Montana S Home Front During World War Ii

This book is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is written to recognize all of the Montanans who played a part, no matter how small, in winning the war. Not all of the story is pretty, but it is a story that needed to be told.

Merriam Press World War 2 History. During World War II the state of Montana gave over 1,000 men to the final sacrifice to defend the United States. Thousands of military personnel trained in the state, before moving onto combat, especially those of four B-17 bomb groups. The state was temporary home to alien detainees and German Prisoners of War. Now, over 75 years from these events, this book is dedicated to these Americans who helped win the two-ocean war the United States fought, 1941-1945. This is truly a look back in time to America�s greatest generation. 304 photos, maps, illustrations.

Includes primary sources on defense workers, women during the war, conscientious objectors, scrap metal collection and recycling, racial issues on the homefront, and civil defense.

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) may have been the most powerful politician Montana ever produced, and he was one of the most influential—and controversial—members of the United States Senate during three of the most eventful decades in American history. A New Deal Democrat and lifelong opponent of concentrated power—whether economic, military, or executive—he consistently acted with a righteous personal and political independence that has all but disappeared from the public sphere. Political Hell-Raiser is the first book to tell the full story of Wheeler, a genuine maverick whose successes and failures were woven into the political fabric of twentieth-century America. Wheeler came of political age amid antiwar and labor unrest in Butte, Montana, during World War I. As a crusading United States attorney, he battled Montana’s powerful economic interests, championed farmers and miners, and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. There he made his name as one of the “Montana scandalmongers,” uncovering corruption in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Drawing on extensive research and new archival sources, Marc C. Johnson follows Wheeler from his early backing of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent support of the New Deal to his forceful opposition to Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Supreme Court and, in a move widely viewed as political suicide, his emergence as the most prominent spokesman against U.S. involvement in World War II right up to three days before Pearl Harbor. Johnson provides the most thorough telling of Wheeler’s entire career, including all its accomplishments and contradictions, as well as the political storms that the senator both encouraged and endured. The book convincingly establishes the place and importance of this principled hell-raiser in American political history.

Brings together 1,000 focused biographies of Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived, and protested its major wars from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Inventors and scientists, nurses and physicians, reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, financiers and economist, artists and musicians have all been soldiers on the home front. Home Front Heroes brings together brief and focused biographies of 1,000 Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived and protested its major war efforts from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Battlefield victories and defeats are in a very real sense the reflection of the society waging war. Inventors and scientists, social reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, nurses and physicians, actors and directors, financiers and industrialists, economists and psychologists, artists and musicians, writers and journalists, have all been soldiers on the home front. The biographical entries highlighting the subjects' wartime contributions are arranged alphabetically. Many of the entries also include suggestions for further reading. Thematic indexes make it easy to look up people alphabetically by last name and by war, and other indices list entries under broad categories - Arts and Culture; Business, Industry, and Labor; Nursing and Medicine; Science, Engineering and Inventions - with more detailed occupational background. Entries include: Julia Ward Howe, composer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Robert Fulton, inventor of the steam engine and architect of the submarine Nautilus; Martin Brander, maker of Eliot's Saddle Ring Carbine; Robert Parker Parrott, inventor of the Parrott cannon; Novelist and War Correspondent Stephen Crane; Founder of the Army Nurse Corps Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee; Composer John Philip Sousa (Stars and Stripes Forever); Louis M. Terman, who invented the IQ test; Reginald Fessenden, developer of a sonic depth finder; machine-gun inventor Benjamin Hotchkiss; Labor leader John L. Lewis; Comedian and USO stalwart Bob Hope; Dr. Ancel Keys developer of the K-ration; napalm inventor Louis F. Fieser; and many more. The work is fully indexed, and contains an extensive bibliography.

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

The Battle of the Bulge was the largest land battle in U.S. history, a battle that cost the United States 20,000 lives and stopped the last German offensive of World War II. The authors, both residents of Helena, Montana, studied the history of this battle and walked the critical sectors of the battlefield, examining examples of American heroism and looking for evidence of involvement by Montanans. Their objective was to better understand this significant battle and how our soldiers managed to stop an enemy steamroller, overcoming their fears while outnumbered more than three-to-one. This book examines the eleven critical junctures of the battle and includes personal stories of Montana veterans.