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My World War II



J. Quinn Brisben

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 7:55am December 7, 1941. The news of the attack reached Enid, Oklahoma, by radio shortly after noon. By two o’clock that afternoon news bulletins from Hawaii and elsewhere had pre-empted all regular programming. The news took another half hour to reach me. I was outside playing our neighborhood version of football with friends. It was tackle football, but the rules were that no one could be tackled on a sidewalk, only on grass. I was four months beyond my seventh birthday, in the second grade at Adams Grade School. I suppose I had read the Sunday funnies with my parents that morning, although I was already sufficiently skilled to decipher some of them by myself. I suppose we had had Sunday dinner, which always took place at noon or soon after in those days. The memorable part of the day began for me when a boy named Harry Taylor came running out of his house to interrupt our game.
“Go tell your dad that the Japs have attacked the Philippines,” he said, “and he’ll give you a nickel.”
I doubted that, but I went home anyhow. Our radio was on, broadcasting one breathless news bulletin after another. Our brand new globe was out. So were our atlas and several encyclopedia volumes. I learned more geography in the next few hours than I had learned in my entire life before. I learned that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii on the island of Oahu and that Hawaii was a possession of the United States in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I learned that the Philippines were also our possession and that it was already the next day there because they were on the other side of the International Date Line, which was amazing but true, as confirmed by our new globe. I learned that battleships were named for states and that the one named for our state, the Oklahoma, had been sunk. I learned that Japanese fighter planes were called “Zeroes” although I never learned why, that day or later. I was allowed to stay up past my normal bed time of 8pm to listen to Walter Winchell’s staccato delivery of all the news and rumors.
It was definitely a new epoch in the history of the world. However, I still had to go to school the next day. My exceptionally competent second grade teacher Miss Moore took advantage of the teachable moment to drive home some geography lessons, and my arm was in the air to answer questions so often that I was admonished to let others have a chance. We got time off from lessons to hear President Roosevelt ask Congress for a declaration of war. What happened in the days after that I have no idea, and I would have some difficulty telling you what I did last week, but my memory of December 7, 1941, and its immediate aftermath is indelible, as it is for nearly every American my age or older. Memory works that way.
When I became a public school teacher in 1959, I would build lessons around this quality of memory. I would tell my students that their parents could clearly recall where they were when they first heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor. My students did not believe their parents were capable of such knowledge of ancient events, and were always amazed at the depth of detail the question elicited. Parents recalled Pearl Harbor with as much clarity as they recalled the birth of their children or their weddings. There were exceptions. One father in 1962 recalled that December 7, 1941, must have been after cotton picking was over and about hog-killing time in Sunflower County, Mississippi, but that for a family with no radio and no newspaper delivery, the day had no special impact. He knew it had changed his life, however, for within two years he got a letter from a cousin in Chicago inviting him to make fabulous money helping make airplane engines while living in a place with electric lights and a flush toilet. He understood very well that somehow the attack on Pearl Harbor had made this possible.
Within a few years the parents were getting too young to remember Pearl Harbor, but there was another universally memorable date. My students could all remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22, 1963. Within a decade they were getting too young to remember that, but their parents could. By the time I retired from teaching in 1991, there were even parents of high school freshmen who were getting too young to recall that. I suppose teachers today teach the same memory lesson with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. By 2010 there will be high school freshmen too young to recall that clearly, and I sincerely hope there will be no newer universally memorable date. The Chinese are quite right to regard “May you live in memorable times” as a terrible curse.
Actually, I was a bit surprised on December 7, 1941, to find that the United States was not already at war. I knew that American ships carrying supplies to the British and Russians were already being sunk by German submarines. When I had my tonsils out in September, 1939, my ether dreams were a green cloud of storm troopers goose-stepping through Poland like the ones I had seen in the newsreels. I knew that the United States had already started drafting soldiers, among whom was the boxing champion Joe Louis, whose defeat of the German Max Schmeling on June 22, 1938, is my very first datable memory. I recall hearing news bulletins day after day in 1940 giving news from “unoccupied France.” I asked why there was never any news from “occupied France” and did not get a satisfactory answer.
I recall a favorite game of kindergarten boys at Miss Frances Reynolds’s Bluebird School that was based on the understanding of five year-olds concerning current events. We would agree to be representatives of various world powers with a designated enemy. We would be Chinese versus Japanese, Germans versus French, Italians versus Ethiopians, Russians versus Finns, and so forth. Then we would rush at each other in one grand melee with inventive alliances and betrayals. One boy told his parents about the game and was told that he could not be an Ethiopian any more because Ethiopians were niggers. The problem was easily solved because Italy was fighting Albanians by that time, and Albanians were white as far as any of us knew.
There were already a lot of movies about the British being nice people who deserved our support and how we must learn to be tough in preparing for war. My favorite among those I was taken to see was a story of World War I, Sergeant York starring Gary Cooper. Alvin York was a poor hill farmer in eastern Tennessee who had become a religious pacifist after a wild youth. When he was drafted, an understanding commander sent him home for a few days with his Bible and also the basic documents of American government. After serious contemplation on a mountain top, York chose to aid his country. After his best friend was killed by the Germans, he became angry in the classic manner of Achilles. He used his back country shooting skills to kill or capture literally hundreds of Germans. My favorite bit was when he imitated a turkey gobbler, then shot the German who poked his head up to see what was happening. His neighbors rewarded York with a piece of the good bottom land he had always coveted, complete with a house with electricity and a flush toilet. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked, the American public, including seven year-olds like me, had been well prepared.
President Roosevelt had many detractors in Enid, Oklahoma, his wife even more, the British Empire was not popular and the Communist Russians less so, but I do not recall any significant opposition to the war once it had begun. Hitler, who must have had the most easily caricatured face in history, was universally despised, Mussolini regarded as a buffoon, and the sneaky Japanese, who all looked alike anyhow, merged into one hated slant-eyed toothy face. There were German Americans in Enid, all of them loyal American patriots, but none of us had ever even seen a Japanese. On radio the Green Hornet’s valet Kato switched ethnicity from Japanese to Filipino the week after Pearl Harbor, although still played by the same actor with the same accent. No one objected when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and put in concentration camps.
Our neighbor Sally O’Donnell was a local celebrity in early 1942 because she had actually been in Hawaii visiting her daughter when the attack occurred. She told us that Hawaii was full of Japanese, very few of whom had been arrested. Much of the work of the islands, including the running of military facilities, could not be done without them. This ran counter to a common but not universal opinion that the Japanese were not even human, just evil little monkeys. My mother believed that people who could create such beautiful fabrics could not be all bad but warned me not to repeat that opinion in public. My father, who had been twelve years old when World War I ended, warned me not to believe all the atrocity stories about the Bataan death march and the German concentration camps. He had believed the stories about German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, and they had turned out not to be true.
All the boys in the neighborhood became experts on the war. When I was in first grade before the war began, the flight of an airplane over our area was so rare an event that we would be let out onto the playground to watch it fly over. An older cousin had taught me a joke that was guaranteed to upset our teacher, although we had only the vaguest notion as to why it did. One of us would ask: “Is that the mail plane?” and another would reply: “No, that’s just the landing gear hanging down.” By the next year Enid had an Army Air Corps training base, and the sight of BT-9 and BT-15 trainers became so common that we were no longer allowed outside to watch. We knew all about the Boeing B-17 long range bomber, the beautiful twin-fuselage Lockheed P-38, the British Spitfire fighter and Hawker Hurricane bomber, the German planes called Messerschmitt and Fokker, a name which gave rise to much schoolyard smut. I cannot identify any of today’s jetliners, including the ones I have flown in, but in the early 1970s I amazed my children by identifying every World War II aircraft baking in the sun at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson.
We knew every gradation of rank in the army and navy, the difference between the wings of a pilot and a bombardier, the insignia of every branch of the service, and many corps and division patches like the thunderbird of the Forty-fifth Division, which was the Oklahoma National Guard. Many houses in the neighborhood had a red-bordered banner with a blue star hanging in the window, indicating that a family member was in the service. A gold star meant that a family member had given his life for his country. There was no such banner at our house, for I had no relative closer than first cousins in the service. I knew my father sincerely wanted to serve but could not.
He had two young children and a business that could not run very well without him. He was in his late thirties and had once spent a year in a sanitarium and in bed with tuberculosis. He had no military experience and no military skills. Nevertheless, he wanted to serve. Brisben Furniture Company had been doing fairly well since 1940 brought the first good rains in a decade and simultaneously high wheat prices because of the war in Europe. My mother’s skills as an interior decorator were becoming widely known and widely appreciated. Good furniture was in short supply because all production was directed toward the war effort, and home appliances like floor furnaces and kitchen ranges were in even shorter supply. His only help with heavy lifting was R. D. Phelps, a fascinating man with four sons in the service and much of his savings in his mouth in the form of gold teeth. Mr. Phelps could not get a job in a war plant because he could not produce a birth certificate. He was white but lived on an unpaved street in a part of Enid I never heard called anything but “Niggertown” until after I was grown.
My mother had a genius for supplying her customers. She negotiated a contract for decorating the officers’ club at the air base and some of the housing for married officers as well. The only upholsterer she could get during the war was dying of cancer, but Mr. Wassum’s remissions somehow got us through until VJ-day. My parents went to Chicago twice a year for the furniture markets and were very good at negotiating special orders of scarce furniture for customers. Once she went to Wichita to see if the stores there had furniture we needed and would exchange for items we could not move, a successful trip. She took me along. I was standing on the street in front of a furniture store when a bus stopped and about twenty midgets got off, most of them smaller than me at age nine. They worked at the Boeing plant. The B-29 bomber, so necessary for our victory in the Pacific, had been designed so quickly that the assembly line was already being set up when it was noticed that about fifteen spots on each line would not accommodate anyone taller than fifty inches. Midgets had been recruited from all over the country and specially trained, becoming one more group that the war was boosting into the middle class.
That day at the same spot I also met a man named Gordon, a light-skinned African American who had once shined shoes in an Enid barber shop. I hailed him. He had on a Boeing badge like the midgets I had just seen. He told me his name in Wichita was Gonzales and that he would greatly appreciate it if I told no one in Enid that I had seen him here. I promised this on Cub Scout honor. He got on a bus, sat near the front, and I never saw him again. The president had issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in war plants, but this had not been enforced in Wichita except in doubtful cases like that of Gordon-Gonzales.
At one time the army was excepting enlistees as old as forty-five years of age, and construction workers could be Seabees even older than that. Then the army announced that it was lowering its top age for enlistees to thirty-eight and would be more particular about persons in the upper reaches of that age range. The army had tired of having enlistees die of heart attacks during basic training and of having to pay for false teeth and bifocals. One evening after supper near the time when the new regulations were about to go into effect, my father left the house without telling us where he was going. The previous year he had taken a free chest x-ray from a storefront machine and had received a clean bill of health, indicating that the tubercular hole in his lung had healed over and that the scar tissue did not show in the low resolution picture. He was thirty-eight. He decided to take a chance.
The county draft board was headed by John Vater. He owned a book and office supply store where I sometimes bought and often browsed. He was a Roman Catholic. His store had been vandalized in the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. By the 1940s that incident was part of the community’s collective amnesia. His administration of the draft was universally praised, even by former Klansmen trying to get exemptions for their sons as needed farm workers. He kept the draft board office open some evenings as a convenience to those who worked days. When my father asked for an enlistment form, John Vater said the matter needed serious discussion, the kind that was best held over a few drinks. He lauded my father’s patriotism but raised serious and reasonable objections, all the time pouring drinks from the office bottle into paper cups from the water cooler. My father tried to refute the objections, which he knew to be strong, and, clean contrary to his usual habit, kept taking more drinks.
Close to midnight our doorbell rang. This was so unusual that it awakened me as well as my mother. John Vater was there with his arm around my father. It was the only time in my life I ever saw my father the worse for drink. Mr. Vater explained the situation and apologized to my mother. My mother hugged my father and said, “John, it would have been the wrong thing for you to go, but you are so brave and I am so proud of you.” I was proud of him, too, but I never got a chance to tell him so because the incident was never mentioned again by any of us.
I helped the war effort as much as any boy my age could. There were scrap rubber drives that had me hauling my wagon around the neighborhood asking for old hot water bottles and patched inner tubes. Once I collected a whole ton of scrap metal for a drive at school. My school’s discretionary fund and the treasury of the local Cub Scout organization benefited greatly from the scrap paper drives that went on throughout the war, for my friends and I would never be war profiteers. My only indulgence was to read many old magazines before I turned them in.
My grade school held twice-weekly stamp parades to a branch post office across the street. We would buy defense stamps, later called war stamps, in ten or twenty-five cent denominations, and paste them in a book. When we had eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents worth, we could trade the book for a war bond that would be worth twenty-five dollars in ten years. I became expert at getting the last dollar or so needed for a bond from my grandmother or other generous relatives and friends. Once I got the final nickel out of a bank cashier who was a family friend. By the end of the war I had three hundred dollars in bonds. I forgot about them until 1955 when I was getting married. Inflation had outpaced interest, which did not bother me because, like most Americans, I had bought them for patriotic reasons, but they allowed me to buy an engagement ring that I could not otherwise have afforded.
The thing about World War II that I have had most difficulty explaining to subsequent generations is the near unanimous American support for it. Overage or inappropriate volunteers like my father were far more common than draft resisters. The husband of one of my mother’s cousins joined up even though he was in his mid-thirties and had enough political pull to get deferred and make big money. My father took him in as a business partner after his discharge on generous terms. I have been told many times that command economies do not work, but the United States allocated scarce resources to war production and starved the civilian sector with few complaints. We went without new cars, new refrigerators, and much else.
Rationing and price controls were not popular, but they worked. We were limited to three new pairs of shoes per family member per year, an inadequate number for my rapidly growing feet. I managed to wear out one of my father’s pairs when we wore the same size, but my mother was in tears when my feet outgrew his. We saved sugar ration stamps for months so that I could have one of my beloved cherry pies when that fruit was in season. We did not want to be like the woman our neighbor Mrs. Miller told us about who had had two miscarriages and had ration books for both of them. My parents drove at thirty-five miles per hour on the open highway and never tried to get a larger gasoline ration than that the local board thought fair. We complained frequently, but most people obeyed the rules and vented their irritation at the Office of Price Administration (OPA) by making jokes.
I really did not understand the following joke the first time I heard it, but it became a favorite. I used to tell it to the young men who made high scores on my World War II test as a special reward. A Chicagoan was looking for a prostitute. He went to North Clark and was told the OPA ceiling price was three dollars plus three red ration stamps. He had the cash but no red ration stamps. He was told the same thing on West Madison. Then he went to East Forty-seventh, the heart of the African American ghetto. He was told the price was five dollars. “No red ration stamps?” he asked. “No, man, this here’s the black market.”
Bubble gum disappeared from the market, comic books shrank from sixty-four to forty-eight pages and were published less frequently, western movies of the type I watched every Saturday at the Cherokee Theater were limited to forty-five blank shots per picture. Gym shoes made with inferior synthetic rubber made ugly black marks on basketball courts. Women who could no longer get silk or nylon stockings painted their legs and drew artificial seams up the back of them. Buses and trains were crowded with those who could no longer drive cars.
There were honorable ways around some of these shortages. My father claimed to be able to tell the difference between butter and oleomargarine, but my mother used oleomargarine in cooking without telling him, and he did not detect the substitution. He found a supplier in Missouri who mailed him Old Gold cigarettes when they were unavailable elsewhere. When I went to Chicago with my family in July, 1945, I found a candy machine in the lobby of a newsreel theater that dispensed Tootsie Rolls and spent fifty cents buying ten packages of five candies each. I rationed my consumption so that they lasted the rest of the war.
The war was great early training for someone like me who would later earn a living teaching history and geography. I learned to find Singapore, Guadalcanal, Casablanca, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Bastogne, Remagen, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and many other places on a map. I knew that Rommel lost because he ran out of gas and why Mark Clark found it so difficult to take Monte Cassino. I even knew secrets which I did not repeat because “loose lips sink ships.” For instance a friend of my parents who was an importer was getting orders for high quality imported chess sets from places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, and had deduced that refugee scientists were up to something important in those places. By 1945 I was following the formation of the United Nations with great interest and was charting the slow progress of our troops in Okinawa from each day’s newspaper map.
For those Americans who were not getting killed or crippled, World War II brought many benefits. It was considered out of line when my senile grandmother thanked God for the war while saying grace at a family gathering, but we all knew what she meant. My parents’ store was making good money and would make much better money when wartime shortages were over. My uncle’s bar near several war plants in Oklahoma City was filled with patrons at all hours drinking as if they were on a twelve-hour pass from hell. A cousin who was 4-F because he had lost the toes on one foot in a corn shucking machine was using his profits to expand his operations and buy new equipment. All of my cousins in the service got college educations through the GI Bill of Rights and eventually entered the labor force equipped with skills that they would not otherwise have been able to acquire. Many people like my parents felt somewhat guilty about this, but I never heard of anyone turning down the benefits the war brought. For midgets, for African Americans, and for those in the rapidly disappearing category of “Okies”, it was a brave new world.
We got a few hours off at school anticipating VE-day, which did not happen until the day after we had spent a pleasant morning listening to Cliff Arquette in Glamour Manor. This did not bother me, for my fifth grade teacher was a hateful incompetent. When I heard news of the Hiroshima bombing, I had no idea of its importance. We were used to totally destroyed cities by that time and were hardened to the idea of civilian casualties. Most of the ten year-olds in the country envied the killers and would have been killers ourselves if we could. The few groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses or others who had religious or other principled objections to killing seemed faintly ridiculous. Many people thought that it would take another two years to defeat Japan with many hundreds of thousands of American casualties.
On August 14, 1945, I was in the Chief Theater watching Boris Karloff strangle Bela Lugosi in a movie called The Body Snatcher. At that moment a bunch of newsboys rushed into the theater yelling: “Extra! Extra! Japs Give Up.” I jumped about a foot. That night my family and I went downtown to celebrate with our neighbors. A loudspeaker from station KCRC kept booming a Spike Jones number about a returning soldier called “Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma”. There would be no more gold stars.
Within a few months bubble gum came back, comic books became plumper and more frequent, the “ruptured duck” button of returning veterans was a common sight. The end of gas rationing meant that we could visit my aunt and paternal grandmother in Oklahoma City more frequently. On one of those trips we stopped to deliver several cartons of cigarettes at the German prisoner of war camp near El Reno, Oklahoma. The prisoners were being rented out to local farmers at twenty-five cents per hour and were being held until the 1946 cotton crop was picked. My father knew the stories about death camps by that time and believed them, but he said most of these poor bastards had just been doing what they were told and had no choice about it. By that time we had heard stories from returning veterans that American troops had occasionally committed atrocities, too. It was my father’s opinion that we would have to do business with these people some day and that they would appreciate a small act of kindness. He insisted that the gift be anonymous but was thanked effusively by camp administrators and the prisoners working in their office.
Within five years there was another war in Korea, but few Americans were enthusiastic about it even though there was little significant resistance to it. The movies about the Red menace were never able to rekindle the enthusiasm of the movies about the Nazi menace. Every American troop commitment since has aroused more opposition than the last. The sixtieth anniversary of the end of the World War II has been celebrated by its surviving veterans, and they have been widely and justly praised. Soon they will be gone and those of us who were children on the safe and prosperous home front will follow them. May you live in less memorable times.




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