The Greatest Generation
I wrote a post today on my links blog about German POW camps in the US during World War Two. My paternal grandmother, who worked on Ft. Bragg, the large Army base in southeastern North Carolina, during the war, told me stories of trading with the Germans prisoners for the chocolate they received in their Red Cross packages. Chocolate was hard to come by on the local economy with rationing in full force, so the civilians working on post would trade cigarettes through the wire with the German POWs while the guards looked the other way. Most of the prisoners were members of Germany's Afrika Korps, the troops Hitler sent to do battle in North Africa under Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox for his early success before being defeated by a combined Allied Force led by General Dwight Eisenhower and British Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery.
My grandmother talked often and at length of her experiences during World War Two, about the music, the men from all over the country who passed through, and the different opportunities women had during that time. She was raised on a farm in Hoke County, NC and lived a good part of her life within a mile of it. Prior to the war her life was devoted to taking care of her six brothers, cooking prodigious meals for them and the appetites they got plowing with mules. The tremendous growth caused by the manpower needs of the country led her to what she called a "public job", one away from the farm. The authorities sent buses into the rural areas to pick up workers for Ft. Bragg. For the first time in her life, she had money of her own and independence. All of her brothers who were old enough left to fight. One brother, Gratton, never came home. He was killed fighting fascists in Italy and posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry.
My grandfather, also the child of a farmer lived a typical depression era life. When there wasn't enough work on the farm for him and his brothers, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and worked in camps in the North Carolina Mountains. When he returned home, he joined the local National Guard Company to earn an extra few dollars. Unexpectedly, his unit was federalized two years prior to Pearl Harbor and sent to Trinidad to guard the harbor there. When the fighting actually started, the unit was returned to the US and reorganized. In a six-month time period, he rose in rank from corporal to fist sergeant, the rank he held throughout the war. He eventually landed in France and made his way across Europe, meeting the Russian Army at the Elbe River at the end of hostilities in Germany. He wasn't sent home though. Declared "vital to the Army's needs" he was slated to be transferred to the Pacific theater for the planned invasion of Japan until the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the country's surrender and the true end of World War 2.
Because the men he served with had all been from the same community, he spent the rest of his life in their company. I grew up listening to them talk about their experiences during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 and about the Ruhr pocket, a large concentration of German soldiers posing one of the last obstacles to total victory in Europe.
I count myself fortunate to be related to such people. They are the classic examples of the men and women who rose to the occasion during the 1940s to do their part in the defeat of the Nazis and fascists. After the war they lived absolutely normal lives, farming for a while and then turning to industry and homemaking. They revered President Roosevelt and even took my siblings and I to the place of his death in Warm Springs, Georgia on a kind of pilgrimage during the 70s. My grandfather's World War 2 service accomplishments are engraved on his tombstone. My grandmother lies there next to him just as she did in life, and I will be forever proud of them both.
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