“For the Duration,” a term with poignant and hopeful symbolism in World War II, has gained currency in today’s media as commentators reference the unknown length of COVID-19 remediation and its effects on society.
The phrase was used with quiet patriotic optimism in World War II as manufacturers of consumer goods told the American public that their factories were converted to only wartime production “For the Duration.”
Invoking “the Duration” during World War II was tacit acknowledgement of hardships to be borne. And the Duration was an unknown event some time in the future throughout the war, even as Allied victories raised hopes by 1943. Two more years of war would unfold before the Duration came to pass.
Anecdotally, a review of American magazine advertising suggests a trailing off of the use of “For the Duration” after late 1942. By September 1944, with the Allies firmly back on the European Continent, at least one pundit was predicting the collapse of Germany before the end of the year. But the German army proved to still have some fight left in it, and the war in Europe continued into May 1945.
The war appeared far from over in the Pacific. Dr. Otis A. Pease, chairman of the University of Washington history department in the early 1970s, told his undergraduate students that when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945 weeks before the German surrender, his successor, Vice President Harry S. Truman, had to be briefed about America’s ongoing development of the atomic bomb. That’s how tightly the nuclear story was held — not even the vice president had been told.
With Americans-at-large unaware of what lay ahead in the summer of 1945, a saying among Pacific combatants longing for home was poetically stated as “The Golden Gate in ’48.” That’s how many years some estimated the ultimate assault on Japan would require.
A Pacific B-24 Liberator crew took that estimate one step further, wryly painting artwork on the side of their bomber depicting a down-on-his-luck man in tattered clothing under the rhyming caption “Bread Line in ’49”.
The Duration ended much more quickly, with no ground invasion of Japan, when surrender came in mid-August 1945.
The British also used the phrase during World War I in reference to enlistment lengths being a specified number of years “or for the duration of the war.” It sounded more grim than the later American slogan of World War II.
As the Second World War progressed and a few American consumer goods became available, some advertisers boasted about the quality of their products, saying they were so good they would last for years beyond the Duration, even when that date was unknown.
And now we again find ourselves in a situation requiring everyone’s participation and sacrifice, where the outcome is not clearly delineated in time. There are stark differences between the current Duration and the wartime version. During World War II, production boomed. Work stoppages did not occur until after the war was over and manufacturing returned to smaller peacetime levels. Yet once again, we’re all in it For the Duration.
WWII was long and hard but the fighting and dying was in the distance (405,000 Americans perished). The Civil War was worse given it had a direct affect on US property and the US population (750,000 Americans perished). Even the American Revolution lasted seven years. Finally, the ‘war on terror’ is by far the longest struggle this country will ever face…the longest war now being the Afghan war some sixteen years and counting now.
Comparing these disasters to one another has no meaning.
This virus has destroyed the economy and pressed it’s affect on everyone in the population. The misery index is high but does it make it any less important when compared to a shooting war? No.