My dad turned 18 in March of 1945 in his senior year of high school. The war was still going on and he was drafted, going into the army right after graduation in June. As it turned out, he was still in training in the U.S. when the war ended in August of 1945. He ended up going over to Belgium, where he was involved with various things and was also in the army band, being a first-rate trumpet player. When he was in his 70’’s he wrote his army memoirs, which were a compilation of his memories while he was writing, and excerpts from letters he wrote home.
I want to share with you his introduction to the memoirs, since it gives a good picture of what life was like in those wartime days.
Becoming a soldier in the United States Army never entered my mind while I was growing up. When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, I was only twelve years old and still in elementary school. During the next two years the Germans under Adolph Hitler and the Italians under Mussolini took over most of Europe and in 1940 the German Luftwaffe began a series of air raids on English cities to prepare for an invasion of the British Isles.
I remember our family sitting around the radio in the evening listening to the war news from Europe. Our old radio hummed and crackled while foreign correspondents like Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severeid and Walter Cronkite told us how England was being bombed day after day by the German Air Force. It didn’t seem possible that Great Britain could survive such devastating attacks on her major cities, but the English people refused to give up and the German bombers were eventually turned back by the heroic efforts of the British Air Force.
I was fifteen years old in 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war on the side of Great Britain and the Allies. News of the war was in the newspapers every day and on the radio every night, but the fighting was far away from our shores and I didn’t expect it to last until I was eighteen and eligible for military service.
Nearly every facet of our daily lives was affected by the war. For example, many popular songs of that period were related in some way to the war. The most obvious were songs like “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “Coming In On A Wing And A Prayer,” and “Praise the Lord and Pass The Ammunition,” but there were also songs about young couples and what they were going through when they became separated because of the war. Songs with a message like “We’ll Meet Again,” “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Gonna Take A Sentimental Journey” were very popular at the time.
Hollywood films of the war years alternated between musical comedies to make people forget about the war, and dramatic films that glorified the war. These films were exciting to watch, but the Hollywood version made the war seem more exciting and glamorous than it really was.
Finally, the long-awaited invasion of the European continent was announced on the radio and in the daily paper. In June of 1944 an Allied armada swept across the English Channel and landed on the coast of Normandy in northern France. It was beginning to look like I might be involved in the war after all.
I was seventeen years old at the time of the Normandy invasion and had just finished my junior year at high school. In nine months I would be eighteen and eligible for the draft. Like most of my high school friends, I was excited about becoming a member of the armed forces. Of course we knew nothing about the hellish conditions of war; we perceived only the glory of war as we saw it on the movie screen and in the newspapers.
These years must have been heart-wrenching for our parents as the time approached for us to go off to war and take our chances with fate itself. But for us boys it was an exciting time, a time when we were filled with pride at being chosen for such an important mission as defending our country in a time of war.
My dad was a capable illustrator in a cartoon style and sent home several of his own renditions of army life.
These army memoirs of his, along with all his letters home (typed up by my mother) are a true treasure and a wonderful memento of the veteran in my life.
I’ll probably stow this in a foot locker in the morning.
