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The Home Front

Introduction

WITH THE BITTER EXPERIENCE of two unpopular and unfinished wars in Asia now a part of our national heritage, we have come to think of World War II as the last of the good wars and the only one we can understand. Like a short story from almost any popular magazine of that period, the war had a dramatic beginning, a middle fraught with conflict, and a happy ending. Our concept of it is not fogged by the gray areas of morality that plagued our wars in Korea and Vietnam. Nostalgia has seeped in to replace the facts of history, and many of us look back on those four years with a longing unequaled by any other period in our history.

The war years of 1941-45 are unique in our national experience: Never have we been more united with a common goal on which to focus our attention, our energies, and our hate. Unlike economic or natural disasters, World War II had a definite goal and definable enemies to overcome. So convinced were we that our cause was just that the war has become firmly lodged in our national conscience as a crusade against evil, a united effort by free people to save the world from dictatorship. It was the last of our holy wars.

Thus has nostalgia clouded our memories of a period that was not really as pleasant as we choose to remember it. We forget how many men were killed or maimed. We forget how many personal freedoms were abruptly suspended for the duration of the war, based only on race or religion and involving whole peoples who were thrust into prison or camps that today we can only call concentration camps. We forget the fear of invasion of our coasts, the panic-stricken evacuation of our far-flung territories, the loneliness of young widowed mothers, and that excruciating waiting and worrying about sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, friends, and lovers. We forget the immediate aftermath of the war when the economy was staggering under the pressure of the diversification brought on by peace. And we forget how those men who only weeks before were heroes suddenly became ordinary men let loose on the uncertain job market; heroes become anachronistic the moment war ends.

We also forget about the injustices we heaped on 4-F’s; and when we talk of our national unity at that time, we forget the draft dodgers, black marketers, and the pious, holier-than-thou minor bureaucrats who ruled ration boards and the surly waitresses and clerks who had no fear of losing their jobs during the wartime boom. We forget how enraged we became when we heard that catchall question: "Don't you know there's a war on?" The weapon of the incompetent, the arrogant, and the smug, that question was flung in our faces anytime we complained or asked for a product or service we thought should be available.

Yet those four years were for many of us the most important years of our lives and made an indelible impression. Those years colored our concept of America and left us unprepared for brinkmanship, détente, and limited warfare. It is inconceivable that anyone could experience the intensity of that period and remain unchanged. Many of us were liberated from the prison of poverty that had been our legacy. Those who were not already poor became so during the Great Depression that occupied the entire decade of the 1930s and gave the nation despair, just as the war gave us hope. We were deeply divided by the Depression and strongly united by the war as one disaster was replaced by another. It was a special time in our history and we have never been quite the same since.

One definition of "history” might be "an anthology of personal experience," and this book was begun with that in mind. Although I was a child during World War II, I knew its impact on me and my family was enormous. Yet I found no satisfactory answers to basic questions about the era in the books I read or the people I talked to. Since I was brought up on the oral tradition of the Missouri Ozarks at a time when the only radios we could use were powered by batteries, I decided to use the oral-history approach. This seemed the only way to take the book away from policy- and opinion-makers and return history to the people who lived it. I did not want to reduce the period to the confines of an author's set of restrictions or personal viewpoint.

But after interviewing more than 200 people all across the nation, over a two-year period, I found that pure oral history with no attempt by the author to explain the background can leave gaping holes and create as many questions as it answers.

I do not pretend that this is both an oral and a formal history of the American home-front period. Instead, it is a selective history, concentrating on the events and circumstances that seemed to affect the most people. The experiences and thoughts and opinions of the individual are dominant.

I began by collecting stories without discrimination. I simply asked people what they did during the war years-and no strictly "war" stories, please. I asked newspapers around the country to run stories about the project so people could contact me, and in this manner I obtained wide geographical coverage with stories unique to particular areas. After nearly a hundred interviews had been conducted, the subject matter began to divide itself into separate categories.

Still, there were whole topics missing that I believed should be included, and I called on friends, organizations, agencies, and more newspaper editors for assistance and suggestions. In every case they responded, sometimes with information or experiences not found in any of the documents relating to the period. The subject and approach appealed to people, and almost invariably they were willing, if not anxious, to help.

Most people I interviewed were less interested in having their names published than in trying to help define this vital period of American history. Several said they hoped the book would help explain how life was back then to their children, because members of the postwar baby boom seem to find it difficult to believe war could ever have been so clear-cut and simple.

There were large areas of experience I expected to hear more stories about but did not-due in part, I suspect, to my own misunderstanding of what was considered important by those interviewed. I expected to hear from women who lost their sons or husbands in the war, but I have come to believe that most do not care to talk about those things. More than one told me there was nothing they could add beyond the bald fact that their son-or husband or lover-was killed. Also, our patriotism was whipped to such a frenzy then that it wasn't unusual for the mother of a dead soldier to tell reporters she wouldn't hesitate to send another son to the war if she had one to send. Now it is difficult for us to believe that our patriotism was so intense, and few, if any, mothers would say such things today about Korea, Vietnam, or any other war to which America sends its soldiers.

I expected to hear how we were manipulated by government propaganda, but seldom did. The fact of Pearl Harbor erased the memory of maneuverings between our government and that of Japan before the war, and there are still a few who become agitated about the possibility of our intentionally leaving our Pacific bases vulnerable to attack so the war could start on a note of deep hatred. Some believe that, but most do not. Most feel that we considered ourselves so immune to attack that absolutely nobody expected it.

Concentrating as I have on the so-called ordinary people of the country, there is very little material on some subjects, such as the death of President Roosevelt and the sudden emergence of a relatively unknown politician named Harry S. Truman. Everybody said essentially the same thing: how saddened they were by Roosevelt's death and how at first they couldn't stand the sight of Truman's eyeglasses or the sound of his voice.

Another area of interest I did not touch upon at all was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. With the exception of a Quaker I interviewed, I distrust people who speak of those bombings today as an atrocity they strongly opposed in 1940s. If we are to believe what we are told, almost everyone in America was appalled that we would treat anyone that way, even though our propaganda machinery had boasted of the devastation of Dresden, Berlin, and most of Germany. Today most people who were adults during that period say they were shocked, ashamed, horrified, and strongly opposed to using the bombs.

I don't believe them. At that time virtually everyone was delighted that we dropped the bombs, not only because they shortened the war and saved thousands of American lives, but also because the "Japs" deserved it for the terrible things they had done to our boys at Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Guadalcanal, and all the way through the Pacific. Many of us today are suffering from a delayed, and perhaps unnecessary, guilt over those incidents.

Another subject I expected to yield an outpouring of complaints was rationing. I was under the impression that some people had suffered because of it. If they did, they did not tell me. The rationing system seems to have provided people wit enough food, clothing, and gasoline, although the American love affair with transportation made the word "enough" difficult to define. Another factor was the ability, developed over a decade, to get by, to make do, to "Hooverize." There were the usual complaints, by now expressed with good humor-about the quality of shoes and the scarcity of stockings an good cigarettes, but most admitted the system was generally fair. Part of the rationing problem was the fact that the sudden abundance of jobs and paychecks coincided with governmental restraints on spending. This led to inevitable abuses, but on much smaller scale than one might expect. Most people believed strongly in helping the war effort and saw a direct relationship between the rationing program and the comfort an safety of loved ones fighting the war.

During the years I interviewed people for this book, the role of oral history has been questioned repeatedly. Used sparingly in the past, it has become a familiar device during the past decade. Can oral history be trusted over traditional history? Is it history or only nostalgia?

In college I was taught that interpreters of events are a least as important as the participants. Oral accounts were considered curiosities, evidence but not conclusions.

Although I have not relied totally on the oral history approach, the book is heavily laden with information from historical eyewitnesses. As I progressed, my doubts about the accuracy of historical material gathered from eyewitness were eased when I found that the interviews had a way of merging, of complementing each other, until there was little room for doubt that, for example, displaced persons from Europe were roundly disliked by Americans because it was felt they didn't appreciate America enough. As one reads these accounts, one is reminded of a parent discussing an unimpressed and ungrateful child.
I also found that what might be of interest to a historian is often of little or no concern to those who experienced the events. Formal historians too often write for peer acceptance and forget the average reader. The people will tell you that their daily affairs often have their own drama, one that some-times overshadows the headlines of the day. Thus, while men are being killed in foreign countries, women stateside may worry about that ghastly fluid they applied to their legs to simulate hose, and stateside men wonder how they are going to go on a hunting trip without sufficient gasoline and good tires.

Throughout the interviewing process I used George Orwell's dictum on autobiography as a barometer for truth: that autobiography is to be trusted only when it reveals something disgraceful; that when we give a good account of ourselves we are usually lying. I constantly watched for the Orwellian Law to be broken, and I think it only seldom was. Sometimes the disgraceful acts were concealed by an apologetic laugh, or were tossed into the conversation as jokes, but the statute of limitations on our consciences usually runs out after three decades and we are now able to discuss the sometimes shameful matters of the Second World War with only a token apology.

Early in the interviewing I wondered why people would tell a complete stranger the stories I heard from all over America. I asked some people, and their replies were varied but revealed a few basic needs on the teller's part. A major factor is that most of us are lonely and paradoxically become more so with the increase in population and mobility. Each of us is at least partially alienated from the present and we long for the virtues of the past, even though we can't always prove those virtues ever existed. Talking about the past can give it
a firmer reality. Our memories are selective and the pains and joys stand above the valleys of the ordinary. We do not want our memories to die with us. Many of these memories are singular; an event or an impression will represent an entire era for us. We remember what we want to remember, and we want to share it.

At the extreme we become evangelists for the past. Some people spoke to me to explain themselves to others, and to themselves; to sort out their lives by putting them into words and into print. We do not grant interviews to absolute strangers for immortality alone. We do so to share a part of our lives and to understand it better by doing so. In such eases the printed word takes on a vivid reality that film can never duplicate.

Documents such as this must have limitations imposed by the author. Thus, I have concentrated on the people. Accounts by the powerful and the famous do not interest me, because power surely corrupts and fame usually does. Those who possess either become so accustomed to speaking through a public-relations filter that interviews with them are always suspect. They have formed the survival habits of covering their tracks and giving Orwell's good account of themselves. I wanted the defense workers, not the Henry Kaisers; the sidemen and fan-club members, not the Artie Shaws and Red Foleys; the people who voted for politicians, not the politicians themselves.

As you read these accounts of that four-year period, I think you will frequently ask yourself, as I have, whether we are any happier than we were during the Depression and the war; whether we have made any real progress in our quality of life, or whether we have simply changed our addresses and style of clothing. There is a statement near the end of the book that will always disturb me. One woman tells of the fellowship during the war and how people cared for one another, strangers helping strangers. But when the war ended, she found that people no longer cared, that we lost our inhumanity. Repeatedly people interrupted their narratives to offer an apology for enjoying themselves during a war. They said they did not like wars and did not like the thought of having to be at war to see the country united. World War II was different, they said. Somehow it was better.



Remember Pearl Harbor

Let's make Hitler
And Hirohito
Look as Sick
As Benito.
Buy Defense Bonds.

BURMA-SHAVE




We are the sons of the rising guns.

The U.S. will take the Nip out of the Nipponese.

Let's blast the Japs clean oft the map.

Be smart--act dumb.

Loose lips sink ships.

Once a Jap, always a Jap.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

Pay your taxes and beat the Axis.

Weed 'em and reap (Victory Gardens).

Bye-bye, Benito.



V-MAIL


DEAREST SWEETHEART:

Reporting on the first St. Louis blackout-a huge success much to everyone's surprise! The lights all over the city were off and the city looked like a big piece of barren land. The blackout extended all over nine Mid-west states and was pronounced really good which just proves what we've always said, that the Midwest is in this war lots more than we know.

Last night Fred Waring dedicated his program to the P.1. Marines and played the songs they requested:
"For Me and My Gal" from that last picture we saw, "Silent Night" and the Marine hymn, which made me cry with pride. You don't know how wonderful it is to tell people your husband is an officer in the Marine Corps serving overseas. They all just look at me in awe and then I show them your picture and they believe me. I'm so proud and so are all the folks-Dad is so busy telling everyone about us that they all think the war is all over now that you're in action-well, so do I. Thank heaven you chose the right outfit and got your commission, too-just remember you're tops in the top outfit.

Lots and lots of love,




YESTERDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1941--A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY
--THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS SUDDENLY AND DELIBERATELY ATTACKED BY NAVAL AND AIR FORCES OF THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN.


THE UNITED STATES was at peace with that nation, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday the Japanese government also launched attack against Malaya.
Last night the Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake island.
This morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implication to the very safety and life of their nation.
I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, hut will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.

FROM PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT'S SPEECH ON
RADIO, DECEMBER 8, 1941



ON THAT WINTER MORNING AMERICA, the sleeping giant so feared by cautious Japanese and Nazi officials, was slowly stirring as the thunder of distant guns and the rattling of armor grew louder and more threatening. In Europe, America's womb, the German war machine was erasing national boundaries, exterminating leaders, and trampling over lesser armies with the force and finality of a hurricane. When Hitler's Nazi party came to power in 1933 and immediately began organizing a war machine, it took less than six years to become the most powerful military force in Europe. In 1939 Germany defeated Poland in an eighteen-day war, and by 1940 Germany controlled Denmark and Norway to the north. Belgium, the Netherlands, and France followed. Then came North Africa and the bombardment of England that continued throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1941.
To the west lay another threat, a potential enemy America did not know so well. Orient culture was as exotic to us as an undiscovered Indian tribe in the High Andes, and Japan itself had been as insulated from Western thought as America was from the Oriental culture.

This closed, remote island empire had earned a reputation for sneak attacks when on February 8, 1904, at nearly midnight, the Japanese fleet smashed the Russian navy that lay at anchor off Port Arthur, Manchuria, without benefit of formally declared war. Most Americans did not know their Asian military history, and American leaders ignored this trait so foreign to our more polite, formal methods of starting wars. Foreign wars were remote events in those days, tragedies that happened to someone else in another country. We did not care much what the Japanese, Chinese, Mongolians, and Russians did to each other. It was inconceivable that anyone in the world would attack us; and as to us attacking them, we didn't start wars, we only finished them.

But Japan was on the march, moving down the Asian mainland from French Indochina (which another generation of American soldiers would know as Vietnam) toward Malaysia and the islands of the Pacific. The movements were swift, unannounced, and as impersonally brutal as a tsunami. That was a problem on the far side of the world to be worked out by culturally and mentally inferior nations, we believed. No American boys would be lost in that war. We paid little attention to the reports on radio and in newspapers about the exchange of threats, deadlines, and ultimatums between the Roosevelt administration and Emperor Hirohito.

We had better things to think about. For more than a decade America's dreams and waking thoughts had been directed inward. The worst depression in our history had slowed technological and industrial growth to a crawl. There were 4 million men out of work that morning, and those with jobs were subservient to their employers. The threat of unemployment hung heavy and made men willing to swallow their pride and sacrifice self-respect in order to keep a job. There was too much truth in the old chestnut about there being at at least three other men waiting for the job if you didn't like it.

A generation of younger people was growing up with no promising future, and adults were faced with a future as bleak as their past. Opportunity hardly existed. More or less typical was a young woman, the eldest child in a family of three daughters and parents who had no jobs. Nearly four decades later she could not speak of those years without bitterness, and her life was permanently marked by injustices by her family and American society.
She was almost eighteen, a high-school senior with a year of typing and stenographic skills behind her, when one night her parents called her into the dining room. The family had $2.80 in the house and no prospects of work for the parents. She recalls:

"From the time I was fifteen I had worked for people as a housekeeper when they had money to pay me, or bedbugs to donate, which happened. My dad had been a timekeeper for the county and made seventy-two dollars a month for a family of seven. Now he had nothing.

"I had also worked for nothing. I walked two and a half miles every day after school to work for nothing for a county road district commissioner to learn secretarial skills. Once in a while his wife gave me five or ten dollars a month, but not very often. They didn't have any money either. I worked for the experience.

"So that evening while we sat around the dining room table, I asked, 'Should I drop out of school?' and that was what they were waiting for someone else to suggest. I said I would, my dad cried and stopped hunting for a job, and we owed a big grocery bill at two stores that took me two years to pay off.

"I got a job at the WPA {Works Progress Administration]. When the man told me what I'd be making a year, I had no conception. I went out of his office into the hallway and leaned against a wall, got a piece of paper, and divided twelve into the figure he gave me as my annual salary, and came up with eighty-five dollars a month. I couldn't believe it. I went back in and said there must be a mistake because was good at figures.

"When I cashed my first check, I got it all in one-dollar bills, took them home, and went into the kitchen. I threw them all over the kitchen and everybody grabbed those dollar bills. They hadn't seen that much money in I don't know how long. I handed my checks over to dad until 1937, when I tool the bit in my teeth and left home.

"We lived thirty miles out of town and I commuted for the first six weeks, two and a half hours each way on a rinky dink bus. When I got home I was too tired to eat. I was' skinny and nervous (now I'm fat and nervous and still stupid) and I would collapse on the bed and fall asleep. My mother had to shake me awake to feed me.

"I moved to town and still sent money home. Dad figures out just how much I needed for rent, food, and occasionally5 some clothes. But never entertainment. So I learned to wall everywhere. I visited the morgue, the art museum, skid row everywhere. I was never molested on those excursions. I was only molested in offices by successful businessmen and bureaucrats.

"I was the only one in the family my parents leaned on The rest got violin lessons and baton-twirling lessons. Violin' are okay-but batons? I went home one night and here's m~ kid sister twirling around with her baton, bought with m~ money, and I can't have anything for myself. That was the end of supporting my family. After that I was gone for good.”

There was a bitterness across the nation that ran deeper than resentment between the haves and have-nots. There was a feeling of despair; that things were never going to improve., that there was no point in life, that the country could not care for its own and should not try to solve Europe's problems again. . .