CONCLUSION: Andy Zahn Remembers the War Years

By ANDY ZAHN

October 20, 2014

PART 5

With so many women working on the war effort, and many had children, there had to be a way to take care of these kids. My town came up with “Child Care Centers,” and my mother, being a natural with children, got a job as a Child Care teacher. Now this was amazing since Mom never graduated from 8th grade because her father got killed at work and left a widow with seven kids. The oldest had to quit school and had to find jobs.

I’ve heard of “horse whisperers” and “dog whisperers” where a person can train the animal through just plain love, and I think some people, especially kindergarten teachers, also have this talent.

After Mom quit school she was playground director in the school she had just left. At times she taught nursery school and in a large federal housing project in California she was in recreation for the teenagers. I saw my mother who was 4′ 11″ just simply clap her hands at a dance of a couple hundred boys and girls and the place fell totally silent. The respect was incredible!

Dad was overseas, and he loved real stinky German Limburger and Liederkranz cheese. The cheese came in a wooden box with about eight half-pound blocks, each wrapped in tin foil, and then Mom wrapped the whole thing securely in brown paper and I took it to the Post Office. They could smell it, and it had to be re-wrapped and then sent. I avoided the kitchen whenever my parents were eating that cheese.

Dad was a stickler about eating. “Eat that fat. I paid 35 cents a pound for that too!” “Clean your dish.” We had a deal which was fine for me. Eat everything on your dish, that meant all the veggies, etc., and then you could have seconds on whatever you wanted, which meant steak and chops. Dad couldn’t abide people who ate with their eyes or noses. “Taste it. You may like it,” and usually he was right. Finally he goaded me into trying the stinky cheese, but one bite was my limit. I said it tasted just like what it smelled like.

Turkey, I got the drum stick. T-bone steak, I got the tail. I thought it was the best part and because they loved me. Only now I realize their teeth couldn’t handle it!

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During the war we had songs like “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” and we saw in the newsreels (no TV) B-17 bombers coming back to England so badly shot up it was a miracle they stayed in the air. Many did not! A lot of planes landed or crash landed with half or more of the crew wounded or dead. They said an aerial gunner on a B-17 or B-24 had a life expectancy in combat of scant minutes. A lovely song with hope was “When the lights come on again, all over the world.”

Out in California, after driving from New Jersey up over the most scary road I have ever seen, with switchbacks and two lanes, no shoulder or guard rail, and looking straight down to where you were an hour ago, I ate a steak dinner in Wickenberg, Arizona, where I fell out of bed. Then on to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. It was 70 years ago — 1944 — and people were getting ready for Christmas. I was amazed that it was so warm.

We had Christmas dinner with a relative of my uncle, and we were staying in a motel with a Murphy bed, eating as cheap as possible in cafes and diners. One man in the motel was a Navy medic. Some days he went to work as a Navy lieutenant, other days a Marine captain. We ate at Jack’s Beanery near the motel where he had a sign saying “Jack makes bean soup with beans in it.”  Everywhere the juke box was blaring, of course Bing with “White Christmas” but more so “Don’t Fence Me In.” People wanted FREEDOM, but sadly since 1944 all we have done is lose ground.

We went to the new base in Stockton and stayed in a motel on Highway 99 between Stockton and Lodi. Right away I got a job at the motel. I was in 8th grade, raking leaves and taking care of the owner’s three horses. We had an electric coffee pot, and dad could cook eggs hard boiled or potatoes, and with an empty bottle of Olympia beer make mashed potatoes. He had me on the farm roads learning to drive with a clutch and shift but no permit — too young. My two-room school was a walk on the side of Highway 99. A couple of us from school would hitchhike into Stockton, and we had some wild rides. One time we were in the rumble seat of a “rod,” and the road went around a walnut orchard. Flying low, the driver went through the orchard with trees flashing by.

When the new Navy quarters were built off the base we moved to the City of Stockton (now bankrupt). Mom worked in the housing project and I got a job there mainly cutting grass with a power mower.  I was 14 and signs everywhere said “Be a Navy Pilot.” Oh, boy! But you had to be 17  and a high school grad. Each time I got to a level like 17, then they changed the requirements. First it took two years of college, then four. Wasn’t going to happen. I flunked the eye test. They were kind and let me jump rather than fly.

Being a German boy I was raised on beer. Ran a commercial boat before the fuss and always had my beer on board. Never had a problem with cars, boats, or anything else. Dad and me would go fishing in a rented rowboat with our 5 horse Johnson, and beer was always part of our day. In California Dad and I drank Olympia beer and when I was at Fort Lewis I drank Olympia beer. The brewery was in Olympia, Washington, about 40 miles south of the fort. The brewery invited all the MP officers from the fort to the brewery to see the operation and drink some fresh-made ice cold brew. Then they took us across the street to a nice restaurant for a wonderful steak dinner and some more beer. There were two MP companies at the fort; mine was with the 4th Infantry Division while the other was Sixth Army and for the fort. Too bad for the duty officer and those on duty, but someone had to “mind the store.”

At the end of the war in Europe when the U.S. Army liberated our POWs and got to the death camps where the SS executed millions of Jews, Ike said “take pictures, take plenty of pictures.” He said the world will never believe this. I saw the pictures in the newspaper and in the newsreels. Naked bodies stacked high, hundreds, thousands of murdered Jews, and now we have a nut case in Iran saying it never happened.

Pictures of the death march at Batan where thousands of our captured soldiers were murdered by the Japanese. Pictures of General Wainwright and General Stillwell after Jap prison camp in 1946, weighing about 80 pounds. I was in the infantry at Ladd AFB, Fairbanks, Arkansas, and I am happy that it is now Fort Wainwright.

THE END

This concludes Andy Zahn’s five-part series on the war years. CLICK for Part 1, CLICK for Part 2, CLICK for Part 3, CLICK for Part 4.

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