I have to agree with what Poppagator said just above.

Living in Seattle, as I did (and do), out here on the West Coast, we were very conscious of the fact that, if the American forces were to lose in the Pacific, and for awhile, that looked like a distinct possibility, the Japanese would probably invade and it wouldn't be long until we'd find ourselves in some pretty deep trouble. A not too gentle reminder of the possibilities was the first time a Japanese submarine surfaced, stood off-shore, shelled the California coast, then submerged and slipped away. Nobody knows what they were firing at (probably just any target of opportunity) and they didn't do much in the way of damage (put a couple of shell craters in Highway 101), but it was a bit of an hors d'oeuvre for a meal that, fortunately, never came. And, of course, the balloon bombs (launched from Japan, drifted east on the jet-stream, and released over the continental United States) which were more of a terror weapon, but they did manage to kill a few people here in the U. S.

The Japanese did bomb Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, and invaded and occupied two of the Aleutians, Attu and Kiska, occupying them for nearly a year before a combination of American forces and the weather drove them off.

Bond drives, scrap metal drives, Victory gardens (almost everybody in my neighborhood turned their back yards into garden patches, raising vegetables and such). Kids in my neighborhood (me, too) fought whatever battle was current in the news on the big vacant lot across the street. We fought with guns that we made ourselves (having turned our metal cap pistols and such into the scrap metal drives), carved out of bits of scrap lumber, many of them pretty realisitic looking. We were sticklers for fine detail. And each of us did a characteristic gun-shot sound-effect by mouth, some of which were pretty imaginative. We were all American troops (the girls, too–no gender discrimination in this war!), and nobody played the enemy. We saw them in our minds' eyes ("Look! Over there in those bushes!" "Watch out! Some of them are trying to encircle us!" "Pow! Pow!" "Rat-tat-tat-tat. . . !").

All we kids studied drawings of aircraft silhouettes, American, Japanese, and German, so that when a plane flew over, we could identify whether it was a commercial airliner, or an American B-17 or B-25 or P-40, or a Japanexe Zero or an Aichi D3A carrier based bomber, or a German Heinkel He 111 or a Messerschmitt ME-109 (not too likely on the West Coast). It was our patriotic duty to know, and notify our local air raid warden should we be the first to spot an enemy aircraft (!). After all, a war is everybody's concern!

Gasoline was rationed. Unless you had some special need (my father was a health care provider who made house calls, so he had no limitation on gasoline, but still, we drove only when absolutely necessary), you were limited to four (4) gallons per week. Black marketeers and those who dealt with them were regarded with the utmost contempt, and generally wound up getting reported, should they be stupid enough to brag about "getting a good deal" on something.

There may have been pockets of dissent about our part in WWII here and there, but it certainly wasn't pandemic, and whenever it appeared, it, too, was generally treated with anger and contempt by most Americans.

We fully realized that if the Allies lost this war, we would soon be living (if, indeed, we were still living at all) in an entirely different kind of world.

There was no television, of course, but we followed the progress of the war through radio and newspaper reports (the reports from overseas of radio reporters like Edward R, Murrow were listened to avidly). The visuals were provided by newsreels shown in movie theaters, and by Life Magazine—large format, packed of photographs, weekly, 10¢ a copy at the news stand.

Don Firth