We’ll remember Pearl Harbor

Yes, I know: the 70th anniversary of “a day that will live in infamy” was yesterday, not today.

But 70 years ago today, Franklin Roosevelt declared war, and we, as they say, were in it to win it.

I don’t know when, exactly, my father decided to enlist, and it’s over 40 years too late to ask him, but at some point, my father decided to sign up. And in 1942, he did.

He was nearly thirty at the time, and his life had not yet taken off. A true child of the Depression – he graduated from high school in 1929 – on Pearl Harbor Day, he was working as a wire-drawer at Thompson Wire in Worcester, and taking night school courses towards a bachelor’s degree at Northeastern University Extension, which held its classes, I believe, at the Worcester Y. As far as I know, he didn’t have a girlfriend – serious or otherwise – at this point in his life. And I hope that he was no longer sharing a bed with his brother Charlie in the cold and dismal back room of the first floor apartment they occupied in the three-flat my grandmother owned. That he had decamped to the bedroom long-vacated by his sister Peg when she had married a decade earlier. But you never know. He and Charlie may still have been sharing a bed; that is when Charlie, something of the Wild Rover of Main South Worcester.,wasn’t sharing a bed, or the backseat of a Buick with some lovely. (Charlie had at least one child out of wedlock, possible two. He was definitely before his time in the baby daddy department.)

Anyway, my father could have used an adventure, and he loved his country. So why wait around to be drafted? He didn’t have a wife. He didn’t have a family. Let’s go!

He tried first to get into the Army, but was rejected because of his flat feet. It was felt that he couldn’t march in the infantry and was, thus, of no use to them. But my father – a tremendously gifted athlete – was not going to let Uncle Sam call 4-F on him, so he tried the Navy, which apparently didn’t mind my father’s flat foot floogie (without the floy-floy).*

Based on the results of his intelligence test, the Navy offered my father the opportunity to go to into officers’ training, but he turned them down. He didn’t want to be one of those stuck up, rich-boy, snot-nosed officers. So he joined as an enlisted man, and made his way up to the highest level non-com, Chief Petty Officer (a rank similar to Master Sergeant.)

He never saw any action. You went, as he would say, where Uncle Sam sent you. And Uncle Sam sent him to Norfolk, Virginia; Trinidad; and Chicago.

At one point, early on, the FBI showed up at wherever my father was stationed to ask him why he had lied on his enlistment form.

He had claimed to have never been arrested, but the FBI had proof positive he had been.

It seems that, at the age of 15, my father had been busted for crashing a dance with some friends. They didn’t have the dime or quarter admissions fee.

Anyway, they were hauled off to the police station on Waldo Street, where my father’s uncle, who was a policeman, came and got him and brought him home.  My father could not recall having been booked, and he never had to go before a judge or “do time”. So he didn’t realize he even had an arrest record.

One would think that, especially in time of war, the FBI would have better things to do – like look for spies – than to hound someone who’d been arrested at age 15 for trying to crash a school dance.

But, ah, the long arm of the law…

The closest my father came to action was on the ship to Trinidad, which went through waters full of U-boats on the prowl. And, while in Trinidad, he saw a captured German submarine brought in. But that was about it.

With an Irishman’s healthy skepticism towards authority, my father liked to tell stories about the idiocy, the arbitrariness, the pettiness of the military.

One time Eleanor Roosevelt was visiting Trinidad, and there was some command-performance review of the troops. My father and the men under him were supposed to be there – well in advance of Eleanor, by the way – at 09.00 hours.  My father had given his Catholic men permission to attend Mass, and they showed up a minute or two late. As punishment, my father had to haul – in the broiling tropical sun – heavy wooden boards (I always pictured railroad ties) from one end of an area to the other. Then back. Then forth. Then back.

He understood that the military needed to maintain discipline, but he found this entire incident ridiculous. Especially the harsh and inhumane punishment. (And you wonder why he didn’t want to be an officer…)

He always said that he would do it again – i.e., give his men permission to go to Mass, even if it meant being a minute late – because church was more important than an extra minute standing in the sun waiting for Eleanor to arrive, which wasn’t going to happen for a couple of hours, anyway. (He didn’t hold it against Eleanor, by the way.)

Mostly he was a supply guy, a paper pusher. (At the end of the war, he was a paper flusher, as he and his boss – one of those officers he hadn’t wanted to be – flushed some of their paper work down the toilet to get thing over and done with.)

In January 1945, while stationed in Chicago, he met my mother on a blind date. They became engaged seven months later, when the first atom bomb was dropped and my father realized that the war would soon be over, and that he wouldn’t be shipped off to the Pacific.

So, yes, we’ll remember Pearl Harbor.

Mostly for the poor boys blown to bits on the Arizona and the other ships that were harbored at Pearl. And for the fact that it ushered us into a war we had been tippy-toeing towards for a couple of years, which took the lives of four hundred thousand American young men and untold millions of soldiers, sailors, and civilians across the globe.  (Hard to imagine those numbers now, isn’t it?) But also because it indirectly brought about my existence.

So, yes. Yesterday, we remembered Pearl Harbor.

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*Allusion to a WWII-era jazz song, “Flat Foot Floogie (with a floy-floy)”.