American Propaganda During World War II - Themes - Home Fires

Home Fires

Most of the entertainment aimed at soldiers was heavy on sentiment and nostalgia, to help sustain morale. In most media, the girl next door was often used as the symbol of all things American. Betty Grable characterized it as women giving soldiers something to fight for, but one soldier wrote to her saying that her pin-up photographs told them, in the midst of fighting, what they were fighting for. Songs on armed forces request programs were not about Rosie the Riveter, but of the girls who were waiting for the soldiers to return. Many such songs were also popular at the home front. Themes of love, loneliness and separation were given more poignancy by the war.

German intelligence officers, interrogating American prisoners, mistakenly concluded that the Americans notions of why they were fighting were for such vague concepts, such as "Mom's apple pie," and concluded that American servicemen were idealistically soft and could be convinced to desert their allies.

Stories for the home front recounted the soldiers' need for their sweethearts and families to remain as they were, because they were what the soldier were fighting for. As the war ended, real and fictional stories often featured women who left war work to return to their homes and to raise children. Women, particularly wives whose husbands were at war, and children were often portrayed as what was at risk in the war.

Home-front posters also invoked an idealized America, as in the series declaring "This is America", portraying "the family is a sacred institution," "where Main Street is bigger than Broadway," and "where a man picks his job". Typically, men were presented as ordinary but women as beautiful and glamorous.