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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 24 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: October 1986 Volume 24 Number 4, Pages 127–138 Club Members Remember : The Home Front During the Second World War [It has been said that during the second World War everybody became involved in the war effort in one way or another -- those on the "home front" as well as those in the service. These recollections of various club members recall some of the ways the war affected the "home front".] Barbara Fry Our family, as I grew up, was both a city family and a country family -- the city house was in Binghamton, New York, and the farm was in Hawleytown, near the New York and Pennsylvania border. The war years brought a number of changes and new demands to both ways of life. The family farm, where my mother had grown up with eight brothers and four sisters, had done well even through the Depression, with only two of the brothers there still to manage its 350 acres. Seasonal help was always available, because factory lay-offs were consistent in the city, and plenty of hired help boarded year round at both houses on the farm. The family members who had moved into town could also be counted on to help out in emergencies. When the war took most of the able-bodied men from 18 to 35, though, my uncle with the dairy barn had to hire several 16-year olds as replacements during the first summer, and they drove him almost to distraction! Most of the farm was in apple orchards, and my uncle made most of the cider that was sold in Broome County. Women took over most of the apple picking chores during the war, and also the cider-filling responsibilities. In the fall my mother, sometimes with the younger children in our family, would be picked up early in the morning and return late at night after a full day's work in the country. The farm was located at the end of a long dirt country road, sitting on the top of a high ridge of hills. Because of this, it became the airplane spotting station for the area south of Binghamton. My aunt had spotters in her kitchen 24 hours a day all through the war! Every plane that flew over was reported, and charts were kept showing the direction each aircraft was flying. Back in the city, my oldest sister and I were in high school, and had joined the Fife and Drum Corps. At first we were called on to play with the school band at the station when boys went into the service, but this was not possible for long because the call-ups were so frequent. We continued to play for bond rallies and parades, though. Eventually only the 18-year old boys who were seniors were allowed to finish high school; those who were sophomores or juniors were called into the service and had to postpone school until after the war. This made a change for me, too, for suddenly all the fellows who were snare drummers in the band were taken into the service, and I was moved from the all-girl Drum Corps to the almost all-male band. I could manage drum beats for marching, but concert band music is written and played quite a bit differently from marching cadences. So I had to teach myself how to play concert band music while a very impatient band barely tolerated me! When we practiced at night at the high school, we had to have black draperies on the small high windows of the basement band room. We also had to stay there until the "all clear" sounded after the many practice air raid drills that were held. The air raid wardens dutifully checked on us regularly during the drills. At home we had our black-out room in the upstairs hall, which was the closest thing to an "inside" room we had. The one window in it was completely covered. Again, air raid wardens covered the neighborhood, making sure no one violated the black-out after the sirens blew. The war news was censored, although some of the reports from broadcasters abroad were great journalistic accomplishments. Every night we listened at 9:00 o'clock to Elmer Davis, who was head of the Office of War Information, to learn what we were allowed to know of the progress of the war. Letters from service men were also censored. My sister finished high school in 1943 and went to work in an office. Her employer was required to release each of his office employees for four hours a month to work at the Ration Board. My sister's work there was to mail out additional stamps to people for whom they had been approved. My uncle who handled the fruit and truck patch at the farm received extra stamps for gasoline to bring his produce into town. But if you did not use your car for business, you got only a few gallons of gasoline each week. Meat, sugar, gasoline, and shoes could not be bought without stamps. We were each allowed two pairs of shoes a year; the stamps were given by family, and parents with growing children often had to do without to keep their children in shoes. We had a good friend in the Drum Corps, Sima Zodikoff, who was a Russian Jew. With her family, she had recently escaped from Germany, where her father had had a business. Like some of the German Jews, he had come to work at Agfa Ansco, a German company in Binghamton that was soon to be taken over by the United States government. The Zodikoffs were extending every effort to bring others from Germany, through Switzerland, and were constantly celebrating the arrival of people who seemed quite different to us, in their ski clothes and long coats. They were all brilliant, and friendly people, and spoke several languages. We really had no understanding of what it meant to be a Jew in Germany at that time; we just thought of them as losing their businesses and livelihood. The Zodikoffs, incidentally, were under continuing surveillance by the government. F.B.I, agents would show up at any time, day or night, to go through their home and their papers. Jobs and wages were frozen. Men could avoid the army by doing defense work, but normally defense jobs would go to those who could not pass the service physical examination, or to women. Workers could not move from one plant to another without a release. But to keep production moving, key people in defense plants were deferred. We worried all the time about the possibility of sabotage at our defense plants, but I can't remember anything that actually occurred. Workers were cautioned to keep whatever they were doing a secret, and slogans like "Loose lips sink ships" abounded. Leighton Haney You mentioned Elmer Davis and the O.W.I. In his book entitled Don't You Know There's a War On?, Richard Lingerman notes, "Censorship was voluntary on the part of the newspapers, but it caused constant concern and was the chief topic of complaint at every meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Elmer Davis' OWI, charged with coordinating the information the federal government released, came in for much criticism. He was in the thankless position of being caught between demanding reporters and governmental agencies which often sought to release as little news as possible, especially if it reflected adversely in any remote way on their performance. The military was especially niggardly at times." Bob Goshorn I have some of the posters that were used to encourage greater war production and warn against loose talk and sabotage. "SOMEBODY BLABBED", one of them, showing a drowning sailor's arm reaching out from the sea, proclaims, "...don't talk about ship movements! ...don't talk about war production! BUTTON YOUR LIP!" "MORE PRODUCTION", another, showing a snowball rolling down hill over Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, urges, while another, with Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeve, exhorts "STILL MORE PRODUCTION". Others proclaim "GIVE YOUR BEST", "The battle begins with your job! Do it right", and "WORK TO KEEP FREE". There are also other posters promoting the purchase of War Bonds. Eva Noll Ray [later my husband] and I were in high school during the Second World War. The year we graduated, 1946, was the first year that men had the option of going to college or going into the service. Ray opted to go to college and enlisted in the R.O.T.C., so he was in the Korean War, not the Second World War. But he still has his Boy Scout medal that he got for collecting a thousand pounds of scrap during the Second World War. Each Boy Scout who collected a thousand pounds of scrap was awarded this "General Eisenhower Medal". He was very proud of it, and has kept it all these years. I also have my grandmother's ration books. Somehow or another she was in bed a lot of the time, and didn't seem to use all her stamps -- which I thought was rather interesting. Most of the other ration books that I found around my father's house were empty! I was in the "Victory Corps" at school. We collected scrap. We collected rubber. We collected metal and tin cans. We collected newspapers. And then on certain days of the week, when the boys got called up for service, we would march with them down to the railroad station. They would go from the Lansdowne station in to town. It was sort of a sad thing, because we knew a lot of the boys, especially those who had graduated just a few years ahead of us. I still have my Victory Corps cap, a khaki overseas-type cap with a red "V" at the front on the left side. Every afternoon we would drill -- "To the rear, march!" and all that -- and we felt that we were quite snappy when we marched down to the station and saw the boys off! There was a picture of us in the Yearbook, drilling and marching past the high school. Frances Ligget Even before we were in the war my husband did a great deal of work in the scrap iron campaigns. I have a letter to him from John D. M. Hamilton, thanking him for his efforts in the campaign. After the scrap was collected, we stored a lot of it in a barn over at Waynesborough. I also have a picture of Waynesborough farm showing one of the barns we had fixed up as a play house. We had square dances there -- Chris Sanderson came down with his Pocopson Valley Boys to play for us. And the price of admission, if I remember correctly, was a donation of pieces of scrap iron of some sort. At the same time that all this excitement was going on, I was chosen vice-chairman of the Radio Committee of Emergency Aid in Philadelphia. We were on several stations from time to time, and were given free time to interview business officials who headed up newly-formed committees to coordinate the war effort. These different officials of various companies would come in and we would interview them. (We would have a meeting and put everything down in rough, and then have it typed up and a copy sent to them to go over before we went on the air.) I did have one rather unusual, and somewhat upsetting, experience: I received a phone call the night before one interview, and was told "If you appear on that radio station tomorrow I'm going to kill you!" I promptly called the radio station and told them what had happened, and they said they'd see to it that there was a guard at every door. (Apparently the person whom I was to interview had also had a similar telephone call.) Fortunately, it was a radio station with good security, and nothing happened! This was, as I said, all before the war started. And there were "Bundles for Britain". We had our own special reason for Bundles for Britain as my husband's cousin, the Earl Beauchamps, lived in England. And they were tickled to death to get these things! Even way after the war, they kept telling us how much they appreciated them. After the war started here, my husband was chairman of the Ration Board. Dick Onderdonk I grew up in Hagerstown, Maryland. Before I was drafted, my mother was always pushing me to do things. So we went down the streets, knocking on doors, for clothes for Bundles for Britain. I don't remember whether we collected material from the people at that time or made arrangements to come and pick it up later. Janet Malin I got into Bundles for Britain in a round-about way. When it was found out that I could run an electric sewing machine I was asked, "Come around to the YW some day. We're making Bundles for Britain." So I went over, and they started me on those little smocks that the French children wore over their clothes to keep them clean. After I had been going over there for three or four weeks, one day a Miss Barrett, who was in charge of the sewing room, came in and said, "I just don't know what I'm going to do with this sweater." One of the volunteers had said that she couldn't sew but that she could knit, but the sleeves of the sweater she had made were real wide all the way down! So I got some matching wool and took it home to work on it. I took the sleeves out and knitted new ones in so that it would fit somebody. And so now I was knitting Bundles for Britain. My husband was working night work and I had to be quiet in the house all day while he slept, so I would knit. At first I was making what they called "little toddler's packs", with a sweater, cap, and mittens for little children. But then I was asked to knit air pilots' knit helmet liners. They had to be just so, shaped to go under the helmet, with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth, and with holes for the radio earphones. So I took the instructions home and followed them, and made nine or ten of these liners. In the meantime, we were also saving tin cans and newspapers. This was all before Pearl Harbor. Elizabeth Goshorn I started working at the Experiment Station of the Hercules Powder Company in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1940. During the three years I was there, indications of the war effort taking place in the laboratories increased steadily in the reports sent to our library division, where I was working. For example, since rubber was required for so many military (and civilian) uses, the Company was trying to produce an artificial chlorinated rubber. If we could synthesize a product which would not fall apart under stress, for things like overshoes, an equal amount of real rubber could be freed for tires for jeeps, treads for tanks, and soon. Another project was impregnating cardboard with various waxes. We were trying to make a carton that would stay afloat and be water-tight if dumped into sea water, as when a supply ship was torpedoed, and that could later be retrieved with its contents -- food for our troops, for example -- still usable and not wasted. Another sign of the times at the Experiment Station was the acceptance of women as chemists, working in the laboratory rather than in the library division only. The first woman chemist hired for lab work had just received her Ph.D, in chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, where I had known her as a graduate student, so it seemed especially significant to me. Encouraged by the "suggestion" of the Company authorities, we all bought War Bonds. The amount we requested was deducted from our paychecks each pay day. At first the social life of the young people there was not seriously affected by the war. If we were not dating chemists from our own company, we often went out with chemists from Atlas or DuPont. For some time few of them were drafted, as they were in an essential industry. As the war deepened, of course, more of the younger men went into the Armed Forces. What excitement there was at work on the day the news leaked out that there was a tiny shop in Wilmington which sold nylon stockings -- and they'd last forever! No more shiny rayon; no more British walking- style lisle, which we had used to replace the unattainable silk stockings! we could be glamorous again! And inexpensively, too, because they did wear and wear and wear -- better than any have since that time. We were also glad to hear that the same strong fibers were also being used in parachutes, on which so many lives would depend. After war was declared, we were even more sensitive to the fact that we were working in an essential industry, and that the Experiment Station was in the "chemical corridor" of the East Coast. We realized that if the Germans had bombers of sufficiently long range we were not only a very strategic target, but also a vulnerable one -- above ground, no camouflage. Shortly afterwards a scheduling change was made when it was decided to keep the library open until midnight to facilitate the research work in the laboratories. Each member of the library indexing staff worked an evening shift every few weeks. At midnight we were carefully escorted to our lodgings, driven by an authorized chauffeur in a company car. He waited patiently in front of the house or apartment until we unlocked our doors and were safely inside. About a year after war was declared, a sky-blue flag, with a big white "E" on it, could be seen rippling in the wind over the Experiment Station. It was the United States government's way of recognizing Excellence by a company in the production of material needed in the war effort. We were proud of it, and its presence inspired all of us as we wound up the hill to start our day's work. Leighton Haney This may come as a surprise, but each parachute contained the equivalent of only six pairs of nylons! But that must have been a serious situation for the stocking manufacturers: first he lost his silk, then he lost his nylon, and then he lost his finer grades of cotton. Lingerman reports that "one manufacturer said, helplessly, 'We could figure a way to knit them of grass one day and the next day there would be a priority on grass". Bob Goshorn That's not as far-fetched as it sounds! If any of you were in the second grade at Strafford School or the other Tredyffrin-Easttown schools in 1942 you may remember a project to collect milkweed pods. The seeds or flax from milkweed were used to make life jackets for the Navy and the Coast Guard, replacing kapok, which came from countries overrun by the Japanese and was no longer available. So they were almost using grass! Janet Malin After we got into the war, my husband was an airplane watcher and an air raid warden. I remember one night when he was out, there was a knock on the door. It was another air raid warden, and he said, "Do you have a fire in your cellar?" I had just fired up our litle coal stove, a "bucket a day" that we used for hot water, and it was shining through the cellar window. I had forgotten to put anything over the window, and to be caught by another air raid warden was really embarrassing! In 1943 I started to work at Lukens Steel, and my husband was working in research. When I went to Lukens I moved into an apartment. The man up there let me have some land for a "Victory Garden". In the meantime, Lukens had given to each employee who wanted one a piece of land back of Coatesville for a garden. So I had two Victory Gardens! In the evening a friend who lived down the street from us and I, and two or three other women, would get the vegetables and other things we grew ready, and then we would can them. And that's how we spent our evenings! I had three cousins in the army, and my husband's older brother was in the Coast Guard. He was in a boat off Leyte when a tidal wave struck and washed the boat right over the island! They were sitting on top of I don't know how many hundred gallons of gasoline in the boat; he was lucky that it didn't snag something and blow itself sky-high. One of my uncles -- my mother's youngest sister's husband -- was a Captain in the Navy, on convoy duty to Great Britain. He was at one of the meetings where Churchill and Roosevelt were making plans for the end of the war. Grace Winthrop I remember that I was a plane spotter. We went over to Sugartown, to the Fletchers' house, and would go up on her roof. We each were assigned a shift of one or two hours. I don't think we ever did see a plane -- but we were there in case! Millie Kirkner My dad was a spotter. He got a certificate from the Army Air Force's Fighter Command for his "Aircraft Warning Service". He used to go, as I remember, from ten to twelve at night, or from midnight to two o'clock. I can remember that I knitted him a real heavy, warm woolen hood; it was bitter cold out there! They started out on top of the old Berwyn High School, where the Tredyffrin-Easttown Junior High School is now. Then they built an observation post on the roof of the Township Building, on Old Lancaster Road, southwest of the high school. Dorothy Reed asked me to tell you about a few things she remembers. She was working at the post office. One of the main things they had to be careful about was the restrictions on packages; they had to be less than a certain size and a certain weight -- about the size of a shoe box and not more than two pounds. She said one of the happy things that happened were the occasions when someone was mailing a wedding dress to a girl in England who was going to wed the person's son or brother, as they couldn't get material to make a wedding dress in England. In the post office she was also responsible for finger-printing aliens. All the folks who were not U.S. citizens had to be finger-printed. She said it wasn't too bad until you had to start asking them if they had any scars or identifying marks! As for me, one of the main things I remember doing was going over to the Valley Forge Hospital. Many of the men who were there had eye problems, and we would read to them. And that's also where I learned to play pinochle! We played for hours! We would dance with them too. Lots of times they'd come back to visit in our home. My mother was working at that time, so I was the chief cook at home. (I wish I had known Eva Noll's grandmother!) We had very little meat, but I'd find these recipes for hard-boiled egg casseroles, and other things like that. My dad always said it was very good -- but my mother wasn't too sure! Anne Slaymaker Shortly after the war started, my husband joined the Sea Bees, and I got a letter from Fred Miller in the Paoli Bank -- he was the cashier -- inviting me "to join the family". So I went to work there as a bookeeper.(Incidentally, I was the highest paid bookkeeper there -- we got from $15 to $25 a week!) The manager of the Acme, which used to be where the Girard Bank is now, would come in to make a large deposit, with a long list of checks to be deposited. He never had a deposit slip made out, so I would make it out for him. Then one day he came in with a pound of butter, to say "thank you". Butter was hard to get, and I was always too late to get to the store to get it when it came in. So I took this pound of butter home and I made almost two pounds out of it, using gelatine and milk! That's how the frugal housewife used it! I thought that it was a real treat. Leighton Haney I was in college when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and graduated the following May. Along with several other fellows, I took a job in Milwaukee. (We figured we weren't going to be around too long as civilians, and the word was out that there were a number of good breweries in Milwaukee, so we might as well spend our last days as civilians there!) I don't want to hurt the feelings of any midwesterners, but one thing that impressed us at that time was that even though everyone seemed to be involved in war work, there wasn't the strong feeling that there was on the East Coast that there was a war going on! Marian Aument I found that true too. Whenever I came to the East Coast from Michigan the attitude seemed different. I was in Portland, Maine on Pearl Harbor day -- and they all had buckets of sand on their front porches so they could put out any fires from fire bombs! Leighton Haney I think one of the reasons for this was that here in the East we did have German submarines off the coast, preying on coastal shipping. And if you went down to the shore there were black-outs at night, and the beaches would be covered with tar and oil from tankers that had been sunk off the coast. The beautiful shores of Lake Michigan at Milwaukee didn't have that problem, and so I don't think the war impressed the people there quite like it did here. Another thing I remember is about War Bonds. At one of the local bars in Milwaukee -- I guess this is showing a mis-spent youth! -- about once a month the sale of War Bonds was promoted by giving away a little flag when you bought a War Bond. You put the flag in your lapel, and it entitled you to unlimited martinis for that evening! Bob Goshorn We found that distance from the coast reflected in Texas too. As I was in the Army myself, my recollections of the home front during the war are somewhat limited. But one of the things that I do recall concerned the awareness of the war and improving "civilian morale". Our outfit, the 84th Infantry Division, was reactivated in mid-October of 1942 at Camp Howze, in northern Texas. By November there was still only a cadre of officers and a few non-coms, but even so someone decided that to boost civilian morale we should commemorate what we then called Armistice Day with a parade. It was to go down the main street of nearby Gainesville. (It was scheduled on such short notice that we had to send telegrams to our wives in Denton, about forty miles away, to let them know to come up by bus to see it!) The parade started at one end of the town (population 9,651) at half past ten, the three infantry regiments in the van, then the motorized equipment -- all kinds of trucks and jeeps -- followed by the medical units and field artillery. At eleven o'clock we halted in front of the make-shift reviewing stand, where the town officials and generals and other high-ranking officers were, for the traditional two minutes of silence. Our Division was followed by the American Legion, the High School band, and the Boy Scouts. It must have been quite a sight for the townspeople who lined up two-deep on either side of the street! I also remember how glad my parents were when I came home on leave. Our first stop was at the Ration Board in West Chester, to get coupons for gasoline, liquor, a pound of sugar, and whatever. During my 90-day recuperation leave in 1945 I apparently got coupons for sixty gallons of gasoline! (I still have a couple of coupons that weren't used.) Another thing I recall is the respect businesses apparently had for the OPA (Office of Price Administration). During a leave with my family in New Orleans, my father thought he had been charged too much by the hotel for our rooms. But he didn't argue about it; he simply paid the bill, got a receipt, and then quietly asked for the address of the local OPA office. He hadn't got ten steps away from the cashier's window before he was paged and called back to have the "mistake" corrected. Travel on trains while on leave was also something to remember. It was a rare occasion when there weren't at least three different passengers assigned to the same berth, leaving the conductor to work it out in some way. Sleeping was often done in shifts, or sitting up in the washroom. One of the more amazing things about the home front to us in the service was the "grapevine" of the army wives. When our Division was about to go on maneuvers in Louisiana in September 1943, we were told about it just before retreat. When I got home three-quarters of an hour later my wife greeted me by asking if she should cut off the milk order! Eva Noll I remember gasoline rationing. Three of us wanted to go down to see Duke University, so the three families put together all the gasoline coupons they could spare for the trip. One mother figured she could drive us as far as Richmond with the coupons we pooled, and we had to take the train the rest of the way. The trip really broke us as far as our coupons for gasoline were concerned! George Winthrop I was in the Navy and wasn't home much of the time. Elizabeth Goshorn said her company was trying to make paper boxes that wouldn't sink and that would be water-tight. I hate to say this, but in the Navy we had orders that "as soon as you see anything in the water that doesn't look like a life boat -- sink it!". We didn't have any meat rationing in the Navy except in one place. That was down near Australia and New Zealand, where they specialized in mutton. It was cheaper and easier to transport meat from there than from the United States, so they had a system set up where you could get so many pounds of beef if you took so many pounds of mutton -- and we had a lot of this mutton! Well, our captain volunteered to go up to what we called "Green Island", which was the code name for an island up in the northern part of the Solomons, to pick up about 1800 New Zealand troops and bring them back to New Caledonia. We went and got them. Our ship had two big galleys and two mess halls. We kept cooking up this mutton in immense pots -- I guess they must have been about 50 gallons each -- and the crew kept going around, saying "Get back in line for more" and telling them how good it was. (They had been living on K-rations and dried milk, I guess, and probably did think it was pretty good!) We got rid of most of the mutton on that trip. Charles Lee In Berwyn there was a fellow -- his name was Bob Goebel -- who had had an amputation and was bed-ridden. So he started a publication that was sent to every person in the service from this area, from Tredyffrin and Easttown. He couldn't work in a defense plant or serve in the armed forces, but this was something that he could do. It was a rather unique enterprise, a thing that this particular community did during the war. The whole thing was put out by volunteer labor, with many others making contributions of $5 or $10 to help support it. It cost about $100 to put it out each month. The first issue appeared in April 1943, and even though Bob Goebel died in June 1945 it was continued by members of the staff until May 1946. I believe that some 2500 copies were printed and mailed -- many of them overseas -- each month. [There is an article about Robert F. Goebel and the Berwyn Post in the April 1967 issue (Vol. XIV, No. 3) of the Quarterly. And in Volume V, Number 1, published in April 1942 are contemporary reports of the local defense programs in the Tredyffrin-Easttown community, with articles on the Berwyn Lookout or Observation Post; the Paoli Branch of the American Red Cross; and the Berwyn Knitting Class.] |
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