WW II
During World War II, Camp Shanks in Rockland Co., N.Y., about ten miles from New York City, was the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops leaving to fight in Europe. (See here and here.) My father worked there as a clerk. He had been too young for World War I, and while not too old for the Second World War, by 1941 he had six children, and my mother wouldn’t agree to his going off to war. His contribution was to work at Camp Shanks, to edit a newsletter of home town news that he sent to all the young men from West Nyack, N.Y., who were in the military, and by serving as an air-raid warden in that little town.
I have memories of the air-raid drills, of all the lights having to be put out, or the shades drawn, and the top half of car headlights blacked out. We had a Victory Garden in our backyard. We kids would also collect string and tin-foil, for some war-related purpose. We still have the ration-books that were used for buying food, one for each member of the family. (By the time the war ended, there were eight children.)
I remember the fire-siren blowing to celebrate the end of the war, doing summersaults on the front lawn, and telling playmates that my uncle was going to bring a Jeep home. How little I knew at the age of six: he was in the Navy!
“Saving Private Ryan” was on TV last night and perhaps that’s what prompted these memories. Much more realistic than many a war movie, it still falls far short of the horror of the real thing, you will be told by anyone who has ever fought in a war.
Time to put a plug for my grand-father’s “Memoires de la Sorbonne en guerre (1940-1944)” about being a professor during the Occupation. To appear in a few months, L’Harmattan editions.
There is an addendum about the liberation of Versailles (where he lived), that coincidentally happened on the feast day of Saint Louis, the patron saint of Versailles.
Vendredi 25.
Au réveil, soleil radieux et silence complet sur Versailles. A peine quelques bruits de canon très lointain. Une fumée s’élève dans le Nord. Qui est vainqueur ?
A 9h, nous sortons mon fils et moi. [...] Un avion de reconnaissance canadien est tombé avenue de Paris devant le lycée de jeunes filles [dès l’après-midi, son fuselage est couvert de fleurs et de rubans.]. [...] Sur l’avenue de Paris, la foule se presse, plus dense qu’on ne l’a jamais vue aux plus grands jours de fête (aujourd’hui 25 août, fête de Saint Louis, patron de Versailles).
10h50. Débouchant de l’avenue Thiers, venant de Rambouillet où ils ont été alertés hier matin, les motorisés de la division Leclerc (spahis marocains, fusiliers marins, éléments du 3e régiment de marche du Tchad) apparaissent. Les acclamations redoublent, si fortes qu’elles couvrent la voix des haut-parleurs. La ruée de la foule est telle que les chars doivent s’arrêter. Les jeunes gens, les jeunes filles, les enfants acclament les chars, couvrent de fleurs et de baisers les hommes, les uns presque enfants à figure rose, les autres (sans doute les anciens du Tchad et de Libye) tannés par le soleil. Les soldats, étourdis par les acclamations, se bouchent les oreilles, jettent à la foule cigarettes, tablettes de chocolat, boites de lait condensé. Le colonel commandant la colonne [note: Lieutenant-Colonel Rémi, des spahis marocains.] paraît à la fenêtre de la salle des fêtes de l’hôtel de ville et prononce une allocution si hachée d’acclamations qu’on n’en entend que quelques mots. Un disque diffuse la Marseillaise ; mais les gorges, enrouées d’acclamations ou d’émotion peuvent à peine l’accompagner. Mon fils applaudit frénétiquement, agite son éventail tricolore, hurle : « Bravo ! ». Les enfants sont les plus enragés ; depuis quinze jours ils sont accrochés à la TSF ou préparent les drapeaux, drapeaux fanés ressortis des greniers ou des caves, ou bien morceaux de linge blanc passés hâtivement à la peinture ou au crayolor. [...]
A 21hs 30, nous nous rendons devant la mairie où stationne une foule un peu moins dense que le matin, mais tout aussi enthousiaste. On a retrouvé de la voix pour chanter la Marseillaise . Des haut-parleurs diffusent marches et chansons militaires. Les pompiers ont mis en marche leur groupe électrogène de secours et illuminent la façade de la mairie écornée par l’attaque allemande du 24. Tous les éléments jeunes (soldats de Leclerc dont les voitures stationnent aux environs, pompiers, jeunes gens de la D P, secouristes de la Croix Rouge) se prennent par la main et partent en une immense farandole (note: Le lendemain les pompiers de service prétendront avoir retrouvé 35 talons de souliers dans la cour de la mairie). A 22hs 15, une nouvelle Marseillaise ; puis l’on se retire pendant que les F F I s’organisent en postes de garde.
I was on the other side of the Hudson in Westchester and 7 years older. Yes, air raid drills. gardens, collecting scrap…I would like to add we all had war bonds and stamps that EVERYONE invested in.. No bonds. stamps now though. Get the money from China… Now ..it’s leave it to others to participate in sacrifice.
Only remember my mother’s ecstatic response when bananas were freed up from ration cards!
Joe, I don’t think any cinematic version and vision can capture the reality of war, and not to send this off on a cinema verite tangent, but what do you think comes closest? I recently saw the HBO series “The Pacific,” and thought that pretty good, depicting the grind of it all and the other enemies — the jungle and the constant tension. I just don’t know if anything ever can present the steel-in-the-gut fear, the dry mouth, of real awful war.
Remember the gelatinous pale margerine that was supposed to pass for butter. It came with a little capsule of bright yellow dye that you were to mix with the gelatinous mass so that it would approximate the color of real butter. Then there was Spam, which, I’m sad to recall, remained a frequent sandwich meat to take in one’s paper bag lunch when I was in grammar school. I did come to love Campbell’s pepper pot soup, however, which only later I learned was cheaper than any other kind, except tomato soup, which we had a lot.
Thanks, Claire. My French isn’t much, but even I can catch the joy of the day from your grandfather’s description :-)
The surrender of the Japanese was the end of the war for us. The evening of the surrender my brother and I went downtown for the celebration. What I remember most of all was the total elation of some young sailors — surrender for them meant that they weren’t going to be killed young.
The first thing I did when rationing was over was to go to the grocery store and buy a can of asparagus all for me :-) They cost too many rationing stamps during the war to ever get any.
We had learned in school that if Hitler really wanted to defeat the US, he would have to bomb Philadelphia, for wasn’t that city the center of the country (think: 1776) and of its war industry? I remember a night game in Shibe Park, Cy Blanton of the Phillies shutting out the Pirates on three hits despite a half-hour enforced break in the action for an air-raid drill. (Why can’t I remember more useful things?)
What a wonderful description of Leclerc’s troops leading the way into Versailles — and, of course Paris — ahead of the main force of the Allied armies.
Merci, Claire (4:38 pm). Splendide. Quelque chose que nous qui ne vivaient pas dans ce temps-lá ne pouvons pas comprendre. Sacrifice, peur, désastre, libération.
The above (in English) I remember well. Also, collecting cans of cooking fat from the neighbors, the joy of getting enough gas for the family car to go anywhere, and bed-time prayers for peace (do mothers still make kids do that?)
This was brought back to mind this year in looking at a recent study that wondered about cultural influences on young American males in the old days and concluded domestic sociocultural degeneracy of the ’60s was the driving factor. While the ’60s were unforgettable in their own way, I’m convinced the sequence of WWII, massive post-war recovery, Korea, long Cold War, and VietNam made major impacts in many ways on the home front and abroad, not least on young American males. Look at the memories, created with youthful understanding and a horizon limited to the neighborhood, that stick 66 years after our series started.
I remember my mother and other women on our block standing outside beating on pots and pans, so happy. It’s V-J Day, my mother told me.
And I remember that nasty margarine, too, with the yellow capsule inside.
David, I thought The Pacific was great. Heart-wrenching. The interviews with the real men were amazing. Dowling, who threw his dog tags in a mass grave, so his parents would have some idea what had happened to him, and whose mother fainted when he called her? And on the web site are more stories about the real men.
We lived in a Chicago apartment that for some reason in its past actually had a walk-in safe. It was light-tight, so during air raids when everything was supposed to be blacked out, my mother could take my brother and myself in there and read our bedtime stories. I was three, and my memory of this is vague. My memory is better of ration books and of all the complicated redistribution of foods among needy relatives that they entailed. In cleaning out the family home after my mother’s death two years ago, my younger brother found my ration book and those of other family members.
My father, an artist and perhaps the thinnest man in Chicago, was turned down in the draft, but he enrolled in a course on camouflage overseen by the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who founded the Chicago Institute of Design, a Bauhaus-in-exile in the U.S. My brother also found the certificate my father received for completing the course signed by the great Moholy-Nagy himself.
Since the Nazis planned to bomb Chicago rather than Philadelphia (sorry, Nicholas Clifford), these artists, my father later recounted, cooked up schemes to camouflage the city. One plan was to place a string of lights well out in Lake Michigan so that the German pilots would mistake it for the Outer Drive and bomb the lake rather than the city. Another was to paint huge “flats” that would look from the air like the oil storage tanks located in East Chicago, Gary, and Whiting. These would be placed out to the west in farmland so that the German planes would bomb the prairie rather than these prime targets.
These two grand schemes were somewhat contradictory, of course. One created the impression that Chicago was to the east of its actual location, the other that it was to the west. Neither scheme — and there were others of a similar nature — was carried out by any of these artists. I have a feeling that a lot of drinking was involved in their planning sessions.
Food…
My mother, her entire life, refused to substitute margarine for butter, because of memories of awful war-time margarine.
All wheat was supposed to be turned over to the local German occupants but my other grand-father, who lived on a farm, used to hide wheat in a wheelbarrow under some straw and take it to the local miller to make flour, and so his family always had good bread during the war.
My mother and her cousin, as young girls, used to take walks in the nearby woods, ostensibly to go for a picnic, but in reality to deliver food to the young men who were there in hiding. People sent the kids out to do this kind of things because, with children, it looked less suspicious. Her cousin comments: “What fun we had!”
Peter, those are great anecdotes about the artists on the home front. There’s got to be an article there somewhere.
These are marvelous reflections, but Claire’s particularly made me think of my mother-in-law. She was born in and, except for three years at university in Dublin, has lived her entire life in Derry, Northern Ireland. Ireland, as I am sure everyone here knows, was neutral during the war and was a source of all manner of “contraband” for smugglers from the North. In my mother-in-law’s case it was butter. She would often cycle out to a small shop at Quigley’s Point (Rinn Ui Choighligh) in Co. Donegal owned, as it happened, by the father of her future husband, where she would purchase as much butter as she could carry in an overcoat she had tricked out with pockets sewn on the inside. To this day no margarine is served in her home, or by my wife in our home, for that matter.
And apropos of the comments above on the likelihood of Luftwaffe bombings of Philadelphia and Chicago, I believe the furthest west German bombers actually reached during the war was Northern Ireland. Two landmines were dropped by a bomber that may have been intended for the US naval base in Derry but landed instead in a housing estate called Messines Park with considerable loss of life. Messines Park is still there, about 200 yards east of St. Patrick’s Church, Pennyburn, which was also damaged in the raid (and, coincidentally enough, is where my wife and I were married)..
Artists were also used for deception closer to the battlefield. The Historical Society of Rockland County (NY) has an exhibit right now of “The Ghost Army,” which tells the story of artists who were “charged with deceiving the Germans as to the location and strength of American troops on battlefields across Europe. From Normandy to the Rhine, it staged 21 battlefield deceptions, employing an array of inflatable tanks, trucks, jeeps and airplanes. Ghost Army soldiers also employed trucks equipped with giant speakers, emitting recordings of troop movement, bridges being built and tanks rolling. They transmitted phony radio broadcasts and play-acted to fool the enemy.”
Am I correct in thinking that German submarines approached the eastern coast of the U.S.?
My brother is a fund-raiser for the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, which among other things tries to get recipients of the medal no one in his right mind wants to earn to talk about their experiences. For many of them this is extremely difficult, and not just because they have seen things that no one should ever have to witness, but also because many of them may have done things no one should ever have to do.
In “The Pacific,” the hardest thing to watch was the descent of the young man from the mid-west from innocence to brutality.
JAK –
“Am I correct in thinking that German submarines approached the eastern coast of the U.S.?”
Yes. There exists a fascinating map which shows where German subs were sunk during the war along the Atlantic approaches to the US. I haven’t seen it in years and may need a while to track it down. Meanwhile, try this:
http://www.uboat.net/maps/us_east_coast.htm
Convoys from the US to Europe were vital to Allied survival and led to the Battle of the Atlantic, since the Germans understood their importance as well as we did. 15 years later, I met some German Naval officers who had been there and survived. They were tough old salts.
Before we trash that gelatinous margarine, which had to be mixed with a capsule of artificial color to turn it yellow, I should point out (in deference to my habitat in Vermont) that one of the chief architects of the law forbidding the sale of yellow marg was Rep. Elbridge Brigham of Vermont, back in the early 1930s. He was a former commissioner of agriculture in the state, and did what he could to protect the dairy industry. So we can’t blame the war, the Japanese, the Nazis, or even the New Deal for this. Brigham was, of course, a good solid Republican (back in the days when Vermont was, as the People’s Republic of China is today, a one-party state).
In “The Pacific,” the hardest thing to watch was the descent of the young man from the mid-west from innocence to brutality.
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Yes, very sad.
A great scene was after the hell of Okinawa when they heard about the Bomb and refused to believe it. They couldn’t process the idea that the war was over and they had survived.
Another war story from memory: I had four uncles in the war, two in the Navy (the Pacific), two in the army (Europe). The memory: magazine and newspaper pictures of sailors showed them spic and span; pictures of soldiers showed them mud-covered, dirty, sweaty; sometimes crazed looking.
When all returned after the war, my sailor uncles were spic and span, but so were by soldier uncles. The first time I saw the uncle-soldiers (at about the age of five) at my Grandmother’s house, I was stunned. They too were spic and span. After we left, I plagued my mother and father with questions about how they had become so clean. My mother kept saying, “Well, they just took baths.” I was not convinced. My view of the soldier’s war was that mud and dirt were a permanent change. Guess not.
Here is post by a relative of mine on his blog. I think it is worth repeating in this column of reminiscences on WWII.
Note: The athletic fields mentioned in the blog were on the grounds of La Salle College High School run by the Christian Brothers, 20th and Olney Streets, Philadelphia PA. My relative went there for high school and he attests that, since there were so few in the college due to the war, he had the good fortune to be taught by college professors in high school.
“Growing up we had several German American families in the neighborhood who had their own social clubs with the oompah bands and picnics on Sunday with names like Kanstatters and Schutzen park. With the outbreak of WWII there was a sensitivity on their part and they Americanized the names of these facilities. Obviously, they had families back in Germany but two families had sons drafted into our armed services and they were loyal citizens. When I walked to school I passed a building that was a National Guard Armory and I often watched them lower the Stars and Stripes at sundown. During WWII this building housed German POWS and circa 1943 they were probably captured in the North African campaign. The armory was adjacent to several athletic fields (See note above.) and in the afternoons they would be marched to a vacant athletic field and we could see them playing soccer with several U.S. sentries standing guard. But they weren’t going anywhere – their war was over – and we housed and fed them until the war’s end.”
There were German submarines sited in the Gulf of Mexico fairly often. One of them deposited several Germans on the shore of Louisiana. They were captured in the marshes/swamps. I guess they were spies, but the public was never told why they had been dropped off.
Yes, Americans could also do terrible things. My y oung godfather, a Marine lieutenant, told me that after the Battle of Tarawa he had to stop his troops from desecrating bodies of dead Japanese soldiers. But one mustn’t judge. It was one of the most horrible battles of the war. It happened on a tiny Pacific atoll during only 3 days. Of almost 5,000 Japanese soldiers, fewer than 20 surrendered. The rest had to be killed. Madness. Madness.
“My brother is a fund-raiser for the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, which among other things tries to get recipients of the medal no one in his right mind wants to earn to talk about their experiences”
A few years ago, my Dad interviewed two elderly South Philly WWII vets who were friends for 50 years but never discussed their war experiences with anyone, not even each other. That changed after “Band of Brothers” came out. ( One of the vets was “Wild Bill” Guarnere) I was really struck by how, like a lot of veterans, these men couldn’t talk about something that was such a huge part of their life. http://cst-phl.com/brothers-in-battle-p294.htm
Irene (5:24 am), thanks for that lovely article.
It’s not hard to understand why people who’ve been through all that wouldn’t want to talk about it. Talk is almost always about trivial things, or about serious things treated casually. What they did and experienced was far too deep to trivialize.
Irene:
As someone who was “bread and buttered” in Philadelphia and whose uncle-godfather was injured twice with Patton’s army, I thank you for your remembrance. My uncle never talked about his war memories despite the fact that he had several medals of honor. They were truly the “greatest generation.”
97 years ago this week, “the war to end all wars” began – World War I. Will we ever learn?
i happened to be in Brussels for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of V-E day. It was striking to realize there were people walking around with me who had been there for the real thing. A movie from the day (May 8, 1945) is a complement to Claire’s superb souvenir from her grandfather about Versailles, 200 miles from Brussels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWlf68qGAzI
“97 years ago this week, “the war to end all wars” began – World War I. Will we ever learn?”
Hi, Jack, maybe we have … in the sense that we haven’t been in a war that involves the large-scale carnage of American lives in nearly 40 years.
On the other hand, a good part of the reason for that is that our military capability is so awfully destructive that only a fool would engage us in that kind of a war (but there are fools in the world); and our might has engendered a multi-lateral arms race that will, assuredly, result in a nuclear conflagration, quite likely within my lifetime. Pakistan will bomb India or Afghanistan, or Israel will bomb Iran, or something along those lines.
Also – the wars we do fight now may save American lives but seem very efficient in killing our enemies and our enemies’ populations. It is weird, in a way, that most of us are so far removed from all the killing. The wars we’re in now have zero impact on our way of life, unless we have a relative who volunteered for the military.
None of this to try to gainsay what you wrote, just sharing the reflection that it inspired.