Dominic Guzzo spent April 1944 carrying a torch, not a rifle, for his country.
Seven days a week, Mr. Guzzo cut and shaped sheet metal for troop ships being built at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point yard.
During breaks, he read newspapers. Some diversion. Joe Palooka was in uniform, and Popeye was enlisting.
Even The Sun's daily crosswords traced the battle lines: "8 across: Russian city, recently retaken."
"You couldn't escape the war; it was on your mind 24 hours a day," says Mr. Guzzo, now 81, of Highlandtown. "Every day the headlines were as upsetting as if someone today had bombed the World Trade Center."
Home-front Baltimore, 50 years ago this month: Life could be turbulent, scary, weird, heartbreaking. It jolted you like the deafening snarl of a Martin B-26 bomber at treetop height. But ordinary people had the feeling that every job they did -- from constructing warplanes to collecting kitchen grease -- helped the men overseas.
On April 17, 1944, young Marylanders were assaulting Cassino in Italy, training in England for the Normandy invasion, and pursuing the Japanese in the jungles of New Guinea and on sandy atolls in the vast Pacific Theater.
Many 50th anniversary remembrances of World War II focus on battles lost and won. But final victory would not have been possible without sweat, tears and sacrifice back home.
Mr. Guzzo says that building ships drew him nearer the troops bound for combat overseas. Never mind that his job did not require a steel helmet.
"I still felt like I was on a battlefield," he says.
So did many other people.
No bombs or shells ever fell here, of course. But the average citizen felt no certainty that they wouldn't.
Though the war was being won, regular air-raid drills included enforced blackouts, which plunged Baltimore into eerie darkness. And local reservoirs were guarded fiercely by rifle-toting old-timers.
It wasn't easy to forget about the Nazis when you could spot German prisoners of war working in farm fields from Carroll County to the Eastern Shore.
A tourist mecca, Maryland was not -- though the German POWs found it a big improvement over North Africa. But citizens still had some fun, or pretended to.
Lionel Hampton and Sarah Vaughan played the Royal Theater; comedian Martha Raye, the Hippodrome.
Marlene Dietrich wowed wounded servicemen at Fort Meade, also "home" to hundreds of Italian prisoners formed into suddenly friendly labor battalions after their country's surrender in 1943.
To entertain them at dances, the U.S. Army recruited dozens of )) single women from Baltimore, provoking one angry GI to write home: "The scum that maybe killed my buddy is back in the States running around free, making eyes at my girl, and riding around in some drip's car, taking in the sights."
Unlikely. Gasoline led a long list of items in short supply. Civilian drives to collect scrap for the Allied cause erupted into furious scavenger hunts. A two-day salvage effort in Baltimore netted 24 million pounds of old metal and rubber. Taneytown officials ripped the iron bars off an old jail; the town of Cumberland donated the metal fence from a park.
In spring 1944, Boy Scouts gathered hundreds of pounds of milkweed pods, for the manufacture of life preservers. In April alone, Maryland housewives contributed nearly 250,000 pounds of kitchen fat, used to make explosives.
Home-front Baltimore, spring of 1944: Respites from the war were rare and cherished.
One warm Sunday found civilians tending victory gardens, Marines photographing their girlfriends in front of the Washington Monument on Charles Street and Coast Guardsmen from Curtis Bay rowing their dates around Druid Hill Lake.
Folks forgot, for one sun-drenched moment, their weariness, meatless dinners and worn automobile tires.
"We felt it was our patriotic duty to act confident, even though we were worried," says Sarah Hawkins, then a nurse at Maryland General Hospital. "We kept telling ourselves we'd never be invaded, but at the same time the Glenn L. Martin Co. was camouflaged to hide it from the air."
Emotionally, the war seemed just next door. You could walk through any Baltimore neighborhood in April 1944 and find stars hung in the windows of tidy row houses. A blue star indicated a serviceman's home; gold meant a battle death.
Ms. Hawkins, of Lochearn, recalls fighting back tears when she saw the gold stars. "You felt so sorry for the family," she says.
People also rallied in support of war-ravaged families abroad. A citywide clothing drive for Russia netted 70 tons of goods, almost including Clyde Smoot's luggage which he'd placed on his porch while hailing a cab. A clothing truck working 33rd Street accidentally picked up Mr. Smoot's bags, which the poor fellow finally recovered six hours later.
By the spring of 1944, Baltimore and Maryland reverberated with productivity and were posting impressive contributions to the national effort. The state put forth 265,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen -- and the same number of Red Cross volunteers.
Marylanders also rolled up their sleeves and donated more than 320,000 pints of blood. Six thousand people gave a gallon or more; a handful of hardy souls made as many as 24 donations during the war.
Home-front Baltimore: Did the city ever sleep? Diners stayed open around the clock to serve the thousands of people working night shifts as private industry surged to help overwhelm Germany and Japan.
Bethlehem Steel, which employed 60,000 people -- 30 times its prewar work force -- produced nearly 20 million tons of Allied steel.
"The plant was going full-blast, 24 hours a day," says Mr. Guzzo, whose seven-day workweek forced him to attend midnight Mass.
Workers at Bethlehem's Fairfield shipyard cranked out 10,000-ton cargo vessels as if they were automobiles. On March 29, the yard launched its 13th Liberty ship of the month and No. 315 of the war. Christened the S.S. John Murphy, in honor of the founder of the Afro-American newspaper chain, the ship had been completed in four weeks.
Several days later, The Sun reported that an "over-anxious" Army invasion barge broke loose from its mooring in Canton and drifted three miles out to sea before the Coast Guard could retrieve it. (The barge was a trifle early: D-Day in Normandy was 50 days away.)
The Glenn L. Martin Co., a leading producer of military aircraft, had 53,000 employees, including Minerva Gordon, an awed Southern farm girl. Early in 1944, she was settling in as a stock clerk for the defense giant that had made a boom town of Middle River almost overnight.
The job was a major change for Ms. Gordon, an 18-year-old North Carolinian who, lured by Baltimore's wartime bustle, swapped chicken-feeding chores for work distributing high-tech bomber parts.
"I felt so important, doing something for the country," says Ms. Gordon, of West Baltimore. She still cherishes a metal pin, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that was given to her and thousands of other war workers 50 years ago.
Back then, America had a one-track mind, says Ben Meredith, 76, a retired fireman for the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. "Everybody was working for one purpose -- to make sure everything turned out OK."
Mr. Meredith spent long hours stoking the bellies of mighty locomotives that hauled the grist of war: troops and tanks and food and fuel.
"We didn't think we were sacrificing that much, having just come out of the Depression," says the Linthicum resident.
In 1944, the B&O; hauled 62 million tons of coal, twice the amount of any prewar year.
Sometimes the trains carried Axis prisoners, 50,000 of whom were held in Maryland. Many worked as farmhands, harvesting fruit and vegetables. (The state was No. 1 in tomato canning during the war.)
For men who had driven tanks in the desert for Rommel's Afrika Korps, chugging along on a farm tractor was quite a switch. For the better.
Some would yearn to return. From postwar Germany, one former soldier wrote to R. Stanley Dillon, an apple grower for whom he had worked in Washington County:
"I'm always thinking of the good time as a P.O.W. in Maryland. There we had much pleasure to work, with good food and tobacco. Now, in Germany, the life is very desolate. My house is bombed. We are working in the coal mines.
"Is it possible we will come over again to work for you?"