Category: Military History

The Memorial Swinging Bridge was dedicated to persons serving in the military from Pulaski County, but all of those persons also lived in Indiana. The following article was found on the in.gov website and was written by James Madison.

World War II changed everything in Indiana, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The necessities of war–the overwhelming need to defeat the Axis–set the boundaries that shaped lives. The oft-repeated question, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?,” was really a statement. Everyone knew.

The lives most disrupted by war were those of the Hoosier men and women who served in the military forces. Long weeks of hard training in dusty military camps were a prelude to travels and challenges spread across the country and around the world. Far from home, young soldiers could only dimly remember when life included lazy front-porch gossip, amusement rides at the state fair, high school sweethearts.

Hoosiers fought in all combat theaters, from Europe to the Pacific. Some, including Bloomington’s Medal of Honor winner, Gerry Kisters, became heroes. Most did their jobs very well, if not heroically. All wanted more than anything else to get the war over with and come home safe. Too many experienced the worst the war offered, expressed most vividly by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s descriptions of the Dresden firebombing and by the newspaper columns of Ernie Pyle.

Far too many Indiana soldiers and sailors died, more than ten thousand. Some were returned to Indiana soil; others were laid to rest in a French field or a calm Pacific sea. Gold star mothers would always remember. And on courthouse squares across Indiana their names were cut in stone or bronze–the long, simple roll calls of Hoosiers who made the “supreme sacrifice.”

Military service had special meaning for Hoosiers with traditionally restricted opportunities. Women entered military units and made significant contributions as nurses, truck drivers, clerks, and pilots. For many women World War II was a liberating experience long before any of them heard about women’s liberation. Black Hoosiers also stepped into military uniforms, but usually in segregated units and usually in support roles. The discrimination and segregation that wove its tentacles through the American fabric persisted even as the nation fought against the racism of Nazi Germany.

Other than young people leaving home in uniform and the news of letters and War Department telegrams, the most obvious signs of war on the Hoosier home front were the military installations and ordnance plants that sprang up overnight. Camp Atterbury, Crane Naval Ammunition Depot, Jefferson Proving Ground, and Indiana Ordnance Works at Charlestown brought the war to small towns and rural areas in southern Indiana and created thousands of jobs that quickly scared off the Great Depression. Other major war plants included the Wabash River Ordnance Works in Vermillion County and the Kingsbury Ordnance Works near La Porte.

Private industry soon shifted to war production, especially after Pearl Harbor. By 1942 Indiana’s factories turned full blast to making America “the great arsenal of democracy,” as President Franklin Roosevelt had commanded. The list of Hoosier contributions was nearly endless: Allison’s airplane engines, Studebaker’s trucks, Lilly’s blood plasma, the Calumet Region’s steel, RCA’s proximity fuses, Guide Lamp’s cartridge cases, South Bend Toy’s tent poles, Republic Aviation’s P-47 Thunderbolts. From the shipyards on the Ohio River to the steel mills on Lake Michigan the Indiana economy bent and turned to the miracle of war production.

Though many companies made the effort, the major industrial contributions came from big business – the modern, mass production enterprises in steel, oil, metalworking, chemicals, and electronics. These companies won most of the war contracts and produced the goods that ranked Indiana eighth among the states in combat equipment supply.

A major obstacle to increasing war production developed as young Hoosier workers went off in uniform and the labor supply dwindled. For the first time some employers began, of necessity, to hire women and blacks, even in some cases for skilled jobs. The Indiana General Assembly passed a fair employment practices act in 1945 and joined in setting up day-care centers for the children of “Rosie the Riveter.” Old attitudes died hard, however, and discrimination against black and female workers continued.

As Hoosiers bent to the task of pouring out the materials needed to defeat the Axis enemy, they soon learned that other changes would be necessary.

Victory required civilian sacrifice, not as large generally as the sacrifices made on the home fronts of Great Britain or the Soviet Union, but substantial and significant sacrifices nonetheless.

Most apparent was the shortage and eventual rationing of many items considered basic to the good life. A complicated rationing system demanded coupons and points for purchase of food, shoes, and gasoline. Some items, such as nylon stockings and new tires, virtually disappeared. With limited quantities of meat, sugar, coffee, and other foods, homemakers prepared meals with ingenuity in recipe substitution, patience in the grocery stores, and Victory Gardens in their backyards.

Gasoline was severely rationed. Many Hoosiers could no longer visit grandparents or a state park on Sunday. Both the Indiana State Fair and the Indianapolis 500-mile race closed under war demands. Even with a fat wartime paycheck a new automobile was an unobtainable dream until 1946. Many shade-tree mechanics spent tedious hours installing a used part to keep an old Ford or Chevy running on bald tires.

The war meant sacrifice for children too. Many would vividly remember for the rest of their lives the terror produced by blackouts and air-raid drills. Children eagerly joined in scrap drives that gathered metal, paper, and rubber for war production. They worked for war bond and stamp sales, studied maps of Europe and the Pacific, and played war games.

Young Hoosiers became the focal point of new concerns about family breakdown. Some children knew their fathers only as the fuzzy snapshot of a man in uniform. Many adults worried about what would happen with fathers away and mothers working in a factory job. The war brought parents special anxieties about teenagers mixed up with alcohol, crime, or sex. One response was the formation of teen clubs to encourage more wholesome entertainment at places like South Bend’s Hi-Spot and Anderson’s Club Tom Tom. With an increasingly distinctive style of music, dress, and language, wartime teenagers created a life of their own, one separate from that of their baffled parents.

Most Hoosiers found time for entertainment and pleasure. Indianapolis pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly and his fishing buddies carefully husbanded their precious gasoline coupons in order to squeeze out a quick trip to Lake Wawasee. Hollywood movies were more popular than ever. Films like Casablanca and Since You Went Away played to large audiences. Nearly every home had a radio that received Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Kate Smith, and Arthur Godfrey along with news from the battlefields. Even the ubiquitous war bond drives provided diversions, sometimes by Hollywood stars. Many Hoosiers participated in the famous visit back home of Fort Wayne native Carole Lombard, a visit that ended tragically in a plane crash. At USO (United Service Organizations) clubs women gathered to help the war effort by serving coffee and doughnuts and by dancing with lonely servicemen.

There was romance during the war. The Great Depression had delayed many marriages, but the war boom made marriage financially possible once again. Often couples rushed to the altar just ahead of the departing troop train. Young war brides and new mothers made some of the home front’s greatest sacrifices, and in their V-Mail to distant husbands they scribbled some of the most poignant stories of these years.

Victory in 1945 brought the celebratory sounds of factory whistles, the shouts of street dancing, the bright colors of parades, the shedding of tears. Many Hoosiers looked ahead to a return to prewar conditions, without, they hoped, the angry bear scratches of economic depression. Wartime conditions did seem to pass quickly after 1945. Rationing, shortages, and long lines vanished, replaced, for many, by an affluent society. Scrap drives and recycling soon seemed only distant memories of wartime sacrifice. Military uniforms and souvenirs made their way to attics. Many women and many black Hoosiers surrendered their high-paying industrial jobs to returning veterans, though not always willingly. And yet life did not return to the patterns of 1941.

World War II transformed America, not only temporarily but permanently Seeds of change that sprouted in the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s can be found in the years 1941-1945. There too can be found the emergence of a youth culture, long before Elvis or Woodstock. The war created mass college education, via the GI Bill, and laid the base for the suburban houses that flourished in place of corn and soybeans on the outskirts of Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and South Bend. And the emphasis on heavy manufacturing that so dominated Hoosier life in the last half of the twentieth century surely got a major boost from the war economy.

Like all great events, World War II did not end. A half century after Pearl Harbor it remains “the big one.” The shadows persist. From the first fiftieth anniversary on 7 December 1991 to the marking of V-J Day in August 1995 Hoosiers will be able to join in learning, remembering, and commemorating. They will doubtless find considerable evidence of the enduring, long-term effects of this war. Some will see it as a “good war,” and some will dismiss this label as an oxymoron. Many, in thinking about World War II, will gain new insights into the processes of change and continuity–the bread and butter and the sweet jam that give history its meaning and make it a pleasure and a challenge open to all.

James H. Madison is professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Among his publications are Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920-1945 (1982), The Indiana Way: A State History (1986), and Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885-1977 (1989).

This article originally was published in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, a publication of the Indiana Historical Society, Fall 1991, Volume 3, Number 4.

Reposted from the National Center for Biotechnology Information

Author, Carol R. Byerly, PhD

The American military experience in World War I and the influenza pandemic were closely intertwined. The war fostered influenza in the crowded conditions of military camps in the United States and in the trenches of the Western Front in Europe. The virus traveled with military personnel from camp to camp and across the Atlantic, and at the height of the American military involvement in the war, September through November 1918, influenza and pneumonia sickened 20% to 40% of U.S. Army and Navy personnel. These high morbidity rates interfered with induction and training schedules in the United States and rendered hundreds of thousands of military personnel non-effective. During the American Expeditionary Forces’ campaign at Meuse-Argonne, the epidemic diverted urgently needed resources from combat support to transporting and caring for the sick and the dead. Influenza and pneumonia killed more American soldiers and sailors during the war than did enemy weapons.

In the fall of 1918, U.S. Army and Navy medical officers in camps across the country presided over the worst epidemic in American history, but the story was not new. War and disease have been linked throughout history as armies, weapons, and human pathogens have met on the battlefield. The conquistadores brought with them diseases that devastated the New World; typhus plagued Napoleon’s armies; and typhoid fever humiliated the American Army during the Spanish-American War. But now U.S. Army and Navy personnel knew how to test and sanitize water supplies, vaccinate troops against typhoid and smallpox, and treat or prevent other infections. Modern bacteriology, it seemed, had tamed many diseases. Navy Surgeon General William C. Braisted proudly stated that “infectious diseases that formerly carried off their thousands, such as yellow fever, typhus, cholera, and typhoid, have all yielded to our modern knowledge of their causes and our consequent logical measures taken for their prevention.”¹

Twentieth-century warfare, however, had evolved to an even more deadly scale as industrialized armies of millions battled on the plains of Eastern Europe, the cliffs of Gallipoli, and in the deadly trenches of the 550-mile-long Western Front. When the European arms race exploded into war in 1914, the empires shocked themselves and the world with the killing power of their artillery and machine guns, their U-boats and mines, and their poison gas. These new weapons generated new, horrible injuries that took life and limb in a flash or festered into gangrenous wounds that could further maim and kill. The carnage traumatized some men into shellshock, and poison gases burned and suffocated others so horribly that nurses dreaded caring for them because they could provide little comfort. War diseases—notably the soldiers’ nemeses diarrhea, dysentery, and typhus—flourished, and the trenches offered new maladies such as “trench foot,” an infection caused by wearing sodden boots and standing in water and mud for days on end, and “trench fever,” a debilitating fever transmitted by body lice.

Then, in the fourth dreadful year of the war, as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) assumed fighting strength and prepared their first great offensive against the Germans, the flu struck. By the War Department’s most conservative count, influenza sickened 26% of the Army—more than one million men—and killed almost 30,000 before they even got to France.^2,3 On both sides of the Atlantic, the Army lost a staggering 8,743,102 days to influenza among enlisted men in 1918.⁴ (p. 1448) The Navy recorded 5,027 deaths and more than 106,000 hospital admissions for influenza and pneumonia out of 600,000 men, but given the large number of mild cases that were never recorded, Braisted put the sickness rate closer to 40%.^5,6 (p. 2458)

The Army and Navy medical services may have tamed typhoid and typhus, but more American soldiers, sailors, and Marines would succumb to influenza and pneumonia than would die on the industrialized battlefields of the Great War. The story of the influenza epidemic in the military is often lost in the historical narrative of the Great War, included merely as a coda to that four-year horror, coinciding with the final battles and the Armistice. But an examination of medical reports and War Department and Department of the Navy documents from the war reveals that the war and the epidemic were intertwined.⁷ World War I and influenza collaborated: the war fostered disease by creating conditions in the trenches of France that some epidemiologists believe enabled the influenza virus to evolve into a killer of global proportions. In turn, disease shaped the war effort by rendering much of the Army and Navy non-effective and diverting resources, personnel, and scarce human attention and energy from the military campaign. The exigencies of war also thwarted many of the efforts such as crowd mitigation and quarantines to control the epidemic. The influenza epidemic in the U.S. military therefore provides a cautionary tale about the power of war to change the health environment and the power of disease to influence the conduct of war.