the Atlantic coast -- a worry sharpened once German U-boats began attacking Brazilian shipping in 1942. Argentina's continued neutrality until 1945, combined with pro-Axis sympathies within parts of its military elite, made it the country U.S. officials watched most closely for evidence of organized subversion.

By the late 1930s, large communities of Italian immigrants lived across the Americas, especially in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. Mussolini's Fascist government actively courted these overseas communities through cultural societies, Italian-language schools, and propaganda designed to keep emigrants loyal to Fascist Italy. When Italy joined the Axis and declared war in 1940, governments across the hemisphere grew anxious that these ties could be exploited: that Italian communities might harbour a 'fifth column' — a term used during this period for a group of sympathizers who might assist an enemy power through espionage, sabotage, or subversion from within.

This fear was strongest where Italian populations were largest and most organized. In Brazil, President Getúlio Vargas's Estado Novo had already suppressed Italian-, German-, and Japanese-language schools, press, and cultural associations even before Brazil formally joined the Allies in 1942, viewing organized ethnic communities as potential vehicles for Axis influence. In Argentina, where a substantial share of the population was of Italian descent and the military elite included pro-Axis sympathizers, the government's prolonged neutrality (until 1945) was partly shaped by domestic political sensitivity around these communities and fears of destabilizing internal loyalty debates. In the United States, although wartime security policy is remembered chiefly for the internment of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066, Italian (and German) nationals were also classified as 'enemy aliens' after Pearl Harbor, subjected to travel restrictions, curfews, and in some cases relocation or internment, though on a far smaller scale than the mass removal applied to Japanese communities.

Crucially, these fears were driven more by wartime hysteria, nationalist anxiety, and the visible presence of Fascist cultural organizations than by proven acts of espionage or sabotage. Governments used the perceived fifth-column threat to justify broader restrictions on immigrant communities and to demonstrate hemispheric loyalty to the Allied — or, in the U.S. case, the American — cause, reinforcing the wider wartime pattern in which ethnic minorities linked (even loosely) to Axis nations became targets of suspicion regardless of their actual political loyalties.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941), a powerful and largely unsubstantiated fear spread across the Americas: that ethnic Japanese communities, wherever they lived, might form a 'fifth column' -- a network of secret agents, saboteurs, or informants working for Japanese military intelligence against their host countries. This term, borrowed from the Spanish Civil War, described covert internal enemies who could undermine a nation from within rather than attacking it from outside.

In the United States, this suspicion fed directly into Executive Order 9066 (February 1942), which authorized the removal of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry -- about two-thirds of them U.S.-born citizens (Nisei) -- from West Coast 'military zones' into War Relocation Authority camps. Officials argued that Japanese Americans living near ports, airfields, and defense industries posed an unacceptable espionage risk, despite the absence of any documented case of Japanese American sabotage. The fear was concentrated on the West Coast specifically because of its coastal defense industries and proximity to the Pacific theatre, illustrating how strategic anxiety, not evidence, shaped the geography of suspicion.

This same fear extended into Latin America. The United States government actively pressured Latin American states, most significantly Peru, to identify, detain, and hand over their Japanese immigrant populations. Peru had one of the largest and most economically prominent Japanese immigrant communities in South America, concentrated in commerce and small business in Lima and coastal towns. U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI, argued that Japanese business networks abroad could be used to gather intelligence or coordinate sabotage in support of Tokyo, and compiled lists of 'dangerous' individuals largely based on community leadership roles, business prominence, or simply Japanese ancestry rather than concrete evidence of espionage. Panama and several other Latin American governments cooperated with similar U.S. pressure, though on a smaller scale than Peru.

During the 1930s, German and, to a lesser extent, Italian firms had built substantial commercial footholds in Latin America: trading houses, airline routes, banking connections, and technical and military missions, particularly in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile that had significant German immigrant communities. From Washington's perspective, this was not simply competition for markets. U.S. policymakers feared that deep German trade and investment ties could evolve into political leverage -- that economic dependency on Axis capital and goods might translate into diplomatic sympathy, strategic access (ports, airfields, raw materials), or even ideological alignment with fascism, especially given the presence of pro-Axis sympathizers within some Latin American militaries and elites (Argentina being the clearest case).

This anxiety over hemispheric economic security helps explain why the Good Neighbor Policy was never purely altruistic. Roosevelt's administration paired its rhetoric of non-intervention and mutual respect with active efforts to displace Axis commercial influence: expanding U.S. trade credits, purchasing strategic raw materials (such as Chilean copper and Brazilian rubber and iron ore) to keep them out of Axis hands, and using Lend-Lease aid and technical assistance to bind Latin American economies more tightly to the United States. The logic was straightforward: if Latin American governments and elites depended economically on the U.S. rather than on Germany or Italy, they would be far less likely to tolerate Axis political penetration or grant strategic concessions to fascist powers.

During the 1930s, Japan pursued an aggressive policy of territorial expansion across East Asia and the Pacific, driven by militarist factions within its government who sought resources, regional dominance, and an end to what they viewed as Western imperial constraint on Japanese power. This expansion was part of a broader global pattern -- alongside the rise of fascism in Europe -- that challenged the existing international order built around collective security and diplomatic negotiation. For the Americas, Japanese militarism was significant less as a direct territorial threat to the Western Hemisphere and more as a factor that tested American diplomacy, forced difficult choices about neutrality versus intervention, and ultimately precipitated the region's entry into global war.

Japan's expansionist ambitions in Manchuria and China through the 1930s were part of the wider pattern of aggressive, revisionist powers (alongside Italy and Germany) that undermined the credibility of international bodies like the League of Nations and pushed the world toward conflict. While this expansion in Asia predates the direct involvement of the Americas in the war, it forms essential background context: it is the reason Japan later moved further into Southeast Asia and the Pacific in pursuit of resources (notably oil, rubber, and metals) as Western powers -- including the United States -- imposed economic sanctions and embargoes in response to Japanese aggression in China. These tensions escalated through 1940 and 1941, culminating in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States directly into the Second World War and triggered its declaration of war on Japan, followed by Germany and Italy on December 11, 1941.

It is important to place this topic within the correct prescribed period for this subtopic: the Second World War and the Americas is examined for the years 1933-1945. Japan's earlier territorial moves into Manchuria in 1931 and the broader trajectory of Japanese militarism through the early 1930s therefore sit at the very edge of, or slightly before, this window and should be treated as essential background for understanding why war broke out in the Pacific -- not as the primary focus of an essay on the Americas in this period. The directly examinable consequence for this subtopic is the impact of Japanese expansion: the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 and its role in ending American neutrality, reshaping the U.S. economy and society, and reorganizing inter-American diplomacy around wartime cooperation.

By the late 1930s, Japanese expansion in Asia — its invasion of Manchuria (1931) and full-scale war with China from 1937 — was watched with growing alarm across the Americas, not only because it threatened international order but because it raised concrete Pacific security concerns for nations with Pacific coastlines and colonial territories in the region, chiefly the United States. Japan's aggression was folded into the same diplomatic response Washington and Latin American governments were already building against fascism in Europe: a framework of inter-American consultation through the Pan-American Conference system.

This mattered because the United States could not simply act alone in the Pacific without risking the appearance of unilateral intervention that the Good Neighbor Policy had explicitly renounced. Instead, American republics used the same consultative machinery originally designed for hemispheric defense against European fascism to also address, and collectively condemn, Japanese aggression — extending the logic of hemispheric solidarity beyond the Atlantic to the Pacific theatre.

This coordination culminated after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), when the United States declared war on Japan and American republics moved, through further consultation, toward collective alignment with the Allied cause — though, as with responses to European fascism, this alignment was uneven. Argentina's neutrality stance persisted until 1945, illustrating that 'joint condemnation' through Pan-American channels represented an aspiration toward unity more than a guarantee of uniform action by every state.