Growing up during "The War"
“The War,” that impressive new historical series by Ken Burns on PBS TV, stirs vivid memories of growing up in small-town America during World War II.
Fortunately I was much too young to be drafted but old enough to be awfully excited by it all. Several factors made things particularly relevant in my town of Abilene, Texas.
Even before our nation’s “date that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt put it the following day on Dec. 8, 1941, in asking Congress to declare war on Japan for having bombed Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack, my parents’ generation in Abilene was already feeling the effects of America’s war preparations in reaction to Germany’s European conquests and Japan’s battles in Indochina.
Our little town was doubly impacted directly. For one thing, the Texas National Guard had already mobilized in preparation for war. The unit from Abilene ( Battery E of the 131st Field Artillery, 36th Infantry Div.) got sent to far-off Java. Shortly after Pearl Harbor our local troops were captured by the Japanese and became the “Lost Battalion.” Part of the infamous Pacific island death marches, they also helped construct the Bridge on the River Kwai, of movie fame. (For more details, you can Google "Texas Lost Battalion.")
Also, a few miles outside our town a new army base, Camp Barkeley, had been established several months before Pearl Harbor. It trained soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division (a National Guard division mobilized from Oklahoma units). Before the war was over, the base housed as many as 60,000 troops.
That is significant, for when the war began, the town’s population was only about 25,000. Oh yes, and it was legally “dry,” banning beer and liquor sales, which benefited a very large cadre of citizen bootleggers.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the 45th Division left to fight the Nazis in north Africa. Then the 90th Division came to train at Barkeley, which also would house a prisoner of war camp in the latter stages of the war.
My family directly felt the effects. My dad had been exec officer of that ill-fated National Guard unit. He waived the age maximum and tried to go with his unit, but a health exam prevented it. Then he commanded the area’s home defense guard. More significantly, he also headed the local draft board.
That volunteer task brought great grief, since his draft board had to decide on appropriate classifications of all the county’s age-eligible males. 1-A meant almost certainly an assignment to combat in some form or other. Deferments were sought on health, sole-son, religious and other grounds. The hearings were understandably contentious.
As a pre-teener I could care less. I was too busy ogling the huge trucks and tanks that regularly rumbled past on a nearby street, building airplane models and helping with our town’s frequent scrap metal drives.
My closest brush with wartime danger came one afternoon in our neighborhood school. In class, just as we were about to be let out, we heard this awful crashing sound. I ran outside to the only vacant lot nearby where a crowd had already gathered. A military training plane had crashed head-first right into the heart of the lot.
Once, while strolling home from somewhere, I saw this young private gazing intently at the ground beside the sidewalk. His question, in Yankee dialect, was whether the ugly lizard on the ground might bite us. I laughed and picked up the harmless little horned toad and offered it to him. He shied away, still awed over our strange wildlife in the sticks.
In the sixth grade late in the war, we students bought war bonds and sang “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Every afternoon after school I delivered newspapers on my bike. After finishing one evening I got an urgent call from my route manager. I had to come back downtown and distribute an “extra.” Why? The Japs had surrendered!
I picked up my stack of 50 papers but didn’t try to deliver them. Traffic was way too heavy by then. So I merely strode over to the town’s main intersection, where cars were inching along, celebrants blowing their horns and hanging out of windows, waving flags and bottles. And the tips!
It was the biggest payday of my budding career. I counted out the change after biking back home that evening, and bragged to my dad: $37. So to me, that made the whole war a blast.
Such quaint recollections are as nothing compared to the war’s real woes, as endured by our Sun cartoonist Frank Lewis, who fought in hand-to-hand combat to help free Manila in the Philippines, or my brother-in-law Rufus Grisham, who piloted B-17 missions over Germany and later was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Still, thanks to relative youth plus the kind of luck I’ve been blessed with, I’ll probably outlive ‘em both, God bless ‘em.
Fortunately I was much too young to be drafted but old enough to be awfully excited by it all. Several factors made things particularly relevant in my town of Abilene, Texas.
Even before our nation’s “date that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt put it the following day on Dec. 8, 1941, in asking Congress to declare war on Japan for having bombed Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack, my parents’ generation in Abilene was already feeling the effects of America’s war preparations in reaction to Germany’s European conquests and Japan’s battles in Indochina.
Our little town was doubly impacted directly. For one thing, the Texas National Guard had already mobilized in preparation for war. The unit from Abilene ( Battery E of the 131st Field Artillery, 36th Infantry Div.) got sent to far-off Java. Shortly after Pearl Harbor our local troops were captured by the Japanese and became the “Lost Battalion.” Part of the infamous Pacific island death marches, they also helped construct the Bridge on the River Kwai, of movie fame. (For more details, you can Google "Texas Lost Battalion.")
Also, a few miles outside our town a new army base, Camp Barkeley, had been established several months before Pearl Harbor. It trained soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division (a National Guard division mobilized from Oklahoma units). Before the war was over, the base housed as many as 60,000 troops.
That is significant, for when the war began, the town’s population was only about 25,000. Oh yes, and it was legally “dry,” banning beer and liquor sales, which benefited a very large cadre of citizen bootleggers.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the 45th Division left to fight the Nazis in north Africa. Then the 90th Division came to train at Barkeley, which also would house a prisoner of war camp in the latter stages of the war.
My family directly felt the effects. My dad had been exec officer of that ill-fated National Guard unit. He waived the age maximum and tried to go with his unit, but a health exam prevented it. Then he commanded the area’s home defense guard. More significantly, he also headed the local draft board.
That volunteer task brought great grief, since his draft board had to decide on appropriate classifications of all the county’s age-eligible males. 1-A meant almost certainly an assignment to combat in some form or other. Deferments were sought on health, sole-son, religious and other grounds. The hearings were understandably contentious.
As a pre-teener I could care less. I was too busy ogling the huge trucks and tanks that regularly rumbled past on a nearby street, building airplane models and helping with our town’s frequent scrap metal drives.
My closest brush with wartime danger came one afternoon in our neighborhood school. In class, just as we were about to be let out, we heard this awful crashing sound. I ran outside to the only vacant lot nearby where a crowd had already gathered. A military training plane had crashed head-first right into the heart of the lot.
Once, while strolling home from somewhere, I saw this young private gazing intently at the ground beside the sidewalk. His question, in Yankee dialect, was whether the ugly lizard on the ground might bite us. I laughed and picked up the harmless little horned toad and offered it to him. He shied away, still awed over our strange wildlife in the sticks.
In the sixth grade late in the war, we students bought war bonds and sang “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Every afternoon after school I delivered newspapers on my bike. After finishing one evening I got an urgent call from my route manager. I had to come back downtown and distribute an “extra.” Why? The Japs had surrendered!
I picked up my stack of 50 papers but didn’t try to deliver them. Traffic was way too heavy by then. So I merely strode over to the town’s main intersection, where cars were inching along, celebrants blowing their horns and hanging out of windows, waving flags and bottles. And the tips!
It was the biggest payday of my budding career. I counted out the change after biking back home that evening, and bragged to my dad: $37. So to me, that made the whole war a blast.
Such quaint recollections are as nothing compared to the war’s real woes, as endured by our Sun cartoonist Frank Lewis, who fought in hand-to-hand combat to help free Manila in the Philippines, or my brother-in-law Rufus Grisham, who piloted B-17 missions over Germany and later was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Still, thanks to relative youth plus the kind of luck I’ve been blessed with, I’ll probably outlive ‘em both, God bless ‘em.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
3:28 PM
