The Forgotten Reversal: Daylight Saving in Wartime
Few know that during World War II, the US stayed on Daylight Saving Time for three years straight.
In the midst of World War II, as nations scrambled to conserve resources, the United States took an unusual step regarding time itself. While most Americans think of Daylight Saving Time as an annual ritual involving clocks leaping forward each spring and slipping back each fall, a little-remembered chapter in American history saw the entire country live on “advanced time” for over three years.
The idea of Daylight Saving Time wasn’t new by 1942. It had been introduced during World War I as a way to save fuel by making better use of natural sunlight. After the war, it was largely abandoned or left to the discretion of local jurisdictions. That changed dramatically on February 9, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order placing the United States on “War Time.”
This wasn’t simply the annual shifting of clocks. Rather, it meant that the whole country would stay an hour ahead of standard time year-round. The move was designed to save energy for the war effort. By effectively making evenings brighter for longer, households and businesses would, in theory, use less electricity and fuel for lighting.
From February 1942 until September 1945, the United States operated on this permanent Daylight Saving Time. A person in Ohio or California or Texas no longer had to remember to “fall back” in late October nor “spring forward” in April. The clocks simply stayed one hour ahead throughout the seasons.
War Time required adjustments, large and small. Farmers, who had long resisted Daylight Saving Time because it disrupted the natural light needed for their work, faced hours out of sync with the sun. Railroads and factories realigned shift schedules, and children found themselves going to school in deeper darkness during winter mornings. Yet, in the spirit of sacrifice for the war effort, most Americans accepted the change as part of their contribution to victory.
As the war wound down in 1945, Congress repealed nationwide observance of War Time, returning the power to set clocks to individual states and municipalities. The experiments of those years, however, revealed deep regional divides about Daylight Saving Time. The ensuing decades saw a patchwork of timekeeping across America, with some states and even individual cities choosing to observe it and others abstaining, a confusion that persisted until national time uniformity was restored in the 1960s.
Although most people believe that Daylight Saving Time is simply a modern inconvenience, few realize that, for three years during America’s greatest conflict, changing the clocks became a symbol of national unity and sacrifice—and for a time, American midnight struck an hour later than the sun would actually set.
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