THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508050003
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines
This column was first published in The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star on Dec. 7, 1991.
``Where were you on Dec. 7, 1941?''
So asked legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in his unforgettable 1950s recording recalling the '30s and '40s in sounds radioed around the globe during that fateful period: voices of demagogues, domestic and foreign; presidents, prime ministers, a king; the ominous tramp of marching Nazis, cheering fascists. . . .
Murrow spoke with authority, his tone one that History would use if History could. ``Where were you. . . ?'' he asked, the scream of dive bombers as a backdrop.
The hair on my arms still rises when I hear that question. I remember vividly when and where I heard the news. I wasn't at Pearl Harbor - far from it, literally - but in Smithfield, in the family kitchen, at the crowded table with my parents, my sister and an aunt and uncle over from Newport News for Sunday afternoon. An announcer interrupted the Jack Benny Show, as Dennis Day was about to sing. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
A 9-year-old captivated by the adventures of celluloid cowboys projected on the movie-house screen each Saturday, I yelped joyfully. But mother said, firmly: ``No. War is a terrible thing.''
My home-front war memories are like that - vignettes, some fuzzy, all crinkled and fading at the edges:
The spirited ``You Are My Sunshine'' played relentlessly day and night over loudspeakers under the eaves of the worn-white pavilion attached, halfway out, to the Burwell's Bay recreation pier jutting into the James River - as much or more the song in America's heart during the early months of the war as ``Remember Pearl Harbor.''
The strains of the melancholy but soothing ``Don't Get Around Much Anymore,'' floating from the ugly, wooden yellow-and-white Community Hall, where young and less-young local women danced with soldiers bused to town from Fort Eustis on Saturday afternoons; glimpses through the open doors in warm weather of dancing couples; and the thrill of talking with real soldiers, one a sergeant whose polite manner was at odds with the stereotypical gruff sergeants in the movies.
Pulling a wooden red wagon loaded with cans filled with kitchen grease saved by housewives and collected by neighborhood children for the war effort. Where did we cart our cargo? To Mr. Chapman's Independent Market? The memory is indistinct. Fifty years, a half-century, is . . . a while. We collected flattened cans, too, for transformation into - we imagined - bombs with which to destroy America's enemies.
The Community Hall meeting at which a uniformed U.S. Army Air Corps officer sought volunteer aircraft spotters to mount a round-the-clock watch at the small observation post erected seemingly overnight on the high-school grounds bordering New Road. My father signed up for a weekday 4 a.m.-to-8 a.m. shift; I, for Saturday-afternoon duty. I routinely relieved dad around 7 a.m. on his shift, freeing him to go to work at his job-printing shop and weekly newspaper office and me to watch the day dawn and read or study the silhouettes in the aircraft-identification book until the next shift's volunteer arrived and school opened.
The observation post was a gray, A-roofed hut, 8 or 9 feet square, with a single door and a window in each wall. The hut rested solidly on stilts perhaps 6 feet above ground. Plain wooden steps rose to a porch with railing around the hut. Inside were a light bulb hanging from a cord in the center of the room, a wood heater, a chair, a small table, a scattering of Black Mask detective pulp magazines and a wood-encased wall telephone with a black transmitter stuck in the lower half and a black receiver resembling an inverted glass tumbler suspended from a tuning-fork-shaped hook. Perhaps there was a crank, too, with which to ring up the air-traffic controllers at Langley Field, but that could be embroidery.
On watch, hearing the buzzing of aircraft, I would step outside, binoculars in hand, to scan the skies, counting the planes, if I saw them, noting the number of their engines and their flight direction and then, after writing the data on a form, calling in my terse report. How long did I do this? Each spotter was given a winged blue-and-gold Army Air Corps Observer pin. I still have mine.
Other vignettes: air-raid drills and drawing the blackout curtains. The top half of the 1939 Mercury's headlights painted black, to make their beams less visible to the German bombers that never came. Dad hitchhiking to Washington to examine and to buy an automatic printing press; getting a ride all the way from a truck driver who passed three servicemen with their thumbs out. The truck driver's explanation sticks: ``Those fellas, I figure, won't have any trouble being picked up.'' The photograph in The Smithfield Times of a well-liked local youth, an aviator, killed in action, never to return to the modest house on Church Street; the town shared his mother's grief. Ration books for meat and sugar and gasoline - the meat stamps were red. Smithfield hams hanging in a storage room, cut down and cooked one by one for Christmases, until there were none. Big black Norfolk Virginian-Pilot headlines heralding the first thousand-bomber raids against Germany. Picking up the telephone at suppertime on April 12, 1945, hearing dad's advertising salesman say: ``Tell your father Roosevelt's dead.'' Listening most days to the CBS Morning News and, on June 6, 1944, to General Eisenhower's brief recorded announcement that Allied forces had landed in France. Getting the news in the evenings from H.V. Kaltenborn - ``Ah, yes, there's good news tonight!'' Life magazine photographs of skeletal corpses piled pitilessly inside the first German death camps overrun by the Allies, and skeletal survivors, their striped uniforms too big for them, staring blankly through a barbed-wire fence at the photographer: victims of the infinite evil being crushed by Allied might. V-E (Victory-in-Europe) Day, May 8, 1945, cars rolling up and down Main Street, horns, sirens, Hitler dead, the Russians in Berlin, the noose tightening around the Japanese.
Pearl Harbor changed America, changed Americans' lives, changed the course of American history. Pearl Harbor ended the chapter titled ``Great Depression'' and started another: ``America at War.'' Europe, Asia and North Africa had become battlefields before Pearl Harbor, as had the oceans, where German U-boats had sunk some U.S. merchant vessels, dooming scores of American seamen - one a distant cousin from Mathews County.
The Great Depression lasted 10 years; the decisive American phase of World War II less than half that. In August 1945, a new chapter opened: ``The Nuclear Age.'' A friend and I were throwing a baseball back and forth in the bright sunlight on the sidewalk in front of my house. ``Did you hear,'' he asked, ``that we dropped an atomic bomb on Japan?''
What was an atomic bomb?
War is a terrible thing. MEMO: Mr. Scott is interim editorial-page editor of The Virginian-Pilot and
The Ledger-Star.
by CNB