Archive for March, 2022
Storyworth: Did anyone in the family play a part in History with a capital h?
When I was about 10 years old, I asked my father what he did in World War II. He told me he landed at Normandy on D-Day plus 1, June 7th, 1944. He said he was a mile from the front. To my young brain, filled with TV shows, like Combat and 1950’s war movies, his answer was a disappointment. There were no movies about the guys that showed up the next day. All that mattered was what was happening on the front lines. For me, my father was a day late and a mile short.
What an idiot I was (or maybe I was just a ten-year-old boy). To my lifelong regret, I didn’t say, “Wow! That’s amazing! Tell me more.” Knowing what I know now, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to land on Omaha Beach the day after D-Day. A more recent war movie, Saving Private Ryan, was a more accurate depiction of war, specifically what happened on that day. The beach must have been littered with dead soldiers when he arrived. I suspect the surf was still red with all the blood. It must have been horrific.
A number of years ago, my cousin, Bob Black, sent me a trove of letters my father wrote to his sister, Ann, during his service in World War II. One letter refers to his arrival in France from England. Here’s what he wrote to Ann on July 22, 1944 after restrictions on letters home were lifted:
“They have eased up on the censoring enough to so that I can say that we came to France the hard way – landed on the beach. There was no interference. It was quite a thrill tho as we approached the beachhead, to think that we were landing in another foreign country. I kept thinking about how Pete [his brother] had come to France + comparing the circumstances. As for the beach itself, at high tide, it might have been any part of the Cape. Boy, how it reminded me of it. Of course, at the Cape, you wouldn’t see a lot of destroyed barges laying about. For the next four or five days, it was kinda rough. I lived in the truck + ate K rations.”
That’s it. He was 26 years old. I’m sure his goal was to reassure his sister. I have to believe his landing was a bit more traumatic than he described.
[Interruption]
Since beginning this post, inspired by the question, I have systematically gone through all of my father’s letters to his sister during his service in World War II. There are 31 letters. The first letter was written from Aberdeen, Maryland on July 2nd, 1943. The last was exactly two years later, on July 2nd 1945. All were, of course, handwritten. Fortunately, he had pretty good handwriting and the letter’s have held up well. Some were so-called V Mails, which were like postcards that enjoyed expedited delivery, though they were short. Reading these letters was an extraordinary journey through the war experience through my father’s eyes. They are such a gift.
For the most part, they are very personal accounts of his experiences, his concerns and expectations. After getting bounced around quite a bit, he landed in the job that he truly wanted, that of a machinist. He had a girlfriend named Dottie Jayes, who was in the Coast Guard. She dumped him in January of 1945. In a letter on February 4th, 1945, he expressed anger that she also wrote to his mother, my grandmother, announcing the breakup. He was concerned that his mother would worry that “they might be sizing me up for a straight jacket” upon his hearing the news. Amazingly, I googled “Dorothy Jayes, Coast Guard” and she came right up. She died in East Yarmouth on the Cape in 2008 at age 86. She was married twice and had a career as a PR executive in NY. Incredible what you can find on the Internet.
Of course, the letters raise an infinite number of questions, most of which will likely never be answered. By their nature, they leave huge gaps in his experiences during the war. The main locations from which they were written were Aberdeen, Maryland; San Antonio, Texas; England and France. The locations in England and France were a bit vague due to wartime censorship. As noted above, he landed on the beach in Normandy as part of the Ninth Air Force. For years, I’ve tried to find some independent verification of his wartime service, particularly some documentation that he landed on Normandy the day after D Day.
Recently, I discovered a document entitled “A Condensed Analysis of the Ninth Air Force in the European Theater of Operations,” published in 1946. It describes the role of the Ninth Air Force in softening the Nazi resistance in advance of the invasion of Normandy. The Ninth Air Force dropped the paratroopers behind the lines the night before D Day. They also bombed bridges in northern France that prevented German troops and armor from getting to Normandy after the invasion started. The report quotes Herman Goering as saying about D Day, “The allies owe the success of their invasion to their air forces. They prepared the invasion; they made it possible; and they carried it through.” That was the Ninth.
As to D Day plus 1, the report says, “The first units of the [Ninth Air Force] Engineer Command landed on Utah Beach on D Day and on Omaha Beach on D Day plus 1.” My father may have been part of that landing. The Engineer Command were the people who built the air strips as soon as they secured the beaches. My father was with the Service Command, the guys that keep all the machinery operating. I could imagine that the engineers would need men from the Service Command with them when the landed. If so, Omaha Beach must have been quite a sight that day.
After his arrival in France, his letters described a number of his experiences touring the countryside. He spent some time in Paris, which he LOVED. His next three letters had multiple variations of “Did I tell you how great Paris was?” He had another weekend in Paris when his brother, Franny, which was also very special.
His final letters were particularly interesting. He wrote one on May 9th, the day after VE day. He was pretty frustrated that he was in some godforsaken base in the French countryside when the war ended. He said he would have loved to have been in Paris for the celebration. The fact that he was writing a letter the day after the war ended in Europe suggests there wasn’t much of a party where he was. In the letters after that, he was very anxious about getting home. In one letter, he’s optimistic. In the next letter, a month later, he’s worried that he would be assigned to “the occupation.” The letters stopped on July 2nd, so I don’t know when he got home.
So, my detective work continues….
Storyworth: Do You Believe in a Higher Power?
This Storyworth thing allows you to head off questions if you get to them before they are posted. Since I fell behind in my writing, I didn’t see this one coming. I would have headed it off. This is a topic that I’ve wrestled with since I was about 14 years old. I’ll ignore the carefully worded question and just consider the question to be “Do you believe in God?”
Buckle up. This is going to be a long one.
I was raised Catholic and went to grammar school at Sacred Heart School in Roslindale. I was pretty much all in on Catholicism. I was an altar boy for the whole time I was eligible. I almost didn’t make it because I had so much trouble learning the Confiteor Dei, a long prayer in Latin. At my last recital before being washed out, I finally got it. Less than a year later, Vatican Two converted the Mass to English, so it was all for naught. By the time I retired as an altar boy, I was the longest serving altar boy in the parish.
As i approached graduation from grammar school, I was probably headed to one of two Catholic high schools, Catholic Memorial in West Roxbury or Xaverian Brothers in Westwood. Both cost a lot of money and my family had no money. But there was no way my parents were going to send me to Roslindale High the local public school, which was seen as a “thug school.” My grand uncle, Brother Jason, was the librarian at Xaverian, which I think entitled us to a break on the tuition. But it was about a 40 minute drive away. Catholic Memorial was close to home, but no tuition break. In the hope that lightening would strike, I took the notoriously difficult exam to get into Boston Latin School, Boston’s most elite public school founded in 1633. Against all odds, I was one of two boys (only boys could go there) who got admitted from Sacred Heart.
The nuns at Sacred Heart strongly urged me to go to one of the Catholic high school. But BLS was free, so that’s where I went.
Continue ReadingStoryworth: What were your favorite subjects in high school?
Oddly, my favorite subject/class in high school was physics, mainly due to the teacher. I think his name was Mr. Jacobs, but I’m not sure. But I had physics classes with him in my junior and senior years. There was a lot of lab work, which I thought was really cool. I remember one lab where we calculated the diameter of a molecule. I loved the technique for doing so. You would have a dish with water in it. You‘d sprinkle some powdery substance on top of the water. Then you would take an eye dropper with a precisely measured non-soluble liquid in it. You‘d drop the liquid into the dish and the liquid would spread out on top of the water, pushing the powdery substance into a circle. You‘d assume that the spreaded liquid would be one molecule thick on top of the water. So, if you knew the volume of the liquid, you would somehow divide the circumference of the formed circle into the volume and get the diameter of the molecule. Even trying to explain this, I’m not sure I got it right. But I do remember thinking how cool it was to be able to do it.
I remember another class where Mr. Jacobs asked us to consider the possibility of inter planetary travel. Would we do it if we could? Very cool to contemplate. But all I remember from the discussion was Mr. Jacobs‘ frustration with the answers from the class. Kids kept saying that they’d have a hard time leaving friends, presumably permanently. Finally, Mr. Jacobs said, “Get over it! You’re going to spend you life leaving friends.“ I think he was looking for a more elevated discussion of space travel.
I was so inspired by Mr. Jacobs that I started college at Northeastern University as a physics major. What was I thinking??
Actually, I did OK for the first semester and kind of enjoyed it. At the beginning, the math was all differential equations and I understood them. It was in the second semester where I crashed and burned. That’s when you start having to learn calculus. It was as though the class switched from English to hieroglyphics.
That was when i decided I didn’t need a college degree and enrolled in the New England School of Photography in Kenmore Square. That didn’t work out so well either, but that‘s a story for another chapter.
