Arizona opinion: Arizona “occupations,” spring 1942

“Unit Seeks Enrollment of Every Eligible U.S. Student” The unit: the U.S. Army Air Force

The announcement: Published in the May 8, 1942 edition of the Arizona Daily Star.

The enrollment venue: The University of Arizona; chemistry-physics building for mental exams; the infirmary for physicals.

An April 29, 1942 Daily Star article ventured that the War Department hoped to meet future Army Air Force personnel requirements “without abruptly ending students’ studies.”

As to 1942 willingness to commit to training via military curricula, the pages of the Daily Star reported significant undergrad and graduate student readiness.

Those March-May articles would likely have caught my father’s thirty-five-year-old eyes during the eight weeks of 1942 when his Engineer Aviation Battalion was stationed at Davis-Monthan Field. An April 6 top-of-the-front-page photo of Army Air Force units passing in review caught my eye. The grainy photograph nudged me to speculate about his eight weeks at Davis-Monthan.

By the Spring of 1942, my father had served the initial year of his enlistment which would put civilian life on hold for another four years.

Even at a remove, civilian-life diversions would have been revisited, if only in newsprint: the “meetings,” “cards,” and “stakes” at Moltacqua might have been followed. Far from ringside, the barracks would have celebrated Joe Louis’s Madison Square Garden title defense that netted $50,000 for the Army Emergency Relief fund.

During my father’s Spring “semester” in Tucson, the barracks might well have noted the Daily Star’s May 3 article announcing “new accent on vocational training in Arizona schools” which would revise social science courses. The mission: “high school students who will soon go to war should get some idea of what they are fighting for, what our nation’s position is in this war, and why it started, so they will be conditioned against the propaganda from our enemies.”

That same article explained that school calendars were to be adjusted “so that youth can be released to labor on farms, to meet the shortage of men and to help keep up the nation’s food production.”

Also covered was the state’s department of education’s emphasis on “the necessity to increase mathematical subjects so students can meet navy and army needs – and the desirability of achieving health courses to bring down the high percentage of draftee rejections on a health basis, and of the importance of model airplane projects in school shops.”

Giving the preparations underway at my father’s battalion, an April 17 Daily Star article likely received attention: “As army bombers soar high in the night skies, on training flights, above Tucson, student pilots and bombardiers alike can peer down on the town’s center to see a cluster of lights burning nightly until dawn dims their reflection.”

The high school seems to have been the site where “future plane and shipbuilding was being made more certain and secure by Tucson men and women attending classes in electric welding and aircraft sheet-metal work from 11 pm to 6 am.”

A barracks-pleaser: A prominent single-panel cartoon on the funny pages of April 15 depicted a butler-attended tea in which a matron puffs, “We are so proud of our daughter — she just got a job as a machinist.”

The May 2, 1942 edition of the Daily Star carried a text from the U.S. Office of Education’s wartime commission that urged year-round operation of high schools. That front-page story noted that non-compulsory day and evening courses for teens and adults were to focus on “mathematics, science, English, and social studies adapted to the specific needs of the armed forces and war production.”

In addition, new curricula were to be designed so that “girls and women would be trained to take over roles in business and trade as replacements for those drawn into the armed forces or war production.”

And further, summer sessions were to be organized for “intensive promotion of physical fitness of those likely to enter the military services.” Again, the emphasis on mental and physical readiness.

An April 15 article indicated that teachers would be expected to work in defense preparedness industries and farms during summer months.

Prominently on its editorial page, the Arizona Daily Star published Walter Lippmann’s New York Tribune columns (“Today-Tomorrow”). The concluding lines of Lippmann’s April 20 column may well have received attention from those in trades classes, and from my father and many others at Davis-Monthan, as well. That closing expressed alarm as to those, here and abroad, who did not comprehend the designs of Hitler’s National Socialist Party and its war machine: “Hitler’s military mortally threatens Allied vital interests.” Sensing the need to add further alarm about insidious fifth-column activity, Lippmann warned, “Those who do not acknowledge this or seek to hide this from us are, whatever their motives, doing the work of our mortal enemies.”