In the past few months, I have been reading and thinking more about World War II than I had for many years. Three decades ago, it was a faint shock when my son told me that he studied that war in his history class. How could it have been history in the 1970s when I remembered it so clearly from my own childhood?
But now it certainly is history. The obituary pages reflect the passing of World War II veterans in their 80s and 90s. The discount section of my favorite book store has dozens of memoirs and narratives about that war. Recently, we have a new television series about the war, and we even have movies that tell about it from the German or Japanese perspective. Years ago, we made the distinction between the war-inciting governments and the people of Germany and Japan, who were more victimized by the war than any of us in America.
It was not my war, in the sense that I was too young to have fought in it. I was 7 when the war started, 9 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and 13 when the war ended. Before the atomic bomb prompted Japan to surrender, there had been predictions that despite our defeat of Germany in May 1945, the war against Japan would go on for another 2 or 3 years. The war with Japan ended in August 1945.
During the war, we in the center of the United States were not threatened by enemy invasions or bombings or other forms of destruction endured by people in Europe and Asia. Merchant ships were sunk off of American ports by German submarines. But no enemy ships invaded the Mississippi River. Our town was a railroad junction and we were told that it was on the list of enemy targets. But the only enemy troops we saw were prisoners of war, being kept at nearby newly created military bases. Indeed, some of them emigrated to the United States after the war.
To us, the war effort meant building new bases, building new factories to make military supplies, buying saving stamps and war bonds, scavenging scrap metal for recycling, canning food from the family garden, using ration cards for gasoline, tires, and many kinds of food, and doing without new cars, refrigerators, radios, nylon stockings, or even bicycles. Men from our town went into the army or navy. Male teachers left our high school. Two of the five doctors in town went into the military, along with two nurses from the local hospital. So we knew there was a war happening far away. Every afternoon, when I picked up the newspapers I delivered, I read about our triumphs and defeats. Some of the blue stars denoting a man in service gave way to gold stars, indicating a death.
In a perverse way, the war effort ended the decade-long recovery from the Great Depression, which had so paralyzed our economy. The war effort produced well-paying jobs for any able-bodied persons. Women took factory jobs, drove buses, and accepted many other assignments that they could not have had when there were enough men around. The pay was good, for our time and place, and much of it was put in the bank, because there were fewer things to buy or build.
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