During the war, Arkansas ranked twelfth overall in terms of war bond money raised among the forty-eight states of the Union.Īs the U.S. Even though the state ranked toward the bottom in terms of per capita income, this poverty did not stand in the way of citizens doing what they saw as their patriotic duty. On February 8, 1943, Governor Homer Adkins proclaimed a “Victory Garden Day” to promote the practice across Arkansas. To provide additional food, many Arkansans in towns and cities planted Victory Gardens in any available space to grow what they could to augment their rations. Most items were in short supply, and some items, such as new car tires, became all but unobtainable. For most, the immediate concern was dealing with the rationing of a vast array of consumer products. Arkansas National Guard troops saw service in combat theaters around the world, including units sent to Alaska in the months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, where they fought small but brutal battles with Japanese troops in what has been called the Williwaw War (so named after strong winds associated with the weather of the region).įamilies in Arkansas had to endure the worry and fear of sending family members off to war while at the same time struggling with the many changes taking place on the home front. Eleven men with Arkansas ties-four of them graduates of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County)-earned the Medal of Honor in World War II. armed forces, and 3,519 were killed as a result of combat. During the war, an estimated 194,645 Arkansans (about ten percent of the 1940 population of 1,949,387) served the nation in the various branches of the U.S. The war had a great economic and social impact on the people of Arkansas. Industrialization, urbanization, and migration all dramatically transformed the state. Along with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, the transformations that were brought about by World War II were to form a clear break between prewar and postwar Arkansas. In some ways, this reflected issues particular to Arkansas, while in other ways it reflected the profound changes that the United States as a whole underwent during the war. From the creation of ordnance plants to the presence of prisoners of war (POWs) and Japanese-American internees, the impact of the war meant that the Arkansas of 1945 was vastly different from the Arkansas of 1941. During World War II, Arkansas underwent fundamental social and economic changes that affected all parts of the state.
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