IN 1944, GLADYS POWELL WAS A WIDOW AT 48, living alone in Milton, in poor health and suffering from hypertension, the same condition that had contributed to her husband’s death a year earlier. The former no-nonsense southern belle didn’t have her daughters nearby; they had all started new chapters of their lives in other parts of the country. Gladys was in the Red Cross in Arizona; Elinor was in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, also stationed in Arizona; and the youngest, Ruth, was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

The Powells were hardly the only family to be separated and scattered as a result of the war. The workforce was transformed as people left their jobs to serve in the military, leaving dozens of industries inadequately staffed, and the devastatingly large number of casualties resulted in broken families in addition to vacant jobs.

The staggering numbers of men and women entering the armed services triggered fundamental shifts in the American workforce. The number of men in the army more than quadrupled between 1941 and 1943, from 1.5 million to 6.9 million. By 1945, the total number in the army jumped to 8.3 million. Out of that number, 73 percent served overseas, spending an average of sixteen months abroad. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million Americans served in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard combined.1

Farms, factories, plants, and canneries had to figure out a way to cope with the sudden lack of manpower. In particular, cotton farmers needed pickers. Cotton was a crop that wasn’t managed by agricultural machinery yet; cotton picking required backbreaking manual labor in order to extract the cotton from the thorny bush. Cotton was vital to the war effort, but demands for it had begun much earlier. Besides clothing and linens, cotton had been used since the early twentieth century to make rubber tires and airplane wing covers. In Arizona, it had become a substantial cash crop, central to the state’s economy. Several tire companies had moved there, including Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, which set up factories in 1917 in a town later named in its honor. By 1920, there were 800,000 acres of cotton in Arizona.2 After the Great War, the cotton boom ended—until the coveted fabric was needed again for World War II. When American men continued to enlist, leaving the work of sharecropping (and particularly picking cotton) unattended, the U.S. military took advantage of another source of cheap labor: prisoners of war.