http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10979/pub_detail.asp
On September 16th, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt, affronted by Germany’s increasing belligerence instituted the first peacetime draft in the United States. In May 1941, the President declared a national emergency requiring massive industrialization to manufacture weapons, ships, combat vehicles and ammunition. New shipyards were commissioned particularly since Germany was sinking more merchant vessels than were being produced.
By September of that year “Liberty Fleet Day” was officially declared to launch the first ships in the renewed American fleet. Ship builders were challenged by President Roosevelt to increase the fleet by fifty percent.
On December 7, 1941, 183 Japanese warplanes attacked Hickam Field in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war.
On 5 December 1942 a presidential executive order changed the age range for the draft from 21-45 to 18-38, and ended voluntary enlistment which brought the total number of men drafted to one out of five.
Thousands of American men enlisted adding their numbers to those already drafted for service. Over 150,000 American women made noble contributions in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. The Bronze Star was awarded to 565 women for meritorious service overseas. A total of 657 WACs received medals and citations at the end of the war.
However, a two-front war required women to fill the gaps on the home front as well. The monumental decrease in the male work force imperiled the supply of munitions, ships, ordnance and all the goods for the war effort as well as the general population’s needs.
The government issued ads, appeals and columns urging women to fill the gaps.
And, the women responded. Neighborly feuds, racial barriers and religious bigotry were cast aside as grandmothers and neighbors volunteered their services for child-care to those who left homes every day to work in plants, factories, assembly lines, ship yards and munitions plants. Before the declaration of war millions of women had entered the work force but after Pearl Harbor the number grew to nineteen million. Of those, almost six million women worked in war related jobs….welding, drilling, metalwork, carpentry, lumber, building and maintaining railways, driving, loading freight, operating construction machinery, and building tanks among dozens of jobs in the shipping and aircraft industry. They were in the front line of war production and became known as “production soldiers.”