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Read About Life on the WW II Home Front. Learn What was Going on in 1940s America from these Free WW2 Magazine Articles.
During the closing days of the war in Europe, U.S. Representative Clinton P. Anderson (D. NM. 1890 – 1975) adhered to the many cries of his constituents and looked into the possibility that the American military had abused the trust placed in them concerning allocation of meat.
Few Americans realize the deep concern which the Army exercises to determine the exact status of a man reported missing in action, and even fewer are aware of the many complexities that beset the endeavor to track down missing [personnel]… It may be observed, incidentally, that the men reported as ‘missing in action’ has a two-out-of-three chance of being alive, and of turning up eventually.
Attached herein is a fun little chart laying out the reasons why commercial goods on the home front were scarce.
As the Allied Armies were nearing Berlin and Tokyo, U.S. magazines began running articles concerning the nation’s problems that had all been put on the back burner during the war years. Subjects of concern involved inflation, alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency. The article attached here concern America’s curse: racial and religious prejudice, and how to get rid of it.
Having heard from assorted armchair generals, radio oracles and ink-stained bums that the heart of the American home front was not in the fight, journalist Quentin Reynolds bought some train tickets to scour the country and see if it was true.
It wasn’t.
Click here to read about the rationing of makeup.
Newsweek‘s Raymond Moley (1886 – 1975) took a serious look at the year that had just passed, 1941, and concluded that the American people, as a whole, had had embraced the war as their own personal problem. He was impressed with the gravity with which the home front solved the problems that war brought to their doorsteps:
“The pre-Pearl Harbor issue has been liquidated, not because of an act of national will power. It had faded before the immediate tasks of war. The new year brought so many jobs to do, so many problems to grapple with that there was no time to remember 1941… At no time in the year has there been a real failure on the part of Americans to appreciate the gravity of the war job.”
“In the twelve months since Pearl Harbor the American family has begun
to experience war on the home front. Almost a full year has passed before gasoline rationing was extended to the entire country. More than a year will have passed before meat rationing begins next month. The sugar pinch has been only a gentle nip. The full extent of the fuel shortage has yet to be measured against the severity of the weather. The sign ‘one per customer’ appears on more and more shelves in the corner grocery, but except for extra cups of coffee the average menu isn’t too far from prewar. Thanksgiving of 1942 was hardly less than the usual feast day.”
“Every day in Washington, and twice on Sundays, there will be parades. You love parades. You’ll never get tired of turning out for bands, even though they always stop playing just as they get opposite you…. Anyhow, there will always be the feel of parades in Washington, and the echoes of martial music, and the sight of waving flags. Where else, oh where elese, could they sing so fervently God Bless America?”
“The divorce rate took a sharp upswing in all the warring countries after World War I, and another rise after this war is already being foreshadowed… Much of the post-war rise in the divorce rate is expected to come from the untying of knots too hastily tied as a result of [the 1941] war hysteria.”
For those blessed to live in a society with a free-market economy, we are pleased to pursue our whims daily – and eight times out of ten, they are made manifest before too long. Yet this was not the case for those living on the W.W. II home front. This article is about the black market that must have been a temptation for everyone back then. The reader will get a true sense of the tyranny Americans had to suffer when our economy was engaged in total war; it was written by one of the autocrats charged with enforcing the rationing laws.
“There is no other country at war with such an enormous gulf in sacrifice between fighting men and civilians. There is no other country where the men at the front have given up everything, while the people at home have given up practically nothing. And the soldiers know it…‘A few bombs would do this country a lot of good.’ I heard that in San Francisco from a curly-headed sailor who had been sunk in the Pacific, and I heard it again in Washington from a corporal who had left his leg on Hill 609. Both added, rather anxiously, that, of course, they wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Even before the Home Front kicked into high-gear, the men who had been picked up in the 1940 draft were causing real problems in every area where a military training camp could be found. Knowing that the enlistments were soon to grow and these problems would be getting worse, the brass hats joined arms with the town elders to curb the drinking and whoremongering. The cure for these difficulties came in the form of the USO, which would be eatablished before the year was out.
A similar article can be read here.
In 1942, the reasons for despising Global Fascism were many and myriad but the woman who penned this editorial hated Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo for a reason all her own: Gertie McAllister hated them because they put women in pants.
Throughout a good deal of the Great Depression (1929 – 1940), FDR liked to think he was cozying-up to the voters when he insulted the great captains of industry with mean names like “selfish” and “stubborn”. All that ended when the war started, and the President had to make common cause with these men in order gain their cooperation in meeting the military needs of the nation. This article concerns the importance of the industrial might of Detroit.
A grocer and his bookkeeper were sentenced to prison for jacking-up chicken prices in violation of Federal law.
This article appeared six months before the 77th Congress passed a price control law as a wartime measure in an attempt to stave off inflation. The column pertains to the early planning of a wartime economy as the nation prepared to devote itself to total war. You’ll remember that the Supreme Court found FDR’s price control schemes (the NRA) to be unconstitutional during the Thirties. Regardless of their efforts, inflation still kicked-in after the war, up until the Republican Congress cut taxes.
The Victory Corps was a voluntary program open to American high school
and college students during the Second World War. It was established in September of 1942 with an eye toward preparing teenagers for military service. Although its primary concern involved weapons training, physical fitness and mathematics, it also had a “farm volunteer” arm, as this article about one branch of the Sacramento Victory Corps makes clear.
Robert Moses (1888 – 1981) was an American urban planner who worked as the New York City Parks Commissioner between 1934 and 1960. During the Second World War his phone was ringing off the hook:
“All over the country plans are being hatched for war memorials. Demands upon public officials for space in parks and public places are daily becoming more insistent. [But] if truth be told, most gestures of patriotism are pathetic, third-rate, inadequate [and] ugly…”
