Local War Stories: Gustavus R. Ide Jr.
World War II veteran Gustavus R. Ide, Jr. shares his personal memories of the war.
World War II veteran Gustavus R. Ide, Jr. shares his personal memories of the war.
World War II veteran John Laukkanen shares his personal memories of the war.
World War II veteran Bob Doherty shares his personal memories of the war.
I am looking for an electronic copy of a cartoon which shows most of the different aspects of the home front effort in America during World War II.
America’s home front effort included recruiting for the military, participating in scrap drives, paying income taxes, buying war bonds, using rationing coupons, planting Victory gardens, encouraging sanitation, volunteering for civil defense work, increasing public morale, and participating in industrial retooling and production. The Hollywood studios that were making cartoons at the beginning of the war were quickly drafted into turning their art to the war effort, to mobilize the American public. Cartoons were just one part of a propaganda effort, which also included the production and distribution of feature films, posters, war-themed commercial radio, newspaper and magazine advertising, the organization of celebrity tours and war bond drives, the establishment of censorship offices, and the formulation and distribution of a barrage of information and directives from various government officials and agencies.
Leon Schlesinger Productions produced popular cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for Warner Brothers Studios, many of which had war themes, such as “The Ducktators” (1942), “Confusions of a Nutzy Spy” (1943), “The Fifth Column Mouse” (1943), “Tokio Jokio” (1943), “Daffy—The Commando” (1943), “Falling Hare” (1943), and “Draftee Daffy” (1945).
At least two of these Warner Brothers’ cartoons focused on home front activities and might be the cartoon you’re thinking of: “Scrap Happy Daffy” (1943), and ”Wacky Blackout” (1942).
Walt Disney also produced many war-themed cartoons with Mickey, Donald, Goofy and the rest of the gang, some of which were focused on the home front, such as “Out of the Frying Pan into The Firing Line” (1942), and ”Food Will Win the War” (1942).
A collection of short cartoons and movies from the Disney Studio during World War II, which includes many intended for the home front, was released (for purchase) in 2004 as a 2-disc DVD, “On the Front Lines,” in the series “Walt Disney Treasures.” This collection includes such titles as “Donald Gets Drafted” (1942), “Private Pluto” (1943), “Home Defense” (1943), “All Together” (1942), “Defense Against Invasion” (1943), and “Cleanliness Brings Health” (1945), as well as many others. The collection also includes Disney’s 1943 animated film, “Victory Through Air Power,” as well as a few of the hundreds of training films that the Disney studio made for the War Department or the National Film Board of Canada, such as “Four Methods of Flush Riveting” (1942).
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Cass Warner-Sperling, Cork Millner, and Jack Warner. Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
More than 300 U.S. government publications from World War II have been digitized for this site, an ongoing project that plans to add another 200 documents.
Materials include pamphlets and books emphasizing home front issues, such as air raids, preservation, child labor, and victory farms. All materials are searchable by title, author, subject, and keyword. Browsing is also available.
A companion collection of photographs, the "Melvin C. Shaffer Collection," depicts the home front situation in Germany, North Africa, Italy, and Southern France from 1943 to 1945. Shaffer was a U.S. Army medical photographer assigned to document the medical history of the war through major campaigns. Shafer took the photographs on this site—totaling approximately 340—unofficially with the goal of recording the war's impact on civilians.
Created by the First United States Army Group and the Twelfth Army Group, this collection consists of 416 situation maps from World War II. The maps show the daily positions of Allied army units during the campaigns in Western Europe, from the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, through Allied occupation in July 26, 1945. There are also more than 100 reports from the campaigns.
Maps offer insight into daily activities, but also a broad view of movement over time. In addition, they highlight the incomplete nature of information available to commanders in the field during war time. Visitors can search the collection or browse the maps and reports by title, creator, subject, place, or date. The site also includes an interactive essay on the Battle of the Bulge. Visitors can select the desired zoom level and window size for viewing maps.
What were the causes of the Second World War?
Pinpointing the causes of a vast, global event like the Second World War is a challenging task for the historian. Events—especially enormous, multifaceted events—have multiple causes and multiple inputs.
To help analyze the effects of those different inputs, historians often classify an event’s causes into different categories. A proximate cause is an incident that appears to directly trigger an event, as the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the shelling of Fort Sumter led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Such dramatic incidents are often the ones we think of as “causing” an event, since the connection between the trigger and the outcome appears both direct and obvious.
In their attempts to explore cause and effect, however, historians often probe more deeply beyond the “triggers” to locate trends, developments, and circumstances that contributed equally, if not more, to events. In the case of the Civil War, for example, historians often point to the growing sectional polarization that divided the nation in the 1840s and 1850s, the national debate over the future of slavery, and the divergent economic paths that distinguished North and South during the antebellum period. Those factors created the backdrop against which Lincoln’s election and the shelling of Fort Sumter led to full-blown armed conflict in the spring of 1861; those conditions contributed to a state of affairs in which a triggering event could exert such enormous influence and touch off a four-year war.
In the case of the Second World War, historians generally point to a series of conditions that helped contribute to its outbreak. The unbalanced Treaty of Versailles (which forced a crippling peace on Germany to end the First World War) and the global depression that enveloped the world during the 1930s (which led to particularly desperate conditions in many European nations as well as the United States) usually emerge as two of the most crucial. Those conditions formed the background against which Adolf Hitler could ascend to the position of German Chancellor in the 1930s.
Virtually all historians of the Second World War agree that Hitler’s rise to power was the proximate cause of the cataclysmic war that gripped the globe between 1939 and 1945. Without Hitler, a megalomaniacal leader bent on establishing a 1,000-year German empire through military conquest, it becomes extremely difficult to imagine the outbreak of such a lengthy and devastating war.
At the same time, Hitler’s rise to power did not occur in a vacuum. Much of his appeal to the German citizenry had to do with his promises to restore German honor, believed by many Germans to have been mortgaged via the Treaty of Versailles. The peace agreement forced Germany to accept full responsibility for the Great War, and levied a massive system of reparation payments to help restore areas in Belgium and France devastated during the fighting. The Treaty of Versailles also required Germany to disarm its military, restricting it to a skeleton force intended only to operate on the defensive. Many Germans viewed the lopsided terms of the treaty as unnecessarily punitive and profoundly shameful.
Hitler offered the German people an alternative explanation for their humiliating defeat in the Great War. German armies had not been defeated in the field, he held; rather, they had been betrayed by an assortment of corrupt politicians, Bolsheviks, and Jewish interests who sabotaged the war effort for their own gain. To a German people saddled with a weak and ineffective democratic government, a hyperinflated currency, and an enfeebled military, this “stab in the back” mythology proved an enormously seductive explanation that essentially absolved them of the blame for the war and their loss in it. Hitler’s account of the German defeat not only offered a clear set of villains but a distinct path back to national honor by pursuing its former military glory.
During the 1930s, Hitler’s Germany embarked on a program of rearmament, in direct violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty. German industry produced military vehicles and weapons; German men joined “flying clubs” that served as a thin pretense for training military pilots. Rearmament and militarization provided appealing avenues for Germans seeking some means to reassert their national pride.
Hitler’s racial theories provided more context, both for his explanation of defeat in the First World War and for his plans for a 1,000-year German empire. In Hitler’s account, Communists and Jews—whom Hitler depicted as stateless parasites who exploited European nations for their own gain—had conspired to stab Germany in the back in 1918. Creating the 1,000-year Reich required the creation of a racially pure cohort of blond-haired, blue-eyed “Aryans” and the simultaneous liquidation of ethnic undesirables. Hitler’s vision of a racially pure German nation expanding across Europe, combined with his aggressive rearmament programs, proved a powerful enticement for the German people in the 1930s. Politicians in Britain, France, and the United States, encumbered with their own economic troubles during the global depression, were reluctant to act to check Hitler’s expansionism without irrefutable evidence of his ultimate intentions.
Only later would the world learn that those intentions revolved around the methodical military conquest of Europe from the center outward, a process one historian of the Second World War has likened to eating an artichoke leaf by leaf from the inside out. That conquest began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the attack on France and the Low Countries six months later. Hitler’s quest for more “living-space” for his empire led to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. By March of 1942, Hitler’s fanatical desire to conquer Europe—along with Japan’s concurrent push across East Asia and the Pacific—had plunged the world into a war that would last nearly six years and cost the lives of more than 50 million soldiers and civilians: by far the largest catastrophe in human history.
Weinberg, Gerhard. A World at Arms. New York: Cambridge, 2005.
Drawn primarily from documents at the National Archives' National Personnel Records Center, this exhibit explores "the contributions of the thousands of Americans, both military and civilian, who served their country during World War II." Arranged into seven sections--"Prelude to War"; "New Roles"; "Women Who Served"; "The War in the Pacific"; "The War in Europe" "Science Pitches In"; and "The War is Over"--the site presents approximately 60 photographs, editorials, letters, and governmental reports, such as General Benjamin O. Davis's 1943 report concerning racial discrimination in the military. A 3,000-word background essay narrates the materials. Though lacking in depth and limited in size, the exhibit offers a selection of valuable and interesting materials regarding the war effort.
Presents an exhibit on the "United We Stand" campaign of July 1942, a collaboration of the National Publishers Association and the Treasury Department in which approximately 500 magazine publications carried images of the American flag on their covers. The intent of the campaign was to raise public morale and stimulate the sale of war bonds during a time of national anxiety concerning the course World War II had taken. The exhibit includes nearly 300 covers along with a photo-narrative that addresses the history of the campaign and selected aspects of cover design issues. The exhibit also makes an effort to draw parallels to the recent nationwide display of the flag following the September 11th attacks.
Magazine covers are searchable according to subject, title, and keyword. The site includes a 19-title bibliography. Useful for those studying propaganda efforts, the history of business-government wartime collaboration, homefront nationalism, and the history of the magazine publishing industry.
Part of the Memory Exhibition, this site commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima through the presentation of images of the devastation in the former city and discussion of issues relating to the dropping of the bombs and historical memory of the events. The exhibit contains a slide show of 18 photographs by Japanese army photographer Yosuke Yamahata, taken in Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, the day after the bombing--"the only extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki"--with accompanying comments by Yamahata and a 1,200-word memo he wrote in 1952 on "Photographing the Bomb"; a sampling of approximately 65 recollections from people of different ages, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds on how they learned about the bombing; excerpts from a public online forum on "the process of representing history, the inhumanity of war, the ethical responsibilities of scientists and technologists, and the historical decision to use the bomb"; and a list of 9 related films, 2 CD-ROMs, 27 books, and 13 links. A well-organized and powerfully presented exhibit.