The Home Front: U.S.A. (World War II) [First Printing ed.] 0809424789

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Women employees at an P

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'

'

ne yeai:, Kii/t.-

work

imum

u/if

c-

aviation plant in Long tines of transparent s. During the War million women found '

in war-related jobs

on the home

front.

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II

TIME-LIFE ROOKS

•

ALEXANDRIA. VIRGINIA

BY RONALD

H.

BAILEY

AND THE EDITORS OF TIME-LIFE DOOKS

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Duane

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has also published several ar-

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No

that brief passages may be quoted for reviews. Third printing. Revised 1981. Published simultaneously in Canada. Library of Congress catalogue card number 77-87556. School and library distribution by Silver Burdett

Company, Morristown, New TIME-LIFE

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CHAPTERS A Day to Remember 2: America joins Up

16

Miracles of Production

76

Home

102

in

Motion

142

of Dazzling

Growth

180

1:

3: 4:

Bringing the Conflict 5:

6:

Days

A

Nation

42

PICTURE ESSAYS Homeland

6

Bitter Exile in the U.S.

28

Army Now

56

Distaff Side

66

Home

Front

88

The Youngest Warriors

118

One Family's War Making Do with Little

128

Wonderful Town

166

The

Jittery

You're in the

The Heroines of the

154

in Chief

188

Bibliography

204

Acknowledgments

204

Picture Credits

205

Index

206

The Commander

CONTENTS

THE JITTERY HOMELAND

A /.'w

f/cUA

.-liter

Pcjrl ILvbor, a haHily constructed barrier of sandbags protects the telephone C(>n)pan\ in San Francisco against

bombs

that never

came.

GETTINB READY FOR THE LONG HAUL On December

7,

1941, thirteen-year-old Douglas Jaynes

heard the news of the sneak attack on the radio and raced

through the streets of Florence, Alabama, to spread the

word

"The Japs have bombed Pearl Hartown crier, "and they're

to the neighbors.

bor," shouted the self-appointed

headed

for us

of geography, assault

down

on Four Mile Creek." This youthful distortion which had the enemy making a waterborne a tributary of

the Tennessee River, reflected

more advanced

the worst fears of citizens of In practically

cans

felt

every

threatened.

city In

and

Georgia, a citizen's army

Ameri-

known

as

— those too young or too old the with deferments — about preparing coastal

the State Guard

and others

years.

village in the nation,

draft

for

set

German

defenses for an anticipated

invasion.

To meet the

emergency, Georgia convicts were conscripted and put to

work round-the-clock

in

an effort to improve seashore ap-

proaches and build bridges over which the home-grown

army would rush

to

meet the invaders on the beaches. In removed from the

the landlocked state of Arizona, far Anticipating a wartime shortage of alcohol, Washington, D.C., shoppers jam the Milstone's Acme Liquor store in the Christmas season of 7947.

Atlantic or the Pacific oceans, residents fretted over the

prospect of trouble from another direction. "We've got

one said. "Things are liable to pop down there any time." The top officer of the American Legion in Wisconsin appealed for the creation of a guerrilla army that would be composed of the state's the Mexican border to worry about,"

25,000 licensed deer hunters

— "a

formidable foe for any

attackers," he insisted.

Almost everywhere, the preparations to repulse the entinged with fear and panic. In San Francisco, a

emy were sentry on

woman

the Bay Bridge shot and seriously

motorist

who was

slow to halt

at a

wounded

checkpoint.

a In

away against fragments descended on

Los Angeles, an antiaircraft battery blazed

imaginary warplanes; the shell the

city,

injuring

dozens of the

jittery residents.

nation spent a subdued Christmas season and the arrived without an

enemy

attack,

frayed

But as the

new

year

nerves calmed

somewhat and Americans settled into a stringent wartime routine marked by shortages, rationing and dimouts.

Chomping

a cigar, nationa. /'.;l. .\dministrator

Leon Henderson pedals a

'-Victory''

bicycle-touled

as

awarlimestand-m

for

automobile^-inlanuarv 1942.

ON THE ALERT AFTER PEARL HAROOR In

the confusion that

came on

the heels of

Pearl Harbor, the frenzied behavior of the

American people took some bizarre and even irrational turns. Air-raid alarms evand accompanying blackery one false outs threw major cities into panic. In Seattle, during one of the frequent

—

—

air-raid alerts,

a

mob

of 1,000 angry

citi-

zens attempted to enforce the blackout by

smashing windows and looting stores did not

One

comply with the

skeptic

in

that

lights-out order.

San Francisco, fed up with

incessant sirens, asked a valid question: "If

there are Jap planes around

why

aren't

they dropping bombs?" The next morning, Lieut.

General John

L.

DeWitt, the chief of

West Coast defenses, insisted against all evidence that 30 enemy warplanes had flown over San Francisco. "Why bombs were not dropped, do not know," he said. "It might have been better if some bombs had dropped to awaken this city." In New York, where officials decided that the schools would close in the event the

I

of an air-raid alert, a false alarm released

one million children from their classrooms and sent distraught parents through the streets in search of their kids.

A New York cop

10

protects Japanese diplomat Morito Morishima outside the consulate

on December

7.

A Coast Guard motor

Dug

into a California

lifeboat escorts San Francisco crab fishermen in early 1942, a time

beach

in

December

1941, a soldier trains his

when

machine gun ^

TBlAIHIIEiBCMy ^^^f Co

TO cler.onstr^te

Hi. loyalty, a

/apanese-Amencan grocer c/.p/ayed

h,.

naUomlity

lor

,^l^NTo Co

everyone to see;

as the

topmos, s,gn ,nd,cares.

/.e s.//

had

,n get out.

31

A japanese-Amencan ^voman solemnly pauses

Clutching her pockethook and

32

in the

a halt-eaten apple, a

driveway of the

bewildered child

stately

sits

home

that she

numbly amid her

was forced

to

exchange

for a single

room

in a flimsy barracks.

Angeles. family's belongings as she awaits transport out of Los

Facing a

row

of

armed

soldiers,

arriving evacuees from Los Ar^geles line up lor inspection after

at

an

a

enter set

up

at thie

Santa Anita race track.

33

34

Three generations of

Japanese-American family

gatfier at tkie stoop of a assembly center, one of 15 crudely constructed camps on the West Coast where the evacuees were held until more permanent camps were built farther inland a

tiny dwelling place in the Salinas, California,

Exiles

from the West Coast arrive by the truckload

Wyoming

at their

new home

in the

Mountain Relocation Center. In the camp, temperatures plunged to 30° below zero in winter, and the residents had to bank the earth against their barracks to keep out the icy winds. desert, the Heart

A BARREN EXISTENCE IN MAKESHIFT CAMPS "Every place

we go we

cannot escape the

dust," wrote a Japanese-American youngster of his

Topaz, Utah, internment camp.

"Inside of our houses, in the laundry,

the latrines,

in

the mess

halls,

in

dust and

more dust, dust everywhere." All except two of the 10 camps were situated in barren, ly

desolate desert country. Each fami-

was assigned

to an

feet

—

in a

—

one wood-

"apartment"

room measuring 20 by 25

en barracks covered with tar paper. "Aside from the absurdity of living that way," an internee later recalled, "life went

on pretty much as usual." The JapaneseAmericans maintained a stable small-town existence, complete with fire, police and post-office departments, schools, hospitals

and camp-written newspapers. And even though they had been imprisoned by their own government, many began their days by pledging allegiance to the American flag. Furthermore, the Japanese-Americans were subject to the draft; 8,000 served in the U.S.

armed forces, many with combat overseas.

great

distinction in

35

A

japanes^e-American

woman and

her children beat the heat and the in the refreshing waters of a

mnnotonou:^ routine of camp life by wading brook near the Manzanar Relocation Center

in the California desert.

at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in northern California entertain their fellow internees by staging a production that they grandly called the Cabaret Internationale.

Costumed Japanese-Americans

36

fibers, women their faces marked lo prevent inhalation of harmful netting. For internees aid the U.S. war effort by weaving camouflage residents up to $19 a month. this and other jobs, the U.S. paid the camp

With

owned A Japanese-American farmer tram Auburn. W ashington. who being mterned, before years (or business poultry own his and operated Lake Relocation Center gatl^ers eggs in the camp lienliouse at tlie Tule

W

37

38

The one-room apartment of the Hosokawa family, internees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, was a typical camp dwelling with Armyissue cots, a potbellied stove, and shelves and furniture made from scrap lumber. Pictures and curtains made the drab cubicle more livable.

Japanese-American soldiers on leave from the U.S. Army visit with their relatives in the USO center at the Heart Mountain internment camp. "The biggest irony of all," one young internee later recalled, "was seeing three older brothers being drafted, one by one, out of our camp."

my

39

A Buddhist temple

in Los

Angeles

lies

ransacked during the wave of anti-Oriental feeling.

HANDIWORK OF VANDALS AND VIGILANTES the

In

fall

War

of 1942, the

Authority, which

Relocation

was created by the gov-

ernment to run the internment camps, began a campaign to channel the JapaneseAmericans into communities outside the West Coast "war zone." Many towns were still

seething with hatred for the Japanese.

When

five

men who had been

one camp went

to

work

for a

farmer, local vigilantes set

A Japanese-American Denver was

girl

interned

New

fire to

in

Jersey

the farm.

who found

a job

by the minister of her new church that she might feel more at in

told

home

in her own place of worship. By the end of the war with Japan, however, some 55,000 Japanese-American internees had taken up life again outside the barbed wire. Those who eventually went back to their homes on the West Coast often found their property vandalized, their farms gone to seed and their businesses

bankrupt. During their exile, the Japaneselost nearly half a billion dollars

Americans

—

in assets of which only about 10 per cent was returned by a repentant federal government two decades later.

40

1 :.^:

'^''^ii0i

ttk>'

i

M^'-

^5^

An abandoned West Coast farmhouse

is

littered with leaves

and

trash;

its

lapanese-Amencan owners were delated

at

one

oi the

truwdcd

/;i£erni:^cnt c,imp-

41

wake

the

In

of the Pearl Harbor attack, everyone

seemed

ready to join up. Practically everyone wanted to enlist

war

effort.

Army and Navy

recruiting stations

and

in

the

civilian-

defense headquarters were deluged with volunteers.

In Deone family grandfather, father and son showed up at the Navy recruiting station. In Washington, D.C., the revered military leader of World

—

three generations of

troit,

—

War now

General of the

I,

Army John

J.

"Black Jack" Pershing,

was driven over to the White House from his suite at the Walter Reed Medical Center to offer his services. At Overbrook, Kansas, Edward Brentlinger got on his bicycle and rode 28 miles to Topeka to enlist. Hollywood film star Jimmy Stewart fattened up his spindly frame 81

and

infirm,

the minimum weight requirement for the and economics professor Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago joined the Marines as a buck

so he could

Army

make

Air Forces,

Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford joined up. So did Joe DiMaggio, Gene Autry, Texas newspaper publisher Mrs. Oveta Gulp Hobby and a high-school kid in a suburb of Philadelphia who wanted to be a fighter pilot and ate so many carrots to sharpen his vision that his skin

private at age 50.

briefly

turned orange.

Volunteers and draftees, movie

stars and farm kids, proand students, center fielders and congressmen were joining up. To be of military age and not in uniform was to

fessors

be physically or mentally impaired, or the subject of suspicion and innuendo about one's connections or courage. All told, nearly

16 million Americans wore a uniform during

number who served during World War At any given time late in the War, some 12 million were in the service, one in every 11 Americans. Able-bodied men in civilian clothes became so scarce that, in professional baseball, the St. Louis Browns resorted to using a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray. A popular song lamented that the men who were left behind were "either too young or too old; they're either too bald or too bold." And in Hollywood, where most of the leading males were in uniform, an agent summed up for a producer his the War, about four times the I.

A rush to the

recruiting stations

numbers from a glass bowl The categories of men: 1-A to 4-F

Picking draft

The prize for attempted

A surprisingly high

draft evasion

rate of rejections

Small-town send-off for the boys

Waking up

in

the

Army

Patton orders tank parts from Sears, Roebuck Getting married on the run Camp followers, brothels and brawls The cruel dilemma of America's blacks

newest draft-proof discovery: "I've got a prospect a young guy with a double hernia."

for

you

—

As the waves of newly inducted servicemen shuttled between training camps, shipped out for overseas, traveled

home

to wives

AMERICA JOINS UP

and sweethearts or simply went out

for a

dence. Stimson then drew the

and bus terminals became kaleidoscopes of olive drab, navy

first capsule from the bowl and handed it to the President, who extracted the slip of paper and read the number into a battery of radio microphones. The number was 158. "That's my son," shrieked a

blue, marine green.

woman

The uniforms, like many other things in military life, were known as Government Issue, or Gl. And the swarms of men who wore them took for themselves the same unromantic label, Gl. Though many GIs were volunteers, fully two

registrants with the same number.

night

on the town, suddenly uniforms were everywhere.

In

the 16 days that followed Pearl Harbor, railroads on the

home

front

moved more

up through

thirds joined

than 600,000 troops. Train stations

a

system that was largely alien to

America, conscription. Until 1940, the U.S. had been one of in the world that lacked a program of compulsory military training. Then, in September of that year. Congress approved the Selective Training and Service

the few countries

Act, the

peacetime draft

first

controversial,

it

bitter.

One

American

was approved only

sharp debate. Opposition from ly

in

some

history.

Highly

weeks of was extremethe draft would

after several

quarters

clergyman predicted that

reduce American youth to "syphilis and slavery."

The new law required

all

men between

the ages of 21 and

35 to register with their local draft boards on the 16th of

October.

On

that

country, 16,316,908

resignation"

—

the holders of

had held the first number plucked from the bowl by World War Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. The fateful number then was 258. Once the numbers had been picked, questionnaires were

earlier his father

glass

I

sent out by local draft boards to

all

registrants in the order

of the selections from the bowl. Those

who appeared

from

the answers to be qualified for service were then given a

were classiThose who were fit were then called up in the order of the drawing of the numbers from the glass bowl. Those with number 158 who were qualified for military service would go first. physical examination. After that the registrants

fied

according to their fitness for the

The decision

as to

who was

fit

draft.

was made by the

all-

powerful local draft board. The board was an eminently

who

were at least 36 years old and residents of the country over which they had jurisdiction in short, the older friends and neighbors of the young men upon whom they might have to

The

lines at local draft

mood,

York Times, "seemed to be philosophical

certainly not that of "a

day of mourning for

I,

signed registrants by their local draft boards. the

Among

of Boston. Twenty-three years

Jr.

democratic group, consisting of three or more persons

registered.

the death of the American way of life," as the registration was dubbed by the Socialist leader Norman Thomas. Every man who registered received a draft number. Two weeks after the registration. President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and other officials met in Washington around an enormous glass bowl to determine the order in which the registrants would be drafted. The bowl, which had been used for the same purpose in 1917 when the U.S. entered World War contained 9,000 bright blue capsules. In each capsule was a numbered slip of paper. The numbers, from 1 through 9,000, corresponded to the ones as-

When

158 was Alden C. Flagg

were 6,175

men

Rockefellers, factory workers and field hands. Their

New

the audience. Across the land there

day, at 6,175 draft boards across the

boards included executives and truck drivers. Fords and reported The

in

moment

for the plucking of the

numbers from

the glass bowl arrived, an aide blindfolded Secretary Stim-

—

pass judgment. Volunteers

who

served without pay, they

were appointed by the President upon recommendation of the state's governor. The boards ranged in manner of operation from the bureaucratic formality of the big city to the

country folksiness of the one

in

Fentrees County, Tennes-

was presided over by the famous Sergeant Alvin York. A World War hero who had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor by killing 25 Germans and singlehandedly capturing 132 others, York had a special feeling for the problems of the young men under his jurisdiction. Before his own induction in 1917 he had at first refused to serve on religious grounds, insisting "War's agin the Book." Now, when a draftee filed an appeal, York and other board members would journey through the mountains to the man's home and conduct the hearing on his front porch. see, that

I

The

spirit of

the draft

was

set

by the director of Selective

son with a swatch of upholstery taken from a chair used 164

Service, Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey,

years before by the signers of the Declaration of Indepen-

local civilian control and

wanted

to

who

favored

keep red tape

at

a

43

minimum. A square-framed

professional soldier with a wiry

brush of reddish-gray hair and the voice of a

drill

Hershey would survive for three decades

an essentially

in

sergeant,

thankless job. "Let's keep this thing so simple," he said, "that even crooks will say, like all the

'I'll

be patriotic and

register just

other guys.' " Indeed, special draft boards were

pendency essential

or relatives and

of family

ments on the ground that there were

some

young men assumed

mentally or morally unfit for service").

largest

Those in their

most

state

who were

classified

1-A soon found a form

mailboxes. "Greeting,"

yourself to a local board

it

letter

began. "Having submitted

composed

of your neighbors for

their

exceptions.

1-A ("available for military service") to 4-F ("physically,

in

an

employment was

essential to

down on the farm A 70-year-oId man who oper-

the national defense. Nevertheless, even

ated a 765-acre farm

up

in

million farmworkers had been given occupational defer-

and federal prisons, and more than 100,000 convicted felons were taken into the armed forces. The local boards had a great deal of leeway in classifying a potential draftee. They could place him in any of more than a dozen different classifications, which ranged from set

employment

occupation such as farming. By 1944 almost two

sons

lost five of

in Illinois

them

have been inducted in

with the help of

to the draft.

And

his six

the sixth son

grown would

he had not suffered a broken hip

if

an accident. Marriage alone did not warrant deferment, though it

manufacturers of wedding

reported a 250 per cent increase Service Act In

the

many

would, and one of the nation's rings,

J.

R.

Woods &

in sales after

Sons,

the Selective

was approved.

first

years of the draft, fathers

were

were excused from and

the purpose of determining your availability for training and

military service. Babies

armed forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected for training and service in the Army." The letter, signed by a member of the local board, told the draftee when and where to report. Deferment from the draft was based on a wide variety of reasons, including conscientious objection, economic de-

by mid-1943, eight million fathers were deferred. But as the

service in the

manpower

called "draft insurance,"

pool dwindled and demands from the battle-

more and more fathers lost their deferin status was opposed in Congress, where one Senator insisted that "slackers in the government bureaus" ought to be inducted "before American homes fronts increased,

ments. The change

...OFFICERS

©SAD

44

SACK, INC.

ONLY

are broken up." But by the

end of 1944, only 80,000 men

held deferments as fathers.

still

education.

In

the two draft registrations held before Pearl

Harbor, 347,038

men

out of a

total of

over 17 million had to

The burgeoning manpower needs forced Selective Service to conduct a total of eight different registrations. The age span v^as broadened to include all men from 18 through 65, though only those between 18 and 36 were actually called up. In the fourth registration, on April 27, 1942, the 60-year-old President of the United States registered and re-

mark because they could not write their own names. Before the War was over, the Army needed men so desperately that it had to lift the ban on illiterates and set up special schools to try to bring the uneducated up

ceived the draft card that he kept

suffered by his Gl students:

In

in his

wallet until he died.

— nearly 50 — there were remarkably few attempts to evade the

view of the enormous number of registrants

million

Most of the 348,217 cases logged by

draft.

involved technical violations, such as

Selective Service

out a form

filling

correctly, rather than outright evasion.

Some men

in-

attempt-

sign their forms with a

to the fourth-grade level in reading.

Goodman, wrote

B.

his

An Army

teacher, Roger

parents of the learning agonies

"One

boy,

who was

trying to

read for me, started trembling and sweating. His hands,

clutched around his pencil, were shaking like leaves and the sweat was standing out under the hair on his knuckles. A big drop of moisture rolled down his chin and plopped on the page. The soldier was so embarrassed that he put his

over the stain so that

I

might not notice

fist

it."

ed to avoid service by faking deafness, heart ailments or mental disorders. However, the prize for attempted draft

accounted

evasion belonged to Everett Stewart of Valley Station, Ken-

reasons for the high rate of rejections on this score are

tucky. Stewart kept the local board posted

on the alleged

extremely complex and have never been completely untan-

deterioration of his health by impersonating various of his

gled. The anxious times in which these men were living no doubt had something to do with the rejections, and there were other factors. The author Philip Wylie blamed what he

concerned loved ones

—

a sister, half brother, father

and

crippled old uncle. Finally, wearing a wig and floppy hat, he

appeared

own

at the

board as the bereaved

widow

death. For his performance, Stewart

three years

in

—were

rejected

were the most

deficiencies. Until

men

— more than

for physical, educational

called

major cause of rejection, emotional

third

for the 4-F status of

"Momism"

have been

some

— overprotective

right, in part at least. His

instability,

three million men.

mothers.

He may

The

well

view was supported by

Edward Strecker, a psychiatric consultant to the Secretary of War, who said many women "had failed in the elementary mother function of weaning offspring emotionDr.

problem faced by Selective Service during the

War. An astonishing number of lion

to

the federal penitentiary at Atlanta.

Rejections for legitimate reasons, however, frustrating

to report his

was sentenced

The

five mil-

or mental

1943 the Army was the only branch to

ally as

well as physically." Even those

often suffered from

who were

Momism, according

eration of Vipers he wrote:

"I

accepted

to Wiley. In

Gen-

cannot think, offhand, of any

which an entire division of

rely on draftees, and it deliberately set its physical requirements at rock bottom. The minimum height for draftees was

civilization

and the minimum weight 105 pounds. The selectees had to have correctable vision and at least half of their natural teeth; they must not have flat feet, hernia or venereal disease. In 1941 the rejection rate was so high, about 50

spell

Most Americans who were physically and mentally qualified were ready enough to take up arms for their country,

per cent, that Franklin Roosevelt convened a national con-

conscience.

ference to investigate. The conference concluded that the

induction, 42,973

five feet

chief causes of the rejections

— bad

teeth and bad eyes

men

but

except ours

in

living

has been used during wartime, or at any other time, to

out the word 'mom' on a

a small

tive Service

drill

field."

percentage chose not to serve for reasons of

Of

the 10,022,367

were

men ordered

officially classified

to report for

under the Selec-

Act as conscientious objectors "by reason of

Some

COs

could be traced to the shortage of basic medical care and

religious training

the lack of adequate nutrition during the recent Depression.

agreed to enter the service as medics or

Another major cause of rejection, illiteracy, could also be traced to the Depression and its crippling impact on public

duty that would not require them to bear arms. About

Typiiying the plight of the

and

12,000 others worked

belief."

at alternative

25,000 of the in

other lines of

nonmilitary service

in

Army

enlisted man, cartoonist Sergeant Ceorge Gl readers of Yank during World War II loses in his off-duty hours. Intent on a big time in town, he discovers as many a private did that the choicest spots are off limits, except to officers. When Baker's hero finally finds acceptance, the "Enlisted Men Only" notice lures him to a crowning ignominy. Baker's

—

—

Sad Sack out, even

—

a favorite of

—

45

151

Civilian

Public Service Camps.

refused to serve

The remaining 6,000

any capacity and were sent to federal

in

Most were Jehovah's Witnesses, Quakers, Mennoor members of the Church of the Brethren. When a

cial

artists. Some of them worked in mental and about 500 volunteered to be infested with

workers and

hospitals,

prison.

typhus-bearing

nites

serums. But most were assigned to menial labor

number

surprisingly large

of his coreligionists decided to

accept induction after Pearl Harbor, one imprisoned war suggested that the prewar pacifists

bitterly

resister

changed

their

minds and went

to

who

war should be prosecuted.

Conscientious objectors with a clear-cut religious opposi-

war were treated with more sympathy by draft boards and by the general public than those who balked at conscription on political or philosophical grounds. The War's most publicized CO, actor Lew Ayres, was a philosophical pacifist, whose belief stemmed in part from his tion

to

celebrated role as a disillusioned All

German

soldier in the film

Quiet on the Western Front. After Ayres was assigned to

woodsman

duty as a

in a Civilian

public reaction to him was so adverse that refused to

show

starring Ayres,

with

a

Camp, the many theaters

Public Service

which he was featured. One film Be Bad, was reshot by the producers

films in

Born to

new male

lead.

Later,

Ayres distinguished himself

with the Chaplains' Corps, caring for the dying and

ed under

Many

fire,

of the

on the

COs

island

in Civilian

wound-

of Leyte in the Philippines.

Public Service

Camps were

college-educated, highly trained professionals: teachers, so-

46

trees

lice

or infected with malaria to test

and building roads

—

new

— cutting

that neither suited their talents

nor satisfied their intense personal desire to be socially useful.

A

Stanford University research chemist, Dr.

DeVauIt, was assigned to digging ditches.

he did research on penicillin molds special

camp

until

for "rebellious" objectors.

tive Service to

In his

he was sent to a

He begged

announcing he would work full time he was prosecuted and imprisoned.

refused,

The COs

in

paid for their

the camps,

who worked

own food and

regimentation of the camps. tration

ance

When

in his

he

labora-

without wages and

clothing, resented the military In

some

instances their frus-

boiled over into strikes and other passive

tactics

Selec-

allow him to complete his penicillin studies

but was ordered to report for further ditchdigging.

tory,

Don

spare time

borrowed from Mohandas

K.

resist-

Gandhi's inde-

pendence movement in India. In federal prisons, where COs accounted for every sixth inmate, COs staged work stoppages and hunger strikes to protest racial segregation, mail censorship and parole restrictions. At the Danbury Correctional Institution in Connecticut, 18 protestors went on strike for 135 days and won

a

major victory when

officials

agreed to

racially integrate

were so effective that some of the same COs later used them in the civil-rights movement. Prison officials, accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals, had never seen anything like it. The superintendent of a Western prison said he yearned "for the good old days of simple murderers and bank robbers." Even murderers and bank robbers found it hard to understand the COs. One CO tried to explain to the notorious Louis Lepke what had brought him to Danbury. At first Lepke, the boss of Murder, Inc., could not comprehend exactly what crime the CO had committed. Then suddenly he understood and asked incredulously, "You mean they put you in here for not killing?"

The

the dining halls.

tactics

Most young men did not balk at entering the military service, however. If they were physically and mentally qualified, they were classified 1-A and given 10 days to tidy up their affairs. Then, on the appointed day, they gathered with 100 or so others

one with

at the

a suitcase or

designated point of departure

bundle and often with

— each

his wife, girl

friend or parents in tow. In

was

a

major

local event.

A

was described by the sociologist W. Lloyd Warner in his study of a town in Illinois, Democracy in Jonesville: "At 6:30 a crowd of people gathered outside a local cafe where the selectees were having their breakfast and receiving final instructions. Outside, the high school band would fall into position and next a color guard from the American Legion. As the boys came out of the door of the cafe, they lined up and the head of the draft board called 'Forward march.' They marched down Liberty Street to the railroad station where a large crowd had gathered. Everywhere

group of

little

Benning, Georgia; the Southern boy shivered that

blew across the

lynite

came back

a rattlesnake,

drill

ed individuals about to leave. As the

train

of fat supply sergeants

did not always or Marx!" in

who

The sharp break from

the story of the sergeant

The train pulled out and the buzz of crowd was drowned out by the band playing the Marine Hymn. Within a minute or two the station became deserted except for the two men loading in

train.

the

this ain't Hart, Shaffner,

was summed up

civilian life

who was

of draftees so he could swear

them

group Army. "Gentle-

trying to quiet a

into the

men, please be quiet," he begged. Then,

goddam

it,

SHUT

command, he

after they

had

"Now,

roared,

UP!"

camp, the recruit gave up his civilian identity rank and serial number and surrendered his mind and

In training

for a

body

—

numbing rituals morning calisthenics, cadence of 128 steps per minute, practicing the manual of arms and performing the drudgeries of kitchen to a series of

marching

in

He learned

police.

a

new

mal

—

"chow" for food; "on "SNAFU" for "situation nor-

vocabulary:

the double" for hurrying;

fouled up"; and "SOS" as the acronym for the

all

chipped-beef-and-gravy abomination that was served to

him on for ".

.

toast at six in the morning. (The .

on

"O" and "S"

stood

a shingle.")

The college graduates often had officers' training,

climbed onto the

from

doled out drab uniforms that

growling "Buddy,

fit,

pick up tensely and the band begin to play. Hurried kisses,

One

Wisconsin, one Brook-

explaining that he "got 'em off a big woim."

time adjusting to barracks

by one the boys shook hands with the draft board and

the cold

Inside the camp, the recruit found himself in an alien world of inch-long doctor's needles and half-inch crewcuts,

would come

embraces, and handshakes from relatives and friends.

in

Great Lakes Naval

to his barracks bearing a set of rattles

around the curve from the west the conversation would

excitement

fields at the

Camp McCoy,

Training Center. At

recruits

groups of people surround-

made another

The destinations of the trains and buses were stateside camps with such names as Dix, Benning and Meade. The arrival at one of these outposts was like stepping down on another planet. The climate, the culture and almost everything that moved could seem initially hostile to the newcomer. The boy from the North sweltered in the heat of Fort

taken the oath and were his to

small towns, the going-away

typical send-off given to a

mail and baggage onto a truck. Jonesville had

contribution to the war."

but those

life.

a particularly difficult

Many

of

them went

who remained

in

into

the enlisted

ranks found themselves

in an environment that bore no resemblance to the college campus. They had to get used to country music and barracks language. They grumbled at the lack of decent reading matter, and the officers in one camp forbade them to read anything but the Bible during the first

six

weeks

of training.

When one

recruit

had

his first

chance

After registering for fhe draft in 1942, World War I hiero Sergeant Alvin C. Yor/c (in hiat and tie), stops to cfiat outside tlie same country store in Pall Mall, Tennessee, where he had been inducted 25 years earlier. The 54-

year-old veteran was one of 13 million men between 45 and 64 who signed up in the country's fourth draft registration. Though York was raring to go, no one over 36 was actually called up; instead he served through the War as head of the draft board in Fentress County, Tennessee.

47

A TEXAS-SIZED RESPONSE TO A JAPANESE TRIUMPH Shortly after midnight

on March

1,

1942,

the flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, the cruiser Houston,

was sunk by the Japanese

south coast of Java. The entire crew of 1,087 was either killed or captured. off the

Aroused by the sinking of their city's namesake, the citizens of Houston, Texas, vowed that they would get even. With the motto "Avenge the Houston!" as his talisman, district Navy public relations officer Clarence C. Taylor initiated a whirlwind campaign to recruit 1,000 men from the

crewmen. was set up, and an 80-foot replica of the Houston was built to attract recruits. Taylor's campaign was so successful that by Memorial Day, when the official swearing-in of the Houston volunteers was to take place, more Houston area

A

to replace the lost

special enlistment station

than 1,400

men had

Thousands jam Houston on May

48

In

enlisted.

30, 1942, to

watch the swearing-in of Navy

recruits

Navy uniform, Clarence

whose

local

C.

Taylor awaits recruits.

— and national—patriotism led them

to join

up

and go into town, he was surprised to hungered for books more than for women;

to get off the base

find that he

instead of going to town, he hurried to the

(where he was approached by

a

young

sailor

camp

library

who

asked,

—

"Hey buddy, which is true fiction or nonfiction?"). The noncommissioned officers who presided over the training of the fledgling soldiers

the

Army and

and

sailors

Marines, petty officers

— sergeants Navy— were in

the

in

by-four timbers and Ford trucks hung with placards pro-

claiming them to be tanks.

commanders sometimes found strange ways overcome the equipment shortages. In the Louisiana maneuvers in the summer of 1941, a tough but canny major general named George S. Patton jr. was in command of an ill-equipped armored division. The division's tanks included an early 12-ton model that lacked a periscope, which meant Resourceful

to

commander had

monsters unlike anything the recruits had ever seen. To the

that the tank

seemed that the only object of these drillmasters was to make life miserable. "I shall nourish an allencompassing hatred for him so long as live," the newspa-

up through the

recruits

often

it

I

per reporter Jim Lucas wrote of a sergeant at his Marine

boot camp. "He roared until the

moment we

at us

left.

from the

Our bare

moment we appeared which we

existence, for

were humbly apologetic, plagued him, and sent him into spasms of rage." At times the treatment handed out by the sergeants and the officers was brutal. Dr. William C. Menninger, who was chief consultant in neuropsychiatry to the Army Surgeon General, recalled a medical officer who related to him "how well he had handled psychiatric problems when he was company commander." The officer had used a serup.

If

the enlisted

point to the notice on the

company

command.

black eye

—

in a collision

board forbid-

would not disobey

perhaps the recruit had gotten

his

with a door.

was exposed to a different kind of danger as he learned to dodge bullets in simulated combat, and to hug the ground and move forward while artillery fire whizzed overhead. "I've just had my first taste of advancing In

the field, the recruit

under

fire,"

In

Texas.

over

I

its

parts,

but they could be ordered by mail from Sears, Roe-

buck, Patton sent off a mail order and paid for the parts out of his

own

pocket.

America's citizen-soldiers,

War and

in

the Civil lot.

They

when

they could chuck the military

—

—

month when dismay of some

was due to expire. of their more hidebound comTo the manders, the citizen-soldiers frequently showed almost no

desert

in

the

itself."

top speed, the recruits frequently trained with

make-believe guns and tanks. They had to make do with painted wooden rifles, "machine guns" carved from two-

the draft law

respect for rank. Their brashness surfaced in the Tennessee maneuvers of 1941 in one of the most celebrated and controversial home-front incidents of the War. On a hot midsummer afternoon, a truck convoy bearing 350 troops

returning from a

Country Club.

month

When

yelled at the golfer

missed the

in

the field passed the

the troops saw

shorts strolling near the

a friend

I

had nothing to fear but fear

ancestors

chafed under regimentation and lived for the day

wolf whistles and shouts

admit

like their

the Revolution, were a brash and unruly

from

"I'll

the days before the American war machine began to

run at

meant go forward; a kick in the right shoulder meant turn right. Some of Patton's tanks were so old that they were continually breaking down. When a mechanic told him the Army did not have the badly needed spare

the back

was scared sweatless, but know what Roosevelt meant when he

Corporal Melvin Fauer wrote to

Camp Hood, now that it's said that we

—

deliver instructions to the driver through his feet: a kick in

would proudly

bulletin

Surely the sergeant

orders, said the officer

head poking fire and

and mock

barracks walls, tanks and trucks, a threat that they might

ding noncommissioned officers to even touch soldiers under their

to dust

to the

man came

report the beating, the officer

officer to

to ride with his

— exposed

life and go home. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the recruits began chalking on for "over the hill in October" the word "OHIO"

geant, a former boxer, to handle complaints from enlisted

men by roughing them

turret

first

Memphis

group of

tee, they set

girls

in

up a chorus of

— "Yoo-hoo-o-o-o!" A soldier also

on the

ball entirely

a

first tee,

"Fore!"

When

the golfer

someone shouted, "Hey, buddy, do

you need a caddy?" With that, the golfer threw down his club, vaulted a three-foot fence and presented himself to the convoy. He was Lieut. General Ben Lear, commanding general of the

49

WOMEN WHO

HEEDED THE CALL TO ARMS

IN

THE NATION'S HOOR OF NEED

To help

recruit female college students, Eleanor Roosevelt (center) visited U.S. campuses with military directors (left to right) Mildred McAfee

WAVES, Oveta Gulp Hobby of the WACs, Ruth C. Streeter of the women Marines of the

and Dorothy

A WAVE

C. Stratton of the SPARs.

takes aim with a pistol during target Although women in the Navy were never assigned to combat duty, and few of them ever got to leave the United States, WAVES served as gunnery instructors for men.

practice.

when almost every able-bodied man was away in uniform, women came out of the home to work in factories and At a time

foundries (pages 88-101), and to assume military roles hitherto

The nationwide rush

Women's Army

performed by men. to enlist in the

new

Auxiliary Corps startled re-

Soon the other seropened their ranks to women, though there were many restrictions. The Navy took some 77,000 into the Women's Naval Reserve, but although WACs were allowed to serve overseas, it was not until cruiters (pages 66-75).

vices as well

late in 1944 that WAVES— Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service got to travel to such safe areas as Hawaii, Alaska and the Caribbean. Similar restrictions applied to the smaller groups of women Marines and the Coast Guard's SPARs

—

a contraction of

semper paratus,

Latin for

"always ready."

—

Women's

Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. Female fliers, known as WAFS, underwent a stepped-up version of the pilots' training program, sometimes putting in 16-hour days drilling, mastering Morse code and map-reading, and flying single- and twinengine planes. As pilots, they proved faster with instruments and smoother at the controls than their male counterparts. Nevertheless, WAFS were restricted to ferrying planes from factories to Army air bases. The Navy made sure that the women under its command spent most of their time on land, operating control towers, repairing and maintaining everything from plumbing to parachutes, and performing whatever other tasks would free the men for

combat

duty.

By 1945, the number of the military was

women

serving

still

small, but given

society's preconceptions

about the female

in

The Army Air Forces as the air force was then known was so hesitant about enlisting women that it created an Army-

Amazons," the more than 200,000 women on active duty in the armed forces repre-

supervised branch of the Civil Service, the

sented a breakthrough.

—

50

role,

as well as a fear of creating

"new

WAFS makes a solo single-engine plane. Officially members of the Civil Service rather than the Army Air Forces, WAFS nevertheless were trained by the Army and flew Army planes. A

pilot in training for the

flight in a

A

female Marine operates a camera that was used for air reconnaissance. Women filled many ground positions at Marine air stations, directing air traffic

and repairing

aircraft

engines as well as driving service vehicles.

51

Second Army during the maneuvers from which the troops were returning. After Lear chewed them out properly, he prescribed the punishment: a 300-mile round trip by truck to their quarters in Arkansas and back to Memphis, where

camp

they would pitch

way

of the

took

War

it

back to Arkansas with

then march 15 miles gear.

full field

The troops World

in stride, singing an improvisation of the old

song

I

at the airport,

as they

putt, parley voo. vers, civilians

.

.

marched, "Old Ben

he missed

But throughout the rest of the maneu-

."

would

Lear,

his

line the streets

and shout

at the truck

convoys, "Yoo-hoo-o-o-o!" There were loud protests about Lear's harsh discipline from parents and congressmen, but Franklin Roosevelt refrained from intervening.

For

all its

growing pains, the Army emerged from

battles and training routines as a

Harbor,

Pearl

300,000 shall

er"

men

in

modern

— and what Chief of

Staff

mock

had grown from General George Mar-

than two years,

less

its

fighting force. By

it

described as "the status of that of a third-rate pow-

— to

1.5 million

men organized

Moreover, the organizational base zation of eight million

men was

into 31

combat

for the

divisions.

wartime mobili-

to the forefront the

men who would

lead the nation's fighting forces throughout World War II: men like Patton and that inconspicuous newcomer Dwight

D. Eisenhower. As Chief of Staff of the Third

Army

in

the

maneuvers of 1941, Colonel Eisenhower had conceived and directed the brilliant strategy that had routed the Second

Army under "Yoo-hoo Ben years,

Eisenhower would

Western Europe, but

Lear." Within the space of three

command

at the

the great invasion of

beginning of the War, he was

American public that a newspaper picture caption identified him as "Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing." When Ike saw the photograph, he quipped, "At least the initials were right."

so

little

known

to the

The War swept aside many strongly held prejudices toward servicemen. In the pre-Peari Harbor days, men in uniform often were treated shabbily by the public. "Soldiers and

—

a restaurant near a training

keep out," read a sign in camp. But after America entered the War, servicemen were respected, and the uniform became a symbol of pride. Girls flocked to the soldiers, sailors and Marines. The marriage

dogs

52

women

a

months

after Pearl

Harbor an

day married servicemen.

In

1940

many marriages had been the hope of avoiding the draft. Now, for many, it was the search for an emotional anchor among the new uncertainties of war. "1 the motivation for

don't love him," a young told

him

I

woman

told a sociologist. "I've

don't love him. But he's an aviator and he says

should marry him anyhow and give him a

little

I

happiness.

He

says he knows he'll be dead in a year." The old taboos of class, family consent and lengthy courtship were swept aside. Quick courtships were the order of the day, and perhaps the most impressive was that of the movie star Private Mickey Rooney. Assigned to Camp Siebert, Alabama, he met a lovely 17-year-old who had just been named Miss Birmingham. He proposed to her on their first date and they were married after an engagement of was deonly seven days. "I married Betty Jane because termined to marry someone," Rooney later wrote in his autobiography. "I'd had some drinks, was hurt and lonely, reached and grabbed." I

Some

firmly set.

Even more important, perhaps, the maneuvers and the

war games had brought

rate soared, in the first five

estimated 1,000

of the quickie marriages involved

young women, known ing,

as

unscrupulous

"Allotment Annies." After marry-

they received the $50 monthly allotment check due

each serviceman's wife and were the beneficiaries of the

Some married more than one Gl at a time. One Allotment Annie specialized in combat pilots, who were known to have a high mortality rate. Another woman, who was only 17, worked as a hostess in a nightclub and specialized in sailors who shipped out from the big Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. Two of her husbands met by chance in a pub in England and compared pictures of their wives. After the Shore Patrol broke up the fight, the two sailors joined forces to end the career of this

Gl's $10,000 life-insurance policy.

particular Annie.

For most servicemen, courtship and marriage had to be

long distance. At

carried

on

Private

Wayne

at

Camp

Roberts, California,

Harris spent an entire month's

pay

— $21

when the draft started, scarcely more than the $16 that Civil War recruits got 75 years before on one long-distance call

—

to his sweetheart in

Los Angeles.

Some wives attempted

to

keep up with

their

husbands

in

the service. Disheveled and careworn, carrying babies, they crowded the bus and train stations, moving from one train-

ARCHITECTS OF WAR: THE TOP

Army

Chief of Staff George C. Marshall (second from

Although America's military leaders on the battlefields abroad garnered most of the home-front headlines, four men in Washington, D.C., the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

were

charged with deciding how the nation's military could most effectively combat the Axis

enemy. Theirs was

sibility

—

to carve

a chilling respon-

out a worldwide strate-

gy for 11.2 million soldiers and airmen, 4.1 million sailors and more than half a million Marines.

U.S.

left)

BRASS

confers with other Joint Chiefs

(left to right)

The men who ran America's war effort from the home front were strikingly different. General George C. Marshall was known for his force of character and quiet dignity. Admiral Ernest J. King was just the opposite outspoken, blunt and proud of

—

his

reputation for toughness. Lieut. Gen-

Henry H. Arnold, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces, earned himself the nickname "Hap" because of his genial manner. Admiral William D. Leahy, President Roo-

eral

Ernest

].

King, William D. Leahy

sevelt's brilliant

was

and

and Henry H. Arnold.

versatile Chief of Staff,

a skilled organizer.

All four bore heavy burdens, but the most important man was Marshall. So incisive was his mind and so respected was his judgment that when his name came up for

the role of

commander

in

the crucial inva-

sion of Western Europe, President Roosevelt

decided he was too valuable

in

Wash-

ington to be spared, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower

was chosen

instead.

53

camp

ing

Near each camp, they

to another.

set

up house-

keeping as best they could, often paying outrageous

cooking on Sterno stoves and seeing few hours at a time. At Leesville, Louisiana, near

Camp

their

rents,

mates for only a

Polk, a reporter discov-

menace

ered young servicemen's wives paying up to $50 a month to live

in

chicken coops and ramshackle

sheds, converted

which had been broken up into cubicles with makeshift partitions. In one place, a single toilet and shower served 35 families. The local milk apparently was unsafe, and several babies died. In Brunswick, Maine, a college barns,

town, the families of

sailors at the

nearby Naval

air station

were more fortunate. Many of them were taken into the homes of Bowdoin faculty members; one professor provided meals and lodging for 26 people. For the servicemen

who had nowhere

else to

go for enter-

tainment, there was always the tawdry allure of the honky-

tonk

districts that

sprang up around almost every training

camp. Bearing such names

as

"The

Strip" or

they were garish clusters of bars, dance or brothels.

women lights.

in a

"Bug Town," sleazy hotels

At Albany, Georgia, near Turner Field, the

names in neon Alabama, across the Chattahoochee

brothel brazenly displayed their

Phoenix

City,

became was known

River from Fort Benning, Georgia, its

halls,

brothels and brawls that

it

so notorious for as Sin City.

Clergymen and other guardians of the public morality waged an unceasing war against the fleshpots. One unexpected champion of continence was Lieut. Commander Gene Tunney, chief of the physical-fitness program for the Navy, who also happened to be a director of the American Distillers

Corporation.

In a

Reader's Digest article entitled

"The Bright Shield of Continence" the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world asserted that abstinence from sex kept men "at the peak of physical force." He urged all servicemen to remain chaste for the duration and insisted that "Any man above the emotional level of a tomcat must realize that the professional's embrace is not only a

54

to health but a

shameful desecration of ideal love."

The chief weapon of the reformers was the so-called May Act of 1941, which enabled local communities to shut down brothels near military installations. By 1944, some 700 municipalities had closed their red-light districts. But shutting

down

organized prostitution only increased

the vast army of streetwalkers and

operated near the military

camp

installations.

who

followers

The clampdown

was accompanied by a sharp increase in venereal disCoupled with the desire to protect "nice girls" from predatory GIs, this led some spokesmen to advocate the

also

ease.

establishment of special, supervised brothels for soldiers. substitute do we offer for prostitution?" asked a Navy surgeon, who then answered ominously, "Like it or not, somebody's daughter."

"What

Most communities tried to provide alternatives to brothels and red-light districts. Across the country, there were United Service Organization centers where 3,000 USO a Gl could enjoy a clublike atmosphere and find a date for the Saturday-night dance. There were also hundreds of canteens sponsored by churches and local civic groups and occasional invitations for dinner or the weekend with private families. Famous personalities contributed their time to these servicemen's centers. At the New York Stage Door Canteen, the popular comedian Jack Benny served beer to GIs. At a canteen in the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., GIs were entertained by Vice President Harry Tru-

—

—

man's plunking out

a waltz

while film actress Lauren Bacall

perched seductively atop the piano. substitute for the All of the

home

—

girl

problems of being

for

en

in

the service and

the service, the

was no

away from

from loved ones and

first

civilian

—

of the

representatives of their sex

in

the

The Army, Navy Air Corps, Marines and Coast had separate branches for women. They ferried

forces. all

wrenched from

some members

sexual and racial

there

ways were armed services by discrimination. There were 300,000 wom-

the shock of being

armed Guard

in

the loneliness, the separation

intensified

Still,

back home.

planes, drove trucks, served as clerks and otherwise re-

men

leased

for

women

The

combat

uniform were regarded as second-class

in

citizen-soldiers.

They had

to

scored

endure the wisecracks of

who

fellow Cis and the derision of civilians

their

alternately

biased

who

feared they

PWOP — "pregnant

gals just stay

would

get, in the military

acronym,

"Why can't these own sweet self, instead of

without permission."

home and be

their

being patriotic," wrote a soldier trying to dissuade his

from

dam

enlisting.

he told

all,"

it

us dogs.

A Marine

Now

it's

officer put

his first

female

it

more

crudely,

arrivals. "First

sister

"Cod-

they send

women."

But the prejudice encountered by

women was

mild com-

who

pared with that encountered by blacks. The 961,000

compiled by the blacks were depressed by

inferior

educa-

The experience of Jackie Robinson showed how pervawas in the Army. Californian Robinson

sive racial prejudice

faced rigid discrimination for the his

Army

service.

A

serving as a morale officer for a black

One

time

first

in his life

during

lieutenant, he had the unenviable job of

company

at Fort Riley,

one of his men sum up the state of company morale: "They want to send me 10,000 miles away to fight for democracy when a hundred feet away they've got stools can't put my black butt on and Kansas.

day, Robinson heard

I

drink a bottle of beer."

of the War, a policy of strict racial segregation pre-

change. "Nobody's going to separate any bullets and label

system

far

more

rigid

In

life.

the training camps, blacks were relegated to facilities.

Army

were

units

segregated by race from the battalion to the division level

any

in

unit,

no black

officer

could outrank

a

white one.

At the beginning of the War, the Navy accepted blacks only as mess attendants; the Marines would not accept

them at all. Intermingling of the races, said the official government policy approved by President Roosevelt in 1940 "would produce situations destructive to morale and

—

—

detrimental to the preparation for national defense." Fur-

thermore, the Army, with the support of the American Red

went

so far as to segregate the blood plasma donated

by blacks and whites, even though the fected the

method

man who had

for preserving plasma,

per-

Dr Charles

R.

Drew, was himself black. Secretary of

War Stimson and many

—

a be-

reinforced by their generally poor performance on the

Army General

them told

'for

him

white troops' and angrily. "Let

who was unaware to

have your wife

me

put

his caller sitting

Camp Hood,

'for it

was

colored troops,' this

"

Robinson

way," said the provost,

black,

"FHow would you

like

next to a nigger?"

was court martialed after he refused to sit in the back of a bus on the post. Charges were filed against him and, though he was a teetotaler, he was given a test for drunkenness. When two major black newspapers got hold of the story, most of the charges were dropped and Robinson quickly was found not guilty of the remaining two charges. Other blacks from the North ran afoul of Army prejudice and civilian hostility. The training camps were located largely in the South, and there were frequent outbreaks of vioLater, at

Texas, Robinson

lence. In 1941, black soldiers at Fayetteville, North Carolina,

of his generals frank-

believed that blacks were intellectually inferior

lief

were

The next day, Robinson telephoned the camp provost

separate eating and recreational

ly

tests

favor of middle-class whites and that the scores

marshal to protest the segregated seating at the post ex-

vailed.

Cross,

Psychologists

For

a caste

the discrimination they had experienced in civilian

and,

in

test.

conclude that the

to

than

entered the service faced

much

the bottom 40 per cent on the

tional environments.

accused them of lesbianism and heterosexual promiscuity

and

in

have tended since then

duty.

Classification Test. Products of a largely seg-

regated and poorly funded educational system, most blacks

company of white five wounded. of the first man ever

fought an hour-long gun battle with a military police, leaving

One

of these clashes claimed the

killed rifle:

two men dead and

with the Army's

new

life

basic infantry

weapon, the M-1

he was a black American sergeant.

55

SHRUNKEN SHORTS FROM THE LAUNDRY

PREYED

ON

BY

WOLVES

IN SERGEANT'S

i YOU'RE IN THE

ARMY NOW

CLOTHING

The

classic tribulations of

an

Army

rookie are

lampooned

in a series ol

photographic montages syndicated by King Features during the Second World War.

57

CIVVIES TO KHAKIS:

THE MAKING OF A Gl life, millions of young Americans who had never attempted to execute the manual of arms or been exposed to the wrath of a fire-eating first sergeant

Fresh from civilian

or

marched

to

ducted into the

At Fort Douglas in Utah, solemn-faced recruits file off arriving buses and get ready to form ranks upon the command of a sergeant (lower left).

anybody's cadence but their

Army during World War

own were

in-

Going into the Army then carried an impact all its own, for America had been at peace for almost a quarter of a century, and most American men were total strangers to military life and discipline. Green, terrified, and accustomed to his privacy and individuality, the young rookie was in for a series of jolting experiences as soon as he was sworn in. He had said goodbye to his mother, his wife or his girl friend and now found himself in an environment where, as the soldier-author of the time, Marion Hargrove, put it, "persecution is deliberate, calculated, systematic." Or so it could seem during "processing." Here, in a routine as inhuman as an industrial production line, the rookie was first fingerprinted and given a physical, then interviewed, clothed and assigned to a training company. He also received a fitting welcome from U.S.

II.

grinning regulars: "Hello, sucker!" Later, at the barber's, he lost in

50 seconds what might have taken years of careful

grooming

to produce.

"Home" was now

where beds standing in and quickly; where all worldly goods were stored in foot- and wall lockers; and where there were no partitions between toilets. Food, though there may have been enough of it, was a double rows had

far cry In

from

home

to

a barracks,

be made

tightly, neatly

cooking.

the ensuing weeks, the recruit

range of Gl woes

fell

heir to the

whole

— everything

from being blasted out of bed by predawn bugles to toting a full field pack on morning marches. He learned how to strip and reassemble a rifle

"enemy" with a bayonet, even lob hand grenades with the precision of a pro quarterback. "It was tough to learn how to do that stuff," one veteran later blindfolded, gut the

said of his to

58

own

muscle and

training. But

during the process flab turned

a U.S. fighting

man emerged.

During processing,

a draftee at Fort Dix.

New

jersey,

whose

hat

is

now

his sole

claim to dignity,

is

inoculated from both sides for smallpox and typhoid.

59

Grinning troops at

Camp

Shelby, Mississippi, wait their turn to be sheared of their locks by one of their buddies. CI haircuts were

in,"

CLIPPED HEADS

AND LONG JOHNS

Still, if

As the rookie quickly learned, the Army had a reason for everything. Whether the

made sense or not was a differmatter. He was obliged to forfeit two

reason ent

he retorted, "not to make you look

like Cinderella."

and sanieven though he was perfectly ca-

each

man wound up

not always well

basic issue

fitted.

were three

well clothed,

Included

his

in

suits of khakis,

two

wool winter uniforms, two sets of fatigues, two pairs of shoes, four pairs of socks, five suits of summer underwear and two sets

thirds of his hair for "cleanliness

of winter ones.

tation,"

Describing his two-piece regulation long underwear, Private Hargrove commented sarcastically: "The undershirts are cut on a sweat-shirt pattern and are form fitting enough to send any Hollywood designer into frenzies of envy. The nether garments,

pable of taking care of

it

himself.

To get his shoe size, he had to hold two buckets of sand weighing 50 pounds, or as much as his marching pack. When his bare foot spread under the added weight, that was his "correct" size as far as the Army was concerned. One new man complained that he wore a size 9, not the lOVz that was issued to him. But the Army fitter would have none of it. "These shoes are to walk

60

which are called

omable

'shorts' for

some

reason, look like the tights

unfath-

worn

in

medieval days and show off the shapeliness of the masculine leg to best advantage

— or otherwise."

dubbed

"chili bowls.

A

rookie at Fort Sheridan,

Illinois, is

measured

for

long

johm

nlhs,longunde'

duty as paiamas.

\

61

nJnfaSSgSerrpray. 62

all

ul

L .c^u,pmcni

lor a lull

Uckl mspecUon.

I

he 1^17 helmet and the Springf.eld

rifle

began

to

be replaced

in

1941.

LEARNING AND LIVING BY COMMAND draftee's first three weeks in the Army, dubbed the "hardening period" by veterans, were the roughest. It was the time when every private felt he had two left feet and every sergeant would agree with him. Blistered soles were common, and a good laugh was hard to come by.

A

Besides drilling endlessly and standing

innumerable humiliating inspections, the men found themselves subjected to grueling work details. They stoked fires, hauled

and pulled KP. One private, describing his morning misery, wrote: "We have

trash

nothing to do until 7:30 so we just sit around and scrub toilets, mop the floors, wash the windows and pick up all the matchsticks and cigarette butts within a radius of 2,000 feet of the barracks."

After a hard day's work,

many wanted

Some

shot pool or played cards. Others spent their free time reading, or talking and eating at the PX. And almost

just to

relax.

everyone dreamed of a weekend pass.

Sitting

TS atop milk crates, dungareed soldiers

A sergeant shows

rookies at Fort Slocum,

oTkP at Fort McClellan, Alabama, peel a 'sack

New

York,

how

to tuck in their ties for

an A-1 appearance.

method. of spuds using the time-honored knife-and-concentration

63

64

with his girl His basic training a thing of the past, a sergeant enjoys dancing Washington, DC. friend at the USO, or United Service Organization, in Instead of Soldiers stationed close to smaller cities were not as fortunate. excitement and girls, most found little to do in the nearby towns bowl, have a few beers and catch a movie before returning to camp.

but

Whiling away free hours at Iron Mountain, California, CIs watch a film on purposes, movies were a makeshift screen in the desert. For morale shown on a regular basis at most Army posts in everything from ordinary theaters to winterized circus tents that could seat 2,000 soldiers.

65

THE DISTAFF SIDE

^^"^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^T^^^lT^^Tr^rTn^vpfa Director Uveta Limp rookies contrast with two crisp officers (far right) as

Hobbv reviews CuId noooy Luip

a training b unit of

the

Women's Army

Auxiliary Corps.

67

VOLUNTEERINQ FOR A MAN-SIZED JOB American men were not the only ones reality of it,

too.

Army

On

volunteers privates

—

life.

A number

of

jolted by the harsh

women

got a good taste of

the hot, sticky morning of July 20, 1942, the

—440

first

and 330 auxiliaries, or Des Moines, Iowa, to begin train-

officer candidates

•rolled into Fort

Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, forerunner of the Women's Army Corps, or WAC, established in 1943. Eventuing in the

more than 143,000 women served in the WAC, the women's services in World War II. Releasing

ally

largest of the

manpower

badly needed

for the firing line, they did every-

thing from repairing trucks to making aerial surveys

—

in all,

Army jobs. Recruiting began on May 27 and the response was overwhelming: more than 13,000 women stormed registration centers across the country. College girls, career women, secretaries, housewives and widows applied; even an Indimore than 235

an

woman

in

different

tribal

Washington, D.C.

Women cruiting,

volunteers line up in Washington, D.C. On the first day of re750 showed up more than three times the number expected.

—

dress.

(left),

that

So great was the turnout

embarrassed

application blanks twice during the day.

women

officials ran In

New

in

out of

York, 1,400

more than eight hours to sign up. "If the guys can take it," one volunteer said of her new life in uniform, "so can I." This remark was no idle boast. The women took the usual inoculations in stride; a sheepish Gl stood by with smelling salts just in case they were stood

in line for

in most cases they weren't. Like all rookies, the endured the assembly-line issuance of ill-fitting uniforms (they were too narrow in the hips and rode up the thighs), and they joked about the "rich mud-brown color" of their regulation slips and panties. They stood reveille

needed, but

women

all day. Many drilled Army manuals in the lighted after taps. For some old-line offi-

every morning and trained rigorously in

the evenings or studied

latrines of their barracks

—

and enlisted men, the idea of women in the service or "Wackies" was a bitter pill. But at least one 25-year vetercers

—

an disagreed. "They're a

damn

commanded

Fort

they could do

Des Moines.

we

ever

C. Faith,

who

sight better than

expected they would be," said Colonel "I

Don

honestly didn't believe

it."

After arriving at Rock Island Railroad Depot, lov^a, women bound for Fort Des Moines get ready for their first ride in an Army truck. Officer candidates trained lor six weeks at the camp which was the first of five while the training centers for women to open across the country auxiliaries underwent a four-week-long course.

—

68

—

69

70

Des of ibem already in uniform, emerge from the Fort CI Moines clothing warehouse, toting hefty duffel bags full of regular brassieres each. clothing and equipment, as well as two girdles and three

New arrivals, some

through a Beaming trainees are served soup on one of their first trips the calorie content was line The women ate standard CI fare, but men. reduced on the theory that they burned up less energy than

chow

^M with some of sergeant escorting arrivals lends a helping hand given the As part of their training, the women were how to properly make a bed.hovv^ to care initial instruction as

An Army

their suitcases.

same

for their

own

clothing

men—

and equipment, and

"fall

out" and

-fall

in"

71

The threat of inspection produces a flurry of activity. In standard twostory barracks like this one, which housed 30 women on each floor, cots were placed head to foot to reduce the chance of spreading colds.

Apprehensive trainees stand by their beds during an open-footlocker inspection by Colonel Faith (left center) and Director Hobby. Personal items filled the top tray; issued underwear was stored underneath.

11

f»-rji:

-»

Hundreds of

trainees do a waist-bending exercise during calisthenics Oglethorpe, Georgia. In another exercise, which was designed to strengthen arches, each worTian had to pick up a pencil with her toes.

at Fort

Coveralled students of

a motor-transport class line up in froi.i ^. iii^.r Des Moines motor pool. Women learned how to well as how to free mired trucks and assemble engines.

vehicles in the Fort drive in

convoy

as

A HARD NEW LIFE IN AN OLIVE-DRAB WORLD The

women

trainees did not find thempampered. Although they did not handle weapons or undergo tactical training, they endured the same rigid regimen

selves

that

the

—

men

did, with

much

the

same

results aching muscles and sore feet. And they had to put up with a lack of privacy,

too. At

one

post, the

women

that their barracks, like all

discovered

Army

barracks.

women

skillfully navigate a wooden obstacle at Fori Oglethorpe. Training given for overseas assignment also included descending 30-foot cargo nets and crawling through a barrage of tear-gas grenades.

Agile

had no shades on the windows. At others, they encountered latrines with only makeshift cardboard partitions. No less unnerving were the visits of inspecting officers dubbed "bloodhounds in the boudoir" by the women who scrutinized everything from the straightness of stocking seams to hairdos. There was, of course, KP and the daily ritual of calisthenics. And when the women were not sweating their way through gas-mask drills, they were hiking around the countryside or learning to "survive" in the field. They

—

—

dug

slit

trenches, even bathed out of hel-

in training to go overseas, they clambered over mazelike obstacle courses and took long hikes in the rain. Through it all, the women managed to preserve their dignity and neatness beauty parlors were set up on post and suffi-

mets. Later,

—

cient irons

were issued

for pressing easily

creased uniforms. They also managed to have fun. For four hours in the evenings

and for a day and a half on weekends, they were on their own. And like soldiers everywhere, they "did the town."

73

Before a contingent of visiting officers at Fort Des Moines, well-drilled

74

women— now prou d veterans of tfie training grind—pass smarlly in

review. Rookies

in

tt

bleachers

watch

how

it is

done

(right rear). Drilling

went on

for at least an

hour

a day,

sometimes during snowstorms, but

it

offered a respite from dull classes.

75

In

March 1941, bulldozers began

banks of

a lazy

construction of a building. In the

would use up

clearing

mammoth new

next

six

woodlands on the

downtown

Detroit for

Ford Motor

Company

creek 27 miles west of

months, the building's planners

five miles of blueprint

paper

a day,

tons of structural steel would be consumed.

and 25,000 complet-

When

ed, at a cost of $65 million underwritten by the federal

government, the barnlike edifice covered 67 acres and was

most enormous room in the history man." Nearly a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long, it was so large that errands had to be run by motorcy-

aptly described as "the

of

cle or automobile.

Called Willow Run, after the creek on which ed, the

new

it

was

building was the largest aircraft factory

world designed

locatin

the

produce long-range bombers, B-24 Liberators, at the rate of one every hour. The manufacture of the bombers, as conceived by the Ford Motor Company's to

production chief, Charles

Raw

E.

Sorensen, called for an orderly

would be fed into one end of components made in adjacent areas would then be joined together on four main assembly lines; these would converge into one line at the other end of the structure, where the completed planes would be rolled series of steps.

materials

the building;

outside onto concrete runways and flown

off.

Almost from the start, however, there were huge problems. Some were technical: the B-24 had 100,000 parts as

compared with 15,000 production the

Army

in

a Ford,

and

in

the

first

year of

Air Forces ordered 575 major design

bomber plant

changes, each of which required the retooling of machines.

A new B-24 every 63 minutes The show-me Senator from Missouri A mild-mannered war production czar A two-and-a-half-ton metal duck

An even more critical problem was keeping the machines manned. Willow Run had been selected as a site before the imposition of gasoline and tire rationing. Because there was little housing in the immediate area, more than half of the

josef Stalin's predilection for jeeps

workers had to commute from Detroit, an hour each way.

The world's

largest

The new breed of industrial leaders From pinball machines to parachute harnesses A White House floor mat goes to war Chewing gum for K rations

A

use for midgets inside airplane wings

How to fly a B-29 Marilyn

A coal

Monroe on

in five

minutes

the assembly line

strike that fueled the fires of hatred

The

daily absentee rate ran as high as 17 per cent, three

times the national average, and the turnover was appalling:

during one month. Willow Run hired 2,900 workers and

lost

company's cantankerous founder, 79-year-old Henry Ford, did not help. He was bitterly antiunion, banned smoking on company time and

3,100.

The personnel

refused to hire

policies of the

women

for factory jobs.

Even after he relaxed the

rules,

the plant

still

was beset

with personnel problems. By the end of 1943, the elaborate

MIRACLES OF PRODUCTION

assembly-line setup was turning out only one

bomber

a day,

and people across the country were joking that Willow Run's name should be changed to "Willit Run?" At the government's urging, Ford began to decentralize the

mammoth

operation.

Much

of the

equipment used

to

manufacture parts for the B-24 was farmed out to other Ford and to subcontractors. The scaled-down work force

plants

could

now

focus on the assembly-line operation, the pivotal

materials as steel

critical

items

deemed

and aluminum

to

producers of

nonessential to the defense effort. The carrot

was the prospect

of profits to be gleaned by converting to

the manufacture of essential goods. As Secretary of

Stimson baldly put going to

try

go

to

capitalist country,

in

it

War

the privacy of his diary: "If you are

war,

to

you have to

or to prepare for war, let

business

in

a

make money out

of the process or business won't work."

duced dramatic results. By 1944, a B-24 was rolling out of Willow Run every 63 minutes. In all, the plant produced

The money to be made was alluring indeed. The no-risk arrangement devised by the government and known far and wide simply as "cost plus" guaranteed the holder of

8,685 Liberators, capable of delivering up to four tons of

a

bombs apiece each time

hefty profit as well.

point of Sorensen's original concept. Decentralization pro-

they roared over

enemy

territory.

—

—

defense contract not only funds to cover

The cost-plus policy took The planes that rolled off the assembly line at Willow Run were only part of an avalanche of armaments produced by American industry during World War II. Before that conflict came to an end, American plants turned out 296,429 airand self-propelled guns, 372,431 artillery pieces, 47 million tons of artillery ammunition, 87,620 warships, 44 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition in all, $183 billion worth of war materials. So impressive was this feat that even such a grudging admirer of American achievements as Russian Premier Josef Stalin proposed a planes, 102,351 tanks

—

toast at the

Teheran Conference

late in

1943 "to American

war would have been lost." America's role as the great armaments maker of World War II began a year before Pearl Harbor. "We must be the great arsenal of democracy," President Roosevelt said in a and fireside chat, calling upon America to supply its allies with planes, tanks, guns and build up its own defenses production, without which

this

—

—

ships.

States

But harnessing the industrial might of the United

and turning

it

from

civilian

production to war output

but a

his costs

effect during the pre-Pearl Har-

bor defense build-up and soon incurred the wrath of a

peppery United States Senator, Harry In late

Truman

of Missouri.

1940, he began receiving complaints from constitu-

ents about waste

an

S.

Army camp

in

the construction of Fort Leonard

house thousands of the new see for himself.

Wood,

the southern part of his state intended to

in

One

draftees.

Truman decided

to

wintry day he got into his broken-

down Dodge and drove from Washington unannounced. What he saw there made his blood als of all kinds were out unprotected

to the

camp,

arriving

Building materi-

boil. in

snow and rain, would

the

"getting ruined, things that could never be used,

never be used.

Some

of

them had been bought because And there were men,

somebody knew somebody.

.

.

.

hundreds of men, just standing around and collecting pay, doing nothing."

Truman had been an serving under

fire in

artillery

captain

France, and he

was

spending that would help the soldier's

required a massive governmental effort. Only the govern-

he also expected the government to get

ment could

He was

World War government

in

all

their

I,

for

any way; but money's worth.

lot in its

award contracts, allocate scarce materials. The task, gargantuan in itself, was further complicated by the traditional American aversion to government "meddling" in private enterprise. Businessmen

huge fixed fees assured to cost-plus contractors regardless of what they had been charging for their products before the War. The government, he concluded, was handing out these profits "in

accustomed to freewheeling did not take kindly to dictates from Washington bureaucrats, let alone the baffling regula-

Christmas party."

effectively decide priorities,

and the reams of paper work they generated. The government's solution was to employ the old carrotand-stick technique. The stick was the power to deny such tions

much

especially incensed at the

the

same way Santa Claus passes out

After visiting Fort Leonard

gifts at a

church

Wood, Truman drove more

than 25,000 miles to other camps and to defense plants

around the country, finding evidence of millions of taxpay-

77

ers' dollars

going

down

Upon

the drain.

his return to

Wash-

ington, D.C., he called for the establishment of a special

move

Senate watchdog committee, a

that

March

was warmly en-

of 1941

dorsed by

his

Committee came into

to

being, with

resigned

order to run for the Vice Presidency

in

colleagues.

In

Investigate the National

Truman

as

its

the Special

Defense Program

chairman. Until he in

1944, he

was to remain the relentless scourge of such misusers of government funds as makers of defective airplane parts and cheaters

who

lied

about the tensile strength of the

steel

Shoddy workmanship would never be completely eliminated, of course. Some American weapons and equipment proved faulty: improperly welded Liberty ships that broke apart, guns that jammed, torpedoes that did not explode. But thanks in considerable measure to Truman and his investigators, these failures were exceptional; moreover, by the War's end, the committee's sleuthing had saved

the

who were more and sincerely eager to pitch in to help the cause of democracy. Many of them went to Washington on their own to seek a contract only to find the capital a mindboggling maze of rival agencies and divided authorities. A

—

supposedly all-powerful

More

for

that

much

defense program. The businessman

78

Manageover the

often than not, small businessmen bidding for a

Truman and

of the trouble in the

who

admitted

that, "if

it

in

the

and anything but impressed with what they had seen of the capital. "Washington's a funny town," one frustrated cold,

petitioner fumed. "It's got scores of hotels, and you can't get a room.

meal.

The

blame

final say-so

share of the defense effort found themselves out

nesses

to

Office of Production

awarding of contracts; that was up to such long-entrenched agencies as the Army-Navy Munitions Board and the Mari-

his col-

was

new

ment, for example, did not have the

It's

It's

got 5,000 restaurants, and you can't get a

got 50,000 politicians, and

thing for you. I'm going

billion.

The bungling and the waste itself

couldn't have handled our profits

altruistic

leagues uncovered were far from one-sided. The govern-

ment

we

time Commission.

plate that they produced.

country an estimated $15

hadn't been for taxes,

with a steam shovel" was offset by others

industrial

— and

nobody

will

do any-

home."

giants fared

better than the small busi-

not only because of their proven ability to

produce on the mass scale

that the military required.

enjoyed added influence through company

They

men who were

the capital serving in the

in

government

for a dollar a year,

but who often retained their corporate salaries and loyalties. A survey made in December 1942 showed that 71 per cent of

defense contracts were held by America's 100

all

biggest corporations.

Yet

ing committee, he had access to the

What he had

nation's business leaders

were

at first

many

of the

wary of plunging

White House at will. was short but not

to say to Roosevelt this time

sweet: his committee was about to issue

and it would an unholy mess. report,

of the certainty of great gain,

in spite

the increasingly prestigious chairman of a Senate investigat-

its

annual

first

war production

indict the

effort as

Following Truman into the Oval Office was Wendell

into

L.

the defense effort. After the Depression of the 1930s, the

Willkie, the Republican Presidential candidate in 1940.

economy had just begun to flourish again, releasing a pentup civilian demand for automobiles, refrigerators, vacuum

had come armed with an impressive personal statistic. had counted up, he told Roosevelt, and found that he had

cleaners, luxury gadgets. Eager to exploit this ket,

growing mar-

manufacturers foresaw only the headaches that would

be involved

retooling their plants and coping with ever-

in

Moreover, no one could be sure how much longer the war in Europe would continue; Hitler appeared to be on an irreversible winning streak. shifting military specifications.

the postwar era, overexpanded plant facilities could be

In

a costly

burden.

American manufacturers was to same time keep turning out a cornucopia of consumer goods. This attempt to resolve the classic dilemma of guns versus butter was doomed to failure: arms production during the prewar period fell far short of the government's goals. It took the rude awakening of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor to put America's war machine into high gear.

some

for

military orders but at the

Willkie

—

—

who was in charge except himself. Even his supportconceded that he was no genius as an administrator. "The boss," said one, "either appoints one man to do four

clear ers

jobs or four

One day America's

men in

do one. Often he does both." mid-january, 1942, more than a month

in

One

to

make

125th

his

try

in

a

—

Willkie did not have to

make

the 125th

afternoon a big, affable Missourian

Later that

try.

named Donald M.

summoned from

ing of the government's Supplies, Priorities

a

Nel-

meet-

and Allocations

Board. As the SPAB's executive director. Nelson was already the top ranks of Washington's wartime hierarchy; even

in

he was stunned to learn of the elevated post that Roose-

so,

velt

had

in

mind

for him.

He was

to

be head of

a

new War

Production Board (WPB), with more authority over the nation's

economy

than any other American except the Pres-

ident himself.

discussing his marching orders with Roosevelt, Nelson

politely

reminded the President

that previous so-called su-

peragencies had failed because neither their functions nor

powers had been adequately defined; he would need, an Executive Order spelling out his role. The President's reply was typically breezy. "He told me," Nelson recalled, "to write out my own order and send it over to

their

he

said,

him; he'd sign

it."

Drafted by Nelson, with the help of his advisers, the or-

der was unprecedented

in

grabber; he was,

somewhat abashed by

in fact,

scope. Nelson was no powerhis

sudden

press acclaim as a "dictator" about to "tackle the biggest

months before

facture of products he judged to be nonessential. Moreover,

visitor

in to

went on, he planned

see Roosevelt for just a brief social call; now, as

entry into the War, Roosevelt received

visits that

helped change

was Harry Truman. As

a

his

mind about

a

freshman Senator

1934, he had been obliged to wait five

getting

after

87

in all history." But he was a thoroughgoing pragmatist. To do the job, he required, and got, the authority to commandeer materials and assign priorities in their use, compel the conversion and expansion of plants and bar the manu-

official

two successive czar.

to

effort

speech before an audience Roosevelt could not afford to shrug off the United States Conference of Mayors.

In

The Japanese attack touched off a nationwide clamor for a single director of the war effort a "czar" empowered to do whatever was necessary to get things done. Some of the men around Roosevelt had been urging such an appointment for many months, but the President's preferred way was to spread responsibilities so diffusely that it was seldom

war

times during the campaign and 37 times since. That night,

son arrived at the White House,

The prudent course

take on

publicly called for a single director of the

He He

job

Production czar Donald M. Nelson climbs down from an armored vehicle 1942, while Chrysler president K. T. Keller (left) and plant manager E. J. Hunt (center) look on. Industry-wide conversion from cars to war production had recently been completed, and Nelson was in Detroit to give defense workers a pep talk. Their job was just beginning, he told them; in 7943 the U.S. would count on them to turn out $12 billion in war materiel nearly nine times their output in the previous six months. in July

—

79

his

orders were to take precedence over those issued by any

to

come

At 54, Nelson had the

little

Missouri town of

way since his boyhood in Hannibal, made famous by Mark a long

Twain; once, while taking a piano lesson

in

Twain's old

when he dropped youthful aspiNelson's own look around. nostalgic in for a to become a profesrations were academic; he had hoped house, he had even met the great author

sor of chemistry. Instead, he had

Roebuck,

rising to

president

in

How

become

its

gone

to

work

for Sears,

$70,000-a-year executive vice

charge of merchandising.

this qualified

him

to supervise history's biggest pro-

duction job was a mystery to

many people

in

Washington;

Nelson himself long remembered the "polite coughs and lifted

eyebrows"

that greeted his elevation. But, as he point-

ed out, the Sears, Roebuck experience was invaluable. Responsible for procuring 100,000 different items, from spools

ture in order to

As

WPB

a lot

about

know where

boss, he

was

methods of manufacthem at the right price.

their

to find

to retain a merchandiser's eye.

he saw Winston Churchill ing a one-piece siren suit,

When

White House meeting wearhe was instantly reminded "of a

at a

which we had sold in great quantities Roebuck & Co. to filling-station operators and

pair of the overalls at Sears,

who

had to crawl underneath automobiles."

was

a

major weakness:

distaste for contention. In spite of his dictatorial

he preferred to

rely

his

powers,

on persuasion and amicable compro-

mise, patiently hearing out

sides of a dispute, his

all

and untroubled face reminding one observer of Western Buddha."

a

plump

"Middle

manner posed a problem with respect to Though nominally he had the

Nelson's mild

the awarding of contracts.

control, he chose to leave this vital matter to the military.

The military, chafing in any event under civilian direction, was not especially grateful, and some observers thought Nelson was too easygoing with the brass. "One of these War Department generals," a Nelson aide remarked, "will stick a knife into Nelson, and all Nelson does is pull the knife out and hand it back and say, 'General, believe you " dropped something.' I

But beneath

of thread to fertilizers to heating equipment, he had been

compelled to learn

mechanics

Offsetting Nelson's strengths

other government agency.

tougher than some of

his critics

followed the WPB's creation, a his office sharply curtailing

tion of approximately to the

war

effort.

was to prove weeks that stream of edicts flowed from

affable exterior Nelson

his

suspected.

In

the

or entirely banning the produc-

300 items judged to be nonessential

Among them were

refrigerators, bicycles,

waffle irons, beer cans, toothpaste tubes, coat hangers

even metal caskets. The manufacturers of these products

were given

a hard choice: they could convert to essential

and make do with

items, or they could try to find

substi-

tute materials.

For consumers, the worst

would have In

to get

blow was the word

along without

four decades, Americans had

new

that they

cars for the duration.

grown used

to the picture

of Detroit as a boundless purveyor of pleasure on wheels;

since 1900, almost 86 million automobiles and trucks had rolled off

its

assembly

lines,

But

now

those assembly lines

the core of the mass-production system that

key to victory

— had

to

would be the

be preempted. Predictably, the man-

datory conversion of the automobile industry was Nelson's

first

edicts.

No

among

other industry could produce with

in the volume required in wartime. In the was to turn out $29 billion worth of war materiel. The wheeled and tracked vehicles of war were obvious candidates for manufacture by Detroit, and they came off the lines in staggering numbers: a trainload of tanks every

the speed and

end,

The boarded window ol an electrician's shop in Coolidge, Arizona, proclaims somewhat optimistically the fate of one small business in 1942. Facing shortages and giant competition that they could not keep up with, many such businesses had to shut down and in doing so changed a traditional American fact of life. At the beginning of the War, some 175,000 small companies did 70 per cent of the nation's business; by March 1943, however, they accounted for only 30 per cent.

—

—

—

80

it

day, 2.4 million military trucks in

strange

known

new conveyance,

all.

There was also

the amphibious

as just plain "duck." Half truck

DUK-W,

and

a

odd animal character

half boat, the

of the official designation

the invasions of Sicily and the mainland of

in

the

Popeye; the government

duck could lumber through the water transporting 50 soldiers at a speed of 6.4 mph, then clamber ashore and make as much as 50 mph on the highway. It was used with great success

came from

better

Italy,

cle. Josef Stalin

via

insisted that

— GP

Lend-lease that he kept asking for more of them,

—

beyond the Ural Mountains

barrels capable of extremely rapid

origin of

name. Some people claimed that the name

its

al-

though Russia's dictator did nothing to dispel the Red Army myth that they were Soviet-made produced in a secret

The only bone of contention about the jeep concerned the

of

a corruption

purpose" vehi-

took such a fancy to the jeeps he received

factory

in a string

the comic strip

was

for "general

amphibious operations in the Pacific that included Tarawa, Kwajalein and Saipan. The most popular wartime vehicle to come out of the auto industry was the rough-riding jeep, made by WillysOverland and by Ford. Equipped with four-wheel drive, it could travel cross-country and just about anywhere else.

and

in it

at a

place improbably

called "Willys-Overland."

The techniques used

to turn out vehicles also

proved

adaptable to the mass production of weaponry of every sort. Chrysler, for

40mm

example, tackled the manufacture of the

which had from one to four fire. The Swedes, who had developed the Bofors, required 450 man-hours to make Bofors

antiaircraft gun,

A PAIR OF THE WAR'S

MOST VERSATILE VEHICLES Two

most ingenious vehicles turned home front were the jeep and the amphibious DUK-W, or duck. The jeep proved as nimble as a motorcycle and was able to negotiate rocky hills, marshy swamps and shifting sands. Originally designed for messenger service, it was soon being put to dozens of other uses in every war theater. With an antitank gun of the

out by workers on the

in

tow,

it

could quickly bring firepower to

tached,

enemy armor or, with evacuate wounded off

the battle-

field.

was variously called the

iron pony,

bear on

It

leaping lena and panzer

a litter at-

killer.

Brigadier

General Theodore Roosevelt, son of President Teddy Roosevelt, and an assistant di-

commander in North Africa, Sicily and France during the War, affectionately

vision

named The

his

jeep Rough Rider.

jeep's less widely sung but equally

heroic cousin, the duck, had

its

two-and-a-

half-ton truck chassis encased in a water-

and rudder The duck gave a new

tight hull fitted with propeller

for duty in water.

dimension to landing operations. Transport ships could anchor out of range of beach-based guns, open their bows, lower their ramps and disgorge hundreds of ducks that ferried troops and cargo ashore and then carried them inland at speeds up to 50 mph. About 1,000 ducks took part in the invasion of Sicily

twice that

mandy

number

in

1943; more than

participated in the Nor-

landing the following year.

Troops

roll

overland

in a

duck, which by a

flick

of a lever could be converted to sea duty

81

one gun by handcrafting. Chrysler's engineers designed jigs, dies and other machine tools to mass-produce the parts, which could then be put together on the assembly line; total manufacturing time was 10 hours. By the summer of 1942 the auto makers were also heavily involved

in

the manufacture of airplanes, engines and other

While Ford was ironing out the production problems at Willow Run, the Packard Motor Company was making Rolls Royce engines for the RAF, Chrysler was manufacturing bomber fuselages, and General Motors was assembling fighters and turning out wings, landing gear and other parts for bombers. aircraft parts.

But the aircraft production goals set by President Roosevelt required a gigantic effort,

have to be borne by the

and the major burden would

aircraft industry itself. In the

turers

the defense build-up

had produced

in

a total of

in

1942, and 125,000

in

ta,

six billion

1940

number

of aircraft

to 81 in 1943,

while floor

space for plane manufacture and assembly was expanded

from 14 million

to

170 million square

feet.

Employment in the aircraft industry rose from 100,000 in to over two million at the peak of the war effort.

1940

Although President Roosevelt's goal of 125,000 planes 1943 proved unattainable, the total U.S. production

in

in-

creased from 23,000 planes per year before Pearl Harbor to

85,898

in

1943 and 96,318

Moreover,

as the

War

in

1944.

progressed, the quality of Ameri-

can aircraft improved dramatically. The performance of the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, the work-horse

82

predecessors, the B-29 could travel a third farther and

and carry over two and a half times the bomb load. improved dramatically from the sluggish

U.S. fighters also

P-40

Tomahawk

the swifter,

widely used

more

at the outset of the

agile P-38 Lightning,

and P-51 Mustang, generally regarded of World War II.

War

to

P-47 Thunderbolt

as the finest fighter

hack their way through jungles of red tape, improvise

solutions to production problems and inspire their employ-

ees to herculean efforts.

1943.

Georgia. Across the country, the in

its

faster

to

aircraft

plants increased from 4!

the B-29, the gigantic Superfortress. Almost twice as large as

1940, U.S. aircraft manufac-

equipment were on order. orders would require an enormous Fulfillment of these enlargement of production potential, and the aircraft industry set about at once to increase its plant capacity. The Boeing Airplane Company began expanding in the Seattle area; Douglas Aircraft enlarged its facilities in Southern California to include a new $12-million plant at Long Beach. Bell Aircraft put up a new fighter assembly plant at Niagara Falls, New York, and a huge new bomber factory at Marietand

arma-

75,000 planes by the use of

Within a few weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, dollars in planes

its

ment was dramatically increased. Before the end of the Second World War the B-17 and B-24 were superseded by

To meet America's stupendous production goals a special breed of industrial leader was required. Men were needed

handcraft methods. The President was calling for 60,000 planes

speed and range remained about the same, but

32

years between the Wright brothers' pioneer flight and the start of

bombers of the Army Air Forces, was improved: the B-17's speed was increased from 256 to 287 miles per hour, and its range was extended from 1,377 to 2,000 miles; the B-24's

Of

all

the miracle workers, the

most dynamic, perhaps, was the shipbuilder Henry

J.

A landlubber who

bow

persisted

in

"front end," Kaiser built nearly Liberty ships

— the

calling a ship's

one

Kaiser.

the

third of America's 2,716

ungainly-looking merchant vessels that

bore the brunt of carrying materiel to the fighting fronts. Kaiser's very

name became

done

effectively.

fast

and

He had been

a

synonym

for getting things

shipyard only once before he started

in a

new pursuit he brought organiand the techniques he had perfected in the construction industry. A junior-high-school dropout, he began his career as a photographer and paving contractor, building ships. But to this

zational genius

and went on to construct the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge and the world's largest dam, the Grand Coulee. During the War, Kaiser operated seven shipyards and revolutionized shipbuilding. Instead of laying a keel and constructing the ship around and above fabricated and then effective

it

by

riveting,

that at the

peak of the War he astounded the

world by building and launching and 30 minutes. Kaiser

was

a

he had sections pre-

welded together. His methods were so a ship in only

260-pounder with energy

to

match

80 hours his

phy-

sique. In his early sixties, he slept only four hours a night.

phone

calls

and

rushed around the country hiring workers, organizing

new

spent $250,000 a year projects and cutting for steel

of steel,

and

in

long-distance

government red tape

to get priorities

and other materials. When his shipyards ran short he borrowed $106 million from the government

built California's first steel mill, near Fontana. Kaiser,

said an associate, "is like a breathless elephant.

He

just leans

belt just long

enough

Priority ratings, lar

match

to

when

that proportion

— 60

feet.

obtainable, proved to be a particu-

source of discouragement to small businessmen. The

WPB

and C, but wangle an A soon found that it had been topped by ratings AA and AAA granted indestarted out simply with the ratings A, B

applicants

who managed

to

—

pendently of the

WPB

by the military's chief contracting

on you, smiles, and you move."

agency, the Army-Navy Munitions Board. Henry Kaiser him-

The industrial giants such as Kaiser and Ford usually got what they wanted, but in the scramble for materials many small companies fell by the wayside. Some were elbowed

took a dim view of the system. "A priority," he said, "is something which gives you an option to ask for something which you know you're not going to get anyhow." Kaiser could cut his way through the labyrinth of the self

out

in

whose

the competition for scarce metals; the

product required just a

stood no chance experts in

War

fellow

power

move them, and the arsenals

in

where

who were

lucky

enough

to secure a hearing

could not always be sure of a logical reaction from the thinkers.

a priority for materials to

or belt.

When

a

WPB

One

food processor requested

construct

official

a

100-foot-long convey-

asked what proportion of the

company's production went into the war effort, the reply was "60 per cent." The official did some quick figuring and ruled that the

lost.

In

less

than a year

to juggle the dwindling supply for use

Production Board's

they were made.

WPB's bureaucratic

smaller fry tended to get

Nelson's domain had 25,000 employees and a stupefying table of organization that included such units as the Pipe,

the electric transmission lines to

Businessmen

WPB;

Wire Products and Galvanized Steel Jobbers Subcommittee of the Iron and Steel Advisory Committee. The howls of the modest entrepreneurs quickly reached Capitol Hill. In mid-1942 an act of Congress required the War Production Board to set up a Smaller War Plants Divi-

the

the ships and trains to

in

little

copper, for example,

own

when

were having

munitions,

bit of

company could have

priority for a

conveyor

sion "to mobilize aggressively the productive cai^acity of

all

small business concerns." Later reorganized as a corporation with lending powers,

it

was headed by

Congressman, Maury Maverick,

who

a

former Texas

up to his name. A passionate foe of bureaucracy, Maverick was destined to win a permanent [jjace in the dictionary by coining the word "gobbledygook" to decry bureaucratic jargon; his

own memos were

liked to live

labeled with such trenchant phrases as

"bloody urgent." Maverick championed the cause of the small businessmen, securing prime contracts and subcontracts for thousands of them. But the battle was never fully won. Many would-be [participants in the war eftort had to shut down; by 1942, there were 300,000 fewer small companies in existence than there had been before the War. large, medium ,\nc\ All told, some 200,000 companies small successfully made the conversion to war production. Some were able to take the leap with relative ease. A bedspread manufacturer turned to making mosc|uito netting for use in tropical combat zones. A soft-drink maker, accustomed to filling bottles with liquids, instead loaded shell casings with explosive chemicals. A producer of rub-

—

—

ber boots

A New

pontoons.

A paper-box manufacturer

man implements his solution to the tire shortage in 1942— made from soles of old shoes. Rubber was one of the most

jersey

retread critical

now made

— and scarcest —of wartime materials:

a flying Fortress took half a

needs for the 18-month period beginning in July 1942 were estimated at 842,000 tons— 200,000 more than in the national stockpile. Not until mid-1944 was there enough synthetic rubber to ease the shortage and again allow civilian consumption. ton, a destroyer

some 50

tons. Military

83

turned out plasma

kit

own

One

containers.

to

its

at least.

C.

Smith had started out

L.

roots,

typewriter

company

on one side of the corporation,

went back

in

the 19th Century by

fashioning shotguns, and later merged with Corona typewriter business.

producing

Now

the

the

in

merged company turned

to

was more

difficult,

A

maker of model trains switched to bomb fuses, a merry-goround manufacturer to gun mounts, a casket factory to airplanes, a piano factory to airplane motors, a pinball-

machine producer to hardware for parachute harnesses. The requirements of mechanized warfare compelled the creation of some new industries, most notably as a result of a perilous shortage of rubber. In early 1942,

seizure of \lala\a and the Dutch

when

Japan's

East Indies cut off 90 per

cent of America's imports of natural rubber, the United States had less than a years supply

on hand

— and the needs

increasing: a B-17 Flying Fortress required half a ton of

One

potential source of natural rubber was the gua\ ule which grew wild in the Southwest and in Mexico, and which, in fact, had provided half of America's rubber supply in the early part of the 20th Century. An attempt was made to cultivate guayule on a large scale, but the harvest was too plant,

potential source

June 1942, Roosevelt called

was reclaimed scrap rubber. In on the public to turn in "old

old rubber raincoats, old garden hose, rubber shoes,

bathing caps, gloves."

In

New

York

City, a carload of

chorus

Broadway musical drove up to one collection depot, Nat Jupiter's service station, and wriggled out of from

a

their girdles. In L.

it

up and had

est collection point.

brought

in

his

mat

at

the

chauffeur deposit

White House, it

at the near-

Within four weeks Roosevelt's appeal

some 450,000

tons of scrap rubber. But

much

it, like ickes' floor mat, already had been reclaimed once and was unsuitable for further reprocessing. Finally, Roosevelt imposed nationwide gasoline

ing

— more

to

conserve rubber than gas

of

at least

— the equivalent of the

har-

vest from 180 million rubber trees.

Washington

the neat trick of persuad-

peacetime product was war effort. The classic case involved Wrigley's chewing gum. To stav in business, Philip K. Wrigley had to solve two formidable problems: the lack of chicle, which, like rubber latex, had been coming from trees in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, and the shortage of sugar, which was rationed in the United States. Wrigley overing

that their regular

essential to the

came

the

obstacle by turning to South America, where

first

grew abundantly. He had

chicle trees

there tap rubber trees grow ing

in

his

gum-tree tappers

same

the

He then

areas.

arranged to ha\e the chicle transported back to the States

in

ships carrying the high-priority rubber. Next, to obtain a

sugar

priorit\'

from the government, Wrigley needed to his chewing gum was essential to the war

He argued — w the help of — that chewing gum was great

effort. ry

ith

a

wound up

sion; he

a

government laboratowartime ten-

reliever of

the rations

in

foreign

to

become, along w ith such other and cigarettes, the

as chocolate bars

currency for GIs

soil.

who

bartered their

Wrigley also distributed

plants, with this skillful sales pitch: feel better,

for

packing

rations, but

his factory as well.

American stand-bys

common

gum

not only supplying a stick of

each package of the Army's combat K

work

his

way

across

product to war

"To help your workers

better, just see that they get five sticks of

chewing gum every day."

was ultimately responsible for was the most productive in the nation's history and the most unusual. Operating at full blast, industry had to rely heavily on the skills of those who had been largely excluded from the

The

civilian labor force that

the wartime triumph of American technology

—

factories in ration-

— and ordered

full-

steam-ahead on synthesizing rubber from petroleum, a process in which the Germans had a huge head start; they had

84

a year

Washington, Secretary of the Interior Harold

Ickes spotted a rubber floor

rolled

were

to private industry. By 1944, the factories

producing 800,000 tons

Chewing gum was thus

slow to count on.

girls

them

government spent

svnthetic-rubber factories, then

build 51

demonstrate that

rubber, and U.S. tanks used a ton.

tires,

leased

the 1930s. The American

to

A few manufacturers performed

For other manufacturers the transition

A second

in

it

$700 million

rifles.

involving the use of unfamiliar machines and techniques.

were

undertaken

prewar days: women, blacks. Southern white

migrants, teenagers, convicts and ex-convicts, the aged and

the physicalK' handicapped. At San Quentin prison fornia, inmates turned out materiel ranging

marine nets to night

sticks for the National

in Cali-

from antisub-

Guard.

In

Maine

a builder of ters

wooden minesweepers

lured 100 ship carpen-

man aged knew how to use

out of retirement, including one

discovering that no one else

84, after

an old-

fashioned tool called an adz. Aircraft plants hired midgets to inspect the ers to sort

cramped

out

rivets

insides of plane wings, blind workfrom the floor sweepings. Other fac-

by mid-1943, some three million youngsters aged 12 to

those with a high degree of training. Former watchmakers

states

17 were employed

Unemployment

in

war work. Even those

who

in

wound up with jobs. Urban police rounded up skid row inhabitants, weeded them out for useful skills and offered suspended sentences to those in trouble with the

1942,

Inc.,

when

filed

his

law

—

if

they would go to work.

Hoboes of America customary annual report with the State of Jeff Davies, president of

Indiana, he disclosed that virtually

members had

left

the road.

few had

virtually disappeared.

ordinary times chose to remain idle

In

—

example, shortened the training period required for a welder from three months to just 10 days. In fact, workers with

noise level

tion;

were not full-fledged hoboes at all, Davies added "They're just bums." Though most of the newly employed had never seen the inside of a factory, new training techniques and the relative simplicity of mass-production methods reduced the need for long apprenticeships. Henry Kaiser's shipbuilders, for

deaf for jobs in plant areas where the high was intolerable to people of normal hearing. suspended their child-labor laws for the dura-

tories hired the

Many

the rest had jobs. The few exceptions

all

Many were

two million the service and

of the in

skills

to

sometimes fared better on the assembly

be retrained because of

their distressing

lines than

tendency to

stop the assembly line and repair faulty parts instead of

throwing them out.

How-to manuals came the Boeing Airplane uals, totaling

ment

into their

Company

more than 2,000

official visited

all

When

pages.

Boeing's plant

questioned the need for Forces colonel

own. For the B-29 alone, a dozen man-

published half

in

a high

govern-

Wichita, Kansas, and

those manuals, an

who was showing him around

Army

Air

staged a con-

He picked an employee at random and had him study the Boeing Pilot's Handbook for five minutes. Then the employee climbed into the cockpit of a vincing demonstration.

B-29 Superfortress, compared the tles

had

with the illustrations all

in

the

maze of dials and throtbook and 18 minutes later

four engines running.

/The most

significant addition to the wartime work force, more than six million women who took jobs (pages 88W1 ), came relatively late. Factory managers had been loath to hire women, arguing that they did not understand machines and, moreover, would distract male workers. In 1941, when Vultee Aircraft took the plunge and hired 25 women for production jobs, it rushed them to work on March 31

the

a

day

planned

earlier than

—

lest

the experiment be branded

an April Fool's joke. In

the

months

first six

women

after Pearl Harbor, an estimated

applied for work

in war plants, but only about 80,000 were taken on. With a growing shortage of manpower, however, industry was forced to reconsider, and

750,000

an intensive recruitment of

women

began. Radio stations,

newspapers and magazines exhorted

employment

women

to "enlist" at

showing Lockheed Aircraft's mythical "Rosie the Riveter" a buxom, longlashed heroine in coveralls began appearing everywhere, their local

office.

Posters

—

In Valparaiso, Indiana,

pound pile

junkman Frank Schumak

of scrap that military

—

vainly defends a

policemen have come

200 000-

to appropriate.

Schumak, claiming he wanted the metal as an investment for his old age, had refused to sell it at the government's price of $18.75 a ton. But such holdouts were rare. Three weeks after the government called for scrap drives in mid-1942, civilians had contributed five million tons of pots and pans, horseshoes, discarded car bumpers and other metal objects.

85

along with feature stories about her "If

you can run Connecticut ordnance

you can drive

slogan of a

5,000 more

a car

a

counterparts.

real-life

machine," became the

plant's

campaign

to hire

women.

The addition of

current myth that a job on an assembly line could cause

including a mysterious malady

called "riveter's ovaries,"

which supposedly resulted from

A

excessive vibration.

women

to the

essential for production, but also

work force was not only evidence of the all-out

ef-

bigger deterrent was the matter of

men

unequal pay. Though

it

— "Re-

to get married to get

men's

liked

member when women had

on the home American girl with the toothy smile was supplanted by the image of a dirt-streaked face beneath hair bound up in a bandanna. Military photographers were often assigned to factories to get that morale-boosting new image to relay

— the

women

averaged about 40 per cent

to the forces overseas.

example, simply changed

was on such a mission that an Army photographer named David Conover discovered a curvaceous 19-year-old

and female workers

to

discriminating

pay

fort

traditional picture of the all-

It

the Radio Plane Parts

beauty

at

fornia.

When Conover

liquid

mon

on the

Company

Burbank, Cali-

in

spotted her, she was spraying a

r'uselage of a

plane and radiating an uncom-

mixture of sex appeal and ethereal beauty. Her

was Norma Jean Baker, and she agreed only after he had

to

name

pose for Conover

secured written permission from

her

foreman. Conover spent three days taking pictures of her

—

around the plant in the overalls she normally wore to work and also in a sweater. One of her pictures appeared in the Army magazine Yank and came to the attention of a photographer named Potter Hueth, who in turn photographed her and showed

his pictures to a modeling agency. Under the name of Marilyn Monroe, she would wind up one day making movies. The presence of women in the war plants helped improve working conditions, bringing such innovations as employee cafeterias and decent rest-room facilities, as well as the

addition of such labor-saving devices as mechanical the assembly

lines.

lifts

to

Employers became more aware of the

by

men doing

was

fact

the

same

Board ruled that

women

work, but

too

left

it

in

its

en also had trouble finding transportation to work. What tion difficulties

— led

to a

86

One was

a

— domestic and transporta-

high

rate of turnover

and ab-

senteeism. The turnover rate at Boeing was so high that,

company had

over a four-year period, the

to hire 250,000

women in order to maintain a work force of 39,000. When one woman was questioned as to why more members of her sex did not go into

war work, she snapped: "Because they

don't have wives."

Absenteeism concern

in

— both war

the

female and male

plants. In 1943, with

job running as high as 20 per cent

in

— was

a persistent

absences from the

some

plants, the flying

hero Captain Eddie Rickenbacker undertook a one-man crusade across the nation. "There

Some even greater

separate categories of male

one company labeled "the DTs"

protective guards were built into machines. in

loopholes. General Motors, for its

scales.

foxholes

variety of deterrents.

to

than those earned

The most serious deterrent for many women, however, was the fact that a factory job only added to their domestic burdens. More than 50 per cent of the female work force were full-time housewives, saddled with the continuing need to shop, cook and care for the children. Many wom-

Africa," he declared, "for

for a

less

wages paid

"heavy" and "light" and went on

for safety precautions; industrial accidents were causmore American casualties than the fighting itself. Safety goggles were made mandatory for certain operations and

might have gone into war work

the

should receive equal pay for equal

many

ing

Women

now

The government's War Labor

jobs.

need

numbers except

even

that

about

to joke

wages?"

The

front.

all

of bodily ailments,

sorts

a

in

bayonet

is

no absenteeism

in

the

the jungles of the Pacific or the burning sands of

in

if

their bellies

attempted there, they would get

from

their fellow

Americans."

and other cash incentives to work every day, while women employees of

industries used lotteries

keep people

at

a Portland shipyard hit

upon

their

own

effective solution:

who were

they refused dates with fellow workers

absent

without good cause. Soon, other companies followed

— No

and started "No work Strikes

proved

less of a

woo"

suit

clubs.

after Pearl

Harbor, labor leaders took

a no-strike

and

for the

most part they

Overall, strikes cost

less

than half of

per cent of

1

dispute that did erupt

up

lived

made

to

it.

work

all

pledge,

time, and any labor

The most notorious involved higher wages. Their leader, John

a series of strikes in

L.

1943,

who were demanding

Lewis, a burly

man

with

a

mane, beetling black eyebrows and a gift for Biblical rhetoric, was by far the most colorful figure

silvery gray

rolling in

the American labor

movement. Lewis detested Roosevelt

all of Washington. When the government took over the struck coal mines and threatened to operate them with soldiers, his defiant answer was: "You can't mine coal with bayonets." Soon, critical shortages of coal developed along the East Coast, eliciting from Interior Secretary Ickes one of the worst puns of the War: "We can fuel all of the people some of the time, and fuel some of the people all of the time. But in war we can't fuel all of the

and was ready to take on

people

all

was probably the most unpopular man

America. Polls showed that though

people thought the miners deserved

wage

ceilings,

"John

The miners' increase,

a raise despite

wartime

L.

Lewis,

strikes,

—

Amerthe Gl newspaper Stars and

men. "Speaking

ican soldier," said an editorial in Stripes,

majority of the

a

87 per cent regarded Lewis unfavorably

feeling shared by the fighting

damn your all

strikers

would enable the government

deemed

whatever jobs

it

velt called for

such

a

law

wage

be drafted and

to assign people to

necessary. In January 1944, Roosein his

State of the

but neither business nor labor wanted

women. "A woman kept on any job

.

.

has the strongest won't."

Cleveland company producing airplane parts,

Inc., a

ish

baihs and referred to

Andrew Jackson

ates."

.

it.

Union message, Nor did most

against her will

is

all

of

its

9,000 workers as "associ-

Higgins, a swashbuckling Louisiana

manufacturer of torpedo boats and landing an unabashed appeal to

his

craft, relied

on

employees' patriotism. He had

"The Star-Spangled Banner" played over loudspeakers and had pictures of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito posted in the men's rooms, with the caption: "Come on in, brother. Take it

easy. Every

minute you

loaf here helps us plenty."

The workers themselves spurred on one another through sheer pride of craftsmanship. Engineers burgh, steel

New

made what

is

They sent

it

it

was almost

show you what wc are doing in Newburgh." wire came back mounted on a steel small microscope attached. One by one the

just to

later the

block with a

find that their rivals in

New-

to a rival factory upstate with the note,

engineers peered through hole

at a plant in

they thought was the finest

wire possible, stretched so thin that

invisible.

"This

York,

the microscope, chagrined

had succeeded

in

boring

a

to

minuscule

the wire.

For workers with

ties

to the

men on

the battlefronts

the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and wives on the pro-

—

at home there was a special incentive that outweighed everything else: the possibility that their own handiwork might somehow directly affect the life of a loved

duction lines

coal-black soul."

revived discussion of a national service law, similar to Britain's, that

tries,

for the

eventually settled after a small

brought demands that

woman

head of a

man may have

Most employers devised their own answers to the problems of labor disputes and absenteeism. Many got around government wage ceilings by introducing such fringe benefits as medical insurance. Jack and Heintz Precision Indus-

A few weeks

of the time."

For a time, Lewis in

a leash," declared the

gave monthly banquets for employees, provided free Turk-

headlines.

by approximately 400,000 coal miners

on

organization. "Don't forget that a

the strongest will, but a

war production. Shortly

threat to

likely to act like a cat

women's

one. They relished

the story of a

seaman named

Elgin

Staples, whose ship went down off Guadalcanal. Staples was swept over the side, but he survived, thanks to a life belt that proved, on later examination, to have been inspected, packed and stamped back home in Akron, Ohio,

by

his

own

mother.

87

^

-

*

^

113 per cent during the War.

A

23-vear-okl worker in a steel mill

in

Cuy,

In u/ci/id,

OMc..^ wio

movement

of a

huge

ladle used for

molten iron to the

transfer car she operates at

left.

99

i^

^^:-

,:>•;

'*'

^ififal

r

Kir

V

n

V %-

Asscmhiy-line workers

100

at

>^*i lam

A. N. Y/n-LJA»4»

the

iiinTfTTniiitnTiMrrtuJM rf*wif na

&45JAh

TAXI PA

I

J

"i.

"I'm sorry to be the one to deliver this,"

19

d Oi

PM

taxi

driver said to Albert

Wood

as

he

handed him the envelope. The message would make January 19, 1945, the darkest day of the War for the Woods. Albert later recalled: "I realized the driver knev^ the

j:co;;d ave portwaj:

my telegram, and that it must be one of those next-of-kin missives I'd hoped never to receive." The message was blunt. Francis had been seriously wounded

contents of

:T TO

n^FQPa.i

YOU yOUR-SON STAFF SERGEANT'FRAHCIS F

;E;jousLY""\'^io^r^Ef"i:,1^

eiGmT

:.CTrc*j T'venty

JIRECT

..

iiiaaiiTT

-

'

ifTTf -'ifw:DUN}.OP; ACTING THE A:"!JUTA T

FRO'.:

'~^

;DECE;..oEr;

HOSPITAL

^~'

•

; JE;ic

Vf(

lu

_.

.

J

^^^7

Ti

in

the Battle of the Bulge.

weeks with practically no news of their son's condition, Albert and Louise were relieved to learn from a friend After several

who

visited Francis at a hospital in

England

was recovering nicely. "The war the Pacific was not over, and we began

that he

in

to

anxious about Paul," Albert wrote, his words hinting of the ordeal that faced parfeel

B

COMPANY WllL APPRECIATE SVOOESTION3

mOV IT?

ents with sons

still

fighting.

Wood was twice wounded and received the Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster (right). The first wound was minor; the second one was revealed to his parents in this telegram.

Francis

Relaxing in Bavaria, where he was stationed in the late summer of 1945, Francis enjoys a liqueur that he once described as "sweet and

powerful as

this

new atomic bomb."

Francis sent his parents a his scar. Five

weeks

photograph (above) of

after his family learned

of his injury, the Army mailed them an abruptly worded bulletin (below) on his progress.

4-173

US HOSPITAL PLANT

NEW-IQM,

llY.

2 4 FEB

1945

S/Sgt Prancls F. Wood, 42124899 IWAKING nORi.JA L ir^jPRnVFucf^T;

Wound, left chest. V«y tn|)r JTDM^

L>or, MAP. _ _T^ Beg j^ 3 1 ra r_ (1KB.

138

l-«)n«H«L-*»M(Mr«r*i

Louise and Albert played together often in the winter of 1945. Alter their son Francis was

wounded and news was

scarce, they turned to music for solace.

139

from the War, the Wood clan celebrates in Port Washington. are: foreground are Francis (left) and Bertram. Standing (from left) Gardner. and Albert Penelope, Bartlett, Robert brother-in-law Moyer,

Home In the

gathering of the family and his wife, Louise, host a postwar friends in of the children and their wives, husbands and gid Hotel in New York City. the elegant dining room of the Waldorf Astona

The patriarch for

some

SONS REUNITED AFTER THE TEST OF FIRE of Albert and Louise Wood returned from the War eager to make up the time that they had sacrificed. Only Francis bore a scar, but all four had changed. Like so many fathers of his generation, Albert

The sons

Wood

discovered that

his

sons had

left

boys and had been forged by the first fires of their experience into men. At sudtheir to adjust to difficult it found he

home

as

den maturity, their new sense of independence and their reluctance to resume life exactly as it had been before the War. But he came to accept these changes. "We all polished up our rose-colored glasses," Albert said of this period, "and peered deeper into

what we thought the world of ever-

lasting

peace held

in

store for us."

been artistically inand now they plunged into the acting, writing, painting and sculp-

His sons had always clined, arts:

ture.

But gradually, as the

last

of

their

Army paychecks diminished, they began to spend more time in the shop of Albert Wood & Five Sons, finding again the old pleasure of working together in Port Washand looking ahead to the future. ington

—

140

141

Sometime during the autumn R.

of 1942 an

lowan named John

Brauckmiller decided to pull up stakes and go West. Like

thousands of Americans seized with the same notion, he

had motives both patriotic and personal. By getting

some shipyard along

the

booming

a job in

he would

Pacific Coast,

bit for the war effort but also betterincome he had been able to earn as a construction worker and blacksmith in Grand Island, Nebraska. Brauckmiller, however, was not exactly foot-loose. He had a wife, 10 sons, three daughters and 16 grandchildren. Although several had left the fold one son to go into the Army, another to work in a defense plant in the East, a daughter to live near the Army camp where her husband was stationed the rest of the Brauckmillers were still close-knit. They saw no reason to disrupt their happy state.

not only be doing his ing the

—

—

And

so they migrated en masse, traveling

in

assorted jalop-

—

and arriving at their chosen destination Portland, Oregon in successive waves. The trek failed to dampen the Brauckmillers' zest for togetherness. Before long, 15 of them had found jobs at the same place Henry j. Kaiser's Swan Island shipyard and on the same midnight-to-morning graveyard shift. Grandpa Brauckmiller, eight sons and a son-in-law worked as shipfitters, while a daughter and four daughters-in-law worked as welders, welder's helpers and shipfitter's helpers. Grandma Brauckmiller might have joined them except that she was keeping house, looking after her youngest daughter and grandchildren, tending the family pooch and canary, feedies

—

—

—

ing three non-Brauckmiller boarders and, as a sideline, rent-

two furnished rooms to transients. Portland, like were reaping a bonanza in war contracts, was crowded and short of housing; Grandma, after a lifetime of enforced frugality, was not about to miss a chance at ing out

Boomtowns and Sleeping

the housing shortage

in shifts at

25 cents a turn

Willow Run goes "trailerwacky" Rivers of spending money Broadway's biggest season

The War as a leveler An upsurge in weddings, births and divorces The teenager's new independence The Sinatra craze Those aggressive Victory girls Zoot suit with a reat pleat The seeds of racial equality

other

cities that

some

extra cash.

But the Brauckmillers' lean years were over. The ship-

yard contingent's combined weekly take at the Kaiser pay

windows averaged

among

a princely $996.

Even after

the 15 individual earners, the pay was

was split enough to

it

permit them to invest anywhere from a tenth to a half of their

wages

in

War

Bonds.

Numerous though they may have been, the Brauckmillers were by no means unique in pulling up stakes. They were part of a mass movement that was one of the home front's

A NATION IN MOTION

most dramatic and not

America was

features.

during the War.

An estimated 40

just for training

a nation

motion

in

million people

left

home,

camps or assignments overseas, but

to find jobs or seek their fortunes in other parts of the

country. Moreover, the dislocation

was not

just physical,

but social and psychological as well. By providing rich

job opportunities and putting rivers of

money

new

into circula-

War produced sudden and startling changes in the economic and social status of many people. In the process, individuals, families and the whole fabric of it subjected American society to great strains.

Camp

men were employed in its construcaccommodations were inundated, and residents were persuaded to open their homes to those in need of shelter. Still, some who were unable to find other housing

addition to the 16 million people

In

who

left

home

for

changed their residences across county lines. For most of them the magnet was jobs, often in places far from where they had been living. According to Bureau of Census estimates, 1 .7 million Americans moved to other states and 3.6 million to and

different parts of the country. California's shipyards

alone attracted 1.4 million people, helping to

aircraft plants

set the stage for the state's later

population center

As an early

in

ascendancy

as the largest

the United States.

result of the

massive reshuffling of the pop-

ulation, acute shortages of

housing developed. Hundreds

than 20,000

tion; local

slept in cars or lived in lean-tos, roadside brush piles or

even packing cases.

Many Southern

tion, the

military service, an estimated 15.3 million civilians

Blanding, a post for 60,000 soldiers, was built close

More

by.

cities,

converting

in

hurry to heavy

a

were overrun by newly arriving workers. The situation was most acute along the Gulf Coast, where shipyards drew tens of thousands of job seekers from the backwoods. In Mobile, Alabama, the population shot up 60 per cent in three years. So crowded was the metropolitan industrialization,

area that landlords rented so-called "hot beds" to workers in

shifts

— eight

hours' rest for 25 cents.

To the

visiting

author John Dos Passes, Mobile looked "trampled and battered like a city that's been taken by storm."

however, that the

living conditions there,

He noted,

though primitive,

were often an improvement over the new residents' prelot: "Housekeeping in a trailer with electric light and running water is a dazzling luxury to a woman who's lived all her life in a cabin with half-inch chinks between the

vious

splintered boards of the floor."

boomtowns appeared across the nation, as the sheer numbers of new migrants quickly overwhelmed existing housing, schools and other facilities. Around many cities instant slums sprang up so-called "new Hoovervilles" that

lack of housing was critical elsewhere, too: in Portwhere the Brauckmillers settled; in Hartford, Connecticut, and San Diego, California, where many workers

consisted of trailer camps, shantytowns and tent settle-

er

of

—

ments.

A

many

newcomers, and the established residents did ease their plight. "Those folks in houses think trailer

to

little

sense of impermanence governed the

lives

of

of the

people are vermin,"

a

newcomer

to Pascagoula, Mississip-

Agnes E. Meyer, whose investigations of boomtowns were later published in a book aptly titled pi,

told reporter

journey through Chaos.

No

other area of the country

tion

more

there

— before

felt

the effects of the migra-

sharply than the South. The Pearl

Harbor

boom came

from the economic stagnation that had beset Civil

War.

Its

early

raising the entire region

resurgence stemmed

in

part

it

up

since the

from the scores of

camps located there. Starke, Florida, formerly a depressed backwater town with a population of 1,500, overnight became the state's fourth largest city when military training

The

land,

rooms, makeshift houses and trailhead of the Federal Security Administra-

lived in barely furnished

camps

that the

tion said constituted a new kind of "slum on wheels." The most notorious boomtown was Willow Run, Michigan, site of the giant Ford aircraft plant. The plant attracted more than 32,000 new residents to the area, and its assembly-line

technology contrasted cruelly with the primitive

around

Outdoor

living

con-

were situated dangerously near wells. One fairly typical house served five men li\ing in the basement, a family of five on the first floor, four people on the second floor, nine men in the garage and four families in four trailers parked in the yard. Working in the Ford plant was not so bad, a resident told a visiting reporter, but after being cooped up in the trailers all day the women went "trailerwacky." To alleviate the housing shortage at Willow Run, the federal government planned construction of a permanent ditions

it.

privies

143

community

that

was

to

accommodate 30,000 people. But

security

men

ripped up the surveying stakes. Eventually

the plan ran into heavy opposition. Residents of the area

10,000 temporary housing units were constructed, half

opposed permanent housing because they feared that Wil-

the form of dormitories for single

low Run would become a ghost town and tax burden after the War. And Ford officials feared that the existence of a

As America's war plants went into

permanent community would strengthen the auto workers' union. When surveyors began work on the project, Ford

in

men and women. full

production, the

country became prosperous once more. Unemployment levels

and the number of low-paying jobs declined dramati-

Dubbed by a West Coast newspaper as "the shipbuildingest family America," the hard-hatted clan of John R. Brauckmiller (sixth from left) perches on a railing at Portland, Oregon's Swan Island shipyard. There, 15 Brauckmiller kin found jobs after migrating en masse from the Midwest in search of a larger share of America's generous wartime wages. in

144

income soared from $96 billion to War years. The weekly earnings of the average factory worker nearly doubled, rising from $25.25 to $47.08, and many people (such as the Brauckmillers) did much better. With the economy running at top speed, some workers began to eye the prospect of peace with ambivalence. "It's a pretty good war if you don't get shot at," one man said. After stinting through a decade of Depression, people suddenly had money to spend, and they did not let rationing or shortages stop them from doing so. Production of consumer goods rose by 12 per cent in spite of the high priority accorded war materials, and the nation went on a spending spree. "People are crazy with money," observed a jeweler in Philadelphia. "They don't care what they buy." Overall, personal

cally.

$171 billion

in

the four

They bought

furs,

26 per cent

in

cosmetics, handbags. Jewelry sales rose

On

1942.

the third anniversary of Pearl

Harbor, Macy's department store a

in

New

York City enjoyed

record-breaking selling day. Driven by the pressures and tensions brought on by the

War, people began to spend lavishly on entertainment.

Wartime business was up 40 per cent at nightclubs like New York's Latin Quarter, which featured elaborate, flashy shows. Lou Walters, the club's owner, explained: "You gotta keep in mind you are selling them luxury and waste." Broadway enjoyed its most prosperous season in 1944-1945, mainly with frothy, escapist fare. The movie business was also booming. In Portland, Oregon, theaters stayed open all

night, featuring a workers' "swing-shift

midnight to 4 o'clock

dance in

at race tracks

in

New

in

its

history,"

the morning. Betting and atten-

reached their highest wartime levels

noted columnist Dan Parker of the

York Da/7y News.

To many soldiers returning seas,

it

often

seemed

ious to the true

that

to the

United States from over-

Americans

at

home were

obliv-

dimensions of the War. "Their way of

life

changed a damn bit," grumbled an Army Air Forces bombardier on furlough. His bitterness was understandable: civilians all around him appeared to be having the time of their lives. But in spite of the fun, economic and social changes of profound significance were taking place. hasn't really

in the process America was being irrevocably altered. The new job opportunities and the new prosperity were the catalysts, job prospects improved up and down the line. A poll showed that seven out of every 10 citizens questioned felt that they now had a better chance of getting ahead than their parents had possessed. Businessmen, farm-

ers,

the

women, good

workers shared

skilled workers, unskilled

times. But the biggest gains

of the social pyramid.

While income

creased by 20 per cent,

it

rose

in

came in

at the

the top

the bottom

in

bottom fifth

fifth

in-

by 68

per cent. Perhaps the best index of the economic gains was the increase in the number of Americans who had to pay income taxes. In 1940, only 7.8 million filed tax returns; in 1945, no fewer than 48 million in a population of 140 million filed returns with the Internal Revenue Service. (To some degree the tax-paying population was in-

creased as well by a reduction

in

the

minimum

taxable

income from $800 to $500.) The War was not only putting more money in most people's hands; it was having a democratizing effect as well through the impact of rationing and shortages. A social reformer pointed the fact out early in the War: "Rockefeller and can now get the same amount of sugar, gasoline, tires, etc., etc., etc., and the etc.'s will soon fill many pages." The gasoline shortage even forced that arbiter of upperclass manners, Emily Post, to revise her code. Hosts were no longer expected to pick up their guests at the train I

station, she ruled.

A more

matinee" from

1944 and 1945. "America was on the damndest gambling

binge

And

fact that

serious

many

consequence

for the

lost their servants to

upper crust was the the lure of wartime

wages, never to get them back again. By 1944 the number

women in domestic work had decreased by one fifth. Newspaper want ads attested to the shortage of maids. A woman in Newark offered "room, radio, good salary and nice home," then desperately threw in the privilege of wearing her mink coat on days off. The old ways died hard, of course, and the people who were high on the status ladder went to great lengths to of

maintain in

a

Seneca,

semblance of Illinois

River), the units of a

project

were

all

social stratification. At a shipyard

(which had direct access to the Mississippi

new government-constructed housing

exactly alike

—

in style,

the shipyard quietly arranged for

its

quality

and

rent.

But

executives to reside

in

145

MAKING DO ^, „„.„„ WITH TEEN-AGE POWER With the War's growing appetite for ablebodied men consuming America's labor supply as

the early T940s, teen-age boys

in

were among those who filled in replacements. At the same time, many

and

girls

had to relax their child-labor laws there to allow minors to work. By 1943, were almost three million American boys

states

American fields them in at the paid were they where defense plants

and and

on the job

girls

half

factories,

standard

These

a

in

million of

rate.

striplings

stitutes for strong

were not just poor submen: they pulled their

load, despite

share of the

their

lack

of

defense contractor, Lock1,500 boys in 1943 as hired Aircraft, heed riveters, draftsmen, electricians and sheetmetal workers. Their delighted supervisor? discovered that two voung people working more than a four-hour shift accomplished

seasoning.

One

an adult employee who was doing a regular eight-hour stint. numIn the process of bringing great bers of children into the work force, the War altered the lives of many adolescents.

Lured by high wartime wages, they took jobs and forgot about their education. Be-

tween 1940 and 1944, the number of teenage workers in America increased by 19 million; the

number attending school de-

clined by 1.25 million.

Many who

tried to

combine school and work fell asleep in job. class, weary from the demands of the

In a California shipyard,

Tom

Powell (above

foreground), 17, and his youthful co-workers chip excess metal from a jig used in the construction of ships. Roy Popp (right), works on a transport plane's fuselage on the .

right,

16,

'

assemhiv

146

line of a

West Coast

aircraft plant.

the block of houses nearest town. Although a carbon copy of

the others

all

in

the project, this block

became known

as

"Gold Coast Row."

—

man, of course did not comment on unfaithful soldiers. Problems of separation and infidelity had always plagued marriages in wartime, but World War II introduced a com-

Many GIs came home to find that their become much more independent. The new selfsufficiency stemmed from the fact that more than six million women, better than half of them married, had experiplicating factor.

While people were growing richer, the physical and social upheavals of the War imposed severe strains on many of the country's most basic institutions. Foremost among these were marriage and the family, which endured conflicting

wives had

and often intolerable stresses. The War had a double-edged effect. On the one hand the rash of whirlwind romances

of earning their

produced an upsurge of weddings and

terror. In

a startling rise in the

birth rate. In 1943, after declining since the 1920s, the birth

rate

reached

its

two decades, thanks in no "goodbye babies," those con-

highest level

small part to the

boom

in

in

ceived just before their Gl fathers

same

left

more

than half a million marriages were dissolved

— almost dou-

ble the prewar figure.

number

for the sharp increase in the

of divorces was, of course, the

burden of long separation

between servicemen and their wives. The women had to learn to wait; as one wife put it, "to endure the slow trickle of time from hour to hour, from day to day, for weeks in anguish and suspense." Some women sleepwalked through the War. Others cracked up or turned to alcohol for sol-

ace

— by

1943 the

jumped from Infidelity,

1

female alcoholics

ratio of

to 5 to

whether

was

it

to

male had

real

was

or only imagined,

husbands and wives. A 1943 -revealed that nearly

principal source of stress for

taken of young

women

in

first

time the excitement and independence

own paychecks

(pages 88-101). For them

Iowa, sociologists studied 135

bands had gone

A

to war.

sizable

not miss their husbands at

some

a

poll

half

of

women whose

number

its

hus-

of the wives "did

the sociologists concluded

all,"

and, indeed, "were glad to be free."

While the

and mother was changing, the

role of wife

dislocations of the

War were

radically altering the status of

member of the family. acquired a new independence another

was the teenager, who through the breakdown of

This

normal family

life and the availability of jobs that paid well. Aided by ready access to plenty of easy money and the

relaxation of social constraints, the

wartime crop of teen-

agers developed into a highly specialized subculture, with

own

The young dance known as the jitterbug, which required such strenuous hopping and leaping about that scarcely anyone over 20 could, in the teen-age parlance of its

clothing styles, interests and problems.

people evolved

a

the day, "cut a rug." Psychologists concluded that the

to 2.

1

for the

divorce, or the prospect of living alone, lost

for overseas. At the

time, the divorce rate rose dramatically. In 1945

The primary reason

enced

bug was

—

as

one put

it

— "a

jitter-

mating dance that emulated

sexual foreplay."

The psychologists

had

a

ready explanation for the

— singer

Frank Sinatra. They attrib-

also

believed that their husbands were being untrue to them.

teenagers' biggest craze

Servicemen were equally worried about receiving "Dear

uted his great appeal to frustrated love induced by the

John"

letters

from home, informing them that

their

sweethearts had taken up with other men. Valid infidelity it

were not compiled during the pre-Kinsey

common enough

was

wives or

statistics

bishop to suggest that

at

era.

on But

across the Atlantic for a British

the end of the

War

all

reunited

couples should forgive each other's lapses and go through a

second marriage ceremony

start.

in

A

less conciliatory

in

New Jersey who declared, "If who are unfaithful would

wives

letters

and have

their

order to achieve

a

fresh

opinion was heard from the judge I

had

my

way, soldiers'

be branded with

heads shaven." The judge

scarlet

— who was

a

pressures of wartime. Whatever the cause, American

show

business had never before seen anything like the hysteria that

surrounded

who was

this

classified 4-F

scrawny young man from Hoboken because of

a

punctured eardrum and

whose voice reminded one

adult critic of "worn velveteen." swooned. Two girls almost strangled him in a tug of war with his bow tie. Once, when he sang "I'll Walk Alone," a voice from the audience cried out in Brooklynese: "I'll walk wid ya, Frankie." His appearance at Manhattan's Paramount Theater in 1944 caused a near riot by 30,000 teen-age girls (they were called "bobby-soxers"), and more

Teen-age

girls

147

order. than 700 policemen had to be called in to restore even was and Sinatra was blamed for teen-age truancy

denounced

in

Congress

one

as

of "the prime instigators

and disof juvenile delinquency in America." But other— parate wartime phenomena were also blamed: working

—

mothers, the absence of fathers, the sense of impermanence engendered by wartime mobility, the lack of customary

boomtowns, even the violence on the popular radio show The Lone Ranger. The increase in juvenile delinquency during the War was

social restraints in

dramatic. During the nile

first full

year, 1942, the rate of juve-

delinquency rose 8 per cent

among boys and

an as-

tounding 31 per cent among girls. The increase of delinquency among girls was accounted for largely by sexual misbehavior, attributed to the "khakiwacky" teenagers who

hung around drugstores, bus depots and other places where servicemen on leave usually congregated. These girls were known as "patriotutes" or "Victory girls" because, as one observer wrote, out of "a misguided sense of patriotism giving [she] believes she is contributing to the war effort by herself to the

man

uniform."

in

were not just promiscuous but aggressively around its so. In Detroit, the Navy had to build a fence worker social a Antonio, San In V-girls. armory to keep out Victory

girls

reported that prostitutes were angry pies" because they

New

York

were "cramping

at

workers reported that

City, social

And in more than 60

among

soldiers

had

Americans, teen-age promiscuity seemed to

sig-

per cent of the cases of venereal disease

been contracted from

To many

"the young chip-

their style."

girls

nal a general decline in

under

21.

moral standards. They found confir-

the public dalliances of actor Errol very young Flynn, who seemed to have a preference for rape by statutory In 1943, Flynn was charged with

mation of that belief

in

women.

But his canny lawyer attacked the character of the plaintiffs, and Flynn was acquitted.

two 17-year-old

girls.

people Public concern about delinquency among young their on than morals sexual their on less frequently focused clothing.

known and

Some young men wore

as the

zoot

suit,

an outlandish costume

which had overstuffed shoulders

a jacket that reached almost

down

to the knees.

The

that coat was worn unbuttoned to reveal baggy trousers the at from 16 inches wide at the knee to 6 inches

tapered

in Los Angeles wears a popular nonmilitary garb of the early '40s— a zoot suit, complete with a thigh-length, broad-lapelled jacket and baggy trousers pegged at the cuff, topped off by a broad-brimmed felt hat. The City Council made the wearing of zoot suits a misdemeanor after servicemen and police clashed with zootovertones. suiters in June 1943 in a series of riots that had ugly racial

A Mexican-American youth

148

pegged bottom and

a

key chain that almost dragged on

the floor. Zoot-suiters often carried switchblade knives their girl friends bra.

Under

packed whiskey

wide-brimmed

a

flasks

felt

shaped

to

fit

and

one reporter

as "of

first

important

In

I,

had urged

The zoot suit, which originated among teenagers in Harlem and other urban slums, became a widespread fad. A song helped enhance its popularity: "I wanna zoot suit with a reat pleat/With a drape shape and a stuff cuff." To some observers, the zoot suit was a harmless emblem indicative of the desire to wear gaudy plumage before drab Army khaki replaced it. To others it was the uniform of young street gangs, an affront to the established order, a symbol

ances." Most had, at

— perhaps because of among whom

nority youngsters,

quency was

its

association with mi-

the rate of juvenile delin-

War

between zoot-suited pachucos and GIs provoked a crackdown by the county sheriff, who believed that MexicanAmericans had "a biological predisposition to criminal tendencies" because their ancestors, the Aztecs, had practiced human sacrifice. Then, in June 1943, a rumor spread that a sailor had been beaten up by a gang of pachucos. A mob of 2,500 soldiers and sailors gathered and, waging a "clean-up campaign," began pummeling some 100 young MexicanAmericans and ripping off their zoot suits. The Los Angeles City Council in contrast to other communities where

—

lawmakers dealt with teen-age violence by imposing p.m. curfew or by providing

new

recreational facilities

sponded by outlawing the wearing

a

10

—

re-

but agonizing period at

in

the struggle for equality.

the outset by discriminatory hiring policies

defense industries and trade unions, and by the gation practiced

our special griev-

disregarded them.

however, blacks were determined to

mocracy on two

fronts

— abroad

and

at

World

In

fight for de-

home. Only

this

determination could overcome the cynicism and despair

many

that

student

of

at a

them

felt

black college

he declared "The :

Army

the early days of the War.

in

in

the South spoke for

jim crows

us.

The Navy

A

many when lets

us serve

only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers

and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We crowed and spat upon. What more

are disenfranchised, jim

As

in

the

armed

services,

in

rigid segre-

blacks began

a matter of fact, a

few blacks expressed an empathy

not with the Germans but, because of their color, with the Japanese. "By the way. Captain," a sharecropper

hear the Japs

New York in

said to

a plantation

"I

In

City a poll of blacks revealed that 18 per cent be-

lieved they

than

is

owner after Pearl Harbor, done declared war on you white folks."

have remarked to

would be

treated better under Japanese rule

white America.

Elijah

Muhammad,

the leader of

was charged with sedition for his proJapanese sympathies and eventually served a four-year prison sentence for dra't evasion. the Black Muslims,

Most black leaders, however, urged full participation in the war effort. They felt that if their people could work as equals, American society would reward them with equal rights. The first major move in this direction came in th months before Pearl Harbor when blacks were being ex one

one on the home front was affected more deeply by the upheaval of World War II than America's 13 million blacks. For the blacks the War years marked a Aroused

least,

eluded so blatantly from the defense labor build-up that

of zoot suits.

the long run no

critical

II,

his fellow blacks to "forget

could Hitler do than that?"

high.

Antagonism against the zoot suit reached its zenith in Los Angeles where the outfit was favored by the pachucos, teen-age Mexican-Americans who had acquired a reputation for toughness. A series of small-scale clashes in 1942

In

of the Nation-

Negro Committee, which later became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),

al

increasing density and length at the neck."

of lawlessness

rights victories since the period of

civil

War Reconstruction. World War W. E. B. DuBois, cofounder

post-Civil

inside a

hat the zoot-suit wearer

usually sported a hairstyle described by

the

to

press effectively for their rights and in the process scored

aircraft

employees.

company had only 10 In

May

blacks

among

the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, federal

government

and threatened the

number

its

33,000

1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of

to

ban discrimination

to lead a

in

called

on the

defense plants

march on Washington on

July 1.

As

of potential marchers escalated from 10,000 to

50,000, liberals and

some

black leaders tried to dissuade

Randolph. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the blacks' most influential

friend in Washington, told

Randolph

that such a

march

149

would be impractical because the hotels and restaurants in the nation's capital were not open to blacks. But Randolph persisted. Five days before the scheduled march, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 that forbade racial discrimination in defense industries

and

Commission to enforce the ban. Although the FEPC had the power only to investigate complaints, not to compel compliance, it immeone diately became a lightning rod for Southern hostility newspaper called it "dat cummittee fer de perteckshun of Rastus & Sambo." The FEPC proved able to resolve successfully only one third of the 8,000 complaints received^ and established the Fair

Employment

Practices

—

even

compliance often took a bizarre turn toward The Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in Indiana,

legal

total segregation.

which was constructed

money, had a and bomb shelter marked

entirely with federal

special production line for blacks, separate toilets

the most preposterous indignity

—

a

"for colored only." Nonetheless Roosevelt's Executive Or-

der was

a

landmark

— the

first

federal intercession

on behalf

of equal rights for blacks in three quarters of a century.

The planned march on Washington signaled a new turn the civil rights struggle. For the first time a major protest had been planned to exclude white participation. In relying solely on the resources of the black community, the movement rekindled some of the mass enthusiasm sparked by the Jamaican-born black separatist Marcus Garvey in in

No

the 1920s.

longer,

commented

the conservative

Pitts-

burgh Courier, would blacks make "the mistake of relying entirely

upon the gratitude and sense

of fair play of the

American people." The new black militancv' fed on the hypocrisy of a nation that was waging war on totalitarianism abroad while main-

home. The hypocrisy never seemed more ironic than in the case of privileges extended to some German prisoners of war who were interned in the U.S. In Salina, Kansas, for example, a black soldier went to a restaurant on the main street just to watch German POVVs having lunch and was reprimanded by the counterman. "You know we don't serve colored here," he was told. Of this incident, the soldier later wrote: "If we were untermenschen in Nazi Germany they would break our bones. As taining segregation at

—

'colored'

men

in Salina,

the black singer Lena

POW filled in

they only break our hearts."

Home was

camp she discovered

When

German camp commander had

invited to sing at a

that the

the front rows with prisoners and put the black guards

— the back

the blacks' traditional place

down from

seats.

turned defiantly to the Germans, sang for her

The

civil

She stepped

the stage, strode up the aisle and, with her back

rights struggle at

bitter fact that black

own

people.

intensified by the

servicemen overseas often found that

they were treated better

home

home was

b\'

the local populace than by the

where between blacks and local women sparked violent clashes among black and white American servicemen, British b\standers sometimes joined in on the side of the

whites at

fraternizing

Detroit policemen tangle with a rioter on February 28, 1942. a day of racial violence that exploded when white defense workers cordoned off a new federal housing project intended for black occupants. The riot was a prelude to a wave of race conflicts in 1943 in several American cities, including Detroit, where blacks endured poor housing and low income.

150

or by their fellow GIs. In Britain,

.^.

v:

Alter a 25-mile hike in sweltering desert beat, soldiers of the 93rd Inlantry Division, Annerica's first all-black combat division, march in parade formation at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in the sumnter of 1943. During the Second World War the majority of blacks in the Army served in segregated supply and construction units, which were not sent into combat.

151

blacks.

A few pubs even

practiced a kind of reverse dis-

crimination, posting signs that read, "This

House

Is

for

Englishmen and Coloured American Troops Only."

Aroused by discrimination both services, the

organizations such as the rapid gains

in

in

and out of the armed

heightened black consciousness pushed older

membership

NAACP

to a

new

militancy and

— during the War, NAACP mem-

bership increased ninefold,

new

-iff'

of

in

it

the South. The

new

groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which adapted the principles and tactics of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi practiced

Among CORE'S

early

in

India.

leaders

were James Farmer and who would figure

Bayard Rustin, two young black pacifists

^^lu OHP^^E ^^ BHi. ^^^^F ^^^

much

black awareness also led to the formation of

.JF^^

^^

"^j

\l

W^^^M

'

Ai the end of a harvest day in August 1944, three German prisoners of war begin the drive from the farm where they wor/c to their nearby detainment camp in IHoopeston, Illinois. During World War II, more than 425,000 Axis POWs were held in the U.S. At the War's end, some fought deportation to homelands ravaged by war and stayed in America.

152

prominently

in

new weapon

for desegregating restaurants

the North

future integration battles. Their principal

was the mass

sit-in.

In

1942,

and theaters

when

in

a restaurant

downtown Chicago balked at serving blacks anything except sandwiches made of eggshells and garbage, CORE in

sent

in a

group

large biracial

to attempt to get seats. At

first

the restaurant refused to seat them, but finally an elderly

white

woman

to the

invited

one

of the blacks to share her table

applause of some 200 white diners

who had

tensely

watched the drama. The War years saw other gains, many in the entertainment field. All-black films began to appear regularly, and the hit of the 1943 Broadway season was Othello, starring Paul Robeson (page 175). On a more basic level, the Supreme Court, in 1944, outlawed all-white primary elections, thus taking the first step toward guaranteeing Southern blacks

economic

were scored during the War frequently served to fuel black impatience and discontent. While black employment rose by one million and the number of skilled workers doubled, the average black family's income by the end of the War still was only half that of the average white's. Moreover, living conditions remained substandard for most blacks. The paradox of progress feeding discontent, which social scientists would latgains that

er label "the revolution of rising expectations," set the cities in

—

in

25 years

the worst race riot

fact,

jobs

in

On

— came

in Detroit.

Though

who

had newly migrated from the South

in a

the war plants, most of

them were boxed

the tracts of

facilities

in

whites had allegedly and her baby. Then came full-scale war. Blacks from nearby Paradise Valley smashed and looted white-owned stores. White mobs counterattacked. Be-

woman

killed a black

fore federal troops had forced a troubled peace on the area

36 hours

later,

nine whites and 25 blacks were dead. Seven-

teen of the blacks had been killed by the police.

The bloodshed

in

Detroit and other riot-afflicted cities

Springfield, Massachusetts;

stirred

El

— had

Paso and Port Arthur, Texas; at least

one

salutary effect.

cities

and towns

set

up

interracial

committees. And

ning to

wake up

to the old discontent

were beginand the new militan-

cy of black Americans. In 1942, a year before the

were "pretty well

satisfied

1944, only 25 per cent

Many South who had

of the whites

were

also

newcomers from

the

brought their prejudices with them. White workers regard-

ed the growing prosperity of blacks

as a

threat to their

62

armed

with things

felt that

in

this

country." In

way.

which had black soldiers was agonizingly slow. The seeds change were sown, but meaningful results were a long

Even

in

the

services,

fighting abroad, progress

ing in

in

coming.

1944, the

camp

Army ordered

facilities,

the South,

the desegregation of

its

train-

but the pace of compliance, especially

was slow. Overseas,

late that

same

year,

when

the Battle of the Bulge produced a shortage of infantry

Army took

battlefield integration:

with the growing resentment of working-class whites.

riots,

per cent of the whites interviewed believed that blacks

tentative step toward

companies. But integration did not go beyond

were concomitant

blacks

It

the public opinion polls indicated that whites

where sewage ran The frustrations

Detroit's

—

nationwide concern about the race problem. More

than 200

In

the streets.

— multi-

woman;

replacements, the

of

in

June, racial fistfighls

squalor of the ill-named Paradise Valley, a 60-block slum in

—

crowded municipal park on Belle Isle in the Rumors spread a black man had supposedly

raped and killed a white

time

into the

upon by

Smith. Overcrowding

—

Detroit River.

things

to find

K.

L.

steaming Sunday afternoon

a

broke out

the

in

had been getting better for Detroit's blacks, especially for the 60,000

fear skillfully played

a

plied the potential sources of friction.

of

1943.

The worst outbreak in

—

housing, transportation and recreational

helped to

scene for the rioting that rocked several American

United States

status

such hatemongers as Gerald

Hubbard, Ohio; Harlem

the right to vote. Ironically, the

own

and white

soldiers

still

it

its first

attached black platoons to white

were not mixed

in

that.

combat or

Black

training

was not until after the War— July 26, 1948— that Truman signed the order officially desegregating the armed forces.

outfits.

It

President

153

{

\\\\\

J^

m^

Cro%^ f

i-!r

lii^B \MUV'-\

'

5(S

ANCVS. "^..'''18**''"'

MAKING DO WITH LITRE

Zr^^!^d^5 pressed

into service as ambulances, the Boston

Record American uses horse-drawn u.gons

to

make

da.ly dcl,ver,es o, the newspaper.

155

SCARCITY IN THE LAND OF PLENTY To be

living

on the home

front during the

War was

to

experience almost daily the frustration of not being able to To save gas and rubber, a 35-mph speed limit was imposed; commuters formed car pools, and driving alone produced a touch of guilt.

buy what you wanted, when you wanted it. Even with the coupons for rationed foods and goods, the money for a major purchase or the patience to wait in long lines, there was never quite enough to go around.

Auto makers were ordered to stop building family cars 1942; gas was rationed, and tires even retreads were in short supply. Gone from store windows were new toasters and refrigerators, irons and washing machines in fact, most household appliances. Meat eaters got by on an initial weekly ration of 28 ounces. Butter lovers were held to an average of 12 pounds a year, 25 per cent less than normal. Coffee drinkers made do on a pound every five weeks, less than a cup a day. The sugar ration averaged eight to 12 ounces a week. Cigarettes were hard to come by, because 30 per cent of production went to the military. There was hoarding of scarce commodities one man in New Jersey stashed away enough sugar to satisfy his sweet tooth for 577 years. Many storekeepers learned soon enough to "set aside" for favored customers, and for a price, goods not readily available. Most Americans, however, fortified their patience, drew on the old Yankee ingenuity and made do. They patched up aging cars, drove slower and shared rides. Their motoring reined in, they jammed railroads, which in 1942 turned a profit on passenger traffic for the first time in 15 years. Housewives used saccharin and corn syrup instead of sugar and stretched meats with all sorts of casseroles. Smokers revived the "roll-your-own" cigarette, and coffee drinkers rebrewed grounds. Neighbors shared appliances. The annoyance of shortages was compounded by the

VICTORY

SPEED

— —

—

in

—

—

amount of money ready to be spent more than $90 billion more in the pockets of consumers in 1944 than at the time of Pearl Harbor. In general, though, spirits remained high.

Home-front

sacrifices stirred a sense of duty. Victory

was

coming. The promise of plenty made scantily stocked grocery shelves, and even

156

empty auto showrooms,

tolerable.

Although the bjiic gasoline rjtion

tor ph.\'.'.tiic

dnving peimiUcd only three to

t /\

.

.1

week, drivers often discovered

that the

pumps had run

dry.

157

THE STRUGGLE TO REMAIN MOBILE When

War

the

Production Board banned

the manufacture of private automobiles

in

February 1942, the order had the impact

bomb on American motorists. There were more than 27 million cars on the road and an inventory of barely half a million

of a

replacements. In addition, with industry geared up to make vehicles for military use, spare parts for the civilian

came

market be-

virtually unobtainable.

The result was a frantic campaign by car owners and the government, in the slogan of the times, to "Keep 'em Rolling." Drivers wore tire treads down to the cord and scavenged junk yards for everything from intake valves to exhaust pipes. Tire and gas rationing, introduced in 1942, saved equip-

ment by reducing automobile mileage one third

by 1943.

America's inventors got into the act, too. There were engine modifications to save gas,

and wooden wheels

livery trucks

produced

a

—

— usually

One was made

to save rubber.

wheel that

on de-

A

driver sets a torch to the charcoal-burning generator that helped to

power his

truck with methane.

tinkerer

of steel

springs covered with layers of paper.

And

Newport, Rhode Island, a dowager got around town in a beach chair propelled by a motorcycle. As a result of its conservation measures, America did keep rolling: the number of passenger cars in use at the peak of the war effort was off only 12.9 per cent from what it was in 1941. in

Two

158

pairs of

hardwood

tires

— one

set

new. the other driven 500 miles— are displayed by

a

mechanic.

A

straining wife

p ushes

as

parts the garage. The car', reverse gear was broken, and replacement her husband steers the family car out of

159

Soldiers

on weekend furlough

line

up with

civilians for

THE CRUSH OF WARTIME TRAVEL If

the car

was broken, the

tires

al-

ways public transportation. But millions of travelers had the same idea. Virtually every train station, bus depot and airport in the country was jammed with military personnel on the move between training camps, military posts and ports of embarkation. The railroads carried 97 per cent of the traffic, transporting two million men a month, more than 43 million in toto. Troop movements required half of all Pullman space, relegating weary civilians to fretful nights in cramped coach seats. Troop trains, some with white flags denoting them "specials," churned from coast to coast and forced parlor-car riders onto sidings for hours on end. A scheduled overnight's journey from New York to Chi-

160

at a station in

Colunihuf, Georgia. Military personnel had

cago invariably got the weary traveler to his destination by lunch instead of breakfast and often as late as dinner. The government begged foot-loose civilians to stay at home. "The time is here," warned the Office of Defense Transportation in 1942, "when all must realize that unnecessary travel can seriously harm the war effort." But travel volume, necessary or not, was huge. In 1944, railroads logged three times as many passenger miles as in

—

bald or the

gasoline ration expended, there was

bus tickets

1941; intercity buses, more than twice as

many

miles as

in

prewar days.

Riders endured cattle-car conditions

and were grateful even for standing room. There was a brisk trade in black-market Pullman reservations. Scalpers sold tickets at markups of $10 to $50; tourist agencies added $20 "service charges" to reservations. All told, the War meant unprece-

dented travel turmoil. An ad for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad said, correctly: "You'll be more comfortable at home."

first call

on transportation.

Pa eked shoulder to shoulder, nders on a Southern Raikvay coach log

some

ot the 55 Ivllion passenger nvlcs tallied

on trams

m

the United States

m

1942.

161

A crowd

>unds a dealer as he doles out precious heating oil in 1942.

ol

post

PLEASURES NO LONGER TAKEN FOR GRANTED Americans choosing to stay at home often found life uncomfortable there, too. During the icy winter of 1942-1943, fuel ra-

was begun, and consumers were about two thirds of their 1941 consumption barely enough to heat homes to 65°. The situation became so severe in tioning

allotted

—

the Northeast that Connecticut launched a

campaign

to

list all

wood

lots

where

resi-

dents could cut kindling and logs to burn in

stoves and fireplaces.

Everyday items of convenience or selfindulgence, long taken for granted, were hard to

come by

cial tissue,

—

liquor, laundry soap, fa-

cotton diapers, thumbtacks and

Nylon had "gone to war," and back to stockings of rayon and cotton. In late 1944, most stores had to

"No

— many

Cigarettes" signs. But

did

have black-market "stoopies" "the kind you stoop down behind the counter for." The shortage that hurt people most involved a staple meat. In New York, beef

—

were 35 per cent of normal. Boston, used to a million pounds a day, received three carloads instead of its normal 75. Housewives in almost every U.S. city found themselves with meat ration coupons to stocks

spare, but nothing to buy.

The alternatives were to patronize the black-market butchers, who got an estimated 20 per cent of the beef, or to locate substitutes. Unrationed and going for 20 cents a pound, horsemeat became a replacement for beef, which cost 55 cents a pound or more. Some restaurants began to serve buffalo, antelope and even beaver

Gourmet magazine soon joined

hair curlers.

meat.

women went

trend: "Although

162

The policeman was on hand

it

the

isn't/Our usual habit,/

This year we're eating/The Easter Rabbit."

to help regulate distribution.

Nassau streets in 1944. Each customer was allowed to purchase only two packs. N/cot/ne-stan ed Ne.J Yorkers queue up for scarce cigarettes at Fulton and

MAfTo^

j

pT^^r/.

/.e.

nnd.

a

woman

slips

right into a pair of

nylon hose.

^^|WARK;s7iRsT

The Man-O-War Packing Co

,n

Newark.

Now

ler..

Icature^ horser^eat .

163

A Washington,

with a houseboat D.C., couple solves the housing shortage

Used houses, ready

for purchase, are inspected

by

a family in Los Angele.

A CRUNCH

ON LIVING SPACE The most stubborn and ubiquitous shortage of all was housing, with 98 per cent of U.S. cities reporting insufficient singlefamily houses and 90 per cent unable to

meet apartment needs. Workers streaming booming defense towns were greeted with "No Vacancy" signs. The lucky shared

to

rooms with other new

arrivals or

moved

rows of jerry-built boxes of plywood and plasterboard. The unlucky resorted to tents and even shelters nailed together out of packing cases. For some, such makeshift dwellings became "home." When social workers asked a man to move his large family from a tent to a government-housing unit, he refused: "What's good enough for the boys in Africa," he said, "is good enough for me." into

164

Hungry workers from an

aircraft plant dig into j

mcjl ^nved

at

an o\erc/ou dcJ

boardinghouse

in

San Dil-^u.

i'ub!:^

War Housing

Centers

^cmun^cd communitn

rooms. sod space and urged householders to double up and rent spare

165

>t

jr

(Ill

/

i"***

#

Sa,/or5

on shore leave from the battleship US.S. North Carolina, accompar^ied by

a civil iar., possibly a iourr^alist, cross

New York

Harbor to Mar>haitar.

or. a

bunch.

THE GLinERING ALLURE OF OLD OROJUHNAY The pressures and tensions of the War created a need for escape annong hard-working people on the home front and one of the best places to get away from it all was New York City. There was more opportunity for enjoyment per square inch along the streets of midtown Manhattan than anywhere else in the country, and servicemen in particular took full advantage of it. They swarmed over Times Square and Broadway, New York's "Great White Way," in search of live

entertainment and the company of pretty

York,

in turn,

About 200

girls.

New

way never seen before. some five million meals a Times Square's bustling tourist trade. An

came

alive in a

restaurants, serving

week, catered to evening was hardly complete without a slice of Lindy's famous cheesecake or a cheese blintz at one of Broadway's many delicatessens. Over 50 nightclubs such as EI Morocco and the Stork Club provided drinks and dancing to the

Theater, government and military officials in 1942 check a list of Broadway theater attractions for which tickets were available to officers at half-price.

^'^^^^^H ^^^^^j J

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music of the big bands, and audiences thrilled to the voice of a young crooner by the name of Frank Sinatra, who was appearing at the Paramount Theater. The Copacabana headlined

Jimmy Durante, the proud possessor

of the greatest

proboscis on Broadway.

showed first-run war themes. Often, as

films dramatiz-

Scores of movie houses ing morale-boosting

See Here, Private Hargrove (sign,

right),

in

the

comedy

the movies

were

simply adaptations of best sellers or of plays that had ready proved their appeal on the

many Broadway

New

York

stage.

al-

With

attractions offering free tickets or discount

audiences swelled. In 1943 people attended Broadway

rates for servicemen, the size of

alone more than 11

shows. The

The

New

million

demand was

so great that the

drama

York Times commented with acerbity:

critic for

"It

was

a

public so anxious to attend the theater that for a time it would attend anything playing in a theater. Some of the

and offered plays which, in normal years, would never have passed Bridgeport." Not that it mattered, for the excitement alone of an evening on

managers took advantage of

this

Broadway was more than enough excursion to

New

to

make

York City worthwhile.

a serviceman's

T^c^J1^*^*** 1

1

%

^ oAvs or

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^

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rt li>3;>jc^^f-

Co/or/u/ b,7/board5

and marquees dominate the Great White Way

at

Times Square,

New

i.stv^'

York City's popular cer^ter for movies, plays, dining and dancing

GOING ALL OUT FOR THE BOYS IN UNIFORM Broadway greeted

its

wartime guests grauniform ev-

ciously, ottering the boys in

ife*5.

appear in shows themselves. The cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma! put on 44 free performances for servicemen only, while Irving Berlin's This the Army boasted a "Cast of 300 SolIs diers"

in a

rousing spectacle of

Army

iL

life

i:

set to music.

successful war-

One of Broadway's most time efforts was the Stage Door Canteen, which opened in the basement of the 44th

Ah

long line of Street Theater in place in the a find to thrilled men enlisted with big city where they could live it up were hostesses 2,200 as many the stars. As

1942 to

a

keep the men company and ofdoughnuts fer such all-American treats as order of the on celebrities while and milk, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

on

call to

ioiri actress Tallulah Bankhead n loin Servicemen

in

song

at

New

York's Stage

Door Canteen.

Si *:'-S5HaSS1CT5?"^l»«H)(e^

^M^^I

entertained them. Seven other Stage Door Canteens opened across the U.S., but the A original remained the most famous one.

weekly radio program was broadcast from inevitably a love storyit, and a movie— it. about was made

SOL LESSER in OMOcialion with

mi\m

THEim

wiic

eatures hostesses and The program hook of the movie Stage Door Canteen le

soldiers.

resents

m m. CAST OF 300 SOLDIERJ PROCEEDS TO ARMY EMERGENCY RELIEf FUND (

A poster

lor Irving Rprlin\ Thi^

1^

thr

Army

Veteran Berlin,

touts

in his

its st.irs:

soldiers

from

all

over the

1918 uniform. rehearses with the CI

US

cast.

A

soldier

shows

his

form

as a clancinR waitress

TREADING THE BOARDS IN THE THEATER OF

wU

Jv'jp-M i

WAR

f^h

^

/ ^-^^Ljl

^ 1 1^

HERMAN SHUMLIM LILLIAN

HELLMANS

IIH\HI

^

„..

an American In Lillian Hellman's phv Watch on the Rhine, and her German husband take refuge with her mother.

,,..1

^^^

«•"«""'

t^*''**"*^

«..,..,...„,.

MARTIN BECK THEATRE

—

soldier falls in love in Broadway's longrunning comedv The Voice of the Turtle.

A

i

^

^ f

ii

-1

CI comes home to find he has been writing not to Ruth, but to her younger sister. In the

An

1945 comedy Dear Ruth,

all-black cast brings

prostitute's

Anna

a

drama about a Broadway in 1944.

Lucasta, a

liaisons with sailors, to

U

.pi 1

/

The Broadway

theaters did

come servicemen to they took the War as

their

more than welperformances;

many Works by such

the subject of

of their finest productions.

authors as John Hersey and Lillian Hellman were based on war themes or actual incidents out of the War. The plays reflected the audiences' concern not just with the world conflict, but with the careers and

romances of individual

soldiers.

cast as a lover or a leader, a

Whether

man

in

uni-

form possessed an immediate heroic appeal that civilians, as well as servicemen,

could understand and applaud.

FREDRIC MARCH AIM

ti»

Major Joppolo

11^.^

CORT THEATRE

an March (poster and seated, above left) projects military authontv as Maior loppolo. Bell tor Adano. American serving as military administrator of an Italian town, in the 1944 play A Fredric

Alexandra Danilova of the Ballet Russe

cle

Monte Carlo, which attracted many GIs, dances Swan Lake in a triple exposure taken in 1942.

Judith

Anderson and Maurice Evans enact the

coronation scene of Macbeth. The ruthless king's treachery seemed particularly apt in 1942.

ENTERTAINMENT New

The the

War

IN

THE CLASSIC MODE

York theaters' offerings during

years included not only contem-

porary drama and music, but also classic works everything from opera and ballet

—

to

Shakespearean tragedies. World-famous

ballet dancers, including the corps of the Ballet Russe

de Monte Carlo, who had

Europe, were

ences

in

now

New

fled

performing before audi-

York

City.

keeping with the times, the works presented had war themes or appropriate messages. Program notes sometimes called attention to parallels with ongoing world events and conditions or such villains as In

—

Adolf

Hitler.

^M^

PAUL ROBESON

OTHELLO MOOR

THE

OF VENICE

A X

\_s

this

It

m

may

and

in the

begins,

we

in

are

when

nuddle of a war; and

the

at war.

noe be out of place to keep ocher wars, of other tunes

mind Foe. by

dearer U'e are

which w^ of people

her

"Ochello'

productjon of

niKkfle ol a year

feel offers

in a

war to protect

a

way

the greatest boiefit to the greatest

\enice

in

were

to

wars

may be

means, patterns and directions

this

now engaged

the Sixteenth

protect

Century was

Christianity

m

the

of Ufe

number

fighting too.

Eastern

the

Mediterranean In our conflict,

The Negro

command

all

piloc of

races are allied to fight for

the

Army /ui Corps may

common fly

ideals

under the!

%.

of Chiang in China, just as soldiers of other races|

fought with Venice for the protection of Christianity

*

The program for the 1943 revival of Othello includes a note explaining the significance ni the play for a wartime audience, especially in terms of its racial implications. As Othello, Paul Robeson (right) received one of the longest ovations in New York theater history.

^ * i>y

HASSARD HERBERT

and

allenIienkins

mi^-^

mw^ical fthcl Mprm.in (center -;(.ipe), in the 194^ 5omrt/i/nq /or the Box v p/.n f/ip unlikeh role oi .VTe\-choru< p/>/ \\hosr carborimdum radio. f/pnl.i/ work turns her mto s human Cole Porter <

m

,te

ail

Sophie Tucker, "The Last of the Rod-hiot Mammas," assumes a patriotic Statue of Liberty pose and leads a budesque troupe in High Kickers.

WINGED VICTORY

•

-T

li^m^ ,n . dr.,n...c n.on.en. ^.on,

Bro.c/u.V. ,943 HU

VV',ngec/ V,c,orv,

-u-ngs

'

.re .u.rc/ed to n.em6ers o^ the

An.v A.

Force,

uho H.e

pa.ec/ the. spec./,zec/

•f

J r f

1

:.

i

1

i

i|

training.

The

play,

?

Crccik s(a

J--

-J

*^s)f^^j

^

f'

widow

awards a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor to arrange and son of Colonel Demas T. Craw, killed while attempting to North Africa in November 1942. a truce during Allied landings in French the

FDR

dinner jacket and a black tie, F.D.R. keeps in touch with The gala setting— the East Room of the White House "fireside chat." during a diplomatic reception— was unusual for a

Dressed

in a

the nation by radio.

the President, his neighbors on election night in 1944, W^ivv cane he nrelerred to an overcoat, watches a torchlight

Gathered with ..-..ino f/iP

the spectacle with

Wagner,

him are Mrs. Roosevelt, daughter Anna and Elmer von who helped produce the festivities.

a longtime political friend

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1

of years of The drawn visages of Churchill arid Roosevelt reflect the tension 1944. war leadership at the second Quebec Conference in September

vyaui^^.^v talks with Stalin's deputy, foreign Minisier in 1945. cap) and Churchill (center rear) at Yalta early

A haggard Roosevelt Molotov

(in fur

BONE-WEARYING WARTIME MEETINGS In

the pursuit of his wartime duties, Roosewent to any lengths necessary to meet

velt

with Allied leaders.

He journeyed

to such

Quebec, Casablanca and Cairo to confer with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. And he went to Teheran

distant places as

and Yalta for discussions with Churchill and Russian Premier Josef Stalin. Roosevelt and Churchill hit it off from the start. "It's fun to be in the same decade with you," Roosevelt cabled "Winnie" in 1941. Churchill said being with F.D.R. was "like opening a bottle of champagne." The

two Western leaders were

split

on

Stalin.

F.D.R. said he "got along fine" with the

Russian leader, but Churchill regarded him

with suspicion. Roosevelt's travels

and he usually gia,

visited

after his return

were bone-wearying,

Warm

Springs, Geor-

home

to

recoup

his

by the time he went to Yalta 1945 the War years had taken their toll.

strength. But in "I

noticed that the President was ailing," commented. "Often there

Churchill later

a far-away look in his eyes." His jaw sagged; the famous cigarette holder dangled. Soon he was back at Warm Springs, but this time it was too late. On the 12th of April, 1945, while posing for his portrait, the President succumbed to a massive ce-

was

rebral

hemorrhage.

«

:mm m: 1^ 'mlm

mil

I

III

II

I

lull

i

i

:;\

»

A DAY OF NATIONAL SORROW Franklin Roosevelt

ure and was so

was such a

much

a part of

familiar fig-

the lives of

Americans that the news of his death struck almost everyone on the home front with the same impact as the loss of a member of the family. A shopkeeper in Pittsburgh closed up and hung a hand-lettered

all

sign in the

York

window; "He died."

In

New

got out of his cab, sat on the curb and wept. "It doesn't

a taxi driver

down

seem possible," said a woman in Detroit. "It seems to me that he will be back on the radio tomorrow, reassuring us that it was just a mistake." In

Washington,

a soldier

spoke the nation's grief: "I felt as if knew him. felt as if he knew me— and felt as if he liked me." A special train bore the President's body north to Washington. All along the route, Americans gathered to say farewell. At the I

I

I

White House, the coffin lay in the East Room, where at the close of another terrible war, almost 80 years to the day, Abra-

ham

Lincoln's

body had

lain. In

a steady

downpour, the

train traveled the last leg of

the journey to

Hyde

Park,

where the war-

time leader was given a solemn military funeral. "All that is within me cries to go

back to my home on the Hudson River," F.D.R. had said nine months before. At long last, he was home.

rs

earlier, Franklin

Roosevelt

tf'^.

HE

»''

'

#;

SW

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Henry Aver, Fred,

Jr.,

Harry Hopkins. C. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977. Before the Colors Fade: Portrait of a Soldier, George

Lingeman, Richard

H.,

5.

Patton,

jr. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964. Ayling, Keith, Calling All Women. Harper & Brothers, 1942. Barnes, G. M., Weapons of World War II. D. Van Nostrand Co., 1947.

Baxandall, Rosalyn, Linda

Cordon and Susan Reverby,

eds.,

Amer/ca'5 Working

Women. Random House,

1976. Baxter, James Phinney III, Scientists against Time. M.I.T. Press, 1946. Bliss, Edward, Jr., ed., In Search of Light. Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during

World War II. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Burns, James MacGregor: Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Carr, Lowell Juilliard, and James Edson Sturmer, l\'/7/ovv Run: Study of Industrialization and Cultural Inadequacy. Harper, 1952. Catton, Bruce, The War Lords of Washington. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948. Cerf, Bennett, Try & Stop Me. A Collection of Anecdotes and Stories, Mostly Humorous. Garden City Publishing Co., inc., 1944.

Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic Oxford Uni\ersity Press, 1972. Alliance. Bantam, 1950. Churchill, Winston S., The Grand Clark, Ronald W., The Birth of the Bomb. Phoenix House Ltd., 1961. Cochran, Bert, Harrv Truman and the Crisis Presidency. Funk and Wagnalls, Chase, William Henry, The American

and

Political Roles, 1920-1970.

1973.

Colby, Benjamin, Tvvas a Famous Victory: Deceptions and Propaganda in the War with Germany. Arlington House, 1974. Conrat, Maisie and Richard, Executive Order 9066. M.I.T. Press, 1972. Cooper, Martin R., Glen T. Barton and Albert P. Brodell, Progress of Farm Mechanization. Miscellaneous Publications —630, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1947.

Correspondents of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE, The, December

7:

The

First Thirt)

Hours. Alfred A. Knopf, 1942. Dalfiume, Richard M., Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. University of Missouri Press, 1969. Daniels, Roger, Concentration Camps, USA: Japanese Americans & World War II.

Dryden

Das-is,

Press, 1971.

Forrest,

and Ernest

K.

Lindley,

How War

Came. Simon and Schuster,

1942.

Good

Night, Sweet Prince. Viking Press, 1944. American Nation: A History of the United States. Harper & Row, Publishers,. Inc., and American Heritage Publishers, 1966. Girdner, Audrie,and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal. The Macmillan Co., 1969. Goodman, Jack, ed.. While You Were Gone. Da Capo Press, 1974. Groueff, Stephane, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb. Little, Brown and Co., 1967. Guiles, Fred Lawrence, Norma lean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe. McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969. Gunther, John: Inside U.S.A. Harper & Brothers, 1947. Roosevelt in Retrospect. Harper & Brothers, 1950. Hargrove, Marion, 5ee Here, Private Hargrove. Henry Holt and Co., 1942. Hinshaw, David, The Home Front. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1943.

Fowler, Gene,

Garraty, John A., The

Hoehling, A. A.:

Home

Front, U.S.A.

Thomas

Y.

Crowell, 1966.

The Week before Pearl Harbor. W. W. Norton, 1963. Hosokawa, Bill, Nisei. William Morrow, 1969. Lamont, Lansing, Day of Trinity. Atheneum, 1965. Langer, William L., and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1953. Laurence, William L., Men and Atoms: The Discovery, the Uses and the Future of Atomic Energy. Simon and Schuster, 1959.

R.,

Don't You

Know

There's a

War On?

G.

P.

Putnam's Sons,

1970. Lord, Walter, Day of Infamy. Bantam, 1957. Manchester, William, The Glory and the Dream. Bantam, 1973. Martin, Joe, My First Fifty Years in Politics. McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1960. Martin, Pete, V\'/7/ Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe? Doubleday & Co., 1956. Meyer, Agnes E., journey through Chaos. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1944. Miller, Merle, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. Berkley Publishing Corp., 1974. Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Rising Sun in the Pacific. Little, Brown and Co., 1948. Morris, Joe Alex, Deadline Every Minute. Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1957. Nelson, Donald ,M., Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production. Da Capo Press, 1973. Nesbitt, Henrietta, White House Diary. Doubleday & Co., 1948. Pendleton, Ann, Hit the River, Sister. Howell Suskin, 1943. Penfold, J. B., "Japan's Rambling Balloon Barrage." Published in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 73, August 1947. Perrett, Geoffrey, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973. Phillips, Cabell, The 1940s. The Macmillan Co., 1975. Pinza, Ezio, Ezio Pinza. Rinehart, 1958. Pogue, Forrest C, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope. Viking Press, 1965. Polenberg, Richard: ed., America at War. Prentice-Hall, 1968. War and Society. J. B. Lippincott, 1972. Pusey, Merlo J., Big Government: Can We Control It? Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1948. Rachlis, Eugene, They Came to Kill. Random House, 1951. Reilly, Michael F., and William J. Slocum, Reilly of the White House. Simon and Schuster, 1947. Rogers, Donald I., Since You Went Away. Arlington House, 1973. Roose\'elt, Eleanor, This I Remember. Harper & Brothers, 1949. Roskill, S. W., The War at Sea. Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1956. Shea, Naney, The Waacs. Harper & Brothers, 1943. Sherwin, Martin J., A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Sherwood, Robert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins. Harper & Brothers, 1948. tenBroek, Jacobus, Edward N. Barnhart and Floyd W. Matson, Prejudice, War and the Constitution. University of California Press, 1968. Thomson, Harry C, and Lida Mayo, United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services. The Ordnance Department: Procurement and Supply. Dept. of the Army, 1960. Toland, John, The Rising Sun. Random House, 1970. Treadwell, Mattie E., The Women's Army Corps. Dept. of the Army, 1953. Truman, Harry S., Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, Vol. I: Years of Decisions. Doubleday & Co., 1955. Tully, Grace, F.D.R. My Boss. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949. U.S. Air Force Historical Aircraft Background Information. Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information, Internal Information Di\ision, 1970. von Miklos, Josephine, / Took a War job. Simon and Schuster, 1943. Walton, Francis, Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible. The Macmillan Co., 1956. Warner, William L., Democracy in jonesville. Greenwood Press, 1976. Webber, Bert, Retaliation: Japanese Attacks and Allied Countermeasures on the Pacific Coast in World War II. University of Oregon Press, 1975. West, J. B., Upstairs at the White House. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973. Whitehead, Don, The FBI Story. Random House, 1956. Wittner, Lawrence S., Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement. Columbia Unixersity Press, 1969. Wynn, Neil A., The Afro-American and the Second World War. Paul Eiek, 1976. Zolotow, Maurice, Marilyn Monroe. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS this book was prepared by Mel Ingber. For help given in the preparation of this book the editors wish to express their gratitude to Clarence Boston, Records Manager, U.S. Selective Service System, Washington, D.C.; David Bruster, Historian, Agricultural History Group, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.; George Coffman, Agricultural Economist, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.; V. M. Destefano, Chief, Reference Branch, U.S. Army Audiovisual Division, Pentagon, Washington, D.C.; Detmar H. Finke,

The index ior

204

Historian, Center of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.; Robert Fredlund, Director of Administrative Programs, U.S. Treasury Department, Washington, D.C.; Jerry Hill, Industrial and Social Branch, National Archives, Washington, D.C.: James Idema, Washington, D.C.; Francis X.

Maloney, Assistant Director, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Colonel Bettie J. Morden, Center of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.; Allan Priaux, King Features Syndicate, New York, New York; James Sullivan, Cedar Falls, Iowa; Clarence Taylor, Houston, Texas.

PICTURE CREDITS COVER

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1

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tions.

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DAYS OF DAZZLING GROWTH: Hoffman

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R.

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for LIFE.

THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF: 188 through 191-Franklin D. Roosevelt Librarv. 192-Harry S. Hood. 193-Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; UPI. 194-Wide World, courtesy the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library— Margaret Bourke-White, courtesy Ed Cantor. 195-Thomas D. McAvoy for LIFE. 196, 197-U.S. Navy; Wide World. 198, 199-Harris & Ewing-Thomas D. McAvoy for LIFE: George Skadding for LIFE. 200, 201— Studio Sun, Ltd., inset, George Skadding for LIFE. 202, 203-George Skadding for LIFE.

205

knowledge of atomic bomb, 187; meets with Roosevelt in Washington, 24-25; at Potsdam, 187; priorities in War, 24; at Quebec, 200: on Roosevelt, 193; at Yalta, 200-201 24;

INDEX Mumerals in italics indicate an illustration of the subject mentioned.

Civil Air Patrol,

Agriculture: agribusiness, 182; growth, 181 productivity, 182 Air raids on U.S.: balloon, 105-106, 707; false ;

alarms, 10; precautions against, 6-7, 10, 72-73, 74-75, 104-105; submarine-launched,

26 Aircraft production, U.S., 82; by aircraft

by automobile industry, 76-77, Willow Run plant, 76-77, 196

industry, 82; 82, 796;

Allis-Chalmers, 186 Allotment Annies, 52

Anderson, Judith, 774 Armaments: produced by aircraft industry, 82; produced b\' automobile industry, 80-82; quantity produced by end of War, 77; women and ammunition production, 700-707. 5ee also Production of armaments Arnold, Henry H., 53 Atlantic Charter, 24

Atomic bomb: construction, 187; decision

to

developments, chain reaction, 186; test, 187

use, 187; early scientific first

women

volunteers, 92, 93

Camps, 46 Codes, Japanese diplomatic code deciphered, 20 Columbia University, 183 "Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer," 117 Compton, Arthur, 184, 186

Autry, Gene, 42 Ayres, Lew, 46

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founding and tactics, 152-153 Conover, David, 86 Conscientious objectors, 45-47 Cost plus, 77 Cox, James M., 193 Craw, DemasT., 198 Crosby, Bing, 107

Baker, George, 45

William, 22 Balloon bombs, 105-106, 707; and censorship, Ball,

105,115 Bankhead,Tallulah, 170 Barrymore, John, 27 Bartlett, Mari Wood and Robert, 728-747 Bates-Batcheller, Tr\phosa Duncan, 116 Bell Aircraft, 82 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 104 Berlin, Irving, 170, 777 Big Four, sign Declaration of United Nations, 25 Black Americans: in armed forces, 55, 757, 153; on Broadway, 772, 775; and civil rights organizations, 149, 152-153; discrimination against, in industry, 149-150; economic changes, 153; effect of War on, 149-150; new militancy, 150; overseas, 150, 152; proJapanese sympathies, 149; and race riots, 750, 153; women in labor force, 98 Blackouts, 8, 73 Boeing Airplane Company, 82 Bofors gun, 81-82 Bohr, Niels, 183 Bombers: B-17, 82; B-29, 82; construction of B-24, 76-77 Boston, Massachusetts, painting of State House,

24,25 Brauckmillcr family, 142, 744

Bureau of Motion Pictures, 116 Bush, Vannevar, 183, 185 Business: and antitrust, 181; and atomic bomb, 186; growth of sector, 181 influence in government, 78-79, 181; small vs. large companies, 78-79, 80 ;

D Danilova, Alexandra, 774 Dasch, George, 116 Davis, Elmer, 117 DDT, 183 DeGreve, Arthur F., 20

DeWitt, John L., 10, 12; on Japanese-Americans, 30 Dietrich, Marlene, 170 DiMaggio, Joe, 42 Dos Passes, John, on Mobile, Alabama, 143 Douglas, Melvyn, 106 Douglas, Paul, 42 Douglas Aircraft, 82 Draft boards, 43-44; deferments, 44; letters from, 44. 5ee also Selective Training and Service Act Drew, Charles R., 55 DuBois, W. E. B.,149

DUK-W(duck),87 Durante, Jimmy, 168

Early, Steve,

Economic

Children: and scrap drives, 118-119, 124-127;

and war effort, 118-127 armaments production, 81-82 Churchill, Winston: addresses in U.S., 24; American ancestry, 24; and Atlantic Charter,

Chrysler,

206

20

policies of U.S.: agriculture, 181-

182; antitrust, 180-181; labor, 181; rationing, 110-111 taxes, 108; War Bonds and Stamps, ;

108-110,120,121 Economy of U.S.: and blacks, 153; boom areas, 143-144; growth during War years, 144-145, 180-183; in the South, 143; before War, 24. See a/so Agriculture; Business; Labor, organized; Labor force; Rationing; Shortages Educational institutions: and armed forces, 182-183; government contracts, 182-183 Einstein, Albert, 183 Eisenhower, Dwight David: chosen to lead invasion of Europe, 53; on day of attack

on Pearl Harbor, 17; position in 1941, 52 Entertainment, 145; and blacks, 153; in New York, 766-779; and propaganda, 116-117 Evans, Maurice, 774

Fair

California Institute of Technology, 183 Censorship, 115, 116 Chayney, Mayris, 106

Flynn, Errol, 148

Fontanne, Lynn, 170 Ford, Gerald, 42 Ford Motor Company: jeep, 81 and Willow Run boomtown, 143-144; Willow Run ;

796 183 Nobuo, 105

factory, 76-77, Frisch, Otto, Fujita,

Garner, John Nance, 188-189 Gar>', Indiana, 72-73 General Electric Company, 186 General Motors, armaments production, 81-82

German-Americans: internment

of, 27; suspicion of, 26-27 Germany: declares war on U.S., 23; forbids uranium export from Czechoslovakia, 183; and sabotage in U.S., 115-116; surrender, 187 Germany, Navy of, attacks offshore U.S.,

26,

106

Grable, Betty, 109

Detroit, race riot, 750, 153^

B

Alden C, Jr.,43

Flannagan, John W., on War, 23

Civilian Public Service

Daniels, Jonathan, 24 Daniels, Josephus, 792, 193

Arnold, Thurman, 181

183-184;

106

Civilian defense, 104-106, 107; air-raid precautions, 6-7, 10, 104-105; blackouts, 8, 73; scrap drives, 107-108, 118-119, 124-127;

Flagg,

Employment Practices Commission, 150 Don C, 72; on WACs, 68

Faith,

War on one, 128-141. See also Social changes Farmer, James, 152 Fermi, Enrico, 183, 184, 186

Family, effects of

Great Britain: losses in Asia, 25-26; trades bases for destroyers, 23 Grew, Joseph C, return to U.S., 20 Groves, Leslie, 184, 786 Gypsy Rose Lee, 170

H Harding, Warren G., 193 Hargrove, Marion, on life

Harvard

the ,^rmy, 58, 60

Hoover, J. Edgar, on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 17 Hoovervilles, new, 143 Hopkins, Harry, 18 Home, Lena, 150 Housing: for blacks, 153; shortages, 143 Houston, sunk, 48 Houston, Texas, and sinking of namesake, 48 Hueth, Potter, 86 Hull, Cordell, meeting with Japanese on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 18, 20 Hunt, E. J., 78, 79 I

G. Farbenlndustrie, 181 Italian-Americans: internment of, 27; suspicion of, 26-27 Italy, declares war on U.S., 23 I.

J

Japan: decision to use atomic bomb against, 187; diplomats meet with Hull on day of Pearl Harbor attack, 18; protection of diplomats in U.S., 70 Japan, Navy of: air attacks on U.S. mainland, 105; submarine attack on U.S. mainland, 26

Japanese-Americans: in armed forces, 35, 38, 39; hostility toward, 26-27, 28, 40; internment, 27, 28-39, 40, 41 after internment of, 40; order permitting exclusion of, from areas of U.S., 27, 30; potentially dangerous aliens ordered detained, 20; work in internment camps, 36, 37 ;

Jeep, 87

Johnson, L\ndon, 42 Juvenile delinquency, 148

K

Fireside chat, 798

Kaiser,

Hamilton, and Roosevelt, 21

in

183

Helicopter (YR-4A), first successful Army, 782 Henderson, Leon, 9 Hershey, Lewis B., 43-44 Hobby, Oveta Gulp, 42, 50; and troops, 66-67, 72 Hoffman, Clare E., 104

Fighters: P-38, 82; P-40, 82; P-47, 82; P-51, 82 Fish,

Universit\',

Henry

82-83

J.,

82-83; and shipbuilding,

Keller, K. T., 78,

o

Kennedy, John

Oak

79 16-17 King, Ernest J., 53 Knox, Frank, informs Roosevelt of attack on Pearl Harbor, 18 Krock, Arthur, 23 Kurusu, Saburo, 18, 20

in

Ridge, 186 Office of Censorship, 115 Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), 104-108; Civil Air Patrol, 106; number of volunteers, 107; propaganda, 107; scrap drives, 107-108; Volunteer Participation Division, 106

F.,

Office of Price Administration (OPA), 110, La Cuardia, Fiorello H., 705; and Office of Civilian Defense, 104, 105, 106; on potential for attack on New York, 12 Labor, organized: growth, 181; and politics, 181 strikes, 87; and Wagner Act, 181 Labor force, 84-87, 180; absenteeisnn, 86; blacks in, 98, 149-150; hoboes in, 85; mobility of,

111,112, 114 Office of Production Management, 78 Office of Scientific Research and Development

(OSRD),183, 185 Office of

142-143; in shipyards, 88-89; strikes, 87; teenagers in, 146; of U.S. government, 180; use of normally excluded workers, 84; wages, 86, 87, 94; women in, cover, 7, 86, 88-100, 145; working conditions, 86 Lake, Veronica, 96 Lamarr, Hedy, 109 Landis, James M., and Office of Civilian Defense, 106-107 Laurence, William L., on atomic-bomb test, 187 Leahy, William D., 53, 187 Lear, Ben, 49, 52 Lend-Lease, established, 23 Lepke, Louis, 47 Lewis, John L., 87 Lunt, Alfred,

170

M McAfee, Mildred, 50 Magic, 20 Project, 184-187; chain reaction, 184, 186; controls, 184; production of atomic bomb, 186-187; secrecy, 184, 186, 187; test of atomic bomb, 187; uranium supplies,

Manhattan

184, 186 March, Fredric, 773

Marshall,

Information (OWI), 114, 117.

Oppenheimer,

J.

Robert, 786, 187

P Packard Motor Company, armaments production, 81-82

Company, 181 Patton, George S., Jr., Parker

in

1941 maneuvers, 49

Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on: fears

and

response of mainland to, 6-75; news of, 16-17 Penicillin, 183 Pershing, John J., 42 Plutonium, 187 Popp, Roy, 746 Porter, Cole, 176 Powell, Tom, 746 "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," 116-117 Price, Byron, and Office of Censorship, 115 Princeton University, 183 Pringle, Henry F., 114 Prisoners of war, German, in U.S., 752 Production of armaments, 76-87; acquisition of materials for, 83; by aircraft industry, 82; by auto industry, 80-82; awarding of contracts for, 78-79; conversion from civilian production to, 77, 79; and improvement of aircraft, 82;

George C, 53

labor force

in,

84-87; priority

ratings for, 83; profits from, 77-78; rubber,

and small businesses, 83-84; and War Pro-

Martin, Joe, 17

Massachusetts institute of Technology, 182-183 Maverick, Maury, 83 Mead, Margaret, on women after War, 96 Medical research, 183 Meitner, Lise, 183 Merman, Ethel, 170, 776 Meyer, Agnes E., 143 Midgets, and aircraft production, 85, 796 Migration, population, 142-143; and jobs, 143; and racism, 153 Mitchell, Archie, 707 Molotov, Vyacheslav, at Yalta, 200-201 Momism, 45 Monroe, Marilyn, 86 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., orders President's guard increased, 21 and War Bonds, 108-109 Morishima, Morito, 70 Muhammad, Elijah, 149 Murrow, Edward R., on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 22, 23 ;

N National Association for the

Advancement

of

Colored People (NAACP): founding of, 149; growth of, 152 Nelson, Donald M., 78, 79, 80; head of War Production Board, 79, 80 Nelson, Lindsey, 16

New York, New York:

War

See also Propaganda

;

air-raid alert in, 10;

entertainment in, 766-779 Nixon, Richard M.: on day of Pearl Harbor attack, 17; and Office of Price Administration, 110 Nomura, Kichisaburo, 18, 20 Nye, Gerald, on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 17

duction Board, 79,80, 83 Propaganda: against Germany and Japan, 116; in

entertainment, 116-117; poster, 774;

pro-Allied, 116; symbols, 117 Prostitution, near training camps, 54. 5ee also

Victory

girls

Q Quebec Conference, 200

R Racism, 149;

in

armed

services, 55, 757, 153;

armed

forces,

50

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 188-203; as administrator, 79; and Atlantic Charter, 24; and atomic bomb, 183; and Churchill, 200; on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 18, 20-21, 23; death, 187, 200, 202-203; early life, 790-797; fireside chat, 798; at first Selective Service drawing, 43; on foreign affairs, 194; issues order barring Japanese-Americans from West Coast, 27, 30; meets with Churchill in Washington, 24-25; morale boosting, 796-797, 798-799; on not sending Americans to war, 16; polio,

192; political progress, 193, 194; priorities War, 24; at Quebec Conference, 200; and racism, 55; requests declaration of war on Japan, 18, 79, 23; and Stalin, 200; steps toward war, 23, 194; travels, 200; on U.S. defenses in 1942, 26; at Yalta, 200-201

in

Roosevelt, James, 190 Roosevelt, Theodore (President), 190 Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., jeep, 81 "Rosie the Riveter," 85 Rubber: cutoff of supply, 84, 181 guayale, 84; industry pact on, 181 needs, 85; produc;

;

tion, 84, 85; synthetic,

84

Rustin, Bayard, 152

Sabotage attempts, 115-116 Sachs, Alexander, 184 5ad Sack (cartoon), 44 San Francisco, California, air-raid alerts, 10 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 117 Science and technology, 181, 185; and agriculture, 182; air conditioning, 785;

armaments

research, 183; atomic bomb, 183-187; computers, 785; health research, 183, 785;

helicopter, 783; peacetime implications of, 185; radar, 785; research contracts, 182183; synthetic rubber, 84, 181 Scrap drives, 84, 85, 107-108; and children, 118-119, 124-127 Selective Training and Service Act, 43; conscientious objectors, 45-47; deferments, 44; draft evasion, 45; first drawing under, 43; physical requirements for selectees, 45; registrations, 43, 44, 47; rejections from service, 45 Servicemen: attitude toward armed services, 49, 52; life at training camp, 47, 49, 52,

54-55; marriages, 52, 54 Shipbuilding: and Kaiser, 82; and women workers, 88-89 Shipping losses, in U.S. waters in early 1942, 26 Shortages, 110-111, 114-115, 154-165; anticipated, 8; and hoarding, 156; housing, 143,

and blacks, 149-150, 152-153; and Federal Employment Practices Commission, 150; and Mexican-Americans, 149; riots, 750, 153. 5ee also Japanese-Americans Randolph, A. Philip, and racial discrimination, 149

764-765; meat, 110, 162, 763; of motor vehicles, 154-155, 158-159; transportation, 760-767. See also Rationing Sikorsky, Igor, and helicopter, 187 Sinatra, Frank, 147-148, 168

Rankin, Jeanette, 23 Rationing, 102, 110-111, 112-113, 156; black market during, 110-111, 162; cigarette, 162, 763; coffee, 112; coupons, 110-111, 772; fuel oil, 762; gasoline, 84, 110, 111, 156, 157; hoarding during. 111, 156; meat, 110, 162, 763; points, 112; as social leveler, 145; sugar, 84, 110, 112. See also Shortages Rayburn,Sam,18, 79 Red Cross, women volunteers, 92

Smith, Gerald L. Smith, Kate, 110

racial

discrimina-

55 Rooney, Mickey, 52 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 190, 797, 794, 198-199, 203; and demonstration against racism, 149; and Office of Civilian Defense, 106; and women tion,

Smyth, Henry 186

D.,

Merrill,

K.,

186

153

on producing atomic bomb,

Social changes, 145, 147-153, 180;

and black

Americans, 149-150, 152-153; breakup of families, 147, 148; moral standards, 148149; and women, 90, 147; and young people, 146,147-149 Songs, patriotic, 116-117. See also Entertain-

ment

Rickenbacker, Eddie, 86, 116

Robeson, Paul, 775 Robinson, Jackie, 17; and

Skidmore-Owings

Sorensen, Charles E., 76 SPARs, 50 Stage Door Canteen, 770

and atomic bomb, 187; at Potsdam, 187; on U.S. war production, 77 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, agreement with I. G. Farbenindustrie, 181 Stalin, josef:

207

Steinbeck, John, 17 Stewart, Everett, 45 Stewart, Jimmy, 42 Stimson, Henry L.: at first Selective Service drawing, 43; and Manhattan Project, 187; and racism, 55; on war profits, 11 Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation,

186 Stout, Rex, 116 Stratton,

Doroth\ C, SO

Strecker, Edward, 45 Streeter,

Ruth C, SO

Sullivan family, 22 Szilard, Leo,

183

opinion on War, 23 United States, Air Force of, 50; women in, 50,57 United States, armed forces of: attitudes of enlisted men, 49, 52; conflicts with War Production Board, 80; conscientious objec45-47; conscription, 43; convicts in, 44; deferments, 44; early training conditions, 49; and educational institutions, 182-183; enlistments after Pearl Harbor attack, 42; entertainment near bases, 54; entertainment in New York, 766-779; equipment shortages, 49; farewells to draftees, 47; JapaneseAmericans in, 35, 38, 39; Joint Chiefs of Staff, S3; losses in Pacific in 1942, 25-26; preparedness for war, 20, 25; rejection from, tors,

attack,

45; racial and sexual discrimination, 54-55, 757, 153; training camps, 47, 49, 56-65, 66-75;

C, 48 Teenagers, 147-148; and delinquency, 148; in labor force, 746; and zoot suits, 748, 149 Toscanini, Arturo, 117 Transportation: automobiles and trucks, 758759; public, 760-767 Truman, Harry S.: and Manhattan Project, 184, 187; and waste in government spending, 77-78, 79 Tucker, Sophie, 777 Tunney, Gene, on chastity, 54

treatment of enlisted men, 49; women in, 50-57,66-75 United States, Army of: Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), 182; build-up and train-

Tamm, Edward, on day

of Pearl

Harbor

17 Taylor, Clarence

u United Nations, Declaration of the, signed, 25 United Service Organization (USO), 54, 65 United States: anti-Japanese sentiment, 26-27; attacks on mainland of, 26, 105-106; attitudes toward servicemen, 52; dailv life, 102-104; on day of Pearl Harbor attack, 16-18, 20-21, 23; at death of Roosevelt, 202; declares war on Germany and Italy, 23; declares war on Japan, 23; economic changes during War, QO, 145, 153, 180; effects of War on a family, 728-J47; fears of airraids, 6-7,10, 12, 104-105; fears of invasion, 8, 11, 12, 20-21

German

naval attacks on, offshore, 26, 106; reactions in Washington to attack on Pearl Harbor, 20-21 migration within, 142-143; peacetime draft, 23; prewar public

ing of, 52; equipment shortages, 49; first successful helicopter (YR-4A), 782; haircuts, 60; life in training camps, 56-65, 66-75; physical requirements for draftees, 45; racism in, 55, 757, 153; Sad Sack (cartoon), 44, 45; strength by 1942, 52; uniforms, 60; women

in,

SO, SI, 66-75

United States, Coast Guard of, 77; women in, SO United States, Congress of, declares war, 23; investigation of defense spending, 78 United States, federal government of, 180; and business, 181; and educational institutions, 182-183; growth of, during War, 180 United States, Marine Corps of: racism in, 55;

women

in,

50, 57

Victory girls, 148 von Miklos, Josephine, 90

w WACs,

50, 68; training of, 60-75; uniforms,

68,71

WAFS,

50, 57

Wallace, Henry, 18, 79 War Bonds and Stamps, 108-110, 120, 121 War Production Board (WPB), 79, 80; growth of, 83; Smaller War Plants Division, 83 War Relocation Authority, 40

Warner, W. Lloyd, 47 Washington, D.C., defense of, 74-75 Watson, Edwin "Pa," 184 WAVES, SO Westinghouse Electric Corporation, 184, 186 Wheeler, Burton K., and declaration of war on Japan, 23 Wheeler, Lawrence, 26 White, E. B., on prewar years, 23 White, William Allen, on Roosevelt, 190 Wickard, Claude R., 108 Wigner, Eugene, 183, 186 Willkie, Wendell L., 79 Willow Run, 76, 77, 796; housing at, 143-144. 5ee also Ford Motor Company Willys-Overland, jeep, 81

Women: and ammunition 707;

in

armed

changing role

manufacture, 700-

forces, 50-57, 66-75; black, of,

147; daily

life of,

9i

102;

discrimination against, in armed forces, 55; in labor force, cover, 7, 85-86, 88-100, 102, 145, 147; and living conditions near bases, 52, 54; married to servicemen, 52, 54, 147; paid less in industry, 94; prejudice against, in industry, 90; volunteers, 92-93, T22; as wives, 147; work at home, 96 family of Albert and Louise (Anne, Bertram, Francis, Gardner, Mari, Moyer, Paul, Penelope), effect of War on, 728-747 Wrigley, Philip K., 84 Writers War Board, 116 Wylie, Philip, on Momism, 45

United States, Navy of: and enlistments in Houston, 48; Navy College Training Program (V-12), 182; racism in, 55; women in, SO University' of Chicago, 186 Uranium: production of enriched, 187; supplies, 184, 186

Wood,

V-for-Victory symbol, 117 Vandenberg, Arthur, on day of attack on Pearl Harbor, 17 Victory bicycle, 9 Victory gardens, 108, 709

Yalta Conference, 200-201 York, Alvin, 43, 46, 47

initial

;

opinion, 23-24; propaganda campaigns, 116-117; racism, 55, 116, 149-150, 151, 152-153; social changes, 52, 145, 147-153; trades destroyers for bases, 23; unity of

Zoot

suits,

748, 149

Printed

208

in

U.S.A.

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