Early on in World War II, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, one of Adolf Hitler’s top lieutenants, said that Americans could only make refrigerators and razor blades—they would never be able to produce the military equipment and supplies necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. Hitler took the same view in his public speeches, but privately he knew the clock was ticking. Germany would have to achieve victory fast, before American production had time to ramp up.

There’s an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. That sentiment was definitely the case during World War II, a massive global conflict that presented the United States with a variety of tactical and logistical challenges. At every turn Americans seemed to need more of everything—more supplies, bigger bombs, faster airplanes, better medical treatments, and more precise communications.

World War II put a heavy burden on US supplies of basic materials like food, shoes, metal, paper, and rubber. The Army and Navy were growing, as was the nation’s effort to aid its allies overseas. Civilians still needed these materials for consumer goods as well. To meet this surging demand, the federal government took steps to conserve crucial supplies, including establishing a rationing system that impacted virtually every family in the United States.

Fighting World War II presented daunting military obstacles overseas, but it also involved serious challenges for American communities on the Home Front. 

Opened June 2017 in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion, The Arsenal of Democracy: The Herman and George R. Brown Salute to the Home Front tells the story of the road to war and the Home Front, drawing on personal narratives and evocative artifacts to highlight facets of WWII-era American life through an experiential narrative.

Voices from the Front is a new interactive experience at The National WWII Museum that helps visitors connect with the WWII generation in a high-tech yet personal way. By using cutting-edge technology to facilitate real-time interactions with more than a dozen veterans, Home Front workers, Holocaust survivors, and other witnesses to the war through interactive video displays, Voices from the Front puts real faces to history. Combining artificial intelligence technology and a repository of prerecorded answers to hundreds of questions, the experience provides visitors with authentic and unaltered answers in each interviewee’s own words and voice.

How soil from Mississippi, and subsequently all over the country, ended up spread across the globe during World War II.

During World War II, African Americans made tremendous sacrifices in an effort to trade military service and wartime support for measurable social, political, and economic gains. As never before, local black communities throughout the nation participated enthusiastically in wartime programs while intensifying their demands for social progress.

When we think of World War II, the first images that enter our minds usually involve battle: armies fighting their desperate struggles on land, huge navies patrolling the oceans, and aircraft soaring sleekly overhead.

Louisiana in World War II Teacher Professional Development Webinar

From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all. Even as the war consumed large portions of Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was no clear consensus on how the United States should respond.

Rohwer War Relocation Center in McGehee, Arkansas, was created to educate the children of Japanese American descent who were forced from their homes along the West Coast of the United States and required to live behind barbed wire for the duration of WWII, far from the homes they knew.