| Texas Goes to War takes me back to my own pre-war childhood in the Central Texas town of Lakeview, where I lived with my mama and daddy in a little two-bedroom frame house on an acre of land. Lakeview, on the Dallas highway a few miles north of Waco, is a country community. It has no city council, no government structure other than a school board. There were two stores and a filling station. And, as best I can tell, there was no lake to view. |
| Most Texans lived a rural or small-town life in the years before the war. We had no superhighways. Even our network of farm-to-market roads was yet to be built. If you wanted to go from Waco to Dallas, you could take the Texas Specialthe Missouri-Kansas-Texas passenger trainor you could take the Interurban. Rush-hour traffic was unheard of, and flying was still exotic. We lived at a slower pace. |
| Before World War II, Dallas and Houston were big cities as far as we were concerned. They had less than 250,000 people. The state as a whole had 6.5 million people, less than a third of the population today. Texas was a different place in many ways, as Kent Bowman and Clay Reynolds point out in the opening chapters of Texas Goes to War. |
| The war changed our livesmine and most every other Texan. Because of the war, the cotton and corn fields east of little Lakeview were paved over. Runways and hangars and barracks were built, and our little community had a sprawling new neighborWaco Army Air Base. The drone of B-25s and B-26s filled the skies above our house. Because of our proximity to a military base, I was convinced that my little hometown was the prime target of the Japanese. |
| Somehow, the Japanese spared us, but our lives were transformed, nonetheless. John T. Smith recalls how we who were schoolchildren bought war bonds and stamps, collected paper and aluminum foil, and made do when shoes, food, and gas were rationed. |
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