Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest

by Klancy de Nevers (Editor), Lucy Hart (Editor)

Early in 1941 the Grays Harbor Post, in Aberdeen, Washington, introduced its readers to The Kitchen Critic, a new column chronicling life in nearby Cohassett Beach. By the end of the year the U.S. was at war, and columnist Kathy Hogan's weekly dispatches turned to soldiers, rationing, and the barbed wire that lined the sand dunes around her weathered cottage. Today, fifty years later, Kathy Hogan's writings provide a window onto how one Pacific Northwest community responded to World War II. Cohassett Beach Chronicles, a collection of Hogan's columns from the war years, offers a remarkable social history of the war at home. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought U.S. troops to Cohassett Beach and to towns up and down the West Coast. With sharp wit and perception, Hogan writes of civilians valiantly coping with this friendly occupation and wartime scarcity. Her neighbors - loggers, commercial fishermen, Finnish cranberry farmers - learn to live with blackouts, blimps, and a ban on beachcombing. From her victory garden, Hogan watches troops - city boys unnerved by the tall timber and farmers' sons in awe of the ocean - come and go. Hogan's weekly descriptions of life on the home front capture America's wartime mood. Together, her columns document the war's tremendous impact at home, from the internment of Japanese Americans and the spread of government regulations to the changing role of women. They also reveal that in spite of the war effort life, in many ways, continued as it always had. There was still time to pick blackberries, gossip at the local tavern, and attend the occasional Friday night dance.

320 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Nancy Schielmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cohassett Beach Chronicles is mainly a collection of articles written during WWII by a woman living near Westport, WA. They document life on a homefront that was perhaps more vulnerable to coastal attack than most of us today are aware of, and give a clear – and often amusing – picture of what rationing and government bureaucracy meant in the day-to-day existence of the common folk. Sometimes, not much, and the rose-colored glasses are definitely missing. Stop trying to find realism in fiction, and read this instead - it's fascinating!

The last article included that muses on the end of the war holds a lesson we can learn from today: that it takes time to return to what we once thought of as normal, and that it will probably never really return to what it was. The essence of life, which is what this book is really all about.

The articles are in order of publication, and are accompanied by a running timeline down the margins of the book that detail what was going on in the nation and in the war during that month. I think I learned more about WWII just by reading this bit of nostalgia than I did in all the history classes I took in school.