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I was born into a world preparing for war. Just a month and a half before I came into the world, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed a pact with Nazi Germany that he infamously predicted would bring “peace in our time.” Ten months later, Britain would be at war with Hitler’s Germany.
It is strange and unexplainable the way memory works. It often doesn’t recall the most important events, while decades later seemingly trivial occurrences return to us most vividly. My war memories are a similar patchwork of the trivial and the important.
My most trivial memory is that of my mother telling her sisters she wouldn’t wear a red and yellow scarf because they were the colors of the Japanese flag. I’ve since checked out what the national flag of Japan looked like during World War II. It was red with a white background. No yellow in it, yet I clearly remember my mother scorning the red-yellow combination.
I also remember my Dad telling me a distant cousin was killed in an attack on his submarine in the Atlantic. All of my uncles served in the war. One was injured by American fire while a Germans’ captive. He lost two toes off of one foot. “Uncle Boot” wore a special shoe the rest of his life, and earned his nickname for obvious reasons. I remember when my mother’s kid brother was drafted into the Army.His sisters cried hysterically when he left for the war. He would serve with honor with Gen. George S. Patton, only to be burned over half his body in a barracks fire.
The day my Dad got his draft notice, he had just finished cutting down a tree in our yard. It leaned dangerously over the back of our home. Dad took it down piece by piece over what seemed like a year’s time. It was almost as if the Navy let him finish his task before telling him to ship out on some battleship. I remember the odd looking bell-bottoms, dashing blues and sailor hat that made Dad look 10 years younger. He was discharged about six months later with an inflammation of his sciatic nerve. Dad would learn later the Japanese had sunk the battleship to which he was assigned.
Dad became my personal war historian. I listened avidly as he spun heroic stories. There was Colin Kelly, the pilot who stayed at the controls of his plane long enough after it was hit on a bombing mission to allow the rest of his crew to bail out and save their lives. Kelly perished with his plane. An area guy, Al Schmid was a marine who, after being blinded by a grenade, kept firing his machine gun at the enemy through the night. Schmid was later played on the screen by John Garfield. Dad and I loved that movie. In the comics of that time, Superman triumphed over the Germans and Japanese. The movie newsreels were filled with great battles: Our defeat at Wake Island and the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
I remember ration books. Gas rationing did not affect us so much because we didn’t own a car, but other items were rationed as well. I remember how Mom replaced the creamy unsalted butter on our table with a bad tasting concoction called “margarine,” which was totally white and looked and tasted nothing like butter. Mom added food coloring to make it appear more palatable. It was one of those small sacrifices that made people like us feel we were involved in the war effort. I saved a huge ball of tin foil for reasons i have forgotten over time. Scraps were saved and sold to the “junk man.” We were proud of our frugality. It seemed to show the boys over there that we were with them.
I remember the “blackouts.” At a designated time in the evening, all of us had to turn off all the lights in our house. If enemy bombers ever flew over our city they would not have our lights to help guide them to their target. Neighborhood men acted as air-raid wardens to monitor our compliance. They wore red cloth armbands to identify themselves. I would lay there in the dark trying to shake the fear that planes could actually bomb our home. They were serious times, the adults were grim and determined.
Mom loved to sing patriotic songs. Many years later, she would still gleam with pride when she heard songs like “God Bless America,” “Anchors Aweigh” and “Over There.” Dad was the romantic. He played romantic ballads, such as Hildegard’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “The White Cliffs of Dover.” and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” on our wind-up Victrola. Dad was strangely sad when playing Miller’s music. He had perished in the war when his plane went down over the Atlantic. I didn’t really know Miller or actress Carole Lombard, who also had died in a plane crash after conducting a war bonds drive in Indiana, but I shared Dad’s sadness. Lombard’s husband, actor Clark Gable reportedly had never gotten over her loss.
I pictured Gable waiting in vain for Lombard to return to him. That was the kind of sadness we felt from the war.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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