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

by William M. Tuttle Jr.

Looking out a second-story window of her family's quarters at the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, eleven-year-old Jackie Smith could see not only the Rising Sun insignias on the wings of attacking Japanese bombers, but the faces of the pilots inside. Most American children on the home front during the Second World War saw the enemy only in newsreels and the 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 the 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 the end of the 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 the home front children are vividly present in excerpts from the 2,500 letters Tuttle solicited from men and women across the country who are now in their fifties and sixties. From scrap-collection drives and Saturday matinees to the atomic bomb and V-J Day, here is the Second World War through the eyes of America's children. Women relive the 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 the pain of saying good-bye, perhaps forever, to an
enlisting father posted overseas and the sometimes equally unsettling experience of a long-absent father's return.
A pioneering effort to reinvent the way we look at history and childhood, "Daddy's Gone to War" views the experiences of ordinary children through the lens of developmental psychology. Tuttle argues that the Second World War left an indelible imprint on the dreams and nightmares of an American generation, not only in childhood, but in adulthood as well. Drawing on his wide-ranging research, he makes the case that America's wartime belief in democracy and its rightful leadership of the Free World, as well as its assumptions about marriage and the family and the need to get ahead, remained largely unchallenged until the tumultuous years of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and Watergate. As the hopes and expectations of the home front children changed, so did their country's. In telling the story of a generation, Tuttle provides a vital missing piece of American cultural history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Family

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 1993

About the author

A professor of history and American studies at the University of Kansas, Bill Tuttle specializes in twentieth-century American history and African-American history.

Reviews

[Kari]

Really interesting content in this book but it was not written in a way that made it easily accessible. I found the writing to be scattered or "jumpy" for my tastes even though, overall, I actually learned quite a bit. For example, the author had many first-hand stories from homefront children which I would have preferred to read in large chunks to support overarching ideas instead of single sentences used to illustrate specific topics.

With my nit-pickiness aside though, it was interesting to think about WWII through the lens of children and how they viewed the newsreels, fear of bombing, etc. I did not expect, but was very gratified by, an exploration of gender roles and how the war influenced those in the children as well.

[Michael]

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.

[Kate]

This is one of the most moving history books I've ever read. It details the effect of wartime on children's lives. It doesn't fail to include fearfulness (hiding under the kitchen table during air raid drills) and everyday privations and tragic loss, but it's at its best when it presents the teamwork of a country that was largely united in its homefront efforts. Yes, people complained (as we all do) when various supplies were limited. Yes, some people hoarded bags of sugar in the attic. But it was a time when even small children participated in "keeping the home fires burning."

Children moiled away in Victory Gardens and saved their pennies to buy War Bonds and even donated their precious toys to scrap drives. That deeply touches me.

I'm not blinded by some sense of a lost Eden. And it's not that one would ever wish that anyone anywhere would ever have to face a worldwide threat like the Nazis again... but wouldn't it be great if we could join together like that, young and old, for something worthwhile?

[RL]

This is the best book that I have ever read on domestic life during the Second World War. Tuttle uses a combination of anecdotes from children from that time along with information that he got through research. One tidbit from the book is that it was during the War that men wearing wedding rings became fashionable. He also addresses the difficulty that so many GIs had connecting with children who were born when they were away, as well as reconnecting with little ones that they hadn't seen in years. There are a couple of spots that are dry, but overall, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what really happened.