The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II

4. Junior Commandos

4 Junior Commandos † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † Be thankful American boys and girls can still play. —Flexible Flyer advertisement, Life (December 8, 1942) Life can never be all sombre where children are concerned. —Sally Alderson, War All Over the World: Childhood Memories of WWII from Twenty-three Countries (2003) † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † † On the Saturday morning following Pearl Harbor, an Iowa housewife took her egg money to Toyland to purchase two Tom Thumb tanks. “I’ll probably step on one of these in the night and break a leg,” she told the clerk. “But it’ll at least keep us reminded that we’re in war!” War toys had not been selling very quickly in Des Moines or even in Los Angeles until the attack of the Axis that week in December 1941. Now euphemistically called “defense toys,” ideas abounded in what the Los Angeles Times titled this “Grim Yuletide”: antiaircraft guns; two-person sidewalk tanks; model airplanes such as Thunderbolts, Hell Divers, and Tomahawks; miniature trains with attached camouflage cars; toy soldiers with battle dress and the latest weapons; board games called Build Your Own Defense , Axe the Axis, and Bombers Aloft; and even dolls with little sailor or nurse uniforms. As the Times concluded, “War is here—as far as toys are concerned.”1 Even recently bombed Hawaii retained its optimism for this Christmas season and the wartime holidays to come. “Your old Uncle Santa Claus isn’t downhearted—not a bit!” a Honolulu newspaper editor promised. “And he’ll zoom in from the sky Christmas Eve, with his rarin’ reindeer Dancer and Prancer pulling a big sleigh load of gifts for Hawaii folks. In 56 57 Junior Commandos other words, Christmas is coming right along, and not all the axis powers and their puppets in the wide, wide world are going to prevent it.”2 But buying toys during a global war could seem frivolous or unpatriotic . The Treasury Department urged parents that holiday season and through 1945 to purchase “more significant gifts” than “trinkets and baubles and toys.” The Treasury Department recommended giving “a defense bond, something that expresses the spirit of the season and at the same time helps the nation arm.” One can quickly imagine the disappointed holiday looks, then and now, as a young boy or girl opened a gift to discover a government document rather than a brand new set of toy soldiers or a gleaming model airplane. Still, the war-bond propaganda continued to target children’s play. One advertisement showed the well-known Uncle Sam image angrily pointing at a little boy—”I Want You!” The boy in the ad nervously tried to reply, “Bu—but I like to PLAY!” Uncle Sam responded even more harshly, “And you’ll find there’s no play in all the world that’s as much fun as helping to build the world of the future.”3 The day after President Roosevelt had appeared before Congress to ask for a declaration of war, a sixth grader from Philadelphia wrote to the president of his own youthful intentions. “I heard you on the radio at A boy in a cardboard tank. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa Archives. 58 The Forgotten Generation lunch time,” John Cameron began. “I hope we win this war. I hope we can work and play without being bombed and I hope we can sleep without being bombed, I love this country and hope it will always be free.” John signed his letter simply “An American Patriot.” This world of war desperately needed workers of any age, and American children would no doubt work diligently for their country’s war effort; but as John stated, they also wanted to play . . . just a little. Yet even a children’s page in Successful Farming—ironically titled “The Playhouse”—continually emphasized responsible work for its young rural readers. “I know that as loyal Americans ,” the children’s columnist wrote, “you’ll work just as hard in school as you worked at home during the summer.”4 Although children’s lives during the Second World War now comprised long hours of volunteer and paid labor, American children needed respite from their patriotic duties in fields and factories, neighborhoods and schools. Play, as the historian Pamela Riney-Kehrburg points out in Childhood on the Farm, has always been “relatively unregulated”: “The opportunity to play in many ways represented what it was to be a child: to run, to laugh...