World War II Remembered

Parallel Realities

287 Parallel Realities • Sally Todd Nelson When the War began, I was in high school, so the war years were the years in which I grew up. One by one, the boys I grew up with went off to fight. Their letters and stories allowed me to share their experiences and made the War shown on the radio and in papers and magazines a parallel reality to our own daily lives. Everyone I knew was in the Navy, and I spent the War writing letters . At first, it was just fun and exciting. The boys were in boot camp and wrote funny, complaining letters with Sad-Sack-type cartoons of oversized uniforms on undersized sailors, and we wrote long letters with S.W.A.K lipstick kisses on the backs of the envelopes. Then we sent little blue-gray V-Mail overseas letters to the Pacific, which made their way to PT boats, Pacific islands, and all the ships at sea. You could communicate a lot despite the censor. The boys I knew well were telling amusing stories about Japanese torpedoes just missing them, but I knew it was real, and not funny. During the War, Columbia University trained naval officers, and at Evensong at Riverside Church the nave was filled with the midshipmen 288 World War II Remembered singing: Eternal Father strong to save, Oh hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea. And I thought of all my friends at sea. In New York we went to dances at school, and at Riverside we went to parties in people’s homes. At these, we met boys in the Navy on leave or in training. At Columbia, we met a lot of the midshipmen. They had not yet been exposed to the War, and they felt grown-up; they were funny and confident, and they flirted. One boy I danced with asked the name of my perfume, and when I told him it was Elizabeth Arden’s Heaven Scent, he smiled and said, “You certainly are.” I danced with an English sailor at a party in the school gym; it was a slow dance near the end of the evening, the lights were low, and the singer sang: And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. And I felt a tear on his cheek. In the subway we smiled at groups of Russian sailors who were stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. At parties we heard what it was actually like to be escorting a convoy with supplies for England across the North Atlantic and for Russia on the Murmansk Run, and for how many minutes one could live in the cold Atlantic water. I knew a boy who had gone ashore in the second wave on Iwo Jima; the second wave lacked the benefit of surprise, and most of his buddies died. My sister and I wrote to a childhood friend, the son of our mother’s college roommate, who was on Tinian Island, where going out in the open meant facing Japanese snipers. His letters to me were later used by the Navy as evidence for giving him medical benefits: once home, he still could not go out of the house to work or school. Our lives changed. My grandparents had planned to send each of their grandchildren to school in England for a year, but that all ended on September 1, 1939, when, instead of being in England at school, I looked at the pictures of people digging trenches in London’s Hyde Park. My aunt’s wedding to an Oxford classmate was put off because her fiancé was now in the RAF, flying in the Battle of Britain. Those were the flyers that Winston Churchill spoke of when he said, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” My aunt and her fiancé never married; by the end of the War they’d lost too much time together. My father had been in the 7th Regiment of New York in World War I and had fought in the battle breaking the Hindenburg Line. Each day, he read the Herald-Tribune on his way to work at the Bell Labs, listened to the radio when he got home, and, after supper, listened to the radio Parallel Realities: Sally Todd Nelson 289 with Rosalie Allen singing cowboy songs while he waited for the late news. He had maps...