Home Front USA WWII

WOMEN VOLUNTEERING FOR A MAN-SIZED JOB
American men were not the only ones jolted by the harsh reality of Army life. A number of women got a good taste of it, too, On the hot, sticky morning of July 20, 1942, the first volunteers 440 officer candidates and 330 auxiliaries, or privates rolled into Fort Des Moines, Iowa, to begin training in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, forerunner of the Women's Army Corps, or WAG, established in 1943. Eventually more than 143,000 women served in the WAG. the largest of the women's services in World War II. Releasing badly needed manpower for the firing line, they did everything from repairing trucks to making aerial surveys in all, more than 235 different 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 Indian woman in tribal dress. So great was the turnout in Washington, D.C., that embarrassed officials ran out of application blanks twice during the day. In New York, 1,400 women stood in line for more than eight hours to sign up.

If the guys can take it, one volunteer said of her new identity in uniform, so can I. This remark was no idle boast. The women took the usual inoculations in stride; a sheepish GI stood by with smelling salts just in case they were needed, but in most cases they weren't. Like all rookies, the women endured the assembly line issuance of illfitting uniforms they were too narrow in the hips and rode up the thighs), and they joked about the rich mud brown color or their regulation slips and panties. They stood reveille every morning and trained rigorously all day. Many drilled in the evenings or studied Army manuals in the lighted latrines of their barracks after taps. For some old line officers and enlisted men, the idea of women in the service or Wackies was a bitter pill to swallow. But at least one 25-year voter had disagreed. They're a damn sight better than we ever expected they would be, said Colonel Don C. Faith, who commanded Fort Des Moines. I honestly didn't believe they could do it.


ON THE ALERT AFTER PEARL HARBOR
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 constantly and every one false the accompanying blackouts threw some major cities into a near panic.

In Seattle, during one of the frequent air-raid alerts, a mob of 1,000 angry citizens attempted to enforce the blackout by smashing windows and looting stores that did not comply with the lights-out order. One skeptic in 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 the West Coast defenses, insisted against all evidence that 30 enemy warplanes had flown over San Francisco. Why bombs were not dropped, I 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 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.

TAPPING THE NATION'S WOMAN POWER
America s war effort called for an augmented labor force large enough to fill not only those vacancies left by men who had gone into the service, but also new jobs created by urgent wartime needs. To bring this force up to strength, the nation looked to its women.

Only one thing stood in the way: ingrained prejudices about women's place in society. The government got together with industrial leaders and persuaded the bosses that if the War was going to be won, they would have to overcome their male biases. An advertising campaign was instituted. Billboards aimed at women posed such provocative questions as, "What job is mine on the Victory Line" and supplied some ready answers: If you've followed recipes exactly in making cakes, you can learn to load shell. The women responded. By 1943 they constituted nearly a third of the total work force. Among those who did not take jobs, many managed to make a contribution of another kind through volunteer work.

Some women, like New York commercial designer Josephine von Miklos, sacrificed their regular lives and comfort to the war effort purely out of patriotism. To hell with the life I have had, von Miklos wrote in 1943. This war is too damn serious and it is too damn important to win it. Closing her New York studio, she took a job in a New England munitions factory. Down South, the 80-year-old widow of Confederate General James Longstreet turned her back on the benefits of retirement and joined the 08:00 AM shift at the Bell Aircraft factory in Marietta, Georgia.

Still, prejudices about women in industry died hard. So people argued that women lacked the ability and stamina to perform jobs previously held only by men. Jokes reflect the surprise that people felt in discovering that women could indeed hold such jobs. One cartoon showed a girl at finishing school saying, I flunked in charm and society composure, but I passed in welding and riveting. By time the War ended, doubts were fewer, and most Americans were willing to concede that victory could not have been achieved without the contribution of the women.


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 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 in 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 percent 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 became 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 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 empty auto showrooms, tolerable.


WOMEN WHO HEEDED THE CALL TO ARMS IN THE NATION'S HOUR OF NEED
At a time when almost every able-bodied man was away in uniform, women came out of the home to work in factories and foundries  and to assume military roles hitherto performed only by men.

The nationwide rush to enlist in the new Women's Army Auxiliary Corps startled recruiters. Soon the other services as well opened 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 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.

The Army Air Forces as the air force was then known was so hesitant about enlisting women that it created an Army-supervised branch of the Civil Service, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron. Female filers, 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 twin-engine 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 women serving in the military was still small, but given society's preconceptions about the female role, as well as a fear of creating new Amazons, the more than 200,000 women on active duty in the armed forces represented a breakthrough.


DECEMBER 1941
All week long the weather had been so unseasonably warm that in New England the pussy willows suddenly budded, and residents began twisting them into special Christmas wreaths. For most Americans, it promised to be the brightest Christmas season in a decade. Europe and parts of Asia had been at war for more than two years, but Americans had not really felt the impact of the fighting. The peacetime draft and the gradual shift to defense production were putting people back to work after years of Depression unemployment, and direct involvement in the War still seemed remote. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had repeatedly promised American mothers, "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

On Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, where double-decker buses were packed with Christmas shoppers, store windows featured the very latest in expensive fashions calf-length dresses with shoulder pads. Across the area, consumers with new cash in their pockets crowded into movie theaters to watch Greta Garbo in Two-Faced Woman or bought radios and hummed the new hit song I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire.?

Sunday, December 7, 1941, was the final day of the professional football season and in Washington, D.C.'s Griffith Stadium 27,102 spectators were watching quarterback Sammy Baugh lead the hometown Redskins to a 20-14 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles. Midway in the first quarter, a series of puzzling announcements crackled over the public-address system. Admiral W. H. P. Blandy is asked to report to his office at once, the voice on the loudspeaker said. Soon the Philippine commissioner to the United States was being paged, and then others newspaper editors, the superintendent of police, key Army and Navy officers were all called.

As more and more VIPs were summoned over the loudspeaker, the ball park hummed with excitement. On the Eagle bench, sportscaster Lindsey Nelson, then a young Army second lieutenant, was watching the game as the guest of three former college classmates who played for Philadelphia. Along the bench and in the stands, he later recalled, people began to whisper, What's this all about? What's happening?

Up in the stands, a young Navy ensign named John Fitzgerald Kennedy was enjoying the game; he did not learn the reason for the announcements until he turned on his car radio on the way home. In the office of the stadium owner, Clark Griffith, a telephone call came through between halves, and Congressman Joe Martin, the Republican Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, who was chatting with Griffith, immediately rushed back to the Capitol. The assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Edward Tamm, viewing the game from a box seat, was called to a special three-way telephone hookup. At one end was his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, who was spending the weekend in New York. At the other end was the FBI's chief agent in Honolulu, who was holding the mouthpiece of the phone near the open window of his office. Thus, echoing faintly across 5,000 miles, the explosions of Japanese bombs rocking the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor reached the ears of America's top two G-men.

The bombs were still falling when the stunning news reached most Americans via radio. Millions were listening to the Columbia Broadcasting System that afternoon when, just as the New York Philharmonic was tuning up for Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1, John Daly's familiar voice broke in a few minutes after 3 p.m.: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.

Though the attack proved to be the worst military disaster in U.S. history five battleships sunk or beached, three others damaged, 10 smaller warships knocked out, some 2,400 American servicemen dead the listeners did not yet know its full tragic dimensions. What stunned them was the suddenness and sneakiness of it: an attack on a peaceful Sunday, against a place many people had never even heard of.

Of all the momentous events that would galvanize their lives over the next four years, this was the one that Americans would remember most vividly. It was as if a camera had suddenly clicked in their minds and frozen in place every motion and thought at the instant when they heard the news of the attack.There were 120 million Americans who were old enough to grasp the significance of what was happening, and each reacted in his own particular way, mixing astonishment, outrage and disbelief with his own particular concerns.

At Fort Sam Houston, Texas, a temporary brigadier general named Dwight David Eisenhower was trying to catch up on his sleep after weeks of exhausting field maneuvers when the telephone awoke him. He took in the news, then ran toward the front door, dressing as he went and yelling over his shoulder to his wife, Mamie, that he did not know when he would be back. The novelist John Steinbeck, visiting in New York, wondered what would happen to his Japanese gardener back home in California. In New Jersey an old man, remembering how, three years before, Orson Welles had panicked listener with his radio fantasy about an invasion from Mars, cackled: Ha! You got me on that Martian stunt! I had a hunch you'd try it again! In San Antonio, in a scene that must have been repeated in many forms, a young couple had just finished a family quarrel when newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn's war bulletin on NBC brought them together again, holding hands as they listened to his broadcast.

Richard M. Nixon, a young lawyer who had been thinking about applying for a government job, heard the news as he left a movie theater in Los Angeles. Being a Quaker, Nixon wondered whether he could actually kill an enemy. Jackie Robinson, the all-around athlete who later was to shatter precedent by becoming the first black man to break the color barrier in baseball's major leagues, was on his way back to California aboard the liner Lurline, after a season of professional football in Hawaii. Robinson first became aware that something extraordinary had happened when members of the crew began racing around the ship, painting the porthole windows black and passing out life jackets to the passengers.

In Pittsburgh, the isolationist Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota was telling 2,500 enthusiasts at an America First rally why the nation ought to stay out of foreign wars when a reporter sent him a note about Pearl Harbor.  It sounds terribly fishy to me, Nye remarked. And in Washington, another isolationist leader, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, was in his bedroom pasting into a scrapbook newspaper clippings about his long fight to keep America out of the War. Now, with America actively involved, he immediately phoned the White House to assure President Roosevelt of his support.

In that moment of shock and anguish, friend and foe alike turned to the White House. Crowds gathered almost immediately on the sidewalk by the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, milling around in silence, waiting perhaps for a glimpse of the famous Roosevelt grin or the reassuring sound of the cultivated accent that many had mocked.

Posted 16 Jan 2008