Bo S.

World War II

When I share my story one thing I mention is that the beatnik movement that I became a small part of in the sixties grew out of rebellion against the crass materialism of the fifties. That America’s young people fought in WWII and came home ready to declare heaven on earth. No more poverty, sickness, injustice, etc. I feel this is accurate and have always felt that research would bear me out for all the weakness of sweeping generalities. This last weekend, I found a newsletter article written by Suzanne’s Father. Title: The War that Changed My Life written especially for the Tallahassee Democrat in December 1, 1991. I include it here because no writing I have come across better states my feelings about the people who took charge of the world as I was growing up. I was born in 1944, so all this reads very clearly to me. We inherited some of this energy and desire to better the world. And we have found ways to actualize at least some of our biggest and best dreams. - Bo Sewell

by Bill Brueckheimer

Nearly all of us believed World War II was the "good war," as Studs Terkel called it.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the isolationism of 1939, 1940 and 1941 vanished overnight. No one questioned our going to way – in great contrast with the later wars in Korea and particularly Vietnam.

Times were much simpler then, and most of us had traveled very little.

More than half of us were from farms and small town. Most of us were ethnocentric, provincial and prejudiced against people of other colors and cultures. We were likely to turn up our noses at different kinds of food, clothing and customs. For many of us, the war would change all of this.

When I started as a freshman at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., in the fall of 1941, I planned on majoring in accounting and becoming a CPA.

Most of my adult life, in contrast, has been spent teaching geography and social science at the university level. Without question, my experiences in the service changed the direction of my life.

Like most young people in the ear of innocence before Pearl Harbor, I was aware of the war in Europe and Japan’s war against China.

But they seemed remote. All of that ws thousands of miles away and President Roosevelt had promised in his 1940 campaign that no American boys would have to fight. We were not worried about going to war, we were concerned about girls, cars, our favorite football teams, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

On the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, practically the entire membership of our fraternity was sitting in the State Theater of Crawsfordsville, enjoying Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary," starring Mickey Rooney.

Partway into the movie the projector stopped and the lights went on. the manager walked out on the stage, raised his hand to catch our attention and then announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

We talked endlessly about the war, about how quickly we should be able to defeat the Japanese. We viewed our new enemy in stereotypes: the Japanese were copycats and really couldn’t produce high-quality weapons like our planes, tanks and battleships, they produced cheap toys and silk kimonos, not weapons of war; they were short, wore glasses and couldn’t see well enough to be good pilots and soldiers.

Americans were smarter, bigger, stronger. And we had better weapons.

The Japanese would be defeated in months. the German’s were something else, but we had beaten them in World War I and we could do it again in a year or so.

In the summer of 1942, I enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

My childhood sweetheart, Mary Ellen Roe, and I were married on a hectic weekend in November 1942, many months, perhaps years, before we might have married in peacetime.

After basic training at Camp Crowder, Mo., I was sent to cryptography school in Virginia.

In August ‘43, many of us who had been trained that summer went to England on the Mauretania, England’s third-largest liner.

I was assigned space along with 60 to 70 others in a 30-by-30-foot room. At night, two tiers of hammocks were hung from pillars, and we lay next to our nearest roommate’s feet to keep from breathing into each other’s faces.

We embarked at night. On the first day out, the crew held a lifeboat drill. Twenty minutes passed from the time we heard the sirens until the time we reached an outside deck. Several of us decided that if it had been the real thing and we had been torpedoed, we might not have reached a lifeboat. So we staked out space on deck and never left it during the rest of the voyage except to take turns going to the bathroom and to eat. There were something like 10,000 of us on a ship built for perhaps 2,000.

Ultimately reaching London, we joined other Signal Intelligence personnel attached to SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces.

Although I was never exposed to military ground action, never shot at, I did experience 14 months of night time air raids, the V-1 flying bombs and the V-2 rocket missiles.

On the ground during the heavier raids we could turn in any direction to see the sky lit up by fires around 360 degrees of the compass.

I do not remember being frightened that I might die. It had nothing to do with being brave or heroic. We were young and, like young people in general, we felt immortal. These terrible things were not going to kill us – other people, perhaps, but not us.

We knew people were dying and being injured. In fact, we helped dig some victims out of the rubble on more than one occasion.

But there was something exciting about the vast scene we were watching. I was the Fourth of July on an unbelievable scale.

At SHAEF, I was thrown in with a bunch of articulate academic types. They opened a whole new world to me at the young age of 22. I had grown up in Gary, Ind., and worked for two years in a steel mill before going away to college on money I had saved. these people attended concerts, ballet, opera and theater, visited museums and art galleries, played chess and read.

My co-workers discussed social problems, politics and speculated about the nature of the postwar world and the need for world government.

I found is all exciting.

After Paris was liberated in 1944, we moved our headquarters there.

Culturally, I discovered another new world.

Paris was marvelous with the great museums, the Paris Opera House, bistros, restaurants and nightclubs of Montmartre. I took both French and fencing and thought seriously of attending the Sorbonne after the war.

Intellectually, I became convinced that the world could be changed, that war, depression, poverty and hunger were manmade and did not have to be the norm.

One of my friends, historian from Seattle, had a particularly telling effect on my. We talked endlessly about the mistakes of the past that led to World War II, the causes of the Great Depression the burning of grain and spilling of milk in a time of hunger, and the failures of the League of Nations and the Unites States. He and others recommended books that I checked out of libraries in London and the American Library in Paris. I have had a love affair with books ever since.

Starting over

It wasn’t until January 1946 that I finally made it back to the states.

I applied to and was accepted by several colleges. I chose the University of Chicago and began my studies in June 1946, almost four years to the day since I had left Wabash College, four years away from my wife, family and friends.

Accounting no longer held any attraction for me. My wartime experiences and travel made me want to learn more about people, their cultures and problems.

During my time in the service, my mother passed away and my stepfather remarried and moved into another home. My younger brother graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army. Several of my childhood friends died in the war, including three from our neighborhood block.

These losses, I believe, developed a need in me to cherish friends and encourage togetherness in my own family. When our kids were growing up, whenever possible, we ate our meals as a family, spent our weekends together in work and play, and took vacations together.

Although our three children all have their own homes now, my wife and I endeavor to get our children and grandchildren together for birthdays, holidays, football games and other occasions. Old-fashioned, perhaps, but I believe it has made for a close family over the years.

Some 50 years after World War II came crashing through America’s front door, out country, our people and I have changed in ways we do not completely understand.

The allies had worked together in war and we believed the new United Nations could be made to work in peace. America would lead the way this time and not sit on the sidelines in an isolationist stupor.

I wanted to be a part of the action, to learn and teach about the world, to be a part of the great crusade to solve the problems of man.

I was very naive, I suppose, in thinking that education, American know-how and technology would in time solve or at least alleviate materially ours and the worlds major problems.

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