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World War II on the Homefront

© Robert Powers

World War II may be ancient history to most of today's Americans, but for a few of us it remains an indelible memory. What was it like on the home front during those days in the 1940s? Answers that may surprise you appear in Jordan Braverman's To Hasten the Homecoming: How Americans Fought World War II Through the Media (Madison Books, $24.95).

Braverman's journalism has appeared in major newspapers. In his preface, he describes the book as presenting "a portrait of America at war through the words we spoke, read, sang, and heard" during the war years. He points out that the war occurred in a time when the country's self-perception was still innocent, when there was no question about America's principles. "It took place when Americans knew their wars were just and, that despite the terrible Depression of the 1930s, their country was still blessed with the freedoms and bountiful resources that formed the foundations for a better tomorrow."

I was a third grader when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. I remember the next morning hearing newspaper carriers in Charleston, W.Va. shout the news as I walked to school. The huge headline on The Gazette appeared in bright red, the first time I had ever seen a newspaper bearing a color banner.

Braverman's fascinating book examines how America reacted to a war fought entirely on foreign territories. "The United States used the media to fight and win," he writes, "as surely as it used guns, tanks, ships, and people." It was a learning experience for the media, who sometimes were duped into carrying false information and often cooperated with government censors to protect our boys in uniform.

The book will bring smiles of those long-ago times, when America went to war at home with food, gasoline and other forms of rationing, when every family did their bit by raising a "victory garden," when youngsters collected old newspapers for the war effort, when mothers who'd lost sons in battle displayed gold star flags in their windows to demonstrate their sacrifice toward the fight for freedom.

Those were innocent times, and To Hasten the Homecoming is a wonderful trip back into our country's past.

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I recently reviewed Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel, Man Crazy, for this column. Impressed by the excellence of this prolific writer's new work, I requested a copy of her previous novel, last year's We Were the Mulvaneys (Plume paperback, $13.95). Despite rave reviews from major critics and a nomination as one of the New York Times notable books of the year, I found it to be a labored, meandering exposition of a family and its problems.

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