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the causes championed by their respective governments, at least unless or until they started losing. But minorities dissented, and thousands were imprisoned in consequence, some of them by the democracies. So too were people whose allegiance was deemed suspect, sometimes grossly unjustly: Britain in 1939 detained all its German residents, including Jewish fugitives from Hitler. The historian G.M. Trevelyan was among prominent figures who denounced indiscriminate internment, saying that the government failed to recognise ‘the great harm that is being done to our cause – essentially a moral cause … by the continued imprisonment of political refugees’. America made the same mistake in the hysteria following Pearl Harbor, by interning its Nisei Japanese. The governor of Idaho, supporting drastic measures, said: ‘The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them.’

At the outbreak of war, the United States was by no means a homogeneous society. American Jews, for instance, suffered suspicion, if not hostility, from their own countrymen, exemplified by their exclusion from country clubs and other elite social institutions. A wartime survey showed that Jews were mistrusted more than any other identified ethnic group except Italians; a poll in December 1944 showed that while most Americans accepted that Hitler had killed some Jews, they disbelieved reports that he was slaughtering them in millions.

Black Americans had cause to regard the ‘crusade for freedom’ with scepticism, for much of their country was racially segregated, as were the armed forces. At army recruit John Capano’s training camp in South Carolina, there was a sign outside a local restaurant: ‘Niggers and Yanks not welcome’. He said, ‘It was a very white troop, which fought running battles with the blacks in the motor pool.’ 1940 witnessed six recorded lynchings of black Americans in the South, four of them in Georgia, and many more floggings, three of them fatal. Virginia matrons delivered a formal protest about Eleanor Roosevelt’s presence at a mixed dance in Washington: ‘The danger,’ they wrote to the president, ‘lies not in the degeneration of the girls who participated in this dance, for they were … already of the lowest type of female, but in the fact that Mrs Roosevelt lent her presence and dignity to this humiliating affair; that the wife of the President of the United States sanctioned a dance including … both races and that her lead might be followed by unthinking whites.’

The 1942 influx of large numbers of black workers to join the labour force in Detroit provoked vociferous white anger, which in June erupted into serious rioting. The following year witnessed further racial disturbances, in Detroit against blacks and in Los Angeles against Mexicans. The president adopted a notably muted attitude to the Detroit clash, and indeed until his death remained circumspect about racial issues. The proportion of black workers in war industries rose from 2 per cent in 1942 to 8 per cent in 1945, but they remained under-represented. America’s armed forces enlisted substantial numbers of African-Americans, but entrusted only a small minority with combat roles, and maintained a large measure of segregation; the American Red Cross distinguished between ‘colored’ and ‘white’ blood supplies. Cynics demanded to be told the difference between park benches marked ‘Juden’ in Nazi Germany, and those labelled ‘Colored’ in Tallahassee, Florida.

At the outbreak of war even many white Americans, immigrants or children of immigrants, defined themselves in terms of the old-world national group to which they belonged, notably including almost five million Italian-Americans: until December 1941, their community newspapers hailed Mussolini as a giant. One published letter-writer applauded the German invasion of Poland, and predicted that ‘As the Roman legions did under Caesar, the New Italy will go forth and conquer.’ Even when their country declared war on Mussolini, many Italian-Americans hoped for a US victory that somehow avoided imposing an Italian