On Sunday, December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked The United States by bombing Pearl Harbor, a United Stated Naval Base situated on Hawaii. That morning, 300 Japanese fighter planes descended onto the base and bombed it, destroying naval vessels, battleships and airplanes while simultaneously killing 2,400 Americans, military and civilians. This attack was the driving force behind The United States joining World War II, which changed American life forever – including the lives of my grandparents – in a myriad of ways, including long-term and short-term affects.
Like many Americans, my grandparents remember exactly where they were when they first learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My grandma remembers being at mass in Seattle when she first heard the news. She doesn’t remember who, but someone came into the church, interrupting the service to announce that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She said she will never be able to forget the terror on people’s faces, and described a chaotic scene of people crying, screaming, and running out of church yelling obscenities about “dirty Japs”. She was 10 years old at the time and didn’t really know what to think, but seeing everyone she cared about look so terror-stricken, she knew this was something extremely serious. She said most people at the time didn’t see the United States as vulnerable, and with the image of United States impenetrability being shattered, it was replaced with fear, especially since Seattle is so close to Japan. My grandfather was as Woodland Park playing with his friends when he first heard the news. His older sister, who he thinks learned of the bombing through an interrupted radio broadcast, came to find him at the park to bring him home. When he arrived home he remembers his dad saying, “Don’t worry – we’re gonna beat those Japs”. From that day on, life changed for my grandparents, along with millions of other Americans.
Right away, there was a widespread community effort on the American Homefront to aid in the war effort. Propaganda, such as posters, newspapers, and the screening of images of the war before movies started in theatres aided in the widespread support for the war. Nevertheless, in Seattle, widespread blackouts were enacted that began at 11:00 PM, which meant that all lights in the community had to be out for fear Japanese planes might spot them. My grandfather’s dad was part of a volunteer group that walked around the neighborhood after blackout hours to make sure everyone’s lights were out. If lights weren’t turned off, the group would knock on the neighbor’s door, asking them to turn off the lights and would wait to leave until they did. During our interview, my grandfather recalled hearing of a story where a crowd rioted in downtown Seattle, smashing lights that were not turned out in order to break them. I late researched this story for better details, and learned that the riot started on December 8th at a men’s clothing store whose lights were still on after 11:00 PM. A group of over 2,000 people formed in front of the store, Foreman and Clark’s, to smash the lights. Reportedly, it took the group an hour to break all the lights, and that was just the first of the stores they hit on their rampage. Ethel Chelsvig, who was married to a sailor who was fighting in the war, shouted at the crowd egging them on, “I’m married to a man in the Navy. He’s out there fighting. Are you going to stand by while these lights threaten the very life of our city? Break them! Turn them out!”, This story is a perfect example of how passionate citizens were about aiding the war effort in order to keep America safe, and they were not at all timid when demanding others do the same.
One other significant way American’s aided in the war effort at home was rationing. In America, almost everything was rationed. The government asked that everyone be frugal and implemented systems of rationing to enforce these new values. They rationed food, materials, gas, everything you could think of. My grandparents recall using ration books which held stamps for things like sugar, oil, and meat. When they went to buy one of those items at the store, they had to give the cashier the corresponding stamp or else they were not permitted to buy the item. My grandma said that no one in her family ever complained about rationing because you realized “you were a part of the common goal” and “understood why rationing was important for your safety”. Rationing, for my grandparents, meant learning how to be frugal. Americans had to be creative when using food and materials in order to stretch out their use. Because of this, rationing changed how people growing up during the war thought about materials. My grandparents never waste food, even today, or throw something out if it’s broken. These are habits learned from their years growing up during a time of extreme rationing. For example, my grandmother said that as a family, you only received a certain amount of shoe coupons. So, when shoes began falling apart, people were forced to find ways to keep them usable. To do this, people would put cardboard in the bottom so they would stay together as long as possible.
Another way that Americans and my grandparents joined the war effort was by building victory gardens. Victory gardens were important to many Americans because they were a way that “men, women and children could fight the enemy at home in their own backyards.” In fact, so many Americans had victory gardens that one-third of the vegetables grown in the United States were produced in victory gardens. The idea for victory gardens was that by growing your own vegetables and fruits, prices for vegetables and fruits would decrease, making it cheaper to feed the troops. With less money being spent on food, more could be spent in other areas of the military. My grandma remembers growing tomatoes, carrots, berries, and all other sorts of vegetables and fruits. She learned how to can so that the food would be preserved long after the growing season was over. Since she was the oldest child, while her mom was busy she tended to the garden. She remembers she felt a great sense of pride toward their garden and saw it as a symbol of patriotism, and was glad that she could aid in any way possible to help win the war.
Although all Americans lives changed drastically because of the war, women’s were probably the most impacted. To win World War II, the entire population needed to join the war effort in order to defeat the enemy. Consequently, women joined the war effort like never seen before. For starters, women joined the military in numbers that had never occurred in United States history. During World War II, more than 400,000 women served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Although most women in the military held bureaucratic military jobs, such as typists and clerks, they were no less essential to the war effort than those fighting on the front lines in combat. The women working behind the scenes in the military is what kept the American warfare strong and running smoothly. Propaganda was widely used to recruit women to join the war effort, such as the well-known icon of World War II, Rosie the Riveter. Rosie appeared on posters, in articles, and in movies, telling women it was their patriotic duty to join the war effort. Overall, the system of propaganda worked, because between 1940 and 1945, five million women entered the workforce. Besides military work, women began working at factories that were building weapons, vehicles, and ships and many war related objects. Besides working in the defense industry, women mainly took over jobs that men had traditionally worked, such as office jobs, which were now empty because the men who had held these jobs were now going off to war. These roles were important because without women working in these factories, and taking on many other jobs they never had in the past, men would have been forced to stay home and work these jobs which would have taken bodies away from actual combat. These workplace changes were huge to women because it gave them independence and expanded their role in the job market. For my grandma, it was an important moment in her life to see her mother own her own business at the start of the war. Before the war, her mother was a stay at home mom while her dad went to work and brought home a paycheck. However, during the war, that changed after her mother and one of her friends opened an apron shop two blocks away from their home. My grandma occasionally went to work with her mother and believes that seeing all the women employees work for their own money and watching her mom be a leader and a boss showed her that women could be mothers and workers, and shaped her feminist views which led her to go to college and become a writer, as well as a mother because the war had showed her that women could do both. My grandma also believes the war impacted her as a woman because she was what was known as a “latchkey” kid which is a term coined during the war for children who spend a lot of time by themselves while their parents are working or off at war. Being the oldest of 5 children, she had to take care of her siblings while her mother was away working even though she was only in her early teens. Many other young women also experienced this during the war, which forced them to grow up quickly because they needed to be responsible. My grandma said that being a latchkey kid “was a blessing and a curse because I had to grow up very quickly but at the same time I learned a lot of important life lessons”. For example, she had to tend to the victory garden, go shopping for groceries, make dinner, and send everyone off to school including herself.
Racism ran rampant during World War II, especially towards Japanese Americans. This quite literally hits close to home because there were a good number of Japanese Americans living in Washington State before World War II and we had our very own internment camp in Puyallup. As soon as Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Japanese people were viewed suspiciously by the American public. This lead to over 100,000 mainland Japanese being placed in internment camps on the west coast of the United States. Propaganda images were released that conveyed Japanese people as an animalistic, crazed enemy and Americans were moved by these images. My grandparents remember seeing posters in an elevator in downtown Seattle that read “Kill the Japs”. My grandfather is ashamed to admit that he was influenced by this propaganda and for many years after the war, still viewed the Japanese as inhumane, evil and the enemy. My grandmother on the other hand, can distinctly remember spreading out the newspaper on her floor, and reading about the Japanese from Bainbridge Island being evacuated from their homes, losing all their possessions, and being forced into Japanese internment camps. She then asked her mother “Why do people hate the Japs?” to which her mother responded, “We don’t talk about those dirty bastards”. She said this made her extremely sad and confused at the time. Now, she believes that it was the extreme hatred the Japanese people suffered that made her think more deeply about racism and hatred at such a young age which led her to the conclusion that “racism is pointless” and she’s thankful for that awakening.
The 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and the war the consequently followed changed American lives forever. For women, their roles in the workplace were altered and they were forced to take on roles that were foreign to them, for better or for worse, racism affected thousands of lives, and communities learned how to come together and work toward a common goal in multiple ways in times of crisis and fear and change.