Class News

Classmates remember what parents told them during World War II

May 30, 2022

On this Memorial Day, 80 years after World War II, Tony Lavely, ’64 Class Secretary, asked classmates to tell him what their parents told them during the war years. See below for what they reported. And below that, see an interesting story from the Yale Daily News about Yale during World War II.

Terry Holcombe: Antonio. we are practically brothers. Rationing was instituted on May 4, the day I was born. Like you, I still have the ration book. The result was (and maybe for your family also) that the rest of the living members of the family had an extra ration until I started gobbling my share. Now of course the rare item is baby formula.

Tony Thomson: My parents were poor communicators about anything more global than Ohio politics — WW II was never one of their topics though my mother was a passionate Anglophile and played “There Will Always Be an England” on the phonograph.

One of my first (perhaps false) memories is that during the war my mother showed me her ration book and told me that I got all her pineapple juice since orange juice went to the army — later I realized that fruit juices were not her thing. After the war my father liked talking about his time in Egypt allegedly chasing spies and saying words in what he claimed was Arabic — perhaps if he hadn't gotten amoebic dysentery and been shipped home his vocabulary would have been larger. In the 1940s both my parents had an ill-informed love thing about France and viewed Germans as enemies — when I was sent to Germany by the army I was surprised to find in training areas like Grafenwohr that the young German soldiers were friendly and glad to party with Americans despite the war — the French (still in NATO then) trained with us also but didn't mix easily — we swapped stuff like sleeping bags for their strong rough red wine — that none of us spoke French worth a damn was part of the problem but many of us disliked the French.

Neil Hoffmann: I was born in Chicago where my father was working for Carrier Air Conditioning … I think on war-related engineering projects. I never thought to ask what; might it have been A/C for the Manhattan Project? Cooling Chicago Pile -1? I doubt it. I do remember going to my mother’s home in Pleasant Point Beach, NJ. Blackout curtains and a very scary atmosphere. Kept the lights very low. There were German submarines out there. I remember that Spam was a treat.

Edward Gaffney: My father was at the Naval Training School in Tucson AZ when I was born.

Here is a transcript of a letter from him to my mother in response to a telegram announcing my birth: “Dearest, I’m glad to hear that you came through with your usual efficiency. Congratulations! Received your mother’s wire this noon, after returning from class, and have been receiving congratulations and envious looks ever since. I will be anxious to learn the details and how you are making out. I am sure that will be relieved. Hope you had plenty of time to get to the hospital. I assume you will take care of the announcements, etc. Take it easy now and get plenty of rest.”

John Witherspoon: Tony, thank you for these monumentally informative Class 1964 Notes. My dad was a B-29 pilot in the war. Somewhere l have a picture of him and me — Baby John — watching the loading of bombs headed for Japan. My dad was more about loving and caring. He was a teacher with a Master’s degree before the war, but good at flying.

Pat Caviness: My father, a recent graduate of George Washington Law School, married my mother in 1939 and worked for the Treasury Department in D.C. during the war years from 1940 through 1945. He would almost come to tears each time he talked about watching FDR's funeral procession.

He treasured a photo of the procession and would remain a yellow-dog Democrat until he died. My parents spent many a night in front of their radio (one they were quite proud of) listening to news about the war.

Richard Peck: My parents told me very little about the war. I was tuned into the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, even as a kid.

Butch Hetherington: The only thing I remember from my parents is all about food rationing and the food we had to eat.

Dick duPont: On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy pitched up at Pearl Harbor “to remain in infamy.” Four days later, we declared war on Japan and Germany (two for the price of three). From that day through D-Day on June 6,1944 — and thence to Germany's surrender in May 1945 and to Japan's in September that same year, my Dad kept a little wooden radio near his place at the head of our dinner table. Every night at 7:00pm Drew Pearson came on and Daddy would reach to turn the volume up. He always shot a quick glance in our direction to bring the meeting to order. It was over in about ten minutes, so both my older brothers snapped to and made damned good and sure I did too — despite the fact that I hadn't a clue what it was all about. I’m not certain how old I was when I first joined in.

Dad, Mom, Hal, and Bill are no longer alive to answer that question. But it doesn't really matter. Suffice it to say that by the time hostilities ended I could understand more. I was already four by then.

Some twenty-five years later, on April 7,1971, I flew my last USAF flight as Aircraft Commander — to deliver a C-97 from Wilmington, DE to the "Bone Yard" at Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ. That old piston-powered transport had reached the end of its useful life, so I asked for and received that particular mission to celebrate its transition and mine. The following day I "retired" at the ripe old age of 29. (The C-97 descended directly from the B-29. Both were built by Boeing. I unabashedly plucked the hubcap from the yoke and kept it as a souvenir.)

My father-in-law, Ken Stacy, was not as lucky as my dad. Ken served in the Pacific theatre as a tail gunner on B-24s. He survived that, but, typical of our "Greatest Generation" servicemen, he never offered much comment on the war. Ken came into my life after Daddy died — a year or so before Mom passed. I shall always be grateful to my wife, Stacy, for the best wedding present ever — her parents, Ken and Gert.

I first met her Mom and Dad when I offered them all a ride back from "Provo" in the Turks and Caicos islands. We were in my Cessna 310. That definitely rekindled his days in the B-24s, for not long after, when I became his son-in-law, I was the only family member he felt like favoring with his parsimoniously delivered wartime memories. More often than not, that was usually early in the morning on Tinmouth Pond in Vermont. Ken would aways make breakfast, after which we would take our coffees out to sit together for a chat on the cottage porch. Of course, he always played down any danger, speaking like a schoolboy of the comradery with his crewmates — particularly his 25-year-old Aircraft Commander "Brownie," whom Ken adored. They kept each other alive. You can’t fly a bomber without a pilot, and the pilot can’t fly it without its tail. Ken was the point man, for the enemy fighters tried their best to attack from the rear.

Note: I first became acquainted with the following striking poem when a senior at Taft in Mr. Sullivan’s Advanced English Class. I offer it now, in Ken's absence, for it brings home that part of the experience we all eschew but can never quite extinguish.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Chris Getman: My father was the class of 1938 at Hamilton College, he got a master’s degree in Latin from Columbia, and was a teacher before he enlisted in the Army Air Force. He and my mother, who went to Vassar, were married in December of 1939. I was born in August of 1941 and was an only child. He flew 39 missions out of England as the pilot of a B-24. It was not a very good job to have as B-24s were slow and cumbersome and their mortality rate was high. He was shot down over Belgium on December 11, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, which was a major Allied victory. He is buried in Henri Chapelle cemetery in Luxemberg.

I strongly recommend that people go to the websites of American cemeteries around the world. It’s remarkable how 70+ years after the end of the war the cemeteries are meticulously maintained, mainly by people who were born long after the war ended. Every Memorial Day and Christmas I get a photograph from the family in Belgium who maintain my father’s grave. They have reached out to the families of the ten other crewmen on the plane who died as well. It’s very impressive. Many of us have been to Normandy and are amazed at the beauty and solemnity of the cemetery. Multiply this manyfold to see how American cemeteries around the world are still being maintained. It’s remarkable. I don’t know of any other classmates who lost a father in World War II, but my guess is that there are some.”

Martin Padley: Tony, for some reason I missed your request for Memorial Day emails and thought I'd send you my recollections from WWII. So, it would seem that I am a day late and a dollar short, but am sending it along anyway. Perhaps it is of some interest to you as you've been immersed in gathering all of the stories, and to me as an exercise in recalling my experience of WWII — if not in a front row seat, probably somewhere in the first or second balcony.

I was born in England on June 22, 1941, a day of great celebration, as it was the day that Germany declared war on Russia and provided some hoped-for release from the pressure on the western front.  My father was 50 when I was born, so he wasn't in the armed services, but he was a member of the Royal Observer Corps, which meant that he would go up into the hills behind our house in a seaside village in Devon to watch for enemy aircraft. He had served in WWI. My parents had left London, where they had lived for a dozen or so years, to get away from the bombing.  I can recall the blackout curtains inside our house, slates on the driveway that my father said had been shot off the roof by enemy aircraft fire during the night, and troops marching past on their way to military exercises in the nearby woods. One of my earliest memories is flying down the stairs in terror, after the air-raid siren went off in the middle of the night, to the questionable security of a bomb shelter in our kitchen — a steel framed device with wire sides. A house nearby had been hit, but my parents never talked about it, and it remained shuttered and seemingly unlived in until we left for America.

There is also a memory of tanks rumbling down a street in the village, leaving a trail of thin lines of powder behind them — their heavy steel treads had literally powdered the concrete. I have a feeling that this may have been when the war had ended and that the tanks were in a parade.

Two of my three half-brothers were in the military. My oldest brother, Jack, was a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the middle brother was in the RAF undergoing flight training in Canada when the war ended. The third brother was too young to serve.

When we left England in June of 1946 to come to this country, we boarded a ship in Southampton, where many of the buildings we went past had bullet holes in their walls. And years later, in the 1950s, when we went back to visit my brothers, we would visit London, where in most blocks there were gaping holes where houses or businesses had been bombed out. It was not uncommon in those days to see men with missing arms and legs begging in the streets. Rationing remained in effect well into the 1950s. Austerity Britain.

In the fall of 1946 I was enrolled in kindergarten in Katonah, NY. As surely was the case with virtually every other public school in the country, incredibly loud bells or buzzers would go off to signal that it was time to change classes. The first time I heard those bells go off, I dropped to the floor under my desk without thinking, believing that an air raid was in the works. But I believe that only happened once.

Mo Dean: “I’m amazed that ANY classmate born during the war can remember what their parents told them DURING it. (As you yourself pointed out: ‘Like most children, I don’t recall anything before I was five years old’.) I see, though, that quite a few classmates submitted SOMETHING (and things quite interesting) in response to the question.”

Roger McPeek: Speaking of relatives in WW2: One was a 2nd Lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne and jumped on D-Day. He got a Silver Star but died after 30 days of fighting. My father was with troops liberating a concentration camp, I think Dachau. Another close relative was a bombardier on a B-17 that got shot down. He survived and spent the end of the war in a POW camp.

Tony Lavely: Like most children, I don’t recall anything before I was five years old … so 1947. My father was a Methodist minister, so he didn’t serve in the military. His brother, my uncle, did serve in the 82nd Airborne as an Army paratrooper with many jumps behind German lines. He telegrammed my parents in 1945 to tell them that a close family friend, who had been a babysitter for my mother, had been killed, and they had to convey the news to his father. That really shook our home. The deaths of Roosevelt and Ghandi were also momentous occasions.

Let us also honor the many classmates who served in the Vietnam War and the three who perished in that conflict: Charles Brown, Bruce Warner, and Phinney Works.

I found it interesting to read the following Yale Daily News account of the Yale Class of 1942 and their experiences 80 years ago.

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Yale: An arsenal of democracy in World War II

Yale Daily News

May 26, 2022

When President Franklin Roosevelt announced his decision to lend arms to Great Britain in December 1940, he declared, “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” Many Americans were still hesitant about entering the world stage, but all doubts disappeared Dec. 7, 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Yale became a small but important part of this arsenal, and the campus’ mobilization and experience during these crucial times symbolize the nation’s shift of attitudes toward a growing sense of character, duty and sacrifice.

An isolationist institution

Yale’s experience in World War II did not begin as nobly as it ended. It started as the story of a conservative student body promoting isolationism.

In 1936, there were peace-week demonstrations on campus, and although the rallies were not the work of the few Nazi sympathizers at Yale, they did reflect the 1930s widespread attitude of appeasement and pacifism.

James McDermott ’42, who served and died for his country after graduation, wrote to his mother Feb. 5, 1939 about the debate on campus relating to the crisis abroad after hearing an author speak to the Yale Political Union about why America could not avoid war. The author failed to convince the YPU, which voted two to one against intervention.

“The other fellow [a student for isolationism], who really meant what he said, spoke against the measure, pointing out the fallibility of humans in prophesying, and declaring it was foolish to rush into something that might possibly be avoided,” McDermott wrote. “He declared that it took more courage to stay out of the war than to go into it.”

Yale students, including future Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. ’41, who was then chairman of the Yale Daily News, were among the principal founders of the America First Committee in1940. The committee, which attracted prominent Americans including aviator Charles Lindbergh, voiced opposition to providing aid to the Allies.

“One of the biggest events they did was invite Charles Lindbergh to come and speak,” history professor and Yale historian Gaddis Smith said. “They filled Woolsey Hall with a very enthusiastic audience.”

Then-Yale president Charles Seymour, a firm interventionist, disliked the attitude on campus, but some feel his administration did little to change it.

“A somewhat shameful action of this was the administration’s refusal to help Jewish refugee scholars come into the United States,” Smith said. “Yale did less than any other major institution. It was still a fairly anti-Semitic place.”

Although the anti-Semitic attitudes did not disappear fully until Brewster, ironically, toppled the social structure of the University decades later, isolationism became less acceptable as 1941 progressed and then was eradicated with Pearl Harbor. Japan had awakened the “sleeping giant.”

Call to duty

When America entered the war, Yale entered fully behind it.

“They’ve been calling up reserves unexpectedly, and I might get yanked out of school,” McDermott wrote to his mother Feb. 2, 1941. “I’d sort of like to finish college before I get militarized if it can be managed.”

Although students wondered when service would begin, few questioned their responsibility to serve the nation.

“We were at war. There was no intellectual debate about it,” Navy veteran Greer Allen ’45W said in an interview. “Already the nation had gotten itself mobilized to help Britain, so the conventional reason was that we should support the enemies of the Axis. I think anyone who would have challenged that would have been investigated and perhaps prosecuted.”

Allen was part of Class of 1945W, whose members saw their college years interrupted by service and eventually returned to Yale to graduate in the latter half of the decade. Upon entering in the summer of 1942, they only received six months of the old and elegant Yale education, which at that time included students wearing coats and ties to meals served by waiters.

Within the same year, military uniforms replaced the old dress codes, while mess lines replaced the waiters. As Winston Churchill prophesied, the New World rushed to the rescue of the Old World, and as an ironic result, Yale had to sacrifice the aristocratic old-world elegance it had previously offered its students.

Mobilizing Yale

Yale devoted more and more of its resources to the war after 1941, and seven of the ten existing residential colleges became Army and Navy housing.

In response to plummeting numbers of civilian undergraduates, Yale fell into economic trouble in 1942 and began to rent its property and education services to the military. By 1943, the Air Force had established an aviation school at Yale, and Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight, and Trumbull colleges were the only colleges that continued to house civilian undergraduates. There were only 565 undergraduates by 1944, Brooks Mather Kelley wrote in his book Yale: A History.

University officials worried about the mobilization’s long-term effects and tried to preserve the academic environment. Despite the large number of Yale faculty members who left for government service, Greer said older faculty members remained in greater numbers than their younger counterparts.

“I had some great classes when I was in uniform,” Greer said. “In many ways, I could guess that the students had a greater access to the senior faculty in ways they would not have today because the younger people [professors] were gone.”

While mobilizing for war abroad, New Haven, like most cities on the East Coast, refined its internal defense systems.

McDermott, who had already enlisted in the Marines, described the wartime precautions on campus while trying to write his thesis, amidst all the confusion.

“The week was also interrupted by the practice blackout,” McDermott wrote home Feb. 22, 1942. “It all went off approximately according to schedule, with no excitement. The result was that the Timothy Dwight shelters supposed to house about 700 people had about 7 occupants.”

Students chose to gather at a movie theater rather than in the bomb shelter. But despite this nonchalant facade, students and city residents worried about safety.

“There was actually a fear that the Germans were going to bomb New Haven,” said Stanley Flink ’45W, who served in the army. “There was a genuine fear that could happen.”

Flink, now a political science professor, worked as a journalist after his graduation in 1948 and produced amateur films, including documentaries about Yale during World War II.

Despite these concerns, there were some perks to attending Yale during war. Great jazz-band leader Glenn Miller was stationed at Yale to form military bands.

“His first headquarters was at Yale, and they [Miller’s band] did a broadcast at Woolsey Hall a couple nights a week, and they played for the GI’s,” Flink said.

Yale also was able to easily post an undefeated football season in 1944 thanks to its new recruits — Army and Navy enlistees.

Yalies in action

Yale’s major contribution to the war was teaching and training over 20,000 future soldiers during the course of the war. 18,678 alumni served in the war and 514 gave their lives, according to Yale Men who Died in the Second World War by Eugene Kone.

Capt. McDermott landed in late February 1945 on the island of Iwo Jima, where U.S. forces were determined to rid the island of over 20,000 entrenched Japanese defenders.

On Feb. 24, 1945, after a harsh day of fighting and a break in the lines, McDermott’s heroics allowed his battalion, which had suffered heavy casualties, to make a safe retreat. He plugged the hole in the lines and directed an artillery barrage to allow the men to fall back. McDermott earned the Navy Cross for his actions.

“Stouthearted and indomitable in his concern for the safety of our troops, he remained steadfast in his isolated position with local security from enemy action and continued to adjust his devastating fire close to our lines, effectively thwarting an imminent Japanese counterattack and enabling our troops to re-form without casualty,” the Secretary of the Navy wrote in a letter awarding McDermott the Navy Cross.

McDermott was killed by a sniper on March 3, 1945, according to the secretary’s letter, stored in Sterling Memorial Library’s Manuscript and Archives. The U.S. forces secured Iwo Jima on March 16 at the cost of 6,000 Marines.

Returning home

At the end of the war in 1945, victorious soldiers returned home to a nation indebted to their service abroad, and Congress passed the GI Bill, giving veterans money for college.

Yale had promised all its students, including the ones admitted only for military purposes, that they could finish their studies after the war. But a new freshmen class was also arriving in the fall of 1946, causing the undergraduate population to soar to around 9,000. The University had to pack students into residential colleges and temporary housing locations.

But after fighting a bloody war, students easily ignored the housing crunch.

“I didn’t even think, ‘Oh it’s crowded,' ” Greer explained. “I had been in the service, where if you want crowded you got crowded.”

The school also became increasingly diverse thanks to the return of military students from a variety of backgrounds who would not have otherwise been admitted to Yale.

“There was quite a bit of diversity from 1945-1950,” Smith said. “It was still prejudiced against Jews, and there were virtually no blacks. It was a more diverse white-European origin.”

The legacy

Yale was a microcosm for America during the war years. It went from isolationism to total war mobilization in the course of a short time. Even after the war, some conservative politicians embraced the vision of a new post-war isolationism, but they no longer had a majority in the country. In 1950, Yale closed its doors again and reverted to its pre-war traditionalist ways.

But from 1941 to 1945, Yale alumni, students, and faculty both at home and abroad showed their courage and honor in defending their nation and its democratic ideals.