Coming into consciousness in the midst of the war, an exciting sense of drama and adventure filled the personal, public and media environments of my childhood. Two of my uncles were in the army, and all around me were the signs, symbols and evidence of a nation united in a common cause. The issues were clear, good guys versus bad guys, and by the time I became aware of the war, the process leading to ultimate victory seemed inexorable.
I developed a passionate interest in everything military. Battle maps, geography, the effectiveness of various weapons, aircraft, the fighting spirit of our allies, I couldn’t get enough. The movies nurtured my enthusiasms; Sahara with Humphrey Bogart. Objective Burma with Errol Flynn, Fighter Squadron with Robert Stack and Edmund O’Brien, and of course the entire John Wayne oeuvre from Flying Tigers to Fighting Seabees and Back to Bataan. However, it was the earlier war films, the ones thrown together following Pearl Harbor that stay in my mind. Many of them were crude propaganda pieces designed to stir the public into a more potent sense of anger, fear and urgency. These movies were not all that good, but the message was clear – the issue was seriously in doubt. Wake Island with Brian Donleavy and William Bendix, The Story of Doctor Wassal with Gary Cooper, even Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, were movies crafted to alarm America to the threat posed primarily by the bestial, inscrutable and utterly inhuman Japanese. As a six-year-old sitting in a darkened movie house, they scared the shit out of me.
For seven years, before and during the war years, we lived at my aunt’s house, and I remember having nightmares and dark daydreams of cruel, buck-toothed Japanese soldiers in thick glasses patrolling our street, taking people away. The black uniformed or leather-coated Nazis were every bit as chilling as the Japs, but ordinary Germans were too much like us to be all that scary. That my thrills were vicarious didn’t hit me until early in 1944 when my romanticizing of the war got its first dose of cold water. One afternoon, my first grade class had stayed after school watch some now forgotten movie. With shafts of sunlight sneaking around the edges of the pulled-down window shades, and with my feet on my book bag under a wooden folding chair, I watched a grainy, black and white newsreel scene that clamped itself onto my six-year-old mind. In the snowy rubble of a gutted city, probably Stalingrad, shabby looking, long-coated Russian soldiers were firing a cannon point-blank into the face of a nearly destroyed industrial building. The immediacy and the unadulterated reality of the footage unsettled me. I was suddenly afraid. I somehow understood that what I was seeing was not playacting; not the cold, the destruction, nor the awful power of the gunfire.
The final blow to my illusions about war as an adventure came on a Sunday afternoon in the late spring of 1945. My mother hurriedly ushered my brother and I to the rear of the Forum Theater on Frankford Avenue just after the newsreel began. Looking back over my shoulder at the screen, I saw a British soldier in his baggy, wooly uniform holding open the door of a furnace. The furnace was filled with what I realized were human skulls and charred bones. Before my mother got us out onto the sidewalk, I’d heard enough of the newsreel narration to piece together the discovery of the Nazi camps. While I’ve never completely lost my interest in war and its trappings, my passions, by the age of seven, had been seriously dampened.
Our move to Olney, and to our own house on a narrow treeless street of tiny row homes, coincided with the end of the war. My sense of displacement, my separation from my friends, from everything familiar, was compounded in ways that worked like a negative multiplier upon my emotional state. In the home of my childless aunt, my younger brother and I had been her pampered princes. In our new house, I had lost all recourse to a higher and always sympathetic court of appeals. My memories of our life at my aunt’s quickly took on a mythic quality, a golden time in a Garden of Eden. The houses on our new street had no front lawns, no glassed-in sun porches, no open, back-driveways to play in. Our new street was narrow and noisy, with none of the tall shade trees I had come to love. Worse, we had suddenly become poor. The treats, toys and gifts that my aunt had showered on my brother and me came to an abrupt end the day we moved.
The end of the war only added to my feelings of estrangement. There was a slight time lag in the public impact of peacetime. For me, when those effects did begin, it was like watching a movie fading steadily from the excitement of Technicolor to the drab dullness of black and white. The newsreels were no longer filled with tanks firing guns or soldiers jumping from airplanes. Peacetime trivialities took over; Clem McCarthy’s stylized announcing of horse races, “aannd, they’re off…,” or snickerings at the latest fashion extremes from Paris. There were no longer any identifiable enemies at large. No longer any sense of larger purpose. Everything was refrigerators, baseball, new cars and what you could buy without ration stamps. The movies I loved, filled with fighter planes and submarines, began to disappear, replaced by detectives in felt hats and double-breasted suits and singing cowboys. It seemed to me to only get worse.
The transition period between the end of the war and the switchover to peacetime themes in my favorite comic books took less than three months. Two days after moving in to Delphine Street, with the first dime that came into my hands, I ran down to the corner, to Hurtle’s candy store for the September 1945 issue of Wings Comics, a fine art publication that featured exquisitely rendered Mustangs, Corsairs, P-38s and Thunderbolts destroying fleets of equally well-drawn ME-109s and Zeros. They were great. The October issue was more of the same. With November came the letdown. No more Luftwaffe, no more weasely Japs, no more recognizably hostile aircraft. The identity of the forces of darkness had become vague and fuzzy. The enemy had become a generalized, non-directional evil, their uniforms a Ruritanian absurdity. I was used to better. I remembered the SS. At eight years old, I waxed nostalgic for the drama and excitement of the just ended war. Despite the first intimations of a new evil empire arising in the guise of our so recently valiant Russian allies, the postwar world of peace looked like it was going to be terribly boring.
Part of being a kid is that no one ever tells you anything or explains what is actually going on around you. You’re left to try and figure it out yourself, for better or worse. I went in the direction of worse, assuming that we had fallen permanently from grace. I came to believe I’d never again experience the nearly perfect state of happiness I thought we’d all enjoyed at my aunt’s. I couldn’t understand my mother and father’s seeming joy at our reduced circumstances. In spite of myself, I actually did have something like a happy childhood, complete with loving parents. But being a child, and a spoiled one at that, I wasn’t able to understand why I had lost the world I had loved. Discovering the sweet consolations and indulgences of self-pity, I came to believe in and even embrace what I felt was my entitlement to unhappiness. The world at large seemed to parallel the contraction of my personal circumstances. It was as if our move of less than ten miles had been made to a lesser world, a place where everything was somehow third-rate, flat, dull. I felt like a refugee, and I couldn’t or wouldn’t reconcile myself to what I felt was my banishment from paradise.
Tags: olney, north philadelphia, john keegan, humphrey bogart, errol flynn, flying tigers, propaganda, nazi camps, stalingrad, clem mccarthy, wings comics, 1944, 1945, p-38, me-109, ruritania, Add new tag, frankford avenue, memoir, 1945-1955
