The story of World War II has been well-mined by historians over the past 80 years. It’s hard to provide a new angle on the action, yet this series of podcasts does just that. While many histories focus on stories of foreign battles, this history tells America’s domestic challenges around the war. It does so using audio footage of interviews from people at the time. While I’ve heard some of these narratives before (e.g., women undertaking industrial work), many of the episodes covered ground that was new to me. Compiling these stories concisely in one place will be an asset to readers in future years.

This series of podcasts gather original source information from disperse archives, each with its own angle on the war. Thus, it can say, through primary sources, what it was like to live in America during World War II. Many accounts of domestic life are whitewashed with a strong, but false sense of united patriotism. This account avoids that by sharing the anxiety and hardships firsthand in observers’ very words and voices.

America transformed because of the war. Racism and sexism were exposed. The infrastructure of scientific research changed. American isolationism, prevalent after World War I, receded. The military grew dramatically and remained large even after V-J Day. Each of these storylines is handled with care using first-hand accounts. Yes, you’re able to hear the voices of people in that time expressing their thoughts on then-current events.

Again, a broad take on the domestic narratives of the war is one that has not been well explored in prior accounts. Each episode’s main storylines has been explored, but this rendition weaves them together and preserves them for future generations. This is a real contribution to American historians, to students learning about the war, to writers of historical fiction, and to curious Americans. The first-hand accounts convey a sense of uncertainty that is often not shared when telling the story of World War II. They show how our society has grown because of the war and how we risk relapse if these lessons in the future aren’t conserved. ( )

Excellent Audio Documentary
Review of the Audible Audio podcast edition (2017)

This was superbly done with narrator Martin Sheen adding a Presidential gravitas to the introductions and descriptions. The audio enhancement of radio broadcasts from the 1930's and 1940's made them sound like present day recordings.

This covered everything from the initial non-interventionist / pro-Germany activists, through Pearl Harbour, the gearing up of American industry and its effect on women workers, the development of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan project, the racism against Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps, the rejection of Jewish immigrants, the racism against Black and Latino-Americans (in the latter case especially in the bizarre Zoot-Suit riots), the return of traumatized veterans to their homes and the subsequent effect on the workforce as military industries closed down but when working life would never be the same again.

The Home Front was one of the free Audible Originals available to members in September 2019. It was originally released in September 2017. ( )

This is an Audible Original production; there is no previous book. It uses oral histories including contemporaneous materials to look at what life was like at home during World War II.

Long ago when I was young, World War II was truly a living memory; not only did we study it in school, but our parents had lived through it, often served in the war. We knew about Pearl Harbor, and we knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending on where we lived, even if we were not Jewish we were likely to know people who had sadly truncated families because so many relatives had died in the death camps. We knew the names of the major battles in Europe and in the Pacific.

This isn't about that. This is about what happened at home, in the US, something rarely covered in any meaningful way in our school classes, and apparently much less interesting for our parents and aunts and uncles to talk about.

This is about rationing and paper drives and saving cooking oil. It's about women being pressured both to enter the work force in ways they had never been allowed to before, and at the same time being pressured to be soft and beautiful and willing, for the soldiers going off to war. It's about African-Americans (though Negro was still the preferred term at the time) seeking both the right to fight for their country on equal footing with white Americans, and to be treated equally when they did serve. It's about Japanese-Americans being rounded up into camps as "enemy aliens," and about young Japanese-American men forming the most decorated combat unit of the war.

It's about how disruptive all this was to social life in America, as people were suddenly working and living alongside races and ethnicities they'd never had much or even any contact with before.

It's told in the voices of the people who lived it. Some were recorded for the still new and exciting radio, during the war. Others were recorded after the war, even decades later, for a variety of oral history projects. I think everyone will learn something from this. I've always been a history buff, and I thought I knew this history pretty well, but many details were new, and some things were completely new. Antisemitism, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the much less comprehensive round-up of Italian-Americans, the German-American Bund--I'd encountered all of those.

Mexican-Americans and the "zoot suit riots" were completely new to me. I'd encountered the term "zoot suit" and the idea that it was associated with a relatively wild lifestyle, a forties version of the Beat Generation or the 1920s flappers. In fact it wasn't that different, except for its timing in the war, meaning that people came in contact with it who could have sneered at it from a distance in other eras.

The zoot suit was style of men's suit favored by, initially Mexican-Americans, and it became associated with their perceived wild lifestyle. They were in fact working hard in war factories like their contemporaries, but the war's movement of people to where war work was necessary, along with all ethnicities enlisting and mixing in the military meant that relatively straight-laced, Protestant, midwestern whites came in contact with this Latin, Roman Catholic culture that was much more expressive, looser, culture, more oriented to dance, music, and colorful clothing as well as activities in their leisure time. That contact, probably predictably, didn't go well. There were riots. I found it fascinating--especially as my own Roman Catholic, half-Sicilian background finds the zoot suit culture as described a lot more normal than midwestern Protestants who thought dancing was sinful.

There's also extended discussion of returning soldiers and the effects of what we now call PTSD, which was barely understood at the time.

Some of this is pretty explicit, and it can be even more startling because so much of it is in the voices of those who lived through it, speaking at the time--on a radio program intended to send the views of ordinary Americans to President Roosevelt, for instance--much of it is not filtered through later sensitivities. Be prepared to hear how people really felt then, not just how they remembered it later.

Highly recommended.

This program was available for download free "for a short time" when I got it from Audible. ( )

Narrated by award-winning actor Martin Sheen, The Home Front: Life in America During World War II takes listeners into the lives of Americans at home who supported the war effort and sustained the country during wartime. The war brought immediate, life-changing shifts; from the rationing of butter, to an explosion of war-related jobs, to mixed-signals about the role of women in society. Feel what living in the United States was like for everyday people during this disruptive and uncertain period of American history in the newest Audible Original series.

When you add The Home Front: Life in America During World War II to your library you will receive all 16 episodes, each with a runtime of approximately 30 minutes.