On 11/11/11, Carroll Lutheran Village paid tribute to Veterans Day by presenting a remembrance of the Home Front in World War II. It was set up beautifully by members of the Mens Club and the Red Hatters. Some of our fellow residents served in that war and were honored. Some others of us who served in later wars were also honored. However, the main topic was, as I said, The Home Front in World War II. .
Many of us who were too young to be drafted helped in the war effort by collecting scrap paper and metal. Some of us wrote about that and other wartime experiences on The Home Front and a book was published with our writings. It's available for viewing at our library, a very nice place in our Village to sit and read, surrounded by thousands of good books, old and new.
At the Veterans Day presentation, some library books about WWII were on display and I was pleasantly surprised to see one by recently-deceased Andy Rooney. As the one or two who read my blogs, you already know that Andy was one of my heroes. I thought of him variously as: a curmudgeon, a humorist of the first order, a naive observer of the world, a fantastic public speaker, a wise old man, .... depending on the article I was reading that was written by him, or the words that he was saying to close out a television show... or by what I read in the humorous books written by him that I unfortunately gave away before I moved to the Village. And.. of course, I have tried to imitate him in some of my writings. Charles Caleb Colton wrote in 1820: "Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery."
The book was titled: My War by Andy Rooney. 1995 by Essay Publications, Inc.
ISBN: 0-8129-2532-7
Andy tells about his life from 1939 to 1945. As a staff writer for the GI publication, The Stars and Stripes, he traveled in his beloved Jeep all over Europe and Asia for stories, often hemmed in between massive tanks and 4x4 trucks, sustaining lots of enemy fire. Many of his fellow correspondents were killed, some right by his side, and how he escaped his own demise is a mystery to me, as it was to him.
He was near the action on D-Day and was with the troops when they drove the Germans out of Paris. He observed that Parisian man crying when the French partisans and American GI's entered his city, and tries to tell how much that liberation meant to the people who had suffered so long under German occupation.
Andy was there with the troops when they entered Cologne (my old "stomping ground") and the Schnee Eiffel (where I spent 18 months in the 1950's). He has nothing good to say about General Patton, who took credit for the Battle of the Bulge. He got chewed out by the General one time, but ignored the admonition and lived to tell about it.
Andy was also there when the American troops entered Buchenwald.. I quote: "Buchenwald represented the worst of everything in all the Nazi extermination camps. The dead and dying were still everywhere." My friend, Harry Wade, was there at that time too and he echoes what Andy said.. and also what Andy said about the SS-run work camp at Thekla:
"When these SS troops realized U.S. soldiers were going to arrive in Thekla within hours, they herded 300 prisoners into one of the barracks... They threw pails of gasoline over the barracks and onto some of the prisoners and then tossed incendiary grenades into the building. It surely was one of the pinnacles in the annals of man's inhumanity to man."
Some of the Thekla citizens who lived close to the barbed wired compound, came out of their neatly trimmed homes and told Andy: "We didn't know."
Andy was also not very impressed with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. He reminds us that our B-29's had already bombed 39 Japanese cities in the spring of 1945. The Russians were impressed though and joined us in the war against Japan.
From what I have been saying, you might think that this is a depressing book. Not so. Andy's subtle humor shows through on almost every page.
For example: One of Andy's assignments was to cover an American unit that was training Chinese soldiers to help us in the war. He found that many people in that area of China understood English and used a form of it for communication. He liked these examples:
A billboard ad: Chenmen cigarettes: smoke one and you'll never smoke another.
A sign over a tailor shop: Respectable ladies having fits upstairs.
A dentist's sign: False teeth. Latest methodists employed.
Well, Andy Rooney survived the Great War, and lived to be over 90.. but he left one unsolved mystery that I want to clear up right here and now. Andy had this Jeep that became almost a part of him. He traveled everywhere in Europe with it.. but when it came time for him to leave Europe in 1945, he couldn't fit it into a duffle bag, so he had to leave it sitting on a corner somewhere in an Army base. He always wondered what happened to it.
I came to Europe in 1953, just 8 years later, and began my term of duty in that "Scnnee Eiffel" that Andy liked to pronounce. A little while after I arrived, I won a Jeep in a game of chance. It was in the Motor Pool, buried in 6 feet of snow (Schnee) with just an antenna poking out. I dug the Jeep out, turned the ignition (no key). It started right up and became my constant companion for over 3 years in Germany. When I departed for home in 1956, I left that Jeep on a corner, just as Andy did before me. I'll bet that someone adopted it and it's still running today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep
Read the book! Enjoy!
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