It was the beginning of about a year of what they called the "Phoney War" (fake war). We were neutral. We would receive newsreels from both sides. I remember one time I went on my bicycle down to South Manchester to a movie, and they showed a newsreel from Germany of a very stirring military march. At another time a large section of our class was taken to the Palace theater in Rockville to see newsreels of the war, which included German planes taking off to bomb England. At that point, half the class cheered!
There are so many things people forget, and are never put into history books. For example, the Polish government prior to the invasion had been leaning towards Germany! Another thing, in the 1930's, there was a popular U.S. radio commentator, exceedingly anti-Jewish, by the name of Father Caughlin. There were both pro-Nazi's and pro-Communists throughout the country. One pro-Nazi group was called the German-American Bund. They held a ralley in NYC and filled Madison Square Garden. Prior to hostilities, there were some "leanings" towards the Nazis in the British royal family, also amongst Scottish nationalists, and in the USA, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindberg.
Just at that time also, was the 1939 New York World's Fair. My sister Barbara and some others took a group of Girl Scouts down to New York to see the Fair, and I was given the opportunity to go along, which I did. We took the train down for a very long day of it, during a part of which my nerves gave me trouble (traces of the effect of Chorea from previous years), so I didn't get to enjoy it as I should have. The train went underground before reaching Manhattan, and while still underground, we changed to another train going to the fair. It wasn't until years later that I ever saw NYC above ground!
The Fair was in Flushing, N.Y. and to me it was utterly fantastic. One of the most memorable things that I saw for the first time was television. Another thing that impresed me was that at night, you could look up in the sky and see all the clouds totally lit up from escaped light from below. Crosley had a remote-controlled car. Both Germany and Poland had pavilions.
I remember once during study hall in the High School auditorium, one kid had a newspaper with headlines, "1,000 PLANE RAID ON LONDON". It really didn't look good for England and France. And then France was finally defeated. German bombers over England were so safe at that time that the Luftwaffe head, Reichmarshal Herman Goering went along once for the ride.
We had a short-wave set at that time, and I regularly used to listen to Radio Berlin to see what they had to say. In fact I listed so regularly that our hired man thought I was a Nazi sympathizer (but I wasn't). I just liked to hear everything from all sources. In fact, prior to the outbreak of hostilities, about 1938, we used to listen to short-wave station EAR, "The voice of Republican Spain", in Madrid. This was during the Spanish Civil War, when the Communists were supporting the Republican (Loyalist) side, and Hitler and Mussolini were supporting Generalissimo Franco's dictatorship. Franco won, and I fully expected he would come into the war on the Axis side, and he proabably would have except Spain was too worn out by the long civil war. At that time the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was against the Spanish Loyalists. My Dad, then a Socialist, was for them.
With regard to Japan, at that point it was of course neutral also. But the way Japan had treated China was common knowledge in the USA, and almost everyone was pro-China and anti-Japanese, including myself. I remember even in first grade, in the Weekly Reader, an account of Japanese soldiers roping together a crowd of Chinese civilians, pouring on gasoline, and setting them on fire. In the mid to late 1930's, I remember going with my Dad to "Storrs College" (forerunner of University of Connecticut), and hearing a speaker talking about our selling scrap metal to Japan, which he said "we will get back in the form of shells fired at us".
While in High School, I regularly read the Reader's Digest. They gave good reasons for being against excessively strong central government, and convinced me to be a Republican, which I have been ever since. But in wanting to hear all sides, for 6 months or so, I subscribed to a New York Communist newspaper, "The Daily Worker". After about 6 months, I had the feeling I could have written it myself, it was so predictable. There were a number of Communists around, including one of the local farmers, Mr. Grabowski. My Dad was against them, as they claimed to be Socialist, but were actually violent.
Just for excitement, one night my friend and I made a big firey hammer and sickle on a hillside, just to see what the reaction would be. Nobody saw it. Another night, we did the same thing, but this time with a swastika. Same thing, no excitement, nobody saw it.
All these shennanigans came to a screetching halt after December 7, 1941. "A day which will live in imfamy". We were at war! It was Sunday evening, and Dad and I were down in the barn milking cows, and had the radio on. It was unbelievably shocking news. Back up at the house, we continued to listen to Radio Berlin on short-wave. Our news wouldn't say what or how many ships were sunk at Pearl Harbor, but Radio Berlin listed them all, the names of all the battleships that went down that day. My dad's comment: that sounds more like the truth. It sounded quite grim.
On the local news we listed to broadcasts from Manila until sometime in January 1942 when it fell to the Japanese. In those days our country was totally unified. I never heard on one dissenting word. We were at war because we were attacked. Hitler had made the comment once that he would "take the US by telephone". Germany at that time was making so much progress in their war that probably Japan figured "now is the time". Plus they had had previoous experience. In the 1900's they did a sneak attack on the Russian Far East Fleet, and practically sunk the whole thing, and wound up victor in that conflict. So they had "learned their lesson". But of course it was the wrong lesson.
Now I have become convinced for some time that we really had no business entering the First World War, and believe a big factor was British propaganda. What a difference there would have been had we remained neutral during the First World War! But obviously WWII was totally different.
I was always facinated by geography. And in looking at the Western Hemisphere, it looked quite plane to me that the most reasonable thing for me to do language wise, was to learn Spanish. In High School I was having two years of Latin and two years of French, but Spanish was not offered. In earlier years they had dropped Greek, and in WWI they had dropped German to get even with the Germans. So my sister and I signed up for a night course in Spanish, while I was still in High School.
In my Junior year of High School, I took my first plane ride, a United flight from the field next to the river by downtown Hartford, up to Logan in Boston. On the flight, as we approaced Boston harbor, the stewardess pulled down the curtains by each window so that we couldn't see tahe ships in the harbor because it was a wartime secret, classified information. The reason Iwent to Boston was to apply for admission to MIT as an engineering student. To my great joy, I was accepted, and started receiving invitations from fraternities.
However, my Dad said something that I misunderstood, thinking he was forbidding me to go, and I held it against him for several years until the misunderstanding was cleared up. Later he explained that his position was that if I went, I would just be drafted into the Army, and not get to go at all. So I stayed home, for a while. But I was restless. I thought maybe I'd get into the Navy V-12 program, where they put you through college for officer training. So I went down to New Haven, and applied at Yale for the V-12. They gave me a bunch of examinations, including a thorough dental examination, and at that point, my old "bugabo", my nerves started acting up, (the Chorea resido from years before), and based on that I was rejected.
I then enrolled in Hillyer Junior College in Hartford, night school, to learn "Radio" as electronics was called in those days.
But I was still restless. So, even though I was an essential worker (our doctor said "you can get along without doctors, but you cannot get along without food) I went up to the local draft board and asked them to draft me (make me 1-A). They said, are you still working on the farm? I said, "Yes". They said, "You have to quit first". I went home and thought about it for a while. A week later I went back to the draft board, and said, "I quit". They said, "OK, in a few days you will get a postcard in the mail". Those few days came, and I showed the card to my Dad. He said, "Well, we'll take care of this!" I said "I asked them to." He said, "Oh, if that's the way it is, I gues there's nothing to be done about it". And a little while later, I was told to come to Rockville, to get on a bus there to take us to Hartford to be entered into the armed forces.
More details later. Time to quit.
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