The House That Went to War — 1941–1945 (2027 Edition, PDF)

Volume I priced what the war cost at the counter. This is the other half of the ledger: what the house gave.

Every American household ran its own small war-production system — a garden plot, a scrap pile, a Series E bond, a blacked-out window, a letter folded down to a photograph. None of it happened by accident. Washington designed it, tracked it, and kept the records. This book reconstructs that system the same way Volume I reconstructed the ration books: from the government's own figures, converted to what they mean today.

Inside:

- The Series E bond system: payroll drives, denominations, and what a $25 bond actually cost and returned

- Victory gardens by the numbers: 21 million gardens in 1943, growing 42% of all the produce raised in the country that year

- The home kitchen as a supply line: 4.1 billion jars of home-canned goods, and 711 million pounds of salvaged fat turned back into the war effort

- Scrap drives: the tonnage of rubber, metal, and paper a single town could collect in a weekend

- Blackouts and the Office of Civilian Defense: the wardens, the drills, the household rules

- V-mail: how 37 mailbags of letters became one bag of film — and what that meant for a family waiting on word

- A closing ledger that gathers all nine household systems into one place — bond entry price, fat and scrap poundage, jars canned, garden produce, blood pints, V-mail volume — as the national totals each program recorded, every line with its own date range and named source

- Roughly 60+ pages, set in 13-point type for comfortable reading

Format: instant PDF download, print-friendly, delivered immediately after purchase.

Guarantee: the Cited-Source Guarantee — two promises, not one. Read it, and if it doesn't earn its place on your shelf, write us within 7 days of purchase and you get a full refund. And if a figure doesn't trace to the order, bulletin, table and page we cite for it, tell us: we correct the record in the next edition — however long after your purchase you find it — and refund every cent if you write within 7 days of buying.

This is history, not financial advice.