Remembering life during WWII

For the last three days, I’ve been reliving my life in the breadth and sweep of Ken Burns’ 15-part TV reincarnation of World War II and the intimate stories of the people, at home and abroad, who fought it.

This may well be more than most Americans who weren’t there want to know, especially as it is being offered back-to-back daily for a week in two-and-a-half-hour gulps.

But I intend to wallow in the memories it brings to the surface, memories whose edges have been softened by time and repeated telling to glassy-eyed listeners.

It’s the bits and pieces Burns assembles to punctuate his big pictures that light those memories that are packed away in the closets of my mind.

Like, for example, the horses in Missouri.

A batch of 1903 rifles being used in an infantry company was held up by Burns as an example of how ill-equipped we were for fighting a war against two highly trained modern war machines in 1942. And that carried me quickly to a medieval military exercise that partnered me with horses in a union of immediate mutual dislike.

I was then a junior at the University of Missouri, a land-grant college where military training was required of students.

Our unit was horse-drawn field artillery, right out of the Civil War.

Dragging these antiquated pieces around Missouri back roads on training missions and picturing them going against German tanks was absurd enough in peace time, but the prospect of fighting a real war with this equipment was a major factor that sent me running to enlist in the Navy Air Corps.

Along with the remarkable unity of the country in building our own war machine, probably no impression more permeated the three episodes I’ve seen of “The War” than the youthfulness of our soldiers and sailors and pilots.

The military pool of 50 million draftees was heavily loaded with kids right out of high school who weren’t allowed to drink or vote. Just to get shot at or blown up. And unlike the wars that would follow, fathers with clout weren’t keeping their kids out of the military, nor was status in society.

So recruiters had no trouble finding prospects. There were long lines daily waiting to enlist. And all this enlistment fervor was only partly about patriotism.

This war was a crusade in which we were very clearly the good guys, wearing the white hats. We were young and we wanted a piece of the action. Many months would pass before the realities of war hit us.

If you ever want a deeper, longer look at what it was like for middle-class white kids, during World War II, read “The Last Convertible” by Anton Myrer.

Black kids were another matter. The civil rights movement hadn’t happened yet.

There’s an interview with a black veteran in Mobile, Ala., who remembered wistfully that when African-Americans were allowed to fight, they fought exceedingly well, even when they didn’t kid themselves about risking their lives to defend and preserve freedoms they didn’t have. And the considerable contribution of Latinos was almost an afterthought to Burns, a section that was added after the film was finished.

I was 20 when I enlisted during my Christmas vacation from college in 1941.

We were already at war; yet, in a supreme irony, I was required to get my father’s approval before the Navy would accept me.

I had to talk him into it; he wanted me to finish my school year first. I had just hit 22 when I got my Navy wings. That made me two years older than a cadet named George Bush who graduated two weeks behind me.

And I was 22 when I was married to my high school sweetheart in a chapel on a Navy base in Corpus Christi, just like those old Warner Bros. movies. We were given 30 minutes for the service before the next wedding moved in.

Burns deals at length with the first American disaster after Pearl Harbor, the defeat of Douglas MacArthur’s army in the Philippines, the surrender of 78,000 American troops and the subsequent Bataan Death March, six days and nights in which thousands of American soldiers died, many of them brutally killed after the Japanese general in charge promised civilized treatment with the assurance that “we are not barbarians.”

Three years later, the surviving death march prisoners were freed by our returning troops. I was piloting a Navy transport then and carried the first group of these emaciated men on the last leg of their journey home.

We arrived with excess fuel so we brought them into the pilot’s cabin for a look at San Francisco before we landed. They performed this exercise in total silence.

There was no exhilaration or demonstration of joy, and I wondered if the damage of those three awful years could ever be healed. I still do.

I was very lucky in this war, even though I didn’t see it that way at the time. I was young enough and sure enough of my own immortality to rail over a change of orders from the dive bombers I was trained to fly to four-engine transport planes — we called them trucks — carrying wounded out of combat areas.

That change in orders quite possibly saved my life. A few months ago, I spent a week with a close friend whose luck was mixed with grief. As a Marine infantry captain, he led assaults on Bougainville and Guam — and survived.

But the memory of close friends who died at his side are still difficult for him to bring up.

So each one of us has his own stories to tell.

One of the veterans interviewed in the third episode pulled it all together succinctly. He said: “We lived life fast forward.” And so we did.