__________
“One of the great souls of history.”
Grace Tully on FDR
__________
 |
President Roosevelt in 1937. |
February:
President Roosevelt returns from the Yalta conference. “Finally yielding
publicly to his infirmity, he delivered his report to the Congress sitting
down.” Heretofore, he had never allowed himself to be photographed with braces,
or in a wheelchair. (1127-66)
*
February 23: The battle for Iwo Jima rages, Hershel “Woody” Williams remembers lying in the black volcanic sand, doing his best to stay alive. “Suddenly, the Marines around me starting jumping up and down, firing their weapons in the air,” he told the Marine Corps History Division long afterward. “My head was buried in the sand. Then I looked up and saw Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi.”
Woody, 21, was from West Virginia, where he grew up working on a farm. At five feet, six inches tall, and 135 pounds, he barely qualified for enlistment in the Marines, but he made the cut in 1943. (He was from a family of eleven children, but six of his siblings died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.)
It was now the fifth day of combat on the island, and Williams was about to forget all about staying alive.
As The New York Times explained in his obituary:
That afternoon, he wiped out seven Japanese pillboxes with flamethrowers, opening a gap that enabled Marine tanks and personnel carriers to break through the enemy defenses. He scurried from one pillbox to another, miraculously untouched by the intense Japanese machine-gun fire that bounced off his equipment — sounding, as he told it, like a jackhammer.
During
his four-hour foray, in which he received supporting fire from several fellow
Marines, two of whom were killed during the mission, Corporal Williams returned
five times to his headquarters to get new flamethrowers when his supply of
diesel fuel and high-octane gasoline ran out.
Corporal
Williams saw combat on Guam a year later, then arrived on Iwo Jima with the
21st Marines of the Third Marine Division. When Marine armored vehicles became
bogged down in their attempt to penetrate the network of Japanese defense
positions, his commander asked him if he could do something to support them.
Thus
began his one-man flame-throwing foray.
He told
Larry Smith for the oral history “Iwo Jima” (2008) that “you had to get within
20 yards of a pillbox, with machine-gun bullets kicking up.”
“One
time, the men in one pillbox came out,” he recalled. “As they came running
toward me with their rifles and bayonets poised, they ran straight into the
fire from my flamethrower. As if in slow motion, they just fell down.”
Like so many other Marines, Williams was wounded eleven days later, but remained on the island. For his exploits, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, pinned on his chest by President Harry Truman, in October, and discharged from the Marines in November 1945. He would go on to live to be 98.
Truman, the Times adds, would often tell recipients of the medal, “I would rather have this medal than be president.”
Woody, himself, once explained
to a gathering of veterans from the battle, “I claim to be only the caretaker of the medal. There were 27
medals awarded [to Marines and Navy personnel during the 36-day battle for the
island], but there were countless others who did as much, if not more.”
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think
it might be worth discussing with your classes the PTSD so many combat veterans
have experienced – including long before it was ever known as PTSD. What kind of
nightmares might Williams have had, after seeing so much carnage on Iwo Jima, or
the air crews, and the people they targeted (story below)?
 |
The strains of war are very real. |
*
The
smell of burning flesh at five thousand feet.
March 9: The following description from The New Yorker is excellent. On this day:
…an armada of more than three hundred B-29s flew fifteen hundred
miles across the Pacific to attack Tokyo from the air. The planes carried
incendiary bombs to be dropped at low altitudes. Beginning shortly after
midnight, sixteen hundred and sixty-five tons of bombs fell on the city.
Most of the buildings in Tokyo were constructed of wood, paper,
and bamboo, and parts of the city were incinerated in a matter of hours. The
planes targeted workers’ homes in the downtown area, with the goal of crippling
Japan’s arms industry. It is estimated that a million people were left homeless
and that as many as a hundred thousand were killed—more than had died in the
notorious firebombing of Dresden, a month earlier, and more than would die in
Nagasaki, five months later. Crewmen in the last planes in the formation said
that they could smell burning flesh as they flew over Tokyo at five thousand
feet.
That night, Yoko Ono was in bed with a fever. While her mother and
her little brother, Keisuke, spent the night in a bomb shelter under the garden
of their house, she stayed in her room. She could see the city burning from her
window. She had just turned twelve and had led a protected and privileged life.
She was too innocent to be frightened.
The Ono family was wealthy. They had some thirty servants, and
they lived in the Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace, away from the
bombing. The fires did not reach them. But Ono’s mother, worried that there
would be more attacks (there were), decided to evacuate to a farming village
well outside the city.
Yoko’s father was Christian,
rare in Japan, and she was also tutored in Buddhism and piano. Later, she
attended elite public schools. Two of the emperor’s sons were classmates.
*
Integration the hard way.
March 14: Lt. Harold Brown is strafing a German freight train from a low altitude, when his bullets cause a massive explosion. Shrapnel from the blast wrecks the engine of his P-51, and he has to bail out.
Born in Minneapolis in 1924, Brown had once refused as a boy to keep taking piano lessons as his mother had wished. As a teen, he saved money from his job as a soda jerk and took seven flying lessons, instead. In 1942, he tried to enlist, as part of a program to train African American pilots. He came up four ounces short of the minimum weight of 128.5 pounds. (The average American soldier or sailor of that era was much lighter, averaging 144 pounds, and standing five feet, eight inches tall.) Brown eventually made weight, graduated from Army flight school and joined the 332nd Fighter Group, the famed Tuskegee Airmen. Captured after he had to bail out, a mob of Austrians surrounded him, produced a rope, and marched him to a tree, where he expected to be lynched. A constable intervened, however, and Brown was saved. He spent the rest of the war (fortunately, only a few weeks) in a German POW camp.
It was the first time, he laughed later, that he ever spent time in an “integrated” military facility.
He would later recall his return to the United States – to a base, Fort Patrick Henry in Virginia. “We got off the boat,” he explained, “everything was the same. Patrick Henry was still a segregated base, no changes, no nothing, just the way I left it.”
Brown went on to fly combat missions in Korea. He later qualified as a pilot of B-47s, for Strategic Air Command.
“What the Tuskegee Airmen did is not black history,” Brown later explained. It’s not military history. It’s American history.”
April 10: Henry Kissinger, who had fled Germany in 1938, with his family, is serving with the 84th Infantry Division, as American forces sweep across France and into Germany.
The New Yorker explains:
“He was more American than I have ever seen any
American,” a comrade recalled. The work of the U.S. occupation, with its
opportunities for quickly assuming positions of authority, thrilled him. In
1945, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp,
outside Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star for his role in breaking up a Gestapo
sleeper cell.
(Ahlem is a small camp, where prisoners
had been forced to dig an underground facility to protect a rubber
manufacturing plant. Several hundred prisoners likely died there, and only 200
sick Jewish and Russian POW men remained, when Kissinger’s division arrived.)
*
April 12: FDR passes away, at age 63. (It’s interesting to note that he had had three different vice presidents during his time.)
George Wolfskill describes his impact:
Many who admired
Roosevelt, who approved the New Deal, could not have given any rational
explanation for this if their lives had depended on it. Their response was
uncalculated, intuitive; it had something to do with Roosevelt’s ability to
communicate concern, with his enthusiasm, his optimism, his self-confidence. It
also had something to do with his supposed feeling for the “little fellow” (look
at the enemies he had made – and was making – among all those millionaires.)
…Over the years there
developed between Roosevelt and literally millions of Americans a love affair
that was simple and uncomplicated that bordered on worship, That approached
idolatry. (1127/72)
Grace Tully, who had worked for Roosevelt, remembered him this way: “it was my good fortune to work for a man of straightforward simplicity, courage, passion and honesty – one of the great souls of history. (1127/203)
He had his critics, of course, many of them using virulent terms.
A short list of the milder
epithets includes Communist, fascist, dictator, revolutionist, crackpot,
weakling, opportunist, renegade Democrat, unprincipled charlatan, simpleton,
swollen-headed nitwit, destroyer of capitalism, nigger lover, the Great Uncertainty,
the Pied Piper of Hyde Park, the High Priest of Repudiation, “two-thirds mush
and one-third Eleanor,” and perhaps the meanest of all, “that cripple.”
(1127/79)
Free speech, at
least, was in flower. Huey Long called the president a “liar and fake.” He said
they should “hold the Democratic convention and the Communist convention
together and save money.” He called the New Deal “the united order of crooks,
thieves, and rabble-rousers,” “the blue buzzard government,” a brain-trust-bureaucratic-alphabetical
conglomeration of everything except sense and justice.” Father Coughlin labeled
the new deal the “Pagan Deal” and the “raw deal.” Of the two major parties, he
said, “One was the left wing and the other the right wing of the same bird of
prey.” He labeled the president as “that great betrayer and liar – Franklin
Double-Crossing Roosevelt.” There were rumors spread about his having VD, by
way of Eleanor, with a Negro. (1127/90-92)
This doggerel was widely circulated:
What man said that woman?
You kiss the negroes
I’ll kiss the Jews,
We’ll stay in the
White House
As long as we
choose. (1127/80)
John T. Flynn, in The Roosevelt Myth, published in
1948, would put it this way: “Little by little a nature not greatly unlike many
well-considered public men of his type, disintegrated, until power corrupted
him. In the end it corrupted him utterly.” (1127/203)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Wolfskill has a few interesting comments about textbooks, and how they cover the New Deal (and, as most of us know, many other topics). One text will vary from another slightly,
But they will likely have two things in common: uninspired prose and
inoffensive interpretations.
Which means that survey textbooks in United States history tend to be dull and uninteresting. I will not elaborate on a dark suspicion, developed over nearly thirty years behind the desk, that authors and publishers do not want to make anybody mad. They both know what sells textbooks. Since selling textbooks is big business, the strategy is not to antagonize customers. … textbook writers approached the New Deal with the blandness of an ulcer diet… (1127/205)
He adds later,
Suggested readings are part of the ritual of textbook writing,
somewhat like playing the national anthem at sporting events – everybody
expects it; it does not add much, but neither does it do any particular harm. I
have often pondered their reason for being. Authors do not really expect
students to pay any attention to them; most authors, being teachers, know by
experience that even getting students to read the textbook is a miracle only
slightly less difficult than turning water into wine. (1127/213)
*
“A real dialogue between Franklin and the people.”
One historian described the New Deal as “a revolutionary response to a revolutionary situation.” Rexford Tugwell complained, by comparison, that Roosevelt spent “a lot of time…planting shrubbery on the slopes of a volcano.” By comparison, one GOP lawmaker referred to Tugwell as a “Goddamn Communist.” He referred to Tugwell as “Comrade Tugwell, Brain Truster No. 1.” On one occasion, Sen. Simeon D. Fess of Ohio said Karl Marx “would, were he living, necessarily be compelled to apologize for his conservatism to Professor Tugwell.” As Wolfskill explains businessmen “would sigh and look back to 1933 as the fateful year when the United States traded its birthright of free enterprise and laissez-faire economics for the pottage of federal regulation, bureaucracy, and economic paternalism.” (1127/211, 120, 122)
He comments on FDR’s “bedside manner,” and
what it meant to national
morale, the national convalescence. His real, most lasting contribution to the
national rejuvenation was spiritual: a rekindled hope in the hearts of
individuals; for the country, a renewed sense of destiny, a reaffirmation of
the efficacy of democracy and capitalism in a tormented world. (1127/144)
And again:
It was not just that Roosevelt
was a strong leader; it was his rare gift of being able to reach people, move
people (move them sometimes to heroic heights), inspire trust; it was his
ability to “personalize” his leadership. It is probably true that no President,
before or since, was able to evoke such an outpouring of popular support and
confidence. (1127/158)
And:
Eleanor Roosevelt related that,
after the death of her husband, people would stop her on the street to say “they
missed the way the President used to talk to them. They’d say ‘he used to talk
to me about my government.’” There was, said Mrs. Roosevelt, “a real dialogue
between Franklin and the people.” (1127/159)
He also credits the president’s wife:
Eleanor’s life had not been a
happy one. Her lonely childhood and growing awareness that she was
unattractive, that she was awkward and homely and lacking in the social graces,
made her early years miserable. The one bright spot was her marriage to the
handsome young Franklin. Eleanor marveled at her good fortune. But the marriage
was not a good one. The early years of having babies (six in all), of living
under the critical eye of a domineering mother-in-law, of always having under
foot her husband’s possessive friend, Louis Howe, and, finally, the shattering
knowledge of Franklin’s relationship with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd left a deep
sense of self-sacrifice and betrayal. (1127/161)
Wolfskill also outlines Franklin’s relationship with Lucy. She worked for Eleanor as a part-time secretary, starting in 1914. She was “beautiful and charming,” and had wide connections in D.C. “There seems little doubt that Roosevelt fell in love with Lucy, and that his love was reciprocated.” Roosevelt traveled to Europe, came home ill in 1918, and during his illness, Eleanor came across letters from Lucy, “confirming what she had long only suspected.” The three had a confrontation – with Franklin and Lucy agreeing not to see each other. “But the Roosevelt marriage had very nearly ended in divorce.”
After Franklin was stricken with polio, his wife “became the eyes and ears and right hand for her husband, walked and talked in his place. But more, she became his conscience, and after 1933 the conscience of the New Deal as well.” (1127/161)
FDR changed the presidency: “ like it or not, the chief executive had become chief legislator, and even so popular a president as Dwight Eisenhower could not change it.” (1127/166)
He also changed the Democratic Party:
The signs were clear. The
classical Democratic Party was yielding to one that was more northern than
southern, more urban than rural. It was a new combination of forces that appealed
to labor, to traditionally Republican Negroes, to the ethnic groups of the New Immigration,
to women, and to intellectuals. Roosevelt was constructing a new political
edifice – one in which the South was the frieze, not the cornerstone.
(1127/170)
There were failures, too, and other proposals went down to defeat.
child labor legislation,
an anti-lynching bill, a stronger food and drug act, a ship safety bill, crop
insurance, a proposal to make the Civilian Conservation Corps permanent, an
extension of the TVA concept to other parts of the country, and the transfer of
authority over air transportation to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
(1127/130)
And there was the danger of centralized power. Gov. O. Max Gardener of North Carolina, for one, warned that the New Deal was destroying local government and putting in its stead, an “all-powerful federal authority similar to the current dictatorship in several European countries.” (1127/171)
On the other hand, former North Carolina Gov. J. Melville Broughton, summed up the necessity of the New Deal this way:
Those of us who believe in the
fundamental principles of states’ rights and local self-government may as well
concede frankly that much of the almost terrifying expansion of federal
encroachment upon the original domain of the states has come about because
state governments failed to meet the challenge of the new day. Inadequate educational
opportunities, archaic labor laws and regulations, unrelieved hardships and in
equities suffered by the working people, low-pitched politics and unjust class
and race discriminations have, all too frequently, caused the people to…call
for relief from the Federal Government. (1127/185)
Wolfskill puts it this way, saying “what emerged from the New Deal was at least the beginning of a welfare state superimposed upon a capitalist foundation.” (1127/197)
The New Deal,
did reverse the pessimism of the depression era and restore faith in capitalism and democracy. It projected the country a long way down the road from its “rugged individualism” heritage toward a more humane, collective social action. It preserved freedom at home in a world made delirious by the fever of fascism and dictatorship. Without espousing revolutionary goals or resorting to radical methods, the New Deal achieved a level of individual security and well-being undreamed of as late as the 1920s. Its spirit is the driving force behind that deep yearning still abroad in the land for social change, for getting on with the task of perfecting a yet unfinished, imperfect society. (1127/200)
He adds, that while the New Deal had “chastened business” and “shamed it,” it “had made little change in the structure of American business or in the locus of economic power.” (1127/133)
Wolfskill summarizes Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s take on FDR this way,
Schlesinger admires
Roosevelt unabashedly. He is enamored of the “great man” concept and the
ability of great men to shape the course of events. Schlesinger sees Roosevelt in
this role, as a heroic figure rescuing democracy and capitalism from between
the railroad tracks at the last possible second. (1127/210)
He continues:
“Rejecting the platonic
distinction between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’,” writes Schlesinger, “he [Roosevelt]
led the way toward a new society which took elements from each and rendered
both obsolescent. It was this freedom from dogma which outraged the angry,
logical men who saw everything with dazzling certitude.” (1127/211)
*
Advice from the era: “The one way to get thin is to reestablish a
purpose in life. … Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom
and disappointment.” Cyril Connolly,
The Unquiet Grave.
*
“Everyman as president.”
Harry Truman, suddenly elevated to the highest office in the land, once described himself this way. “I’m a homegrown American farm product,” he said. “And I’m proud of the breed I represent – the completely unterrified form of American democracy.”
After he announced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the socialite Susan Mary Jay was dismissive. “Truman looks like my dentist,” she said.
Walter Lipmann, however, saw the strength in the man – and the goodness. While it was easy to get mad at the president, Lipmann wrote, “neither he nor his critics and opponents were able to keep on being angry. For when he lost his temper it was a good temper that he was losing.
In a book called The Trials of Harry S. Truman, author Jeffrey Frank notes, as many have, that Truman was more bookish than many of the most-educated presidents. I have several quotes, myself, from Truman. This one, I have always liked:
“Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.”
A couple of others that resonate:
“You are the government. I am only your hired servant.”
“I’ve always felt that people are pretty much the same everywhere, but isn’t it a pity we have to be taught that.”
*
“The Bride of Belsen.”
April 15: British troops liberate the German concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. One of the lucky survivors is Gena Goldfinger, 18. She had spent time in several German camps, including a brief period in Auschwitz. One of the Brits who took the camp was Sgt. Norman Turgel, and he soon fell in love with the prisoner, even arranging to take her to dinner at the officers’ mess in the British camp. She remembers, “I turned ’round to this Sergeant Norman. “I said: ‘Do we expect any special visitors? What am I doing here?’ So he says: ‘You are the special visitor. This is our engagement party.’”
They married six months later, and Gena became known as the “Bride of Belsen,” a light of hope in a world shocked by the horrors of war. But she knew the worst of the worst, once saying, “My story, the story of a survivor, is the story that six million others cannot tell.”
The youngest of nine children, her father had died before the war, and she and the rest of her family were relocated to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, after the Germans invaded Poland. The New York Times described her ordeal.
Her other family members were
not so lucky; one, a sister, was subjected to horrible medical experiments.
“I often ask, ‘Why were my
brothers and sister shot? Why was my sister injected with petrol? Was I meant
to be here to tell this story to people who didn’t know?’ Perhaps God guided
me, put me under his wing.”
With her mother, she was moved
to Bergen-Belsen after a brief period at Auschwitz. Another prisoner in her
crowded barracks there was Anne Frank.
“Her bed was around the corner
from me,” Ms. Turgel told the British newspaper The Sun in
2015. “She was delirious, terrible, burning up,” she said, adding that she had
brought Frank water to wash.
Frank…died in March 1945 during
a typhus epidemic at the camp. Ms. Turgel saw the effects of that epidemic up
close: In an effort to ensure her and her mother’s survival, she had talked her
way into a job at the camp hospital.
“The people were dying like
flies — in the hundreds. Reports used to come in — 500 people who died. Three
hundred? We said, ‘Thank God, only 300.’”
After the British liberated the camp, Ms. Turgel helped explain
to them the needs of the sick. He husband was part of a unit tasked with
finding German officers who had committed atrocities at the camp. Her husband
died in 1995, but Ms. Turgel is survived was three children and grand- and
great-grandchildren.
She once recalled the vows she
had made to herself after her husband took her to England to live.
“I adopted three ambitions,” she
said. “To learn the way of British life, and to learn the English language, and
to write about my memoirs in case I forget. But how can one forget those
atrocities?”
*
Dachau: “It was very nice.”
May 9: Germany finally surrenders to the Allies.
Gudrin Burwitz dies in 2018, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler; born in 1929. Her father called her “Puppi,” or doll in German. She was his only child by her mother, though he had two by a mistress; and they adopted a son. She kept scrapbooks filled with his picture and called him “Pappi.”
At least once he took her to see Dachau. “We saw everything we could,” she wrote in her diary. “We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.” She was 11 or 12 at the time, 1941.
March 5, 1945, she writes: “We no longer have any allies in Europe and can only rely on ourselves. The Luftwaffe is still so bad. Goring does not seem to care about anything, that windbag. Goebbels is doing a lot but he always shows off. They all get medals and awards, except Pappi, and he should be the first to get one.”
April 19, 1945: “Daddy and all the others are there and
remain for the moment now that the great battle in the East has begun. Daddy
has found it terribly difficult with the incredible amount of work. The Fuhrer
will not believe that the soldiers will no longer fight. Still, perhaps
everything will turn out fine.” Her father is with Hitler at his bunker in
Berlin. Her father had to flee in disguise after Hitler ordered his arrest,
shaving his moustache, donning an eye patch; he is captured on May 20, kills
himself (cyanide) three days later. She and her mother Margarete try to escape;
are caught in N. Italy.
Eventually, she married, a right-wing political leader; she was also a member of Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), a secret organization that, according to the NYT, “was formed after the war to help former Nazis escape prosecution and provide them with financial assistance.”
She was never apologetic—always felt her father was a great
man. Her last name often caused her trouble, and even lost jobs; but she would
not bow. Once, at a dance, no young man would ask her to the floor. “If Hitler
had won the war, they’d all be clamoring for me,” she told a reporter in 1958.
“And I – I am Gudrun Himmler; I am Himmler’s daughter. But now my father’s men
pretend not to know me.”
*
 |
Almost nothing was left in downtown Hiroshima. |
August 6: The first atomic bomb, a 9,700 pound
uranium device, is dropped by the crew of the Enola Gay on the city of
Hiroshima. Sunao Tsuboi, a
20-year-old engineering student, is less than a mile from where the bomb lands.
As The New York Times
explained in his obituary (Tsuboi lived to be 96), he
was
too close to the blast site to see the mushroom cloud. There was a silver-white
flash and a bang, and he was hurled into the air. When he gained consciousness,
he found his body burned from head to toe.
In an interview with The New York Times,
he described the aftermath of the attack as “a living
hell on earth.” All around him, he saw people trying to walk and collapsing,
people with exposed organs or missing limbs.
After being taken to a military hospital
and lapsing back into unconsciousness, he slowly recovered. For some time, he
could crawl but not walk. Scars covered his body and his face.
In Japan, survivors of the
atomic bomb strikes became known as the hibakusha or “bomb-affected people.” Tsuboi
became one of the most active survivors, often describing the horrors of that
day for school children and other audiences. When he was 91, he spoke to
President Obama, during Mr. Obama’s visit to Japan in 2016. In a speech that
day, Obama called for a “moral revolution,” and for the world to do far more to
combat the spread on nuclear weapons.
*
“The boy with the red back.”
August 9: The U.S. drops the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Sumiteru Taniguchi is one of the “lucky” ones in the city below. He survives.
The New York Times notes,
On the
day of the bombing, Mr. Taniguchi, then 16, was delivering mail on his bicycle
in the northern corner of the city, just over a mile from ground zero.
When the
bomb detonated overhead, the force of the explosion tossed him into the air,
and the heat it radiated melted his cotton shirt and seared the skin off his
back and one arm.
Three
months later, he was taken to a navy hospital, where he lay on his stomach for
nearly two years. Bedsores formed on his chest and left permanent scars.
He spent
a total of more than three and a half years in the hospital after the bombing.
Sometimes he was in so much pain, he said, that he would scream to the nurses,
“Kill me, kill me!”
In 1946,
United States forces filmed his treatment. That footage was shared across the
world, and Mr. Taniguchi became known as “the boy with a red back.” When giving
speeches calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he would sometimes show
pictures of his burns to illustrate the horrible suffering that resulted from
the bombings.
A decade
after the war, when Mr. Taniguchi had learned to sit up, stand and walk again,
he joined a youth group for survivors and began working as an activist.
He did recover, did marry, and
did have two children, a boy, and a girl. During his life, he attended 396
protests against the use of atomic weapons.
*
August 14: Jerry Yellin died in December 2017. He is remembered as the man who led the last air raid on Japan before the end of the war. He joined the Army Air Corps on his eighteenth birthday, February 25, 1942. On August 15, 1945 (Japanese time), he led a group of four P-51 Mustang fighters on an attack on enemy airfields.
It was agreed by that time that a coded message would go out if the Japanese agreed to surrender. That would mean any planes in the air should turn back and abort. At noon that day Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender. Yellin, flying from a strip on Iwo Jima said he never received a message. Only after his three-hour flight ended did he learn the war was over.
Yellin long suffered after the war from what we would now call PTSD. He had seen sixteen men in his unit die. The aftermath of the fight for Iwo was horrible. “Body parts were everywhere and the smell of death permeated the air,” he said in 2014. Yellin also suffered a cruel loss in that last mission. Lt. Philip Schlamberg, 19, his Brooklyn-born wingman disappeared into clouds over Japan and was never seen again. “Because of our common Jewish heritage and because he was one of the younger pilots, I had naturally taken Phil under my wing,” he later said.
Yellin had named his plane
“Dorrie B,” after a girlfriend. On another mission, when he was grounded by the
dentist to have painful wisdom teeth pulled, an inexperienced pilot took his
plane on a raid and he, too, was lost. Captain Yellin was discharged in
December 1945, with nineteen combat missions to his credit. “I was angry,” he
remembered. “I could go to college. I had no desire to do that. I couldn’t hold
a job. I had many, many jobs. I was depressed. Every symptom that they now
diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder, I had.” Ironically, before the war
he had been working seven days a week in a steel mill to save for college.
He married Helene Schulman in 1949 but his emotional problems never entirely vanished. He did find great relief in 1975 after his wife suggested he try Transcendental Meditation.
In later years he worked to help others overcome their post-war emotional struggles. In 1983 he was asked to come to Japan to speak on business. Reluctant to go, his wife pressed him. In Japan, Yellin was impressed by the people. Their son, Robert, visited Japan in 1984 when he was a senior in college. He fell in love with the country, and married Takako Yamakawa in 1988. Takakoa’s father had also been a pilot in World War II and the two vets struck up a deep friendship. “We became brothers, he and I,” Yellin said. “I went from thinking a group of people were my enemy to finding my best friend. It’s a lesson to remember that at the end of the day we are all human and have so much love to give,” he said in 2017.
*
August 14: George Mendosa, a sailor who had served aboard The Sullivans, is celebrating in Times Square when news spreads that Japan has surrendered (it is already August 15, in Japan). Impulsively, he grabs a nurse and gives her a kiss, and they are caught in a famous photo. Mendosa is in uniform as is the nurse, in her white dress and white hose, the style of the time. Neither face can be clearly seen.
Alfred Eisenstadt, who snapped the picture for Life magazine on August 14, was too hurried to get names. So for decades there were various claims. Three different women believed they were the nurse, with most experts who studied the photo finally concluding it was Greta Friedman who had been kissed.
In 1980 the question came up again—and this time dozens of
men said they believed it might have been them. Eleven seemed to have solid
claims; and experts used 3-D imaging to compare facial constructions. Most
decided it was Mendosa, and he later sued Life
when the magazine refused to say it was him. “How many people in a lifetime do
something famous?” he later explained. “There isn’t a Navy man alive who hasn’t
looked at that photo and said, ‘I wish I were that guy.’ I was not looking for
any financial gain. I only wanted the recognition.”
By 2014, as times changed, there were those who said the picture was nothing less than evidence of a public sexual assault. Ms. Friedman, however, has said some years before that, “It wasn’t much of a kiss, it was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back, I found out later. The reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he just felt very grateful to nurses who took care of the wounded.” Friedman and Mendosa later became friends. In 2012, she commented again, “I can’t think of anybody who considered that an assault. It was a happy event.”
Mendosa was born in Newport, R.I. in 1923, later dropped out
of high school and joined his father, an immigrant from Portugal, to become a
fisherman. In 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. His love for nurses, he said,
came after he saw a kamikaze strike an aircraft carrier and he had to help more
than 100 sailors picked up from the water reach a nearby hospital ship. As for
the famous lip-plant, Mendosa was with a new girlfriend, Rita Petry, at the
time. She reportedly saw the kiss, didn’t object. They married in 1946, started
a family, and remained together until his death in 2019.
*
Writing in The Crucial Decade, Eric Goldman notes details from that day of joy for most Americans: “…a St. Louis crowd, suddenly hushing it’s whistles and tossing aside the confetti, persuaded a minister to hold services at 2 a.m.” (1/3)
“Whole families made their way to Times Square until 2,000,000 people were milling about.”
“The nation was a carnival but the festivities, as a reporter wrote from Chicago, ‘didn’t seem like so much. It was such a peculiar peace. … and everybody talked of the “end of the war” not of “victory.”’” (1/4)
“Americans tried to make jokes.
The Japanese were suffering from atomic ache people giggled to each other.” As
for the atomic bombs, themselves, the captured Nazi leader Herman Goring had a
more sobering response. “A mighty accomplishment,” he admitted. “I don’t want
anything to do with it.” (1/15)
*
August 15: Japan agrees to surrender. By this time, the United States, with a population about the third of its size in 2021, has spent $300 billion during the war. That would equal $4,609,800,000,000 in today’s dollars (calculated on 11/27/21). About a third of the cost was raised by sale of war bonds to the American people, themselves.
Another source was the highest taxes ever imposed on the country, in the form of corporate income and excess profit taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, and personal income taxes and surtaxes collected on a pay-as-you-go basis through payroll deductions that commenced in 1943. (1127/63)
*
“From altar to divorce court.”
Between 1940 and 1945, five
million people had left the farms, mostly tenants and poor farmers, either “to
punch a time clock in a war plant or to greet each new dawn to a bugle solo.”
That was one-seventh of the farm population. Wolfskill also argues that the drive
to boost war production helped accelerate the growth of “corporate industrial
capitalism” turning it into “a dominant institution of American society. No one
could seriously believe there would ever be a turning back here, either – a
slow-down of corporate expansion, a significant revival of small business.”
(1127/136, 141)
Many couples married in haste, with war looming, in these years. As Wolfskill notes, 1 in 3 marriages in 1945 “led from the altar to the divorce court.”
He adds,
The incidence of venereal disease reached epidemic proportions, prostitution thrived (although law enforcement agencies waged continuous wars against it around military bases), and the sexual promiscuity of young girls (“victory girls”) was scandalous. Nearly 75 percent of all females who were arrested for sex offenses were under twenty-one years of age, and girls under nineteen accounted for over 40 percent of all reported cases of venereal disease. (1127/152)
On an entirely different note, 350,000 teachers, about a third of the nation’s educators, left the field during the war years, for higher paying employment in business, industry or government. (1127/152)
Church membership, which declined during the Depression began to rise again.
*
Eric Goldman writes:
All through the New Deal period and the war years, the powerful thrusts of minorities had been ramming more and more holes in the walls of discrimination. By V-J, Jews seeking admission to professional schools had a ten-to-fifteen per-cent [better] chance than the applicant of 1929. First generation Catholics of eastern or southern European backgrounds reported far less difficulty in purchasing homes in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. During the four swift years of the war, Negroes for the first time knew the white-collar kudos of working as sales girls in the swank department stores of the North, and Negro representatives on labor grievance committees were becoming accustomed to speaking up as freely as their white colleagues.
If the
upsweep was plainest among the minority groups, it touched the whole bottom of
American society with a tonic sense of new possibilities. The GI Bill of Rights
became law in 1944 and with the first release of veterans during the war, the
legislation began working its revolution. Men who had entered the army as
employees returned to borrow money from the government and set up their own
businesses. Hundreds of thousands who had thought of the university as a
preserve of the rich found themselves headed toward an A.B. – a in many cases
toward the highest of professional degrees.
Women, too, were looking at the world differently. Maurice O’Connell told the LA Chamber of Commerce, “Rosie the Riveter isn’t going back to emptying slop jars.” (1/12-13)
Fred Vinson, Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion, said, “The American people are in the pleasant predicament of having to learn to live 50 percent better than they have ever lived before.” (1/14)
A problem after the war was: “reconversion” or getting back to a civilian economy.
Three months after the Japanese surrender, the United Automobile Workers read out the declaration of war. Inflation or no inflation, forty-eight or forty hours’ work, the UAW demanded that its members should take home at the end of the week at least as much purchasing power as they received before V-J.
Goldman says Truman’s mother would always send him off after a visit, “Now, Harry, hew to the good line.” (1/17)
*
“Big dough.”
Burlesque shows are big, and one of the biggest stars of all is Betty Rowland, who in 1945, is making $250 per week, or more than $4,100 in 2022 dollars. “She was known as the ‘Red Headed Ball of Fire,’ a title given her for her stature — she was a diminutive 5-foot-1 — and her fiery hair.”
Rowland later described her earnings as “big dough,” said she never smoked or drank, and did her first show at 14, filling in for a performer who sprained an ankle. Betty was so focused on the music, she forgot to take any of her clothes off…and, what the hell...she was performing at 14??
As The New York Times writes:
Ms.
Rowland had a languid, balletic style (hers
was a gentle grind) and she often threw in an undulating stretch and drop known
as a German roll. Her costumes were elegant: She favored long skirts
with a side slit to the hip, bandeau tops and evening gloves. After a slow
burn, she shed most of her gear; but, like most burlesque stars, she kept her
pasties and her G-string on.
One of
her signature pieces was called “Bumps in the Ballet,” a spoof of a ballet
routine that she liked to introduce to her audience with a bit of patter:
“Let’s put a little juice in the Ballets Russes, and give the dying swan a
goose. In a classical sort of way, might I put a bump in this ballet?”
Rowland was born in Columbus Ohio, on January 23, 1916, and had a stage career lasting into the 50s. She insisted, years later, that what she did was in no way pornographic. She was a “dancer,” she said. “It was the only thing I knew how to do, and I was a success at it.”
“We
teased,” she explained. “That was the name of the game. You become a fantasy to
other people.”
*
Second Lieutenant Julius W. Becton Jr. is stationed on the island of Morotai. He and his men are charged with using a bullhorn to call out to Japanese soldiers and tell them the war is over and they should surrender.
They do not always respond well.
“That took care of my first combat experience of being shot at,” Becton would later joke.
The young African American
officer would go on to fight in Korea and Vietnam, win two Silver Stars, and
reach the rank of lieutenant general in 1972
Staff Sergeant Alfred Ireland, a Marine, sets a record for
the Corps, no one would want to break. He is wounded five
times during World War II, and awarded five Purple Hearts. He later fights
in Korea, and is wounded four more times, the last so badly that he is
medically discharged after he recovers.
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