Victory City: A History Of New York And New Yorkers During WWII, Strausbaugh - Incomplete

         "In the decades surrounding World War II, New York was a far larger presence in America and around the world than it is today." It was the largest city in the world and 40% of America's exports and imports came through its harbor. An amazing 850,000 New Yorkers wore a uniform during the war. The man who ran the Manhattan project, and the people who betrayed it, were from the city.

            As news of the Pearl Harbor attack spread through the city that fateful Sunday, reactions were many and varied, but none more poignant than that of the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. After the announcement of the bombing, the orchestra played the Star Spangled Banner.  Soldiers and sailors reported to their duty stations.  Starting Monday, recruitment centers were open 24 hours per day. In the early months of the war, anywhere from 5 to 24 U-Boats patrolled the east coast, with particular attention paid to New York harbor. In the first six months of 1942, Germany snk 226 freighters in US waters. Eventually, the Reich was unable to project that much power that far.

        Throughout the city, businesses converted to war time production. The fabled team at Steinway made army-green-colored uprights and glider planes. That said, by 1942 the city had more unemployed than in 1939, as most of the major defense contracts went to the large industrial states in the midwest. LaGuardia successfully pushed FDR to utilize the garment industry to manufacture uniforms. The Navy began to increase hiring in Brooklyn. "The wartime boom had finally come to New York City and it spread through the entire town." Vast amounts were spent on entertainment by the millions in uniform who passed through the city.

        A great topic - a great city - but an author who, in a 10 page chapter, covers a dozen people doing twelve different things with no sense of narrative or continuity led me to call it a day.