Howard Zinn was born in 1922. During World War II he served in the Army Air Corps as an officer and bombardier. He participated in bombing missions including against several German cities. Zinn would later comment that his experiences in a bomber unit informed much of his later pacifism. First, he objected to the targets he was being ordered to attack. While American war planners focused their attacks on critical infrastructure, the layout of German cities meant that those missions typically involved targeting entire neighborhoods and city districts. In addition, bomber crews suffered some of the highest attrition of any combatants in the Second World War. More bomber crewmen were killed than Marines fighting in the Pacific theater. After the war, Zinn took advantage of his GI Bill benefits, one of many American men who decided to attend university immediately after their military service. Zinn would graduate with a Ph.D. in 1952.

In the generation when Zinn received his Ph.D., few historians had adopted his bottom-up approach to American history. Anyone keeping up with the bestselling historical scholarship of that era would have read works by President Dwight Eisenhower, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and countless others in which the most famous people of the 1940s argued over which of them deserved credit for what.