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.
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…
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…
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.
The Japanese now are permitted fuel for their homes for only two months of the year and the prices are so high that many homes are without heat the year around.
This article was written by Max Hill, who was serving as the Tokyo bureau chief for the Associated Press at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. The column consists of his observations as to how the Japanese home front operated during his seven month incarceration.
Click here to read about the Japanese home front during the early period of the Sino-Japanese War.
Click here to read about the W.W. II German home front.
During the Summer of 1952, an unhappy Christian cleric in far away Scotland weighed in on Jane Russell – provoking the Hollywood beauty to weigh right back.
Arriving in Hollywood by way of The Trouble with Harry in 1955, and cute as buttons – Shirley MacLaine (b. 1934) was the adopted little sister of the Rat Pack, that odd movie star whose sensitive skin burned too easily in the California sun and one of the few starlets who was actually capable of sewing her own clothes.
‘The public school system will become a vast political machine.’ And this machine, it is charged, ‘will give a Federal Administration the opportunity of creating an educational autocracy, really endangering the liberty of thought and information, which is a basic right of the people.’
This article pertains to a bill that was before the Congress one hundred years ago that proposed the creation of a Department of Education. The bill was defeated. The proposed legislation was enthusiastically supported by the National Education Association.
This 1943 article by the noted American sociologist, Willard Waller (1899 – 1945), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Waller pointed out that during the course of 1942-43 school year, as many as 189,000 teachers had left their classrooms in order to work in defense plants. The author argued four distinct points that would halt the mass exodus – among them was the cry that salaries of teachers must be raised to the point where they match favorably with industry.
Then came June 24 [1950]. Her skirts legally clean, Russia hit upon a way to fight the U.S. without technically using a single bullet or soldier of her own. It mattered little if Korean mercenaries, not identifiable nationally with the USSR, were doing the fighting. A satellite war was just as good a way to weaken the U.S. as a direct war – if not better.
With the U.S. inducting some 50,000 men a month there must necessarily be a high number of delinquents… Few draft dodgers realize that the FBI steps in when the draft board steps out of the picture. Furthermore delinquents are liable to five years imprisonment.
To read an article about American draft dodgers of W.W. II, click here.
Nine months after the American intervention into the Korean War, the Congress saw reason to expand the draft pool to an even wider degree:
Eighteen-year-olds were a little closer to the draft this week, and America was a step closer to a system of permanent universal military training…
Christmas in khaki became the new theme song of thousands of the nation’s young men last week when the Army handed Selective Service a new quota… the Army wants 70,000 in November.
John Thompson of The Chicago Tribune saw more of the World War II than most other correspondents. He had witnessed to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald death camp. Throughout his life, Thompson held the distinction of being the last surviving war correspondent to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings; by war’s end he had been awarded the Purple Heart, nine battle stars and was the first correspondent to receive the Medal of Freedom. This column was written in 1943 and pertains to some of his experiences in North Africa and Sicily.
Richard Tregaskis (1916 – 1973) covered the invasion of Guadalcanal and the first seven weeks of Marine fighting on that island, the earliest stages of the Tokyo air raid, covered the Battle of Midway, wrote a best-selling book
(Guadalcanal Diary) and accompanied the forces that invaded the Russell Islands.
It wasn’t long after he arrived in the Mediterrian that stories began appearing in American papers under the Tregaskis byline, and he is still ‘somewhere’ on the European fighting front covering the big battles which make news.
This 1944 article by the U.S. Commissioner of Education, John W. Studebaker (1887 – 1989), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Studebaker pointed out that during the course of the national emergency, as many as 115,000 teachers had left the nation’s classrooms in order to help the war effort in one form or another.
When we read this transcript from The Congressional Record we were flabbergasted! You will find that it is a compilation that was pieced together in the late Fifties listing all the changes America’s Communist enemies wished to see take place in the United States in order to make their mission of conquest that much easier – yet as you read the list you quickly recognize that at least 85% of this tally fell into place as recently as 2020.
