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 s...