World War II and Memory

Abstract

Trained as a combat infantryman during the last months of World War II, I came closest to actual combat in a confrontation between black and white American troops in occupied Germany. Like many others in many countries, I was a child when World War II began and was an infantry private when it ended. I can remember taking a box of leftover toy soldiers to school and constructing a model to dramatize the fall of Wake Island. It all seemed very remote, like the movie heroes of the 1930s, as I first cheered the Finns for clobbering the Russians and then enthusiastically moved Soviet flags westward on my bedroom wall map, as Marshal Semen Timoshenko pushed the Nazis away from Stalingrad. Fortunately, in a moment of teenage rebellion, I decided at the last moment not to quit high school and enlist in the marines even though I traveled in a moment of rage to the marine recruiting office-as I recall, in December 1943, not an auspicious moment to plunge into combat. But during the last phase of the Battle of Okinawa, I found myself in Georgia, learning how to fire mortars and flamethrowers and disarm booby traps as we captured mock Japanese villages, replicas of the ones many of us would be dying in, we were officially told, in the fall invasion of 1945. Army films made it graphically clear that the Japanese had been willing to sacrifice one hundred thousand men to defend Iwo Jima. They would fight even harder for every inch of their homeland. We wept no tears when, on maneuvers with live ammunition, one of our sergeants caught the news on his radio of the bombing of Hiroshima. But because I had studied some physics and knew about the theoretical possibility of atomic fission, I remember being thunderstruck by the significance of nuclear weapons. I felt sure that the bomb had rendered war obsolete. As it turned out, I soon sailed east instead of west and found myself in occupied Germany, a lone, callow replacement among hardened and often drunken combat veterans who longed only to get home. Because in high school I had learned a smattering of German, I soon became an interpreter in the Security Police (SPs) of the First Armored Division (unlike the Military Police or MPs, who had jurisdiction over members of the United States armed forces, the SPs were charged with keeping order and enforcing military law among the civilian population and even foreign troops within the American zone of occupation). Actually, becoming a Security Policeman was the way I escaped a week of punishment for shooting at rabbits when I was supposed to be guarding an abandoned air strip and became terribly bored.