Return to college helped, as sophomore year was packed with as many courses as were allowed and there was time for little else. And I had some good experiences academically and even a few random flirtations as the months ticked by. Letters were scarce and would come in bunches and I read them over and over. After a 3-mo ocean journey he was sent to Syria for training, then joined the British 8th Army at El Alamein in Egypt where Montgomery had turned Rommel’ advance back and then pushed the Germans all the way to the Mareth Line in Tunisia. He then was shipped to southern Italy with his ambulance and finally came home on a month’s leave in November 1944. I kept his letters for decades and then they resurfaced in Long Beach one day when I was cleaning out the garage. I gave them to Eric, thinking he might want to review his war experiences, now that so much time had passed and perhaps the memories had softened. But when I asked for them back a few weeks later he had trashed them, they were too overwhelming still.
I graduated from college in August 1944 and started my first job at Rockefeller Foundation in NY as a lab tech in the scrub-typhus unit. One weekend morning in late October my mother called upstairs to me that I had a visitor. I came down in my robe and slippers, totally unprepared to see Eric. But there he was, slim and with a buzz cut and looking like a mature adult, not the young and naive person I remembered. It was an eerie experience – we were strangers, period. I didn’t even feel comfortable kissing him, altho I had often dreamed of doing so. I’m sure he felt just as strange. It was several days before we were again close, realizing that basically nothing had changed. If anything, we were more in love than ever. I have often thought since that many, many couples went thru this experience. It was as sure a test of enduring love as could be imagined.
Our relationship resumed the pattern of the summer of ’42. I was commuting to NY to work, he would join me afterwards; weekends were spent entirely together. At some point he bought an engagement ring and asked me to marry him. I said yes to marriage, but after a few days said no to being engaged and returned the ring. I had such mixed feelings, nothing felt right. I would have married him instantly, knowing he was going back, but he was not ready. Being engaged meant nothing but loss of freedom without gaining something more desirable like sex. I know I loved him and was ready to marry, but not to be tied up by a meaningless ‘engagement’. It was so unconventional, the way I felt, and none of my family or his understood or approved. But the relief I felt on returning the ring reassured me that it was the right move, regardless of the opinion of others.
After Eric returned to Italy his AFS unit joined the allied drive up through Italy and France to Belgium. In Brussels he got very, very sick with bacterial pneumonia. The timing was incredibly lucky, as penicillin had just arrived at army hospitals. His mother got several telegrams from AFS that caused us severe anxiety but finally he recovered enough to be sent home. But before he came back in the summer of 1945 my family suffered the most agonizing loss inaginable. In March my older brother Howard was declared ‘missing in action’ on his first flight over Germany as a bombardier on a B24. He was actually dead as we found out later that two U.S. Bombers had collided in the air, but there were no bodies recovered so the Air Force declared the crews ‘missing’. It was more than two years later that one of his buddies came to see us – and told us that he had seen the collision from another plane on the mission. And years later we found that some Germans where the plane wreckage come down had gathered fragments and buried them. It took that long to get some closure, and the effect of Howard’s death was devastating on our family, particularly on my parents. The timing was also dreadful, as a month later the war in Europe was over.
The war in Europe had ended in the spring, but the Japanese war was still being fought when Eric returned. He was again a stranger, terribly gaunt and serious and there was every indication that he would be sent to the Pacific when he was fully recovered. I don’t know how our lives would have been affected if that occurred but it didn’t. After the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in early August, WWII was over. We were in the city that night and actually celebrated on Times Square with hundreds of others. But for those of us who had lost family and friends and now had a new horror on our minds as the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became clear, it was an emotionally mixed occasion.
I need to comment here on the meaning of WWII for our generation, and how different it was from all subsequent U.S. military engagements. First, it was a defensive war; although the U.S. was heavily on the side of England and France from it’s inception in 1939, the very strong isolationist movement kept us from actual engagement, and it was not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that we formally entered it. Every ‘war’ since has been instigated by us, or (as in the case of Vietnam) taken on voluntarily. The country was overwhelmingly in support of WWII and the attitude of most young people was to help the war effort in any way possible. Among college students the urge to become a participant or join the ‘war effort” was so strong that huge numbers accelerated in order to become war workers, or dropped out to join up. But when the massive bombings of European cities began the world was faced with the terrible realities of war, and blind patriotism was no longer possible. But at the end, when the holocaust was revealed, the horrible evil that was the German regime reinforced the belief that this was a ‘just war’ if ever there was one. But then came the atomic bomb attacks in Japan, causing a huge controversy that still remains, as they pulled the US into the sphere of horror-creators of an unprecedented sort. So ultimately WWII had good and evil on both sides, and horror everywhere. I’m finding this narrative more and more difficult to write; reliving that period is excruciating – such misery, anguish, anxiety. So I’ll skip the rest, hoping I have conveyed some of the reactions felt universally.
I’m finding this narrative more and more difficult to write; reliving that period is excruciating – such sorrow, anguish, anxiety. Eric, who in his last years was writing his memoirs in the form of letters to his family, had to give up when he got to the war as it was making him so miserable. So I’ll skip the rest, hoping I have conveyed some of the anguish felt universally.