WAR IS SWELL?

My last week’s column seemed to dwell on the blessings of war for stimulating an economy that had gone dead before World War II woke it up and put it to work again. Well I was there and I saw it happen. One winter the City was able to assemble an army of unemployed men with snow shovels to clear our locals streets after a heavy fall. The next winter there were no such men. They were all doing war work, the lucky ones in private industry, the others in government work -- of the kind that’s done with a rifle and bayonet.

So the unemployment crisis was solved. People who hadn’t been working at any job were now working at one or even two or more, to meet the demand for labor. I heard first hand about the subway workers in sedentary jobs who now were getting overtime as “pushers.” These were the men who stood at the edge of the platforms and filled the cars by packing them with passengers who needed an extra shove to get them through the doors into the jammed interiors. It called for deaf ears and a thick skin to cope with the objections of the first comers squeezed by the newcomers. The overcrowding was a result of the business hyperactivity caused by the war and the inadequacy of repair and maintenance of the subways also caused by the war, which created shortages of everything needed to keep them running.

It was all in a good cause, or so we were told. We heard it from the radio, read it in the papers, saw it in the movies. Being young, though, my own little concerns tended to overshadow the daily catastrophes and disasters that were racking the world. But the big things stood out, Pearl Harbor, the Bulge, Hiroshima later on. When things were at a stalemate, one’s attention wavered. And if things were going too well, that meant that there might be a letdown in the effort people were putting into their war work, and that would never do. Or so the government thought anyway, so that news of the biggest victory of the war, the battle of Midway, was suppressed after one announcement for fear that the country might conclude that the war was over and it was time to go back to normal life. When a chronology of the war was printed on V-J day, Midway didn’t appear in it. I had read about it once in the old New York Sun, and saw it no more until peace broke out.

I think the war hardship that most of us youth felt the most was the cigarette shortage. I should probably extend that to take in the whole male population and a good part of the female one. Still, the adults had more money to spend on the happy habit and we didn’t. The adults got their Chesterfields and Camels, while we only did so by luck and most of the time had to settle for stuff called Kings and Queens, allegedly manufactured in a garage in Brooklyn, or for off-brand items named Parliament, Herbert Tareyton, Virginia Rounds, Viceroy, Pall Mall, or such. When some of these actually became popular postwar, we couldn’t believe it. We had thought of them of them as the horrors of war.

Income taxes were one wartime hardship that didn’t impinge on us much. At the same time we knew that there were a lot of grownups that were making a lot of money from the war and were glad to have our envy gratified by news of the confiscatory income taxes they were paying. The salary of Louis B. Mayer of MGM was something like a national monument. It was the highest in the country every year, but on the other hand it was taxed at 91%. The next biggest earner in Hollywood was Bob Hope. He also was in thrall to the IRS, or so we thought. We had never heard of the oil depletion allowance which enabled investors to retain their earnings from oil wells. Louis B. Mayer and Bob Hope owned a lot of oil wells. Mayer also had a hobby of raising racehorses which produced tax losses which greatly reduced his taxable income. Hope’s little hobby was real estate. Through these two chaps and others like them, the term “tax shelter” entered into the national dictionary. They were men of vision, men of foresight. They hewed out a path to the future that has been followed by millions who came after them. They have no monument except in the hearts of those who have done this, but that is permanent.

Big taxes were an innovation of the war years, but big bands just didn’t fit in anymore. The draft wiped them out. There were still instrumentals for us to listen to, “Cherokee”, “Sleepy Lagoon”, “Sugar Blues”, but they had all been made before the war. The bands that survived during the war had to make do with whatever talent was available after the draft and produced very few hits. They turned to singers instead. Sinatra took over. The Army said he had a punctured eardrum and returned him to the women of America. Crosby was in full voice and so were Dick Haymes, Perry Como, Peggy Lee and others, who replaced the bands and leaders as the focus for the fans, putting a premature end to the big band era, which has never come back, though I’m still waiting.

War heroes. From the beginning the battling nations worked to put a human face on the war by spotlighting individuals whom it was hoped the public would take to its heart. The star system worked for Hollywood, it would work for Uncle Sam as well. The trouble was that the First World War had left the public with a skeptical attitude toward propaganda. People were likely to look for hidden meanings behind the breathless announcements of glorious achievements. Early in the war the British beat the drums for a flier named Paddy Finucane, the scourge of the Luftwaffe. It didn’t work. Obviously the Brits were trying to win over the Irish-Americans who resisted American entry into the war. Even when Finucane was killed in action, the suspicion persisted. You can’t please some people.

The glorification of John Basilone, a Marine who distinguished himself on Guadalcanal in 1942, was met with the same attitude. Now Uncle Sam was trying to reconcile the Italian-Americans to a war in which we were unfortunately fighting…Italy. Don’t try to get around us with your Italian hero was the response. This was regrettable because John Basilone was a genuine hero, a career soldier who had the rank of gunnery sergeant. Like Finucane he proved his legitimacy through death in combat on Iwo Jima.

Oh yes, the Bronx had a hero too. He was Lieutenant Charlie Shea of the 88th Infantry Division, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Of his heroism there can be no question.






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