We were born into the worst years
of the Great Depression and welcomed pass-me-down clothes, darned socks and
shoes repaired multiple times by our Dads. We delivered newspapers in the early
morning dark, shoveled snow for a dime and traded baseball cards, shooting
marbles and “Dick Tracy” rings from Wheaties
box tops. We didn’t ride to school on buses, and when we got there we
joined in prayer and saluted the flag in every classroom. School lunch was
something from home ( probably P,B n J
or baloney sandwiches and a red apple) we carried in a tin lunch pail
like our Dad’s, but smaller. We came home full of “the olde nik”, played in the streets, in the woods or on the
sandlots until dark (or until Dad came after us with a switch.) We started with
red hot water and “Ivory soap that floats”
in the tub for the first guy but by the last one in it was “cold and gray” with
broken pieces.
Our Dads worked hard and for long
hours, six days a week while our Moms kept house and home together. We had lots
of friends, and neighbors looking out for us, and aunts and uncles and cousins
galore. We did not think we were
poor! I felt lucky to have been born in America. And I thought about it a lot.
My friend Pierre Poirot was from France, Ziggy Klausner whose father drove a
locomotive, from Germany and Paul Glen from Ireland. I wouldn’t have changed
heritage with anyone – even my own cousins in England, where bombs were already
falling.
The day Pearl Harbor was bombed I
was listening on the radio, and from that moment on I lived each day as an active
participant. In fact I think of
myself as a “child of World War II; it is in my blood, and I am of that generation even though too
young to go. I collected scrap, ran obstacle courses, target-fired weekly,
drilled with my high school friends, waited faithfully for letters from my
Marine Corps brothers; bought Savings stamps and bonds, watched fighting ships
come and go from New York’s busy harbor and fighters and bombers take off from
Mitchell and Floyd Bennett fields.
We gladly weathered the
inconvenience and dietary limitations of rationing and pinched budgets, getting
by on 10 gallons of auto fuel a month, 35 mph speed limits, blown tires that
had to be patched or abandoned, and watching the number of gold stars in
neighbors’ windows grow in number; getting word that Junior LagGande was
missing on a training flight in the Cascades and Jackie Mueller had lost a leg
in Africa.
Then it was all over: VE Day, then
VJ Day, and good-looking cars started to flow out of Detroit, and America was
ready for good times again. Then, just as I and millions of other young men
ready for higher education or jobs in the real world were leaving high school,
the unfinished business of WWII began to come home to haunt us. In fact history
will eventually agree with my personal belief that The Second World War did not
end in 1945, but just took a rest while the Chinese repossessed the hardware of
war the Allies conveniently left stacked and ready for them to appropriate, and
Communist regimes moved across Europe as we and our docile “friends” signed
mindless treaties and “giveaways” in the name of “peace and friendship”.
Then those of us who thought we had
“lost our chance” to fight in the “Big” war got the call to a faraway land
called Korea and we went by the tens and then hundreds of thousands, occupying
old tar-paper training barracks and left-over uniforms; left-over everything including M-1s and carbines
with rusted firing pins. We drove 1942 Ford-built jeeps (which turned out to be
superior to the largely-deficient Willys
which replaced them.) We rode to war in
“moth-balled” Liberty ships quickly
returned to service, and ate “C” and “K” rations of uncertain antiquity in the
field. We learned that none of our 6X6s and “weapos” had been winterized, that
a “10-second” hand grenade better be thrown before the count of 3, and that .50
cal. ammo. supplies limited us to 10 “test” rounds a day. (In my Air Force outfit
we traded a surplus of ammo. for desperately-needed concertina wire to protect
ground facilities from infiltrators.)
The zippers on our sleeping bags
froze shut trapping our guys for night bayonet attacks, and the firing rate of
cheap communist “burp guns” out-stripped anything we had for two years. We flew close-up air support with leftover
P-51 “Mustangs” and F-4U “Corsairs” – which turned out to be a “blessing”
compared to the new F-80 “Shooting Stars” which lacked diving brakes and
accuracy (and with whose help my outfit bombed itself; twice.)
With a lot of experienced leadership
from our senior NCOs who were mostly “big war” veterans, our guys fought
bravely and well, eventually routing the invaders and saving today’s Republic
of Korea (South) for its 43 million residents,
an anchor of democratic capitalism in East Asia, from godless Communism.
Proud of what our big brothers had
done before us, and aware that the folks at home were not exactly rolling in
the aisles with applause for us, we became the Quiet Generation. Our
casualties per month of warfare were higher than those of any other American
conflict since the Civil War, and our war
was one we actually WON! What a novel outcome!
I’m fiercely proud of every living
(and gone) Korean veteran, and I for one of them refuse to be quiet when I see
high school graduates (and college-age contemporaries) who don’t even know
about that bloody struggle for human freedom. And I will have you know that we too are dues-paying members of “the greatest generation!”
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