A Nebraska Town Played Host to 6 Million GIs During WWII

North Platte, Nebraska canteen, where the women of the area volunteered their time to prepare food for passing servicemen during World War II. Photograph Courtesy of the Lincoln County Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska

Our story begins with a case of mistaken identity.

Just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Rae Wilson, age 26 and a store clerk, heard that her brother’s National Guard Company D was due to pass through town on Dec. 17. She spread the word around North Platte, Nebraska, population 12,000, and was stunned when hundreds of people bearing gifts and food for the troops showed up at the train station. They waited eagerly for the arrival of Nebraska’s Company D, only to discover, when the train, arrived that the troops aboard were Company D, but of the Kansas National Guard.

After a moment of confusion, the townspeople swarmed the outside of the train, passing baked goods, chewing gum, cigarettes, and other treats through the open windows to the troops inside. Having quickly realized the boost in morale this hospitality gave to the soldiers on their way to war, the next morning Wilson wrote a letter to the local paper asking for volunteers and got permission from the railroad station to set up a canteen.

Just days later, on Christmas night, five volunteers met the train and began distributing presents and food to the soldiers.

Rae Wilson says goodbye to unidentified soldiers, 1942. Photograph Courtesy of the Lincoln County Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska

With that initial act of charity was born one of the most incredible home-front stories of the war.

Cooking for a Crowd

Passenger trains stopped in this railroad town on prairie for one reason alone: The steam engines needed tending. In North Platte, they paused for 10 to 15 minutes to relubricate the wheels and take on water. That stopover gave the volunteers a brief window of time to distribute food and drink to the men in uniform.

A breathtaking number of military personnel passed through the town during the war. As many as 24 trains, often carrying a total of 3,000 to 5,000 men and women in uniform, stopped every day in North Platte. From that first Christmas greeting until months after the end of the war, well-wishers eager to lift the spirits of the troops met every single train.

Civic organizations and churches from 125 other towns joined this effort, with some traveling from as far as 200 miles away to offer their time and talents. Others sent money and food, and as the word spread donors from around the country helped out. With many men away at war, the great majority of the North Platte volunteers were women, not only distributing the gifts but preparing foods like fried chicken, deviled eggs, sandwiches, cookies, fresh fruit, and hot coffee.

The amount of food given away during these years staggers the imagination. Here, for instance, are statistics courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution:

“In March 1945, the canteen served a record 40,161 cookies, 30,679 hard-boiled eggs, 6,547 doughnuts, 2,419 loaves of bread, 2,845 pounds of meat and more than a dozen other items in similarly impressive amounts. On a typical day, volunteers handed out 1,080 cookies, 2,000 buns, 1,000 bottles of milk, 100 pounds of ham, 80 pounds of ground beef, 70 fried chickens, 720 hard-boiled eggs, 23 pounds of butter, 16 pounds of coffee, 2 crates of oranges, 8 bushels of apples and 36 birthday cakes.”

Birthday cakes were also handed out at the North Platte canteen. Photograph Courtesy of the Lincoln County Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska

Amazingly, all of those items were gathered and prepared with rationing in force across the nation.

The Canteen

“Loose lips sink ships” was a warning against unguarded talk created during the war by the Office of War Information. To prevent spies from discovering U.S. troop movements, military men and women aboard trains were generally forbidden to leave their carriages when at a stopping place. Officials soon made an exception of North Platte, and soldiers were permitted to enter the depot, where they were greeted by tables of food, free magazines and newspapers, and maternal hugs and smiling faces.

There was also a piano around which the soldiers would gather, with one of them or a local girl playing popular music of the day, like “Stardust,” and others singing or dancing along. On one occasion, the canteen served up dishes of fried pheasant. In a 1977 interview with correspondent Charles Kuralt, volunteer Rose Loncar said of that day, “Whoever was in charge saved all the tail feathers and had them in jars on the tables, and I tell you it was just like ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ Every soldier had a feather in his hat when he left.”

Some of those soldiers kept those feathers with them in combat as reminders of home.

Slattery’s Shirts and Popcorn Balls

As might be expected, this buffet of patriotism and kindness produced an ample supply of stories.

The canteen received no federal funding at all. Consequently, raising money to pay for this enormous undertaking was an ongoing effort, again a task performed by volunteers. Ordered by his mother to get rid of his goats because they had ruined the family’s cherry trees, young John Slattery sold them at the town’s livestock market, then announced that he was donating the money to the canteen. Asked what else he had to sell, the boy replied, “All I have is the shirt on my back.” A buyer stepped forward, Slattery removed his shirt, and a tradition was born. Over the new few years, he won renown by frequently appearing to sell other shirts, donated by a local clothing store.

Among all the foodstuffs, popcorn balls were quite popular. The young women who made and distributed these treats to the soldiers took to writing out their names and addresses on slips of paper and inserting them into the balls. Numerous pen pal correspondences ensued, at least two of which brought about marriages: two soldiers to two sisters.

After the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the canteen continued operating until April 1 of the following year, catering this time to soldiers, sailors, and aviators returning home from battle. In 1973, the depot was torn down, though a memorial made of some of its bricks was erected on the site.

More recently, the locals have made other efforts to ensure that the volunteers will be remembered. Downtown North Platte is now known officially as The Canteen District, and the Lincoln County Historical Museum is currently working to build a much larger exhibit to honor the region’s wartime volunteers.

‘They Were There’

A roomful of servicemen in the canteen at the North Platte station. Photograph Courtesy of the Lincoln County Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska

Their layover in North Platte may have been brief, but the impact on the soldiers of the canteen and the women working at it was profound. Director of Lincoln County Historical Museum James Griffin noted that many of the soldiers were teenagers, young people away from home for the first time. They would “get off the train, and they see [a maternal figure], and she’s got food. ... They’re only here for ten minutes, but they knew they were loved when they left here.”

Nor did the war-bound travelers on those trains forget North Platte. While being interviewed by Kuralt, Loncar mentioned that she’d love to hear from some of the men who had passed through the town 30 years earlier. Through the mail came a flood of 20,000 letters.

Several writers have put out books on the canteen, including journalist Bob Greene with his “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.” Quoted in the Smithsonian article, Greene described his experiences interviewing the men who’d experienced the town’s hospitality. “So often, their voices would break, and some of the men would cry as they would try to put into words the gratitude they felt for the people of North Platte. They spoke of how lonely they had felt on the troop trains, heading for war and perhaps for death. And then, in that one little town, the train paused and, like a miracle, the people of North Platte were there. That’s exactly how one soldier put it: ‘They were there.’ The soldiers weren’t expecting anything and weren’t asking for anything. But the very fact that the people of North Platte were there meant the world to those soldiers.”

Greene later concluded, “What the people of North Platte did for the soldiers of this country—what they did on their own, without any help from the government—is as fine an example of what our nation can be as anything, and any place, I have ever found.”

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