Lex Anteinternet: A normal winter. How it used to be.

Lex Anteinternet: A normal winter.: A normal winter. That's exactly what we're having.  The weather here has been normal. And in Central Wyoming, that means multiple be..

After I posted the item above, it occurred to me that part of the complaining people do about winter is because they've so been able to defeat natural conditions in their daily lives and then, although only rarely, nature comes along and reminds you it's dominant for the most part. So far, our means of defeating it only do so in fairly average conditions.

Now, these are fairly average conditions, but people aren't used to them.  And there are some things you can't get around.  Six foot drifts on the Interstate highway, for example, are one such thing.

Anyhow, this caused me to recall that there was a time when people just basically endured these things.  It's always easy to say that, but it's true.

Thinking back to when I was a teenager in high school, and fewer people lived on the mountain, it was the case that the county used to annually simply inform people that the mountain road was not its first priority. So if you lived up there, they'd get around to the road after they'd cleared every other country road.  It was last.  If you didn't like it, don't live there, was the message.  People still complained, but not as much, and they didn't receive much sympathy either.

Ranchers, much like now, really didn't expect to get plowed out at all.  During the famous Blizzard of 1949 there were instances in which aircraft were ultimately flown over some ranches to see if the occupants of them were in trouble.  They didn't have phones or their lines were down.  Having known some of the ranchers who experienced that when I was young, their reaction was surprise.  They didn't expect anyone to send out an airplane, and they didn't figure they'd be regarded as imperiled for the most part.  There were excepts that year, I should note, which resulted in the Wyoming Air National Guard dropping hay for cattle.

This blog started off with the pre World War One era. What about these environs, then?

Cars already existed, and the predominant car of the era, the Model T, would actually have been a fairly good car for the conditions.  It has high clearance, thin wheels, low gearing, and it was fairly heavy for its size.  Therefore, it was a good car, to some degree, for snow.  

It wasn't a four-wheel drive, of course, and the snow we've been getting has been phenomenal.

Snow removal wasn't a thing anywhere before Milwaukee started doing it in 1862.  For the most part, most municipalities didn't do it, however, until the automobile era.  Quite a bit of plowing originally was done with draft horses, and this continued on until after World War Two to some extent.  When streets started to be plowed I don't know, and it's a little difficult to tell, without going through piles of old newspapers to find out.  The oldest example I could find was a municipal truck plowing snow in Washington, D.C. in 1916, which is frankly earlier than I would have guessed.

You don't have to have paved roads to have roads that are plowed, but it helps.  In 1916, Washington had paved streets.  Photographs of Casper show it having maintained dirt roads in the early 1920s.  I'm sure that by the 1930s, they were mostly paved.  What I don't know is when the city started plowing the snow.  A photograph that's online from the Wyoming State Archives shows the Wyoming Highway Department's first snow plow, when it was purchased, which has a date of 1923, just one hundred years ago coincidentally enough.  It's probably safe to assume the State didn't plow any highways prior to that.  Another photo from the same source shows the local high school's snowplow, which is mounted to a tractor, and has a date of 1930.  All in all, plowing the streets and highways must have come on during the 20s and 30s.

Older newspapers also show that in the 20s, the State simply closed more highways than it does now. Some highways are still closed for winter, but at least in the early 1920s the State simply closed, for example, the highway between Shoshone and Thermopolis.  Of course, you could, at that time, still make that trip by train.

That brings up this, which we've addressed before.  Prior to World War Two, 4x4 vehicles were a real rarity and tended to be confined to industrial operations or logging. Ranchers didn't have 4x4 vehicles, and regular people certainly did not.  For that matter, early 4x4s were a real slow moving off-road affair, and they wouldn't have been very useful for most people.  It was the U.S. Army that really started the development of the road capable all wheel drive vehicle and it took World War Two to really make them common.  Even after the war, it took a long while before very many town residents owned a 4x4.

This meant that once winter came, winter travel in and out of towns became much more limited.  Sure, in the 20s, when the weather improved, you could venture out, and people no doubt did. But busting drifts and the like became a post-war thing, and wouldn't have really become common until the 1960s for town residents.  Ranchers, for that matter, kept more employees at the time and some of them were stationed in the remoter areas of larger ranches so that they could take care of necessary chores during the winter.  In some instances, that meant that cowhands were stationed in remote cabins all winter long, and were checked on rarely, if at all.  And they spent the winter there without television or the internet, or for that matter, electricity.

Of course, the other thing this meant is that people whose livelihoods were in town, lived in town.  People didn't live on small acreages outside of town, for the most part, if they had jobs in town.  If you needed to be in the office, you needed to be within a reasonable distance, which often meant walking distance, of the office. For that matter, people with industrial employment tended to live near it.

The point of all of this, other than things were different then?  Well, they were different then.

They were different, for that matter into the 1980s.

And maybe folks need to have a little patience now.

The Rise and Decline of the "SUV".

 Some time ago, on this transportation obsessed blog, I published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: SUVs before SUVs: 

A 1962 Dodge Power Giant Carryall.  Not mine, I saw it for sale the other day while driving through town.  It appears in nice shape, and still features bias ply tires.  This is a D100 Carryall, which means its rated at 1/2 ton, although it has a two speed rear axle.  Of course, I don't know anything about it or what is, or isn't original.  It looks pretty original, however.

Anyhow, it's interesting how SUVs are supposed to be a modern concept, with the Chevrolet Suburban supposedly sort of ushering them in. But Suburban's themselves go way back, and before them were vehicles like this Dodge Carryall.  Carryalls, in fact, go all the way back to World War Two.

Of course, these aren't easy to drive.  It has a manual transmission and armstrong steering.  And, of course, conventional hydraulic brakes.  Not something a soccer mom, or dad, would probably drive.  Still, it's interesting to note how far back the concept of a full sized 4x4, built on a truck frame, goes.  About as far back as 4x4 trucks themselves.

Since that time, I posted a comment on trucks or SUVs on the M K Wright blog, and Jenny, who has a couple of excellent blogs herself, including the 1870-1918 blog, noted that she'd be interested on how SUVS became the sort of bloated light duty vehicles that they've become. To a fan of 4x4s, which I obviously am, that question struck a chord and so I'm back on the topic.

I guess to start off on this, we'd have to define what an SUV actually is. The term isn't really that old in comparison to the vehicles that arguable fit the definition.  SUV, as we know, stands for Sport Utility  Vehicle.  But what's that?

It's a bit hard to say. When the term first was used, it seemed to fit any 4x4 that was a light carryall, but over time it expanded to include all the traditional carryalls and perhaps even things like Jeeps. So, here we'll take a look at that class of vehicle, that being the 4x4 that isn't a pickup, but is designed to carry multiple passengers.

 

M151A1 Jeep in the foreground, with self propelled artillery in the background, South Korea, 1987.  The M151 was the last of the US military Jeeps.  Today, the Jeep is basically almost back to a single manufacturer after having had as wider run at one time.

If we look at it that way, I suppose the Jeep, which we've discussed here before several times.  Probably the last time I looked at them at length was in this post:

Jeep

I've owned Jeeps twice.

 

My first car, a 1958 M38A1 Army Jeep.  In the words of Iris Dement, "it turned over once, but never went far."*

My very first vehicle was a Jeep.  I bought it for $500 with money I had earned from a summer job.  I was 15 at the time, and not old enough to actually drive, but I still had it when I turned 16.  

The engine was a mess, in need of rebuilding or replacement, and as you can see, the prior owner had hit a tree with it.  As the engine was so worn out, it burned nearly as much oil as gasoline, and I sold it when I was 16 and bought a Ford F100 to replace it.

My second Jeep was a 1946 CJ2A, the very first model of civilian Jeep.  I kept it for awhile, but ultimately when my son was small, I sold it too.  The CJ2A, particularly ones made in the first couple of years of production, was nearly unchanged from the World War Two Army 1/4 ton truck that gave rise to the species, and indeed, the model I had, had some parts commonality otherwise unique to the Army Jeeps of the Second World War.

Depiction of Jeep in use on Guadalcanal, bringing in a KIA.

Jeeps got their start in that role, as a military vehicle, a 1/4 ton truck, entering service just prior to World War Two.  Bantam, a now extinct motor vehicle manufacturer, gets a lot of credit for the basic design, and indeed the Bantam Jeep did enter U.S. and British service.

Bantam Jeep being serviced by Army mechanic. The Bantam was actually lighter than the Willys Jeep.

But it was Willys, with larger manufacturing capacity, that really gets credit for the design.  It was their design that became the Jeep, although Ford made a huge number of Jeeps during the Second World War as well.

Coast Guard patrol with Jeep.  The Coast Guard also had mounted patrols during the Second World War, acquiring horses and tack from the Army.

American and Australian troops with Jeep serving as a field ambulance.

Jeeps became synonymous with U.S. troops during World War Two.  Indeed, there's a story, probably just a fable, of a French sentry shooting a party of Germans who tried to pass themselves off as Americans, simply because the sentry knew that a walking party of men could not be Americans, they "came in Jeeps."  A story, probably, but one that reflected how common Jeeps were and how much they were admired by U.S. forces at the time.  It's commonly claimed by some that Jeeps replaced the horse in the U.S. Army, but that's only slightly true, and only in a very limited sense.  It might be more accurate to say that the Jeep replaced the mule and the horse in a limited role, but it was really the American 6x6 truck that did the heavy lifting of the war, and which was truly a revolutionary weapon.  

None the less, the fame of the Jeep was won, and after the war Jeeps went right into civilian production.  For a time, Willys was confused over what the market would be for the little (uncomfortable) car, and marketed to farmers and rural workers, who never really saw the utility of the vehicle over other options.  Indeed, for farmers and ranchers who needed a 4x4, it was really the Dodge Power Wagon that took off.  The market for Jeeps was with civilian outdoorsmen, who rapidly adopted it in spite of the fact that it's very small, quite uncomfortable, and actually, in its original form, a very dangerous vehicle prone to rolling.  Still, the light truck's 4x4 utility allowed sportsmen to go places all year around that earlier civilian cars and trucks simply did not. The back country, and certain seasons of the year, were suddenly opened up to them.  For that reason, Jeeps were an integral part of the Revolution In Rural Transportation we've otherwise written about.  You can't really keep a horse and a pack mule in your backyard in town, but you can keep a Jeep out on the driveway.

Not surprisingly, Willys (and its successor in the line, Kaiser) soon had a lot of competition in the field.  The British entered it nearly immediately with the Land Rover, a light 4x4 designed for the British army originally that's gone on to have a cult following, in spite of being expensive and, at least early on, prone to the faults of British vehicles.  Nissan entered the field with the Nissan Patrol, a vehicle featuring the British boxiness but already demonstrating the fine traits that Japanese vehicles would come to be known for. Toyota entered the field with its legendary Land Cruiser, the stretched version of which I once owned one of, and which was an absolutely great 4x4.  Indeed, their smaller Jeep sized vehicle, in my opinion, was the best in this vehicle class.   Ford even entered the field with the original Bronco.  Over time, even Suzuki would introduce its diminutive Samurai.

So, what's happened here to this class of vehicles anyway?

Recently, for reason that are hard to discern, I decided to start looking once again for a vehicle in this class.  I know their defects.  They are unstable compared to trucks, and they don't carry much either.  But there is something about them.  Last time I looked around there were a lot of options, and costs were reasonable for a used one. Well, not anymore.

I don't know if its the urbanized SUV that's taken over everything.  But whereas once a fellow looking for a Jeep like vehicle could look for Jeeps, Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, Samurais, Broncos and International Scouts, now you are down to Jeeps, the Toyota FJ Cruiser or the soon to be extinct Land Rover Defender.  The Defender is insanely expensive, but the Jeep and Cruiser sure aren't cheap.  Even used vehicles in this class now command a crazy price.  I'm actually amazed I see so many around, given that most people don't use them for what they are designed for, and they're so darned expensive.

The Jeep  was the first of the SUVs, although only barely so.  The Jeep came about just prior to World War Two, as the U.S. Army, which had quite a bit of experience all read with front and rear axle drive vehicles, sought to have a really light car, or truck developed for military use. Being light weight was a requirement for the vehicle, as was it being four wheel drive, a revolutionary requirement at the time.  Jeeps were the result, with there being two Jeeps to see U.S. service during the war, the Bantam Jeep and the Willys type Jeep, which was also made by Ford.  The Willys type Jeep was made in much larger numbers.  By the wars end, the Soviet Union was making its own version of the Jeep, based on the Willys and Bantam examples they'd acquired via Lend Lease.  The Germans, who loved all things mechanical, had also experimented with light weight 4x4s after being exposed to the Jeep, and came up with 4x4s based on the Kubelwagen. The Germans, however, never made the full switch to 4x4s so their examples are much less common that their 2x4 vehicles.

Civilian Jeep fans would tend to identify this as a CJ5, but it's actually a M38A1, in service with the South Korean Army in 1987.

I've addressed at length before, but Jeeps have had a long run as a popular civilian 4x4, and have actually outlasted their use by Americans in the civilian role, the Army no longer using Jeeps at all.  Those armies that do use a Jeep like vehicle today, use Toyota, Land, Steyr or Mercedes trucks, not American ones.  But the Jeep lives on as an American 4x4, but only made by Jeep.  A small close cousin, but much lighter, does exists in the form of the Suzuiki Samauri and the General Motors equivalent of it, but that vehicle seems to be an example of what generally seems to have occurred here.  Starting out a sub Bantam type Jeep, but made for the outdoors, it's evolved into a little 4x4 car.  As we'll see, that seems to have been the general trend.

The Jeep wasn't the only 4x4 passenger vehilce (ie., I'm omitting trucks) introduced by the military during World War Two.  Just as the Army sought to introduce 4x4 trucks and the Jeep, it also introduced, during the war, a class of vehicles we'd later know as Travelalls or Carryalls, and which like the Jeep, we find that there was explosion of types, but that we're now down to a singular example.

I've posted an example of a Dodge Carryall above, so we know what the type is, but we can probably define it as a 4x4 panel truck with seating.  Indeed, the first vehicles to carry that name were in fact 4x2 panel trucks.  Just before the Second World War, however, the Army decided to introduce a Dodge variant of the panel truck for passengers, just as Dodge was also producing a 4x4 heavy duty pickup truck for the Army. And, in addition to that, Dodge also introduced a vehicle called a "command car" that went under a variety of WC designations.

We'll take a quick look at two of these vehicles, before going on to the third, as it's interesting how Detroit sort of missed the boat on these early on, although that's true of nearly all of the early 4x4 vehicles.  Truth be known, they just didn't see much of a post war use for any of them.

 

One of the WC Command Cars

Command cars were a Dodge product based on at first the 1/2 ton Dodge military pickup chassis, and later the 3/4 ton chassis. They were a great vehicle, and were very popular with the service at the time.  Sometimes called a "weapons carrier", they were basically the first true SUV.  Senior officers with access to them, such as George Patton, frequently used them rather than the Jeep, as they were just big enough to be a bit more useful, and small enough to remain really maneuverable.  When we see the later SUVs of the 80s and 90s, we're really seeing something that's pretty darned close to these, conceptually.  Oddly, however, not only did the automobile manufacturers basically fail to appreciate that there's be a post war market for them, the Army phased them out after the war in favor of the Jeep, which isn't quite as useful.

Dodge 4x4 military ambulance, essentially a panel truck.

Also based on the Dodge truck frame was the Dodge military ambulance. This vehicle was hugely successful and a nearly identical model was put into production after the war when the Army adopted the M35, an updated version of the World War Two 3/4 ton Dodge military truck.  Again, however, this didn't seem to inspire the manufacturers to produce a civilian model, and perhaps that's understandable as these were, after all, military ambulances. They did find some favor with civilian users, however, post war as a surplus rugged panel truck.  Here two, however, we can see something that would come back into favor later in another form.

Dodge military carreyalls.

Dodge also produced true carryalls for the Army during the war, and it's hear that we really see the beginnings of something that would find widespread post war use.  The least significant of Dodge's wartime vehicles, it's almost hard t find a picture of them actually being used overseas.  But they set a pattern, along with the Dodge 4x4 truck, that would soon find expression in post war vehicles.

Wartime manufacture.

After the Second World War, Dodge kept its military truck in production, in a civilian variant, as the Power Wagon, vending the heavy 4x4 to commercial and agricultural customers as being "job rated".  Willys kept the Jeep in production as well, struggling to vend it to a market it didn't quite understand.  Soon, sportsmen proved to be the market for Jeeps, while Power Wagons were bought by the anticipated market.  Nobody kept a 4x4 panel truck in manufacture except for Willys, which alone made one in this class, based on its small frame 4x4 pickup truck.  This vehicle, termed by Willys a "station wagon", also very much anticipated the later size of common SUVs, although the car, nicknamed the "rumble wagon", was very much a truck.

In 1954, however that suddenly changed.  Dodge came back out with the vehicle depicted above, the Town Wagon.  But they were late by a year. The prior year, International Harvester, the heavy truck and implement company, came in with the Travelall, a vehicle built on the same concept.  Chevrolet was already making its panel truck, the Suburban, but in 1957 it entered the 4x4 market with the panel truck as well.  As odd as it may be to think of the "family truckster" starting off as a fairly heavy 4x4, they all were.

So, by the late 1950s three American manufacturers were making heavy 4x4 panel trucks for passenger use.  The Carryall, the Travelall and the Suburban all vied for the same, fairly off road, passenger market. A fourth, the Jeep, was a smaller vehicle nearly alone in its class. None of these vehicles was  the plush type vehicle that the Suburban is today, but they are all recognizable as being in that class.  

That class took a new turn in 1963 when Jeep took a huge leap and abandoned its station wagon in favor of a luxury carryall, that vehicle being the Jeep Wagoneer.  There was nothing really like it.  Dumping all pretensions of commercial use, the Wagoneer was the luxury vehicle in the suburban or carryall class, and it did really well. While Jeep vehicles, save for the Jeep itself, have been somewhat forgotten as being pioneering, this one clearly was. 

Just a few years thereafter Chevrolet ramped up the competition by taking it in another direction, when it introduced the Blazer.  Based on a half ton, short box, pickup truck frame, the Blazer took the carryall one notch down in size, marketing its vehicle to the smaller family size now emerging in the US and the weekend sportsman. The Blazer was a huge success.

1972 Chevrolet Blazer.  This type of Blazer (without the lifted suspension and large wheels) was the first model of the popular 1/2 ton SUV.

The Blazer was such a successful vehicle that soon there were others in its class.  Ford, which had a contender in the Jeep market which was very much loved, the Bronco, dumped it in favor of a larger Blazer sized vehicle, still called the Bronco. Dodge, which of course had a military vehicle in this class as long ago as 1940, came back out with one based on its 1/2 ton short box pickup frame, calling it the Ram Charger.  By the early 1980s, Ford, Chevrolet and Chrysler were all competing in this class, and International and Chevrolet were still competing in the carryall class, Dodge having dropped out.

In the meantime, other manufacturers had not been idle.  Toyota had come out with a stretched Land Cruiser, and entered the field, by the 1960s.  Land Cruiser had as well, but it's temperamental expensive 4x4 was never really popular in the US, so that variant was rarely seen.  International Harvester, which had competed in the Jeep class with its Scout, came out with a new larger variant of the Scout which also competed in this smaller, but not Jeep sized, class.  Jeep itself would attempt to enter it from time to time, but was never successful in really figuring it out.

 
 Chevrolet Blazer in use by the U.S. Army, in this case the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard, in South Korea.  It's odd to think that this class of vehicle, which basically started off as a military vehicle, had a return, albeit a not too successful one, to military service.

By the late 1980s, this latter class, the smaller, but not 1/4 ton, 4x4 market really took off.  Nissan entered the class with its rugged Pathfinder.  Toyota, already in the class, came out with an additional vehicle in it called the Four Runner.  Mazda entered it as well.  Seeing what was going on, Chevrolet abandoned its trailblazing full size Blazer in favor of a smaller model in this class, also called the Blazer.

And then, something happened.

Somehow these vehicles quite being what they were, which was offroad vehicles, and simply became panel trucks, with 4x4, once again.

How it happened isn't clear, but whole class of rugged personal 4x4s began to evaporate.  The Bronco disappeared.  International quit making personal vehicles.  And the small SUVs increasingly became large 4x4 cars, but not really trucks.  

Some of these vehicles are still around in one form or another, but only some.  The Jeep class is principally occupied by Jeep, unless a person is so well off they can afford a Mercedes or Land Rover.  The mid sized SUV still sees a rugged Toyota class vehicles, and Jeep has finally figured it out, virtually dominating the field now with its four door Jeep.  General Motors still makes a Suburban class vehicle and a Blazer sized vehicle, but both vehicles now are nearly luxury vehicles, not the field vehicles they once were, although they can still do the back country and come with off road options.

People will buy, of course, what they want.So the manufacturers can't be blamed for producing what they do. But the evolution is an interesting one.

Lex Anteinternet: So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in genera...So what about World War Two?

Some time ago I looked at this in the context of World War One, but what about World War Two?

Lex Anteinternet: So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in genera...: what would that have been like? Advertisement for the Remington Model 8 semi automatic rifle, introduced by Remington from the John Bro...

 Wisconsin deer camp, 1943, the year meat rationing began.

Indeed, a person's reasons to go hunting during World War Two, besides all the regular reasons (a connection with our primal, and truer, selves, being out in nature, doing something real) were perhaps stronger during the Second World War than they were in the First.  During WWII the government rationed meat.  During World War One it did not, although it sure put the social pressure on to conserve meat.

Indeed, the first appeals of any kind to conserve food in the United States came from the British in 1941, at which time the United States was not yet in the war. The British specifically appealed to Americans to conserve meat so that it could go to English fighting men.  In the spring of 1942 rationing of all sorts of things began to come in as the Federal government worried about shortages developing in various areas.  Meat and cheese was added to the ration list on March 29, 1943.  As Sarah Sundin reports on her blog:

On March 29, 1943, meats and cheeses were added to rationing. Rationed meats included beef, pork, veal, lamb, and tinned meats and fish. Poultry, eggs, fresh milk—and Spam—were not rationed. Cheese rationing started with hard cheeses, since they were more easily shipped overseas. However, on June 2, 1943, rationing was expanded to cream and cottage cheeses, and to canned evaporated and condensed milk.

So in 1943 Americans found themselves subject to rationing on meat.  As noted, poultry was exempt, so a Sunday chicken dinner was presumably not in danger, but almost every other kind of common meat was rationed.  So, a good reason to go out in the field.

But World War Two was distinctly different in all sorts of ways from World War One, so hunting by that time was also different in many ways, and it was frankly impacted by the war in different ways.

For one thing, by 1941 automobiles had become a staple of American life.  It's amazing to think of the degree to which this is true, as it happened so rapidly.  By the late 1930s almost every American family had a car.  Added to that, pickup trucks had come in between the wars in the early versions of what we have today, and they were obviously a vehicle that was highly suited to hunting, although early cars, because of the way they were configured and because they were often more utilitarian than current ones, were well suited as a rule.  What was absent were 4x4s, which we've discussed earlier.

This meant that it was much, much easier for hunters to go hunting in a fashion that was less of an expedition.  It became possible to pack up a car or pickup truck and travel early in the morning to a hunting location and be back that night, in other words.

Or at least it had been until World War Two. With the war came not only food rationing, but gasoline rationing as well.  And not only gasoline rationing, but rationing that pertained to things related to automobiles as well

Indeed, the first thing to be rationed by the United States Government during World War Two was tires.  Tires were rationed on December 11, 1941.  This was due to anticipated shortages in rubber, which was a product that had been certainly in use during World War One, but not to the extent it was during World War Two.  And tire rationing mattered.

People today are used to modern radial tires which are infinitely better, and longer lasting, than old bias ply tires were.  People who drove before the 1980s and even on into the 80s were used to constantly having flat tires.  I hear occasionally people lament the passing of bias ply tires for trucks, but I do not.  Modern tires are much better and longer lasting.  Back when we used bias ply tires it seemed like we were constantly buying tires and constantly  having flat tires.  Those tires would have been pretty similar to the tires of World War Two.  Except by all accounts tires for civilians declined remarkably in quality during the war due to material shortages.

Gasoline rationing followed, and it was so strict that all forms of automobile racing, which had carried on unabated during World War One, were banned during World War Two.  Sight seeing was also banned.  So, rather obviously, the use of automobiles was fairly curtailed during the Second World War.

So, where as cars and trucks had brought mobility to all sorts of folks between the wars in a brand new way, rationing cut back on it, including for hunters, during the war.

Which doesn't mean that you couldn't go out, but it did mean that you had to save your gasoline ration if you were going far and generally plan wisely.

Ammunition was also hard to come by during the war.

It wasn't due to rationing, but something else that was simply a common fact of life during World War Two.  Industry turned to fulfilling contracts for the war effort and stopped making things for civilians consumption.

Indeed, I've hit on this a bit before in a different fashion, that being how technology advanced considerably between the wars but that the Great Depression followed by the Second World War kept that technology, more specifically domestic technology, from getting to a lot of homes. Automobiles, in spite of the Depression, where the exception really.  While I haven't dealt with it specifically, the material demands of the Second World War were so vast that industries simply could not make things for the service and the civilian market. 

Some whole classes of products, such as automobiles, simply stopped being available for civilians.  Ammunition was like that.  With the services consuming vast quantities of small arms ammunition, ammunition for civilians became very hard to come by.  People who might expect to get by with a box of shotgun shells for a day's hunt and to often make due with half of that.  Brass cases were substituted for steel before that was common in the U.S., which was a problem for reloaders. 

So, in short, the need and desire was likely there, but getting components were more difficult. And being able to get out was as well, which impacted a person to a greater or lesser extent depending where they were.

And, as previously noted, game populations are considerably higher today than they were then.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one.*

Ad from the Sheridan newspaper, December 31, 1945.

December 31, 1945, marked the first peacetime New Years in much of the world, although not all of the world was at peace.

1945 marked the end of what we consider the oddly nostalgically recalled, but undeniably bloody, 1940s.  It's the operation of Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History, which provides:

Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History:  There are decades, but they are not decadal.

In common histories, people often reference the "40s", or the "50s", or the like.

The references are useful, but very imprecise.  Decades, as people recall them, really reflect eras, and the ears themselves do not device up so neatly.

The 1940s, for example, are heavily associated with World War Two.  The Second World War, however, in Asia really broke out in 1937 and in Europe in 1939.  Because the slide of one era into another is not precise, it's hard to say when the 1940s started, but 1938 would be a good place to begin it.  They clearly ended, however, in 1945.

The 1950s, in contrast, the way we remember them, started in 1955, with the end of the Korean War.  The period from 1945 to 1955 is really its own separate decade, and is nearly a forgotten one . It's sort of the Proto 1950s.  The 1950s we recall ended in 1964, at which time the 1960s, as we remember them, commenced.  The 60s lasted until about 1972, when the US was really pulling out of Vietnam, or perhaps to 1973.

And so on.  While this makes sense, as we do not tend to think of things in this fashion, we often miss that the flow of history works in this fashion, rather than in neat ten year groups.

1945 was the end of World War Two, and the beginning of the post war era, and era which we still live in.  It was the penultimate year of the 1940s, and to some degree, the penultimate year of the long 20th Century.¹  It was the year that the Second World War ended  with a massive technological nuclear flash, but it was also the year that featured the bloodiest fighting in a unified war that began as a series of wars in 1937 and 1939.

The end of the Second World War determined, or seemed to determine, questions that had arisen with the end of the Great War in 1918.  World War One had caused the death of the old order in much of Europe, an order that saw aristocracies dominate in varying degrees in many of the European, and indeed international, states.  The strain on the old order was obvious even before World War One, but it remained strong nonetheless.  The Great War killed it.

The death of the old order did not answer the question of what would replace it. Every nation that fought in the war, however, would see immediate political evolution due to the war, with all  of it reflecting forces that had been at work before the war.  In functioning democratic countries with stable governments, that resulted in an expanded franchise.  The UK extended the vote to entire classes that had not had it before the war, allowed Ireland to go independent, more or less, allowed its dominions to be actually independent, and extended the vote to women.  The US extended the vote to women and soon made Native Americans citizens, with new states being admitted to the union prior to the Second World War.  Canada and Australia obtained true political independence.

In countries that had strong aristocracies that opposed democracy, however, radical elements of the far left that had been underground to some degree leaped forward, the prime example being Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union.  As forces of the far left advanced, finding a great deal of support in in the formerly disenfranchised working class, forces of the far right appealed to the same base and to conservative aristocratic classes, crushing democratic forces in between, as in Germany, where the Nazis gained power.  In unstable democracies without long histories of democratic behavior, forces of the left and the right contested for total control, as in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Mexico, with democracy faltering in many to some degree, sometimes totally.

World War Two was not, as some like to claim, a continuation of World War One, but rather a violent sorting out of the democratic, anti democratic, and populist forces it had unleashed.  Starting in the late 1920s it seemed that the question the world was faced with was whether the future was democratic, fascist or communist.  The Second World War determined, at least it seemed, that the world would not be fascist, but left the question of whether it would be communists or democratic undetermined.

Determining the question was bloody on a scale that we can no longer even imagine, although in terms of human history it was not all that long ago.  The expenditure of lives in the war by all contestants was enormous, with the fascist and the communists states freely willing to waste the lives of men, and the democratic ones emphasizing technology where they could.  All the combatants, however, acclimated themselves to conduct that at least the democratic ones would not have tolerated prior to the war, with mass bombing of urban targets being the most notable.  By 1945 the US, arguably the most moralistic of the combatants, was willing to engage in fire bombing and ultimately the atomic bomb to bring the war to a conclusion.

Truman as Time's Man of the Year, posted under fair use exception.

The significance of the atomic age, contrary to the way things are currently remembered, was appreciated immediately.  Truman was Time magazine's Man of the Year, pictured in front of a fist grasping nuclear firebolts.  Newspapers, even by late 1945, were pondering what atomic warfare would mean.

The war not only determined that fascism would not be the future of Europe, or Asia, but it it changed everything about everything, and much of that not for the good.

We've argued it here before, but the Second World War created the modern United States, and more than that, modern American culture, in both good, and bad, ways.

Tire rationing came to an end on this day in 1945.

The most oblivious, at first was the change to the economy, which was little understood.  Pent up consumer demand dating back to the start of the Great Depression  meant that the country did not slide back into the depression as nearly all Western economist had feared.  Adding to this, however, was the fact that none of the European industrial powers, along with Japan, had not suffered some level of industrial destruction. The U.S.'s industrial base was not only left intact, it had expanded.  Only Canada could claim to enjoy the same situation, although its economy was much smaller.  American workers took advantage of the situation nearly immediately with a wave of strikes demanding higher wages, strikes that were in fact largely successful.  The economic golden age that current Republican populists imagine to have existed in the past reached its most pronounced form in the 1950s which is still looked back upon fondly, if inaccurately, in the same way that singer Billy Joel imagined it to have been in his lamet Allentown

Well our fathers fought the Second World War

Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore

Met our mothers in the USO

Asked them to dance

Danced with them slow

And we're living here in Allentown

The obliteration of European industry created the illusion of some sort of American economic uniqueness that remains to this day and which the country is presently attempting to sort out by restoring it, which will not and cannot work.  Part of that also involves an imagined domestic perfection that doesn't' reflect what was going on in reality either.

Prior to the Second World War the domestic culture of the United States was different in nearly every fashion.  Even the horrors of World War One had not changes that.  Most Americans lived closer to the poverty line than they do today, even if most Americans lived in families.  Most Americans did not attend college or university, and most men didn't graduate from high school.  There was a minimum of surplus wealth on the part of the average, although that had started to change by imd 1920s, only to be retarded by the Great Depression.  Most people did not move far from home.  Most men and women married people who grew up near them and were part of the same class and religion, although a surprisingly large lifelong bachelor class existed, particularly in certain occupations.

The war changed nearly all of that, and even during the war itself.

The first peacetime Federal draft in the nation's history took thousands of young men away from their homes starting in 1940 and 41, and of course became the major wartime draft that continued on until after the war, and with some hiatus, basically until 1973.  The country would not have tolerated a peacetime draft prior to 1940, and barely did in 1940 and 1941.  The country's views on the military, which prior to the war was sort of a type of disdain but acceptance of it as necessary, as long as it was small, completely changed during the war so that by the war's end the concept of a large peacetime military was fully accepted, and even admired, although that would be disrupted again due to the Vietnam War for a time.  

Prior to the war, soldiering was, for enlisted men and junior officers, a bachelor occupation with servicemen largely looked down upon as lazy. The enlisted ranks often contained large numbers of immigrants, although that is still true.  After the war, the view of servicemen, many of whom for decades were conscripts on relatively short enlistments changed radically.

The expectation of marriage changed as well, even at a time that wartime marriages came into periods of great stress.  Prior to the war a fair number of blue collar workers and nearly all non owner agricultural workers were lifelong bachelors.

Cowboys Out Our Way from December 31, 1945.  The two working hands are discussing "Sugar", their former ranch cook, who just married a rich widow, and Stiffy, the oldest cowhand on the ranch.

This ended after the war for a variety of reasons, one simple one being that entire classes of men who had never really lived any other life now had seen at least much of the country, and some large sections of the globe.  Men who had planned on a life of working on the farm or ranch and living in a bunkhouse no longer found that appealing and no longer believed they had to do that.  For those who returned to their states of origin, and huge number of them did not, this often meant taking up a job in towns and cities, rather than in fields.  Quite a few used the GI Bill to advance an education that benefited them at a time in which a university education guaranteed a white collar job.  Regions that had large reservations found that many returning Native American veterans chose to live in towns and cities near the reservations they were from, rather than on them where living conditions remained comparatively primitive.  Lots of men married who would not have otherwise.  The average marriage age notably dropped for the first time in decades and remained depressed in the 1950s.

Lots of couples got divorced in fairly quick order as well.

This was because of a "marry in haste" situation that had broken out during the war.  Couples who figured that the male's chances of surviving the great blood letting were fairly slim and were willing to accordingly gamble, where as previously they would not have been.  Moreover, many of the couples that married were of different backgrounds and different regions of the country, and not the literal "girl next door" so often portrayed.  A really good portrayal of the this sort of situation was given in the brilliant 1946 film The Best Years of Their Lives, which gave a dramatic, but fairly accurate, examination of the domestic situation of the post war years.  Of note, 1946 also gave the country It's a Wonderful Life, which really portrayed the prewar, not the wartime or postwar, domestic ideal.

The amazing film The Best Years of Our Lives which captured the immediate impact of World War Two on Americans.

It's a Wonderful Life, also released in 1946, but which really portrayed the nature of American life from the 1910s until the late 1930s, although it was set in 1946.  It's gone on to be a sentimental Christmas classic.

One of the things The Best Years of Their Lives examined was divorce, which had been disdained, with good reason, prior to the war.  Now it was becoming rapidly accepted, which was a major evolution in American domestic culture, and not a good one.  And of course it wasn't just this.  Divorce became common post war in a way that it never had been before, and the concept of divorce without fault was introduced.  First introduced by a modern nation in 1917 in Russia, and codified by the Communist in 1926, it was introduced into the United States in California in 1969 where it was signed into law by the divorced (1949) and remarried (1952) Governor Ronald Reagan.

Final scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.  It's emblematic that the film concludes with a recently divorced central character proposing, over the objection of her father, to a young woman who had vowed to break up that characters marriage (she doesn't).

The Best Years of Their Lives also depicts fairly heavy drinking, and not in an accepting fashion, but in a relatively realistic one .That was also something that the war really brought in.  Returning veterans were often very broken men, and alcohol abuse was an enduring feature of their lives, along with chronic cigarette smoking.  This bled over into the culture in general and an increased acceptance of heavy alcohol use became common, and indeed is something often featured in post war films in a routine fashion.  Men who had endured killing on a mass scale often never really adjusted back to a normal life, and resorted to the bottle in varying degrees.

At least by my observation, some of these men became downright mean.  We hate to say that about "The Greatest Generation", but it's an enduring theme of the recollections of many of their children.  Alcoholic fathers who were extremely demanding on their male children seems to have been routine.  Again, by my observation, many of the same children, who went on to rebel during the 1960s, returned to their childhood roots and became mean demanding fathers to their own children, making World War Two the domestic abuse gift that keeps on giving.

While certainly most returning veterans did not become mean, or abusive, it has to be noted that the Second World War started the country off on a destruction of the natural relationship between men and women we're also still dealing with.

Not since the American Civil War had so many young men been taken away from their homes and never in the country's history had so many young men been kept in the company of young men overseas.  War involves the ultimate vice, the killing of other human beings, and all other vices naturally come along with it, in varying degrees by personality, and by military culture.

All wars involve the abuse of women, the most spectacular example during the Second World War being the mass rapes, often accompanied by murder of the victims, by the Red Army late in the Second World War.  There are some examples by Western armies as well, but they are much smaller in scale.  Also notable, however, was the largescale outbreak of prostitution in Europe, some of which was conducted nearly publicly in places that would never have tolerated it before the war.  Economic desperation caused much of it in some areas, which included underaged European women prostituting themselves in some instances and the military simply accepting it.² 

Bill Mauldin in 1945.  The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph.  Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enough, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI.  Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service.  She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school.  While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy.  In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.

Even where not completely sordid, plenty of misconduct occurred in all of the ranks.  This is depicted in the recent series Master of the Air with at least one of the affairs depicted actually having occurred.  In fictional form, it's portrayed in 1956's The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.

The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit from 1956, but which starts off in World War Two and the moral failings in combat of the central character, including the violation of his marital vows.

This was bound to have some impact on the wider culture, and we've argued that it lead to the wider acceptance of the objectification of women.  Indeed, thousands of men became acclimated to the centerfolds in Yank during the war, making the introduction of Playboy in 1953 not all that much of the big leap as its claimed to be.

First issue of Yank's pinup girl.

Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold.  Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.  Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection.  She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.

Actress Susan Hayward as a Yank centerfold.

Playboy often gets credit for firing the open shots of the disastrous Sexual Revolution, but it can be argued that Yank did.  At any rate, by the wars end, millions of men had served in places were morality of all types was at a low ebb, and had ogled the girls in Yank, and perhaps painted topless or nude figures on government aircraft.  That this would have some effect, particularly later when bogus sex studies were released as scientific texts, isn't too surprising. The major erosion of the natural order between men and women that came into full fruition after the late 1960s had some roots that went at least as far back as the 1910s, but World War Two gave it a major boost.

The war also gave a major boost to automobiles.

Prior to the war, and during it, the US relied on rail transportation. But new types of automobiles, notably 4x4s, were introduced during the war, and cars overall simply improved.  By 1950 it was clear that road building and automobiles had become a major American obsession, spawned in part by the heavy road use, in spite of automobiles, that occurred during the war.  4x4s, which were strictly an industrial vehicle, were introduced into civilian use shortly after the war, with pickup truck variants ending the need for ranches to have cowboys in the high country during the winter, and allowing any part of the country to be accessed to some degree by sportsmen or agriculturalist year around.

1947 Sheridan newspaper advertisement for what was probably a surplus Dodge WC.

Reliance on equine transportation, in contrast, started to decline markedly.  

December 31, 1945 brought the news that Hirohito had renounced claims to divinity, with the nature of the Japanese monarchical claim on that point never understood by Westerners in the first place.  He did not ever claim to have been a god, and it was soon learned that the majority of the Japanese had never believed in the imperial family's claim to a unique divine status in the first place.

The war ended, seemingly for good, Japanese militarism.  It also seems to have ended German militarism as well, something assisted by the fact that the Soviets ended up with Prussia, it's source.

The war, of course, also advanced the frontiers of Soviet domination beyond its 1940 status, something the Soviets had been working on since 1917.  This would prove to be temporary, as would the Soviet Union itself, but that could not be foreseen in 1945.  A world that had worried about whether fascism, communism, or democracy would prevail, now worried over whether communism or democracy would be the ultimate victors.

In China, where on this day an unsuccessful treaty between the Nationalist and the Communists would be signed, a contest more resembling the pre World War Two one was going on, revived from its 1927 start and temporary hiatus during the Second World War.

1945 was a fateful year.  For Americans it started with American troops fighting the Germans in Bulge in Operation Wachts am Rhein and in Alsatia in Operation Nordwind.  For the Soviets, January 1945 would be the bloodiest month of the war, as it would be for the Germans.  For the Japanese, it marked pitched resistance to Allied advances everywhere, and a desperate effort to advance in China.  It all came to an end in August, 1945, and by December 31, 1945, the world was trying to sort out where it was going.  Much of it could be anticipated, but much could not be.

Some additional items:

Today in World War II History—December 31, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 31, 1945: US National War Labor Board is disbanded. US ends tire rationing. British Home Guard is officially disbanded.

The prewar world was gone forever.  Sorting that out is still going on.

Related threads:

Father Arne and the Greatest Failure of the Greatest Generation

Baby Boom Generation, Great Migration, It was because of World War Two, mehr Mensch sein, trends, World War II (Greatest) Generation, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Footnotes:

*I had typed out a very long and detailed look at the 1940s, and 1945, for the December 31, 1945 entry, before some computer glitch entirely wiped it out.  It's completely gone.

I may try to reconstruct it a bit, but the fact that I started working on it some time ago is a deterrent to that. And even if I do, a reconstructed post is never as good as the original.

1.  Like decades, centuries don't really track the calendar precisely either.  The 20th Century arguably began around 1898 or so, and continued on, perhaps, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

2.  An interesting sympathetic depiction of a woman engaging in prostitution due to economic desperation in found in the 1946 Italian film Paisa'.

Last edition:  

Saturday, December 29, 1945. Korean protests on US decision.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1948, Adolf Hitler, Army, Cartoons, Eva Braun, It was because of World War Two, J.R. Williams, Korea, Occupation of Korea, Operation Blacklist Forty, U.S. Coast Guard

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels, part two.