1941: THE WORLD WAR II YEAR OF INFAMY

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



Like nothing had done to that point, Nazi Germany’s occupation of Paris on June 18, 1940 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) nomination to an unprecedented third term as President of the United States the following month, alerted the American people to the threats to their nation posed by Europe’s Second World War. While during his first two terms as president, FDR had used his pulpit to educate the public about those perils, sentiment consistently weighed heavily toward non-intervention in the war. The summer of 1940 saw a shifting in the attitude, one toward building up the nation’s defenses, which resulted in an eventual outpouring of material aid from America to the Allied countries, shoring up America’s military forces, and instituting the nation’s first peacetime draft in its history.

Having gone into effect in September, the Selective Service Act of 1940 placed all men between the ages of 21 and 35 eligible for one year of military service. Marlin Landon “Bob” Gaffin, having turned 21 on January 20, 1941, and the president’s swearing into office for his third term on the same day, the lives of both men thereafter are to be defined primarily by their involvement in World War II.

            Following his nomination for his third term, FDR explained his motivation for defying the country’s traditional policy of two-term presidencies. He stated that he had suffered many sleepless nights over his own right to refuse the call to duty when the young men and women of his country were facing the call to serve. He said, “Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction…These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger. In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for service in those capacities for which they may be fitted. Those, my friends, are the reasons why I had to admit to myself, and now to state to you, that my conscience will not let me turn my back upon a call to service.”^[1] 

            The summer of 1941 also saw the opportunity of a new kind of personal life for Bob embodied in the alluring Dorothy Boldman of Cedar Fork, Ohio, a particular private life, like the president’s, that by year’s end will be held delicately in the balance while America’s foreign affairs unfold. Meanwhile, Bob ventures no more than thirty miles southwest of the farm of his parents in search of employment that he is confident will set the pattern for the home-life for which he hopes with Dorothy. In an illustration of Bob’s plucky nature, Bob writes to his mother from Blanchester, Ohio where he has found a job: …We sure had a time coming up here. We done all right till we got on the other side of Fayetteville. We had tire trouble and didn’t get here until 9:30. I went to work Monday morning…When I went to work the boss asked me if I could drive a truck and I said sure I could. He asked me if I could handle the tractors and I said I could, so I went to work. Ha – Ha. Well a fellow has to tell a few [lies] once in a while. But I operated them like an old hand and kind of fooled them. Ha. They just seemed to come natural to me or something…

While the tone and content of the letters exchanged among Bob and his correspondents during these months are amazingly devoid of any allusion to, or speculation about, the war, especially in view of the fact of the institution of the draft, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, in her journal, which later is published in book-form, portrays a picture of civic-minded and politically-savvy individuals whose thoughts and daily lives are deeply influenced by the government’s stance on the war. At that juncture, she states in her journal the greatest issue of speculation was whether or not Washington DC would go one step further and finally grant Great Britain’s request that American ships convoy, or in effect, act as full-metal and armed shields to British supply ships crisscrossing the Atlantic. She writes of the high tension in Washington, a state of affairs she speculates cannot go on. At the same time, she sympathizes with Roosevelt’s dilemma regarding establishing a convoy system, a predicament based on the fact that doing so will require transferring ships from the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic. Such a move would render America’s presence in the Pacific so thin that the president fears it will encourage the Japanese to ever greater expansion into the Pacific. But by mid-August, FDR seems to waver in his position, and in a secret meeting off the coast of Newfoundland with Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, the British leader comes away from the meeting convinced that FDR has agreed to America’s convoying of British ships as far as Iceland.

            But still the president is disinclined to step up his nation’s presence in the European war to such a degree. With Germany’s breaking of its non-aggression treaty with Russia and its placement of troops on the Russian border, FDR is often of the opinion that he should just sit back and let Russia handle Germany – or better still, let the two repressive dictator-nations wipe each other out. In his characteristic manner, the president adopts a stance of “wait and see.” 



Bob Gaffin spends his workdays in Blanchester and heads home for the weekends where he cuddles with Dorothy on the front porch of her parent’s Peebles, Ohio country home nestled peacefully beneath a pitch black sky alight with stars. In New York City, top-drawer matrons such as Anne Morrow Lindbergh in mink coats, Made-in-Paris chapeaus, and Estee Lauder’s “V” for “Victory” lipstick read Vogue’s latest issue sporting models in military garb in front of “Bundles for Britain,” while fuzzy-cheeked American military recruits pack the subway trains to take in the sights. All the while, spanking new Made-in-America airplanes buzz a sky streaked with searchlights.  

            Bob’s desire to marry Dorothy in the near future is dashed on November 18^th when a letter arrives, one informing him that he has been drafted into the Army. A letter of a few days later tells him to report to the Reception Center at Fort Thomas, Kentucky.



Ft. Thomas, Ky. Dec, 4, 1941…Dear Mother: Will write you this evening to let you know I am O K and hope everyone are well. Well, I’m in the army now (as the slogan goes) and its not so bad so far. Of course we haven’t had any actual training yet. I sure hated to leave civilian life, but we can’t help it…Your loving son, Bob



As tensions mount dangerously in the Atlantic theater of the war, the Japanese continue to aggress against their neighbors in the Pacific, and like the Nazis, have set against the land and resource-rich territories beyond the borders of their own land. Their resolve strengthened by the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan, a pledge in support of one another if attacked by any outside enemy, the three aggressors strike, conquer, and plunder their ways across their particular hemispheres, to this point, almost none the worse for wear, and nearly with impunity.

            Roosevelt retaliates by placing an embargo against Japan: no more exportation to Japan of aviation fuel and highest grade steel and scrap iron. Japan responds by seizing oil-rich Indochina. The Roosevelt administration hits back by freezing all of Japan’s assets in the United States and cutting off all exports of oil to the country. Intended to halt the advance of the Japanese, the embargo ricochets and Japan counters with a threat to move in on the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies and other East Asian regions rich in natural resources. Several back and forth negotiations between the two countries failing, Japan and the United States are approaching a collision of epic proportions.

              Lulled to complacency by the promises of their president to keep their boys out of foreign conflicts, the American people conduct their daily business and personal lives as usual, unaware that warfare on a level never before seen was lying in wait for them.

In his address to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”^[2] In the Fireside Chat on the radio where he talked to the nation about the Declaration of War with Japan, in part he said:

MY FELLOW AMERICANS:

The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality. 

Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. The Japanese have treacherously violated a long-standing peace with us. Many American soldiers and sailors have been killed by enemy action. American ships have been sunk; American airplanes have been destroyed.

The Congress and the people of the United States have accepted that challenge.

Together with other free peoples, we are now fighting to maintain our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom, in common decency, without fear of assault.^[3]

A letter from his mother to Bob illustrates the shock of the nation at the attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor that hurls the United States into the war: Monday Morning, Dec. 8, 1941…Dear Son. I will try to write some this morning. I was so nervous yesterday I just couldn’t write and not much better this morning…Bobby we heard down at the church last night that war had been declared. It sure does worry me. I just can’t help it. They tell me if I don’t be careful I’ll go crazy. But I don’t know. They surely can’t take you though until they get you trained. Of course I know that I am just one Mother in thousands. We will just have to trust in God. Of course you know that we are praying for you, and that will help you along…



Even as the greatest challenge of both of their lives has been placed before them with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and while Bob with his characteristic curiosity and composure is in the throes of noting the vastness of the differences between the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which he had served as a teenager, and that of the military, FDR is experiencing an odd form of relief. Japan’s strike against the American Fleet in Hawaii, while creating an enormous crisis for the president, at the same time, it lifts from him the solemn mantle of a choice between war and peace for his country, and as noted by his wife, he is serener than he has been in a long time.©



The above is a work of creative non-fiction by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene. Her books are available worldwide on Amazon.



Image: “I WANT YOU” poster.



Recommended Reading: WAR WITHIN AND WITHOUT, DIARIES AND LETTERS 1939 – 1944, Anne Morrow Lindbergh; THE ROOSEVELT PRESENCE, The Life and Legacy of FDR, Patrick J. Maney.

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[1] http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3318

[2] http://www.millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/digitalarchive/speeches/spe_1941_1208_roose…

[3] http://franklincollege.edu/pwp/bgaskins/EDE226/Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt.html

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL©

By Linda Lee Greene

One of my sister Susan’s coffee cups warming my left palm, and the thumb and fingers of my right hand encircling its curved handle, I sat and watched the droplets of rain eddy across the surface of the pool in the lanai of her Florida home. Beginning as tiny rings of rain that rippled out in a series of concentric circles, I was reminded that birth and death and the life in between behave in the same manner. Like the lifespan of every human being, each concentric pattern on the water was a whole, a time-capsule of a tiny aspect of the energy of life.

 

                All through Florida’s December rains in this year of 2018 my darling sister Susan kept to her bed suffering the culmination of more than two years of life-robbing illness. Her earthly future was nearing its end, but like the cores of the eddies in her pool, she was still the nucleus of the enormous circle of life she had created in her sixty-three years. There was evidence of it everywhere—in the home, the garden, the artwork, the crafts, the pet grooming business, in every concerned human and animal voice, and in almost countless other illustrations of her heart and mind and spirit. Having scored so many achievements, one would think that there was no more for her to accomplish. A casual glance would suggest that her circle of life was complete—that a person in her weakened state couldn’t possibly do any more anyhow. But no—there was still one more contribution she had to give to life, and her debility was her instrument.

“To live is to suffer!” Nazi concentration camp survivor and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl examined this reality to great depth in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He advanced further the premise that if there is a purpose in living at all, there must also be a purpose in suffering and in dying. Woven among Susan’s several successes was an equal number of misses, and the hardships of existence she sometimes encountered manifested now and then in defensive behaviors that were unfortunate and/or unproductive. She was no different than most of humanity in that regard. But over the course of her illness, she did attain to an almost immaculate grandeur. As her body deteriorated, her soul grew sweeter, and her spirit blossomed. My sister showed us how a person can rise to the highest level of courage and strength and even of altruism in the acts of suffering and dying. In effect, she showed us how to die a good death.  

Dostoyevsky said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.” My sister’s final deed, that last concentric ring that sealed the circle of her earthly life, was to prove herself worthy of her suffering, a feat that shaped a shining example for all to follow.

Readers and Writers Have Much to Learn from Author William Styron in His Sophie’s Choice

Finding the right title for a book is often the bane of an author’s existence. One highly successful present-day author is so book-title challenged that she runs contests among beta readers to come up with the best titles for her tomes. Author William Styron (1925 - 2006) didn’t have that problem, and of all of the great titles among his published works, the absolute spot-on one is Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979. Apart from the fact that it has found a home in the lexicon as an idiom translated as “faced with a forced decision in which all options have equally negative outcomes,” amazingly, those two little words hold within themselves the entire description of this 626-page novel. This is because contained in every major theme of this masterwork, Sophie is confronted with unbearable choices—she just can’t win, a consequence infecting everyone else around her—and of course, that is the seminal factor of the story. She is doomed, as is her paramour Nathan. An adjunct to the story is Stingo’s unlucky fate, as well—Stingo, the narrator of this story about three people in three separate rooms in a boarding house in post Second World War Brooklyn and the third leg of the ménage a trios around which the novel is constructed—Stingo, the young and naive writer whose life can only be construed as a portrayal of Willian Styron himself; Nathan, the drug-riddled, brilliant and charismatic lover; and Sophie, the beautiful and embattled Polish survivor of the Nazi terror, around whom the plot centers in regard to a tragic decision she was forced to make upon imprisonment at Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the war.

            Stingo’s Sophie’s Choice, to make use of the idiom here, was whether or not to woo Sophie, for whom he suffered an agonizing passion, or to honor his friendship with Nathan. A choice between his unbearable life or release through self-inflicted death was Nathan’s Sophie’s Choice. And Sophie’s options, or lack thereof, were fixed a handful of years before, specifically on the day she came face to face with the fascists' hideous ignominy toward life—her chances ruined by the blight it continued to cast on her life, as on countless others, for incalculable years following the war to defeat Hitler's evil regime.

Despite his unrequited desire to bed Sophie, and his failed attempts at love with every surrogate female who crossed his path, Stingo/Styron did walk away with a good story that found voice in the bestselling Sophie’s Choice, a winner of the US National Book Award for Fiction and the book widely considered his greatest literary achievement. Five years in the writing, the book was, says Styron, “suggested by a mere germ of experience. I had been living in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn one summer just after the war and such a girl lived on the floor above me; she was beautiful, but ravaged. I never got to know her very well, but I was moved by her plight. Then, about five years ago, I awoke one morning with a remembrance of this girl; a vivid dream haunted my mind. I suddenly sensed that I had been given a mandate to abandon the novel I had been at work on and write her story.”

Although deemed a modern masterpiece and a profound meditation on the foremost evil of the Twentieth Century, it is not without controversy, especially among those who consider some topics so heinous as to be unspeakable. A number of his detractors found Styron opportunistic and exploitive in this choice of topic, this one especially judged the third rail of letters. Styron answered his critics thusly: “No event could be so hideous that it would defy a novelist to trespass upon it. It was an episode in history that cried out to be explored, the ultimately challenging subject for a novelist.”

Bringing history to life in fiction can be tricky business. The central dilemmas of the authors of historical fiction are how to avoid coming across as pedantic, as well as how to bypass stiff and dry parroting of statistical information gleaned through research. The best advice I can offer in that regard is to study Styron’s techniques in this book. He couched his deep exploration of the history of the Nazi’s horrendous pursuit of a "Final Solution" in his characters—the actions of his characters revealed the history. He made an untouchable and unutterable story, real and describable by having his characters sweep the floors and vomit all over themselves and pee their pants.      

An additional literary device Styron used successfully, and an effective one often employed by writers, is the suggestion of background music to set a mood or design an ambience, and in this case, to announce Sophie’s presence or absence in her room. Nathan’s phonograph and enviable collection of long-playing classical records, housed in Sophie’s room, were crucial to the story. I last saw this method used in an outstanding book I read in recent months which I will review here in the coming weeks—a novel titled Those Who Save Us, authored by Jenna Blum, another book centered on Second World War Europe. 
         

I would venture a guess that far more people are familiar with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name than with the book. Although an outstanding film, one of the best, do yourself a favor and read Sophie’s Choice. Savor Styron’s intricate weaving of Stingo’s story, which the film downplayed, but which is the driving force of the book, lending it a full compliment of emotions and diversity of experiences that divert to lighter places, here and there, the heavy stream this novel follows. In addition, Styron’s elaborate prose is not to be missed…but keep your dictionary handy. Styron loved his polysyllabic words. Ha Ha!

www.booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com

www.gallery-llgreene.com

Jillian Cantor's Novel--Artful Amendment of The Diary of Anne Frank

Author Jillian Cantor’s Margot, an ambitious “what-if’ story worthy of studying by writers and savoring by readers follows a trend among some contemporary writers of offering a new “take” on a time-honored history/story. Recently, I came upon an internet discussion by a writer who has authored a modern-day love story based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—and my author friends K. R. Hughes and T. L. Burns, in their What She Knew, propose an entirely different version of the tragic death of actress Marilyn Monroe. These are only two examples among many others. The revised history in Margot is that of the esteemed true story The Diary of Anne Frank, the vivid impressions in the form of a diary, of Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl in Amsterdam, Holland, who with her mother, father, and sister Margot, as well as the family of their friend Peter Pelt, were forced into hiding on an upper floor of an office building for two years during the Second World War to evade capture by the Nazi Gestapo. Published in 2013, Cantor’s Margot posits that Anne Frank’s sister Margot Frank (the book’s protagonist) did not go to her death in the Nazi Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen along with her fellow members of the household, all but her father, as reported, and instead, through a series of propitious circumstances, escaped to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, which is the setting of the book.

                The story opens on Friday, April 3, 1959 on the heels of the release of the acclaimed motion picture of the famous diary, a feature film at a movie theater in the Center City, Philadelphia neighborhood where the protagonist lives. Working in a Jewish Law Firm as a legal secretary under an assumed identity of a Gentile named Margie Franklin, Margie/Margot lives a circumscribed life—a near recluse in a studio apartment “…containing only a blue couch, a wooden table with two chairs, a single bed, and the tiniest of kitchens,” a wall to wall area spanned by just ten of her compulsive paces, and shared with her only steady companion, an over-weight tabby named Katze, a tiny parcel of space in which she holes up every evening and weekend to partake of her only indulgence—a study of law books in her quest to become a paralegal, a mission set forth at the suggestion of her employer, attorney Joshua Rosenstein.  

Margie/Margot’s workmate and only friend Shelby does pry her loose from her furled way of life. Now and then, she acquiesces to accompany Shelby to a local establishment for a drink, “…even though I don’t drink alcohol…Last month Shelby dragged me to see Some Like It Hot…I thought the movie was fine, but I did not laugh at the places Shelby did, at Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s antics dressed as women. I still do not fully understand the American sense of humor. Hiding is hiding is hiding. What’s so funny about that?...Shelby wears a short-sleeved cotton blouse and full green skirt today, because it is April and the sun is warm enough to be without a sweater. But I still have my navy sweater on. I wear a sweater always, no matter what the temperature, so the dark ink on my forearm remains hidden, unseen.”

                This particular close-of-workday-Friday, Margie/Margot dodges Shelby’s appeal to accompany her to the movie theater to see the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank, an account “of another time, another place, one which I never wish to go back to in my mind.” She enters her apartment and visits for a while with her cat on the blue couch. “Friday nights, I always light a candle at sundown and say a silent prayer. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam…Words repeat themselves in my brain, even though Margie Franklin, she is a Gentile. My Friday prayer, it is not a religion, it’s ritual.” She fingers her unopened copy of her sister’s diary. “No I haven’t read it. I don’t want to,” she says in her mind to an imaginary query on the part of Shelby. “I put the book back on the shelf, and I reach for the phone on my small kitchen counter. I turn the dial to o…’Operator,’ a woman’s voice says on the other end. I open my mouth to ask for him. Peter Pelt, I want to tell the operator. I need to talk to Peter Pelt.

                And so, the tale begins to be revealed. By way of the author’s clever plot devices—“hiding is hiding is hiding;”…the perpetual sweater to keep “hidden, unseen” the despised tattoo; the hemmed-in habitation; the stereotypical lonely-woman’s cat; all of it works so well toward this theme of concealment. The interplay of various psychological mechanisms—survivor’s guilt; sibling rivalry; self-imposed isolation and estrangement from her father ingrained through habit and fear; low self-worth due to wrecked goals and dreams and a detoured natural life-course; despondency; grief; loss—are handled subtly, but effectively, and on a rather high key. The author somehow avoids a maudlin approach, as the subject-matter would suggest, and builds a “what-if” conclusion much more palatable and humane than the “real” history. This is an interesting read, especially for lovers of historical fiction. It is also a quick and easy study for writers of the plot techniques stated above.