William K. Klingaman - The Darkest Year: The American Home Front 1941-1942

When Americans retired for the evening on December 6, 1941, they were looking forward to a glittering holiday season, with their pockets full of cash and department stores filled with a wealth of material comforts. Although they could see the war drifting toward them from a distance, it seemed to still be a long way off. A day later, they were thrust into a conflict for which the nation was painfully unprepared.

The twelve months that followed would be, by any measure, one of the toughest years in American history. In the Pacific theater, American military forces suffered a string of setbacks that included the loss of Wake Island, Corregidor, and the Bataan Peninsula, and a devastating naval defeat in the Java Sea. Off the Atlantic coast, German U-boats sank hundreds of American and Allied merchant ships, sometimes in full view of onlookers on eastern beaches. By the autumn of 1942, both civilian and military officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the United States might lose the war.

On the home front, Americans did not lay aside their differences and join together in the war effort, cheerfully making whatever sacrifices the government requested. Instead, a society that was already deeply divided before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor splintered further as numerous interest groups sought to turn the wartime emergency to their own advantage. Blunders and repeated displays of ineptitude by the Roosevelt administrationat a time when the federal government was exercising unprecedented power over its citizensadded to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty that hung over the nation.

Goods vanished from their familiar places in American life: gasoline, rubber, sugar, coffee, and nearly anything made of metal. Heavy-handed censorship hid discouraging war news from the people, or deliberately misled them into believing the military situation was less desperate than it was. Civilian defense drills demonstrated that neither federal, state, nor local governments could protect their people; fears of sabotage led to the wholesale internment of American Japanese. Perhaps most disturbing was the disappearance of people, especially sons and husbands who entered military servicewhose families could never be certain, at any given time, whether they were still alive.

This book attempts to study the psychological effects of total war on the American people, focusing on the publics state of mind as revealed not only in what Americans said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. It is based almost exclusively on contemporary sources, especially newspapers, magazines, diaries, letters, journals, and essays. Given the well-demonstrated unreliability of human memory, particularly regarding events which occurred years or even decades earlier, I have treated oral histories and memoirs with caution. There are, however, a number of excellent secondary sources which proved invaluable in providing both a sense of perspective and exemplary analyses of the period. In particular, I should like to acknowledge David Kennedys The American People in World War II; Richard Polenbergs study War and Society: The United States, 19411945; Lynne Olsons narrative of the election of 1940, Those Angry Days; and Richard Reeves (Infamy) and Greg Robinson (By Order of the President) on the Roosevelt administrations decision to intern Japanese Americans. If I have shortchanged specific aspects of the home front experienceI am well aware, for instance, that I could have written far more on race relations during this periodit is because those topics more properly belong in a study of the American home front in the later years of the war.