Daddy's Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children

by William M. Tuttle Jr.

Book Overview

Looking out a second-story window of her family's quarters at the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, eleven-year-old Jackie Smith could see not only the Rising Sun insignias on the wings of attacking Japanese bombers, but the faces of the pilots inside. Most American children on the home front during the Second World War saw the enemy only in newsreels and the pages of Life Magazine, but from Pearl Harbor on, "the war"--with its blackouts,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195096495
• ISBN13: 9780195096491
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An excellent book

This book is an excellent interdisciplinary study of World War II and its effects on American children of that time. Tuttle uses methodologies from history, American Studies, psychology, and sociology (among others) to depict the fears, comforts, and perceptions of homefront children during the war. He suggests, among other things, that within the war generation are two "cohorts," each one based on having experienced different events at different courses during the war. How children experienced the war, Tuttle argues, affected their later lives, outlooks, and relationships with others. Although it's very much a "scholarly" work, with plenty of references to historical, psychological, and sociological theory, I found this to be a very interesting--and for Tuttle--personal book.