The story of wartime children starts, of course, with wartime marriages. The marriage rate for women over the age of 15 rose from 73 percent in 1939 to 93 percent in 1942.1 Couples were taking happiness where and when they could. Some women, knowing their new husbands would not be coming home from the war, were choosing to be widows rather than old maids. The result was a jump in birth rates from 77.6 per thousand to 94.3 per thousand.2
As always, parents held the greatest influence on these children. Children felt the absence of a father profoundly. (The absence of an older brother could be just as painful.) Separation from a parent was seen as so detrimental to a child that the US did not follow Britain’s program of evacuating children from danger zones.
Whether a child lived in a city or in rural America, the war was to become central to his growth and values for his lifetime. Here is one story.
Tina B. (b. 1938):
I thought that spies were around every corner, listening and reporting back to Germany or Japan. In downtown Mobile there were posters on lamp posts that said “loose lips sink ships.” I didn’t want to have loose lips and worried about what that was. The pictures of Japanese soldiers they showed were terrifying to me. The worst was in the movies where we saw the endless lines of German soldiers marching. My friends and I wondered how we could ever beat such an army. My uncle Roy was in the Army and he said we would beat them for sure, so I held on to that.
It’s funny that when I talk to people my age today, they mostly say, “Oh, yes, I forgot about that. I was afraid back then.” I hope I forget someday.3
The majority of children spent the war years in the same home they were born in, but many others were subjected to migration either because of their mother following their father base to base as he served, or from chasing after defense work and its high paycheck. The impact of migration, particularly on children, was judged to be so great that Congress created The Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration.
No matter where the children spent the home front years, they endured anxiety. Children absorbed the fears and tensions of their surrounding adults. Adding to their fears were the graphic and vivid depictions of war in the newsreels shown at the Saturday matinee. With a father gone and a mother working, a child faced drastic changes. No aspect of life was left unchanged.
I can confess it now to people who read this who are sort of from the same era. I was terrified.
by Sarah M. (b. 1932):
All day long I heard grown ups and older kids in the street talking about the Germans and the Japs and how they were winning. In the newsreels at the movies I saw how powerful the Germans looked with all the tanks and thousands of marching men. My Uncle Alan told me how mean the Japs were to our Marines.
Two girls in my school lost their brothers and one of them stayed home for a long time. My father worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and told me he and the other men were building ships that would go fight them and that we would win, but I was still afraid.
I spent all those years so scared. I had bad dreams about German soldiers breaking into our house. After the war my mother said she thought I was just a quiet kid.
I’m well over 80 now and I still have moments of fear come over me. You just don’t forget that.4
It was easy for a child to get lost in the shuffle. “Latch key kids” and “dresser drawer babies” became shorthand for neglect. Children were left to watch movies all day. Some were left locked in parking lots at war plants. Some were locked in (or out) of their home. These were by no means the majority, but they were enough to catch notice.
In the beginning most children were cared for by the traditional networking of family and friends, but this proved inadequate. The upshot was the development of a new social entity that would change lives long after the war: day care. Childcare was seen as a mother’s responsibility and there was social resistance to government involvement in caring for children.
The well to do could place their children in private nurseries. Other than private nurseries, day care as we know it today did not exist. To provide a subsidized system of care the government called on provisions of the Lanham Act, an act which gave the Federal Works Agency the authority to fund the construction of houses, schools, and other infrastructure for laborers in the growing defense industry. More than 4000 Lanham-funded centers served approximately 600,000 children. Some of the defense plants, the Kaiser Works chief among them, provided childcare for their workers on their own. Separately, Eleanor Roosevelt had urged President Roosevelt to approve US government childcare facilities under the Community Facilities Act of 1942. Seven centers, servicing 105,000 children, were built.5
As groundbreaking and helpful as subsidized day care was, it was not fully subscribed. Mothers were not yet comfortable trusting their children to strangers and some of the physical conditions were poor. The programs ended after the war and subsidized day care was not seen again until recent years.
Across the country officials took steps to protect children. There were advocates for creating a master registry. In some locations children were registered and fingerprinted. Children in the San Francisco area had to wear ID tags stamped with numbers corresponding to those on lists held by Civil Defense in case they became evacuees. In Washington DC children were given copper dog tags. In New York City they were fingerprinted.6
A very successful program took shape in early 1942. Called Extended School Services (ESS), it simply had school teachers stay on and care for the children until the working mother could get there. FDR managed a grant of $400,000 to kick off the program and it spread very quickly with no added funds to more than 600 locations. So popular was ESS that when the school year ended, locales, parents, schools, and others found ways to keep ESS going through the summer.7
Another Washington originated program was “Schools at War,” which was used as a platform to engage children in scrap drives, bond drives, and other patriotic activities.
At this time on the home front a change came sweeping over the field of child development. The standard all through the 1930s had been personified by John B. Watson who advocated “habit training” of children in all things, starting at an early age. A parent was not to pick up a crying child if it was bedtime. Feeding took place at a specific time. But Watson’s philosophy came under fire from followers of Dr Benjamin Spock who advocated a child-centered and more flexible, natural rhythm of child rearing. In time it would be almost impossible to visit the home with a child without seeing a worn copy of Dr Spock’s famous book.
Children who accompanied their mothers to a defense factory town found a different culture where people behaved differently and talked differently, making it difficult to fit in. They could encounter poor living conditions. They might be subject to group living or living in temporary housing or in trailers. Wherever it was, the child knew it was temporary. Friendships and relationships of all kinds, whether with other children or adults, were tempered by the child’s awareness of impermanence. When a child did commit to a relationship they could be hurt by its severance when they moved next.
The war exposed colossal deficiencies in American education: massive functional illiteracy, a terrible shortage of people with basic competence in math, foreign languages, and science. And woeful levels of vocational skills. Coming out of the Depression, only one in four had finished high school. Most had not finished grade school.8 Education in the US, never uniform across the country in terms of quality or even quantity, now came under new, severe pressures.
The first pressure arose from the call for workers, first to replace draftees and second to replace those entering the high paying defense jobs springing up across the country. With teachers’ salaries perennially low – teachers’ annual salaries in parts of the South averaged less than $500 – the depletion of teachers was rapid and severe. The shortage of teachers forced larger or discontinued classes in some places while in others it broke down the long-standing objection to teachers being married. Conditions led to school systems hiring unqualified teachers, some with barely a high school education themselves.
Pressure came from the need for home front children, now more than ever, to help on farms and other family businesses, which led to longer vacation periods and shorter class days, though in some areas Saturday classes were laid on to lessen the lost educational time.
Pressure also came from the military demanding more functional recruits. leading schools to add more math, vocational, and technical studies. Low salaries had led to low competence of teachers. The Los Angeles School system went as far as ordering physical exams of the county’s 10,000 high school seniors with free dental and medical care for those who could not afford it. The seniors were also threatened with a physical fitness requirement to graduate.9
While all of this was occurring, a philosophical battle was taking place over teaching methods. The long prevailing pedagogy involved quantification and standards with points, units, and tests, always tests. But a set of progressive ideas had been quietly growing and burst forth during 1941. This progressive methodology put the engagement of students and their personal development at the top of its list of must haves.
A huge experiment completed in 1941 purported to show the progressive method superior to the rigid rules of the past and schools became amenable to changing to the new method. However, as deficiencies were revealed by the draft and as reports of unruliness in progressive schools emerged, the progressive trend went into hibernation on the home front for the duration and more directed rules and ‘hard’ subjects were in. Though no one seemed to lack patriotism, patriotic fervor entered the curriculum, and teaching of the benefits of democracy became popular. (No doubt with dollops of propaganda such as the Democracy Reader, included.)
Higher education also came under pressure. No federal agency existed for its guidance, benefit and help. In addition to the financial pressures from Depression-depleted endowments, enrollments declined prompting some colleges and universities to lower their standards. Once enrolled, students could come under draft rules as they approached draft age prompting some institutions to develop three or even two-year programs. Often these programs now contained such studies as ballistics and other courses useful for military purposes. Colleges also embarked on a hunt for communists. At the extreme were acts of book banning and censorship. Some campuses endured friction between more liberal faculty, which favored intervention, and conservative students who opposed it.
The conditions around the new defense plants were far worse than elsewhere with shortages of everything including classroom space. Students flooded into, often small town, school systems woefully unprepared to handle them. The long-standing demands for local control of education gave way to demands for federal funds to rescue their systems. More than $100,000,000 was appropriated to aid “impacted areas,” most of which were in rural and poorer parts of the country. Given the turmoil of the times, the appropriation passed quietly and provided a kind of social aid that such grants still provide.
The government directly inserted itself into education to bolster the country’s supply of technically and scientifically trained people. It offered and funded, tuition free, more than 200 programs in those disciplines as the 1941 academic year opened.10 It also created a registry of those on the home front who held technical degrees or enjoyed scientific experience which resulted in the creation of a vital inventory of a critical resource. These actions demonstrated a measure of thoughtfulness often believed to be lacking in government.
The military, faced with astounding levels of illiteracy in its draftees, began education programs of its own. Using teachers from its own ranks and a “Soldiers’ Reader” which conveyed lessons in a more simplified manner, it brought more than 100,000 men up to a fourth-grade level of education.11
The school day for almost all now started with the pledge of allegiance and the singing of patriotic songs. In addition to the Star-Spangled Banner, children now might sing God Bless America, Anchors Away, Caissons Go Rolling Along, and the new Air Force song, Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder. Students put on patriotic plays. Some teachers asked their class to show hands if they had a family member in the service and then would lead prayers for the servicemen. Children wrote letters to their family members and even to strangers. Teachers sometimes read the (poignant) letters children received in return.
Playground games changed from cops and robbers and Cowboys and Indians to war games with pointed hands for pistols and running, arms spread, making roaring sounds to play at being an airplane, and crying, “bombs away.” Girls’ dolls wore the uniforms of the WACS or WAVES or nurses. The following depicts how two youngsters enjoyed those times.
We all knew when it was a troop train because of the color of the cars. Frank G. (born. 1934):
The Southern Railway’s cars were a bright “livery green” and the troop trains were plain gray or brown. The trains all stopped just outside of Charleston, we guessed as a safety check, and that gave everyone a chance to go down and greet the troops, mostly recruits, heading to Fort Benning, Georgia.
We brought them food, of course, mostly sweets, and we also brought them toilet items like soap and razors. What I remember most about all that was how everyone from all around came down together. It was like all those soldiers were our own family, including the black soldiers.
For that time we were all together. It was too bad it took a war.12
Lynne C. (b. 1940):
I was born in Newark and then moved to Union where the memories of the war click in. How can I remember so much?
The dark green light blocking shades.
Daddy’s head lights half blocked.
The running board and rumble seat.
The excitement in the streets on VE and VJ Day.
Mixing the ‘butter’ at my neighbor’s house. (Don’t know what we used.)
Saving the ‘tinfoil’ from gum wrappers.
Party lines at Unionville 2 5057 J.
Mom giving me twenty five cents to walk to the store (Heavens, she’d be in jail today) for a few slices of bologna.
Johnny ride a pony – hide and seek – kick the can – sleigh riding on the street in winter – freedom to roam all over the neighborhood.
My first portable radio – looked like a big lunch box.
Climbing and falling out of many trees…guess I was a real tomboy.
Oh, and I do remember going to the old, old, Newark airport to mail packages to my Uncle Joe who was a cook (chef) in the Navy in the Pacific. (I still have his hat from 1939.) I remember all the things he brought home…a piece of a Japanese Zero, a hand grenade, a bloody Japanese flag.
Another customary activity for children was the movies, mentioned in Chapter Two, where they would see two features, a serial, and a newsreel. It was the newsreel that brought the war to home front children in clear visual images, the war in scenes from air, land, and sea battles uncensored by their parents.
Comic books burst on the scene in a big way. Superman, Batman, and many other characters were bought up to the tune of 20,000,000 copies a month.13 While most of these characters were male, one female character drew a huge audience: Wonder Woman, who arrived in the comic world in 1941. Attired in red, white, and blue and complete with bullet dodging bracelets and a gold lasso, she battled Axis male villains with the best of them.
In September 1942, the Department of Education created the Victory Corps to involve high school students and prepare them to aid in the war effort at home and in the service. To participate the student must take part in a physical fitness program, enroll in a war-effort class, and volunteer for at least one extracurricular wartime activity. The physical fitness program was deemed important because many of the military inductees were in such poor physical shape.14
While Japanese children were removed from most school settings, German and Italian American children remained and could endure taunts and ostracism.
Of course, children’s experiences varied by age. Older boys shouldered men’s work where needed. Girls became the cook and household cleaner. At 18 girls could join the USO dances but in some communities that was considered daring. The term “Victory Girls” came to mean teen girls who were promiscuous (or appeared so). School enrollment dropped drastically. Part of the reason was that defense factories, short on labor, ignored the age of some teen boys and hired them for factory work. Teenage vandalism became a problem due to urban crowding and general lack of parental supervision due to work schedules.
Some people thought you were a bad girl if you went to the USO By Mary L. (b. 1930):
I was too young to go into the USO canteen, but I did hang around to see what it was all about. At our USO in Portland it was mostly sailors. The girls who did go said that they were nice. Some were afraid of going overseas and wanted a girl to write to them. My friends, Marie and Claire, would get their names and a bunch of us would write to them. Sometimes we would get letters back from sailors we hadn’t even met.
When the war was over, they all went home and the letters slowly stopped coming.15
Home front children participated wholeheartedly in scrap drives of every kind, metal, paper, or fat. The Boy and Girl Scouts were often the organizers. Children toiled in Victory Gardens and carried the experience into adulthood. They sold garden seeds and victory stamps and saved for defense bonds and even ran bond drives of their own. They built model airplanes and acted as airplane spotters. They acted as auxiliary fire and police. In short, they rose to the occasion, and they bonded together. (The bond of “war kids” carries over to today.)
They were also, in some cases, more supportive of rationing than their parents. They were disillusioned by the personal dishonesty of adults including close relatives.
Lyla (b. 1936):
Prices had been going up fast because of the shortages and then along came rationing. A lot of my memories about those times have to do with all the hitches and squabbles in our big family about rationing and hoarding and swapping rationing stickers. They changed over to tokens and points, and we had to learn about when things expired. Some stores would let you trade one kind of stamp for another. One store in our town was like a bank with lots of tokens, points, stickers, and ration books. Some people said it was illegal. Ads in the newspapers said, “Don’t pay above the ceiling price!” I worried when I overheard that one of my aunts had bought meat on the black market because my teacher said you could go to jail.
What I remember are the times when our neighbors and my mother and her sisters would all get together in our kitchen and talk in loud voices about rationing. They argued some about who owed what from last time and who would get extra next time. The stamps, tokens, and checks did not all come on the same day or expire at the same time, and that made things complicated. But they always worked things out, and they always said they could “make do.” Which everybody said…,16
Children on the home front suffered the normal diseases of mumps and measles but were most likely to die from accidents. Accidents were the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 5 and 14.17
But home front parents worried much more about polio. Terrified would not be too strong a word to use about how parents felt. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason about how, where, and who polio hit. Even the president of the United States had polio. Accidents were understandable and parents could take positive steps to limit them. Not so with polio. Causes were thrown around for years before its true cause was found. Having tonsils out, swimming in a public pool, going to the movies, chewing a certain gum, flies and other insects were all considered at some point. (Some towns sprayed DDT liberally around garbage cans.) Eventually polio became recognized as a virus.
Polio is an intestinal infection spread by contact with fecal waste. The virus enters the body through the mouth, travels down the digestive tract and is excreted in the stool. Usually the infection is slight, with minor symptoms. In a small number of cases – about one in 100 – the virus invades the central nervous system, destroying the motor neurons that stimulate the muscle fibers to contract. At its worst, polio causes irreversible paralysis, most often in the legs. Most deaths occur when the breathing muscles are immobilized, a condition known as bulbar polio, in which the brain stem is badly damaged.18
Parents tried any number of treatments, including those of Sister Kenney who advocated hot blankets, hydrotherapy, and assisted motion in place of splints and frames. Parents were urged to keep children away from public pools, banish flies, and avoid letting children get chilled and overtired. These conditions permeated summer life for most of the war years. A powerful charity arose to combat the disease called The March of Dimes. With President Roosevelt as its spokesman and other celebrities promoting its efforts, the March of Dimes worked hard, especially during the 1944 epidemic. President Roosevelt said the dimes given “were like victory bonds which would be the ammunition to fight the disease.” Eventually the Salk vaccine and then the Sabin oral pill would stave off the epidemic, but not until into the 1950s.
C. D. Peterson (b. 1937):
A villain lurked in all our childhoods back then. We talked about the villain, but always in quiet tones. We worried because we didn’t know when he might strike or who might be stricken next. We heard he could strike when you took a drink at the water fountain in the Hollis Theater or went swimming in Learned’s Pond. Parents couldn’t protect you. Nothing could protect you from polio.
One Saturday morning before we went to the movies, a bunch of us went to see a boy who was in an iron lung because he had polio. He lived on a nice tree-lined street near Butterworth Field, where we played baseball. We lined up in silence and walked single file through the house to a quiet, front living room. All I could see was his head lying on a pillow, sticking out from the round cylinder of a machine that made hissing sounds.
He had dark hair, and I didn’t know his name, but I said “hello” and he said “hello” back. He was smiling. His mother followed us out and called to us as we walked away, “It was very nice of you boys to come by. It’s not contagious, you know. Come back again.”
I had never had so much as a cold and couldn’t imagine what that boy must have been feeling. I became sad every time I thought about him lying there, trapped in that steel tube, not able to be outside playing baseball.
To address the pitiful cases of pregnant service wives struggling to get by on $50 a month, a groundbreaking effort at maternal and child health was implemented in 1943. Called the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care (EMIC) Act, it provided federal funds for military wives prenatal and childbirth expenses, along with pediatric care for the infant’s first year of life. It was the biggest health experiment in history, functioning in all forty-eight states and Alaska and Hawaii. Women had freedom of choice among providers assuming the doctors and hospitals were approved by EMIC, which set standards of care and facility hygiene. Over its lifetime the program authorized more than 1 million maternity cases.
EMIC was resisted by political conservatives and leadership in the American Medical Association, (AMA) who called it socialized medicine. However, the largest survey of physicians overwhelmingly approved of EMIC.19 There can be no doubt that the children of the million women cared for were able to grow up in better health to become a functioning part of the post-war generation. Nonetheless, EMIC was cancelled in 1946.
Occasionally the war intruded on the home front. A soldier home on leave would flash around a souvenir, perhaps a German Lugar pistol or, if he was a sailor from the Pacific, a Japanese flag with blood red markings. The worst would be gruesome photos.
Not surprisingly, these war time children revered FDR and felt sadness at his passing. He was the leader and the only leader they had known. It seemed to them that every important announcement came from him. He was the person who put every important change in motion. His picture was everywhere, and his deep reassuring voice came to them at home on the radio and in the movie theaters in the newsreels.
One remembrance…
Nick N. (b.1939):
I remember discussing President Roosevelt’s death with my elementary school classmates. We were not sure that this might cause our country to lose the war.
Home front children carried on with a great deal of pride. They bonded among themselves and knew they were real contributors to something bigger – the war effort.
Some children, such as those hauled around to military camps and were often intrusive in the lives of their parents who were under emotional strain, never did really bond with their fathers before they shipped out. Those that did, like their mothers, endured high anxiety over separation from their fathers, especially at the last separation before he was shipped overseas. Children often interpreted the goodbye as final and feared they would never see their father again. The scene could be heartbreaking with the child screaming at the vision of the father leaving forever, potentially to be killed overseas. Parents were advised to say goodbye at home, not at the train or bus station.
VJ-Day was a glorious celebration of parades and fireworks for home front children. The end of their fears welled up in tears of joy. Then, as fathers slowly began to return home, the joyous anticipation of their return met with reality: these men were not the same men who had left. In many cases the readjustment was easy but in others the impact of the war had changed the father profoundly. Even when the father returned relatively unharmed, the roles in the family had been changed. The home front child and his family faced a period of, sometimes, difficult readjustment. Just the sound of a male voice in the household could alarm a child. The war had changed everything.
One adult home front child described his memory of the war below.
R. LaRue (b.1937):
The smooth voice of Lowell Thomas comes over the airways. He tells us the news of the day. Most of what he has to say is about the war. The war is not news to me. Like the endless routine of the dairy, it has always been there. It is a part of our lives. We don’t feel it; it is far away. But we hear about it constantly. It is like the sound of the ocean when we camp on Laguna Beach. It rumbles in the background without end.