by Studs Terkel
World War Two was utterly different. It has affected me in many ways ever since. I think my judgment of people is more circumspect. I know it’s made me less ready to fall into the trap of judging people by their style or appearance. 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 the endless excitement, the theatrics of it. 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.
PEGGY TERRY
She is a fountain woman who has lived in Chicago for the past twenty years. Paducah, Kentucky is her hometown. She visits it as often as her meager purse allows.
The first work I had after the Depression was at a shell-loading plant in Viola, Kentucky. It is between Paducah and Mayfield. They were large shells: anti-aircraft, incendiaries, and tracers. We painted red on the tips of the tracers. My mother, my sister, and myself worked there. Each of us worked a different shift because we had little ones at home. We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. [Laughs.] To us it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing.
You won’t believe how incredibly ignorant I was. I knew vaguely that a war had started, but I had no idea what it meant.
Didn’t you have a radio?
Gosh, no. That was an absolute luxury. We were just moving around, working wherever we could find work. I was eighteen. My husband was nineteen. We were living day to day. When you are involved in stayin’ alive, you don’t think about big things like a war. It didn’t occur to us that we were making these shells to kill people. It never entered my head.
There were no women foremen where we worked. We were just a bunch of hillbilly women laughin’ and talkin’. It was like a social. Now we’d have money to buy shoes and a dress and pay rent and get some food on the table. We were just happy to have work.
I worked in building number 11. I pulled a lot of gadgets on a machine. The shell slid under and powder went into it. Another lever you pulled tamped it down. Then it moved on a conveyer belt to another building where the detonator was dropped in. You did this over and over.
Tetryl was one of the ingredients and it turned us orange. Just as orange as an orange. Our hair was streaked orange. Our hands, our face, our neck just turned orange, even our eyeballs. We never questioned. None of us ever asked, What is this? Is this harmful? We simply didn’t think about it. That was just one of the conditions of the job. The only thing we worried about was other women thinking we had dyed our hair. Back then it was a disgrace if you dyed your hair. We worried what people would say.
We used to laugh about it on the bus. It eventually wore off. But I seem to remember some of the women had breathing problems. The shells were painted a dark gray. When the paint didn’t come out smooth, we had to take rags wet with some kind of remover and wash that paint off. The fumes from these rags—it was like breathing cleaning fluid. It burned the nose and throat. Oh, it was difficult to breathe. I remember that.
Nothing ever blew up, but I remember the building where they dropped in the detonator. These detonators are little black things about the size of a thumb. This terrible thunderstorm came and all the lights went out. Somebody knocked a box of detonators off on the floor. Here we were in the pitch dark. Somebody was screaming, “Don’t move, anybody!” They were afraid you’d step on the detonator. We were down on our hands and knees crawling out of that building in the storm. [Laughs.] We were in slow motion. If we’d stepped on one...
Mamma was what they call terminated—fired. Mamma’s mother took sick and died and Mamma asked for time off and they told her no. Mamma said, “Well, I’m gonna be with my mamma. If I have to give up my job, I will just have to.” So they terminated Mamma. That’s when I started gettin’ nasty. I didn’t take as much baloney and pushing around as I had taken. I told ’em I was gonna quit, and they told me if I quit they would blacklist me wherever I would go. They had my fingerprints and all that. I guess it was just bluff, because I did get other work.
I think of how little we knew of human rights, union rights. We knew Daddy had been a hell-raiser in the mine workers’ union, but at that point it hadn’t rubbed off on any of us women. Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper were allowed in every building, but not a drop of water. You could only get a drink of water if you went to the cafeteria, which was about two city blocks away. Of course you couldn’t leave your machine long enough to go get a drink. I drank Coke and Dr. Pepper and I hated ‘em. I hate ’em today. We had to buy it, of course. We couldn’t leave to go to the bathroom, ’cause it was way the heck over there.
We were awarded the navy E for excellence. We were just so proud of that E. It was like we were a big family, and we hugged and kissed each other. They had the navy band out there celebrating us. We were so proud of ourselves.
First time my mother ever worked at anything except in the fields—first real job Mamma ever had. It was a big break in everybody’s life. Once, Mamma woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and she saw the bus going down. She said, “Oh my goodness, I’ve overslept.” She jerked her clothes on, throwed her lunch in the bag, and was out on the corner, ready to go, when Boy Blue, our driver, said, “Honey, this is the wrong shift.” Mamma wasn’t supposed to be there until six in the morning. She never lived that down. She would have enjoyed telling you that.
My world was really very small. When we came from Oklahoma to Paducah, that was like a journey to the center of the earth. It was during the Depression and you did good having bus fare to get across town. The war just widened my world. Especially after I came up to Michigan.
My grandfather went up to Jackson, Michigan, after he retired from the railroad. He wrote back and told us we could make twice as much in the war plants in Jackson. We did. We made ninety dollars a week. We did some kind of testing for airplane radios.
Ohh, I met all those wonderful Polacks. They were the first people I’d ever known that were any different from me. A whole new world just opened up. I learned to drink beer like crazy with’em. They were all very union-conscious. I learned a lot of things that I didn’t even know existed.
We were very patriotic and we understood that the Nazis were someone who would have to be stopped. We didn’t know about concentration camps. I don’t think anybody I knew did. With the Japanese, that was a whole different thing. We were just ready to wipe them out. They sure as heck didn’t look like us. They were yellow little creatures that smiled when they bombed our boys. I remember someone in Paducah got up this idea of burning everything they had that was Japanese. I had this little ceramic cat and I said, “I don’t care, I am not burning it.” They had this big bonfire and people came and brought what they had that was made in Japan. Threw it on the bonfire. I hid my cat. It’s on the shelf in my bathroom right now. [Laughs.]
In all the movies we saw, the Germans were always tall and handsome. There’d be one meanie, a little short dumpy bad Nazi. But the main characters were good-lookin’ and they looked like us. The Japanese were all evil. If you can go half your life and not recognize how you’re being manipulated, that is sad and kinda scary.
I do remember a nice movie, The White Cliffs of Dover. We all sat there with tears pouring down our face. All my life, I hated England,’cause all my family all my life had wanted England out of Ireland. During the war, all those ill feelings just seemed to go away. It took a war.
I believe the war was the beginning of my seeing things. You just can’t stay uninvolved and not knowing when such a momentous thing is happening. It’s just little things that start happening and you put one piece with another. Suddenly, a puzzle begins to take shape.
My husband was a paratrooper in the war, in the 101st Airborne Division. He made twenty-six drops in France, North Africa, and Germany. I look back at the war with sadness. I wasn’t smart enough to think too deeply then. We had a lotta good times and we had money and we had food on the table and the rent wa
s paid. Which had never happened to us before. But when I look back and think of him...
Until the war he never drank. He never even smoked. When he came back he was an absolute drunkard. And he used to have the most awful nightmares. He’d get up in the middle of the night and start screaming. I’d just sit for hours and hold him while he just shook. We’d go to the movies, and if they’d have films with a lot of shooting in it, he’d just start to shake and have to get up and leave. He started slapping me around and slapped the kids around. He became a brute.
One of the things that bothered him most was his memory of this town he was in. He saw something move by a building and he shot. It was a woman. He never got over that. It seems so obvious to say—wars brutalize people. It brutalized him.
The war gave a lot of people jobs. It led them to expect more than they had before. People’s expectations, financially, spiritually, were raised. There was such a beautiful dream. We were gonna reach the end of the rainbow. When the war ended, the rainbow vanished. Almost immediately we went into Korea. There was no peace, which we were promised.
I remember a woman saying on the bus that she hoped the war didn’t end until she got her refrigerator paid for. An old man hit her over the head with an umbrella. He said, “How dare you!” [Laughs.]
Ohh, the beautiful celebrations when the war ended. They were selling cigarettes in Paducah. Up until that hour, you couldn’ta bought a pack of cigarettes for love or money. Kirchoff’s Bakery was giving away free loaves of bread. Everybody was downtown in the pouring rain and we were dancing. We took off our shoes and put ’em in our purse. We were so happy.
The night my husband came home, we went out with a gang of friends and got drunk. All of us had a tattoo put on. I had a tattoo put up my leg where it wouldn’t show. A heart with an arrow through it: Bill and Peggy. When I went to the hospital to have my baby—I got pregnant almost as soon as he came home—I was ashamed of the tattoo. So I put two Band-Aids across it. So the nurse just pulls ’em off, looks at the tattoo, and she says, “Oh, that’s exactly in the same spot I got mine.” She pulled her uniform up and showed me her tattoo. [Laughs.]
I knew the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a big terrible thing, but I didn’t know it was the horror it was. It was on working people. It wasn’t anywhere near the big shots of Japan who started the war in the first place. We didn’t drop it on them. Hirohito and his white horse, it never touched him. It was dropped on women and children who had nothing to say about whether their country went to war or not.
I was happy my husband would get to come home and wouldn’t be sent there from Germany. Every day when the paper came out, there’d be somebody I knew with their picture. An awful lot of kids I knew, went to school and church with, were killed.
No bombs were ever dropped on us. I can’t help but believe the cold war started because we were untouched. Except for our boys that went out of the country and were killed, we came out of that war in good shape. People with more money than they’d had in years.
No, I don’t think we’d have been satisfied to go back to what we had during the Depression. To be deprived of things we got used to. Materially, we’re a thousand times better off. But the war turned me against religion. I was raised in the fundamentalist faith. I was taught that I was nothing. My feeling is if God created me, if God sent his only begotten son to give his life for me, then I am something. My mother died thinking she was nothing. I don’t know how chaplains can call themselves men of God and prepare boys to go into battle. If the Bible says, Thou shalt not kill, it doesn’t say, Except in time of war. They’ll send a man to the electric chair who in a temper killed somebody. But they pin medals on our men. The more people they kill, the more medals they pin on ’em.
I was just so glad when it was over, because I wanted my husband home. I didn’t understand any of the implications except that the killing was over and that’s a pretty good thing to think about whether you’re political or not. [Laughs.] The killing be over forever.
E. B. (SLEDGEHAMMER) SLEDGE
Half-hidden in the hilly greenery, toward the end of a winding country road, is the house he himself helped build. It is on the campus of the University of Montevallo, a forty-five-minute drive from Birmingham, Alabama.
On the wall near the fireplace—comforting on this unseasonably cool day—is a plaque with the familiar Guadalcanal patch: “Presented to Eugene B. Sledge. We, the men of K Co., 3rd Bn., 5th Reg., 1st Marine Div., do hereby proudly bestow this testimonial in expression of our great admiration and heartfelt appreciation to one extraordinary marine, who had honored his comrades in arms by unveiling to the world its exploits and heroism in his authorship of WITH THE OLD BREED AT PELELIU AND OKINAWA. God love you, Sledgehammer. 1982.” It is his remarkable memoir that led me to him.37
Small-boned, slim, gentle in demeanor, he is a professor of biology at the university. “My main interest is ornithology. I’ve been a birdwatcher since I was a kid in Mobile. Do you see irony in that? Interested in birds, nature, a combat marine in the front lines? People think of bird-watchers as not macho.”
There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don’t act like an ex-marine. How is an ex-marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereoptype in mind. No, I don’t look like John Wayne.
We were in it to get it over with, so we could go back home and do what we wanted to do with our lives.
I was nineteen, a replacement in June of 1944. Eighty percent of the division in the Guadalcanal campaign was less than twenty-one years of age. We were much younger than the general army units.
To me, there were two different wars. There was the war of the guy on the front lines. You don’t come off until you are wounded or killed. Or, if lucky, relieved. Then there was the support personnel. In the Pacific, for every rifleman on the front lines there were nineteen people in the back. Their view of the war was different than mine. The man up front puts his life on the line day after day after day to the point of utter hopelessness.
The only thing that kept you going was your faith in your buddies. It wasn’t just a case of friendship. I never heard of self-inflicted wounds out there. Fellows from other services said they saw this in Europe. Oh, there were plenty of times when I wished I had a million-dollar wound. [Laughs softly.] Like maybe shootin’ a toe off. What was worse than death was the indignation of your buddies. You couldn’t let ’em down. It was stronger than flag and country.
With the Japanese, the battle was all night long. Infiltratin’ the lines, slippin’ up and throwin’ in grenades. Or runnin’ in with a bayonet or saber. They were active all night. Your buddy would try to get a little catnap and you’d stay on watch. Then you’d switch off. It went on, day in and day out. A matter of simple survival. The only way you could get it over with was to kill them off before they killed you. The war I knew was totally savage.
The Japanese fought by a code they thought was right: bushido. The code of the warrior: no surrender. You don’t really comprehend it until you get out there and fight people who are faced with an absolutely hopeless situation and will not give up. If you tried to help one of the Japanese, he’d usually detonate a grenade and kill himself as well as you. To be captured was a disgrace. To us, it was impossible, too, because we knew what happened in Bataan.
Toward the end of the Okinawa campaign, we found this emaciatated Japanese in the bunk of what may have been a field hospital. We were on a patrol. There had been torrential rains for two weeks. The foxholes were filled with water. This Jap didn’t have but a G-string on him. About ninety pounds. Pitiful. This buddy of mine picked him up and carried him out. Laid him out in the mud. There was no other place to put him.
We were sittin’ on our helmets waitin’ for the medical corpsman to check him out. He was very docile. We figured he couldn’t get up. Suddenly he pulled a Japanese grenade out of his G-string. He jerked the pin out and hit it on his fist to pop open the c
ap. He was gonna make hamburger of me and my buddy and himself. I yelled, “Look out!” So my buddy said, “You son of a bitch. if that’s how you feel about it—” He pulled out his .45 and shot him right between the eyes.
This is what we were up against. I don’t like violence, but there are times when you can’t help it. I don’t like to watch television shows with violence in them. I hate to see anything afraid. But I was afraid so much, day after day, that I got tired of being scared. I’ve seen guys go through three campaigns and get killed on Okinawa on the last day. You knew all you had was that particular moment you were living.
I got so tired of seein’ guys get hit and banged up, the more I felt like takin’ it out on the Japanese. The feeling grew and grew, and you became more callous. Have you ever read the poem by Wilfred Owen? The World War One poet? “Insensibility.” [He shuts his eyes as he recalls snatches of the poem and interpolates] “Happy are the men who yet before they are killed/Can let their veins run cold.... And some cease feeling/Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves/The tease and doubt of shelling.” You see, the man who can go through combat and not be bothered by the deaths of others and escape what Owen calls Chance’s strange arithmetic—he’s the fortunate one. He doesn’t suffer as much as the one who is sensitive to the deaths of his comrades. Owen says you can’t compare this man to the old man at home, who is just callous and hardened to everything and has no compassion. The young man on the front line develops this insensitivity because it is the only way he can cope.
