The homefront

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I’m reading James Ellroy’s “Perfidia,” a fictionalized account of Los Angles at the beginning of World War II. Suddenly I’m back, caught in that vortex of time. Memories long buried bubble to the surface. I was not quite seven when the war was over. So what are these memories? Which ones did I actually experience, which are the result of the stories my father told me in the years after the war and which are those told by my seventh grade teacher, Miss Young?

Dad had been drafted into the Navy toward the end of the war. He was medically discharged because of a sciatica condition, so he did not see any fighting. He also had a vivid imagination, so whether it is true that he had been assigned to a ship eventually sunk by the Japanese and that his discharge saved him, is a matter for family speculation. Miss Young was a feisty, wonderful, very patriotic woman. An ardent admirer of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the budding United Nations, she brought World War II alive in her classroom. So what I am about to tell you is a mixture of dimly lit memory, World War II movies and the tales of my father and Miss Young of Furness Junior High School circa 1950.

The war hit home one night in my grandfather’s house at Ninth and Wolf streets. Uncle Chibby was drafted into the war. The wails of my mother and her sisters still pierce my heart. He was one of the lucky ones. Survived battle with Gen. George S. Patton’s troops before irony struck. Got burned badly in a barracks fire before he got home. Lived but never to tell the tale. We kids in the family were always curious about the ugly pink scars on his body that never dimmed his smile.

Other men in our family were also called. My aunt and her teenage daughter moved in with us to spend the duration of the war until my uncle returned. Movie magazines and banana sandwiches are the most vivid memories of my teenage cousin. Turned out we did lose a cousin I never met to a German U-boat. He was only 18.

Uncle “Boot” was shot in the foot and captured by the Germans. Wore an artificial shoe ever after, hence the nickname “Boot.” Dad still kept the yellowing clipping of his release. Uncle Boot smiling, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lei around his neck. Was he on R and R in Hawaii? If so, had it really been the Germans and not the Japanese who had captured him? Fog of memory.

I remember the blackouts. Had to turn out all the lights at night during a blackout. Practice in case Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever got across the ocean and did a London blitz on us. The less light, the tougher for the Nazis to hit their targets. Scared lying under the blankets, not so much of the Germans as the dark.

My father told me about the heroics of Colin Kelly, the American pilot whose plane was fatally hit so he dive-bombed into the smokestack of a Japanese battleship. Kelly was a genuine hero who sacrificed his life to save his crew, but it turns out he never did fly his plane into that ship. I only found that out now in researching this column. Fog of war.

Saw all those war films with Dad. They were still running in our neighborhood movie house five or six years after the war ended. Not all the films had happy endings. Hard to put a happy ending on “Corregidor,” “Bataan” and “Wake Island.” All places where the Japanese took it to us in the Pacific in the early days after Pearl Harbor. John Garfield as Al Schmid in “Pride Of The Marines.” John Wayne, a former college football player who never served a day in the military — he was too important to the movie studio — became a war “hero” through his films. “The Fighting Seabees” and “Flying Tigers,” how we loved him.

Even Superman fought the Nazis and Japs in the comics and short animated features. The “Japs” were always pictured as little diabolical yellow men — a racist stereotype — grinning through large, prominent teeth. The “Japs” could lure you into a trap by speaking perfect English at night while you were hiding in your dark foxhole. The “Japs” were always more nasty in their movie portrayals than even the Nazis. Experts in methods of torture. Served them right when we dropped not one, but two atomic bombs, the prevailing opinion.

Hitler was a madman, but even after his demise, one heard whispers of respect for his war machine. The Holocaust wasn’t a familiar term, the subject never covered in my schooling. Hitler’s master scheme was only apparent in the Movietone News (The Eyes and Ears of the World) in black and white clips of gaunt skeleton-like prisoners being freed from concentration camps. Quick shots of the crematoriums. None of the abject horror really registering. Creepy anti-Semitism — ”Hitler was right”— not in my predominantly Jewish neighborhood — helped me escape the virulent strain of Jew hatred.

Mom was super-patriotic. Nothing she liked better than to sing those old flag-waving songs. They were real to her. More than a song.

Dad warns me. War ahead with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Inevitable. Maybe Red China, too. Atomic bombs turn into Hydrogen bombs. Threat of extinction. Joe McCarthy on the horizon.

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