The
Greatest Generation
Goes to War
The Greatest Generation – by Tom Brokaw
GENERATIONS
In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. I was well prepared with research on the planning for the invasion-the numbers of men, ships, airplanes, and other weapons involved; the tactical and strategic errors of the Germans; and the names of the Normandy villages that in the midst of battle provided critical support to the invaders. What I was not prepared for was how this experience would affect me emotionally.
The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow plows and construction machinery, part of a crew that kept the base functioning. When he was drafted, the base commander called him back, reasoning he was more valuable in the job he had. When Dad returned home, it was the first time I saw my mother cry. These were powerful images for an impressionable youngster.
The war effort was all around us. Ammunition was tested on the South Dakota sagebrush prairie before being shipped out to battlefront positions. I seem to remember that one Fourth of July the base commander staged a particularly large firing exercise as a wartime substitute for fireworks. Neighbors always seemed to be going to or coming home from the war. My grandfather Jim Conley followed the war's progress in Time magazine and on his maps. There was even a stockade of Italian prisoners of war on the edge of the base. They were often free to wander around the base in their distinctive, baggy POW uniforms, chattering happily in Italian, a curious Mediterranean presence in that barren corner of the Great Plains.
At the same time, my future wife, Meredith Auld, was starting life in Yankton, South Dakota, the Missouri River community that later became the Brokaw family home as well. She saw her father only once during her first five years. He was a front-line doctor with the Army's 34th Regiment and was in the thick of battle from North Africa all the way through Italy. When he returned home, he established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld's Army coats with the major's insignia still attached, I remember thinking, "God, Doc Auld was a big deal in the war."
Yet when I arrived in Normandy, those memories had receded, replaced by days of innocence in the fifties, my life as a journalist covering the political turmoil brought on by Vietnam, the social upheaval of the sixties, and Watergate in the seventies. I was much more concerned about the prospects of the Cold War than the lessons of the war of my early years.
I was simply looking forward to what I thought would be an interesting assignment in a part of France celebrated for its hospitality, its seafood, and its Calvados, the local brandy made from apples. Instead, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had landed there and now returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories in the cafes and inns, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished. These men and women came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time. Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they quit school or went from cap and gown directly into uniform.
They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.
They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible, across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria. They fought their way up a necklace of South Pacific islands few had ever heard of before and made them a fixed part of American history-islands with names like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. They were in the air every day, in skies filled with terror, and they went to sea on hostile waters far removed from the shores of their homeland.
New branches of the services were formed to get women into uniform, working at tasks that would free more men for combat. Other women went to work in the laboratories and in the factories, developing new medicines, building ships: planes, and tanks, and raising the families that had been left behind.
America's preeminent physicists were engaged in a secret race to build a new bomb before Germany figured out how to harness the atom as a weapon. Without their efforts and sacrifices our world would be a far different place today.
When the war was over, the men and women who had been involved, in uniform and in civilian capacities, joined in joyous and short-lived celebrations, then immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They were mature beyond their years, tempered by what they had been through, disciplined by their military training and sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.
They became part of the greatest investment in higher education that any society ever made, a generous tribute from a grateful nation. The GI Bill, providing veterans tuition and spending money for education, was a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation's future. Campus classrooms and housing were overflowing with young men in their mid-twenties, many of whom had never expected to get a college education. They left those campuses with degrees and a determination to make up for lost time. They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy, all the fields of American life, bringing to them the same passions and discipline that had served them so well during the war.
They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history. They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare.
They helped rebuild the economies and political institutions of their former enemies, and they stood fast against the totalitarianism of their former allies, the Russians. They were rocked by the social and political upheaval of the sixties. Many of them hated the long hair, the free love, and, especially, what they saw as the desecration of the flag. But they didn't give up on the new generation.
They weren't perfect. They made mistakes. They allowed McCarthyism and racism to go unchallenged for too long. Women of the World War II generation, who had demonstrated so convincingly that they had so much more to offer beyond their traditional work, were the underpinning for the liberation of their gender, even as many of their husbands resisted the idea. When a new war broke out, many of the veterans initially failed to recognize the differences between their war and the one in Vietnam.
There on the beaches of Normandy, I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives are laced with the markings of greatness. At every stage of their lives they were part of historic challenges and achievements of a magnitude the world had never before witnessed.
Although they were transformed by their experiences and quietly proud of what they had done, their stories did not come easily. They didn't volunteer them. I had to keep asking questions or learn to stay back a step or two as they walked the beaches themselves, quietly exchanging memories. NBC News had brought to Normandy several of those ordinary Americans, including Gino Merli of Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania, who landed on D- Day and later won the Congressional Medal of Honor for holding off an attacking wave of German soldiers. This quiet man had stayed at his machine gun, blazing away at the Germans, covering the withdrawal of his fellow Americans, until his position was overrun. He faked his own death twice as the Germans swept past, and then he went back to his machine gun to cut them down from behind. His cunning and courage saved his fellow soldiers, and in a night of battle he killed more than fifty attacking Germans.
We also brought Harry Garton of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who lost both legs to a land mine later in the war. Merli and Garton had both been in the Army's "Big Red One," the 1st Division. This trip to Normandy was their first time meeting each other and their first journey back to those beaches since they'd landed under greatly different circumstances forty years earlier. Quite coincidentally, they realized they'd been in the same landing craft, so they had matching memories of the chaos and death all around them. Garton said, "I remember all the bodies and all the screaming." Were they scared?, I asked them. Both men had the same answer: they felt alternating fear, rage, calm, and, most of all, an overpowering determination to survive.
As they made their way along Omaha Beach in 1984, they stopped and pointed to a low-lying bluff leading to higher ground. Merli said, "Remember that?" They both stared at a steep, sandy slope, an ordinary beach approach to my eye. "Remember what?" I asked. "Oh," Merli said, "that hillside was loaded with mines, and a unit of sappers had gone first, to find where the mines were. A number of those guys were lying on the hillside, their legs shattered by the explosions. They'd shot themselves up with morphine and they were telling where it was now safe to step. They were about twenty-five yards apart, our guys, calmly telling us how to get up the hill. They were human markers." Garton said, "When I got to the top of that hill, I thought I'd live at least until the next day."
They described the scene as calmly as if they were remembering an egg toss at a Sunday social back home. It was an instructive moment for me, one of many, and so characteristic. The war stories come reluctantly, and they almost never reflect directly on the bravery of the storyteller. Almost always he or she is singling out someone else for praise.
On that trip to Normandy, I ducked into a small cafe for lunch on a rainy Sunday. A tall, familiar-looking American approached with a big grin and introduced himself: "Tom, Congressman Sam Gibbons of Florida."
I knew of Gibbons, a veteran Democrat from central Florida, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, but I didn't know much about him.
"Congressman," I said, "what are you doing here?" "Oh, I was here forty years ago," he said with a laugh, "but it was a little different then." With that he clicked a small brass-and-steel cricket he was holding and laughed again.
I knew of the cricket. The paratroopers of the 101St and 82nd Airborne divisions were given the crickets to click if they were separated from their units. As it turned out, most of them were. When I asked Gibbons what had happened to him that day; he sat down and, staring at a far wall, told a harrowing tale that went on for half an hour. In the cafe, all of us listening were hypnotized by this gangly, jug-eared man in his sixties and the story he was sharing.
Gibbons, a captain in the 101St, was all alone when he landed in a French farm field in the predawn darkness. Using his cricket, he clicked until he got an answer, and then formed a squad of American paratroopers out of other units. They had no idea where they were, and for a time Gibbons thought the invasion had failed because there was no sign of American troops besides his small patched-up patrol.
Gibbons and the other paratroopers with him moved along the country roads between the hedgerows, getting ambushed and fighting back, moving on again, trying to figure out just where they were. Gibbons even tried to converse with the terrified French villagers, using his high school Spanish. It didn't help. It was eighteen hours before they hooked up with other units.
His original objective, holding the bridges over the Douve River at a village called St. C6me-du-Mont, turned out to have been a far tougher assignment than the D-Day planners had realized. It took a whole division, fire support from U.S. cruisers offshore, and tanks to take control of the river crossings. By the third day, Gibbons was exhausted, he said, and he was one of only six hundred or so of the two thousand men in his battalion still on his feet. The others were all dead or wounded.
As he sat there on that rainy afternoon, describing these scenes from passing images of his memory, Gibbons's tough-guy demeanor began to change. He softened and then began to weep. His wife touched his arm and said he didn't have to go on. But he did, and those of us in his tiny audience were enthralled.
Later, Gibbons told me that he fought his way all across Europe and into Germany without a scratch. His brother, also in the Army, was badly wounded, and when the war was over they both enrolled at the University of Florida law school. They didn't talk much about the war until one Saturday in the fall term when they decided to try to count up the young Floridians they had known who hadn't made it back. Gibbons says, "When we got to a hundred we stopped counting and said, 'To hell with this.'
Gibbons went on to his career in politics, first in the Florida legislature and then seventeen terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he became a champion of free trade as a means of keeping international tensions under control, a lesson he learned from the politics of World War II. He was also a solid member of the ruling Democratic majorities. He initially supported the Vietnam War but says now, "The sorriest vote I ever cast was for the Tonkin Gulf resolution," the congressional mandate engineered by President Johnson so he could step up the American efforts in Vietnam.
Gibbons's personal war experience rarely came up publicly again, but it did one day in the fall of 1995, after the Republican Revolution of the year before, when a well-organized class of GOP Baby Boomers took control of the House, determined to deconstruct many of the policies put in place by Democrats during their long congressional rule.
Gibbons, now in the minority on the Ways and Means committee, was furious. The new Republican leadership had cut off debate on Medicare reforms without a hearing. Gibbons stormed from the room, shouting, "You're a bunch of dictators, that's all you are. ...I had to fight you guys fifty years ago." Gibbons then grabbed the tie of the startled Republican chairman, demanding, "Tell them what you did in there, tell them what you did."
Watching this scene play out on CNN, many of my colleagues were puzzled by the eruption in the normally calm demeanor of Congressman Gibbons. I smiled to myself, thinking of that day in Normandy in 1944 when Gibbons, who was then just twenty-four, learned something about fighting for what you believe in.
When I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, my wife, Meredith, joined me. By 1994, I felt a kind of missionary zeal for the men and women of World War II, spreading the word of their remarkable lives. I was inspired by them but also by the work of my friend Stephen Ambrose, the plain-talking historian who had written an account of the invasion called D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.
From him I learned that the men told the stories best themselves. So I told Meredith, "Whenever one of these guys comes over to say hello, just ask, 'Where were you that day?' You'll hear some unbelievable stories." And so we did, wherever we went. What we did not know at the time was that an old family friend back in our hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, had played a critical role in D-Day planning.
In fact, we were only vaguely aware that Hod Nielsen had anything to do with World War II. To us, he was the keeper of the flame of high school athletics as a sportswriter and radio sportscaster. In his columns and on the air, he chronicled the individual and team achievements of our local high school, writing generously of the smallest victories, celebrating the stars but always finding some admirable trait to highlight in his descriptions of those of us who were known mostly for just showing up. What I did not know-nor did any of my high school contemporaries-was that Hod Nielsen, who spent so many of the postwar years making sure our little triumphs received notice, had been a daring photo reconnaissance pilot during World War II. He was in the unit that flew lightly armored P-38s over Normandy just before the invasion, photographing the beaches and fields for the military planners. As soon as they returned from that mission, they were hustled back to Washington to report directly to the legendary commander of the Army Air Corps, General Henry "Hap" Arnold. It's also likely they were spirited out of England quickly to diminish the chances that the identity of their reconnaissance targets would somehow leak.
Hod was one of many in our midst who kept his war years to himself, preferring to concentrate on the generations that followed. He is so characteristic of that time and place in American life. One of four sons of hardworking Scandinavian immigrants, whom he remembers for their loving and frugal ways, Hod doesn't recall a missed meal or a complaint about hard times during the height of the Great Depression.
All four boys in his family were in the service. One brother was killed in action when his bomber was shot down over Europe. The war had been a family trial but also an adventure. Hod had a lot of fun as a freewheeling young officer during pilot training. He managed to avoid getting shot down during numerous reconnaissance missions. He saw a lot of the United States and the world, but when the war was over Hod wanted to return to the familiar life he had known in South Dakota.' He says now, "I thought then, If this is the fast track, I don't want any part of it."
Instead, he returned to a career in broadcasting and sports writing. He's been at it for more than half a century, and he can still get excited about the local high school team's coming football season. He can tell you the whereabouts and the personal and professional fortunes of the athletes long gone from that small city along the Missouri River.
To get a favorable mention in a Hod Nielsen column requires more than a winning touchdown or all-state recognition. He is as likely to write about an athlete's musical ability or scholastic standing or family. As a result, it's always been a little special to read your name beneath his byline. Now that my contemporaries and those who followed us onto the playing fields of Yankton know more about his early life, I am confident they'll feel even greater pride in recognition from this modest and decent man.
During NBC's coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, I was asked by Tim Russert on Meet the Press my thoughts on what we were witnessing. As I looked over the assembled crowd of veterans, which included everyone from Cabinet officers and captains of industry to retired schoolteachers and machinists, I said, "I think this is the greatest generation any society has ever produced." I know that this was a bold statement and a sweeping judgment, but since then I have restated it on many occasions. While I am periodically challenged on this premise, I believe I have the facts on my side.
This book, I hope, will in some small way pay tribute to those men and women who have given us the lives we have today. It is not the defining history of their generation. Instead, I think of this as like a family portrait. Some of the names and faces you'll recognize immediately. Others are more like your neighbors, the older couple who always fly the flag on the Fourth of July and Veterans Day and spend their vacation with friends they've had for fifty years at a reunion of his military outfit. They seem to have everything they need, but they still count their pennies as if the bottom may drop out tomorrow. Most of all, they love each other, love life and love their country, and they are not ashamed to say just that.
The sad reality is that they are dying at an ever faster pace. They're in the mortality years now, in their seventies and eighties, and the Department of Veterans' Affairs estimates that about thirty-two thousand World War II vets die every month. Not all of them were on the front lines, of course, or even in a critical rear-echelon position, but they were fused by a common mission and a common ethos.
I am in awe of them, and I feel privileged to have been a witness to their lives and their sacrifices. There were so many other people whose stories could have been in this book, who embodied the standards of greatness in the everyday that the people in this book represent, and that give this generation its special quality and distinction. As I came to know many of them, and their stories, I became more convinced of my judgment on that day marking the fiftieth anniversary of D- Day. This is the greatest generation any society has produced.
THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES
"This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. "
-FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other. It was a critical time in the shaping of this nation and the world, equal to the revolution of 1776 and the perils of the Civil War. Once again the American people understood the magnitude of the challenge, the importance of an unparalleled national commitment, and, most of all, the certainty that only one resolution was acceptable. The nation turned to its young to carry the heaviest burden, to fight in enemy territory and to keep the home front secure and productive. These young men and women were eager for the assignment. They understood what was required of them, and they willingly volunteered for their duty.
Many of them had been born just twenty years earlier than I, in a time of national promise, optimism, and prosperity, when all things seemed possible as the United States was swiftly taking its place as the most powerful nation in the world. World War I was over, America's industrial might was coming of age with the rise of the auto industry and the nascent communications industry, Wall Street was booming, and the popular culture was rich with the likes of Babe Ruth, Eugene O'Neill, D. W. Griffith, and a new author on the scene, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What those unsuspecting infants could not have realized, of course, was that these were temporary conditions, a false spring to a life that would be buffeted by winds of change dangerous and unpredictable, so fierce that they threatened not just America but the very future of the planet.
Nonetheless, 1920 was an auspicious year for a young person to enter the world as an American citizen. The U.S. population had topped 106 million people, and the landscape was changing rapidly from agrarian to urban, even though one in three Americans still lived on a farm. Women were gaining the right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and KDKA in Pittsburgh was broadcasting the first radio signals across the middle of America. Prohibition was beginning, but so was the roaring lifestyle that came with the flouting of Prohibition and the culture that produced it. In far-off Russia the Bolshevik revolution was a bloody affair, but its American admirers were unable to stir comparable passions here.
Five years later this American child born in 1920 still seemed to be poised for a life of ever greater prosperity, opportunity, and excitement. President Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge was a benign presence in the White House, content to let the bankers, industrialists, and speculators run the country as they saw fit.
As the twenties roared along, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame were giving Saturdays new meaning with their college football heroics. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were raising the spectacle of heavyweight boxing matches to new heights of frenzy. Baseball was a daytime game and a true national pastime, from the fabled Yankee Stadium to the sandlots in rural America.
The New Yorker was launched, and the place of magazines occupied a higher order. Flappers were dancing the Charleston; Fitzgerald was publishing The Great Gatsby; the Scopes trial was under way in Tennessee, with Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a passionate and theatrical debate on evolution versus the Scriptures. A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the beginning of a long struggle to force America to face its shameful policies and practices on race.
By the time this young American who had such a promising start reached the age of ten, his earlier prospects were shattered; the fault lines were active everywhere: the stock market was struggling to recover from the crash of 1929, but the damage was too great. "U.S. income was falling fast. Thirteen hundred banks closed. Businesses were failing everywhere, sending four and a half million people onto the streets with no safety net. The average American farm family had an annual cash income of four hundred dollars.
Herbert Hoover, as president, seemed to be paralyzed in the face of spreading economic calamity; he was a distant figure of stern bearing whose reputation as an engineering genius and management wizard was quickly replaced by cruel caricatures of his aloofness from the plight of the ever larger population of poor.
Congress passed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, establishing barriers to world trade and exacerbating an already raging global recession.
Yet Henry Luce managed to launch Fortune, a magazine specializing in business affairs. United Airlines and American Airlines, still in their infancy, managed to stay airborne. Lowell Thomas began a nightly national radio newscast on NBC and CBS. The Lone Ranger series was heard on radio.
Overseas, three men were plotting to change the world: Adolf Hitler in Germany, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao Zedong in China. In American politics, the New York governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was planning his campaign for the 1932 presidential election.
By 1933, when the baby born in 1920 was entering teenage years, the promise of that early childhood was shattered by crashing world economies. American farmers were able to produce only about sixteen bushels of corn per acre, and the prices were so low that it was more efficient to feed the corn to the hogs than take it to market. It was the year my mother moved with her parents and sister off their South Dakota farm and into a nearby small town, busted by the markets and the merciless drought. They took one milk cow, their pride, and their determination to just keep going somehow.
My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.
My father, an ambitious and skilled construction equipment operator, raced around the Midwest in his small Ford coupe, working hellishly long hours on road crews, hoping he could save enough in the warm weather months to get through another long winter back home in the small wood-frame hotel his sisters ran for railroad men, traveling salesmen, and local itinerants in the Great Plains village founded by his grandfather Richard Brokaw, a Civil War veteran who came to the Great Plains as a cook for railroad crews.
A mass of homeless and unemployed men drifted across the American landscape, looking for work or a handout wherever they could find it. More than thirty million Americans had no income of any kind. The American military had more horses than tanks, and its only action had been breaking up a demonstration of World War I veterans demanding their pension bonuses a year earlier.
Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president of the United States, promising a New Deal for the beleaguered American people, declaring to a nation with more than fifteen million people out of work, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
He pushed through an Emergency Banking Act, a Federal Emergency Relief Act, a National Industrial Recovery Act, and by 1935 set in motion the legislation that would become the Social Security system.
Not everyone was happy. Rich Americans led by the Du Ponts, the founders of General Motors, and big Oil millionaires founded the Liberty League to oppose the New Deal. Privately, in the salons of the privileged, Roosevelt was branded a traitor to his class.
In Germany, a former painter with a spellbinding oratorical style took office as chancellor and immediately set out to seize control of the political machinery of Germany with his National Socialist German Workers party, known informally as the Nazis. Adolf Hitler began his long march to infamy. He turned on the Jews, passing laws that denied them German citizenship, codifying the anti-Semitism that eventually led to the concentration camps and the gas chambers, an act of hatred so deeply immoral it will mark the twentieth century forever.
By the late thirties in America, anti-Semitism was the blatant message of Father Charles Coughlin, a messianic Roman Catholic priest with a vast radio audience. Huey Long, the brilliant Louisiana populist, came to power, first as governor and then as a U.S. senator, preaching in his own spellbinding fashion the power of the little guy against the evils of Wall Street and corporate avarice.
When our young American was reaching eighteen, in 1938, the flames of war were everywhere in the world: Hider had seized Austria; the campaign against Jews had intensified with Kristallnacht, a vicious and calculated campaign to destroy all Jewish businesses within the Nazi realm. Japan continued its brutal and genocidal war against the Chinese; and in Russia, Stalin was presiding over show trials, deporting thousands to Siberia, and summarily executing his rivals in the Communist party. The Spanish Civil War was a losing cause for the loyalists, and a diminutive fascist general, Francisco Franco, began a reign that would last forty years.
In this riotous year the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, believed he had saved his country with a pact negotiated with Hider at Munich. He returned to England to declare, "I believe it is peace for our time. ..peace with honor."
It was neither.
At home, Roosevelt was in his second term, trying to balance the continuing need for extraordinary efforts to revive the economy with what he knew was the great peril abroad. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting a limit on hours worked and a minimum wage. The federal government began a system of parity payments to farmers and subsidized foreign wheat sales.
In the fall of 1938, Dwight David Eisenhower, a career soldier who had grown up on a small farm outside of Abilene, Kansas, was a forty-eight-year-old colonel in the U.S. Army. He had an infectious grin and a fine reputation as a military planner, but he had no major combat command experience. The winds of war were about to carry him to the highest peaks of military glory and political reward. Ike, as he was called, would become a folksy avatar of his time.
America was entertained by Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Woody Guthrie, the music of Hoagy Carmichael, the big-screen film magic of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda.
At the beginning of a new decade, 1940, just twenty years after our young American entered a world of such great promise and prosperity, it was clear to all but a few delusional isolationists that war would define this generation's coming of age.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and Romania had all fallen to Nazi aggression. German troops controlled Paris. In the east, Stalin was rapidly building up one of the greatest ground armies ever to defend Russia and communism,
Japan signed a ten-year military pact with Germany and Italy, forming an Axis they expected would rule the world before the decade was finished. Roosevelt, elected to his third term, again by a landslide, was preparing the United States, pushing through the Export Control Act to stop the shipment of war materials overseas. Contracts were arranged for a new military vehicle called the jeep. A fighter plane was developed. It would be designated the P-51 Mustang. Almost 20 percent of the budget FDR submitted to Congress was for defense needs. The first peacetime military draft in U.S. history was activated.
Roosevelt stayed in close touch with his friend, the new prime minister of England, Winston Churchill, who told the English: "1 have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." And "We shall not flag or fail. ..we shall fight on the seas and oceans. ..we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and on the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender."
Our twenty-year-old American learned something of war by reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, and something else about the human spirit by watching The Grapes of Wrath, the film based on John Steinbeck's novel, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda.
The majority of black Americans were still living in the states of the former Confederacy, and they remained second-class citizens, or worse, in practice and law. Negro men were drafted and placed in segregated military units even as America prepared to fight a fascist regime that had as a core belief the inherent superiority of the Aryan people.
It had been a turbulent twenty years for our young American, and the worst and the best were yet to come. On December 7,1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Across America on that Sunday afternoon, the stunning news from the radio electrified the nation and changed the lives of all who heard it. Marriages were postponed or accelerated. College was deferred. Plans of any kind for the future were calibrated against the quickening pace of the march to war.
Shortly after the attack, Winston Churchill called FDR from the prime minister's country estate, Chequers. In his book The Grand Alliance, Churchill recounted the conversation. "Mr. President, what's this about Japan?" Roosevelt replied, "It's quite true. They have attacked us at Pear] Harbor. We're all in the same boat now."
Churchill couldn't have been happier. He would now have the manpower, the resources, and the political will of the United States actively engaged in this fight for survival. He Wrote, "So we had won after all." A few days later, after Germany and Italy had declared war against the United States, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, who was traveling to Russia, "The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give us certain victory."
In America, young men were enlisting in the military by the hundreds of thousands. Farm kids from the Great Plains who never expected to see the ocean in their lifetimes signed up for the Navy; brothers followed brothers into the Marines; young daredevils who were fascinated by the new frontiers of flight volunteered for pilot training. Single young women poured into Washington to fill the exploding needs for clerical help as the political capital mobilized for war. Other women, their husbands or boyfriends off to basic training, learned to drive trucks or handle welding torches. The old rules of gender and expectation changed radically with what was now expected of this generation.
My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.
It was a monochromatic world, the bleak brown prairie, Army-green cars and trucks, khaki uniforms everywhere. My first impressions of women were not confined to those of my mother caring for my brothers and me at home. I can still see in my mind's eye a woman in overalls carrying a lunch bucket, her hair covered in a red bandanna, swinging out of the big Army truck she had just parked, headed for home at the end of a long day. Women in what had been men's jobs were part of the new workaday world of a nation at war.
Looking back, I can recall that the grown-ups all seemed to have a sense of purpose that was evident even to someone as young as four, five, or six. Whatever else was happening in our family or neighborhood, there was something greater connecting all of us, in large ways and small.
Indeed there was, and the scope of the national involvement was reflected in the numbers: by 1944, twelve million Americans were in uniform; war production represented 44 percent of the Gross National Product; there were almost nineteen million more workers than there had been five years earlier, and 35 percent of them were women. The nation was immersed in the war effort at every level.
The young Americans of this time constituted a generation birthmarked for greatness, a generation of Americans that would take its place in American history with the generations that had converted the North American wilderness into the United States and infused the new nation with self-determination embodied first in the Declaration of Independence and then in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
At the end of the twentieth century the contributions of this generation would be in bold print in any review of this turbulent and earth-altering time. It may be historically premature to judge the greatness of a whole generation, but indisputably, there are common traits that cannot be denied. It is a generation that, by and large, made no demands of homage from those who followed and prospered economically, politically, and culturally because of its sacrifices. It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order. They know how many of the best of their generation didn't make it to their early twenties, how many brilliant scientists, teachers, spiritual and business leaders, politicians and artists were lost in the ravages of the greatest war the world has seen.
The enduring contributions of this generation transcend gender. The world we know today was shaped not just on the front lines of combat. From the Great Depression forward, through the war and into the years of rebuilding and unparalleled progress on almost every front, women were essential to and leaders in the greatest national mobilization of resources and spirit the country had ever known, They were also distinctive in that they raised the place of their gender to new heights; they changed forever the perception and the reality of women in all the disciplines of American life.
Millions of men and women were involved in this tumultuous journey through adversity and achievement, despair and triumph. Certainly there were those who failed to measure up, but taken as a whole this generation did have a "rendezvous with destiny" that went well beyond the outsized expectations of President Roosevelt when he first issued that call to duty in 1936.
The stories that follow represent the lives of some of them. Each is distinctive and yet reflective of the common experiences of that trying time and this generation of greatness.
Heil Hitler!
As Europe struggled through the post-WW1 depression, many countries looked to totalitarian dictators for answers to their problems. When Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin won out in a scramble for power in the Soviet Union. In 1922, Benito Mussolini (Il Duce) staged a "March on Rome" and established a dictatorship of the Italian Fascist Party. In Germany, Adolph Hitler was first elected to the position of Chancellor, then seized power in 1933.
Master Race
As head of the National Socialist, or Nazi movement, Hitler began to remilitarize Germany. While in jail for a failed coup attempt in the early 1920's, Hitler had written a book called Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In it he described the Aryan people as the "master race" who deserved more "living space." The scapegoats for the failures of the German people became the Jews and the Communists, and he began a program of ethnic cleansing that eventually led to the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Appeasement
In 1938 Hitler co-opted Austria into Germany (Anschluss) and occupied the Sudentenland, the western part of Czechoslovakia. Alarmed, the prime ministers of France and Great Britain met with Hitler in Munich and were assured that this was the end of his expansion. Claiming they had achieved "peace in out time, they were jilted when Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Winston Churchill had warned against the "appeasement" of Hitler. Hitler now prepared for the invasion of Poland, but knowing this would mean war against France and Great Britain, he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, agreeing to divide Poland. Thus, WW2 officially began in September of 1939 with the German and Soviet invasions of Poland.
Lightning strikes!
The Germans used a strategy called blitzkrieg, or lightening war to overwhelm first the Poles, then the French and British as well by the end of 1940. Only the refusal ofthe British to give in to the 10 month long bombing barrage by the Luftwaffe, and the valor of the RAF in defending Great Britain avoided complete German victory. Late in 1941, Hitler ended the attack on Great Britain and invaded the Soviet Union, pushing to the outskirts of Moscow and Stalingrad by the winter of 1942.
Don’t Get Me Involved!
The United Stated clung to the policy of isolationism throughout this period. Congress passed the Neutrality Acts, forbidding the U.S. from selling arms to nations at war. FDR looked to get around these acts. Eventually, FDR convinced Congress to supply and ship weapons to the Allies (Lend-Lease). In order to protect American merchant ships from German submarines, convoys were used and the United States began to unofficially fight (Battle of the Atlantic).
Tora, Tora, Tora!
Japan invaded China in 1937 and Indochina in 1941. In response the United States placed an embargo on the one commodity that was so precious to the Japanese that it would spur war, oil. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and the United States was in World War II. The Japanese blitzkrieg pushed the American forces under Douglas McArthur out of the Philippines, after months of heroic fighting on the Bataan Peninsula and the island of Corrigidor.
Homework Assignment # 34
1. Who were the dictators and how did they come to power?
2. Discuss the concepts that led to the Holocaust.
3. Discuss the steps Hitler took that led to the outbreak of WW2.
4. Discuss the reasons for the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
5. Discuss the process by which the U.S. got more and more involved in helping the allies.
6. Discuss the Japanese blitzkrieg.
1942- Turning Point
1942 was the turning point year in all three theaters - Europe, Africa and the Pacific. In November of 1942 the Soviets launched a counterattack in Stalingrad as the German blitzkrieg had become overextended and isolated far from Germany. Though the Soviets lost 1.25 million soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad, from this point on they began to push the Germans back. Also in November, the Americans landed in Northern Africa to help the British chased down the legendary German General Erwin Rommel. Rommel was trapped and defeated in the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Finally, in June of 1942, the United States destroyed the Japanese fleet of aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. From this point on, the Japanese would not be able to attack the Americans, and could only defend against American counterattacks.
Who do we help first?
In 1943, the United States and Great Britain first invaded Sicily, then Italy. This decision would lead to severe problems with our relationship with Stalin, who asked for a second front in France and felt the Soviets were left by themselves to absorb great causalities and the Italian invasion had more to do with reestablishing British and American control over Mediterranean trade routes. Throughout 1943 and 1944 the Americans and British pushed up through Italy, actually fighting German soldiers who had forcibly taken over for the Italians. Finally, in June of 1944 the Allies opened up a second front in France. Led by General Eisenhower, the massive landing on the beaches of Normandy (D-Day) began the American process of pushing the Germans back. In December of 1944, Hitler tried one last ditch attempt to break through allied lines in the Battle of the Bulge. This did cause the Americans to delay, thus the Soviets were the first to enter Berlin. In April, the Soviets stormed Berlin and Hitler took his life (along with his wife, Eva Braun). The Americans and the Soviets met at the Elbe River and the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945 (V-E Day).
In the Pacific, the Americans used a strategy of "island hopping" as they moved back towards Japan. Not every Japanese island was attacked, since the soldiers could do nothing if the Americans skipped them. Fighting the Japanese on these isolated island outposts would prove to be brutal and costly. The key was to keep establishing airfields that would allow the U.S. to get closer and closer to Japan to begin bombing the mainland. In August of 1942, the U.S. stormed Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and retook the Philippines in October of 1944 (Battle of Leyte Gulf). In March of 1945 the Americans captured Iwo Jima, and in June they took Okinawa. From there bombers could reach Japan and began the "fire bombing" of Tokyo. On August 6, 1945 the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb (developed in the Manhattan Project) on the city of Hiroshima. On August 9th, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered September 2nd. (V-J Day).
Throughout the war, the leaders of the Allies met to discuss strategy. In 1943, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Teheran, where Stalin asked for and got assurances that the U.S. and Great Britain would open a second front in France by the end of the year. He would feel betrayed when they chose to invade through Italy instead. In 1945, they met again in Yalta. This was the pivotal meeting in that Roosevelt "agreed" to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe as a buffer zone against future attack by the Germans and Stalin promised to help in the defeat of Japan after Germany surrendered. They also agreed to go ahead with plans to form a United Nations after the war. The final meeting took place at Potsdam (East Germany) after the surrender of the Germans. President Truman had replaced FDR (who had died) and the leaders made plans for disarmament of Germany. This meeting was much more contentious as Truman and Stalin both took much harder lines. Disagreements here led directly to the beginning of the Cold War.
· Ethnic tensions will lead to outbreaks of violence in 1943, reminiscent of the Riots of 1919. Of particular concern will be the Japanese-Americans who will be put in internment camps (Nisei) for the duration of the war.
· Women will take on roles both overseas (Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps – 250,000 volunteers) and at home in the nations factories (Rosie the Riveter).
· The National War Labor Board (NWLB) helped business and labor to ride the fence and limit disruptions in productions due to work stoppages, and the
· Office of Price Administration (OPA) froze wages, prices, rents and rationed important foods (meat, butter, cheese, coffee, etc.)
· The Department of the Treasury issued war bonds to raise money for the war effort and the War Production Board (WPB) rationed fuel and other materials vital to the war effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt justified our involvement in WW2 with a speech called the Four Freedoms. Artist Norman Rockwell showed them in these famous paintings. Can you guess what the four freedoms Roosevelt was talking about?
Homework Assignment # 35
1. Discuss 1942 as a year of turning points in the war.
2. Discuss the progression of American fighting against Germany.
3. Discuss the progression of American fighting against Japan.
4. Discuss the significance of the conferences between the allied leaders.
5. Discuss the war on the homefront.