The June 2007 Smithsonian had a book review by Winston Groom on Alistair Cooke's book "The American Home Front: 1941-1942. This book was "found" in 2004 when his secretary was clearing out some papers in his office.
When the US entered the war, Cooke, then a correspondent of the BBC decided to drive across the country and see first-hand the impact of the war. He concentrated on the regular folks.
Some interesting stories:
The Texas couple in Charlestown, Indiana, who like thousands of others had driven long distances to get jobs in war-related industries. They had slept in all sorts of places during their odyssey for new jobs.
Cooke also wrote about Midwest farmers who weren't sure why bread rationing was on despite the fact they had more wheat than they knew what to do with. They believed it was because of incompetence in Washington, DC.
The huge losses from German U-Boat attacks along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Wisconsin and Florida farmers sent their products to factories where "tons of milk, eggs and oranges were processed into shipments of powdered milk and eggs and concentrated citrus juice that was transported across the ocean so that half-starved British children could have a proper breakfast."
He found huge efforts on both coasts. In California, 'industrialist Henry Kaiser had his factories producing 'Liberty Ships' at the unheard of rate of one a month. In Detroit, tanks and airplanes were moving off the assembly lines at a stupendous pace."
Cooke found women taking up their husbands work as they went off to war. The entire town of Deming, New Mexico, was in shock when 150 men from there had been posted to and captured at Bataan in the Philippines. In Vermont, he found a new surge in business as tombstones were needed for the fallen.
When Cooke finally got around to turning it into a book in 1945, no publisher was interested and so it sat for 60 years.
Sounds Like a Great Book to Read, Especially for Us WW II Fans. --Cooter
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