Bobby

I actually turned nine in September of 1941.

In the early winter of that year, my father picked me up at the movies in our 1939 Plymouth. On the ride home he told me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and we were at war. He was quite formal about it, “the Japanese” he said. Thereafter for the next four years they would be Japs.

I was thrilled. Ever since the war started in Europe, I had yearned for us to have one. The interior light above the front windshield of the Plymouth had a corrugated surface on its half-moon shape and from then on, it looked to me exactly like the ammunition belt for a machine gun. I spent hours of imaginary dogfights in the Plymouth, manning the dome light, until after the war, when we could, we traded the Plymouth for a ’46 Ford.

The war was wonderful fun. We painted the top halves of our headlights to preserve blackout rules. On our coast, oil slicks from sunken tankers washed up on the beaches. It was thrilling to think that there might be a U-boat looking at you through a periscope right at that moment. We were alert for them whenever we were near the ocean. Coastguardsmen with side arms patrolled our beaches, on the lookout for saboteurs, attracting the attention of young women in bathing suits.

During blackouts, my uncle Paul, the drunk, in his white air raid warden’s helmet, was assigned to direct automobiles at a darkened intersection. He usually created a great angry traffic jam. We collected paper for the war, and collected fat in coffee cans. I won a MacArthur medal for collecting so many newspapers. I was years into adulthood before I lost track of it. Most of the ballplayers went to the war. The St. Louis Browns had a one-armed outfielder named Pete Grey.

We studied posters published by Coca-Cola, as I remember, in which the profile of every warplane was presented so that we could spot them at once and know which was ours and which belonged to the Japs or the Krauts. P-40s with the tiger shark nose design that the Flying Tigers used in China. P-41s. P-38s where the cabin was between a double fuselage that stretched back from two engines to twin tails. The unstylish Jap Zeros. The Nazi planes: Messerschmitts, the Stuka dive-bombers with the ugly fixed wheels. The RAF Spitfire. The Navy Corsair. Our planes were always the best-looking. For the first time in my life there were planes overhead often. There were blimps on submarine patrol along the coast, the B-17s and B-24s from Westover Field. The unglamorous transports which one didn’t bother to learn the names of. They came low and very loud and everyone would stop and look up. I always hoped it would be an exciting enemy plane, but it never was.

My father was too old to be drafted, but he would receive a commission in the signal corps if he volunteered. My mother put her foot down, as she often did. “You have a wife and son to take care of,” she said while her foot was down. So my father didn’t volunteer. The son he had to take care of was aghast and perfectly puzzled. I never blamed him. I blamed my mother.

My cousin Dave was in the Navy in the Pacific. We had his picture on the drop leaf maple table in the living room. Dark blue uniform, white sailor hat on the back of his head, big grin. He had worked out a code with his father to let us know approximately where he was, and when we would go to my uncle John’s house he would have Dave’s positions marked with colored pins on a big wall map taped up in the kitchen. The names were operatic: Wake Island, Midway, Guam, Tulagi, Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan. Jungle and vast blue sea, and tracer bullets in the night and the sound of fighter planes in the sky. My soul spun out across the angry planet like the web from a spider.

Everything was rationed: gasoline, tires, bacon, butter. We used margarine instead. It came lard white with a dye pack included. I used to mix the orange-yellow dye into the recalcitrant margarine until it looked sort of like butter. I never questioned this contribution to the war effort, and felt soldierly doing it. Families with men in the war hung small square flags in the window with a star in the center of the flag, sometimes more than one star. The star colors told you the status of the warrior. A gold star meant that the warrior was dead, and the Gold Star Mother became one of the enduring icons of my childhood.

At the movies we saw Bataan, Flying Tigers, Guadalcanal Diary, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Wake Island. The Japs were unremittingly wrong. We were brave. Even the misfits learned before the end of the movie that the war had to be won. All of the bomber crews and rifle squads were a melting pot of American ethnicity, Murphy, Martinelli, Shapiro, Swenson and DeLisle. On screen the war was fought by Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, John Garfield, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Taylor. Of course we would win. Every week at the movies we watched the newsreels which tended to treat the war as an unswerving march by our side toward victory in Europe and the Pacific. No one doubted. There would be no conditions. We required unconditional surrender. Remember Pearl Harbor as we march against the foe... Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, praise the Lord we ain’t a goin’ fishing... We’re comin’ in on a wing and a prayer...

At Mass we said prayers for our boys... Bob Hope went and entertained our boys... The Stage Door Canteen welcomed our boys... The USO brought comfort to our boys. The Red Cross, too... Tokyo Rose urged our boys not to die in vain. How could she do that?

My parents were Republicans and even during the war spoke ill of Roosevelt among their friends. How could they do that? We had some sort of intellectual grasp of the fact that Roosevelt was paralyzed. But it was only that, the knowledge of a meaningless fact, like being aware that calculus exists. Our Roosevelt moved as easily as Churchill. He was never publicly crippled.

There was gasoline rationing and all cars had a sticker designation for how much they could buy a week. We were I think a C sticker. There were ration books. Spike Jones recorded a song called “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” whose lyrics included a forceful Bronx cheer. As the war progressed some of our boys began to return, still jaundiced from tropical fevers, limping from bullet wounds, wearing slings, using canes, deaf in one ear from artillery concussion. They were celebrities, twenty missions over Berlin, veterans of Anzio and Guadalcanal, North Africa and Kwajalein, Italy and France, people who’d fought and killed and seen men die at Iwo Jima and Omaha Beach. They were more important than movie stars or ballplayers. I wished that I could have been one of them. I would have happily suffered what they suffered to have become what they became. If only I was old enough. I never thought about dying in the war. I’d have returned maybe with a wonderful sling, and would shake my head quietly when people asked me about it.

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