The War Comes to Plum Street

11. Will It Never End? 1945

11. Will It Never End? 1945 More Casualties THREE FULL YEARS of war had passed since Pearl Harbor, and there was still no end in sight. The Allies were closing in on Germany, but as the December fighting along the bulge in the western front had shown, the Germans still had plenty of fight left in them and there was no predicting when the end might come. If the Russians got closer to Berlin, or if the Allied armies on the western front could get there, then it might not last long, but who knew when that might be? Even if Germany were beaten, there was still Japan to be dealt with. It was hard going in the Philippines just now, and the Japanese islands were a long way off. B-29s kept hammering the factories and cities there, but the British and Americans had pounded Germany from the air for more than three years without being able to avoid massive invasions of France and Italy and much bloody fighting. And even with that, the Allies were only barely into German territory in the west, with most of the Siegfried Line fortifications intact and filled with Germans. It seemed like a long way to the Rhine just now. The Russians were still only in Poland after coming back so many miles from the tank ditches in front of Moscow. Little had changed in the daily routine on Plum Street. Gemma’s primary concern was with baby Jimmy, who was nearly five months old. She had sent a picture of herself and the baby, 248 The War Comes to Plum Street taken in the back yard, to Ed so he could be reminded of both of them. They wrote steadily, reminding each other of their love and trying not to talk about the war. Everyone tried not to dwell on that too much, wherever they were. They exchanged dreams about a house after the war and shared information and questions about what the little one was doing. Marie was about five months pregnant, due sometime in May. Maxine had left for Miami Beach late in December to be with Kenny, who had finally completed enough missions to come home. They were posted to a resort hotel along with hundreds of other airmen where Kenny began preparing to become a gunnery instructor. It was like a honeymoon for them this time, with opportunities to walk on the beach and savor the fact that he had made it home safely. The war had already made so many reunions impossible. Wanda was still in high school and once again crowded in her room, with two of her sisters back home again and a baby in the house. Gemma took an upstairs room for herself, leaving Wanda to share a room with Marie. Jess went on working long wartime hours, usually seven days a week, and Ethel continued to cook at the Clinic. The news from the fighting fronts came back to New Castle steadily that January. The deaths of three city boys, all in France and Germany, appeared in the paper early in January. The father of one of these soldiers worked with Fred at the Chrysler. When Fred offered condolences at work, they were accepted, but the boy’s father commented that with their remaining children to support, they were just happy that they had the GI insurance of $10,000. Outraged, but unwilling to confront the man for making such a comment, he walked away. Fred, with his one living child in the army, would not have considered any sum adequate compensation for such a loss. The two men never had much to say to each other after that. The war’s toll mounted on Ed’s mother and father. Natural worriers, they dealt with their fears in different ways. Lillian fretted silently, keeping her own counsel alone at home every day, poring over the papers to glean any news about how the war was going in Europe. Ed wrote to her and she cherished the letters, but as with so much of the wartime mail, there was not much of substance except confirmation that, a certain number of days before, he had been well and sound. She always let Gemma Will It Never End? 1945 249 In the fall of 1944, Maxine and Wanda Moles posed with their new nephew Jimmy, on the steps at Plum Street...