Bradford Perkins

Impressions of Wartime

As a teenager, I watched the coming of World War II and its expansion to include the United States. I entered the army at the end of 1942, when I was seventeen, and served about three years. I returned to college in February 1946, just before my twenty-first birthday. My youthful experiences and observations shaped attitudes of which I am well aware and others that I perhaps still do not recognize. Perhaps most important was the conviction that-although the phrase was not then commonly used our war was a good war. I read the newspapers and listened to the radio; neither provided very sophisticated interpretations of events, and I developed none of my own. I had no doubt that the Germans and Japanese were evil. I accepted the drift toward United States participation, only half recognizing it, and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor I had no doubt that our cause was just. Such views were widely shared. This did not mean that we saw the war as a sort of second Wilsonian crusade. But almost everyone in the armed forces accepted the need to beat Adolph Hilter and Hideki Tojo, and they knew that the country shared their views. In this, of course, we had an immense advantage over many of those who later served in Vietnam. In those years I had no real understanding of the problem of racism in the United States. In principle, I was a tepid liberal, so taught by my parents, and I understood in a distant way that blacks were not treated as equals in American society. But the problem did not seem urgent, at least in the North, where I grew up. And, like many others, I was not without prejudice. In the army, like everyone else, I often talked dismissively about niggers and jigaboos. Some of this was simply a function of ignorance. In my entire army service, the only blacks I ever saw, except for a few men on leave in London, were the engineering troops driving trucks in the famous Red Ball Express from ports in Normandy to the front in France or Germany, and they simply rocketed past in a cloud of dust. I never even glimpsed a contradiction between what we were supposed to be fighting for and the condition of black people in America. These things being so, I accepted military service without disquiet. In any case, entry into the war was a national decision, and it seemed to me (although I never formulated this precisely) that it was a citizens duty to respond to the countrys call.