Committed to Victory: The Kentucky Home Front during World War II by Richard E. Holl (review)

Richard E. Holl has achieved an academic and storytelling milestone in his new book, Committed to Victory: The Kentucky Home Front during World War II. His scholarship and sources are broad and in-depth for his purpose of exploring Kentucky’s landscape, people, and wartime activity. He covers both urban and rural Kentucky and their people by drawing on archival resources, local newspapers from across the state, manuscripts, government public documents, periodicals, interviews, and relevant secondary sources. As a result of his sources and well-conceived chapters, Holl has produced a judicious balance of discussing each section of the State of Kentucky, rural and urban, and not just focusing on Louisville to the neglect of other areas. This will stand as the best source on the Kentucky home front during World War II for many years.

Holl responds to Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter’s advice in their book, A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), in which they write, a “full study of the Kentucky home front remains much needed” (1). Holl answers this call with a grand book that will please scholars and the general public by adding to the pride of serving one’s nation and saving the world during the most destructive war in human history. It starts with national wartime institutions created by the federal government to mobilize for the war effort and he covers their counterparts in Kentucky.

Committed to Victory includes Kentucky’s African Americans in a balanced manner throughout the text. Holl includes a chapter dedicated to “A Black Man’s Place and a New Place for Blacks.” Despite most white Kentuckians’ attachment to a Jim Crow society, both whites and blacks were committed to victory and operational unity in the war effort. Yet blacks demanded a Double V for victory at home and abroad, for equality of opportunity and treatment.

Kentucky was part of the Fifth Service District and did its duty to win the war. Early parts of the book cover mobilization of whites and blacks for the war effort across all geographical sections, urban and rural. The United States Army sent “sealed envelopes” to “Ninety manufacturing plants throughout Kentucky…[,] fifty-four in the Louisville area and thirty-six throughout the rest of the state” (13). Holl gives an overview of the major industries that got those letters and their duties to produce war supplies or conversion to particular usable products for the U.S. Army and the Allied Nations fighting the Axis Powers. Thus, Kentucky contributed to the United States as an Arsenal of Democracy for the nation and the world. Fort Knox was designated as the army’s center for armor and graduated 33,440 officers and enlisted men yearly. The civilian Bowman Field Airport became an Army Air Forces base and played a vital function in the war effort. In northern Kentucky, Fort Thomas became a major induction center for Army troops. Camp Campbell, straddling the Kentucky-Tennessee border, became an armor center that trained 30,000 tank warriors. Kentucky’s famous distilleries shifted to producing industrial alcohol, which also led to a vigorous problem of underground alcohol consumption. Kentucky contributed mightily to producing synthetic rubber, since the Japanese attack and invasion cut off the Philippine Islands’ supplies. The federal government supplied the Hillerich & Bradbury Company with machinery free of charge to produce M-1 gunstocks and billy clubs for military police. Louisville’s Ford Motor Company produced 93,389 jeeps and other war vehicles.

By 1944, Kentucky’s war workers numbered 197,000, including 60,000 women. Twelve thousand African American men, 3.7 percent of the state population, engaged in wartime labor. Black women too started shifting from domestic work to more urban factory employment. The real “Rosie the Riveter” was a Kentucky woman named Rose Monroe, who became a ubiquitous symbol...