William M. Tuttle

College text -- very disappointing. One needs objectivity, to fully understand what is happening. The author,uses copious footnotes but then will simply make a statement which he wishes for us to take at face value, without basis of fact. ie "The white populace had long been inimical to the striving of black people, and during World
War I this hostility became markedly more intense as over 450, 000 Southern Blacks migrated to the North."
The author makes no mention on the stigmatization of whites versus the Eastern Europeans, the fact that the unemployment rate had jumped from 2% to 5% in less than one year, that 100's of thousands of veterans joined the labor force or that the labor market was in the midst of a rapid change from agricultural to industrial. None of these things get mentioned. I felt that the book set out to prove only one thing - That the blacks, yet again, got the short end of the stick thru no fault of their own. I had hoped for much better… (meer)

In his introduction, Tuttle explains that he was drawn to the histories of children during the war by his own experience and by the academic experience of studying African American history. His method of "thick description" aims to reproduce the experience of children who lived through the war. Noticing the paucity of source material, he decided to write to major newspapers soliciting responses from readers who had been war babies. He got more than 2,500 letters as a result. Some of the more interesting topics in his consideration involve the experiences of children who benefited from the Lanham Act (which funded childcare centers) and those of people for whom the homecoming of service members was a traumatic, rather than a joyous occasion. Of less interest are probably his claims about developmental stages and his identification of stages at which the experiences of childhood happen. Certainly his observations on the ways in which gender affected those experiences bear further investigation.

In "Pearl Harbor: Fears and Nightmares" he captures the fears of children as they experienced the air raid drills and blackouts. Mothers' reassurances were very important to the children, and the role of the mother was crucial to minimizing children's fears. He opens "Depression Children and War Babies" with a great story about a six year old girl who related how she wanted to kill the Jap Hitler. He discusses the phenomena of "war brides" and "goodbye babies" as well as the fears of "husband shortages" that propelled the early baby boom in 1942 which lasted through the 1950s. In "Daddy's Gone to War" we see more of the impact on small children whose fathers went off to war. Children lived with the fear that their fathers would go off to war, and once they did they lived with the fears that their fathers would not come home. Mothers' roles were very important to the psychological well-being of the child. Strong, re-assuring mothers made the experience less traumatic for the children. Another great story about a woman who heard another woman talking about how great the war was because her husband was earning so much money. The woman with a husband overseas smacked her right in the face! Much of what the war babies recounted though was the great loneliness and sadness that many women experienced during the war. The impact on grandparents was often great, as they often assumed much of the parenting duties. And the greatest impact, of course, was on those who lost fathers, brothers and uncles in the war.

""Children Play War Games" starts out with a song that children sang during the war to the tune of "Whistle While You Work". Children played at war to make it part of their experience, to cope with it. Recreation experts indeed recommended war games as therapeutic. Racial stereotypes of Japanese soldiers were adopted from the adult culture and so too were gender roles. Yet the girls were not easily channeled into appropriate "female" roles, often preferring to take their places right next to the boys. But gender identifications had another side to them. Girls had female role models for the most part, but boys suffered from a great deal of anxiety over whether or not they could live up to the idealized images of masculinity projected on them by absence of father and by the cultural barrage of heroic masculine images. Ending the chapter with a letter from a 12 year old girl to FDR asking to be sent overseas as an assistant to the women in the army. Gender roles were actively contested by the girls of the WWII home front.

"'Daddy's Coming Home!'" will ring true with anyone who has come home from a long absence to their family. The joy of father's return after a long absence was often marred by the fact that families had fallen into different patterns in his absence. Women had taken jobs, grandparents had assumed parenting roles, GIs were often suffering from PTSD (though they didn't know it), and many people had just simply drifted apart -- the war having transformed them into different people. Whereas the difficulties of GIs readjusting was captured in the 1946 Award Winning The Best Years of Our Lives, John Huston's Let There Be Light (which catalogued WWII soldiers with PTSD) was too much for public release. Alcoholism and divorce were a common result. Some children resented their father's return, especially younger ones who were suddenly competing with Dad for Mom's attention. The re-establishment of father's authority over his children was also a source of tension in many homecomings. Illegitimacy was also a problem when father came home. War was an ambivalent time, as Margaret Sam's Forbidden Family attests. He has an interesting point to make about the role of mothers as he closes this section, though. The experience of women-centered families in WWII on the home front could well be a factor aiding the women's movement. After all, the women who were to lead the women's rights movement grew up with the real war heroes, the women who supported the family when father went off to war.… (meer)