Life During Attack On Pearl Harbor: Rationing, Sacrifice, and Hard Work for Americans

World war ll was a very crazy time for Americans. It taught all of us hard work, cooperation, and patriotism. It brought a lot of people together and also tore people apart from each other it was a crazy time for us. So many people tried to leave the cities. It was approximately 6 million people. The amount of schooling they had was very low because the teenagers had to end up quitting school to work at jobs or at home on the farms if they were out of town kids a lot of kids worked for local businesses to try and help their family’s and bring in the stock numbers for all the businesses.

“After December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. was thrust into World War ll, and everyday life across the country was dramatically altered. Food, gas, and clothing were rationed. Communities conducted scrap metal drives. To help build the sacraments necessary to win the war, women found employment as electricians, welders, and riveters in defense plants.” As I said before, the time of the war was very hard for Americans, and it changed a lot of things for us. The kids could not be kids because they ended up having to work full-time jobs at the age of 12.

The time for them was a life-changing event and affected them for the rest of their lives. However, they did not get to have much of a childhood experience. They did get to see real-world things at a young age and could understand them a lot faster. It may have been really confusing to them at the time to have to deal with all of that. “In the earliest days of America’s participation in the war, panic gripped the country. If the Japanese military could successfully attack Hawaii and inflict damage on the naval fleet and casualties among innocent civilians, many people wondered what was to prevent a similar assault on the U.S. mainland, particularly along the Pacific coast.”

Some people, actually probably a lot of people, did not understand what was happening at the time and why there was a war. It was very hard for the Americans because they were losing everything even though things were going as planned. “This fear of attack translated into a ready acceptance by a majority of Americans of the need to sacrifice in order to achieve victory. During the spring of 1942, a rationing program was established that set limits on the amount of gas, food, and clothing consumers could purchase. Families have issued ration stamps that were used to buy their allotment of everything from meat, sugar, fat, butter, vegetables, and fruit to gas, tires, clothing, and fuel oil.”

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