Home Front Headache: Rationing

package design of Lucky Strikes from the traditional green color to a white package (the one still in use today). In fact, American Tobacco had planned to redesign the package to attract women; the war gave them patriotic cover. Of course, Lucky Strike Green never returned from the war.

Despite the black markets and small time chiseling, rationing worked. Between 1942 and 1945, the inflation rate in consumer goods rose only nine percent. Rationing also served as a daily home front reminder of global war. As Bailey noted in the The Home Front , "Practically every inconvenience, every shortage, every small sacrifice -- meatless Tuesdays, gasless automobiles, ketchup-less hamburgers -- was justified as a contribution to the war effort." Rationing with all its headaches proved a small price to pay for the "folks back home." The American home front never felt a bomb or an invaders boot, unlike many other nations whose home front became the battle front.

Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

Sources: Life: The Home Front USA, Ronald H. Bailey; V Was For Victory, John Morton Blum; World War II: The Best of American Heritage, Stephen Sears, ed.; World War II: America at War, 1941-45, Norman Polmar.

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