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

An exemplary combination of solid primary source-work, elegant readability, and theoretical creativity, William Tuttle's Daddy's Gone to War will be of particular interest to historians of childhood and the life course, and of potentially more general interest to anyone born in the United States between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s.

Tuttle's main substantive point is that World War II had an enormous (if very complicated) impact on the lives of American children. Revealing the nature of this impact is problematic, he argues, because it varied considerably along a number of dimensions, one of the most salient and under-recognized of which was chronological age. In short, school age children, who were born during the Depression and who spent much of their time in schools during the War, experienced the period differently than did pre-school age children, who were never directly exposed to the scarcity of the Depression or the homogenization and pervasive patriotism of the war-time schools. Pre-school children were much more influenced by their home lives, which varied according to region, race, ethnicity, social class, and family configuration, the last of these being particularly important in a time when more than one family in five contributed a man to the armed services. Overall, Tuttle suggests that pre-school age children knew the least about the War as it was going on, but were the most affected by it in the long run, in no small measure because of father's early absence and an often traumatic return. School age children, on the other hand, felt more of the tumult and excitement of the immediate homefront world, but - given their later developmental stage - were less affected by the war-time experiences in the rest of their lives.

The bulk of the book is comprised of thirteen thematically organized chapters, which are bounded by an excellent preface at the beginning and two more contemplative theoretical chapters at the end. The first several chapters discuss the effects of Pearl Harbor, Daddy's departure, and the massive homefront migrations. Through their thoughtful examinations of air raid drills, imagining the enemy, difficult good-byes, and overcrowded schools, homes, and communities, these earlier chapters establish a general mood of fear, confusion, and upheaval. Subsequent chapters show how messages originating with parents, schools, and popular culture infused homefront children with a simultaneous patriotism and prejudice. Here, Tuttle conveys a mood of conviction and commitment through descriptions of children saving money for victory stamps and war-bonds, rationing foods and working in victory gardens, participating in scrap-metal, bacon grease, and paper drives of the successful "Schools at War" program, and eagerly accepting patriotic messages from newsreels, movies, magazines, and comics. The final thematic chapter, "Daddy's Coming Home!" explores the confusion and trepidation with which many homefront children accepted the unfamiliar and sometimes disturbed soldiers back into their lives.

Tuttle's richly textured argument draws from a variety of sources, including developmental psychological theory, mid-twentieth century social science research, 1940s government publications, a wealth of popular magazines, comic books, and movies from the period, and more than 2,500 letters written by the now middle-aged "war children" themselves. The letters, which Tuttle solicited from the readerships of more than one hundred major U.S. newspapers in the early 1990s, are essential in making the book the engaging narrative that it is. In a sensitively written preface, Tuttle reveals that a draft of this book which he had written before soliciting the letters "was essentially one-dimensional and boring."(p. x) It is to his credit and to readers' benefit that he took the time, energy, and methodological risk of incorporating these fascinating letters into what was surely an already solid, publishable piece.

Still, Tuttle's use of the letters is not without its drawbacks. Some readers will wish for more than his brief discussion of the possible limitations of such materials. In a book which takes so seriously the individual psychology of historical experience, and focuses on a historical "event" so frequently discussed by subsequent journalists and scholars, it would seem to make sense for Tuttle to have asked what role the public analyses and private reconsiderations that took place in the intervening half-century could have played in coloring homefront children's mid-life understanding of their war-time experiences. Many of the youngest homefront children, for instance, fought in Vietnam - should we expect their disproportionate participation in such a particularly difficult war to have differentially influenced their memory of what World War II meant in their own families? The book's final chapter considers issues like this to a certain extent, but only insofar as adult letter-writers explicitly reflected upon them. A more careful methodological discussion of the letters as products of continually reconstructed memories would have been helpful here.

Similarly, the theoretical contribution Tuttle aims to make seems quite insightful but not adequately situated within the relevant literature on the history of childhood and the life course, especially as it has been developed by Glen Elder, Tamara Hareven, Howard Chudacoff, and John Modell. Tuttle's basic theoretical goal is to bring issues cultivated in developmental psychology to bear on questions of historical experience. He argues that chronological age, always a key dimension in psychological studies, is rarely given its due by historians. By asking how a watershed event such as World War II differentially affected children in various developmental stages, this book is Tuttle's effort to take age seriously. What is missing, however, is an explicit discussion of how this goal diverges from and builds upon existing work on the history of the life course, which has always examined the experience of necessary transitions in individual lives. This book may be offering an implicit criticism of recent historians for seeing childhood as a unified stage in the life course. Or it may be a more modest effort to investigate in a sustained, systematic way issues that have all too often been discussed in only more theoretical terms. To be sure, Tuttle's acknowledgments and meticulous footnotes graciously recognize specific debts to other historians, but readers will still yearn for a fuller, more pointed evaluation of the theoretical issues undergirding this study.

These methodological and theoretical concerns are, of course, quite minor. On the whole, Daddy's Gone To War must be seen as an extraordinary achievement, for it is a rare book that can work from evidence to story to theory as smoothly and convincingly as this one does.

J. Trent Alexander Carnegie Mellon University