On the Home Front: 1940-1945

By: Stewart Desmond

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

On the Home Front: 1940-1945
Volume VI of Main Street: The History of Buffalo by Stewart Desmond

“Main Street” is “a triumph.”
Erik Brady, Buffalo News

America won World War II in the industrial cities of the United States. No city contributed more to the war effort than Buffalo, New York. In the war years, the city’s historic industries converted from making radiators and automobiles to manufacturing munitions. Such factories produced artillery shells, warplanes, land mines, machine guns and food to sustain the Allies—the U.S., British and Russian armies. As enemy supplies dwindled, U.S. plants stepped up production, guaranteeing service men and women abroad an endless supply of weapons required to overpower the Axis. At least five factories in Buffalo worked in the Manhattan Project, producing components on the atom bomb.

“On the Home Front: 1940-1945” continues the story of “Main Street: The History of Buffalo.” The book is told in the same manner—World War II from the point of view of the diverse Buffalonians who enabled American victory. Major characters include: airplane entrepreneur Larry Bell; artist Charles Burchfield; novelist Taylor Caldwell; actress Katharine Cornell; local Office of Price Administration director Leston Faneuf; Democratic Party Chair Paul Fitzpatrick; heiress Fanny Goodyear; philanthropist Chauncey Hamlin; reporter Ethel Hoffman; Mayor Tom Holling; D Republican Party Chair Edwin Jaeckle; Mayor Joseph Kelly; developmentally-disabled John Kocemba; the four Lausted brothers of South Buffalo in the military; the first lady’s close friend Harriet Mack; war reporter Fred Mackenzie; Courier-Express editor Burrows Matthews; local German-American Bund leader Otto Neubeck; Albright Art Gallery director Andrew Ritchie; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; President Franklin Roosevelt; War Manpower Commission area-director Anna Rosenberg; army nurse Archina Rosenthal; “White Angel” Amanda Schallmo; flyer Earl Steiger; prisoner-of-war Santo Trifilio; Vice-President Harry Truman; war-hero Matt Urbanowicz; and many more.

Buffalo did not come into war willingly. Throughout the 1930s, Communist and pro-fascists in Buffalo opposed American involvement abroad. So did many who had lost family and friends in World War I. Buffalo’s chapter of the America First Committee fought fiercely to prevent the U.S. entering war—until the matter was decided by Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The 70,000 young men and women of Buffalo serving abroad were also important to U.S. victory. Men and women who had never before left Erie County—some had hardly ventured beyond South Buffalo or the East Side—were now serving in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, in Africa, Italy, the Philippines and a hundred more war-zone locations. They participated in innumerable ways: pilots, navigators and bombardiers; nurses, doctors and medics; railroaders; doughnut girls; convoy escorts; glider pilots and paratroopers; quartermasters and messmen; prisoners-of-war; war reporters and many more occupations.

Those remaining at home lacked the youngest and fittest young men who had been drafted into war. Soon 200,000 in Buffalo were employed in war plants. Factory managers had never had before considered any worker other than a robust, white man. Now they had to persuade new types of workers to enter this previously homogenous force: women, African-Americans, the aged and the disabled. To their shock, plant managers discovered these new workers brought with them new abilities—sometimes abilities greater than the men they replaced. Many women faced the challenge of running households while working fulltime in the war effort.