Recruting poster by McClelland Barclay, 1942.
Produced for the Navy Recruiting Bureau. From
NARA Still Picture Branch (NWDNS-44-PA-24). |
In the early days of World War II there was a fervor and dedication to the war effort. Thousands of young men responded to the call to enlist in the military. But the services found that, in some cases, their recruits needed a lot of training.
"What had happened in early 1942, with all this rush to get men in a hurry and into training, along about June or July 1942, they realized all of a sudden, that they [the army] had about a quarter of a million people that they considered functionally illiterate. They couldn't read a Military order or they couldn't read at all, or they couldn't write. It looked like it would be a tremendous loss to throw a quarter of a million people out. . . They needed some instructors or teachers.
"So I was sent down along with some other people. We were trying to lift them up to about the third, fourth, or fifth grade level educationally, so that they could function with some simple math, [so that] they could understand orders if they were written fairly simply. They could read some of our army field manuals, because they were written down on a lower level. They reviewed the work this battalion was doing . . . Then they said, 'Hey, wait a minute. Those instructors are 1-A people. Let's find ourselves some limited service personnel — that could still be good instructors, and let's get those fellows back in their old units that are good combat material.' So, boom! Back to the infantry I went."
— Otis Mattox, Unadilla High school teacher,
later U.S. Army Infantryman, European Theater
"How much is my life worth? We had a $10,000 life insurance policy on us, government insurance. Now $10,000 at that time would buy an awful lot. Houses were selling for maybe $1,500-$2,000. Ten thousand dollars was a fortune. There were girls who were looking for the $10,000. They were looking, and if you got married, and if you got bumped off or shot down, why that's all right. Some of them made a racket out of it, and married one or two."
— Floyd Marian
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Nebraskans on the Front Lines