Pascagoula's World War II Home Front: Junior Red Cross, Victory Gardens and War Funds

Pascagoula, Mississippi — an American World War II Heritage City — shows how ordinary civilians supported the war effort. Local newspaper reports from 1941 to 1945 record children, shipyard workers and whole communities pitching in.

Children in the Junior Red Cross

In November 1944, the Chronicle-Star reported that about 6,000 children in Jackson County belonged to the American Junior Red Cross. Working in classroom groups under teacher-sponsors, they made slippers, lap robes, lapboards, menu covers, holiday tray favors and toys for the blind, and filled Christmas stockings for hospitalized service members.

• Schools in Pascagoula and Moss Point had active groups.
• Wade Public School and Daisy-Vestry reported 100% enrollment; students at Our Lady of Victories collected more than 1,000 Christmas cards for Army hospitals.
• The Pascagoula Colored School — in a South where schools were segregated by race — was the first school in the county to report 100% enrollment.

Black residents' contributions

African American residents gave despite segregation. In 1944, the women of the Nightingale Bridge Club held a silver tea at the Carver Village auditorium and gave the $25 raised to the American Red Cross, and the chairman of the War Fund drive thanked Black citizens for their support. That year, Annie Wimbs, the county demonstration agent, organized Black women to sew — starting with slippers for patients in Army and Navy hospitals on the coast.

War fund drives

A War Fund drive ending in November 1943 drew gifts from across the community:

In 1942, the county's branch of the State Salvage for Victory Program began organizing the collection of rubber and metal for defense.

A victory garden in sandy soil

In June 1945, the paper celebrated S. A. Adkins, a farmer at heart who had moved to Pascagoula two years earlier to work at the Ingalls Shipyard. Neighbors told him nothing would grow in the sandy soil. With one bag of fertilizer and plenty of hoeing, his small victory garden — squeezed in beside a play area for his four-year-old son and a chicken pen — produced watermelons, cantaloupes, beans, tomatoes, a pumpkin for Halloween, and a six-pound turnip 26 inches around. His secret, he said modestly: plant, hoe hard and water every day. See also the NPS on victory gardens.

The first Army recreation camp

In March 1941, before the United States entered the war, Pascagoula was chosen for the first recreational camp in the country for Army troops in training. Civilian Conservation Corps trainees from Ocean Springs built it at the Municipal Beach Park, under Major Breth:

• room for about 500 soldiers at a time, in wood-floored, screened tents, kept by a corporal and eight men
• troops from Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mobile and other training centers trucked in for weekends of golf, sailing, swimming and fishing
• meals by local contractors
• similar camps planned for Biloxi, Gulfport, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola and Panama City

The Army, Breth explained, wanted recreation for its trainees without simply dropping them on nearby towns.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Civilian Volunteerism and Contributions to the Home Front in Pascagoula, Mississippi, World War II Heritage City," National Park Service, and the 1941–1945 Chronicle-Star reports it presents; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson gives the 1943 drive's total as $9,870.24, but its listed gifts add to more, so no total is given here.