I received the memoir that follows from a dear friend and World War II veteran, Hal Stubbs, who wanted to express his thoughts and feelings about a challenging time in his life that he feels resonates with our times, and yet also differs in some important ways. While editing it for him, I learned much about his life and times as well as about another very turbulent period in American history. I was especially struck by the student activism of the ‘30’s that I knew little about. I have included some parenthetical information about organizations and individuals who I believe it helps to know about in order to more fully appreciate the context of Hal’s experience. Hal and I would greatly appreciate any reactions this produces in terms of its relevance, the similarities and differences between then and now and any other thoughts triggered. Here’s Hal’s story:
I became very interested in pacifism and socialism when I started junior high school in Scarsdale, N.Y. at the beginning of the Depression Several stimuli helped propel me towards these ways of seeing the world, though I can’t say exactly which were the most important. In terms of pacifism there was a young Associate Rector, Harry Price, who today we would call an activist and there was a visiting speaker on disarmament whom he brought to our young peoples’ group. With socialism there was the experience of hearing Norman Thomas speak on the radio. Meanwhile, on the home front, my parents were staunchly conservative Wasp Republicans and my brother, two years older, caught some liberal idealism from me, I think, rather than vice versa.
As I reflect on the origins of my interests, there were other experiences I recall that occurred even earlier in my life. As kids in the 1920’s we had often seen World War I amputees and a couple of our Boy Scout leaders were vets with tough stories. We watched World War I movies like “All Quiet on the Western Front” and for a long time we assumed that a war like the one depicted in the film was a horrible thing that could not possibly happen again.
At Scarsdale High School in the early 30’s I became part of a small group of pacifists-socialists in a club called The Forum. We tried to plan a big anti-war event with the aforementioned Mr. Price as one of the speakers, but we were told that we couldn’t get permission unless we agreed to have the American Legion also provide a speaker. At some point in my own personal evolution during high school, I signed the Oxford Pledge to never fight in any war (A group of Oxford University students in Britain took what came to be known as the Oxford Pledge never to bear arms. Those who signed the American version of the Oxford Pledge stated they would refuse to go to war even if their governments drafted them and sought to send them to war). At the same time there were deeply troubling signs from Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini including invasions of the Sudetenland and Ethiopia respectively.
In my freshman year at Harvard in the fall o f ’35. everything became very real. I’m not sure of the exact sequence of events since this is over 70 years ago now, but I think the Veterans of Future Wars meeting came first. A man named Lewis Gorin had published a popular satirical book called “Patriotism Prepaid”, arguing that bonuses should be paid to young men in advance of their military service in future wars, since otherwise many deserving servicemen would not live to enjoy the bonus. (how ironic that this is precisely what our current government is doing to entice men and women to join the military during the Iraq War). For this purpose he had organized the V.F.W. with F. now standing for Future. This was partly an anti-war pitch and partly a satire on the World War I veterans who had recently marched on Washington and camped on the Capitol grounds demanding a bonus and civil service preferences some 20 years after their service, since the country was mired in a Depression with a soaring jobless rate. Some Harvard students took up the idea and called a meeting to form a local chapter of V.F.W. They handed out membership certificates and lapel buttons, and in a large meeting room filled to overflowing, we sang the anthem they had composed to the tune of the song “Sons of Toil and Danger” from the show “The Vagabond King”. I’ve kept a copy of the words: “Youth who bear war’s onus, Let’s collect the bonus, And return prosperity. . . . . .” It was hilarious fun, but we were well aware that the joke might eventually be on us.
It must have been soon thereafter that many of my friends and I joined the recently formed Harvard Student Union (HSU), which voted to affiliate with Joe Lash’s American Student Union (ASU) (Lash, born to Russian-Jewish emigre parents on December 9, 1909 in New York City’s Upper West Side, would ultimately become one of the most important student leaders of the Depression era, as well as a respected journalist and biographer. As a student at the City College of New York, Lash began to write left-wing opinion pieces for the campus newspaper and chaired the college’s socialist organization, gaining a reputation as a young radical whose views only grew more committed in the wake of the Great Depression. Indeed, through much of that time period Lash was vocally committed to a socialist revolution in the United States and he actively campaigned for abolition of mandatory military training. He became a leader in the Student League for Industrial Democracy, founded the Association of Unemployed College Alumni, and served as an officer in the American Student Union. Perhaps most notably, however, Lash was responsible for organizing various anti-war demonstrations on college campuses from 1934 to 1941, in which students refused to attend class for an hour). Rolf Kaltenborn, son of H.V., a German-born radio newscaster, had been “Post Commander” of our VFW chapter and was now elected President of HSU. When Rolf graduated, Bob Lane of our class succeeded him and went on to be national president of ASU. Our official platform was for Peace, Civil Liberties, and Social Security. (This was a switch towards the positive from an earlier ineffective group called the National Student League against War and Fascism.)
I’m having trouble recalling any noteworthy events that the HSU staged to promote our agenda. It was nothing like the strikes and sit-ins of the Vietnam era, but mostly “mass meetings” (indoors), posters, leaflets, letters to the press, etc. It was serious business—one member had an older brother already fighting fascism in Spain—but a good part of our energy was expended in arguing among ourselves.
It became clear very early on that a substantial number of our members were also in the Stalinist YCL (Young Communist League), as well as a small minority in a Trotskyite cell. (Trotsky was still alive then, in Mexico.) Most of the time this mixture was comfortable, although there were times when it was annoying to realize that the Communists were trying to bend the HSU to their agenda. I remember one of them claiming that the Red Army was the “biggest force for peace in the world.” For the rest of my 4 years there was uneasy tension between the anti-war and anti-Nazism forces, with the latter gaining most of our attention, and pacifism seeming more like a dream.
A landmark event was the National Convention of ASU at Vassar in 1938, (The modern American Student movement began in the 1930’s, when the National Student League joined with the Student League for Industrial Democracy to form the American Student Union. During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 college students – about half the American student body – in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining) which several other Harvardians and I attended. By this point, Joe Lash and others were pushing the anti-Nazi platform. When Norman Thomas gave an eloquent plea for the pacifist-socialist position, the standing ovation gained only about 25% participation of the audience.
Three months after we ‘39’ers graduated, Hitler made the deal with Stalin and invaded Poland. My brother and I were spending that Labor Day weekend with a small group of high school friends at the summer home on Shelter Island of the parents of one of the friends, Harry Ballinger. Harry was a popular, outgoing native of London who had arrived in Scarsdale with his family only a few years earlier. Sailing around the island those perfect late-summer days, it was hard for us to believe that our world was falling apart. A staunch British patriot, Harry soon afterwards went up to Canada to enlist in the RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force), ironically the opposite purpose from those who fled to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.
I soon became aware that my few Communist friends were understandably beside themselves, not knowing where to turn when Comrade Joe (Stalin) deserted them. Starting to work as an actuarial clerk in NYC and living at home in Scarsdale, out of regular touch with Harvard classmates (no cell phones or e-mail…), I didn’t know which way to turn either. It had clearly become too late for the war to be stopped, so should I now join America First to help keep the U.S. out of it? But this was the organization of Republican Isolationist Senators Gerald Nye and BurtonWheeler, who were responsible for having kept us out of the League of Nations, thus contributing to its impotence, as well as suspected pro-Nazis like Charles Lindbergh. I did get on their mailing list, but took no active part.
More important for me personally was what would I do about my Oxford Pledge when my draft number came up? I still believed (and still do) that any war is evil, but here it was and there was no stopping it. “Bundles for Britain” sentiment was growing and FDR was clearly nudging us into closer involvement. I had lost my religion and could not claim exemption on that ground. If I just went to jail while all (or nearly all) of my friends were putting their lives on the line, how would I feel after it was over? I really struggled with this, but by the Fall of ’41 I finally decided to use my math-science background to apply for meteorology training in the Army Air Forces. I would be out of direct combat, but at the same time more useful to the “defense” effort than if I were to carry a rifle.
December 7, 1941, of course, brought the end of the use of the word “defense”. My draft number came up in February of ’42 before my meteorology application had been officially approved, so I went through induction at Camp Upton and basic Air Force training at Keesler Field. When the approval of my application came through, I was ordered back from Biloxi to New York University for 9 months of meteorology training, ending with a 2nd Lt. commission. After a few months of forecasting at Mather Field in Calif., I received orders for “overseas” early in ’43. On board an Army transport ship, we steamed out past the Golden Gate in a large convoy, but when all the other ships soon took a right turn to head for the Aleutians, our captain somehow missed the signal, and we continued alone across the Pacific for 21 days, landing in Brisbane. I spent the next two years in the Southwest Pacific, mostly forecasting the weather at 5th Air Force headquarters at three locations in New Guinea, then three more years in the Philippines.
This turned out to work better for me personally than I could have hoped. I did have a couple of bouts with malaria, but logged about 100 hours on flights (mostly reconnaissance) in war zones without being shot at, and the experience was great for my self -esteem. The final good fortune for me came at the horrible expense of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had come back to the U.S. in May ’45 (by plane, hearing the V-E Day news at an island stop en route) with a deal to take a 10-week refresher course in meteorology (with other weather officers from various theaters of war) at Chanute Field in Illinois, then have leave at home for the month of August, and then return to Clark Field in Luzon. When the war ended in mid-August, my orders were changed to report to Fort Dix for optional reassignment or discharge. Terminal Leave also led to my engagement and November marriage to Lu, my wonderful wife of 62 years now, which almost certainly would never have happened if I had returned to the Far East for another year or so.
I had succeeded in obtaining a relatively safe assignment. Of the few die-hard pacifists in HSU, I know of only one who, I heard later, had chosen to spend the war in prison, but I have a related story with a tragic-ironic twist. Don Barker, a good friend from Scarsdale High and my brother’s roommate at Harvard, was politically conservative, an athlete and a star on the swim team. He took Air Force flight training, flew scores of transport missions in North Africa and came home without a scratch. His younger brother, Bob, was at Amherst College when the draft started, and (as Don told me bitterly on a post-war tennis court) under the influence of a strong anti-war professor, Bob chose to declare conscientious objection status, which he was subsequently granted. He was assigned to participate as a guinea pig in some kind of experimental testing of food or weapons for the Army from which he got sick and died.
I was much more fortunate.. There were no casualties among my family or relatives, but my wife still remembers sitting down to a large family New Year’s Day dinner (in ’43 or ’44) when the doorbell rang. It was a messenger bringing news that her cousin had been killed in action in North Africa. There were, of course, a good many of my Scarsdale and Harvard classmates who failed to survive the war, but just three or four who were close friends. One of these was our Shelter Island host Harry Ballinger, the RCAF bombardier, who went down in the North Sea returning from a mission over Germany.
When I reflect back on these difficult times, I have many mixed feelings: sadness for the great guys who gave their lives while still so young and for their families at that time (though this feeling is much less acute now than it was then); frustration in thinking about the time and energy spent on activism to no avail; and despair at how the human race can keep making the same mistakes.
As for my choices and decisions when I was confronted by the draft, I think I made the only decision that made sense. If I had to do it over again, I would do the same….