Hi, I’m curious how a city visibly changes during a major war. I live in Los Angeles and heard of a “Battle of Los Angeles” during WW2 which was nothing more than “war nerves” causing everyone to start firing at the sky. That must have meant a lot of war machinery in the area!
It depends on the city and it depends on the war. Leningrad changed a bit more than Spokane in 1942.
I can’t say for Spokane, but Tacoma WA built the suburb of Salishan up Portland Avenue, uphill from the waterfront to house low-income war workers. Hundreds of houses, looking like clapboard versions of the tarpaper shacks at the Manzinar internment camp. *And they were still there sixty years later. * when I lived across the street from it, the streets clots of Vietnamese and Cambodian kids in bright red sportswear, as the area had been heavily recruited into the Bloods. They finally got some funding ten years ago to tear it all down and put up McCottages.
The other slum of Tacoma was Hilltop, which has a nosebleed spectacular view of the bay, and which during the war had bungalows full of middle class families. (Bing Crosby had been born in one of the) Post-war suburban flight left it to Tacoma’s Black population. Some were war-work migrants, and some were African American military who’d been redlined out of all the other off-base housing outside Fort Lewis. One day in the 1980’s, some soldiers decided to shoot it out with the local drug dealers: several hundred rounds were exchanged but nobody was hit on either side. A sad comment on urban decay and the state of combat training.
San Diego had armed emplacements in the cliff that sit in front of the harbor.
In the months after Pearl Harbor, folks on the West Coast were very nervous, and the reports of planes over LA came from supposedly trustworthy sources. There was a lot of confusion. You may remember something like it in September and October of 2001, as all kinds of goofy precautions were taken in the name of security.
Wartime blackouts of entire cities, painted subdivisions on camouflage netting over the Van Nuys aircraft plants, and later CONELRAD precautions with radio stations are all anachronistic now, but interesting to read about. There are several books about the home front in the US, or in London, a city that was honest-to-goodness at war, that I find fascinating. You may too.
IMO the biggest difference is that all the healthy young men would be gone.
I have asked my mother about this in the past - she was working in Manchester (UK) during WWII.
Main things:
> Everyone seems to be in uniform
> Masking tape on all windows, everywhere
> Everyone carries a gasmask, everywhere, just as you might carry a handbag
> Bomb sites all over the place - turn a corner and there’ll be piles of rubble where a house was yesterday
> Hardly anyone driving cars as they couldn’t get the fuel
> Everyone has a bomb shelter in their back garden, or in their house, eg a reinforced kitchen table
> Frequent black outs
> Pitch black at night time, making it really hard to get about, as everyone had to have blackout curtains and street lighting was banned
> Lots of handsome foreign soldiers around, leading to lots of parties and dates (my mum was 18 at the time)
> Food was really boring due to rationing. They didn’t go hungry, but didn’t eat much meat and didn’t see a banana for years.
> Nobody had many clothes, as these are rationed too. Mum says all women had one brown suit, one summer dress, a bunch of cardigans and that is about it. Saving up coupons for a winter coat took forever, and then you might have two coats to choose from in the whole town. People would be queueing up outside the shop if there were rumours of a new delivery.
> People go about their business much more normally than you might imagine. In the bomb shelter at night then up and out to work the next morning. Life goes on and all that. The blitz spirit in action.
> They couldn’t go to the beach for years, as all the beaches were roped off with barbed wire in case of invasion
Barcelona in the 1936-9 Civil War, and without asking Grandma, just from stuff I’ve picked up in conversations:
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most of the time, the biggest differences were how many things could only be bought in the black market (Grandma would get chickens and eggs from relatives in a nearby village and sell them),
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and that there would be armed men (first milicias, later nacionales) looking for people to enlist forcefully / take for a long walk / imprison
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for a while, there were bombardments from the sea. Industries and depots were strewn all around the city, rather than in specific areas; the bombardments affected the whole city as well.
Pamplona during the same period:
- lots of men gone. Lots of those in town in uniform. Some things could only be obtained in the black market, but it was very few: Pamplona was never near the front, and it’s in a rural enough area that things such as the aforementioned eggs were never a problem (milk was).
There’s actually been conversations where my two grandmothers compared their war experiences.
England had lots and lots of war defenses built around the coast - tank barriers, pill boxes (For someone to sit in and watch ! Early warning system… )… gun emplacements. anti-landing craft devices of all sorts, and even barriers installed on flat fields - They were to prevent the field being used as an impromtu airfield by the enemy. So when you use google earth and go across any part of the coast of south , south east and east England, you see lots of markings of places where war related things were.
Australia had its main cities and harbours protected.
Taxi’s and other important vehicles had a gas producer attached to the back.
This would convert coal into carbon monoxide… carbon monoxide would be added to the air intake and saved on petrol usage.
I just finished reading Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, which I highly recommend. Although it only deals with one aspect of day-to-day life (food), it does so incredibly well.
One of the things that Collingham drives home is that your experience of the war as a civilian would have been vastly different depending on what country you were in. In the U.S., attempts at rationing were perfunctory at most. In the U.K. and Germany, rationing was centrally controlled, though a substantial black market developed in Germany. Absenteeism at factories in Germany got to be a problem at some points, since workers would take days off of work to go “hamstering”—trading with farmers directly—in the countryside.
Civilians in the USSR and Japan were the worst off, food-wise. Once Germany captured Ukraine, the food supply of the USSR was drastically reduced, and U.S. aid shipments were essential for the survival of the populace. Japan, meanwhile, was blockaded and didn’t have a big enough merchant marine even before the U.S. submarines went to work; the result was that large amounts of food spoiled on the docks in Manchukuo and Korea while people starved on the home islands.
I’m simplifying and summarizing a lot here—the book goes into a lot more detail about a lot of this stuff. It’s definitely worth a read.