Hate Architecture: US Army Combat Towns and the Construction of the Enemy, 1941–45

“Our hard job now is to fight at distances which extend all the way around the globe...carrying the war to the enemy in distant lands and distant waters.” On February 23rd, 1942, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt issued this command to the American public during a nationwide radio address outlining, for the first time, the nation’s grand strategy for the Second World War. To execute Roosevelt’s directive, the U.S. Army Ground Forces suddenly faced the task of turning millions of Americans into battle-ready infantry who could kill in unfamiliar environments around the world.

This paper explores how the U.S. Army enlisted the built environment as a mechanism for producing soldiers. Beginning in the summer of 1942, Army engineers and Hollywood scenographers constructed hundreds of imitations of German and Japanese streetscapes or “combat towns” across the United States. Conceived as part of a soldier’s “mental conditioning,” these immersive environments shaped civilians into infantry in two ways. First, they were designed to acclimate enlistees to the “sights, sounds, and smells” of modern warfare and, second, to indoctrinate them with “hate training.” This term refers to the systematic production of a desire to harm specific nationalities and ethnic groups by portraying them as inferior and deserving of violence.

To inculcate feelings of superiority in soldiers, the U.S. Army aestheticized combat towns to denigrate German and Japanese people. They employed everything from racist street signs and caricaturized architectural aesthetics to mock lynchings of U.S. troops. As this paper shows, such villainizations dangerously confused the question of who to hate in a war largely fought among both combatants and noncombatants. The paper concludes by connecting combat towns to war crimes committed by U.S. troops in the spring of 1945 when, for the first time in the war, U.S. forces fought in actual German and Japanese cities.