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The whole effort started by mistake. Several days after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, people in North Platte, Nebraska, heard that their own Company D of the
Nebraska National Guard would be passing through town on its way from an Arkansas
training camp to the West Coast. A crowd gathered at the Union Pacific train station to greet
the boys with cookies, candy, and small gifts. When the train arrived, it turned out it was
transporting a Company D from Kansas, not Nebraska. After a moment of disappointment,
someone in the crowd asked, “Well, what are we waiting for?” And they began handing their
gifts to the war-bound soldiers.
The next day, Miss Rae Wilson wrote the North Platte Daily Bulletin to suggest that the
town open a canteen to greet all troop trains stopping there. “Let’s do something and do it in a
hurry!” she wrote.
Beginning on Christmas Day 1941 and continuing through World War II, the town offered
itself as the North Platte Canteen. For 365 days a year, volunteers from the remote community
of 12,000 and surrounding hamlets provided hot coffee, donuts, sandwiches, and
encouragement for young soldiers passing through. Hundreds of families, churches, schools,
businesses, and clubs pitched in to help raise money, buy supplies, and make food. They
greeted every soldier on every train with gifts and good wishes. By April 1, 1946, its last day, the
North Platte Canteen had served more than 6 million GIs.
“You don’t forget that when you’re overseas,” one veteran told Bob Greene, author of Once
Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen. “There was no place I ever knew of, or ever
heard about, that went to that great effort. A lot of people might be willing to do it. Or at least
they might say they would be willing. But in North Platte, they did it.” |
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| American History Parade |
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| 1941 |
The newly opened North Platte Canteen serves war-bound troops. |
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© 2008, 2010 by William J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb
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