The Cajuns: Americanization of a People

ONE: Cajuns during Wartime

CAJUNS DURING WARTIME 3 Quand j’ai parti pour aller dans l’armée. When I left to go in the army, J’ai quitté tout ça moi, j’aimais. I left all that I loved. Moi, j’ai pris le grand chemin de fer I took the train Avec le coeur aussi cassé. With such a broken heart. —Cajun musician Nathan Abshire, “Les blues du service militaire [Service Blues],” date unknown It’s my job to convince them that it’s more fun to use a bayonet on a Jap than a knife on a muskrat. —Captain Robert L. Mouton, on recruiting Cajuns for the U.S. Marines, 1942 Four thousand miles from his hometown of Breaux Bridge, Ralph LeBlanc, or “Frenchie,” as Navy pals called the twenty-year-old sailor, sat reading comics in Kingfish Hangar’s ready room. Usually occupied by pilots receiving orders and briefings, the room this morning, as every Sunday morning, served as a hangout where off-duty sailors drank coffee while glancing through stateside newspapers. ONE For the past three days LeBlanc and his crew of mechanics had been awaiting aircraft from the carriers Enterprise and Lexington, so the roar of diving planes came as no surprise. Just a few aviators showing off, LeBlanc figured, before swooping down to land. LeBlanc went outside with some of the other sailors to watch the display.“We thought they were going to give us a little show,” he recalled a half century later, “and then one of them drops a bomb right on the PBY hangar.” The bomb’s spinning nose propeller landed at LeBlanc’s feet. He stooped down and picked up the fragment. “It was so hot,” he recounted, “I burned my fingerprints into it.” LeBlanc could only surmise that a “crazy” American pilot had bombed the hangar—then it dawned on him what really was occurring. A short distance from LeBlanc’s post, another Cajun, twenty-one-year-old Louis Provost of Lafayette, watched from the heavy cruiser San Francisco as planes swarmed around his vessel, firing machine guns and dropping bombs and torpedoes. “People were being blown up and thrown in the water,” he recalled.“I was like a scared rabbit.”As Provost watched, an explosion ripped through the nearby battleship Arizona, killing a thousand sailors, including three Cajuns—Charles Donald Frederick of Abbeville, Russell Durio of Sunset, and Felix Ducrest of Broussard.1 The day was December 7, 1941, and the place was Pearl Harbor. Cajun GIs had just witnessed the opening salvo of Japan’s sneak attack on American soil, the event that marked the U.S. entry into World War II and the beginning of a chain of events that over coming decades would immerse most Cajuns in mainstream culture. Cajuns participated in the war effort by the thousands, compelling many to leave their south Louisiana enclave for the first time. In training camps, foxholes , and trenches, Cajun GIs encountered solely English-speaking Americans, and some, like Lovelace Viator of Vermilion Parish—“one of more than a dozen in his original company from the bayou country,” reported his local newspaper in 1945, “who could neither speak nor understand English”—learned the new language in order to serve and survive in the military . They saw new peoples, visited strange places, and were exposed to influences that changed their traditional values. Some Cajun GIs found 4 CAJUNS DURING WARTIME wartime service an ordeal, experiencing culture shock and suffering ethnic slurs. Others excelled as soldiers, exhibiting heroism on the battlefield and winning the admiration of their comrades.2 Back on the home front, Cajun civilians united with other Americans to support the war effort. They volunteered as air raid wardens, plane spotters, firefighters, auxiliary policemen, and nursing aides, and they participated in bond, stamp, and scrap drives. Like combat experience, these activities promoted feelings of national unity, drawing Cajuns closer to mainstream America. Emphasis on “the American way of life” strongly affected Cajun children : census data shows that the use of Cajun French as a first language dropped 17 percent for Cajuns born during U.S. involvement in World War II, the single largest decrease since the beginning of the century. This trend resulted not only from intense Americanism but also from the practice of punishing Cajun students for speaking French at school.3 The war also brought south Louisiana civilians into contact and sometimes conflict with different peoples and...