The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  She remembers the day somebody handed her a well-thumbed paperback. “...And when I read Grapes of Wrath, that was like reliving my whole life. I was never so proud of poor people before as I was after I read this book.”

  I imagine John Steinbeck would have valued that critique as much as the Nobel Prize for Literature he won in 1962.

  Robert J. DeMott has said all that needs to be said. He writes in his introduction to Working Days “... of a man whose fiercely concentrated will and driven imagination enriched the literature of his time and redeemed the tag end of a terrifying decade.... of his willingness to risk everything to write the best he could with what gifts he had, and in doing so to reveal, unblinking, the harsh shape of paradise.”

  “The Good War”:

  An Oral History of World War Two (1984)

  INTRODUCTION

  “I was in combat for six weeks, forty-two days. I remember every hour, every minute, every incident of the whole forty-two days. What was it—forty years ago?” As he remembers aloud, the graying businessman is transformed into a nineteen-year-old rifleman. Much too tall for a rifleman, his mother cried.

  This is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise stastic. In recalling an epoch, some forty years ago, my colleagues experienced pain, in some instances; exhilaration, in others. Often it was a fusing of both. A hesitancy, at first, was followed by a flow of memories: long-ago hurts and small triumphs. Honors and humiliations. There was laughter, too.

  In 1982, a woman of thirty, doing just fine in Washington, D.C., let me know how things are in her precincts: “I can’t relate to World War Two. It’s in schoolbook texts, that’s all. Battles that were won, battles that were lost. Or costume dramas you see on TV It’s just a story in the past. It’s so distant, so abstract. I don’t get myself up in a bunch about it.”

  It appears that the disremembrance of World War Two is as disturbingly profound as the forgettery of the Great Depression: World War Two, an event that changed the psyche as well as the face of the United States and of the world.

  The memory of the rifleman is what this book is about; and of his sudden comrades, thrown, hugger-mugger, together; and of those men, women, and children on the home front who knew or did not know what the shouting was all about; and of occasional actors from other worlds, accidentally encountered; and of lives lost and bucks found. And of a moment in history, as recalled by an ex-corporal, “when buddies felt they were more important, were better men who amounted to more than they do now. It’s a precious memory.”

  On a September day in 1982, Hans Göbeler and James Sanders are toasting one another in Chicago. Mr. Göbeler had been the mate on a German submarine, U-505. Mr. Sanders had been the junior flight officer on the U.S.S. Guadalcanal. Thirty-eight years before, one tried his damndest, as a loyal member of his crew, to sink the other’s craft about two hundred miles off the coast of West Africa. Now they reminisce, wistfully.

  “Every man, especially the youth, can be manipulated,” says Mr. Göbeler. “The more you say to him that’s the American way of life, the German way of life, they believe it. Without being more bad than the other is. There’s a great danger all the time.” Mr. Sanders nods. “It could happen. People could be fooled. Memory is short.”

  For me, it was forty-odd years ago. I was in the air force, 1942—1943. I never saw a plane; if I did, I wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea what to do with it. Mine was limited service. Perforated eardrum. It was stateside all the way, safe and uneventful. Yet I remember, in surprising detail, the uneventful events; and all those boy-faces, pimply, acned, baby-smooth. And bewildered.

  From Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, to Fort Logan, Colorado, to Basic Training Center 10, North Carolina, my peregrinations were noncombative in nature. How I became a sergeant may have had something to do with my age. I was ten years older than the normal GI and, willy-nilly became the avuncular one to the manchildren. Special Services, they called it.

  The other barracks elder was a crooked ex-bailiff from New Orleans. He was forty. Propinquity, the uniform, and the adventure made us buddies. Even now, I remember those wide-eyed wonders, our nightly audience, as Mike and I held forth. Who knows? Perhaps we were doing the state some service in giving these homesick kids a laugh or two. In any event, they were learning something about civics hardly taught in school, especially from Mike.

  When he and I, on occasion, goofed off and, puffing five-cent Red Dot cigars, observed from the warm quarters of the PX toilet our young comrades doing morning calisthenics in the biting Rocky Mountain air, it was without any sense of shame. On the contrary. Mike, blowing smoke rings, indicated the scene outside and, in the manner of General MacArthur, proclaimed, “Aintchu proud of our boys?” I solemnly nodded. The fact is we were proud of them; and they, perversely, of us. Memento mores.

  Seated across the celebratory table from Hans Göbeler and Jim Sanders, I think of the nineteen-year-old rifleman. “It was sunshine and quiet. We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. They were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us.”

  “Boys” was the word invariably used by the combat-protagonists of this book. The references were to enemy soldiers as well as our own. The SS were, of course, another matter. Even the most gentle and forgiving of our GIs found few redeeming attributes there. So, too, with the professional warrior of Imperial Japan. As for the Japanese citizen-soldier, let a near-sighted, bespectacled American corporal (now a distinguished near-sighted, bespectacled economist) tell it: “In Guam, I saw my first dead Japanese. He looked pitiful, with his thick glasses. He had a sheaf of letters in his pocket. He looked like an awkward kid who’d been taken right out of his home to this miserable place.”

  Paul Douglas, the liberal Illinoisan, volunteered for the marines at fifty “to get myself a Jap.” True, it did no harm to his subsequent campaign for the United States Senate. There was nothing unusual in Mr. Douglas’s pronouncement. “Jap” was a common word in our daily vocabulary. He was a decent, highly enlightened man caught up in war fever as much as fervor. It was the doyen of American journalists, Walter Lippmann, who strongly urged internment for Niseis and their fathers and mothers.

  Fbr the typical American soldier, despite the perverted film sermons, it wasn’t “getting another Jap” or “getting another Nazi” that impelled him up front. “The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery,” reflects the tall rifleman. “It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. There’s sort of a special sense of kinship.”

  An explanation is offered by an old-time folk singer who’d been with an anti-aircraft battery of the Sixty-second Artillery: “You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We were in a tribal sort of situation, where we could help each other without fear. I realized it was the absence of phony standards that created the thing I loved about the army.”

  There was another first in the lives of the GIs. Young kids, who had never wandered beyond the precinct of their native city or their small hometown or their father’s farm, ran into exotic places and exotic people, as well as into one another, whom they found equally exotic.

  “The first time I ever heard a New England accent,” recalls the Midwesterner, “was at Fort Benning. The southerner was an exotic creature to me. People from the farms. The New York street-smarts.” [Author’s note: The native New Yorker was probably the most parochial, most set in his ways, and most gullible.]

  One of the most satisfying moments during my brief turn as a “military man” came at a crap game. It was in Jefferson Barracks. A couple of hotshots from New York and Philadelphia had things seemingly going their way. I and several others lost our pokes in short order. Along came this freckled, skinny kid off an Arkansas farm, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. It appeared that the ea
sterners had another pigeon. An hour or so later, the street-smart boys were thoroughly cleaned out by the rube. It was lovely. City boys and country boys were, for the first time in their lives, getting acquainted.

  In tough circumstances, as a war prisoner or under siege or waiting for Godot, what was most on the soldier’s mind was not women nor politics nor family nor, for that matter, God. It was food. “In camp,” a prisoner of the Japanese recalls, “first thing you talked about is what you wanted in your stomach. Guys would tell about how their mother made this. Men would sit and listen very attentively. This was the big topic all the time. I remember vividly this old Polack. One guy always wanted him to talk about how his mother made the cabbage rolls, the golabki. He had a knack of telling so you could almost smell ‘em. You’d see some of the fellas just lickin’ their lips. Tasting it. You know?”

  Food. Fear. Comradeship. And confusion. In battle, the order of the day was often disorder. Again and again survivors, gray, bald, potbellied, or cadaverous, remember chaos.

  The big redhead of the 106th Infantry Division can’t forget his trauma. “So here I am wandering around with a whole German army shooting at me, and all I’ve got is a .45 automatic. There were ample opportunities, however, because every place you went there were bodies and soldiers laying around. Mostly Americans. At one time or another, I think I had in my hands every weapon the United States Army manufactured. You’d run out of ammunition with that one, you’d throw it away and try to find something else.”

  The lieutenant recalls an experience some five days after D-Day “We were in dug-in foxholes, in a very checkered position. There were Germans ahead of us and Germans in the back of us. Americans over there ahead of these Germans. There was no straight front line. It was a mess.”

  A mess among the living, perhaps. There was order, of a sort, among the dead. At least for the Germans. A Stalingrad veteran is haunted by the memory of the moment. “I was sleeping on the bodies of killed German soldiers. The Germans were very orderly people. When they found they didn’t have time to bury these bodies, they laid them next to each other in a very neat and orderly way. I saw straight rows, like pieces of cordwood. Exact.”

  A woman, born in 1943, cannot forget the camp photographs in Life. She had been casually leafing through some old issues in a Pennsylvania school library. She was twelve at the time. “In those grainy photos, you first think it’s cords of wood piled up. You look again, it shows you human beings. You never get the picture out of your eye: the interchangeability of the stacks of human bodies and the stacks of cords of wood. There is something curious about the fascination with horror that isn’t exhausted anywhere. Prior to finding these pictures, there were merely hints of something to a sheltered girl, nothing she could put together.”

  Between the winter of 1941 and the summer of 1945, Willie and Joe, dogfaces, and their assorted buddies grew up in a hurry. It wasn’t only the bullet they bit. It was the apple. Some lost innocence, abroad. “I went there a skinny, gaunt mama’s boy, full of wonderment,” says the rifleman. “I came back much more circumspect in my judgment of people. And of governments.”

  Others were not quite so touched. “I got one eye. My feet hangs down. I got a joint mashed in my back. I got a shoulder been broke. Feel that knot right there.” The Kentucky guardsman offers a litany of war wounds, but is undaunted. “I’d go fight for my country right today. You’re darn right. I’d go right now, boy.”

  They all came back home. All but 400,000.

  At home, the fourteen-year-old Victory girl grew up in a hurry, too. “What I feel most about the war, it disrupted my family. That really chokes me up, makes me feel very sad that I lost that. On December 6, 1941, I was playing with paper dolls: Deanna Durbin, Sonja Henie. I had a Shirley Temple doll that I cherished. After Pearl Harbor, I never played with dolls again.”

  After the epochal victory over fascism, the boys came back to resume their normal lives. Yet it was a different country from the one they had left.

  In 1945, the United States inherited the earth.... at the end of World War II, what was left of Western civilization passed into the American account. The war had also prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.34

  We had hardly considered ourselves God’s anointed in the thirties. The Great Depression was our most devastating experience since the Civil War. Somewhere along the line, our money machine had stripped its gears.

  The sixteen million Americans out in the cold reached for abandoned newspapers on park benches and—would you believe?—skipped over the sports section and flipped feverishly to Help Wanted. A hard-traveling survivor recalls an ad being answered at the Spreckels sugar refinery in San Francisco: “A thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through. You know dang well, there’s only three or four jobs.”

  With the German invasion of Poland in 1939, it all changed. The farewell to a dismal decade was more than ceremonial: 1939 was the end and the beginning. Hard Times, as though by some twentieth-century alchemy, were transmuted into Good Times. War was our Paracelsus.

  True, the New Deal had created jobs and restored self-esteem for millions of Americans. Still, there were ten, eleven million walking the streets, riding the rods, up against it, despairing. All this changed under the lowering sky of World War Two. What had been a country psychically as well as geographically isolated had become, with the suddenness of a blitzkrieg, engaged with distant troubles. And close-at-hand triumphs.

  Our huge industrial machine shifted gears. In a case of Scripture turned upside down, plowshares were beaten into swords (or their twentieth-century equivalents: tanks, mortars, planes, bombs). In the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr. New Deal was replaced by Dr. Win The War.

  Thomas (Tommy the Cork) Corcoran, one of FDR’s wonder boys, remembers being called into the Oval Office: “ ‘Tommy, cut out this New Deal stuff. It’s tough to win a war.’ He’d heard from the people who could produce the tanks and other war stuff. As a payoff, they required an end to what they called New Deal nonsense.”

  James Rowe, who had been a young White House adviser, recalls: “It upset the New Dealers. We had a big PWA building program. Roosevelt took a big chunk of that money and gave it to the navy to build ships. I was shocked. A large number of businessmen came down as dollar-a-year men. Roosevelt was taking help anyplace he could get it. There was a quick change into a war economy.”

  And prosperity came. Boom had a double meaning.

  For the old Iowa farmer, it was something else. Oh yes, he remembered the Depression and what it did to the farmers: foreclosures the norm; grain burned; corn at minus three cents a bushel; rural despair. Oh Yes, it changed with the war. “That’s when the real boost came. The war—” There is a catch in his voice. He slumps in his rocker. His wife stares at the wallpaper. It is a long silence, save for the tick-tock of the grandfather’s clock. “—it does something to your country. It does something to the individual. I had a neighbor just as the war was beginning. We had a boy ready to go to service. This neighbor told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we’d solve our agricultural problems. And I said, ‘Yes, but I’d hate to pay with the price of my son.’ Which we did.” He weeps. “It’s too much of a price to pay.”

  The retired Red Cross worker wastes no words: “The war was fun for America. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time. Farmers in South Dakota that I administered relief to and gave ’em bully beef and four dollars a week to feed their families, when I came home were worth a quarter-million dollars, right? It’s forgotten now.”

  It had, indeed, become another country. “World War Two changed everything,” says the retired admiral. “Our military runs our foreign policy. The State Depar
tment has become the lackey of the Pentagon. Before World War Two, this never happened. Only if there was a war did they step up front. The ultimate control was civilian. World War Two changed all this.”

  It is exquisite irony that military work liberated women from the private world of Küche, Kinde, Kirche. “I remember going to Sunday dinner one of the older women invited me to,” the ex-schoolteacher remembers. “She and her sister at the dinner table were talking about the best way to keep their drill sharp in the factory. I never heard anything like this in my life. It was just marvelous. But even here we were sold a bill of goods. They were hammering away that the woman who went to work did it to help her man, and when he came back, she cheerfully leaped back to the home.”

  Though at war’s end these newborn working women were urged, as their patriotic duty Over Here, to go back home where they “naturally belonged” and give their jobs back to the boys who did their patriotic duty Over There, the taste for independence was never really lost. Like that of Wrigley’s chewing gum, found in the pack of every GI, its flavor was longer-lasting. No matter what the official edict, for millions of American women home would never again be a Doll’s House.

  War’s harsh necessity affected another people as well: the blacks. Not much had happened to change things in the years between the two world wars. Big Bill Broonzy, the blues singer, commemorated his doughboy life in World War One:When Uncle Sam called me, I knew I would be called the real McCoy.

  But when I got in the army, they called me soldier boy.