The doomer "Were Going to War" threads got me wondering what our grandparents  in the 40s generation did to prep.
There appears to have been lots of  shortages and rationing of critical items. At least some knew  what was coming. My Grand mother always saved bacon  grease so Glycerin  could be recovered from it. Recycling of news papers, to metal cans contributed to the "War Effort"
Joyce Hornady and Vernon Speer started making bullets from  fired copper 22 cases.Ammo was very hard to get.  There was rationing shortages  of static items. People planted Victory Gardens. Canning was more popular than now. People joined the Civil Air Patrol and coastal watches.  German U boats were sinking ships off the East coast within sight of land. The West coast were terrified of a Jap invasion. Then there were rumors Mexico was in league with the Germans ... again like WW1. There was sabotage.

I guess what I'm asking what else did they do to prep for the upcoming war??
Hopefully our generation won't have to face what my parents and grand parents did.

Well I guess in a lot of the country they already were used to being self sustaining.

My grandparents all had gardens and livestock even though they also worked in industrial stuff too

I don't have any grandparents left that I can ask.    But a lot of things involved a lot more manual labor that pretty much anyone could do.  Didn't need electricity for most parts of life.  Sure, it was nice, but people lived without it.  Hell, the Amish still do, for the most part (outside of their businesses) around here.

Victory Gardens in both the UK and Estados Unidos.  Merry-Cans were also encouraged to raise rabbits for meat.  During the Great Depression, some Merry-Cans raised chicken for extra income.  It was a perfect sedgeway into WW II for supplementing protein.

Casemate Publishing has the British Home Front manual which is a fun read:  https://www.casematepublishers.com/9781612008677/the-home-front-pocket-manual-19391945/

So get your heirloom seeds, make some raised garden beds (less stooping and easier on the back).  If you have critters, compost the feces for fertilizer.

BTW, the nation of Columbia never lets their soil rest (Bible tells us to rest it every seventh year).  Don't need to since the children pick up goat droppings and that's used to replenish the soil.  Chicken sh*t is also good too. Juan Valdez and his burro knew and took care of their land.  Local Mennonite chicken rancher uses goat and chicken sh*t on his soil.  He also hauls in compost (cow manure) to fertilize his soil.

One neat thing about WW II was all the recycling.  Tin, aluminium, steel, kitchen fats/oils (needed for glycerin) returned to the butcher, rubber, paper.  Unlike the Soviets our paper was of superior quality.  It's one reason why a lot of Soviet sniper manuals didn't survive WW II.  Cheap acid based (wood pulp) paper doesn't last.  

Both UK and Estados Unidos implemented a rationing system so there were shortages and people learned to substitute.  Oleo (margarine) was one of those ersatz/replacement items.  .  Buy now before you need it (but you'll be called a hoarder).  

Learn to ration.  Don't waste.

Funny thing was an Italian or German PoW here ate better than the American civilian.  Plenty of milk, butter and meat (and the Germans starved our guys and made them work).

Lots of things were very limited and rations; others, not so. I remember a story of a UK family who boarded a foreigner (Norwegian) sailor who knew how to cook whale meat. Whale wasn't rationed, as it needed special skills to cook it. So this family ate quite well throughout the war.

And of course, the black market flourished! If you didn't have a car, or used it very little, you could trade your gasoline stamps for most anything.

Interesting thread.

I have my grandparents ration books, too. Coupons for everything from sugar to coffee to tires to shoes.

War IS coming. Don't wait until it's here to learn how to plant a garden. Make sure your vehicles and wardrobe are in good shape.

I have a copy of this book, "Food will Win the War". It'll give you both ideas and a perspective on what it means to live in a country at war:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15464

I recall my grandparents talking about it.  They lived in a small to medium sized town.

They said Sugar, Meat and Dairy were rationed and they had ration cards for those things.

They were able to get around some of the rationing by knowing some farmers and ranchers.

They mentioned one rancher was selling "goat meat" to them and some locals which helped a lot.

But it was in fact beef. But I guess the law said any Beef could not be sold on the side and had to all go to stores or the government.


It seems connections were very important and useful.

People in general were more self sufficient back then and grew gardens and preserved the extra or traded it for other items.
For a long term prep you could try some pemmican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican
Interesting thread BTW.

both sets of grandparents were farmers

one had minimal electricity no plumbing except for the kitchen sink off a pump well, crap in the outhouse, decent sized farm 1 tractor no car a few of all the usual animals their own food crops beside the main cash crop.  no debt and very frugal in all things, no radio, no phone.  sons too young to go to war so except for the occasional newspaper maybe half a dozen trips to the nearest town via horse and wagon and shooting the shit with the neighbors the war did not really affect them much.

Remember that these folks had just lived through a decade of the Great Depression.

They'd been in raw survival mode as their normal matter of daily living

Hopefully were not on a parallel course, but it might be wise to learn from that past.

FDR was sending P-40s to China and war supplies to England. I wonder If farmers were growing extra crops?? Were we producing extra oil and steel inventories before WW2 started?

Besides putting an extra can of beans in the shopping cart, keeping our vehicle tanks full, and paying attention to world events what are we missing??  Some of the WW2
generation were caught off guard.I dont want to be in that situation for my families sake.

I would also suggest learning to can veggies and meat.
If you guys have a local farmers market you can usually get the freshest veggies there unless you will have a garden.
Learning to garden would be a good first step also.

Lots of the stuff done during WWII were not as direct as things appeared to be.

We had a good supply of gasoline , the reason it was rationed was because we were desperate for rubber .

Much of the scrap metal (tin cans , aluminum cooking pans , lamp posts ) that was collected never made it to the end of the pipeline .

My Grandfather worked in the silk mills in Manchester CT including lots of overtime .His family had been hit very very bad by the great depression . He had gone nearly 10 years with hardly any work .

The whole world had been in a depression for damn near a decade.  Everyone was already in survival mode.   People saved everything because they couldn’t afford anything at a basic survival level in much of the country.  They grew and canned their own produce, hunted and fished to supplement their protein if they didn’t live in an urban area (even in urban areas there was fishing, and some….hunting…depending on how hungry you were)

My dad took his shotgun on the bus to the end of the line in Bosie.
That’s where the duck ponds were. He said he would keep one and give rest
To people  on the return bus ride. Home.He said he only used #9 shot as that is all he could acquire from the army base where he was a Sargent .

and in general, the boys that went to war gained weight

"Learning to garden" means getting your crops in the ground RFN. If your land isn't tilled and ready to plant, you are a year behind!

This is largely what Ragnar Benson's Survival Poaching is about.

Yep.  There are a couple of books with very short first hand accounts. We Had Everything But Money & When the Banks Closed, Our Hearts Opened.  We had a thread here a few years back that discussed WW II books.  Many of the soldiers were Great Depression Era children and their books could describe their formulative years growing up in the Great Depression.

Now that's a Godly man.  Hayseuss would approve and he got his ticket punched to Heaven.  

Not in the my area.  Too soon.  April is the time to start sprouting seeds here (but the weather can really f*ck up things like hail storm or overnight freeze).  It reduced my harvest for a couple of years.

I agree that it should at minimum be tilled no matter what part of the country you're in.
I generally won't plant anything until early May to make sure there's no frost to come.

This.

People were tougher back then. Even many poor Americans have much greater access to food and basic utilities now than in 1940.

My family "back then" struggled and worked hard just to survive. I imagine many other families did the same.

My grand parents went through the depression. Grand mom grew potted plants for money. Clay pots cost money, there were no plastic ones.grand dad collected empty oil vans from service stations. Cut the lids out, these were steel cans.got them for free, as an added bounds they had a little oil left in them.
A funnel in the apple tree to a glass gallon and he had free oil.
I do the same today minus the apple tree.

Read the excellent book “Don’t You Know There’s a War On?”

Things like radios, cars, household appliances weren’t made at all. Can you imagine your radio breaking, not being able to have it fixed, and you have to go for years before a new one is even available to buy? I bet there was a huge market for used items.

The newspapers of the time are a great resource.

ETA: my dad’s grandparents were the ones I knew. They lived in a suburb close to Detroit (Lincoln Park, in the Downriver area), married in 1940. My father was born exactly three months before the US had war forced on them. My grandfather worked for the US Steel Ecorse, MI plant. He was a fireman in the plant, so he didn’t go to war himself. Essential industry in a job a woman couldn’t do, I was told growing up. They had a house. I assume my grandmother grew a garden in their yard. They had electricity, running water, coal fired furnace. Typical suburban lifestyle of the time.

We still have snow on the ground with more in the forecast.

Hunting devastated the game population so badly that when a deer was actually harvested, it would make the newspaper.  Considering that the average man in those days would have had an  open sight rifle, a shotgun with pumpkin balls, or a 22 to hunt with, their range would have been more limited than what is common today.  Also considering that if one was to hunt at night, the light the average farmer had was a lantern.

Today, we have scopes, night vision, and thermal sights.  Suppressors are common, as are the listed night vision accessories.  The absolute slaughter of wild game and unattended farm animals would be so rapid that anyone who is counting on hunting as a food source, is being foolish.  Consider also that unemployed rural folks may very well turn to market hunting to sell game for income if they are otherwise impoverished, further depleting the game supply.

Hunting is a sport that may provide some food when times are easy and people are obeying the game laws.  It should not be counted on as a food source when people are gong hungry.

Amen Lumper

A post WW2 Joke about the end of the Depression

Man walks into the barber shop and happily announces
"Boys this depression is over."
"On my way into town today a rabbit crossed in front of me and nobody was chasing it."

Most families or at least many were still in the tail end of the Great Depression.   The approach was often kind of simple...   If Dad was lucky enough to have a job, he brought his pay home. They paid the mortgage, the insurance on the house.  They stuffed a dollar in a coffee can "for a rainy day".  They bought basic groceries like sugar, and flour and bacon.  Once in a while they bought new shoes for Jimmy, and Jimmy's old shoes got passed to Joey, and Joey's old shoes got handed down to Johnny.  

If they didn't have a job, people lined up for work through the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Forget preps.  You got handed a shovel, a jacket, and three hots and a cot in exchange for 40 or 50 hours of manual labor.  These CCC workers built roads in Yellowstone, dug drainage in Florida, etc.  No preps.  It was more a case of "this is how I get to eat today and tomorrow".  

Preparations were pretty damned simple:  A couple bucks a month stuffed in a coffee can.  Mom tended the garden and canned everything except the grass.  It was reuse, repurpose, or do without.   There simply wasnt enough left over cash to be "prepping" as we know it.   The root cellar was full of quart jars of green beans and beets, with a few bushel baskets of potatoes in the corner.    There were chickens in the back yard.

If you look at world war 2 civilian life, its kind of evident that 'preps" were much more sophisticated. Ration books and coupons and product shortages were REAL.  It was worse in the UK:  Wolfpack U-boat tactics during the battle of the Atlantic came awfully close to starving Britain out of the war.  Legions of British kids had vitamin deficient diets...  A lack of vitamin C (no citrus) caused the Brits to search for alternatives...   As a result, the Black Currant Cordial became a childhood treat and replacement source of Vitamin C.  We event got this, I guess we will substitute that....

The government got caught off guard too.  And it was more of the same "what will be good enough?".  In a purely reactionary "Holy shit, this is desperate!" reaction we came up with items like the STEN submachine gun and the  Liberty Ship.

I really dont think there was a lot of actual "prepping' in a "lets get ready for war" sense.  Most of the USA was "we already fought a European war.  No thanks.  we are out of this one".  Churchill wanted help, but we - by and large - opted out.  It wasn't until the morning of December 7, 1941 that we woke up and thought "okay. Enough.  Fuck it.  Lets go kick ass".