"Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children.

Abstract

Looking out a second-story window of her family's quarters at Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, eleven-year-old Jackie Smith could see not only Rising Sun insignias on wings of attacking Japanese bombers, but faces of pilots inside. Most American children on home front during Second World saw enemy only in newsreels and pages of Life Magazine, but from Pearl Harbor on, the war--with its blackouts, air raids, and government rationing--became a dramatic presence in all of their lives. Thirty million Americans relocated, 3,700,000 homemakers entered labor force, sparking a national debate over working mothers and latchkey children, and millions of enlisted fathers and older brothers suddenly disappeared overseas or to far-off army bases. By end of war, 180,000 American children had lost their fathers. In Daddy's Gone to War, William M. Tuttle, Jr., offers a fascinating and often poignant exploration of wartime America, and one of generation's odyssey from childhood to middle age. The voices of home front children are vividly present in excerpts from 2,500 letters Tuttle solicited from men and women across country who are now in their fifties and sixties. From scrap-collection drives and Saturday matinees to atomic bomb and V-J Day, here is Second World through eyes of America's children. Women relive frustration of always having to play nurses in neighborhood war games, and men remember being both afraid and eager to grow up and go to war themselves. (Not all were willing to wait. Tuttle tells of one twelve year old boy who strode into an Arizona recruiting office and declared, I don't need my mother's consent...I'm a midget.) Former home front children recall as though it were yesterday pain of saying good-bye, perhaps forever, to an enlisting father posted overseas and sometimes equally unsettling experience of a long-absent father's return. A pioneering effort to reinvent way we look at history and childhood, Daddy's Gone to War views experiences of ordinary children through lens of developmental psychology. Tuttle argues that Second World left an indelible imprint on dreams and nightmares of an American generation, not only in childhood, but in adulthood as well. Drawing on his wide-ranging research, he makes case that America's wartime belief in democracy and its rightful leadership of Free World, as well as its assumptions about marriage and family and need to get ahead, remained largely unchallenged until tumultuous years of Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and Watergate. As hopes and expectations of home front children changed, so did their country's. In telling story of a generation, Tuttle provides a vital missing piece of American cultural history.