A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  16

  * * *

  Why I Fight

  Saturday Night

  April 14 1945

  Dear Jimmie:

  In another week or so I am going on a long journey to a strange land many thousands of miles away from you and Mother in Ann Arbor. The last time I saw you was last Sunday night when I flew home for my first visit with you and my last with Mother before leaving the country. You were two weeks old, a tiny infant lying in a crib. Your interests of course were quite simple. Most of the time you slept, on your tummy like your mother. When you were hungry you started to cry. Then you were fed and you went right back to sleep again. You were a healthy, happy, red-headed little baby, Jimmie, and I was mighty proud to be your Dad.

  I would have liked nothing better than to have remained there with you and Mother, who is a wonderful woman whom I love deeply and tenderly. For many years we had been planning for your arrival. The three of us—and the brothers and sisters we hoped you would have—were going to have a happy time, filled with love for each other and our family and friends, and also filled with study and work and music and books and many of the other things that make people so glad to be alive.

  You know of course that when you were born I was a soldier in our country’s army. In fact I had been a soldier for many years before, ever since our nation was attacked back in 1941. As an enlisted man I had served overseas for some time in 1942. I came back to our country to attend an Officers’ school. Now I am a first lieutenant, and I am to go overseas again in command of a group of Negro soldiers.

  So it is going to be some time before I see you and Mother. I have a hunch where I am going but I can’t tell you just yet. Naturally I don’t know how long I will be gone, although it’s a pretty safe bet that I won’t come back this time until the whole war is over.

  As you can see this “war” which I have been talking about is a pretty important thing. It has separated me from you and Mother at a time when I want to be with you most. It has already taken the lives of many millions of people all over the world, including the dads of many boys not much older than yourself. Many people all over the world have been killed, murdered, starved and tortured by our enemies in this war. Little Chinese boys of your age have been bayoneted to death by the Japanese. Young women, as full of life and love as your Mother, little girls as sweet and innocent as your cousin Peggy, and older women as kind as your grandmother have been murdered by the Germans. A few of those people were Americans, but most of them were French or Russian or Polish or Filipino or Czech. But they were all good people and they were all our friends. We know they were our friends because it is only by reason of their suffering that the Germans and the Japanese did not kill American children, bomb American cities and land on American soil.

  Jimmie, you know that I love you and your Mother very much. I wouldn’t be a very good father, nor much of a man, if I didn’t stand up and fight against those Japs and Nazis. That is why I am in the army and that is why I am going far away for a long time. Your mother, who is not only very beautiful but also very brave and very intelligent, understands all this. And I know that you will understand too, Jimmie.

  When I last saw you, it was very difficult for you to focus your eyes. You probably didn’t see very much. But in a little while you’ll be seeing all kinds of things that will make your eyes pop and your head swim. And then you will understand another of the reasons why I and your uncles Bob and Joe and John and Milty and many millions of other Americans are fighting so hard in this war. For you will see this great and beautiful country of ours and the friendly, warm-hearted and hard-working people who live in it. I have been in practically every corner of this big country, and it was the hope of your mother and myself that you would get to see most of it while you were young.

  But even before you get to travel around very much you can learn a great deal about our country. Right around home. Ann Arbor is as beautiful a spot as you’ll find in the world and it symbolizes in itself and in the great university many of the most cherished traditions of American life. Of course Ann Arbor will always be a favorite spot for our family. Mother and I were married there in 1939 when we were both students at the University of Michigan. You were born there, at the University hospital, in 1945. And all of us spend many happy days there at grandpa and grandma Cummins’ house on Henry Street.

  When Mother and I were students at the University we used to walk through the streets of the town and we loved the big trees and the green lawns and the flowers and the neat, well-built houses, especially a little blue house on Stadium Boulevard. And we used to say to each other how wonderful it would be if all the people in our country could live in such clean and beautiful towns and in such comfortable houses. For it was also in Ann Arbor, at the University, that we started to learn a great many other things which we have never forgotten and which have helped shape the course of our lives. From our studies, our books, and our professors we learned about the history of our country. The most important thing we learned was that our country and our people became strong because we loved liberty and freedom and fought and died for it.

  Yes, Jimmie, for more than 200 years now, the American people have been fighting for liberty every time it was threatened. They have been ever-hopeful and ever-striving for a free land of free citizens in a free world, in which every man could live in peace with his family and friends & neighbors. They have sought to make this a land of equal opportunity where men of all faiths and all creeds and all colors could live in security and friendship, and by their individual and collective efforts fulfill the great promise of this nation. Some people have called this hope and this effort the “American Dream.” Well, I guess you could call it a dream, and I can’t think of a nobler one.

  But the men who cherished this dream most dearly also worked most diligently to make it come true. It was born in the hearts and minds of the artisans of Boston, the pioneers of Virginia and the farmers of Georgia, and it was given its most glorious expression by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It was carried across the country in the wagons of pioneers who pushed into Ohio and Michigan and Kansas and California and the Northwest. It was preserved on the bloody battlefields of Vicksburg and the Wilderness, and re-stated in simple majesty by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. It was immortalized in the lusty full-throated songs of Walt Whitman. It was nourished and vitalized by the freedom-loving millions who came from Europe to help build our railroads, our cities, our industries. It lives today in the heart of a Negro in Mississippi, an auto-worker in Detroit, a farmer in Nebraska, a teacher in Massachusetts, a miner in Illinois, a student in California, a President in Washington and soldiers, sailors, and marines in Germany, Okinawa, the Philippines, Burma. It rides over Tokyo in the nose of a B-29. It bounces along the roads of Italy in a jeep. And Jimmie, it will cross the ocean with your Dad.

  So you see, Jimmie, it is because I love you and Mother and my country so much that I am leaving you all. I hope I have explained to you why it is necessary.

  This will be a wonderful land to live in when I come back. We will have destroyed, for all time, the evil, criminal, war-makers of Germany and Japan. We will have created an organization of all the nations of the world that will be vigilant in preserving the peace.

  And then you and Mother and I will take up our lives in a country dedicated to the task of making all of its people prosperous and secure and healthy and happy.

  All my love

  Dad

  17

  * * *

  In the Blood

  AS I READ my father’s war letters, there were times when I felt he had written them not just for my mother, or in one instance my older brother, but also for me. He wrote these letters before I was born, of course, and after finding their way to my mother in Detroit and Ann Arbor, they survived twelve moves over the following seventy years. I had had a vague idea they existed but had never looked at them until I started to plan the shape of this book. My sister Jean had the
m. I had sent them to her after my wife and I cleaned out my mother’s apartment and storage bin at the senior living center in Madison where she lived the final year of her life, the lonely period when she was without Elliott, who died first, on May Day 2004, at age eighty-six.

  A letter he wrote on April 15, 1945, the day after his good-bye letter to Jimmie, erased any lingering anxiety I had about telling his story. It was a letter that seemed to be talking to me directly over the years, newspaperman father to newspaperman son.

  The weather was so bad last night, and there was so much to do around the company, that I just hung around the orderly room till about eleven o’clock. At about eight-thirty I had an irresistible feeling to sit down at a typewriter and write something. So I knocked off that letter to Jimmie in about thirty minutes just as if I were writing to make a nine o’clock deadline. It was a wonderful feeling to be sitting there and let the words and sentences and thoughts take shape. There is no other feeling like it in the world, and for me there is no greater happiness, no more satisfying activity. Whatever else I do in my life you can be sure that I will also write. When I come back to civilian life, I will most likely go back to newspaper work, and make that work my base of operations for whatever writing I do. From that I can branch off into other kinds of writing. But I will always do newspaper work also, for I love it, and it is in my blood.

  Maybe you don’t know it, but in addition to being a pretty good newspaper writer, I am also a pretty good all around newspaper man. I love everything connected with putting out a paper from gathering the news, writing it, editing it, printing it, and watching it roll off the presses. When I was on the Daily my best friends were the fellows in the composing room who used to say that I was born with a feeling for a well-laid out, well-edited, and well-printed paper. But enough of this boasting! Let’s hope that I remember enough to be able to hold down a job!

  Throughout my career, when people asked why I became a writer, I always had the same answer, but I never knew I was repeating the precise words of my father when I said, “I love it, and it is in my blood.”

  In one of his first war letters, back when he was a private at the air base in Trinidad, my father had told my mother that his daily letters would take the place of a journal. I don’t believe in fate, but sometimes patterns emerge from the chaos of life that seem to have some larger purpose. The more I read the letters, the more I thought to myself: Why did he write them like a journal, and why did my mother keep them through their many moves over the years, until her dying day? Why, if not for me to find them and give him a voice again, to show the determination, romanticism, and patriotism of a man who once was called un-American?

  18

  * * *

  The Power of America

  THE LAST PARTY was under way when Elliott entered the hall at half past eight on Tuesday night, April 24. It had started as soon as the busload of young African American women arrived from Richmond. The soldiers of the 4482nd knew it would be their final dance at Camp Lee, and soon their dates knew it too, once Sergeant Plinton announced it on the loudspeaker. Along with dancing, there was a special buffet supper put on by company cooks.

  The feeling in the room was warm and infectious, Elliott thought, a distinctive camaraderie among his men. “Sgt. Reeves and his quintet started singing at about 11:15 and from then until the dance broke up at midnight, the girls were all but forgotten. All the men crowded around the band-stand and joined in the singing. The whole room shook with the echoes of their songs. When Sgt. Reeves started singing ‘We’re Shoving Right Off,’ they let out a howl and really let loose. Then T-4 Holden took the mic and gave forth with ‘Stardust.’ He was terrific. Then Sgt. Plinton put on a one-man show with the bass violin, the trumpet, the saxophone and the piano. He brought the house down. The men sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ about six times and shook hands all around. Then they sang ‘God Bless America.’ ”

  Two days later, they shoved right off from Camp Lee, traveling cross-country by train from Richmond to Columbus and Chicago, then over the Plains through Council Bluffs and Omaha and on to Cheyenne and Salt Lake City and Spokane and finally Seattle. The trip was long and tedious but stirred Elliott nonetheless, reminding him of what he first discovered when he hitchhiked from coast to coast before enrolling at Michigan in 1936: “the bigness and beauty of this land of ours.”

  The move toward action in the Pacific had been a long time coming, but now at last it had begun. Elliott’s right hand was swollen from a last-day game of catch, but he was ready for this moment, and so, he thought, were his soldiers. “The battle is the payoff, it is rightly said,” he wrote as the journey began. “But it is also true that when you reach the battlefield, it is too late to start learning what to do. Training is what makes the battle pay off for your side. And my men are well-trained.” He claimed not to have given a second’s thought to the danger he might face, not that he was any less afraid than anyone else, but because there was so much for him to do. As an officer, he had learned to send his thoughts outward to his troops rather than inward to himself.

  In the final days before leaving Camp Lee, he had soaked up all the war news he could find. The Times-Dispatch had a long story from London and Moscow with accounts of the battle for Berlin. A radio report told him that Hitler had acknowledged the collapse of the German armies. “One of the most interesting developments of the past few days has been the first-hand experience of the Yank fighters with the evidence of Nazi barbarism,” he said in a letter to Mary. “General Patton did a wise and sensible thing when he made the people of the Weimar come to the death pits of Bergen-Belsen and see for themselves the terrible deeds they permitted to be committed. And Gen. Eisenhower, in a typical Eisenhower move, also did a smart thing in inviting congressmen and editors to view the inhuman crimes of the Nazis.” All of this, Elliott thought, would strengthen American resolve to work for a lasting world peace and finish the fight against the Japanese.

  After four days in Seattle, Elliott and his soldiers boarded their troopship, the Cape Canso, on May 7. It carried 1,300 men, including various army outfits and a navy crew. There was only one all-Negro unit aboard: the 4482nd. On the third day out, Elliott got “sick as a dog from the choppy seas,” but that discomfort faded, and he never suffered from seasickness again, which was lucky for him, because it turned out that their ship would be at sea an inordinately long time. He had time to organize bridge tournaments and cribbage contests and absorb the news from Europe and learn more about himself. He came to realize that despite his nervous habits—biting his nails, doodling, smoking—he was calm under most circumstances.

  Every afternoon, after morning preparations, he conducted an hour-long orientation class to provide his men with a rudimentary understanding of the world to which they were heading. He led discussions on the people of the Philippines, Japanese militarism, the history of Japan, the progress of the war, and the life and customs of people in various Pacific islands, including the Marianas and the Ryukyu. Several nights a week, he left his quarters to take a shift with his men down in the hatch. “After the order is given to darken ship and clear the weather decks, all the men come down to the hatch,” he wrote. “Some of them go right to bed. Others lie in their bunks reading. Still others gather in groups to shoot the breeze. And still others get involved in crap games and poker games. By this time the stakes in most of the games is pretty small. We haven’t been paid in some time now.”

  He tried to consider the various needs and attitudes of the men, some thriving, some anxious. “Sgt. Plinton has already established himself as the most widely known person on board and is continuously paged over the loudspeaker system for one reason or another. Sgt. Anderson was chafing a bit at the lack of activity, and his constant hunger, so I solved both of his problems by putting him in charge of the detail that eats 3 meals a day. Some of the eighteen-year-olds have a natural, but not acute, case of homesickness. Young Leon Stanley looks like he’s always about to bust out in tears. I’ve to
ld the older men to lay off him.” Stanley, a baby-faced eighteen-year-old from Baltimore, was the understudy to the company clerk. Among other duties, he sorted the mail, and he represented good luck to Elliott because when he approached it was often to bring a letter from Mary.

  Their first stop was Oahu. The men went ashore with a liberty party as guests of the navy. Elliott had two beers and a Coca-Cola and took his first swim in the Pacific. He had grown up near the ocean, spent his adolescence on the beach at Coney Island, but had never experienced anything like this. “It was superb and satisfying, the clearest, loveliest water, a warm sun, a clean beach and cooling breeze.” Only the fear of too much sun got him out of the surf.

  A few days after the Cape Canso shoved off again, the ship’s captain inspected the hatch where the men of the 4482nd were quartered. He complimented Elliott on the cleanliness of the hatch and the discipline of his troops. Elliott thought the remark was “especially significant” since his company was the only black unit aboard. The fact that his men were cohesive and disciplined did not surprise him, but given the racial attitudes of the time, he was always heartened when other white officers noticed this as well. “Many other officers, who have white units, have commented wonderingly on the fact that my men have been ‘so well behaved’ and such a ‘soldierly-looking’ unit.” From the time they left Camp Lee, he had only one troublesome incident, when one of his men landed in the brig for wielding a knife during a craps game.