When Idaho State University student Sophia Perry tells people she is doing a project on Idaho’s impact on World War II, they tell her they thought the state’s role was minimal.
Even she believed that until digging deep into research with three fellow ISU students, who are all making a 125-page book that will feature World War II-related photos of Idaho with captions providing information and context.
“We really did have a huge contribution to the war and no one really knows about it,” Perry said. “So that’s one of the most important things coming from this book is that we can tell people about it.”
The book is being made in an ISU class called Collaborative Creativity, in a partnership between the ISU College of Business and the University Honors Program. This is the fourth edition of the class, which previously made books on ISU’s history, Pocatello’s Garrett Freightlines and the city of Pocatello.
“The goal of the class is to teach students how to work collaboratively in creative projects and as a team, that’s higher stakes than a standard classroom exercise.” said ISU Associate Professor Alexander Bolinger, who’s teaching the class.
The three other undergraduates in this semester’s class are Ashley French, Dalene Hunter and Kathryn Wagoner. The students have a wide range of majors that include anthropology and social work.
Their book will be published by Arcadia Publishing and appear in print next summer.
“It’s really important for us as the younger generation to understand where the older generation is coming from and to understand how much different their experiences were,” Wagoner said. “We did experience 9/11, but to have your family be torn apart because your siblings or dad would have to go to war, that’s just something I’ve never experienced and could never imagine experiencing.
“So this class and diving into this subject material has really helped me kind of be more humbled about my life experience.”
The group has gathered photos from Bannock County Historical Museum, Marshall Public Library and the Museum of North Idaho among other places.
If you have photos on the subject that you are OK with the class using in the book, email them to idahoworldwar2@gmail.com or contact Bolinger by phone or leave a message at (208) 282-6242.
“It would be great if we could actually talk with World War II people and look through their photos and talk to them about what they did,” Hunter said.
The students have found plenty of stories that they are excited to tell in the book, including about United Service Organizations huts, one of which was in Pocatello.
“Most interesting thing for me was the USO huts and civilian life because these women of the USO huts, it was all volunteer-based and they wanted these soldiers coming through town to feel at home,” Perry said. “They would have women on standby to make a fresh warm cookie just like their mom would make at home just to kind of calm their nerves I guess before they were shipped off.“
Soldiers would talk about their lovely experiences at the Pocatello USO hut decades later, according to Bolinger.
Besides Pocatello, the class found many other important places in Idaho, where the war was felt.
In the Stibnite Mining District in Idaho, tungsten was mined as an element for armor-piercing bullets. Submarines were tested in Lake Pend Oreille and Farragut was home to the second-largest U. S. naval training station in the world.
Not only did the students discover the state’s effect on the war, but the motivation behind the results.
Hunter said there was a “team attitude in the entire state and I feel like the entire country” – words echoed by her class, including Perry.
“People forget that we are all Americans at the end of the day,” Perry said. “Looking back on these photos, no one was a Republican or Democrat. They were an American and they were going to fight. And they were lying about their age, so they can go sooner to fight and now we have forgotten about all of that American pride and we’re so – like Dalene said – into our individual views that we forgot what it was like to work together towards a common goal.”