Stories about my Father 13
On April 6, 1943, my father reported to Fort Meade, Maryland for active duty in the United States army. A couple of days later he was shipped to Fort Eustice in Newport News, Virginia for basic training. He was 19 years old.
On the way to Fort Meade, he, and the guys from his college, who he was traveling with, had a two-and-a-half-hour layover in Washington, so they went to see the Capitol. None of them had ever been in a big city before. In a letter home to his parents, Dad wrote, “I was more impressed by the railroad station than I was by the capitol. I don’t think I ever saw anything quite so big.”
He along with hundreds and thousands of kids just like him was the raw material that the army needed to keep their war machine running. Clueless, wide-eyed young men from all over the country were shipped to camps so that they could be turned into soldiers and sent out into battle. My father was as clueless and as wide-eyed as any of them.
There is nothing new or unique about this. World War II was not the first time it happened. Every single army in earth’s history has been created using innocents who have the misfortune to be born at the wrong time. No child is born a soldier; they are taught to be one. I am profoundly grateful to have been born when I was. I can remember being terrified that I would be drafted while the Vietnam war was raging, but the last draft call happened when I was ten. The need to register with the Selective Service stopped when I was thirteen. By the time the Persian Gulf War started, I was already twenty-eight and by Afghanistan, I was nearly forty.
World War II was, of course, different than the wars in my lifetime. It was hard to understand what we were doing in Vietnam, the Gulf, or in Afghanistan. The protests against our involvement in Vietnam changed how we view fighting for many people. World War II was long before that shift. It was a simpler conflict to understand. There were very clear bad guys who were trying to take over the world and very clear good guys who were trying to stop them. There were even vivid logos to identify the sides. Of course, there was far more nuance to it than that but, at the time, nobody was deluged with information and diverse opinions the way we are now. There was no television. Household radios were only starting to become widespread. You might see a short propaganda newsreel at the movie theatre before the main event, but there was nothing like the nonstop barrage of images and footage we experience today on our phones and computers. The news arrived in print on your doorstep at least a full day after it had happened.
All of this is to say that my father, and very likely most everyone going through this with him, didn’t have the slightest idea what they were getting into.
The day he reported for duty, the war was being fought - seemingly everywhere. General Patton was in North Africa pushing the Germans back alongside the British. About three weeks earlier, the Nazis had emptied the Jewish ghetto in Kraków, Poland. 2,000 people who were deemed to be able-bodied were sent to the Palszów concentration camp to work, the rest were shot in the street. Two days, before Dad left for Maryland, a large group of Allied prisoners escaped from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Mindanao in the Philippines. It’s the only time that anything like that happened in the Pacific region during the war. Those soldiers were the first to report to the rest of the world about the atrocities the Japanese had committed during the Bataan Death March.
While some of this news was being reported by the press, not all of it was. Some of this we only found out about much later. I don’t think that my father was aware of much of anything going on outside his immediate orbit. Certainly, reading his letters home, few current events seemed to impress him enough to talk about - even in the most general way. Instead, he writes mostly about the food he was given, the training exercises he had to do, and the weather. A year or two before, most of the haunted men who had endured that unimaginable March in the Pacific had also probably been just the same - fresh-faced naïve guys from different corners of the country who wrote home to their parents about not being able to get a weekend pass.
When my dad’s group got to Fort Eustace, it was announced that their actual training wouldn’t start for a week. “We were all pretty mad to find that out. We feel like we aren’t getting anywhere.” They were all sent to see a USO show. It was a touring production of the hit play Arsenic and Old Lace which was still running on Broadway. As the week dragged on, they were assigned non-sensical busy work seemingly just to keep them occupied and out of trouble. One group dug holes and then another group filled them in. For a few days, they were all sent into the woods to collect brush. After a day or two of this, their impatience started to wear off. “When we are down in the woods out of sight, we all stop work and sit around… I like the life fine… I really enjoy being outdoors in the woods.”
It must have been a bewildering experience for all of those guys to be suddenly thrown together with thousands of strangers. Up until then, the people my father had met in his life were almost all exactly like him. Lynchburg, Virginia at the time, of course, was racially segregated. The army was segregated too so nothing much was different for him in that regard. Lynchburg had a small, tightly knit Jewish community, but given the level of anti-Semitism that still pervades the south to this day, I don’t think my father would have known any of them. In the army, however, the white population was all thrown in together regardless of where you were from or what you believed. Suddenly he was surrounded by radically different types of people from all over the country.
“It is surprising what a variety of people you come across in the army. One man in here looks like little Abie who can get it for you wholesale. He speaks English with a hell of an accent. I thought he must have been a Jew who ran a pawn shop in Brooklyn. It turned out that he is a professor of Spanish at Columbia University. He has been all over South America and he came originally from Spain.
Another fellow in here used to be a sailor in the Belgian Navy. I didn’t even know they had a navy, but he might mean their Merchant Marine. Anyway, he has been torpedoed at sea. He was one of eight saved on his ship. His father was killed on the same ship. He has been in this country only two years.
One man in here used to make his living guessing people’s weights. Another is from Poland and is a concrete worker. About the only thing I haven’t run across is a bartender. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the guys aren’t at that. Since I have gotten to know more of them, I find that the majority of them are pretty good guys as the saying goes.”
He might have only been nineteen, but I can already hear the older man I knew. My father spent his whole life grilling people about where they were from and what their histories were. Even at the end of his life, he knew all about the nurses who were caring for him. He never stopped asking. I can just see him in the barracks eighty years ago cornering someone and dragging out their whole life story. The more he asked people about themselves, the more he chipped away at the prejudices that had been a part of the community he grew up in.
In one letter home, he talks about going before the Officers Candidate School review board. One of the questions he was asked was what he thought of the men in his barracks and did he think it broadened his outlook on life to associate with them. He doesn’t say what he answered, but the fact that his Battery commander even asked him that, means that the mixing up of people was probably being done by the Army intentionally. Those young guys needed to be able to count on each other completely in the middle of battle. Any kind of division between soldiers in the field could be fatal. They needed to get used to being in the middle of people who were nothing like them. It wasn’t just my father who needed his horizons broadened. He probably seemed just as strange and just as foreign to the guys from New York as they were to him.
My father went to college at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. It is a land-grant college and a senior military college. At the time he was there, VPI had a compulsory two-year Corps of Cadets ROTC program for everyone who attended. In all his writing, he doesn’t talk about why he decided to go there. He must have balanced the prospect of having to do all that military training with what he’d gain going to a top research institution. He didn’t think there’d be a war when he went in, so I can’t imagine he’d thought through what it would mean if there was. Because of that ROTC training, once he was in the army, he was tracked into the Officers Candidate School training program. As it happened, his poor eyesight, alone, was going to keep him from getting through OCS, but he also just wasn’t the kind of guy that would have made a good officer and he knew it.
He was constantly getting “gigged” which meant earning demerit points for some shortcoming or infraction of duty. He suspected that it was just a matter of time before they relieved him of OCS duty and sent him somewhere else. He talks about it time and time again. In the early spring of 1944 when it was becoming crystal clear that he would, in fact, be kicked out, he told his parents, “I am going to fight this thing out to the last straw. The colonel who gave us an orientation talk my first week told us that if a man did his best and washed out it was no disgrace, but that if he gave up it was. That’s about the way I feel. If I do my best and still don’t make it, I can look anybody in the eye.”
He then goes on to prepare his parents for what he sees coming for him afterward. “I suppose I may as well tell you what will happen to me if I am relieved here. I will go overseas pretty shortly. The boys who have been kicked out recently have gotten furloughs, or delays in route, and gone to Fort Meade to the Overseas Replacement Pool. From there they go to New York or some other P.O.D (point of departure) and across. If I don’t make it here, that is what I want to do anyway. There’s no point in sitting around the country if you are not working for something.”
“I would like to go to Europe. The boys I have talked to from over there and from the South Pacific, too, say that it isn’t bad, and it is pretty interesting. I would like to travel some places. Being as far away from home now as I have ever been, I am still closer than most men in the army. The only reason for my not wanting to go overseas is that I know you all will worry. However, there is not much that can be done about it. I think that if I went overseas as an enlisted man, it would probably do me personally more good than hanging around some officer’s pool in this country as a lieutenant.”
In another letter a few days later he wrote, “I don’t really mind busting out so much. It hurts, of course, but I think that will wear off.”
The Army had taken a full year to decide where my now 20-year-old father belonged. On March 30, 1944, he got his orders to ship out the following week as part of the Infantry. He still had six or seven months of training ahead of him before he was sent overseas, but he was already as ready as anybody ever is to be sent into battle.
In other words, like every other kid who has ever been sent into battle, he wasn’t ready at all.