Small Town America in World War II: War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania

CONCLUSIONS: "Home"

CONCLUSIONS “HOME” For Wrightsville’s veterans, whether they served overseas or stateside, home is what they all thought about during their time in the military. In a sense, “home” became a kind of refuge after the initial shock of induction into an unfamiliar military as its alien culture enveloped them. Home was what they used as a kind of yardstick to measure the rigors of military life. Their first shock probably came in the pre-dawn hours of basic training or boot camp as drill instructors yelled at them to awaken. Soon every feature of their civilian lives—birthdays, clothing, family meals, recreation—disappeared into a system deliberately designed to produce the GI. Now, close-order drill, group punishment, and military etiquette became part of their daily routine. All that these young men and women had absorbed during a lifetime at home disappeared as the military trained and prepared them for combat. Then combat left its own indelible mark on the GI’s vision of home. Throughout Europe and the Pacific, American service personnel were exposed to the horrors of modern warfare, and human suffering placed home in a completely different perspective. As the war dragged on, and as casualties and exhaustion decimated the ranks, home was seen as a sanctuary from war’s carnage. In this context, home meant clean sheets, 430 SMALL TOWN AMERICA IN WORLD WAR II home-cooked meals, comfort, and a real sense of gratitude from people for a job well done. With the coming of victory, the troops overseas and stateside celebrated with gusto. Once the festivities ended, however, happiness was replaced by a sense of impatience. “When do we go home?” “How soon will we leave this pesthole and go home?” Thus began the clamor for redeployment home. In barracks and tent cities as well as aboard ships at sea, servicemen waited impatiently for their names to appear on lists tacked onto central bulletin boards that would set their homecoming in motion. The return for most homeward bound men depended on their position in the military’s point system. So, what was “home” like for the veterans as they returned to Wrightsville? Unlike many other towns and cities throughout the United States, the physical structure of Wrightsville did not change very much as a result of the war. There was no marked influx of persons seeking defense-related jobs, for the workforce in the foundries was already in place since it was made up of older, married men with families, men not therefore subject to the draft. With no increase in population, there were no strains placed on the existing school system and infrastructure , nor were there shortages in housing as was the case for numerous boomtowns during World War II. Even with the return of the veterans, Wrightsville’s population in 1950 was about the same as it had been in 1940, and it remained an overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant town. The war had no effect on the numbers of African Americans residing in town. What few remained were almost all elderly couples, and the school system had no black children enrolled in the postwar years. As before the war, the very small African-American minority remained almost invisible. The one distinct change that the returning veterans did discover in Wrightsville was a new-found sense of prosperity on the part of those civilians who had had steady work and made good wages due to the war effort. During the Great Depression, most residents of Wrightsville had “HOME” 431 very little money to spend, and during the war their purchasing power was restricted due to the rationing of civilian goods. With the end of the war, American industry resumed the production of civilian goods, and the pent-up demand for these items led to the widespread purchase of new houses, automobiles, and household appliances. Many veterans were astonished by the large number of people who owned automobiles in Wrightsville after the war as opposed to the few who owned them before the war. The attitudes of local women toward work changed as a result of their experiences during the war. Historians of the home front during World War II argue that the conflict provided a stimulant for the later women’s movement beginning the 1960s and 1970s, but it would be an exaggeration to apply that observation to the women of Wrightsville. For some who had worked in the...