Harriet Downing still remembers exactly where she was on Dec. 7, 1941, – the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“Dero and I were dating then and we were sitting under the overhang in front of (Western Kentucky University’s) Van Meter (Auditorium), and someone came by saying the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor,” said Harriet Downing, the wife of former WKU president and World War II veteran Dero Downing. “And by nightfall it was quiet over campus because we knew the young men there would be going to fight.”

World War II was a crucial war for Americans, and as men from across the country enlisted or were drafted to serve, women were left to pick up where the men left off.

“It was just a different world then,” said Georganna Hagerman, the wife of WWII veteran Bart Hagerman.

Born and raised in Bowling Green and a graduate of Bowling Green High School, Hagerman met her husband in junior high school. By high school they were dating.

“He was a football player and I was a cheerleader,” she said. “He turned 18 in November, and he volunteered to go.”

Hagerman said she remembers when the war broke out. Many family friends headed off to war – she and other friends went to the L&N Depot or to the Armory to send them off – and it wasn’t long before WKU had few boys left on campus.

Soon, however, WKU began a program in which men were trained in the Air Force, which she said made social life good for the girls in Bowling Green.

“Ms. Nell Gooch Travelstead was a music teacher at Western, but she knew everybody and how to get things done,” she said. “She would organize the dances, which were at what is now the library. The Armory would have dances, too. Once a month, either the Armory or Western would have a dance.”

Harriet Downing said Dero Downing enlisted in the naval V-7 program in the spring of 1942, which allowed him to finish his four years at Western before going to midshipman’s school. But one of the conditions was that he could not marry before finishing midshipman’s school.

“If he would have waited, there was a good chance he would have been drafted into the Army,” she said. “We knew he was going. There was no question of that.

“You accept what you can’t change, and we really had no choice on it.”

Dero finished school in October 1943, and the couple were married two days later.

“And I followed him from base to base as he was transferred until March of 1944 when he was sent to Europe,” said Harriet Downing, who remembers being with Dero in New Orleans, where he left on a ship going up the Atlantic coast. “We had our first child in October of 1944, while he was in Europe. I was pregnant when he was deployed. I definitely was. We had hoped so.”

During the war, women found themselves in positions they were not accustomed to, doing work they normally would not have done.

“A lot of women went into the mills, even the steel mills to work,” Harriet Downing said. “Everyone cooperated because we knew we had to support the efforts happening.”

Harriet Downing said she worked at the draft board in Arkansas a little, and in West Virginia, Dero Downing’s uncle had a furniture store, and she would work there off and on.

Hagerman, who was still in high school at the time, remembers working with a group with the American Red Cross that would knit scarves, hats and gloves to send with the troop trains that came into the L&N Depot, or it would make sandwiches and coffee for the troops.

“Someone would call and ask if a group could come down to the depot,” she said. “The troops couldn’t get off the train. They would stick their heads out the window for their sandwich or coffee.”

Janet O. Hamilton was in Morganfield working in payroll for one of the builders with the War Department. They were constructing Camp Breckenridge, an army camp on 36,000 acres in Henderson, Union and Webster counties.

It was there she met her husband, A.G. Hamilton, a civil engineer with the War Department who was deferred twice before being deployed overseas to build airfields.

“That’s how we met. In June 1942,” she said. “We started going together, and we didn’t know how much longer he was going to be deferred and in September he asked me to marry him, and I agreed to that. And we were married November 6, 1942.”

Hamilton said her husband got his orders after that and had to leave the first week of December – “on a train going to California. He was trained in the Mohave Desert.”

“And I continued working,” she said. “When he left, my sister said, ‘you are going to be lonely,’ and it was lonely, but we wrote each other all the time. We had a code system.”

Soldiers were in constant communication with loved ones stateside. Hagerman said as they got older they realized how important communication was for mothers, wives and girlfriends.

“We were always looking for mail,” she said. “It was the only thing to depend on.”

Harriet Downing said she and Dero Downing wrote each other a lot.

“They were little V-mail letters, you probably haven’t seen a V-mail letter,” she said. “There were so many things we didn’t know about until he came home, like D-Day. I knew something was going on because I didn’t get a letter. After D-Day, I got a stack of letters because mail was held.”

All mail was censored, Hagerman said.

“Everything a service person wrote was looked at,” she said. “You might get a letter with a phrase or something cut out.”

With no television, news was broadcast through the local radio station or by newspapers. Hagerman said they also had newsreels, which was “almost like watching TV.” She said when something significant happened, the Daily News would sent out extras – young men touting a paper and yelling “Extra, Extra,” which would also alert people to turn on their radios.

“That’s just the way it was,” she said.

Dero Downing came home in July of 1945. He had to stay on the ship for the first 30 days, but he could get off the ship at night. He was in the Boston Harbor.

“He called and said I have an apartment, and I want you and Catherine, the baby to come stay and bring the ration books. Then sugar was rationed, gas rationed, shoes were rationed. … I didn’t know how to cook, but his friends were so happy to have their feet on solid ground, they didn’t care what I fed them.”

Harriet Downing said she was there when the Japanese surrendered.

Janet Hamilton said her husband came home in the middle of the night.

“He had a taxi bring him in all the way from Indianapolis to Morganfield,” she said. “I didn’t know he was coming.”

Although the war took years from men and women – mothers, wives and fianc/s – everyone left behind contributed to the war effort.

“The difference in WWII and other wars since then has been the fact that everyone in the country was involved and supportive of the U.S. in the war,” Harriet Downing said. “All wives were in the same circumstances, working to keep each other’s spirits up. It was a combined effort.”