• 60 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

World War II Writing Prompts

The war from the kitchen, the classroom and the mailbox: a ration book, a blackout, a letter on film.

World War II Writing Prompts

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  1. A country child must share her room with an evacuee from the city; write the first night from her side of it.Angle: whose bed is by the window, and who cannot sleep for the quiet?
  2. The week sugar is rationed in the United States, a diner owner rethinks the pie list; write the new menu and the complaints.Fact: American food rationing began with sugar in May 1942; coffee was added that November.
  3. An evacuee cannot decide what to call the couple who took her in; write a week of trying names.Fact: evacuees more often called their hosts auntie and uncle than mum and dad.

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The home front 12

  • A bus driver learns to drive at night with covers over his headlights; write his first route of the Second World War. Fact: in the blackout, headlights wore slotted covers that turned their beams down to the ground.
  • A class plants a victory garden on the school roof; write the first harvest as the child who wanted to plant flowers. Fact: during the war American schools often kept a victory garden in a vacant parking lot or on the roof.
  • A family covers the kitchen window with cardboard on the first night of the blackout; write the supper that follows. Fact: in the blackout, windows and doors were covered at night with heavy curtains, cardboard or paint.
  • A family in wartime Britain builds a shelter in the back garden; write the first night all six squeeze in. Fact: the Anderson shelter, designed in 1938, was built in a garden and held up to six people.
  • A girl saves stamps in a booklet until she has enough for a war bond; write the day she fills the last page. Fact: on the American home front, children collected savings stamps until they could buy a bond.
  • A grocer loses his clerks to the war and lets customers fetch goods from the shelves themselves; write the first confused morning. Fact: a wartime shortage of grocery clerks moved American stores from counter service to self-service.
  • A Londoner carries bedding down to an Underground platform for the night in September 1940; write the evening as the stationmaster. Fact: in September 1940 thousands of Londoners sheltered in Underground stations, bringing bedding and food.
  • A neighborhood in an American city turns a vacant lot into a victory garden; write the argument over who gets which row. Fact: by May 1943 the United States had 18 million victory gardens, 12 million of them in cities.
  • A schoolgirl counts the big balloons tethered over wartime London on her walk to class; write what she tells her little brother they are for. Fact: by the middle of 1940 Britain flew 1,400 barrage balloons, a third of them over the London area.
  • A shopkeeper builds a second door inside the first so no light spills out in the blackout; write the customers squeezing through. Fact: wartime shops had to fit double doors so that no light showed as customers came and went.
  • A warden walks a street in the wartime blackout looking for light; write the one window that worries him. Fact: Britain's blackout began on September 1, 1939; wardens saw that no glow of light escaped.
  • A young woman from the city reports to a farm for war work; write her first week in a letter to her mother. Fact: Britain's Women's Land Army, restarted in 1939, had over 80,000 members by 1944.

Rationing and making do 12

  • A back lawn is dug up for wartime potatoes and the family argues over the last rosebush; write who wins. Fact: Britain's digging for victory turned lawns, waste ground and sports fields over to vegetables.
  • A baker may sell only the gray wartime loaf; write what her customers say about it, and what they buy anyway. Fact: Britain's National Loaf of wholemeal bread replaced white bread; people found it gray and mushy.
  • A child in wartime Britain is shown a picture of a banana and does not believe it is real; write the scene. Fact: bananas could not be had in Britain for most of the war; in 1942 many young children thought them unreal.
  • A family eats at a wartime canteen in a church hall where nobody asks for coupons; write the meal. Fact: British Restaurants, set up in schools and church halls, sold a three-course meal for ninepence.
  • A family registers with one grocer for the war and may buy its rationed food nowhere else; write the first Saturday in line. Fact: in wartime Britain each person registered at chosen shops and held a ration book of coupons.
  • A family's car carries an A sticker for the war; write the Sunday they decide where three gallons will take them. Fact: in the wartime United States an A sticker allowed a car 3 to 4 gallons of gasoline a week.
  • A girl has saved her wartime clothing coupons all year for one dress; write the afternoon in the shop. Fact: Britain rationed clothes from June 1941: 66 coupons a year at first, cut to 48 in 1942.
  • A wartime cook has one egg and a packet of egg powder for the week; write the birthday cake. Fact: the British ration was one egg a week, or a packet of dried egg a month that stood for twelve.
  • An American boy is handed small red tokens as change at the butcher's in wartime; write what he thinks they are worth. Fact: American shops gave red point tokens of pressed wood fiber as change for red ration stamps.
  • In wartime a girl's winter coat is cut from her father's old suit; write the fitting. Fact: Britain's Make Do and Mend booklets of 1943 showed how to patch, darn and remake old clothes.
  • On the morning food rationing begins, a grocer explains the coupons to every customer in turn; write his day. Fact: on January 8, 1940, bacon, butter and sugar became the first foods rationed in Britain.
  • The week sugar is rationed in the United States, a diner owner rethinks the pie list; write the new menu and the complaints. Fact: American food rationing began with sugar in May 1942; coffee was added that November.

Letters across an ocean 12

  • A censor reads a sailor's wartime letter home before it may be sent; write the letter, with the lines he blacks out. Fact: in the Second World War, V-mail letters went through mail censors before they traveled.
  • A family in England gets a tiny photographed letter from a soldier in Egypt, three weeks after he wrote it; write their reply. Fact: the first airgraphs between England and Egypt, in 1941, numbered 70,000 and took three weeks to arrive.
  • A family keeps every wartime letter in a shoebox in the order it came; write the note laid on top of the box years later. Angle: who tied the string, and who is allowed to untie it?
  • A father overseas in the war may not say where he is, so he draws a cartoon in every letter; write one letter and its drawing. Angle: a palm tree, a penguin, a mountain. At home the children keep an atlas open.
  • A girl writes to her father at sea in the war on the day she learns to ride a bicycle; write the letter and what she leaves out. Angle: the skinned knee stays out. The distance she rode goes in twice.
  • A little brother dictates a letter to a soldier in the Second World War because he cannot write yet; write it just as he says it. Angle: the dog, a tooth, a question about tanks, love from everybody.
  • A mother's wartime letter crosses the ocean as a picture the size of a thumbnail; write the moment her son is handed the print. Fact: V-mail traveled as thumbnail-sized film images, so one sack did the work of 37 mail bags.
  • A pen pal in America writes to a girl in wartime England about ordinary things on purpose; write the letter. Angle: a school play, a new puppy, ice cream. Why does she leave the war out?
  • A sailor in the Second World War sends his mother the same cheerful letter every week; write the one where a true sentence slips in. Angle: one line, then straight back to the weather.
  • A soldier's sister writes her first V-mail letter and finds the form too small for all she wants to say; write the letter. Fact: V-mail was written on a small sheet and delivered as a print of 4 1/4 by 5 1/4 inches.
  • A wartime postal clerk photographs letters onto film all day and never reads one; write the letter she wishes she could follow. Fact: V-mail letters were censored, copied to microfilm and printed on paper again where they arrived.
  • Two wartime letters cross over the Atlantic, each answering a question the other has not asked yet; write both. Angle: by the time each arrives, its news is old. Let the reader see the gap.

Sent to the country 12

  • A city child boards a train in September 1939 with her whole class and no parents; write the ride as the youngest in the carriage. Fact: Britain's evacuation began on September 1, 1939; schoolchildren went in the care of their teachers.
  • A country child must share her room with an evacuee from the city; write the first night from her side of it. Angle: whose bed is by the window, and who cannot sleep for the quiet?
  • A farmer's wife makes up a bed for an evacuee she has never met; write the hour before the knock on the door. Fact: most of Britain's wartime evacuees were lodged in private homes.
  • A school rehearses its evacuation in the summer before the war, marching to the station and back; write the practice. Fact: British schools held practice evacuations during the summer of 1939.
  • A teacher counts her class of evacuees onto the train and counts again at every station; write her day. Fact: in September 1939 nearly 1.5 million people left England's danger areas, 826,950 of them children alone.
  • A village expects a few dozen evacuees and far more step off the train; write the afternoon as the woman holding the list. Fact: Anglesey expected 625 evacuated children in September 1939 and received 2,468.
  • An evacuee cannot decide what to call the couple who took her in; write a week of trying names. Fact: evacuees more often called their hosts auntie and uncle than mum and dad.
  • An evacuee comes home after years in the country and finds her own street smaller than she remembered; write the walk from the station. Fact: on May 2, 1945, local authorities began to offer evacuees transport home.
  • An evacuee fills in the postcard that tells his mother where he has landed; write the few lines there is room for. Fact: evacuated children were given a postcard to send home with their new address.
  • An evacuee from the city sees a cow for the first time; write his letter home about it. Angle: he gets the size right and nearly everything else wrong.
  • By the first winter of the war many evacuees in a village have gone home; write the day one more leaves, as the friend who stays. Fact: by February 1940, 44 percent of the children evacuated the September before had gone home.
  • Two brothers evacuated together are placed in houses at opposite ends of a village; write the path they wear between them. Angle: a hedge, a stream, one dog that has to be passed.

The day the news came 12

  • A child keeps a scrapbook of newspaper front pages all through the war; write the caption she puts under the last one. Fact: the Second World War is dated from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945.
  • A child wakes on September 3, 1939, to find every adult standing still in the kitchen; write the morning as she understood it. Fact: Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, two days after it invaded Poland.
  • A fisherman on the English coast looks at the sky early in June 1944 and says nobody will cross in this; write the two days that follow. Fact: bad weather on the day chosen delayed the Normandy landings by 24 hours.
  • A geography teacher pins five new names to the classroom map of France one morning in June 1944; write the lesson. Fact: the Normandy coast was divided into five landing sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.
  • A London clock tower is lit again after more than five years of wartime dark; write the evening as someone who walks past it daily. Fact: Big Ben in London was lit again in April 1945; the blackout had been imposed on September 1, 1939.
  • A mother takes down the blackout curtains on the day the war in Europe ends and decides what to sew from them; write the evening. Fact: May 8, 1945, is Victory in Europe Day; over a million people celebrated in Britain's streets.
  • A printer is told in August 1945 to stop work on next year's ration books; write the moment the presses go quiet. Fact: on August 13, 1945, the United States halted the printing of ration books for 1946.
  • A Sunday in December 1941 is interrupted by a neighbor at the door with news; write the afternoon as the child sent out to play. Fact: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war.
  • News that the Second World War is over reaches a farm where the radio is broken; write how the family finds out. Fact: at the time, the war was generally held to have ended with the armistice of August 15, 1945.
  • On the morning of June 6, 1944, word spreads down a street that the landings in France have begun; write how it reaches the last house. Fact: Allied troops began landing on the coast of Normandy at about 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944.
  • On the night the wartime blackout ends, a boy who was a baby in 1939 sees his street lit for the first time; write what he looks at. Fact: Britain allowed full street lighting again in April 1945, after more than five years of blackout.
  • The war in Europe is over, and a grocer's customers ask whether rationing ends tomorrow; write his answer and their faces. Fact: Germany's surrender took effect on May 8, 1945; Britain rationed clothes until March 1949.

How it works

These World War II writing prompts stay with people who were not at the front: a grocer, a warden, a teacher counting children onto a train. No battle is the subject, nothing is graphic, and every person is made up.

Read the full guide

A World War 2 homefront writing prompt for every street

Twenty-four prompts are set at home in Britain and the United States: cardboard over the kitchen window, a victory garden on a school roof, one egg for a birthday cake, red tokens as change at the butcher's. Each of them carries a Fact line.

World War Two narrative writing prompts

The other thirty-six ask for a story told from close by: a letter squeezed onto a V-mail form, an evacuee's postcard home, the morning of June 6, 1944, as word of it reached the last house on a street.

  • Fix the date before you write. A family in 1940 does not know how long the war will last.
  • Let the food do the work. What is on the plate says what year it is.

Questions and answers

What are good World War II writing prompts for a history unit?

Ones with a checked fact and an ordinary narrator. A shopkeeper builds a second door so that no light spills out in the blackout. A village expects a few dozen evacuees and far more step off the train.

Are there prompts about rationing?

Twelve. Britain's first rationed foods, on January 8, 1940, were bacon, butter and sugar; the first in the United States was sugar, in May 1942. The prompts follow a gray loaf, a year of clothing coupons and a car allowed three gallons a week.

What years do the prompts cover?

From the summer of 1939, when British schools rehearsed their evacuations, to 1945. Wikipedia dates the war from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945. One fact reaches further: Britain went on rationing clothes until March 1949.

Are the World War II writing prompts suitable for younger students?

Yes. No prompt describes fighting or injury. The hardest moments are a goodbye at a station and a long wait for a letter.

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