Christmas: 1942

No lighted candles beckoned from the windows on Boston's stately Louisburg Square; the all-but-actual stage sets which lit up the facades of Hollywood homes last year were dark. Few firecrackers sputtered on the South's sunlit streets; no lights shone from the giant fir trees in the thousands of village squares. Christmas, 1942, had moved indoors.

It would be a Christmas unlike any the U.S. people had ever seen, and one they would long remember. There was hardly a person who had not sent a package, or at least a letter, to a man in uniform; hardly a thoughtful man or woman...