Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This.

Today we're going to begin a series called Star Wars featuring stories about movie stars

and their adventures and experiences during times of war.

Our first eight episodes in this series will focus on women in Hollywood during World War

2.

Hollywood was extremely active in the war effort in a number of different ways, which this

series will explore, but today we're going to talk about Hollywood's importance as a place,

a locale in the collective imaginary sure, but also a physical, residential and commercial

community, spilling out of canyons buttressed by hills and dissipating into the vast

diverse sprawl of Los Angeles proper.

After Pearl Harbor, Los Angeles was the main point of departure for soldiers heading to

the Pacific.

Young men would leave their hometowns or bases in land in LA, where they'd often have

a couple of days before sailing into a war zone, often with very little life behind them

and of course, with no way of knowing how much life they had ahead of them.

So these last days on land were often treated like they were last days on Earth.

Los Angeles in the early 1940s was an exciting place to live like there was no tomorrow, not

least because of the proximity high cast off by what was then the glamour capital of the

world.

During World War II, Hollywood stars and craftsmen were legitimately patriotic.

They wanted to do their part, and the publicity arm of the industry wanted to make sure that

the nation knew that Hollywood was doing its part.

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