by Studs Terkel
I wonder when will I be called a man?
As in 1917, black servicemen were almost exclusively in labor battalions: loading ships, cleaning up, kitchen work, digging one thing or another. They were domestics abroad as well as at home. Mythology had long been standard operating procedure: blacks were not to be trusted in combat. To this, Coleman Young offered a wry touch of history: “The black Tenth Cavalry was with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. They saved his ass.” As the war dragged on, and casualties mounted alarmingly, black soldiers were sent up front. Grudgingly, they were allowed to risk their lives in combat. Lieutenant Charles A. Gates tells of the 761st Tank Battalion. All black. “We were very well disciplined and trained. The German army was confused. They couldn’t see how we could be in so many places at the same time.” There was astonishment on the part of our generals as well as theirs. It took thirty-five years for the 761st to get a Presidential Unit Citation.
These were rare adventures for black GIs in World War Two. A schoolteacher recalls his days as a sergeant with the Quartermaster Corps: “That’s where most of us were put. We serviced the service. We handled food, clothing, equipage. We loaded ammunition, too. We were really stevedores and servants.”
At home, things were somewhat different. Like women, blacks were called upon. Their muscles and skills, usually bypassed, were needed in defense plants. The perverse imperatives of war brought about relatively well-paying jobs for black men and women who would otherwise have been regarded with less than benign neglect. Even this might not have come about had it not been for the constant pressure from the black community.
“I got a call from my boss. ‘Get your ass over here, we got a problem.’” Joseph Rauh, working in Washington, remembers June of 1941. “ ‘Some guy named Randolph is going to march on Washington unless we put out a fair employment practices order.35 The President says you gotta stop Randolph from marching. We got defense plants goin’ all over this goddamn country, but no blacks are bein’ hired. Go down to the Budget Bureau and work something out.’ ”
It was not noblesse oblige that brought forth Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee.
Wartime prosperity had extended into an exhilarating period of postwar prosperity. The United States had become the most powerful industrial as well as military power in the world. Its exports were now as truly worldwide as its politics. Fbr the returning GI, it was a wholly new society. And a new beginning.
“I had matured in those three years away,” says the middle manager of a large corporation. He had come from a family of blue-collar workers in a blue-collar town. I wanted to better myself more than, say, hitting the local factory. Fortunately, I was educated on the GI Bill. It was a blessing. The war changed our whole idea of how we wanted to live when we came back. We set our sights pretty high. All of us wanted better levels of living. I am now what you’d call middle class.”
The suburb, until now, had been the exclusive domain of the “upper class.” It was where the rich lived. The rest of us were neighborhood folk. At war’s end, a new kind of suburb came into being. GI Joe, with his persevering wife/sweetheart and baby, moved into the little home so often celebrated in popular song. Molly and me and baby makes three. It was not My Blue Heaven, perhaps, but it was something only dreamed of before. Thanks to the GI Bill, two new names were added to American folksay: Levit-town and Park Forest.
A new middle class had emerged. Until now, the great many, even before the Depression, had had to scuffle from one payday to the next. “When you went to the doctor’s,” remembers the California woman, “it may have been ten dollars, but that was maybe a third of my father’s salary as a milkman.”
“The American myth was alive,” reminisces a Sioux Falls native. “Remember the ’49 cars in the National Geographic? Postwar cars. New design, new body style. In the colored Sunday funnies there’d be ads for the new cars. We’d been driving Grandpa Herman’s old prewar Chrysler. It was the only car on the block. Now everybody was getting a car. Oh, it was exciting.”
It was, indeed, a different world to which Telford Taylor returned from Germany. He had been the chief American prosecutor during twelve of the thirteen Nuremberg trials. “When I came back home in 1949, I was already in my early forties. I’d been away from home seven years and was out of touch with things politically. I thought that Washington was still the way I’d left it in 1942. By 1949, it was a very different place. I had left Washington at a time when it was still Roosevelt, liberalism, social action, all these things. When I came back in the late forties, the Dies Committee...the cold war. I was a babe in the woods. I didn’t know what hit me.”
The cold war. Another legacy of World War Two.
The year Telford Taylor returned to the States, Archibald MacLeish wrote a singularly prescient essay:Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn’t like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune; left-wing movements attacked right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and right-wing movements replied with the same arguments turned round about....
All this...took place not in a time of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state.36
The ex-admiral says it his way: “World War Two has warped our view of how we look at things today. We see things in terms of that war, which in a sense was a good war. But the twisted memory of it encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world.”
In a small midwestern rural town, a grandmother, soft and gentle, is certain she speaks for most of the townsfolk. “People here feel that we should have gone into Vietnam and finished it instead of backing off as we did. I suppose it’s a feeling that carried over from World War Two when we finished Hitler. I know the older men who fought in that war feel that way.”
Big Bill Broonzy put it another way. It happened quite inadvertently one night in a Chicago nightclub. He had been singing a country blues about a sharecropper whose mule had died. It was his own story. During the performance, four young hipsters made a scene of walking out on him. I, working as MC that night, was furious. Big Bill laughed. He always laughed at such moments. Laughin’ to keep from cryin’, perhaps. “What do these kids know ‘bout a mule? They never seen a mule. How do you expect somebody to feel ’bout somethin’ he don’t know? When I was in Europe, all those places, Milano, Hamburg, London, I seen cities bombed out. People tellin’ me ’bout bombins. What do I know ‘bout a bomb? The only bomb I ever did see was in the pictures. People scared, cryin’. Losin’ their homes. What do I know ’bout that? I never had no bomb fall on me. Same thing with these kids. They never had no mule die on ‘em. They don’t even know what the hell I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
Big Bill, at that moment, set off the most pertinent and impertinent of challenges: Must a society experience horror in order to understand horror? Ours was the only country among the combatants in World War Two that was neither invaded nor bombed. Ours were the only cities not blasted into rubble. Our Willie and Joe were up front; the rest of us were safe, surrounded by two big oceans. As for our allies and enemies, civilian as well as military were, at one time or another, up front: the British, the French, the Russians (twenty million dead;
perhaps thirty million, says Harrison Salisbury), as well as the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese. Let alone the Slavs of smaller spheres. And, of course, the European Jews. And the Gypsies. And all kinds of Untermenschen.
True, an inconsolable grief possessed the families of those Americans lost and maimed in the Allied triumph. Parks, squares, streets, and bridges have been named after these young heroes, sung and unsung. Yet it is the casual walkout of the four young hipsters in that Chicago nightclub that may be the rude, fearsome metaphor we must decipher.
The elderly Japanese hibakisha (survivor of the atom bomb), contemplates the day it fell on Hiroshima. He had been a nineteen-year-old soldier passing through town. “The children were screaming, ‘Please take these maggots off our bodies.’ It was impossible for me, one soldier, to try to help so many people. The doctor said, ‘We can’t do anything. Sterilize their wounds with salt water.’ We took a broom, dipped it into the salt water and painted over the bodies. The children leaped up: ‘I’m gonna run, I must run.’ ” The interpreter corrects him: “In the local dialect, it means ‘thank you.’ ”
The tall young rifleman understands the horror. He was being retrained, after his European near-misses, for the invasion of Japan when the first atom bomb was dropped. “We ended halfway across the Pacific. How many of us would have been killed on the mainland if there were no bomb? Someone like me has this specter.” So does his quondam buddy: “We’re sitting on the pier in Seattle, sharpening our bayonets, when Harry dropped that beautiful bomb. The greatest thing ever happened. Anybody sitting at the pier at that time would have to agree.” The black combat correspondent sees it somewhat differently: “Do you realize that most blacks don’t believe the atom bomb would have been dropped on Hiroshima had it been a white city?” Witnesses to the fire bombings of Dresden may dispute the point.
The crowning irony lay in World War Two itself. It had been a different kind of war. “It was not like your other wars,” a radio disk jockey reflected aloud. In his banality lay a wild kind of crazy truth. It was not fratricidal. It was not, most of us profoundly believed, “imperialistic.” Our enemy was, patently, obscene: the Holocaust maker. It was one war that many who would have resisted “your other wars” supported enthusiastically. It was a “just war,” if there is any such animal. In a time of nuclear weaponry, it is the language of a lunatic. But World War Two...
It ended on a note of hope without historic precedent. On a Note of Triumph is what Norman Corwin called his eloquent radio program heard coast-to-coast on V-E Day, May 8, 1945.
Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till
their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and
give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his
father’s color or the credo of his choice....
The day of that broadcast is remembered for a number of reasons by a West Coast woman. “V-E Day. Oh, such a joyous thing! And San Francisco was chosen for the first session of the UN. I was ecstatic. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met, and somehow war never again would happen.” She was an usher at the War Memorial Opera House, where the UN first met in June of ’45. “I was still in my little Miss Burke School uniform. Little middy and skirt. I was part of it. And so deeply proud. When the Holocaust survivors came out, I felt we were liberating them. When the GIs and Russian soldiers met, they were all knights in shining armor, saving humanity.” She laughs softly. “It’s not that simple. World War Two was just an innocent time in America. I was innocent. My parents were innocent. The country was innocent. Since World War Two, I think I have a more objective view of what this country really is.”
The Red Cross worker thinks of then and now. “To many people, it brought about a realization that there ain’t no hidin’ place down here. That the world is unified in pain as well as opportunity. We had twenty, twenty-five years of greatness in our country, when we reached out to the rest of the world with help. Some of it was foolish, some of it was misspent, some was in error. Many follies. But we had a great reaching out. It was an act of such faith.” He tries to stifle an angry sob. “Now, we’re being pinched back into the meanness of the soul. World War Two? It’s a war I still would go to.”
The ex-captain, watching a Dow-Jones ticker, shakes his head. “I don’t have as much trust in my fellow man as I once did. I have no trust in my peers. They’re burnt-out cases. In the war, I was trying to do something useful with my life...”
A thousand miles away, the once and forever tall young rifleman, though gray and patriarchal, stares out the window at the Chicago skyline, the Lake, and beyond. “World War Two has affected me in many ways ever since. In a short period of time I had the most tremendous experiences of all of life: of fear, of jubilance, of misery, of hope, of comradeship, and of endless excitement. I honestly feel grateful for having been a witness to an event as monumental as anything in history and, in a very small way, a participant.”
ROBERT RASMUS
I’ve lived about thirty-eight years after the war and about twenty years before. For me it’s B.W. and A.W.—before the war and after the war. I suspect there are a lot of people like me. In business, there’ll be times when I say, This really worries the heck out of me, but it’s really minor compared to having to do a river crossing under fire. [Laughs.]
He is six feet four or five, graying. He is a business executive, working out of Chicago. Obviously he’s kept himself in pretty good shape. His manner is gentle, easy, unruffled.
I get this strange feeling of living through a world drama. In September of ’39 when the Germans invaded Poland, I was fourteen years old. I remember my mother saying, “Bob, you’ll be in it.” I was hoping she’d be right. At that age, you look forward to the glamour and have no idea of the horrors.
Sure enough, I was not only in the army but in the infantry. Step by logistic step, our division was in combat. You’re finally down to one squad, out ahead of the whole thing. You’re the point man. What am I doing out here—in this world-cataclysmic drama—out in front of the whole thing? [Laughs.]
You saw those things in the movies, you saw the newsreels. But you were of an age when your country wasn’t even in the war. It seemed unreal. All of a sudden, there you were right in the thick of it and people were dying and you were scared out of your wits that you’d have your head blown off. [Laughs.]
I was acutely aware, being a rifleman, the odds were high that I would be killed. At one level, animal fear. I didn’t like that at all. On the other hand, I had this great sense of adventure. My gosh, going across the ocean, seeing the armies, the excitement of it. I was there.
This wouldn’t have been true of most, but I was a skinny, gaunt kind of mama’s boy. I was going to gain my manhood then. I would forever be liberated from the sense of inferiority that I wasn’t rugged. I would prove that I had the guts and the manhood to stand up to these things. There were all these things, from being a member of the Western world to Bobby Rasmus, the skinny nineteen year old who’s gonna prove that he can measure up. [Laughs.]
I remember my mother during my thirty-day furlough. Continuous weeping. She said, “Bob, you’ve got to tell your captain you’re too tall to be a rifleman.” [Laughs.] The only way I could get her off that was to say, “I’ll tell him, Ma.” Of course, I didn’t.
I was in training at Fort Benning, Georgia. If you got sick and fell back more than a week, you were removed from your battalion. I got the flu and was laid back for eight days. I was removed from my outfit where all my buddies were. I was heartbroken.
My original group went to the 106th Division and ended up being overwhelmed in the Battle of the Bulge. I remember letters I sent my buddies that came back: Missing in action. Killed in action. These were the eighteen year olds. It was only because I got the flu that I
wasn’t among them.
When I went in the army, I’d never been outside the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan. So when I woke up the first morning on the troop train in Fulton, Kentucky, I thought I was in Timbuktu. Of course, I was absolutely bowled over by Europe, the castles, the cathedrals, the Alps. It was wonderment. I was preoccupied with staying alive and doing my job, but it seemed, out of the corner of my eye, I was constantly fascinated with the beauty of the German forests and medieval bell towers. At nineteen, you’re seeing life with fresh eyes.
The first time I ever heard a New England accent was at Fort Benning. The southerner was an exotic creature to me. People from the farms. The New York street-smarts. You had an incredible mixture of every stratum of society. And you’re of that age when your need for friendship is greatest. I still see a number of these people. There’s sort of a special sense of kinship.
The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery. It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. Having to leave that group when I had the flu may have saved my life. Yet to me, that kid, it was a disaster.
Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, writes of the fire bombing of Dresden and the prisoner-of-war train in Germany. A lot of my buddies who were captured were on that train. I didn’t know that until three days ago when a middle-aged guy with white hair like mine stopped me on the street and said, “Hey, aren’t you Bob Rasmus?” I said, “Aren’t you Red Prendergast?” He’d been in the original training group, gone to the 106th Division, taken to Germany, was on the troop train that got strafed. I knew him for about five months, thirty-nine years ago, and had never set eyes on him since. I was only in combat for six weeks, but I could remember every hour, every minute of the whole forty-two days.
In Boston Harbor, we actually saw the first visible sign of the war: an Australian cruiser tied up next to the troop ship. There was a huge, jagged hole in the bow. The shape of things to come. There was a lot of bravado, kidding.
