It’s just a torn piece of paper, made of cheap stock, faded. The ink on it is stained — the handwriting, shaky. Still, seven decades after someone took pen to paper, the words on that scrap carry an emotional punch:
Ship went down Jan. 7 – 43
Jap Sub hit us at
6:16 PM
The note turned up in May 1943 in a bottle in the St. Johns River near Jacksonville, Fla., an ocean away from where most Japanese submarine activity took place during World War II. A dredge captain saw the bottle, opened it and quickly called the FBI.
Was it real? A hoax? Agents never figured that out. “No action is contemplated,” an official wrote. The report, plus the torn paper, were filed away — and, presumably, forgotten.
They eventually came to the National Archives at Atlanta, the nation's largest repository of World War II documents. That long-ago message will be one of the exhibits Saturday in "We'll Back Our Boys: The Southern Home Front During World War II." The symposium is the archives' second annual scholarly presentation.
The session will feature authors and historians who've used the archives in their research. The guests include Denise Kiernan, author of the best-seller "The Girls of Atomic City," an account of the women who worked in Oak Ridge, Tenn., helping build the atomic bomb; Courtney Tollison, an assistant history professor at Furman University, author of "World War II and Upcountry South Carolina: 'We Just Did Everything We Could' "; and Edward Hatfield, a doctoral candidate in history at Emory University who'll speak on the war's impact in Atlanta.
Archive employees readying for the symposium “found some amazing things,” said Joel Walker, an education specialist at the facility, located in Morrow.
Among them:
- A plan to improve Atlanta traffic, which apparently was bad during the war. (Who knew?)
- An account of U-boat sightings off the North Carolina coast.
- A report detailing suspected spying activity in Atlanta.
- An "oddball map" of the Normandy coast, drawn two months after the 1944 invasion.
- A photo of two men minding a press in Gadsden, Ala. The image, in black and white, highlights differences between the duo. One is white, the other, black.
The photo, taken when the races just didn’t mingle, sticks in Walker’s memory.
“It gives you a little shiver,” Walker said. “Somebody’s attitude was changing, just a little bit.”
The war was a turning point for women who got jobs in the “secret city” of Oak Ridge, headquarters for the Manhattan Project, America’s entry into the nuclear age.
“What the war provided … was this incredible opportunity,” said Kiernan, whose research on Oak Ridge brought her to the regional archive. Women who had limited career prospects before the war suddenly found themselves “working on massive machines, driving trucks and jeeps and making good money.”
The war created social change across the South, Tollison said. She and her students interviewed older Greenville-area residents — war veterans and civilians — to personalize a momentous period in the upcountry of her home state.
One couple, from Pennsylvania, opened an Italian restaurant, Greenville’s first, catering to soldiers who missed their mothers’ cooking. The duo, known as “Cap” and “Mama” Capri, prospered; today, a chain of Capri’s eateries is a reminder of earlier days.
Tollison, who researched the upcountry at the Morrow archive, credits the repository for helping guide her work. “They have a ton of wonderful, wonderful stuff,” she said.
The war changed the demographics of Atlanta and the state, Hatfield said. People left farms for work in the city; many, he said, never went back when the war ended. The 1950 federal census concluded that more Georgians lived in cities rather than on farms — a first in the history of the state.
A world war also meant a change in people’s worldviews, Hatfield added. The civil rights movement of the 1950s, he said, had its roots in events that took place a decade earlier: blacks who’d fought for their country would not accept an unequal status quo when they returned.
“It was a pivotal time in American history,” he said.
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