Restraining The Consumer
(American Magazine, 1942)
Click here food rationing at U.S. POW camps. Click here to learn more about the American W.W. II home front… […]
Home Front
Read About Life on the WW II Home Front. Learn What was Going on in 1940s America from these Free WW2 Magazine Articles.
The Most Dreaded Telegram on the Home Front
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)
By the time this historic piece was written, thousands upon thousands of Western Union casualty telegrams had been delivered to altogether too many American households. This article lucidly explains how they should be delivered and how they shouldn’t be delivered. Recognizing the solemnity of the task, the men who passed the news along were often older men, who had tasted some of life’s bitterness:
One mother, receiving the news that her son was dead, crushed the paper in her hand and looking beyond the messenger, said, ‘If it hadn’t been my son, it would have been some other mother’s’.
A Spike In Illegitimate Births
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)
A new problem of the war is the fact that children are born to married women whose husbands have been long overseas… Department of Labor figures show that more than twice as many illegitimate children were born this year than in 1942.
Click here to read more on this topic.
He Censored The Mail
(American Magazine, 1942)
During the Second Word War all mail headed out of the country and all inbound mail from foreign locales fell under the discerning eyes of U.S. Post Office censors. The censors, all 15,000 of them, were under the command a U.S. Army cryptologist named Colonel W. Preston Corderman; click the title link above to learn more about him.
Click here to read about censoring the mail during W.W. I.
Posters For Encouragement
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
There were many varieties of posters to be found on the American home front of W.W. II – most depicting sweaty barrel-chested young men. Yet in the factories another type was prevalent, these were the ones that showed the non-heroic faces of the average American worker. Below these images would be found simple quotes declaring their unique patriotic reasons for laboring on the production lines. This article recalls who dreamed them up and how popular they were.
Adultery on the Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
The overlords of the Illinois justice system became so fed-up with the growing divorce rate in their state as a result of wives who stepped-out while their husbands were fighting overseas, and they decided to do something about it. The Illinois Attorney General proposed a plan:
Penalties for conviction range from $500 fine or a year in jail or both for the first offense to $3,000 fine or three years in jail or both for a third conviction.
Results of the Economic Boom On The Home Front
(United States News, 1943)
After suffering eleven years of the squalor brought on by the Great Depression, many Americans were in shock to find their pockets fully lined with cash and their days spent in gainful employment when W.W. II came along (in 1943, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 1.9%). The bars and restaurants that were situated around defense plants found that for the first time in years they were fully booked with paying customers. This article points out that this new economic boom on the home front was not without complications: absenteeism. As more factory workers discovered the joy of compensated labor, the more frequent they would skip work – which was seen as a nuisance for an industrial nation at war.
Many workers, not just youngsters, are making more money than they ever made before in their lives.
Fair Employment Laws Enforced
(PM Tabloid, 1942)
Some six months prior to Pearl Harbor FDR signed Executive Order 8802 which made it illegal for defense contractors to discriminate based on race or religious faith. Eight months later the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices was convened in New York City to review the evidence at hand indicating that numerous defense contractors were failing to comply with the law.
The Addict’s Plight
(Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
The war in the Pacific interrupted the flow of illegal narcotics to the United States. By the Spring of 1942 opioids were becoming scarcer and the prices were predicted to rise. Drug suppliers turned to an untested source closer to home: Latin America.
Click here to read aboutdrug addiction in the Twenties.
The New Normal
(United States News, 1942)
This was an important article for its time. It seems hard to believe, but it took the Federal Government the full six months after Pearl Harbor to figure out how the home front would be governed and what would be rationed. This article heralds that new day and clarified how the war would affect their salaries, savings, education, shopping, clothing, taxes, leisure time, transportation and their general manner of living:
In 1944, a class of sixth graders wrote General Eisenhower and asked him how they can help in the war effort; click here to read his response…
Click here food rationing at U.S. POW camps.
Civil Defense Insignias
(The American Magazine, 1941)
Here are the sleeve insignia by which you can identify the various groups of U.S. Civilian Defense Workers – men and women, boys and girls, who volunteer for home duty to protect you in war [emergencies]
The American Draft Dodgers
(The American Magazine, 1942)
This article consists of assorted stories that illustrate the length some American men would go in order to stay out of the military during the Second World War. The article also tells of draft evasion during the First World War.
Click here to read a 1945 article about your average Massachusetts draft board.
A W.W. II Draft Board
(Yank Magazine, 1945)
When Michael Campiseno turned 18, he was pulled out of his senior class in Norwood High School and drafted. Mike was sore. He swore that if he ever returned, he’d throw his discharge papers on the desk of the board chairman and say, ‘Now, ya sonuvabitch, I hope you’re satisfied!’
Here is the skinny on Draft Board 119 of Norwood, Massachusetts – an average draft board that sent 2,103 men off to war (75 of them never returned).
A Failed Peace Movement
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
We were terribly surprised to learn of a peace movement that existed on the 1944 American home front. Baring an awkward name that was right out of Seventiespeak, Peace Now printed pamphlets that played the class game so prevalent in the other leftist organizations that would come forth twenty years later.
Japan’s War Against The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
When World War II was inching toward it’s bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign – a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.
The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis – click here to read about it…
Thousands of British Children Welcomed
(PM Tabloid, 1940)
A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, many Americans, 10,000 to be exact, were active in welcoming British children, ages 5 – 16, to their homes. This was a time when it was widely believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain was imminent and the Battle of Britain was in full-swing:
Nobody knows how many will be admitted or how many will land in Canada on the first child-refugee ship, due three weeks from now.The quota for British children is 6,500 a-month; for children from other countries quotas are considerably lower.
To read about the short and productive life of New York’s PM, click here…
D-Day On The Home Front
(Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
By the dawn’s early light America awoke to the knowledge that its D-Day had come. Electricity meters clocked a sudden spurt in kilowatt loads as house lights and radios went on; telephone switchboards jammed as excited householders passed the word along. By morning on June 6, scarcely a family failed to know that the nation’s sons and brothers, husbands and sweethearts were even then storming the beaches of Normandy to begin the Allied liberation of Europe.
Click here to read about D-Day…
Home Front Chicago
(Yank Magazine, 1944)
Chicago, Illinois saw enormous changes take place during the war years, most notably the overnight construction of over 260 defense plants and the opening of its subway system (six miles in length, at that time). Half a million war workers arrived to toil in her new factories while it is said that each city block in Chicago dispatched, on average, at least seven of her sons and daughters for the armed services.
Nerves are taught with war tension. Hard work adds to the strain and increases the tempo. People walk faster in the streets. Stampedes for surface cars, and the new subway are more chaotic than ever… Five thousand block flagpoles have been erected by block committees of the Office of Civilian Defense. Listed in some manner near each are the names of all the GIs from the block. Some of the installations are elaborate and have bulletin boards that are kept up to date with personal news from camps and war theaters.