My War
©
2010, Carroll Williams, all rights reserved
This is my account of how I experienced the Second World War. The war raged in Asia and Europe from 1931 to 1941 before the United States became directly and openly involved. We lived in Melbourne, Florida when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor removed all doubt that we would be directly involved. I was a seven-year old second grader. Dad was a reserve Naval officer and unknown to our family, had already been in the undeclared naval war with Germany in the Atlantic. He was patrolling the waters between Florida and the British Bahamas warning British ships of the location of German submarines.
In September, 1941 while on a trip to Miami to see my grandparents, I bragged to my cousins that my dad would be “flying over their heads soon on his way to Key West to visit the Naval Station there.” We were out on the front lawn of my aunt's home, and many neighbors were outside at the time. Dad quietly took me to one side and told me to never, never tell people about his movements, or any military movements. He said that our enemies may be listening. This was my first experience with the need to keep down loose talk. A poster seen throughout the nation declared, “Loose lips sink ships.” There was a picture on the poster of a ship going down with sailors in the water. I never forgot that short lecture my dad gave me.
Within days of the wars beginning we moved to Ft. Lauderdale where dad was stationed at Port Everglades. We remained there while dad attended various schools and prepared to go to the Pacific.
Along our beach opposite the naval air station, the navy set up a gunnery range. There were gun mounts for 50 caliber and 20 mm guns facing the ocean. By day young navy gunners would fire at Arial sleeve targets towed behind TBF Avengers flying parallel to the shoreline over the Atlantic. Sailors brought the guns out from the base and placed them on the mounts each morning. They removed them late in the afternoon and returned them to the naval air station. We watched from the west side of the Intercoastal waterway as tracers arced upward toward the sleeves.
Each gunner would dip the tips of a belt of ammunition in a paint tray. When the projectile passed through the towed fabric sleeve a particular color would be deposited in the fabric giving instructors an indication of a gunner’s hits. Gunners would often drop a short section of an unused ammunition belt onto the ground with a few live rounds still in the links. At the end of a day kids in my neighborhood would retrieve these and collect them. We were very lucky that none of the projectiles were explosive as we pried them out of their brass casings and collected the gun powder. We made bottle rockets and home-made fireworks from the powder. We often dropped empty shell casings into a camp fire in order to set off the primer. This was exceedingly dangerous, but we didn’t seem to care. They cooked off nicely with a bang, and sometimes primers would zing out of a shall casing narrowly missing one of us.
In the early years of the war we witnessed the loss of American and British ships very close to our shores. In the night we could hear a distant “whump, whump.” German torpedoes found their mark. If it was an oil tanker, as it often was, we could stand on our shore and see the burning ship at sea, knowing that our men were in the water among those flames. In addition to the loss of life and shipping, a foul byproduct was the constant beach pollution. Large and small tar balls washed up on shore and some lay along the bottom in the shallows. We could never to go to the beach without getting black gooey tar on our feet and legs. We removed it with turpentine which left our a stinging sensation that lasted for hours.
Coastal cities tried to reduce the lights seen at sea during the night. German submarines would lie in wait just east of the Gulf Stream facing toward shore. Oil tankers from Venezuela and other merchant ships rode the Gulf Stream on their northerly course. As a ship passed between the sub and a well-lit city on shore it would be clearly outlined and became an easy target.
Street lights even well inland were painted on their east side with black paint. Automobile headlights had to be painted across their top and bottom leaving only a narrow band of light across the middle. Motorists were required to drive at very slow speeds in the dark because their headlights were too dim to see very far ahead. Every neighborhood had an Air Raid Warden, a civil defense person who patrolled the neighborhood to make sure that our lights were not visible outside our homes. During practice “black outs” we were required to make our homes totally dark. If a sliver of light were to be seen a summons would be issued and a fine paid.
Beginning in the second grade our school held air raid drills. When the bell sounded a drill, we would leave the classroom and move to an interior hallway where we all lay down on our belly and placed a folded handkerchief between our teeth. This was a precaution against concussion from nearby bomb blasts if any. No one explained what would happen if a bomb made a direct hit.
We learned to fight fires using several types of fire extinguishers. Every classroom had several buckets of sand and short spades. We were taught how to use sand to cover an incendiary bomb. The British suffered many incendiary raids in 1940 and we benefited from their experience. We drilled in the school yard fighting real fires. The teachers piled up shredded magnesium and set it on fire to simulate incendiary bombs. Kids in my class took turns snuffing out the fires with sand. We learned never to use water on an incendiary bomb as it would only make the fire burn hotter and spread it. We learned to use dry chemical extinguishers on electrical fires, and to use liquid ones only for non-electrical fires.
At Southside Elementary School in Ft. Lauderdale we were treated to a constant stream of SNJ trainers and TBF Avenger torpedo bombers climbing out from NAS Ft. Lauderdale over our playground. Our school was directly under the approach to the north end of the main runway of what is now Ft. Lauderdale - Hollywood International Airport. Before the Navy took over the airfield, we had gone there to watch student pilots in the civilian pilot program flying Piper J-3 Cubs and Culver Cadets. Most of those students enlisted in the Navy or the Army Air Corps and continued their flying careers.
I was fascinated with airplanes and always got a bit too close to flying activity. One afternoon at a rural air strip west of town, a group of boys including me and my brother were watching students landing their J-3 Cubs. We were very close to the edge of the dirt runway. An errant Cub drifted off course, headed right for us and wound up in the palmetto scrub scattering us in all directions. I just remember the propeller looming very close as it whipped by and the airplane came to rest in the bushes a few feet from where were standing. Close, but it missed us. Nobody was hurt. The airplane suffered several punctures to the fuselage fabric. We all gave a hand in pushing the airplane back across the road to the dirt strip. The pilot took off again and we pedaled our bikes homeward. We didn’t even tell mom about the close call. Mothers would never understand that sort of thing anyway.
The ten-story Sweet Building on Andrews Avenue at the end of Las Olas Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale was the highest building in town. The Civil Defense authorities built an aircraft spotting tower on the roof. My brother Bob was a uniformed Air Scout and volunteer airplane spotter. We shared many hours in the tower using binoculars and identification cards to report the movements of all aircraft seen. There was a telephone hotline with a direct connection to base operations at the Naval Air Station. In addition to our aircraft spotting duties we managed to get in some dangerous recreation on the building roof. The building’s parapet was about two feet high, just high enough to trip over and plunge a hundred feet to the street below. We lay on our belly behind the parapet to reduce our chance of falling, and sailed our paper airplanes across the city skyline. We looked straight down on the heads of pedestrians and cars below. The distance to the street was impressive to say the least. Scary, but fun.
My mother along with other volunteer ladies from our neighborhood met weekly at the community center to prepare bandages for the armed forces. They also met there on other days to can vegetables grown in a community Victory Garden on the community center grounds. Most families also grew private Victory Gardens in their back yards. We ate whatever the South Florida bugs chose to leave us. We didn’t do too badly with fresh tomatoes, lettuce, corn, beans, and lots and lots of Zucchini.
Speaking of Victory, we received V-Mail from dad from the Pacific. These were a little flimsy combination of paper, envelope and postage pre-printed. The idea was to save on weight and space aboard military transport airplanes coming back from the war zones. Many more letters could be hauled in that form. The ever-present censor was always felt when we saw words and sometimes whole lines either blacked out or neatly cut away with a razor knife.
Kids can be so cruel to one another. There was a German immigrant family living across the street from us. The father evidently was very favorable to the National Socialist regime of Hitler and made no secret of his attitude. His son Brian echoed his father’s sentiments as kids are wont to do. It was often enough to set off bitter conversations in the school yard.
One afternoon after school it boiled over into extremely bad behavior. Several of the kids attacked Brian on his way home. They knocked him off his bicycle, punched him severely and held him down while several kids kicked the spokes out of his bicycle wheels. All the while chanting, “Hotsie totsie, Brian’s a Nazi.” I did not take part in the attack, but I did not come to the kid’s defense either. I stood and watched. I was afraid of the mob. I may even have secretly wished Brian the worst. My sentiments were very anti-German, anti-Japanese. Everywhere we looked we saw posters depicting German and Japanese soldiers as vicious brutal animals. Our country had its propaganda machine much like any other. We learned to hate our enemies and love our allies. Russia’s Stalin was depicted as “Uncle Joe” on posters and in political cartoons. He was presented as a benign fellow we should all accept as America’s friend and ally.
Many cars were not driven. Everywhere we looked cars were on concrete blocks with no wheels, batteries, or windshield wipers. Their owners removed those items and stored them inside their houses against theft. Gasoline was rationed and people rode bicycles or walked to work. The few people who still drove, car pooled with their neighbors. Many open buckboard-style electric cars appeared on our streets. Someone built them and rented them from the Hertz lot in town. They had four heavy-duty bicycle wheels, a light weight simple frame with a set of wooden slats for an open deck. There were two light-weight canvas seats, a steering wheel, and a couple of car batteries on the deck behind the seats. There was nothing even remotely resembling a body. They had bicycle fenders to keep mud off the driver and passenger. I thought they were pretty neat and looked forward to owning one someday. They disappeared after the war and I never saw another one.
The kids in my school took part in war bond drives. Every week we brought our dimes and quarters to school and purchased savings stamps in class. When we filled a book to the value of $18.75 we turned in the stamp book for a $25 war bond. I managed to buy one bond that way. Each kid who managed to buy a bond earned a ride in an Army Jeep. A young soldier came to school one day each month and took a load of kids around the block in his Jeep. About six or eight piled onto the open Jeep and went for the ride. I only earned it once, but others got the ride almost monthly.
I sold the Ft. Lauderdale Daily News on the streets after school and yelled the war’s headlines from a street corner in front of the Governor’s Club Hotel on Las Olas Blvd. Sometimes I walked around and sold papers wherever I could which often included North New River Drive. There were cafes and bars along the strip filled with military personnel. I went into these bars and hawked my papers to the customers in the booths. Often several sailors or Marines would engage me in conversation. I learned a great deal about the war from these returning service men. Many had just come back from the Pacific Island campaign where my dad was making his way to the doorway of the Japanese Empire. The stories they told may have been embellished, no doubt they often were, but there were elements of truth as well.
One day in 1944 in front of the USO club on Las Olas Blvd I was being teased by a young Army Air Force PFC. I knew that military men were supposed to keep their uniforms clean and their shoes well shined. Well, when this fellow continued the teasing unabated, I got him good. I stepped on his shoes and scrubbed them hard ruining his high-gloss shine.
The young airman was stationed at Boca Raton Army Air Field at the time and was in training to become a radar specialist. Seven years later in 1951, in a conversation with a radar specialist, a Staff Sgt. In my barracks at Barksdale Air Force Base, I learned that the Sgt. had been stationed at Boca Raton during the war. We talked further and I learned that he often visited the USO on Las Olas Blvd. He told me about a young newspaper boy who scuffed his shoes to get back at him for his incessant teasing. Well, there we were face-to-face in the same barracks in Louisiana. I recalled the incident to him and we had a good laugh. What were the odds that we would meet again? It ’s a very small world!
As the war wound down we were inundated with souvenirs. One lad brought a practice hand grenade to school. I was in the sixth grade at North side Elementary in Ft. Lauderdale. At recess the girls played hop scotch and the boys played “throw the hand grenade.” About a dozen boys lined up on opposite sides of the playground and we would take turns trying to hit the other line with the dummy grenade. We saw it coming in and scattered when it hit. One of us would rush over and seize it and throw it back at the other group. None of the teachers tried to intervene.
Nowadays, we would all be rounded up and taken to jail just for having a grenade at school. Times have really changed. We always had some live ammunition at school. We traded live ammunition like some kids trade baseball cards. If you didn’t have a 20 mm live round you would trade a couple of 30 caliber rounds for one. You might have some 45 pistol ammo or almost anything. Our uncles, brothers, fathers, and whoever furnished us with a lot of this stuff. I even had a gas mask and a tear gas kit. I had no idea how to make use of it and am probably very glad I didn’t Some of the kids talked about releasing it in the teacher’s work room, but I squelched that idea. My mother had been a teacher and I didn’t think that was any way to treat teachers. I finally put the tear gas materials into the trash. I suppose the land fill varmints may have suffered from it, but I will never know.
When the news came over the radio that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had each been destroyed by a single bomb, we all cheered for we knew our war would soon be over. Almost immediately commentators began discussing the possible impact of such a bomb on future wars and upon civilization. We were comfortable thinking that no nation other than ours would ever have nuclear weapons. Some in congress who knew nothing of physics and radioactivity strongly suggested using the atomic bomb to destroy hurricanes before they could strike land. They suggested sending a B-29 high into the stratosphere and dropping an atom bomb into the eye of a hurricane. If such a foolhardy thing been done, it would add to the heat energy of the hurricane making it more intense, and fill the eye wall of the hurricane with deadly nuclear radiation which would poison the sea and any land area the ’cane would strike. So much for politicians with brains. But then the latter may well be the ultimate oxymoron.
All-in-all I learned a lot about world history and geopolitics at a very early age. At school I poured over world maps. I learned my geography following the progress of our troops overseas. I learned the names and locations of the continents, the nations, the islands, and I fully expected to join the forces and fight in some far-off place as soon as I was old enough. I knew from map colors which territories were parts of the American, British, French, and Dutch colonial empires. This was the world as it was supposed to be. Imagine my shock when colonial empires came unraveled in years following the war.
I was privy to the main events of World War II from the perspective of a newsboy on the streets shouting the headlines, “Allies invade Morroco, Allies invade Sicily, Italy, Normandy.” “American forces land on Saipan, on Guam, in the Philippines, on Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, Ernie Pyle killed by Japanese machine gun, Roosevelt Dies, Russians enter Berlin, Germany Surrenders, Japan sues for Peace after two atomic bombs blast their homeland.”
I saw the newsreels at the theaters, and rubbed elbows with those who fought the battles. My brother and I participated by spotting aircraft for civil defense, grew victory gardens and financed the war with our dimes and quarters. What more could kids do?