Two years ago, students from Washington College’s StoryQuest oral history program began to seek out and preserve World War II stories and artifacts. The enthusiastic community response—over 80 stories and hundreds of letters from vets to loved ones back home, rationing books, photographs and other artifacts from the war years were collected—inspired this summer’s effort to uncover more stories about the 1940s civilian experience during World War II.
Fifteen student historians are seeking to interview ordinary people who were children or adults during the late 1930s and the 1940s.
“We have a special interest in capturing personal stories of what everyday life was like on the Eastern Shore during this time. Our goal is to create a rich resource for future researchers in order to better understand World War II and the ‘home front’ efforts,” says project instructor Michael Buckley.
The StoryQuest program is sponsored by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and is funded by a grant from the national archival preservation corporation Iron Mountain. Interviews are being collected across Kent, Queen Anne’s, and Cecil counties. Photographs are taken of artifacts and personal papers from the war years to be archived alongside personal recorded interviews at the College’s Miller Library.
Stories collected so far include this one from Roger Smith: “One of the most vivid memories I have of World War II was growing up as a teenager (in Church Hill). It seemed as though all of a sudden I woke up one morning and there were no young men in my community. They were gone. There were only teenagers . . . and older people. Our mail carrier was gone. I went to school one morning and the principal wasn’t there. Several of my friends’ older brothers were gone—either working in defense industry or being in the military. The teenagers took the jobs, and some of the older men took the jobs.”
Kent County resident Arthur Starr found himself at the center of the most consequential and dangerous operations of World War II—the initial assault on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Starr recalls landing on the beach and being under fire from Japanese planes: “We had six or seven hundred ships going in there and I thought we lost the war because this Japanese plane came down, and everybody was shooting at it, and nobody hit it. And I was thinking no one knew how to shoot.”
If you have World War II memories to share or artifacts from 1939 to 1945, please contact StoryQuest project leaders: Michael Buckley at [email protected] /410-810-7156 or Lani Seikaly at [email protected] / 443-282-0931.
Roger Smith with WC student Nick Coviello who interviewed Smith for the StoryQuest World War II Home Front Project.
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