When is Daddy Coming Home? An American Family during World War II

Summary

New paperback edition of a top-selling wartime memoir

World War II was coming to a close in Europe and Richard Haney was only four years old when the telegram arrived at his family’s home in Janesville, Wisconsin. That moment, when Haney learned of his father’s death in the final months of fighting, changed his and his mother’s lives forever.

In this powerful book, now available in paperback, Haney explores the impact of war on an American family. He skillfully weaves together his own memories of his father with his parents’ wartime letters and his mother’s recollections to create a unique blend of history and memoir. Through his father’s letters he reveals the war’s effect on a man who fought in the Battle of the Bulge with the 17th Airborne but wanted nothing more than to return home. Haney illuminates life on the home front in small-town America as well, describing how profoundly the war changed such communities.

With When Is Daddy Coming Home?, Richard Haney makes an exceptional contribution to the literature on the Greatest Generation—one that is both devastatingly personal and representative of what families all over America endured.

Author

Richard Carlton Haney earned his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later graduated from West Point’s post-PhD military history program and the army’s National Security Seminar at Carlisle Barracks. He is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, where he taught courses in twentieth-century United States history, American military history, and Wisconsin history. The UW–Whitewater organization Students for an Accessible Society twice presented him with its teaching excellence award.