Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Only in comparatively recent times, incidentally, has the White House become an unapproachable fortress. As late as the Harding era (1921-3) the public was allowed to picnic on the White House lawn or even wander over and peer through the windows of the Oval Office.14 Harding himself sometimes answered the White House front door.15

  II

  And so to military matters.

  There is an old joke that goes: ‘Dear Diary: Today the Hundred Years War started.’ The fact is that most wars didn’t get the name by which we know them until the nineteenth century. The American Revolution wasn’t normally called that until the nineteenth century. It was the War for Independence, or simply the War with Britain. The Civil War was at the time of its fighting more generally called the War Between the States by southerners and the War of the Rebellion by northerners. World War I for obvious reasons wasn’t so called until there was a World War II. (It was the Great War.) World War II, although the term was commonly applied, didn’t become official until the war was nearly over; Roosevelt didn’t like either World War II or Second World War. Throughout its early years, he called it – a trifle melodramatically – the War for Survival, then shortly before his death started referring to it as the Tyrants’ War. Other names that were commonly attached to it were War of World Freedom, War of Liberation and the Anti-Nazi War. In 1945, the question of a formal name was put to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. His choice, World War II, was formally adopted by President Truman.16

  Battles, too, often went by a variety of names, particularly those of the American Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant didn’t refer to the Battle of Shiloh but of Pittsburg Landing. To the North it was Bull Run, but to the South it was Manassas. The northern Antietam was the southern Sharpsburg, as the southern> Murfreesboro, Perryville and Boonsboro were to northerners respectively Stone River, Chaplin Hills and South Mountain.17

  Wars are always linguistically productive, though military slang and terminology, like armies themselves, tend to be continuously replaced with fresh recruits. In consequence, battlefield terms usually either survive more or less indefinitely – bomb dates from 1582, grenade (from pomegranate and ultimately from Granada) from 1532 – or else fade from the vocabularies of all but military historians.

  Almost all that survives from the period of the American Revolution, apart from the (mostly mythical) slogans and catchphrases discussed already in Chapter 3, is a single song: ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. It was the most popular tune of the day, sung by both sides with lyrics that chided the other. No one knows who first sang it or when, though the mocking tone of the words in the best-known version suggests British authorship:

  Yankee Doodle came to town,

  riding on a pony,

  stuck a feather in his cap,

  and called it macaroni.

  If you have ever wondered why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his cap macaroni, the answer is that macaroni was a slang term of the day for a fop. The feather in his cap possibly alluded to the habit of colonial soldiers, who often had no uniforms, of sticking a feather of piece of paper in their caps as a means of distinguishing themselves during battle.

  The War of 1812 gave us, again as we have already seen, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and Uncle Sam, plus conscript as both a noun and a verb and two catch-phrases of some durability: ‘Don’t give up the ship’ and ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’ The first belongs to Captain James Lawrence and the second to Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry.

  Not until we get to the Civil war period do we at last begin to encounter strictly military terms that have passed into wider usage. Among the Civil War neologisms that are still with us are KP (for kitchen police), AWOL (absent without leave), pup-tents (originally known as dog-tents), and, rather surprisingly, doughboy and grapevine in the context of rumours. Doughboy appears to have been first applied to Union soldiers during the 1860s. (The earliest reference is found in the memoirs of George Armstrong Custer in 1867, but the context indicates that it was already widely known.) The origins are entirely mysterious. Since early colonial times small fried cakes had been known as doughboys, and the word may betoken a similarity in appearance between these cakes and the buttons on cavalry soldiers’ uniforms, but it is no more than a guess. At all events, the term faded from sight after about 1870 and didn’t catch on again until World War I.19 Grapevine, or grapevine telegraph, as a notional medium for the transformation of rumours, is equally mysterious. It was widely used during the Civil War, usually with the sense of a wholly unreliable rumour, but what precisely inspired it is unknown.

  We have been conditioned by Hollywood to think of Union soldiers dressed identically in blue and Confederate troops in grey. In fact, for the first year or so of the war most soldiers wore the uniforms of their state militias, which came in any number of colours. Troops from Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance, wore grey uniforms that were very like the official Confederate outfits, leading to endless confusion on the battlefield. After the North lost the first battle of Bull Run because Union troops failed to fire on an advancing contingent of Virginia militia, mistaking them for northern allies, the War Department rushed into production hundreds of thousands of standard uniforms. These were manufactured with an old process employing recycled woollen fibres and known as shoddy. Because the uniforms were poorly made and easily came unstitched, shoddy came to denote any article of inferior quality. The system of producing uniforms en masse also led, incidentally, to the introduction of standard graduated sizes, a process that was carried over to civilian life after the war.20

  One myth of the Civil War period is that hooker for a prostitute arose from the camp followers of General Joseph Hooker. It is true that the cadres of sexual entrepreneurs who followed Hooker’s men from battlefield to battlefield were jocularly known as Hooker’s Division or Hooker’s Reserves, but hooker itself predates the Civil War. It was first noted in 1845 in reference to a section of New York, Corlear’s Hook, also known as The Hook, where prostitutes congregated.21

  One term that did spring to prominence during the Civil War, though again of greater antiquity, was the Mason-Dixon line. It had been laid out a century earlier by the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were brought to America in 1763 to resolve a long-standing border dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Though we tend to think of the Mason-Dixon line as a straight east-west demarcation, a good quarter of it ran north-south. It was only coincidentally that it delineated the boundary between slave and non-slave states. Had it not been for this, the line would very probably have been forgoften, which would have been unfortunate because it was one of the great scientific feats of its age. Mason and Dixon were not merely surveyors but accomplished astronomers and mathematicians, and their achievement in drawing an accurate line across 244 miles of wilderness had a measure of heroism and scientific scrutiny not easily appreciated today. To the dismay of historians, Mason’s careful notes of his four years’ work disappeared for almost a century. Then in 1860 they turned up – no one knows how or why – two thousand miles from where they had last been seen, on a rubbish heap in Nova Scotia, where they were about to be burned.22

  A final, incidental linguistic legacy of the war between the states was the term sideburns, named for the Union commander Ambrose E. Burnside, whose distinctive mutton-chop whiskers inspired a fashion and became known as burnsides. Within a decade the syllables had been transposed, but quite how or why is anyone’s guess.

  After its brief flurry of creativity during the Civil War, military terminology then grows quiet for nearly half a century. Roughriders, from the Spanish-American War, limey for a British sailor, and leathernecks for Marines (so called because for a decade in the late nineteenth century they wore a uniform with a leather lining in the collar; it was said to be excruciatingly uncomfortable)23 effectively exhaust the list of neologisms from the period 1870-1917.

  But the outbreak of global hostilities with World War I prompted an outpouring of new terms, many of which
are with us yet. Among the words or expressions that entered the common argot during the period are dog tags, chowhound and chowtime, convoy, dawn patrol, dogfight, eyewash, to go west (actually much older, but not widely used before about 1918), stunt, shellshock, gadget, to scrounge, booby trap, foxhole, brass hat, MP for military police, civvies for civilian clothes, draftee, pipe down as a call for quiet (it originated in the nautical use of pipes to announce changes of watch and the like) and to swing the lead.24

  From the British came bridgehead, ack-ack, blimp, tank and, rather unexpectedly, basket case for a severely wounded combatant. Blimp arose from its official designation: ‘Dirigible: Type B-Limp’, and ack-ack was a slang shortening of anti-aircraft, based on British telephonic code for the letters AA.

  From the Germans came zeppelin (named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, its designer), black market (from German Schwarzmarkt) and Big Bertha for an outsized gun. As was their custom, the Germans had named the gun after the wife of the head of Krupp Steel, the manufacturer, and with a certain lack of delicacy had called it not Big Bertha but Fat Bertha. Quite how Frau Krupp received this signal honour is not known.

  From France, meanwhile, came parachute, camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning ‘to blow smoke up someone’s nose’, a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French) and barrage (from tir de barrage) in the sense of concentrated artillery fire. Barrage already existed in English with the meaning of a barrier across a waterway, but previously had been pronounced to rhyme with disparage.25

  Somewhat surprisingly, World War II was considerably less prolific of new terminology than World War I once you strip out those terms like Lend Lease, VE Day and Luftwaffe that are now used primarily in a historical context. Among the relatively few terms to come to prominence during the period and to live on after the war were bazooka, blackout, GI, liberty for shore leave, pin-up girl, Mae West for an inflatable jacket, task force, jeep, blitzkrieg, flak, fascism, gestapo, kamikaze, displaced person, blockbuster (originally a bomb sufficiently powerful to destroy an entire city block, and later of course appropriated by the entertainment industry), the expression the greatest thing since sliced bread and, not least, a robust and inventive use of the word fuck. One of the last named’s offshoots is snafu, often said to be an abbreviation of ‘situation normal, all fouled up’, but don’t you believe it. Once there were many more in like vein – namely, tuifu (’the ultimate in fuck-ups’) and fubar (’fucked up beyond all recognition’). The use of fucked as a general descriptive (’this engine is completely fucked’) appears also to be a legacy of World War II.

  Several World War II words, it will be noted, were foreign creations. Blitzkrieg (literally ‘lightning war’), flak (a contraction of Fliegerabwehrkanone, ’anti-aircraft gun’) and gestapo (from Geheime Staatspolizei, ‘Secret State Police’) are of obvious German derivation. Also from Nazi Germany came one of our more chilling phrases, final solution (German Endlösung) coined by Reinhard ‘The Hangman’ Heydrich. Fascism dates from long before the war – from 1919, in fact, when Benito Mussolini launched the Fascismo movement in Italy – but came to prominence only in the period just before the war. It comes from the Latin fasces, ‘bundle’, and alludes to a bundle of rods that was used both as a tool of execution and a symbol of authority in imperial Rome.26 Kamikaze is of course Japanese. It means ‘divine wind’, and commemorates a timely typhoon that routed a Mongol seaborne attack early in Japan’s history.

  Among the native-born terms that are not self-evident, bazooka was called after a comical stage prop – a kind of homemade trombone – used by a popular comedian named Bob Burns, and GI stands for general issue, the initials stamped on all military property. No one knows quite when GI was first applied to soldiers, but GI Joe can be dated with certainty. He first appeared in the 17 June 1942 issue of Yank, the armed forces newspaper, in a cartoon drawn by Dave Berger.27

  Jeep, as a concept if not as a word, slightly predates America’s involvement in the war. In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, the Army introduced a sturdy vehicle for negotiating rough terrain. The jeep was actually not a very good vehicle. It was heavy, difficult to manoeuvre, devoured oil, had a chronically leaky water pump and cylinder head, and could run continuously for no more than four hours. But something about its boxy shape and go-anywhere capabilities earned it instant and widespread affection. No one knows how it got its name. The most common, and seemingly most plausible, explanation is that it is taken from the letters GP, short for General Purpose. The problem is that General Purpose was never officially part of its title, and doesn’t appear on any documents associated with it. The Army with its usual gift for clunky appellations termed it a truck, quarter ton, four-by-four. More puzzlingly, the prototype for the jeep was generally known – for reasons now lost – as a peep. Mencken stoutly maintains that jeep comes from the Popeye the Sailor comic strip written by EC Segar.28 It is true that a character named Eugene the Jeep appeared in the strip as early as March 1936, though no one has ever explained how, or more pertinently why, that character’s name would have been applied to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. What is certain is that Segar did give the world another useful word at about the same time, goon, named for simian-like characters in the strip.

  Towards the end of the war, a slogan, often accompanied by a cartoon drawing of the top half of a face peering over a fence or other barrier, mysteriously began appearing wherever the US Army went. The slogan was ‘Kilroy was here’. No one has any idea who this Kilroy was. The figure at whom the finger is most often pointed is James J. Kilroy, an inspector of military equipment in Quincy, Massachusetts, who was said to have chalked the three famous words on crates of equipment that were then dispatched to the far corners of the world. Others attribute it with equal assurance to a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the Army Air Transport Command, who would also have had the opportunity to place his name on boxes of supplies and munitions. But the theories are manifold. One desperately imaginative scholar has even interpreted it as an anti-authoritarian Kill Roi, or ‘Kill the King’*32

  One of the more striking fashions to grow out of World War II was a military affection for acronyms and other such shortenings. The practice had begun in earnest in civilian life during the New Deal years of the 1930s when combinations like TVA, WPA, OPA and PWA (respectively, Tennessee Valley Authority, Works Progress Administration, Office of Price Administration and Public Works Authority) became a part of everyday life. The military took it up with a passion once the world went to war, and devised not only alphabet soup acronyms like OSRD-WD (Office of Scientific Research and Development, Western Division), ICWI (Interdepartmental Commission on War Information), and JMUSDC (Joint Mexican-US Defence Commission), but also novel hybrids like ComAirSoPa (for Commander of Aircraft for the South Pacific) and Seabees (out of CBs, from the Navy’s Construction Battalion). Occasionally these things had to be rethought. When it was realized that nearly everyone was pronouncing the abbreviation for the Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet in the Pacific, CinCUS, as ‘sink us’, it was hastily amended to the more buoyant-sounding ComInCh.29

  Oddly, one of the things World War II didn’t leave Americans with was a memorable song. Almost every other war had, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ of the Revolution to ‘John Brown’s Body’ and the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ of the Civil War, to World War I’s ‘Over There’. Most World War II songs by contrast seemed to be begging for instant obscurity. Among the more notably forgettable titles to emerge in the early days of fighting were ‘They’re Going to Be Playing Taps on the Japs’, ‘Goodbye, Mama, l’m Off to Yokohama’, ‘Let’s Knock the Hit Out of Hitler’, ‘Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’, and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. Only one achieved anything like permanence in the popular consciousness – and that as a catch-phrase rather than a song. It was based on the supposedly real-life story of a naval chaplain, William A. McGuire, who reportedly climbed into the seat of an anti
-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor after the gunner had been killed and began knocking Japanese planes from the sky as he cried the famous words: ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ In fact, as a bemused McGuire told the world after the song became a hit, he had never said any such thing, and indeed had never even fired a gun. All he had done was help lift some boxes of ammunition.30

  On 6 August 1945 President Harry S Truman announced to the nation: ‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It is an atomic bomb.’ It was the first time that most people had heard the term. In the following years many other words connected with splitting the atom would become increasingly familiar to them: nuclear, fission, fusion, radiation, reactor, mushroom cloud, fallout, fallout shelter, H-bomb, ground zero, and, unexpectedly, bikini for a two-piece swimsuit designed by Louis Reard, a French couturier, in 1946, and named for the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where America had just begun testing atomic bombs.

  The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of one war and the beginning of another: the cold war. The cold war may not have generated a lot of casualties, but it was none the less the longest and costliest war America has ever fought. War was unquestionably good for business – so good that in 1946 the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, went so far as to call for a ‘permanent war economy’. He more or less got his wish. Throughout the 1950s America spent more on defence than it did on anything else – indeed, almost as much as it did on all other things together. By 1960, military spending accounted for 49.7 per cent of the federal budget – more than the combined national budgets of Britain, France, West Germany and Italy.31 Even America’s foreign aid was overwhelmingly military. Of the $50 billion that America distributed in aid in the 1950s, 90 per cent was for military purposes.