The Home Front

tgbcvr Wrote:
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> and in the Railroad
> context those scrap drives were absolutely
> essential.

I have seen some research, decades ago, that suggested that many of the things on the Home Front in the USA were as much or more about making the home folks feel like they were doing their part (had skin in the game, to be modern) as they were about the actual war effort. Scrap drives, Victory Gardens, even some of the rationing (but not all by any means, not things like rubber where the Empire of Japan had overrun the supply sources for example) were at least in part about this.
I remember my dad, who was in the USAAF during the war, telling being on KP during training and finding coffee cups coming back half full of sugar 'cause the guys who'd never drank coffee but didn't want people to think they were wimps kept putting more in to try to get it sweet enough to drink. Dad said he was fairly cynical about the food rationing after that.
I was amazed that we didn't have *any* rationing or scrap drives or some such after the September 11th attacks, somehow the instructions we civilians did receive didn't have quite the same patriotic ring to them...

Hank



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/2020 05:39PM by hank.