Watching Ken Burns's - The War

I graduated from high school in Bethel, CT in 1940, and all the able-bodied boys I knew in school joined a military service or were drafted after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Events in life caused my family to go in different directions, so Bethel was no longer ‘home’ to me. I lost contact with my school days friends, and I never found out just how many of the boys I knew were killed. I was living here in California in 2000 when I almost got to go to the fiftieth reunion of my high school class. My husband died at just that time and I had to cancel.

Through the years I have learned the fates of a few of my classmates. Carmen Dolan, the son of a local businessman, was a tall, handsome boy all the girls hoped would notice them. He was killed when his submarine was sunk.

My classmate, Bobby Roach, was killed very early in the war. I don’t know what service he was in or how he died. He used to go horseback riding with me when he visited his grandparents on the next farm.

Parmalee Brown and his younger brother Arthur were two boys who spent summers near our farm. They were from New York City, and their father, Chapin Brown, was the first building manager of the Empire State Building bought the small farm across the road from us as a summer home. Parmalee was a tall, fair young man that I remember always seemed to have a quizzical smile on his face. He had been seriously ill as a child and it left him ‘slow’, not mentally impaired, but everything took him longer. He had just graduated from  college when he was drafted. He was killed at Anzio. Last night I saw, and finally understood, what horrors happened at Anzio. Parmalee’s death devastated his parents who had nursed him through such a sickly childhood. Their younger son, Arthur, served as an Army captain and survived the war. I think he married a girl he had met when he went to college at Duke University. They were living in North Carolina the last I knew.

When I first heard about the fate of those boys, it felt like a stone had come to rest in my heart. What a waste! They were all so smart and had such promising futures. I guess that is true of most of the casualties of war.

Last night I watched the third part of The War that showed D-Day as part of the episode. Much to my surprise they interviewed a man from Bethel. He was Joe Vahgi, the brother of a girl who was in my class. He was a beach master at Omaha Beach and lived to tell about it. He looks like a good-natured man much younger than his 80-something years. I sat here in my recliner smiling back at his image on the screen. I think it was his sister Marie Vahgi who sent me pictures of the 50^th class reunion that I couldn’t attend in 2000. She married Tom Clarkson, another class member, and they had a very successful and happy life. Tom was in service too, and survived to run a business and play a lot of golf. They have both passed on since 2000.

World War II lasted less than five years for us here in the United States, yet in that time we went from a peace-loving country with a small military complement, to a determined force to be reckoned with. Within months after the time we entered the war, our factories had converted to war manufacturing, and we supplied not only our own military needs, but those of England and Russia too. We also provided the merchant ships to transport supplies to the war zones.

Meanwhile our military forces had grown, through voluntary enlistments and the draft, to fill the ranks of our military units with enough men to fight in both the European and Pacific theaters of war. This country, with the cooperation of all it people, performed miracles! We had the will to do it. We knew it was a war we had to win or perish as a free country.

Last night on Jim Leher’s program I heard a general giving the reasons the Army can’t supply a much safer vehicle than the Humvee to our troops in Iraq. He said we don’t have facilities to make them, and can only manufacture less than 20 vehicles a month. Maybe not only our pet food and toys are being made in China, but our military supplies too. That could be a fatal situation in a real war not of our choosing, but forced upon us.

This country does a lot of swaggering and bragging about how we are the greatest country in the world, but I’m thinking we had better stop living on our laurels and take an assessment of our place in the real world today. I am afraid we are letting slip away the great gifts the civilian warriors of World War II secured for us at such a high price.