In a revealing moment President Roosevelt lamented that no one had thought of a fitting title for the war (he rather liked “The Tyrants’ War”) and that there were no stirring songs like “Tipperary” and “Over There.” It tipped his hand because that was the kind of thoughts commanders in chief and five-star generals had. GIs would have hooted. To them giving the war a number was fine; if calling them GIs dehumanized them, and numbering wars deglorified them, they approved; it was justice. Walter Johnson has pointed out that despite the title of Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, the ETO war lacked a crusading spirit. Disillusion with World War I had discredited in advance any slogans or parades, and “the Depression had left its mark, as those unsure of their future in hard times now had war added to their doubts about the future. An adolescent thirst for glory was replaced by a grim determination to defeat the enemy. The justness of the cause was not doubted, but the nation fought with a deadpan face.”
Significantly, the two most famous GI cartoon characters in the ETO were anything but comic. War can be preposterous at times, and when the ETO was ridiculous, Willie and Joe noted it with a wry, throwaway wit. But most of the time they were melancholy. Their creator, writing at the time, explained: “We don’t have to be indoctrinated or told there is a war on. We know there is a war on because we see it. We don’t like it a darned bit, but you don’t see many soldiers quitting, so fancy propaganda would be a little superfluous.”
And yet, ironically, they were perhaps the best-prepared generation ever to go to war willingly—willingly only because they knew the job had to be done. And that was how they looked at it: it was a job. A dirty, nauseating job, but what else could you do if you were a young, ruddy, well-nourished male with the right reflexes? To be sure, there were those who refused to go. Robert Lowell was a conscientious objector. In his imagination he could see the mutilated victims of air bombings, and he wanted no part of that. But few had his vision, and most of those who did were unwilling to turn the world over to Hitler.
Most of the swing generation, including those who loathed violence, approved of Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary and uncle of a future Yale chaplain, when he warned that the seminary would not become “a haven for draft dodgers.” Doubtless he would have taken another position on the Vietnam War, for the two conflicts are very different. To a shocking degree the American casualties in Vietnam were to be children of the poor; until 1972 college students were exempt and knew loopholes in the draft law by the time they graduated. In World War II everybody who was fit went. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. commanded tanks in the African desert. William Fife Knowland was a major in France. Hank Greenberg, the great Detroit slugger, was a shavetail. Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were Air Corps officers, Walter Winchell and John Ford naval officers. John Huston became a major, Darryl Zanuck and Frank Capra lieutenant colonels. Jackie Coogan was a glider pilot. Paul Douglas, aged forty, enlisted in the Marine Corps as a private, and other volunteers included Joe DiMaggio, Red Skelton, Robert Montgomery, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Henry Fonda, Louis Hayward, Tyrone Power and David Niven.
In January 1942 Joe Louis knocked out Buddy Baer in exactly two minutes and fifty-six seconds, then turned his purse over to the New York Auxiliary of the Navy Relief Society and went into the Army—this despite the appalling fact that throughout World War II the Red Cross kept “white blood” and “Negro blood” in segregated containers. Joe might have hesitated if the color line had been drawn in combat, with the rich and the privileged in safe zones. But they weren’t. Among those cited for bravery in the naval battle off Casablanca was Lieutenant Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., a gunnery officer on a destroyer. Major Glenn Miller went down with his plane, and the men killed in action included Lieutenant Wells Lewis, son of Sinclair Lewis; Lieutenant Peter G. Lehman, son of New York’s Herbert Lehman; Marine Sergeant Peter B. Saltonstall, son of the Massachusetts senator; Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., son of the ambassador; and eighteen-year-old Stephen P. Hopkins, Harry Hopkins’s youngest boy.
***
The guys up front read about all this in the Stars and Stripes, Yank, or the “pony editions” (small and adless) of Time and the New Yorker. They were proud of America’s democratic Army, just as they were proud of their engineers, who could erect Bailey bridges overnight, and the Seabees, who leveled the mountains of Ascension Island and built a mile-long airstrip there after the British engineers had said it couldn’t be done. But they rarely bragged about their country, even among themselves. They got through what they had to go through by adopting a tough, sardonic facade. They griped about rear echelon pleasures that never reached the front—movies, Bob Hope shows, Red Cross girls—though if a gripe turned into a whine they came down on the whiner: “See the chaplain,” they would taunt, or “Tough shit,” or “Hell, you found a home in the Army.”
Subjects that could be used for communal grousing were greeted with relish. The K-9 Corps was fair game. So were members of the women’s services, who, they told one another, were all sleeping with officers—“Hey! You hear what happened to Halsey? He got sucked under a bridge by a Wave!” (Marines, lacking an acronym, called women marines BAMs—broad-assed marines; the girls struck back by calling them HAMs—hairy-assed marines.) But the greatest source for the mass gripe and the best guffaws was probably advertising from home. That was their one complaint about pony editions. They wanted to see the ads, and wrote home asking for them, and they could hardly wait to see what Madison Avenue would do next.
What Madison Avenue was doing, if you believed every word, was winning the war. THE GREAT GIFT TO THE MOTHERS OF MEN! one classic began. The gift, the first two paragraphs of the copy explained, was sulfa drugs, but the advertiser, you learned in the third paragraph, was the air-conditioning company which kept comfortable the scientists who discovered sulfa. Challenged by this creative stroke, a competitor claimed an assist for the torpedoing of a Jap freighter—“air-conditioning made possible the hit itself” because the periscope used by the American sub had been ground and polished in an air-conditioned workshop.
FERTILIZER CAN WIN THE WAR! another plug began, and the guys agreed that if that was true, Madison Avenue was doing the job. A maker of ball bearings assured the home front that GIs would have “a safe highway home” because the soldier’s bearings “still ride with him.” Sugar was a Nazi-killer. Castor beans had left the medicine chest for Anzio. Lucky Strike green had gone to war. Gillette razor blade steel was going into bayonets. Alarm clocks kept generals on time. The guys read that “cotton cloth can help win an air fight,” that “back of every attack is wire rope,” that heavy equipment was “playing its part in the clearing away of the rubble of destruction and in the building of a better world,” that a manufacturer of metal fasteners—a soldier was shown lying in a hammock—had made certain that “his cradle won’t drop, because it’s furnished with clamps 30 percent stronger than specified.” As a rule, the fruitier the prose, the more soldiers enjoyed it, though some pitches were adjudged to be foul. One New York cemetery deliberately timed its commercials to be broadcast after bulletins about heavy fighting overseas; after the guys had heard about it the commercials were hastily withdrawn. In another unbelievable campaign, parents were warned that they should have the right brand of spectacles so they could recognize their returning sons. Again, a blizzard of angry V-mail arrived on the advertiser’s desk. And when a copywriter for an aircraft company asked in print, “Who’s afraid of the big Focke-Wulf?” the fliers at an Air Corps base wrote, “We are,” followed it with the signatures of every airman there, including the commanding officer, and mailed it to the sponsoring firm.
The most famous ad of the war was “The Kid in Upper 4,” a description of a young soldier lying awake in a Pullman berth remembering “the taste of hamburgers and pop… the feel of driving a roadster… a dog named Shucks, or Spot, or Barnacle Bill.” It continued: “There’s a lump in his throat, and maybe a tear fills his eye. It doesn’t matter, K
id. Nobody will see… it’s too dark….” GIs thought that was a lot of fertilizer, too, but at least it was in a good cause (making room for traveling soldiers), like the appeals to buy war bonds, avoid the black market, collect scrap iron, and, if readers learned about troop movements, to “Keep it under your Stetson.” The doggies passed over them in silence. What really doubled them up were the flagrant attempts to exploit the war for private gain—the assertion that war production would be increased if everyone chewed a few more sticks of Wrigley’s every day, for example, or advertising Munsingwear’s foundation garments with a picture of a WAC saying, “Don’t tell me bulges are patriotic!” or Sergeant’s flea powder advertisement showing “Old Sarge” reporting, “Sighted flea—killed same.”
One such plug, “Angel in Muddy Boots,” was in a class by itself. A nurse was shown leaning over a wounded GI. The huckster read the soldier’s mind: “I remember you… you are the girl with flying feet who led the way to laughter… you are all the girls I ever liked who brightened a fellow’s life…. You didn’t always wear muddy boots. Once you raced over summer lawns, in bright, skylarking shoes….” This sent the adman to dreaming: “Yes, she grew up…. Her muddy boots are an example of that. The men and women—skilled craftsmen all… that first gave her the delight of casual shoes in color, turned their hand to meeting the need for a sturdy boot that would carry a nurse through mud and rain…. When the war came, these same bootmakers… created the Nurses’ Arctic, the Soldiers’ Arctic, the Jungle Boot, the War Pilots’ Boot, the deck-gripping Sea Boot, the Arctic Mukluk…. Someday there will be girls again who… fly over sun-flecked lawns with the lilt of summer in their hearts and rainbows on their feet.” Only the copywriter didn’t want them to wear the rainbows. “Playshoes would be back,” he promised, “and everyone should remember the brand name….” Somehow one has forgotten it.
What made the Angel in Muddy Boots particularly tasteless was that it was trading on something very precious to infantrymen: their secret dream of love and postwar peace. The dreams of different soldiers were remarkably alike. Loping through fields sown with Teller mines, their legs swinging in the awkward gait of the eternal foot soldier, they had come to resemble one another. Willie and Joe might have been twins; Willie had the big nose and Joe the little one, but sometimes even their creator confused them, and in their propinquity, in their shared agony, they had formed a common vision of paradise. It had nothing to do with headlines, salients, or pincer movements; that was the generals’ war. The other war, as John Steinbeck explained it, was “the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or at any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage.” That was Bill Mauldin’s war, it was Ernie Pyle’s war, and Sad Sack’s war, it was the war of men who cherished their Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth pinups in Yank, the war which was completely misunderstood by Postmaster General Frank Walker, who banned Esquire from the mails because he thought the magazine appealed to GI prurience.
It appealed to their yearning for tenderness and passion, for beauty and warmth, for real girls to replace the pinups; for a home that was not in the Army. Betty Friedan, then fresh from Smith, later recalled that “women as well as men sought the comforting reality of home and children…. We were all vulnerable, homesick, lonely, frightened.” Fannie Hurst wrote that American girls “are retrogressing into… that thing known as The Home.” In Europe GIs moodily listened to the strains of “Lili Marlene,” the greatest song of the war, broadcast from behind German lines but universal in its appeal—
Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor,
Steht ’ne Laterne und steht sie noch davor.
Dort wollen wir uns mal wiederseh’n,
Bei der Laterne wollen wir steh’n
Wie einst, Lilli Marlene
Wie einst, Lilli Marlene.
—while at home girls, standing on tiptoe for the postwar world, heard:
I’ll walk alone
Because, to tell you the truth, I’ll be lonely
I don’t mind being lonely
When my heart tells me you
Are lonely too
Or:
I’ll be with you in apple blossom time
I’ll be with you to change your name to mine
Some day in May
I’ll come and say
“Happy the bride that the sun shines on today.”
Possibly because there was so much correspondence between the front and home, the girls and the men in the ETO and the Pacific not only longed for the same future; they often agreed about its most minute details. The house would have a white picket fence. It would be within walking distance of a school. The girl would have a chest of silverware, the ex-GI a den. They would garden together. He would probably commute to work, because they lived in a quiet suburb. Naturally they would have children who would be adorable as babies, cute as grade school pupils, and striking as they entered their teens. After high school they would attend the best colleges and universities in the country, where their parents would be very, very proud of them.
TEN
The Home Front
During March 1942, according to an anecdote then sweeping the country, a woman on a bus was reported to have said loudly, “Well, my husband has a better job than he ever had and he’s making more money, so I hope the war lasts a long time.” At that, another woman rose and slapped her face, blurting out, “That’s for my boy who was killed at Pearl Harbor. And this”—a second slap—“is for my boy on Bataan.”
The story has an air of apocrypha (what mother had sons on Oahu and Luzon?), but its widespread acceptance suggests that it told wartime America something about itself. For tens of millions the war boom was in fact a bonanza, a Depression dream come true, and they felt guilty about it. Not so guilty that they declined the money, to be sure—that would have been asking too much of human nature and wouldn’t have helped combat troops a bit—but contrite enough to make them join scrap drives, buy war bonds, serve in Civil Defense units, and once in a while buy a lonely soldier a drink.
Every great war is accompanied by social revolution, and the very dimensions of this war were bound to alter America greatly. Few realized that then. The New York Daily News really believed that GIs were fighting “to get back to the ball game and the full tank of gas,” and GIs themselves sometimes thought they were in there battling for Mom and apple pie. But history does not let those who make it get off that easily. No country could have survived America’s convulsive transformation of 1941–45 without altering its essence and its view of itself. The home front was in reality a battleground of ideas, customs, economic theory, foreign policy, and relationships between the sexes and social classes. Rosie the Riveter, like Kilroy, was everywhere, and she would never be the same again.
The most obvious source of change was the immense transfusion of cash into what had been an austere economy. In 1942 Washington was pumping three hundred million dollars a day into U.S. wallets and purses. After the windup in 1945 the total cost of the war was reckoned at 245 billion dollars—more than the merged annual budgets of the United States from 1789 to 1940, which included the financing of five wars. In 1939 the Gross National Product, the total value of the goods and services produced by the American people, had been 91 billion dollars. In 1945 it was 215 billion, a jump without precedent in the history of the world. The stubborn tumor of jobless men—there had been eight million as late as 1940—had disappeared. The number of working Americans had grown from 45 million to 66 million, over five million of them women. Paul Bunyan was back. The country’s old, pre-Crash confidence in itself had returned. Corporate profits in 1943 exceeded those of 1929.
Joseph Paul Goebbels cried, “The Americans are so helpless that they must fall back again and again upon boasting about their materiel. Their loud mouths produce a thousand airplanes and tanks
almost daily, but when they need them they haven’t got them and are therefore taking one beating after another!” This was mindless, even antic, but there was something disconcerting about a country which could field an Army of twelve million men, fight two awesome empires at the same time, build a Navy larger than the combined fleets of its enemies and its allies—and still record a 20 percent increase in civilian spending over 1939. The phenomenon troubled some commentators. “We live in the light, in relative comfort and complete security,” said Edward R. Murrow. “We are the only nation in this war which has raised its standard of living since the war began. We are not tired, as all Europe is tired.” Eric Sevareid, observing that most people at home were better off because of the war, warned that “if hardships do things to the mind, so do comforts.”
Time trumpeted that America was “getting suddenly rich—everywhere, all at once,” but not many Americans were accumulating fortunes. It was true that big, efficient corporations were crowding many small businesses off the stage. However, tax returns testify that the real beneficiary of the war boom was the small family which had saved little or nothing during the Depression. It was all unplanned, but part of the explanation lay deep in the American national character. D. W. Brogan, the Tocqueville of the twentieth century, explained to his fellow Europeans that their new ally took a different view of the conflict: “To the Americans war is a business, not an art; they are not interested in moral victories, but in victory…. [T]he United States is a great, a very great corporation whose stockholders expect (with all their history to justify the expectation) that it will be in the black.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 43