A Few Small Candles: War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories

Front Cover
Larry Gara, Lenna Mae Gara
Kent State University Press, 1999 - 207 pages

Little is known about those who openly refused to enter military service in World War II because of their convictions against killing. While many of those men accepted alternative civilian service, more than 6,000 were incarcerated with sentences ranging from a few months to five years. Some were tried, convicted, and reimprisoned for essentially the same offense--resisting induction into the armed forces--after their initial release.

In A Few Small Candles, ten men tell why they resisted, what happened to them, and how they feel about that experience today. Their stories detail the resisters' struggles against racial segregation in prison, as well as how they instigated work and hunger strikes to demonstrate against other prison injustices. Each of the ten has remained active in various causes relating to peace and social justice.

This is a unique collection of memoirs that illuminated the American homefront during World War II and provides an important source for those interested in the American peace movement.

 

Contents

Prison Memoir
1
Why I Refused to Register in the October 1940 Draft and a Little of What It Led To
20
My Resistance to World War II
38
My War and My Peace
53
My War on War
78
War Resistance in World War II
98
Reflections of a Religious War Objector Half a Century Later
130
Prison and Butterfly Wings
152
How the War Changed My Life
174
My Story of World War II
194
Selected Additional Readings
205
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