Too young to serve, the generation that grew up just behind was shaped by war in its own profound, funny, and moving way.
The grim headlines from Europe and the Pacific didn’t scare me. I was a mere tadpole of a kid during the early years of World War II, but I had seen enough shoot-’em-ups and heard enough episodes of Gang Busters to know that eventually the good guys always won and the bad guys always lost. What filled me with dread were the thousand-leggers in the schoolyard. If one of them counted your teeth, you’d die.
That’s what a third grader at Arlington Street Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, told me, a first grader, about centipedes. But recently I found evidence that by the second grade I was pondering war more and arthropods less. A sketch I scrawled in one of my schoolbooks, A Child’s Book of Songs, that year shows a high-flying P-47 Thunderbolt. Another depicts full-scale combat, Americans on top of a hill blasting Nazi tanks down below. Emerging from each tank is a balloon caption in capital letters: “ARG.”
Most of my classmates were two or three years old when Germany invaded Poland and four or five when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Wartime was the only time we knew. Some of my friends had a father or a brother who was far away with no assurance of a safe return. Across the sea, youngsters in London were farmed out to the countryside to escape the Blitz, and children in Europe were wrenched from their mothers’ arms to be worked, starved, and worse in Hitler’s concentration camps. But I was very fortunate. In our modest but comfortable home in Mobile the war simply furnished the backdrop to an uneventful though memorable childhood. Even so, it touched my life— and that of many other American children—in countless ways, many of them keenly important to a kid.
We young people took our roles in the war seriously. My pals and I invested large chunks of our small allowances on war stamps, sat tight through blackouts, and spent hours doing what now would be called “recycling.” We extracted “tin foil” from cigarette packs and gum wrappers, rolled up our empty tubes of Pepsodent and Ipana toothpaste, and went house-to-house with our wagons collecting scrap paper.
We didn’t know that during the summer of ’42 U-boats were sinking cargo ships in the Gulf of Mexico just south of Mobile Bay. To us, the war was “over there”—in a Pacific jungle, for example, where a Japanese sharpshooter was picking off marines one by one. We sat in agony through such a movie scene at the Roosevelt Theater, and clapped and cheered when an American bullet finally tumbled the sniper from atop a coconut tree.
We imagined taking on Hitler and Tojo ourselves. With toy rifles, we waged make-believe battles all over the neighborhood. At one point, my younger brother Mack stormed into the kitchen wailing. Mama asked what was wrong. “Lewis always makes me be the Jap,” he sobbed.
We didn’t realize it, but no community in the South or perhaps the nation was so thoroughly transformed by World War II as Mobile. The Census Bureau showed Mobile County with the highest wartime growth rate in America, its population up 65 percent from 1940 to 1944. (Runners-up: Hampton Roads, Virginia, 45 percent; San Diego, 44 percent; Charleston, South Carolina, 38 percent.)
None of us discussed journalist Selden Menefee’s 1943 description of Mobile as “more like a Western mining camp than a Southern seaport town,” with job seekers pouring in from farms and backwoods; or novelist John Dos Passos’s report that the town “looks trampled and battered like a city that’s been taken by storm.” Nor could we have imagined Mobile as a “war town” prominently featured in The War, Ken Burns’s recent television documentary. (“What’s television?” we would have asked.)
Every week or so, more fresh faces appeared in our school. Many of the new kids had a mom or a dad welding steel plates at one of the two big shipyards that produced a steady flow of warships and freighters. Other parents toiled at the big Alcoa plant that processed millions of pounds of aluminum, helping build tens of thousands of warplanes. Still more worked at Brookley Field, the Army’s aircraft repair base alongside the bay.
Even before the war, housing was hard to find. In 1938, nine months after my birth in a three-room shotgun house in Greenville, Mississippi, my folks loaded cardboard suitcases and myself into a Model A Ford and chugged southeast to Mobile, where Daddy had landed a job at the National Gypsum Company factory.
Nearly all the young men among my kin were in uniform— Uncle Thomas a sailor in the Pacific, Uncle Clay an infantryman training for D-Day, Cousin Charlie a nose gunner on a B-24—but my father remained a civilian. His workplace was producing wallboard for the army, and, with the help of a high school diploma, he had become a foreman. He was healthy, in his twenties, and willing but not hankering to serve when the plant manager persuaded the draft board that his work was essential to the war effort.
In 1943, the year my second brother, David, was born, we became homeowners. For $5,000, Daddy bought a wood-frame house on a dirt street in the Oakdale neighborhood, replete with two bedrooms, a front-porch swing and, out back, a garden and a chicken coop. Some of Mobile’s desperate newcomers were sleeping in abandoned hen houses. But only White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds occupied our roost.
For a kid fascinated by warplanes, our home was a dream. It bordered the sprawling grounds of Arlington Street Elementary, directly below the flight path of aircraft approaching Brookley Field, barely a mile to the south. Countless times every day bombers, fighters, and cargo planes flew low over the schoolyard, coming in for repairs or modifications. Most common were the B-17 Flying Fortresses, the B-24 Liberators, and the C-47 cargo carriers, but we also gawked at an occasional P-38 Lightning and, late in the war, a few B-29s. If all that wasn’t enough, we could take a bus downtown and check out the captured Messerschmitt on display under a tent on the square.
The schoolyard usually bustled with kids well past dusk. Girls in short dresses and pigtails skipped rope and jumped from one hopscotch square to another. My buddies and I drew circles on the hard dirt and shot marbles, always wary of bigger boys who used ball-bearing “steelies” and declared “keepers.”
Caution also was needed in the spring when homemade kites filled the air. Some of the older kids armed the tails of their kites with razor blades and steered them, like Stuka dive-bombers, into kites of the nonaggressors. Memory is foggy, but I suspect it was one of those guys who told me to keep my mouth closed around thousand-leggers.
Shortages affected nearly every aspect of our young lives—the toys with which we played, the clothes we wore, the food we ate—but we were too young to be aware of what we were doing without. And our parents, steeled by the Depression, were accustomed to making the most of anything.
Because the military needed metal, manufacture of the Gene Autry cap pistol, a hot seller in 1940, was suspended “for the duration.” A four-piece wooden train served as a puny substitute for an unattainable Lionel. But I was happy to receive Lincoln Logs and a tube of wooden Tinker Toys in place of the Erector set that had unrealistically topped my wish list to Santa.
Shoes were rationed—three pairs a year per person—but that didn’t bother my crowd. In autumn and spring, roughly only half of the second graders wore shoes to school. By and large, they were the half who also wore dresses and had ribbons in their hair. Except for Sunday mornings and the dead of winter, my associates and I preferred to go barefoot. Recently I came upon Sears Roebuck’s 1943–44 winter catalog and, on page 351, spotted what appeared to be the pair of shoes—brown military-style oxfords for $1.98 and one ration stamp—I wore in Mobile during the Battle of the Bulge.
We didn’t go hungry, either, even though many of the better edibles were rationed or hard to find. The chickens laid plenty of eggs, most of which were collected on my barefoot trips to the hen house on a narrow, slippery plank across a dark mix of mud and the unmentionable. But meat with eggs was rare. One morning, a neighbor sniffed breakfast frying in our kitchen and rushed over. Where, she asked, did we find bacon?
We dined frequently from cans, but also enjoyed fried oysters from the bay and fried chicken from the backyard, as well as ambrosia at Christmas. Good cuts of beef, however, required lots of rationing points. So Mama turned to point-cheap organ meats—this at a time kids were beseeched to “eat everything on your plate to help beat the Japs.” When my mother mixed calf ’s brains into my scrambled eggs, I was ready to show Hirohito a white flag.
I still remember our telephone number; it was 2-8594. Only Mama and Daddy used the phone. And because it cost so much, they rarely phoned long distance. They had replaced the ancient Ford with a ’38 Chevrolet, but the gasoline ration—four gallons a week per family— kept us from visiting our Mississippi kin more than once or twice the entire war. Mama relied on the penny postcard or a letter bearing a three-cent stamp to stay in touch.
Many an afternoon I sat on the front porch waiting for the paperboy to pedal our way with the Mobile Press. Pruneface, the Nazi spy, was trying to disrupt the American war effort, and I couldn’t imagine how Dick Tracy might stop him.
For a hangout, nothing beat the neighborhood paper bin, a wood container on the schoolyard with an open slot under the roof just big enough for my buddies and me to squeeze through. Every few minutes yielded a find worth discussing, like a funny book in which young Billy Batson spoke the name of the wizard Shazam and instantly became the Nazi-fighting Captain Marvel, or an old Police Gazette laden with baseball quizzes and boxing stories and such headlines as “Orgies in a New York Massage Parlor” and “Strong Girl Wrestles Man.”
Every Saturday, a Mercury-head dime and a buffalo nickel bought a seat at the Roosevelt, a bag of popcorn, and four hours of thrills. Parents didn’t dare sit through a noisy matinee at the Roosevelt. But Daddy took Mack and me to the Saenger to see Lassie Come Home. With its ten-thousand-piece chandelier, the downtown palace was renowned since the 1920s as “Alabama’s Greatest Showplace.” Everyone wore shoes at the Saenger.
In early 1945, following the birth of my sister Elaine, Daddy was working six days a week to feed a family of six. But his civilian days suddenly seemed numbered as the draft board expressed doubts about how vital he was to the war effort. It gave him another deferment but told his plant manager it would be his last. In May, the war in Europe ended. But no one believed that anything short of a massive invasion of Japan and additional years of combat would bring peace to the Pacific. Up till 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, my father fully expected to be a soldier in that invasion.
Then came the big news. By 6:30 p.m., the whole family was in the Chevy, rushing downtown toward Bienville Square with Daddy honking the horn most of the way. At the square, soldiers and sailors and their girlfriends formed a parade and marched and sang as civilians clanged the lids of garbage cans. Atop the next morning’s Mobile Register stood a one-word banner: “PEACE!” Another headline explained how it came about: “New U.S. Bomb Made Japanese Toss in Towel.”
Many changes soon followed. The Western Flyer bicycle I had coveted for a year or more appeared beside our Christmas tree, and I used it to race my buddies to a store a mile away when word broke that a shipment of Fleer’s Dubble Bubble bubblegum had arrived. Detroit resumed making cars, including one purchased by my friend Ronnie’s dad: an Oldsmobile that had no clutch pedal and did its own shifting. Even more astonishing was the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star that swooshed over the schoolyard almost as fast as Superman. A savvy fifth grader told me it was “jet propelled”—my introduction to the Jet Age.
All my kin who fought in the war came home safely—Uncle Thomas in his bell-bottom trousers, Cousin Charlie with fifty nose-gunner missions behind him, and Uncle Clay with a big German flag that became my bedspread.
And so Daddy remained a civilian. But decades later he told my wife, whose maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust, that had he known what was going on “over there,” he would have volunteered to fight.
I’m sure he would have, even if it meant leaving Mama with a house full of children in Mobile.
Originally published in the March 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.