Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph LaRossa is professor of sociology at Georgia State University and the author of several books, including The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History.

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Of War and Men

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................xiIntroduction.............................................................1ONE Attacked.............................................................17TWO "The Bodies That We Need"............................................29THREE The Fog and the Sun................................................39FOUR "Giving It the Best They've Got"....................................51FIVE "Rights" of Passage.................................................67SIX Reentry..............................................................81SEVEN Father's Proper Place..............................................101EIGHT Baby Boom..........................................................115NINE "Adventure ... Begins at Home"......................................133TEN Picture Imperfect....................................................153ELEVEN "What a Man!".....................................................169TWELVE "Daddy, That's Not Your Job"......................................187THIRTEEN "Tempered by War, Disciplined by ... Peace".....................201Epilogue.................................................................211Notes....................................................................217Index....................................................................297

Chapter One

Pearl Harbor is located on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. In December 1941 it was a major base for the U.S. Pacific fleet, and housed not only servicemen and servicewomen but also, in some cases, their families. Japanese fighter aircraft attacked the base at 7:55 on a Sunday morning. The bombardment lasted for more than two hours. Almost the entire Pacific fleet was destroyed; more than three hundred U.S. aircraft were demolished or crippled. Casualties on the American side added up to 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded. Japan lost twenty-nine of its 350 planes.

The attack had come as a complete surprise. Sailors fired back at the planes as best they could, but there was not much they could do; the Japanese held the advantage. Servicemen who happened to be home had to choose between protecting their loved ones and defending the base. One sailor recalled trying to get his wife and child to safety and, with the benefit of hindsight, was able see a bit of humor amid the shock. "When we're almost to the car, my wife says, The baby doesn't have any diapers! Get some!' ... Bear in mind that this is Armageddon, the end of the world, and my wife has me chasing diapers!" Local residents were caught in the crossfire as well. A Hawaiian father reported that he "drove his family into the sugarcane fields above the harbor, where they hid among the tall cane stalks."

As news of the attack spread throughout the United States, Americans absorbed the terrible truth that the country was at war. A ten-year-old boy saw his father weeping in front of the radio: "Dad was bent over, his head in his hands ... his shoulders were faintly shaking as the announcer rattled on." Some parents took their anger out on their children—screaming at them, even striking them. Others vented their fury at the Japanese. One man, visibly drunk, kept repeating, "I'm gonna get me a machine gun and kill every one of those slant eyed sons-of-bitches I can find."

Although Pearl Harbor precipitated America's formal entrance into World War II, the social reality of the conflict gripped the country long before the attack, particularly after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Believing that the aggression overseas would continue unabated, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had taken steps to prepare the United States for battle. Coastal installations were placed on high alert. Factories were built, industries were retooled, and new military gear was ordered. All the while, newspapers printed daily reports of war, while letters from family members in Europe described "the ominous drone of German bombers, [and] the fire and rubble of the Blitz." For some, the anxiety over what lay ahead was too much to bear. A twenty-three-year-old farmer in Monmouth, New Jersey, shot and killed himself—after scribbling a note saying he did not want to be drafted.

Fear became a central element in America's collective consciousness and altered the shape and tenor of people's lives. Even advertisements projected alarm. Seventeen months before the Japanese attack, the Bell Aircraft Corporation published an ad that showed a father and son looking across a tarmac where several U.S. fighter planes were lined up. The father, with his hand on the shoulder of the boy, counsels, "Remember Lincoln's words, my son: 'The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends[,]' [is] the keynote to the Nation's future." Fourteen months before the attack, the Lehigh Portland Cement Company declared, "Hurry! Hurry! America's call is urgent for more armament, more tools for its manufacturers, more facilities for making both." By "speeding up [their] construction" with "Lehigh Early Strength Cement," the builders would be "speeding up the first lines of defense." Nine months before, the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company equated buying a life insurance policy with creating a "Defense Committee of One." Said a man pictured in the ad, "Although our defense program is much smaller than the Government's, they're a lot alike. Both are aimed at the same thing—protection now and independence in the future. Both are important—to neglect either would leave us open to the worries and hazards of the unprepared." And just five months before, the White Motor Company, manufacturer of trucks and buses, assured people, "America is secure against any wave of the future pounding at her shores ... as long as there are men and machines to build America's ramparts stronger, faster and better."

After Pearl Harbor, the tone of advertising changed. The actions of the Japanese, coupled with the early success of German submarines (in the first three months of 1942, German U-boats patrolling off the East Coast sank 216 ships) heightened people's sense that the United States was vulnerable. America's industries responded in kind. A March advertisement for Warner and Swasey Turret Lathes began, "Did you ever face the sobering thought that your country may not win this war?" Another Warner and Swasey ad showed a youngster left homeless by the bombing raids in Europe. "It can happen here. If workmen in the machine shops of now-conquered countries had worked harder and longer in time, there would have been enough planes and guns to beat off the Nazi raiders who bombed this pitiable little child." In yet another ad, the company cautioned,

"Pearl Harbor is inviolate"—yet it was attacked

"Singapore is impregnable"—but it fell.

"America and Britain control the seas"—yet Nazis sink tankers in sight of New York; the Japs shell California.

"Our Navy can repel any invasion"—but now the Axis Navy outnumbers ours.

We lull ourselves to sleep with things we want to believe, and while we sleep our enemies close in from either side.... The enemy who will take [our comfortable lives] all away is closing in.

In April 1943 the Magazine Publishers of America ran an...