I have only vague memories of Pearl Harbor Day. I most certainly knew what was happening. We were listening to the radio on December 7, 1941. I seem to remember my mother and I hearing the news while Daddy was out doing the farm chores. We went out in the yard and broke the news to him. At six years old, I could not begin to comprehend what had just happened, but I would soon come to realize how drastically our lives would change.
I also recall an incident a couple of years before that. We were still at Hico on the Benton Place. We didn’t have electricity, and we didn’t have a radio, but a family down the road had a radio, and one night we went down there to hear the news. I remember the grownups had long faces. They said the news was bad. I didn’t know why it was bad. I’m guessing my folks had just heard Edward R. Murrow reporting on the bombing in London.
Wartime certainly disrupted the lives of families all over the world. The landscape of America completely changed as service men married women from other parts of the country and we became a mobile nation. Of course men had their lives on the line and some of them never came back.
But it affected the life of a schoolboy too. I had only been in school about four months when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. War talk was everywhere you went. At first I didn’t understand much of it, but as I got a little older and learned how to read, the classes received a little paper called “Current Events” which brought the war talk down to a level an elementary school boy could understand.
Life was affected in many ways as the poster indicates. Gasoline, tires, sugar, and meat were all rationed. Even shoes were rationed, and that was tough on a growing boy. I was usually barefooted when I started to school in the fall. I put off wearing shoes that no longer fit as long as I could.
We bought savings stamps and those who could afford them bought war bonds. The savings stamps were placed inside a little booklet and when you saved enough of them you could trade them in for a bond. I don’t ever remember getting enough to trade for a bond.
We were encouraged to bring scrap iron to school. It would eventually be turned into weapons and ammunition. I can recall a mountain of junk metal rising above the playground. As kids will do we played on it. If that were to happen today, OSHA would have fit, but neither the adults nor we thought anything about it. I never got in trouble for playing on the scrap heap.
Patriotism was the order of the day. I’ve already mentioned our daily singing of “God Bless America.” We also sang the other songs like “America the Beautiful” and “America.” By the end of the second grade, I could sing the national anthem, but there were also some songs that look pretty tasteless in retrospect.
There’s a song in South Pacific in which one of the characters sings, “You have to be carefully taught to love and to hate.” We were taught to hate – to hate everything German and Japanese. Japanese were thought to have an inferior mentality. Nobody tried to explain how these inferior people built the Zero, the fastest fighter plane in the world. We thought Germans were subhuman beasts of some kind. We even sang songs that reinforced our hatred like “You’re a sap Mr. Jap.” Thankfully that one hasn’t lived on. We didn’t question those irrational premises.
Songs about the war were big hits. Three of my favorites were, “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor,” “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer” and “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” Of course there was other music as well. The Rogers and Hammerstein play, Oklahoma came out during the war years and we were all singing, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” That was a cheerful thought in a drab time.
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