United, patriotic mood swept U.S. during WWII

On Veterans Day, we honor U.S. soldiers who have sacrificed their lives in all our wars. I remember what it was like growing up during World War II and the united, patriotic mood that pervaded the country.

Our lives changed forever on Dec. 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. My twin sister and I were 10 years old then, living with our family in the Wollaston suburb of Quincy, Mass., a city destined to play an important role in the war's outcome. As millions of American soldiers left for Europe and the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt solidified us by saying that this was 'one front and one battle where everyone in the United States - every man, woman, and child - is in action. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives.'

We all participated in meeting the demands and sacrifices of the war. Food, fuel, and rubber were rationed in an effort to produce enough food for American soldiers, as well as other Allied soldiers. Spam became the unattractive replacement for meat which was especially difficult to obtain. The average ration of gas was three gallons per week, although doctors and police officers were issued more because of their job demands.

Victory gardens were promoted to help the war effort, and vegetable gardens sprang up everywhere - from a racetrack in Chicago, to a zoo in Portland, Oregon - and in backyards across the country. In 1943, Victory Gardens accounted for one-third of the vegetables consumed in the U.S. My father tilled a large plot lent to him two streets away from our home. Like many other families, we had no car and I can still see him pedaling his bicycle home, its basket crammed with fresh picked corn, beans and tomatoes.

Many men enlisted in the war, others were drafted. Those too young to serve (like my teenaged brother and future husband, Don) were involved in other ways. They were both plane 'spotters' calling in to a special number every single aircraft that flew over their perch atop a 50 foot-high stone water tower on the grounds of a Quincy golf course. Although they scanned the sky in the daytime, the tower was manned around the clock by two volunteers on four hour shifts. Don also worked after school in a Wollaston factory that manufactured rope for the U.S. Navy.

Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, to which my sister and I belonged, all got into the act. We studied first aid, and collected rubber, metal, paper, tin, silver foil and other scraps to give to factories. We sang war songs and brought our allowances to school to buy war stamps. In 1944, war bonds bought by schools countrywide paid for 11,700 parachutes, 2,900 planes, and 44,000 jeeps.

We got war news over the radio and in newspapers, while Hollywood did its part in the war effort as well. It opened the 'Hollywood Canteen' where servicemen and women mingled with the stars and produced propaganda-filled war movies with negative stereotyping of Japanese and Germans. Movie admission for a double feature plus Pathe News cost a dime, which we gladly paid twice a week. Movie stars went on war bond tours, some of which ended tragically. Actress Carole Lombard, then the wife of Clark Gable, died when the DC-3 plane she was in crashed in the Sierra-Nevada mountains. The stricken Gable, an excellent marksman, quickly became a gunnery officer in the Army Air Corps. Fabled musician Glenn Miller was lost in a storm on a flight between England and France where he was to play for the troops.

Although our father had many family responsibilities, he served in the Massachusetts National Guard, training at Quincy's impressive armory each week. How handsome he looked to my sister and me dressed in his uniform with its wide-brimmed hat.

With most men off fighting, most of the work on the home front was left to women. 'Rosie the Riveter' ads ('If you can drive a car you can run a machine') encouraged females from coast to coast to don slacks, wrap their hair in turbans, and secure jobs in factories and mills. Others enlisted in the WACS (Women's Army Corps), the Navy's WAVES, and WASP (Women Air Force Service Pilots).

Factories, shipyards and aircraft plants quickly sprang up. Others, like the Fore River Shipyard in the southern part of Quincy, had been in business since 1885. But during World War II, the shipyard, which was operated at the time by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, employed 32,000 people, turning out more ships than any other shipyard in the country.

From Dec. 7, 1941 until the end of the war, Fore River built 92 vessels of 11 different types. Among them was the prestigious aircraft carrier USS Lexington, the battleships USS Massachusetts, the USS Nevada and the USS Salem, the world's last all-gun heavy warship, which is still preserved at Fore River as the main exhibit of the United States Naval Ship Building Museum. John J. Kilroy, originator of the famous 'Kilroy Was Here' graffiti, had been a welding supervisor at Fore River.

Quincy was also an aviation pioneer; Dennison Field in Quincy's northern Squantum section was one of the world's first airports. Amelia Earhart took some lessons there in 1927 prior to becoming the first female aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly before WWII, the property was leased to the U.S. Navy, becoming the bustling Squantum Naval Air Base.

Life had a lighter side, of course. We danced the jitterbug and boogie-woogie, wore bobby sox with our penny loafers or saddle shoes, and ate ice cream at the very first Howard Johnson's. It was established in Wollaston in 1929 when Bostonian Howard Dearing Johnson bought a small corner drugstore and soda fountain near the Wollaston train station. Realizing a better-tasting ice cream would boost his business, he bought a recipe that used natural flavors and twice the butter fat. Beginning with three flavors, he eventually produced 28, thus launching what would eventually become a popular nationwide chain. I was sitting on a stool there enjoying an ice cream cone after school when I learned that President Roosevelt had died, and been succeeded by President Harry S. Truman.

There was always ongoing heartbreak. Gold Star Mother flags appeared across the country in more and more windows as sons were killed. Don lost a neighborhood childhood friend who was drafted at 17, only to die six months later on the beaches at Normandy. Don's much-older brother, Stan, was a captain during the Battle of the Bulge, the single biggest and bloodiest battle American soldiers ever fought. It came as a total surprise, on Dec. 16, 1944, when 30 German divisions roared across the Allied front in Belgium and Luxembourg. He saw his men blown up before his eyes, suffering lifelong hearing loss as a result. He very seldom spoke of this horror for the rest of his life.

Despite the hard work of our troops overseas and citizens on the home front, there was clear discrimination against Americans who were black, Japanese and German. African Americans, many of whom were war heroes (like the famed Tuskegee pilots) were placed in segregated Army units, while Japanese Americans were herded into internment camps for the duration of the war, a clear violation of their rights.

Looking back, I remember an incident on May 6, 1937, that seemed a harbinger of the ultimate destruction of the Nazi regime eight years later. As my sister and I walked home from school, we looked skyward where, about one thousand to two thousand feet above us, we were awestruck to see the German passenger airship Hindenburg. At 803.8 feet in length and 135.1 feet in diameter, it was the largest aircraft ever to fly. Along with the Graf Zeppelin, it had pioneered the first transatlantic air service, carrying hundreds of passengers and traveling thousands of miles. We were actually witnessing its last fateful flight, as it would later explode in flames on reaching its Lakehurst, N.J., destination.

Two other fateful explosions helped end WWII, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Major Charles Sweeney, a pilot from Wollaston, was one of only two persons to fly on both bombing missions. Sweeney's plane, the Great Artiste, accompanied the Enola Gay in the attack on Hiroshima on Aug. 6. He then was pilot of the B-29 Bock's Car that devastated Nagasaki on Aug. 9. After Japan's quick surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, a great feeling of relief and euphoria spread across America. But it was not to last.

In 1946, on high school graduation at 17, Don enlisted in the Air Force. Posted to Weisbaden, Germany, as part of the 32 Statistical Control Unit, he supervised the development of statistics, charts, reports and miscellaneous information for the commanding generals of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE). A staff sergeant at 18, he also oversaw the USAFE's control room - to which he had the lone key - where the top generals mapped strategy.

These included the famous Gen. Curtis Lemay, who reorganized the Strategic Air Command, Gen. John K. Cannon, for whom Cannon Air Force Base is named, and Gen. William H. Tunner, a legend of air power. In June, 1948, when the Soviet Union instituted a land and water blockade of Berlin, hoping it would force the Allies to abandon West Berlin, Tunner organized the Berlin Airlift. That operation amassed more than 250,000 flights, cycled a plane every 90 seconds, and broke the will of the Soviet Union when it delivered over 70,000 tons of supplies in a single 24 hour period.

Don, that former plane 'spotter,' had been part of a great team effort.

Nancy Anne Dawe is a writer/photojournalist who lives on Seabrook Island.