Veteran’s Day – Never Forget.

Tags

American history, Arlington National Cemetery, Armistice Day, FDR, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, General John J. Pershing, Veterans' Day, World War I, World War II, WWI, WWII

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

The Veteran’s Day we celebrate now was originally known as Armistice Day until 1954. The purpose of the holiday was to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918. Presidents often participate in ceremonies on November 11th at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, now the Tomb of the Unknowns, at Arlington National Cemetery, which is located across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. President Roosevelt attended Armistice Day events at Arlington every November during his tenure in office. Presented here are photos from four of those years from the Harris and Ewing Photograph Collection held by the Library of Congress.
1936

In 1936, General John J. Pershing joined FDR in paying tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Now Tomb of the Unknowns). As his schedule notes, the President “motored” out to Arlington at 10:45 AM for the 11:00 event.  General Pershing had served as commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I.
Secretary of War Harry Woodring provided remarks, and Pershing placed a white chrysanthemum wreath on the President’s and the American people’s behalf at the foot of the tomb. A solemn crowd then heard a bugler play taps. The President returned to the White House at 11:45.

1937

In 1937, the President was accompanied by his mother to ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.

1938

In 1938, Roosevelt arrived at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of World War I. He was accompanied by his military aides Captain Daniel Callaghan and Colonel Edwin “Pa” Watson.
Earlier that year, he’d signed a bill making Armistice Day a national legal holiday. The future Cuban dictator, who largely exercised control over Cuba at the time, Fulgencio Batista, also attended the ceremonies. Over twenty years later, he’d be overthrown by a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro.

More important than any other guests, even the President, were World War I service members and war mothers. One such veteran was Alex Stern, who lost his leg at the battle of Meuse-Argonne. Nearby, Mrs. Rosa M. Cawood, a war mother, takes a photo of President Roosevelt during the ceremony.

1939

Armistice Day events at Arlington in 1939 were again a somber occasion to mark the sacrifices made by so many Americans, as well as their Allied counterparts, during World War I. That year’s ceremonies were held in the dark shadow of the new European war, which would ultimately become World War II. Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, son of inventor Thomas Edison, delivered remarks.

Source: National Archives/Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

The Magic Carpet That Brought Everybody Home – WWII

Tags

Operation Magic Carpet, Veterans' Tales, WWII

Veterans’ Tales by Vassar Bushmills

(Courtesy of our Vietnam War combat vet, Mike Collins, this is how my Dad got home in ’45.)

The U.S. military experienced an unimaginable increase during World War II. In 1939, there were 334,000 servicemen, not counting the  Coast Guard. In 1945, there were over 12 million, including the Coast Guard. At the end of the war, over 8 million of these men and women
were scattered overseas in Europe, the Pacific and Asia.

Shipping them out wasn’t a particular problem but getting them home was a massive logistical headache. The problem didn’t come as a surprise, as Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had already established committees to address the issue in 1943.

Soldiers returning home on the USS General Harry Taylor in August 1945 (Wikimedia Commons)

When Germany fell in May 1945, the U.S. Navy was still busy fighting in the Pacific and couldn’t assist. The job of transporting 3 million men home fell to the Army and the Merchant Marine. 300 Victory and Liberty cargo ships were converted to troop transports for the task. During the war, 148,000 troops crossed the Atlantic west to east each month; the rush home ramped this up to 435,000 a month over 14 months.

Hammocks in hangar of USS Intrepid (CV-11) during Magic Carpet c1945 (Wikimedia Commons)

In October 1945, with the war in Asia also over, the Navy started chipping in, converting all available vessels to transport duty. On smaller ships like destroyers, capable of carrying perhaps 300 men, soldiers were told to hang their hammocks in whatever nook and cranny they could find. Carriers were particularly useful, as their large open hangar decks could house 3,000 or more troops in relative comfort, with bunks, sometimes in stacks of five welded or bolted in place.

Bunks aboard the Army transport SS Pennant (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Navy wasn’t picky, though: cruisers, battleships, hospital ships, even LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) were packed full of men yearning for home. Two British ocean liners under American control, the RMS Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, had already served as troop transports before and continued to do so during the operation, each capable of carrying up to 15,000 people at a time, though their normal,  peacetime capacity was less than 2,200. Twenty-nine ships were dedicated to transporting war brides: women married to American soldiers during the war[…]

Continue Reading

SOS on Toast

Tags

SOS, Veterans, WWII

Veterans’ Tales by Vassar

The other morning one of our local radio personalities was pitching a fancy restaurant in the Richmond area, and he proudly announced that their most popular entre was chipped beef on toast. A ten dollar platter these days, and whudda thunk it? People paying ten dollars for the most plebeian dish in America, the breakfast anchor for five wars at least for every grunt who ever sat in a mess hall, since Pearl Harbor.

All those memories came rushing forward. I tried to remember how many of those meals I even had to pay for and certainly never more than a dollar.

Chipped beef on toast was always a part of my life.  yet I never really gave it much thought.

It all came back to me.

My mother wasn’t the best cook, bless her soul, and my dad muttered little digs about it all the years I lived at home. He carried a small squeeze bottle of ketchup in his coat pocket for emergencies; brussels sprouts, collard greens, broccoli, they almost always got a dollop. Even eggs; scrambled or sunny side up. “Anything to cut the taste.”

We didn’t have breakfast with dad during the week. He was already gone when we got up. But on weekends we got a fine breakfast of eggs and chipped beef on toast, for the one thing my mother was a master of making was sausage gravy. She would toast up four slices of white bread in the oven…then bring over two slices at a time, cradled in her apron, and then brings the skillet over and ladle out that gravy. Why she did it that way I never understood.

She always kept a jar of Armour’s Beef in the cupboard, For 18 years I saw that there but never made the connection.

Every once in awhile, while traveling, dad would spot it on the menu in a small town down US 25, in North Carolina and order a plateful, plus a side of grits.

Then sometime in the 60s, dad took my younger bothers and I to a VFW function at their hall when I was home from college. They had a mess line and were serving up chipped beef on toast. I hadn’t had any for about five years, and since he’d moved up in management in the coal mines, I assume dad’s regular taste for it had diminished as well[…]

Continue Reading

 

 

Gai-jin (ガイジン) Redux

Tags

caricatures, Elitism and Class, Hideki Tōjō, Identity Politics, Mark Knight, Naomi Osaka, race and culture, Serena Williams, sports, The Herald Sun – Melbourne Australia, Tōjōcaricatures, U S Open 2018, U S Open Tennis, U S war propaganda, victimhood, War propaganda, World War II, WWII

Grumpy Opinions by Vassar Bushmills

Gaijin, pronounced “guy-jin” is a Japanese word meaning “foreigner”.

But it is much more than that.

I lived in Japan 1972-1975 as an Army officer. And I had studied Japanese for four semesters in college to satisfy my language requirements. A solid C-student, I came away with the speaking and reading ability of a Japanese second grader. But I had a good ear for spoken Japanese.

My secretary there, Mrs Minami, who I’ve written about at VeteransTales.org, was an American-born Japanese who had spent WWII in an internment camp out west. She was a GS-grade secretary, and my anchor as to Japanese ways. We were good friends and exchanged letters into the 90s, long after I left the Army.

Mrs Minami schooled me about manners in speaking with Japanese, as there were three ways to speak to a person, depending on their rank; someone beneath you, someone your equal, and someone above you. I was eager to learn this, for if I spoke in the honorific to a Japanese man, he would think I was not a mere “gaijin”, which, as every secretary who tried to talk to John Kerry knows, goes nowhere..

Mrs Minami warned me about that word “gaijin” as well as two other terms I had learned in college that were not acceptable in Japan any longer; “Kon-koku-jin” and “Kai-koku-jin”, which were names Japanese had used for Koreans and Chinese during their occupation during World War II. “Never call a Korean, of which there many in Japan, Konkokujin, for it is a great insult” she warned.

The other word she advised me against was “gai-jin”, which, as Google will tell you means “foreigner.” Only it means so much more.  It really meant “dirty, filthy foreigner”. She said “gaijin” was similar to what white Americans once called Negros while she was a girl in Wyoming. You know, the N-word, only color had nothing to do with it. It meant every foreigner.

And the Japanese government had carried on a national campaign against its use since the 1950s. It was never used in respectable company, but still, you heard it muttered on the streets, usually by lower classes, and usually because they thought the foreigners wouldn’t understand them. I heard it many times, mostly in bars, crowded restaurants and crowded trains during rush hour.

I even had the chance to throw it back at them once, while on a beach in Hawaii.

It was also the first thing I thought of when I watched the closing ceremony of the US Open tennis championship on Saturday.

Naomi Osaka became the first Japanese national to win a tennis Grand Slam title. Ever.

And she defeated Serena Williams, who was in search of her 24th Grand Slam title, trying for the second time in a row to tie the all-time record. She was denied at Wimbledon in July, and now again at Forrest Hills.

She did not comport herself well.

Nor did the tourney spokespeople who made no bones about the fact that Naomi Osaka should not have been the champion in the first place.

Serena has a history of this kind of behavior (you can look it up) and will have to deal with her demons, but perhaps karma has other plans. And perhaps the PC police inside US Tennis may even take a lesson in hiding their boorishness and bias, as if they were a Harvard Admissions Committee.

Derivative. Orig. photo by Pixabay.

Perspective

It is at this point that I blocked out the chatter surrounding the dust up(s) between Serena Williams and U. S. Tennis umpire, Carlos Ramos. I needed to gain my own perspective and so I reviewed the matches and incidents leading up to the explosion last weekend:

• We must thank Serena Williams for giving credence, albeit unintentionally to the myth of the “ugly American.”  Williams has earned the title “Gaijin” hands down.

• The U. S. Open Committee or whatever they call themselves are deserving as well of the title of “ugly American.” Clearly, they had not prepared a Plan B presentation in the event Serena Williams lost, which she did. Naomi Osaka deserved better[…]

Continue Reading

Co-authored by Vassar Bushmills and PUMABydesign001.

A few words on my dad, a WWII vet now deceased

Tags

New Guinea, WWII

Lady Impact Ohio shares a memory of an event as re-told by her father (may be rest in peace) who was stationed at the time in New Guinea.  Excerpt below:

Veterans’ Tales by LadyImpactOhio

I always loved sitting on my dad’s lap and hearing him tell me stories of his war days. He spent three years in the Pacific theater during WWII. He was a staff sargeant, and a radio man in the Army Air Corps (there was no Air Force yet). Dad’s best story was how he tried to get out of flying because he had motion sickness and was always barfing and having to carry sacks around with him. And also he hated parachuting and his superiors always had to push him out of the plane[…]

Continue Reading

Please subscribe to Veterans’ Tales and if you can, a donation would be very much appreciated.  Thank you.

Veterans’ Tales is now Alive

Tags

forum, military vets, MILITARY VOICES, Operation Enduring Freedom, operation inherent resolve, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Persian Gulf War, U S Military, Veterans, Veterans' Tales, Vietnam War, WWI, WWII

Editor’s Note:  In follow up to Vassar Bushmills post earlier this month entitled, ANNOUNCING: Veterans’ Tales, a website for Veteran’s by Veterans, please note that Veterans’ Tales is now live as of this morning.  Below is your invitation. Feel free to stop on by and spread the word.

 

******************************

 

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Ok, now come kick the tires at VeteransTales.org.

We invite every veteran and child of a veteran to come visit and rummage through old letters and stored emails and photos and bring us some of the stories you recall from your tours, daddy or granddaddy’s, or from all those mothers, wives and sweethearts “who also served” by watching and waiting.

This will not be a political blog, but one cannot help but notice from recent events that the principal way in which the “love America” part of our culture is passed these days is through our connection to the military. It may be the only place left in America where the values of America are passed on institutionally.

Families of veterans are vastly outnumbered by the machine-like size of an education system hell-bent on destroying our ability to pass on naturally, from parent-to-child, to grandchildren, just what it means to be an American. So we will speak a lot about the “Passing On” aspect of that long line of military men and women in our histories, at Veterans Tales.

It’s one of several “Themes” Nessa and I are discussing, to create special sections at the site.

Another “theme” -, see just below Allen’s art of a Doughboy writing home from a bunker in France, you’ll see his BEER TENT, which is another, a place where vets can tell more ribald stories, as well as melancholy ones. Many beer tents end up being confessionals.

Continue Reading