Reform Reminder The Last Packard First to Die Brother, Can You Spare a Billion?
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January 2011
That year’s Sergeant York , starring Gary Cooper as the simple blacksmith who went from plunking turkeys in the woods of Tennessee to dropping Huns in the Argonne Forest in the Great War, drew criticism from an ad hoc committee of Senate isolationists. So did Charlie Chaplin’s satirical assault on Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator . Senators Gerald P. Nye, Bennett Champ Clark, and Burton K. Wheeler ran the hearings and made judgments on films they’d never seen, declaring the nation’s seventeen thousand movie houses places for “mass meetings for war.” On average, the senators pointed out, war pictures lost money; only the propagandistic war aims of “foreign-born” producers kept these films coming out of Hollywood. “Foreign-born” was, of course, a euphemism in the mouths of committee members. “If anti-Semitism exists in America,” asserted Senator Nye at one point, “the Jews have themselves to blame.”
When war came at last, most Americans couldn’t identify exactly where it had come. The baseball writer Robert W. Creamer recounts how a boy ran home to the family’s Brooklyn apartment to explain to his mother and stepfather, “We’re at war. The Japanese have bombed Belle Harbor [at Coney Island].”
“I first heard the news from the elevator man in the National Press Building,” the journalist I. F. Stone wrote later that week. “The ticker at the Press Club, normally shut off on Sunday, carried the first flash telling of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a beautiful late-autumn Sunday, the sky clear and the air crisp.”
I was born in 1944, toward the middle of October, when a lot of people were getting killed for me, or blown up, or shot, or captured, or worse. Worse? “The shell hit him about here,” said a veteran not long ago, remembering that time and place; “he disappeared.”
The ones who survived their military service in those years eventually got their discharges, went home, went to work, raised families, and are now of an age to retire. Old age is beginning to do what the war could not, or would not. All these people, men and women, living or not, are part of what must be the most written-about generation in American history. As generations come and go, this is a particularly distinguished one, compared, say, with my own.
If somehow a car could have dog-face drawn into its very styling, it was the Jeep, a homely hero that became one of the most vivid symbols of World War II. Just a very practical vehicle, it had little to do with the great issues of the war, but, rather, had a great deal to do with the soldier’s lot, his work, and his days.
Designed in peacetime as a reconnaissance car, the wartime Jeep was a little showoff, ever awaiting the job that it could not do. It was only forty inches tall and weighed about 2200 pounds so that it could be set right by just two men if it overturned. With four-wheel drive and six forward speeds (two reverse), a Jeep could climb 60-degree hills and cruise at a top speed of sixty miles per hour. It was intended to carry three people; four in a pinch, and six in an emergency. The accessories it had addressed the heated concerns of life at the front: a pole on the front, for instance, protected passengers from decapitation by breaking through wires stretched across roadways.
Five minutes to eight! It was going to be a wonderful day. I had a date with Ensign Jim Watters to spend the day lazily exploring Oahu, stopping to swim wherever we wanted. Jim wasn’t coming for me until 10:00, so, if I decided now what I was going to wear, I could sleep an hour longer.
I had come to the islands from California right after school let out in June. My older sister, Jean, and her husband, Buzz (Ensign R. C. Lefever), were living in quarters on the Naval Air Station at Ford Island, and my parents had given me a trip to visit them after my first two years of college. I was slated to return to school in September, but when September rolled around I was having such a good time that I prevailed upon them to let me stay until Buzz’s orders arrived in January.
What a ball I had! Twenty years old and the only single girl on an island filled with naval aviators and officers from the Pacific Fleet. Today would be a typical example of how the days had gone. What was I going to wear?
Although New York had already won the National Football League’s Eastern Championship two weeks earlier, more than fifty-five thousand Giants fans turned out on Sunday, December 7, to cheer their team against the rival Brookyln Dodgers. The Giants were favored to beat Brooklyn and go on to play the winner of that day’s Chicago Bears-St. Louis Cardinals game for the world title. The Sunday New York Times assured, JAPAN RATTLES SWORD BUT ECHO is PIANISSIMO , while its sports page observed, “the attention of fans and players is bound to be distracted a bit by the Bear-Cardinal battle in Chicago.”
The crowd that filled the Polo Grounds was also there for Tuffy Leemans’s Day. The veteran carrier for New York, Alphonse “Tuffy” Leemans, was honored with a silver tray inscribed by his fellow Giants, as well as a watch and fifteen hundred dollars in defense bonds. Tuffy then made a short speech in gratitude, and Mrs. Leemans received a rose bouquet in equal tribute from the boys on the line.
Even more people that afternoon were listening to a CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic when the news came. The orchestra had begun with an already scheduled rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the radio audience was awaiting a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 to be conducted by Artur Rodzinski at Carnegie Hall when the announcement was made. The live Carnegie Hall audience learned the news at the conclusion of the performance from the announcer Warren Sweeney, who then asked for the anthem to be played again. Arthur Rubinstein, that day’s scheduled piano soloist, joined in playing, and the audience, which had hummed and mumbled in observance the first time, now sang at the top of their voices.
The popular song of that week was a sweet little ballad called “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” Among the other chart hits of 1941 that might have been playing that Sunday were “Blues in the Night,” “Take the A Train,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and “Elmer’s Tune,” the work of a Chicago undertaker’s assistant named Elmer Albrecht.
In a fireside chat on December 29, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt called upon the country to become the “arsenal of democracy,” a phrase that would prove enduring.
The president, coaxing a still deeply anti-war country toward what he thought its real self-interests to be, wanted American industry to gear up for war production in order to help those countries fighting the Nazis and Japanese. He presented the idea as the best way for the United States to remain neutral. Within a year, of course, Japan made the case for neutrality moot and the United States needed weapons for itself as well.
When Roosevelt made the speech, the arsenal was largely empty. The Navy, to be sure, was the equal of any in terms of ships, but it lacked the munitions to fight for any extended time. The Army had only 300,000 men, and its equipment was so antiquated that George C. Marshall wrote that its status had been reduced to “that of a third-rate power.”