Talking About World War II: When the US entered WWII, how far did geography determine where a draftee would be deployed?

Geography was not a factor in most cases. If you were living in Miami, Florida any time after the draft was reinstated in the fall of 1940 (due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of a national emergency) and happened to get the “Greetings! The President of the United States and your neighbors…” letter from the Selective Service office, where you went while in the armed forces was pretty much determined by the needs of the service branch you were in.

Thus, if you were a Floridian, you would not necessarily be sent to the Caribbean Command, North Africa, or the European Theater of Operations/ETO (including the Mediterranean Theater). You could be just as easily be sent to serve in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Philippines (before Pearl Harbor), or the South Pacific.

Heck, you also had a chance to be stationed Stateside, if the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard needed you there.

The only major exception to this: the Japanese-American volunteers who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team and other units like it.

At first, Nisei (U.S.-born Japanese-Americans born on the West Coast) troops were assigned only to the ETO. Later, as the fortunes of war in the Pacific turned in the Allies’ favor, the U.S. Marine Corps and the Army accepted Nisei and Hawaiian-born Japanese-Americans to serve in the roles of translators and intelligence specialists.

Because there were so many U.S. citizens of German and Italian descent, there was no serious effort made to restrict where Italian-American and German-American soldiers could serve. In fact, statistics at the time showed that one out of every seven American soldiers serving in the ETO, including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, had German ancestry. And many Italian-Americans had relatives in Italy and Sicily, both of which were invaded by Anglo-American forces in 1943 and 1944.