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An optimistic article from 1942 that asks us to look for the sunny side of the Japanese American internment camps – after all, they never had it so good!
An anonymous reporter relays all that came across his desk in the way of wild victory celebrations on VJ Day. Spread out over 14 paragraphs are eyewitness accounts of the pandemonium that spread across the nation when the news arrived that the war was over.
“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions.
“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions. The people inside Germany hate the war and want it to end. They are tired of hardships, sick of sacrifice. They lament the moral disintegration of their young women; they shudder at air raids; they weep over their dead. But nowhere do they betray the least suggestion of German guilt or regret for horrors which the German armies perpetrate on conquered countries. Hard as is their life, they know neither starvation nor desperation. Nor do they expect Germany to lose the war. To expect them at this time to revolt against Hitler is as futile and puerile to expect the Fuehrer to live up to his promises or the treatise he signs.”
“In the twelve months since Pearl Harbor the American family has begun to experience war on the home front… More
As the Allied Armies were nearing Berlin and Tokyo, U.S. magazines began running articles concerning the nation’s problems that had
Black author Richard Wright (1908 – 1960) clearly delineated for the readers of Coronet why African American participation in W.W. II was of great importance to the Black community.
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.”
After reading this 1941 article you will come away with a full understanding as to how misguided Imperial Japan was to enter into a war with the United States and the British Empire. At the time of the printing, Japan had been engaged in its second war with a very underdeveloped China; even though Japan had held the momentum in that war, it had still driven the Japanese into a life of highly uncomfortable rationing, which would only get worse as their new war expanded.
