Tom Brokaw

by The Greatest Generation

  “We had the most delicious tea—never had tea that delicious. We were going against fraternization orders . . . I still had my rifle . . . but they were so nice.”

  Days before, the two nations represented by the four people at that party had been in a vicious war with each other. The Japanese family was living in the shadow of the wreckage of Hiroshima, the single most destructive act of war ever. They were entertaining two young Americans, men who were lucky to have survived the deadly intentions of the Japanese as they fought their way across the Pacific. Now they were enjoying each other’s company and a pot of wonderful tea.

  “I finally got back to New York on December thirtieth. I missed Christmas, but I got a temporary discharge so I could spend New Year’s at home. I rode the train into Brooklyn with a rifle over one shoulder and a souvenir samurai sword over the other. I looked so strange.”

  When they were courting, John and Peggy had developed a special signal so they could always find each other in crowded places, like Coney Island. It was what John called his “love whistle,” a sweet, melodious whistle in four beats he used only when he wanted to get Peggy’s attention. When John arrived at the bottom of the steps leading to her family’s home in Bensonhurst on December thirtieth, a great deal had changed in his life, but he remembered how to do the love whistle. When Peggy heard it, he says, “She came running out and almost took my head off.” Her memory: “I had just finished making a big WELCOME HOME sign and I was talking to John’s uncle when I heard the whistle. I just ran down the steps and hugged him.”

  John Assenzio (extreme left) in Kure, Japan

  The Assenzios’ Western Union telegrams—“They speak for themselves”

  MGM couldn’t improve on that for a love scene, and as corny as those black-and-white movies about love and marriage during the war years may seem now, they were a reflection of what was happening to couples across the country. Newly married couples didn’t have an opportunity to adjust slowly to the complexities of suddenly sharing a life.

  And then they were separated, often for years. Husbands were living in an intensely male environment, trying to deal with the stresses and dangers of war, while young wives were left at home, staying with relatives or living alone in strange cities, working when they could or caring for a child conceived before the father shipped out and born while he was away.

  Still, John and Peggy Assenzio were typical. When he came home, they simply resumed their life together. They loved each other. They wanted to have a family. They were faithful Catholics. They were true to the way they had been raised. They were grateful the only lasting effect of the war on John was nightmares. When he went through a difficult time, thrashing around in their bed, sometimes knocking over a table lamp, occasionally sleeping on the floor to avoid hitting Peggy as he flailed out at the dark memories, she was always there to comfort him, to remind him just by her presence that they would get through this together. John says, “The war helped me love Peggy more, if that’s possible. To appreciate her more.”

  John went back to his old job as a salesman for an import-export firm. Peggy had saved some money from her teaching job during the war. They couldn’t find an apartment in their families’ neighborhood, so they bought a home on Long Island, thus becoming part of a fundamental alteration of American life, the rise of the suburbs and the subsequent diffusion of the family.

  They raised a family—two sons. Their firstborn, John Jr., a schoolteacher, died of cancer a few years ago, and they’ve established a scholarship in his name. Another son, Rich, is a production manager with NBC Sports.

  John and Peggy are proponents of women’s liberation, but they worry that in trying to have it all—a career, marriage, and children—too many young women put their careers ahead of their families. Peggy, who had been a schoolteacher during the war, resumed teaching once the boys were in school themselves. She worries. “The morals have changed tremendously. The way you’re told to raise your kids now—there’s no discipline.”

  Divorce is another issue they worry about. Peggy says young couples these days “don’t fight long enough. It’s too easy to get a divorce. We’ve had our arguments, but we don’t give up. When my friends ask whether I ever considered divorce I remind them of the old saying ‘We’ve thought about killing each other, but divorce? Never.’ ”

  John and Peggy Assenzio are not unique within their generation. They can look back on a love affair that began in the Great Depression, was consummated at the outset of World War II, survived combat and separation, and flourished in the postwar years. They were just twenty-one and twenty-three when they were married and they could not have imagined what strains the world would put on their commitment to each other, but they believed their wedding vows were not conditional. Now, in their fifty-seventh year of marriage, that belief has not diminished for John and Peggy. If anything, it has been strengthened by John’s recurring memories of the horrors of combat. They come to him less often now, but Peggy is always there for him. As he says, “I relive it sometimes, but with the help of my wife—and the love she has for me—that’s how you get over it.”

  These marriages and the values the men and women brought to them may seem curiously old-fashioned to modern young couples. They may have a difficult time relating to a love affair forged by sacrifice and separation, faith and commitment. They may not know how to measure the tensile strength such marriages bring to a society. In an age of divorce, pagers, cell phones, and fax machines, they may never know the sweet sound of a love whistle.

  The Dumbos, Halloween party, 1949

  THE DUMBOS

  “Expectations were different: We had a higher regard for marriage. You just didn’t divorce.”

  OTHER WORLD WAR II marriages became part of larger groups. Veterans formed such close associations with their wartime buddies that they became friends for life, and their wives learned to care for each other as well. In some cases, the wives were the catalysts for postwar friendships. Their husbands returned home to find their wives had gotten through the ordeal with the help of other women in similar straits. They were sisterhoods that did not end with the war. With the men back, it became an extended family, a gathering of couples who had shared experiences and common values.

  In the small South Dakota city of Yankton, four wives with husbands in the service met to play bridge: my mother-in-law, Vivian Auld; her sister, Lois Gatchell; their friends La Verne Hubner and Joyce Hagen. Vivian’s husband, Merritt, was an Army doctor who was overseas for five years, seeing heavy action in North Africa and Italy. Don Gatchell was in the Marines. Roland “Doc” Hubner, another physician, was a flight surgeon. Joyce’s husband, Clarence (everyone called him “Hack”), was an officer aboard a heavy cruiser in the Pacific.

  Joyce remembers that it was a mutual support group. All of the women were in their early to mid-twenties. Vivian, Joyce, and La Verne had infants at home, conceived before their husbands shipped out, born while they were abroad. It was an uncertain time in the lives of these young women with their husbands so far away, many of them in the line of fire. Joyce’s anxiety for Hack only heightened when word came that her brother had been killed in action.

  Now, however, more than a half century later, she remembers the solidarity of the little circle of women. She laughs when she says, “If any of the serviceman husbands came home, he had to take us all out to dinner. We’d save gas rations and drive to Sioux City [a small city with more restaurants, about sixty miles away from Yankton] and have a big dinner. Then we’d wait for the next husband to come home.”

  The separation anxieties were not confined to the wives. Meredith, my wife, can remember seeing her father only once during her first five years, when Merritt managed a short home leave between the North African and Italian campaigns. Meredith lived with her mother at the home of her grandparents, not an unusual arrangement for war wives, especially those with small children. Nonetheless, she didn’t have a father around during what we now call the bonding years. It mus
t have been equally awkward for him. He returned home to find a five-year-old stranger as his daughter.

  As a result their relationship evolved slowly; as she was growing up, it was more distant than it might have been if he had been home in the early years. By the time she was an accomplished adult, they were very close. How many other World War II fathers and children must have experienced the same early strains in their relationships?

  Hack Hagen received word of their firstborn just after his ship, the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, had been shot up in a raging naval battle in the North Pacific. It was welcome news after what he’d been through—almost four hours of intense exchanges with a Japanese armada twice the size of the American flotilla. In his definitive study of the naval battles during World War II, the distinguished Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison described how the Salt Lake City “received almost all of the enemy’s attention” as the Japanese tried to sink the cruiser with shells fired from twelve miles away. They were almost successful. It took four major hits before the ship was forced to a stop after a battle that ran for almost a hundred nautical miles.

  Joyce and Clarence Hagen, 1942

  Joyce and Clarence Hagen’s fiftieth anniversary, 1991, with the entire Hagen family, Le Mars, Iowa

  Several crew members were killed near where Hack was a gunnery officer, but as he says, “We just kept going.” Finally, the Salt Lake City was dead in the water. The engine room had taken a hit, killing the power and causing some serious leaking. It appeared Hagen and the crew were doomed, but for some reason the Japanese broke off the attack and retreated. Morison figures that “smoke concealed . . . Salt Lake’s plight” and that the Japanese worried American fighter bombers would arrive at any time.

  The Salt Lake City managed to make it back to San Francisco for repairs, and Hack went on to South Dakota for a reunion with Joyce and their new son, Christopher. Before long, however, he was back on the high seas, once for three months without seeing land. He did have a way of letting Joyce know his whereabouts, however. In his weekly letters he made reference to a time of day, which she could then convert into latitude and longitude. As he says, “It was good for her to know and it was a comfort to me to know she was following along.”

  Those letters, which took a long time to get back to South Dakota, did get special treatment from the mailman. Joyce recalls, “If a letter arrived from a brother or a husband, no matter what the time of day, the mailman got it to our house and dropped it through the mail slot. It was an extra kindness.”

  Most of the war news came from the big cabinet radios that were a fixture in every living room. Meredith remembers the nightly ritual in her grandparents’ home, when everyone would gather and remain absolutely still as they listened to the news from the front. With so much action on so many fronts and the filter of military censorship, they were getting only the big picture. For long stretches of time they had no idea exactly where their husbands were or how they were doing. There were millions of these young wives, women in their twenties, their lives in a state of suspension as they awaited the return of their husbands, always dreading that the unexpected knock at the door would be a telegram or their minister with news that he wouldn’t be coming back.

  There were other sources of information if you were in the right place. Lois Gatchell was living in San Francisco before she returned to Yankton. Her husband, Don, was a Marine officer on the USS Ticonderoga when it was attacked and almost sunk by two Japanese kamikaze planes. He says to this day, “I can still see them—two Japanese planes headed right for us. It was a mess.” Lois remembers her friends who were Navy wives knew almost instantly what had happened, well before the news became public. “It was an incredible grapevine,” she says. “They knew before anyone.” It was not until the ship returned, however, that she knew Don was okay.

  Four generations of Hagens (left to right): Torger Hagen, George Hagen, Clarence Hagen, Christopher Hagen—Webster, South Dakota, 1945

  Meredith, Merritt, and Vivian Auld

  As a result of these harrowing experiences, the young women became emotionally mature beyond their years, just as their husbands were learning to grow up fast with the responsibilities and duties that came with military service. In the nineties, young men and women often talk of using their twenties to find themselves, to explore the options of life. Their grandparents at the same age found themselves in a hurry.

  It wasn’t always perfect, of course. Couples who were just getting started in their relationship were living with the strain of protracted periods of separation, the absence of timely communications between the wife at home and the husband abroad, the anxieties brought on by the everyday life-and-death dangers of war.

  When Meredith’s father returned after five long years away, he brought with him a letter from his mother-in-law, Nan Harvey, written in June 1945. It was a poignant yet firm plea for him to come home. She was worried about his wife, her daughter Vivian.

  Nan couldn’t believe that the Army was insisting Merritt stay on awhile longer even though the war was over. She said that Vivian was “on the verge of the breaking point after hearing you can’t get home. . . . The long separation for you and Vivian has been too long for you both and it does worry us.” Nan went on to relate Vivian’s worry that the continuing separation diminished “the chances to finish life together happily.” Plainly, the brave front put up by Vivian and millions of other wives at home was often just that, a front. Who could blame them for their anxieties?

  Merritt apparently got the message, for he came back to Yankton not too long after that, and his marriage to Vivian was long, happy, and productive. They had five children and regularly took in young women who came from troubled homes.

  In fact, when the war was over, all the husbands of the women in the weekly bridge game returned home safely and went swiftly into their civilian careers. Auld and Hubner joined a medical practice in Yankton. Gatchell entered the insurance business, and Hack resumed the teaching career he had started before the war.

  The wives decided not to give up what had been so important to them during the war—their regular meetings and, by now, very deep friendships. They decided to organize a dinner club and monthly bridge game. They named it Dumbo for one of those silly reasons: the dinners would be jumbo, with everyone bringing food, and someone laughingly suggested, “Dumbo Jumbo, that’s us.”

  The monthly dinners and bridge games went on for the next thirty-five years, and the friendships only deepened as time went along. Hack and Joyce Hagen were absent for a time while he got a degree in optometry, financed in part with a loan from one of the Dumbo members. He set up practice in LeMars, Iowa, just sixty miles from Yankton, and they resumed their regular attendance at Dumbos.

  For the women it was not an easy time, for it was very much a man’s world in the immediate postwar years. In Yankton, married women were not hired as schoolteachers, and in Dr. Auld’s medical partnership his own sister, a pediatrician with a thriving practice, was paid half of what the male partners earned. There were no women lawyers or business owners. It wasn’t fair, especially after all the contributions women had made during the war, but for most of the wives there were other immediate priorities. Children were coming in waves and homes were being bought or expanded. Husbands were working long hours, trying to catch up after their years of military service. Given the current place of women in American life, it is difficult to imagine that time. It is equally difficult to appreciate the urgency of young couples to get on with their marriages after the uncertainties of the war years. It was, as they say, a different time, and it made possible what was to come.

  Considering what they had all been through, they emerged from the war with a remarkable appetite for public service, for “doing good,” as so many of them now describe it. It was a natural extension of the patriotism and training of the war years, but it was not a short-term phenomenon. It was the ethos of the time. Get married, have a family, stay married, do something for your community.<
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  The Dumbos and the other World War II couples in Yankton were in the forefront of every community-improvement project. The two doctors, Hubner and Auld, served terms as president of the local school board, pushing through reforms to get equal pay for women teachers and to raise the place of girls’ athletics in a state where boys had the only games in town. Vivian Auld became a force in building a new public library.

  It was a generation of joiners. They belonged to the Masonic Lodge or Knights of Columbus, the VFW and the American Legion, the Elks, the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Toastmasters International. The wives were in PEO, a popular women’s service organization.

  As children of the Depression, they managed their new prosperity carefully. Within the Dumbos an extravagant purchase, a fancy new car or a boat, would trigger a round of sharp kidding. As couples, they all shared a natural resistance to conspicious consumption. Moderation in spending was as important to them as faithful marriages, well-behaved children, and church.

  They were all active in their various religious faiths well beyond regular attendance at Sunday worship. As Episcopalians, the Aulds and the Gatchells helped start the 20-40 Club for adults over twenty and under forty. They raised money for St. Mary’s, a local school for girls from the Sioux reservations. Later Hack Hagen became active in national Lutheran church efforts to counsel conscientious objectors during Vietnam. As a World War II veteran, far from being bitter toward those who chose not to serve in Vietnam, he says, “I learned about compassion.”

  Don and Lois Gatchell, who now live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, remember life revolving around family, friends, church, and community, and all of the couples approached it as a team effort. Well before the phrase “extended family” came into vogue, these couples were just that. They vacationed together, celebrated birthdays and holidays together, and supported each other during difficult times. I remember them to this day in tandem: Vivian and Merritt; Doc and La Verne; Hack and Joyce; Lois and Don.