One man’s war

On this Veterans Day I’m paying tribute to the veteran I knew best, my father. He served in the United States and the Caribbean during World War II, and thankfully never saw combat. Still, he did spend more than three years in the Army, in a different time and a very different war than most of the ones we’ve fought since. A shoebox full of old letters and memorabilia gives us a glimpse of what it was like.

“Dear Folks,” he wrote from Springfield, Illinois to his parents up in Elgin on April 27, 1942. “Don’t know exactly how to start this so I might just as well jump in. I go to Peoria on May the 5^th to be inducted into the Army. I go to take my final exam anyway and there is a good chance I won’t pass the physical, on account of my foot and my teeth, so don’t start worrying until I pass that.

“Personally, I don’t care a great deal, as I feel quite useless just sitting around here and not doing much of anything to help, and it won’t work a great hardship on Mae (my mother) as she can move right back in with her Mother…Got the boat all ready for launching tonight, and if the Army don’t take me, I feel like going out to “our” island in the Lake and sitting for a week all by myself. However, that’s just what I’d like to do, not what I will do.”

The Army took him and in February of 1943, the Elgin Courier News reported, “Corp. Donald Swan of the Army air base at Salt Lake City, spent Wednesday and Thursday with his parents, Mr. And Mrs. Hoyt Swan, 612 Prospect Street. “ The item noted that he was on his way to Officer Candidate School at Camp Lee, VA and “is expected to have a few hours this morning, between trains, at Cincinnati, with Mr. and Mrs. Edward Wiedemann (Jeanne Dolby).” This, of course, was “social media” in those days – a little long for a Tweet, but it served the same purpose. The postcard below was the equivalent of the camera in your phone.

After Camp Lee, he was assigned to a “rescue boat” unit operated by the Army Air Force on the Gulf Coast. Seventy years ago this week, Mae wrote from New Orleans, “They had an Armistice Day Parade yesterday that was really something. A whole armored division came down with all kinds of tanks and trucks & half tracks and jeeps and scout cars and so forth.”

The Southern atmosphere must have agreed with him because later on, after being sent briefly to New York, he wrote, “New York is about like Chicago, except it is bigger, otherwise about the same…people tear around knocking themselves out just like they do there…guess I’ve been in the South too long or something, but I just don’t get the point…I sure wouldn’t like to live here and spend half of my life riding trains and subways.”

In one of the last letters, dated September 1945, he showed his anxiousness to get home, but also an awareness that things could’ve been much worse. From the AAF Overseas Replacement Depot in Greensboro, North Carolina he wrote, “We were alerted for shipment this morning…they are great on this secrecy stuff around here, for what reason I don’t know, as I heard the war is over, but I guess they don’t know it down here…from the looks of it, and all the rumors we have heard, it will either be South America or Panama.

“From what Gen. Marshall said yesterday it won’t be long before all men with over 2 years service will be out, so at least the end is in sight. I won’t mind a few months over there, wherever it is…All in all I’ve been very lucky throughout my time in the Army, so I can’t really complain about this deal. At least I didn’t get all shot up or have to spend months in some prison camp, and there are plenty of guys who did so I won’t mind for a while.”

Postscript: Many years later, on our first date, my wife and I discovered that my dad and hers were stationed at Keesler Field, the Army air base in Biloxi, MS, at the same time. We don’t know if they knew each other or ever crossed paths, but they both did what their country called on them to do, with pride and dedication. Thank you.