Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

The day America went to war started as a quiet, rather ordinary winter Sunday—December 7, 1941.

When the news of Pearl Harbor shocked Americans, many churches quickly changed their scheduled hymns to let such militant tunes as "Onward Christian Soldiers," "The Church's One Foundation," and "The Son of God Goes Forth to War" ring out.

Other Americans neither sang hymns nor went to church but prayed in the hush of their homes.

Rationing soon went into effect. The ending of automobile production sounded as final and as warlike to most Americans as a bomb. The last car consigned to the civilian market was trundled off the assembly line in Pontiac, Michigan, in early February 1942.

One necessity resulting from World War II that is well remembered is the use of rationing and gas stamps, and meat tokens. If you didn't have these, you went without.

Rationing seemed to snag some of the most unlikely products; for example, millions of American fathers and mothers thought the scarcity of diapers and diaper laundries was, at the very least, capricious.

Tess Whiting, who helped her husband Ted in their car sales and hardware businesses during the war, remembers the lack of vehicle production, except those for war use, such as jeeps.

Things like nylon were rationed. Women would use make-up to cover their legs to give them the nylon look.

The children were also affected by the shortages because bicycles were hard to come by and many children were longing for them.

Hal Edwards doesn't recall any real hardships as a teenager. Because he was not old enough to drive, the gas shortage didn't affect him. He used his bicycle for transportation.

The government interfered quite a bit as Von Barney, who was on a farm, remembers. He had to keep up his quota in order to keep working on his farm.

Holly-Gale Jensen, who married Harold A. Jensen, remembers how hard if was for her and her husband to get an apartment. There were huge waiting lists.

School went on as normal, recalls Myra Sorensen, who along with her husband ran a farm. She was also a teacher. Referring to the war, she said, "Sometimes it was a little hard because the girls lost brothers." It was also hard to watch all of the young men leave on the trains.

Verla Breinholt was sometimes called a "war-bride" because she was only engaged for a short time, one day to be exact, until she married Leo Breinholt. She was able to work making parachutes in the Manti Parachute Plant. It seemed to her an important job because lives depended on how well the parachutes were made.

The experiences of World War Two's "women in overalls" changed individual lives and impacted history. The memories of these years endure.

The memories of the men are equally enduring. Hal Edwards didn't have any sense of how long the war was going to last in terms of years, but he had no doubts about the United States winning the war. It was just a matter of time. He remembers seeing six to nine pictures of war casualties of Utah servicemen every day in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Holly-Gale Jensen's cousin, Elliot Dean Larsen, died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She recalls the sorrow of his parents. "The hardest thing was not to have the body to take care of. To know that you had the place marked out to the cemetery, and had put a flag on it, but there was no Dean there. Of course, the body doesn't mean that much to you, but I guess if you don't have one there, it does."

When the POW camp first opened in Salina, it was hard for Phyllis Powell to have the Germans here when her husband was over there fighting them. Then, when it was evident that the prisoners were doing a lot of needed farm labor, it didn't seem so bad.

Phyllis Powell remembers the day of the shooting at the Salina POW camp very distinctly. She knew Clarence Bertucci as Johnny because that's what everyone at the beauty salon, where she worked, called him. He and his buddies would stop in because the beauty salon was on Main Street.

Clarence would often talk of how he was cheated out of being able to go over to Europe for the war. He said, "Someday I will get my Germans; I will get my turn." They didn't think much about it because the United States was a country at war.

Later that night, the town came alive after hearing a burst of machine-gun fire. Phyllis said to her mother, "Well, Johnny got his Germans." Her father had her stay home so that she would not be in the way of the men helping settle things down. Clarence had been the guard in the tower that night and had begun shooting at the tents which housed the POWs. It was a great upset and many lives were taken.

That fateful spring and summer of 1945, World War II finally burned itself out. In its last flaming gasps, however, the cost in human life was as extravagant as ever, even reaching to the lesser canvas of the home front.

When with V.J. Day the war was finally over, people of Sevier County felt a wave of relief. People spent the day with their families on picnics or celebrating in their own ways.

The home front cannot be forgotten, not by a snap of a finger. The memories of the home front will persist as long as there is both anguish and relief in the hearts of human beings.

More from the Home Front.