Introduction
The World War II years were unlike any other era that America - and Hicksville - ever knew. Consider this statistic: 11,000,000 million Americans served in the wartime Army, a force which had numbered fewer than 250,000 when the war began. Those millions, plus millions more in the other armed forces, were removed from the nation's labor force at the very time that the demand for labor was skyrocketing: agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation all had to function at unprecedented levels.
To meet the needs of those who fought the war, and to mitigate the impact of the shortages which inevitably occur during wartime, America was reincarnated. It became the Home Front, governed by new rules and new practices, in which everyone's life was repurposed for victory.
In concept, America's Home Front faced four challenges:
- supplying people (civilian workers as well as people in uniform)
- supplying food (farming, fishing, etc.)
- manufacturing
- minimizing critical shortages
The wartime changes were especially pervasive in Hicksville and its environs, for the region played multiple roles: home to agriculture, center for aviation research, and large-scale manufacturer of aircraft and technology.
Note to Readers: In recent decades, as the members of "The Greatest Generation" have dwindled, their children and grandchildren have done their best to remember and honor them. To use the words that Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, that is "fitting and proper." True heroes should be remembered.
However, this article (the first of two) is about the Home Front. It is not about those who fought, or even about those who died, in uniform during World War II. I hope that future AH articles will be able to tell some of their stories.
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