“Memories can be beautiful, and yet, things too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”
The words from the Streisand-sung song kept repeating in my thoughts while I, as everyone else who could draw breath, coped with the reality of war, again in our time. While I, as everyone else, watched and listened to the reports coming from Washington, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, memories were being pulled up into consciousness from way, way far back, from out of those places in the mind where we stash things and think we forget. The sirens’ wails coming through on the newscasts from Baghdad and Bhahran, the tone in every reporting voice, seemed to jostle loose the fragments of World War II impressions that my child’s memory had stored, impressions that in quieter times I choose to forget.
Although two intervening wars have been fought out in Korea and Vietnam, it is memories of the Second of the World Wars that come back now and suggest deja vu. I was a mere seven, when the United States actually entered that earlier war in December 1941, but for a year or so before that I had become aware that my quiet TCU world was changing in a way I couldn’t, then, comprehend. Talk among my parents and their friends and colleagues seemed to inevitably come around to the “situation in Europe,” or the threat that came from farther east, from the “Land of the Rising Sun,” Japan. Wartime was coming with a frightening intensity we had not known before and in a way we have not experienced since — perhaps until now.
With the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor still a year-and-a-half away, the first United States Armed Forces training activities commenced on the campus. In June, 1940, boys who were enrolled in the government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program (a name that would be changed all too soon to War Pilot Training Program) were taught in TCU physics classes and were transported daily in buses provided by TCU to local fields for flying lessons. In June, 1941, the Engineer Defense Training Program began to give “up-training” for workers in war plants, plants like Fort Worth’s “Bomber Plant,” known to the present generation as General Dynamics. This training included classes in physics, chemistry, fundamental and advanced radio, accounting, and business administration. Again TCU provided classrooms and faculty.
Once America had entered the war, selective service went into effect and students were called to duty without deferment, many in mid-semester, some even in their last senior semester. To counteract the devastating effect this would have on young lives, the TCU faculty announced a “Policy for the War”, which assured that full credit would be given “to any student … called out by draft, for any course in which he has completed as much as half a semester,” and that degrees would be granted “to seniors who lack only a fraction of a semester when called by draft.” A tragic few would receive their degrees posthumously.
A few faculty would leave the campus also, either as reservists or enlistees. Such was the fervor of patriotism that many wanted to “join”, my father among them, but were reasoned, by the administration, into staying and perhaps serving their country with greater value in the classrooms. Faculty families became involved, too, volunteering to help out in recruiting stations located on campus or working in a Red Cross bandage-making room, which was located in Brite College and run almost entirely by faculty wives.
As the war rumbled on, more support for government programs was forthcoming. Beginning in September, 1942, and continuing through January, 1944, Jarvis Hall was made available to the Special Flight Instructors Program (AV-P), which was an experimental effort by the Navy to utilize, as instructors, a number of ensigns who were slightly over age or under physical requirements to make combat pilots. TCU was the first of only six such units in the United States. Other service units quartered in Jarvis during this same time were the Army’s and Navy’s Enlisted Reserve Corps, and a group of men in the Marine Corps, training for pilots.
The most memorable program to come to TCU was that of the Navy V-12, the purpose of which was to train officers for the Navy. Numbering approximately 200 all told with officers and trainees, they were given residence in old Clark Hall that then stood where Sadler Hall is today, while civilian boys were all moved to the other men’s dormitory, Goode Hall, and to the former girls’ residence, Sterling Cottage, both long since gone from the TCU scene. Their numbers and their white Navy uniforms made them conspicuous and, in the words of Dean Hall, they “added color to the entire campus.” The V-12 men took regular college courses, as well as the special technical training preparatory to their line of duty.
Every phase of every-day life seemed to center on the war. We didn’t have television, nor did reporters have satellite telephones and hi-tech video equipment to bring to us “live as-it-happens” sights and sounds of the maddest of madnesses, but we had more than plenty to see and hear through movie newsreels, newspapers, and radios. Immediacy was mercifully lost to those of us who were shakily safe at home. The buffer of time usually stood between us and the event, so that reports were of done deeds — the results were in, the dies all cast, by the time we heard. We saw the horror after it happened, rather than as it happened. No matter how much one wishes to participate, there is a certain solace in conclusions already concluded by forces beyond one’s control.
Urgent requirements for war materials naturally caused shortages in consumer goods, as peacetime industries geared up to produce guns, engines, war planes, and battle ships. To counteract hoarding and to insure fair distribution, the goverment set up a rationing program. “For the duration” of the war, we would become accustomed to using precious coupons for the privilege of purchasing coveted new shoes, meats, butter, sugar, and for the grownups, coffee and gasoline. “For the duration,” we saved everything from lard in large Crisco cans to empty toothpaste tubes to tinfoil gum wrappers that we rolled into fist-sized balls, all to be taken to locations where the recycling process would begin. “For the duration,” we bought United States Savings Bonds, bought and saved war stamps through public school programs, and conserved energy by cutting off lights and heat in rooms not being used. So engrained was this last in my “war” training, that I can hardly leave a room yet, without the warning memory-voice that echoes, “Did you turn out the light?”
New names entered our vocabulary and were used familiarly; we would name our dog, Blitzkrieg, and the baby kittens, Vinegar Joe (after General Stillwell), General MacArthur, Ike, and the little lady kitten, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Our songs turned from abstract nonsense and light love to those with more meaningful titles — “Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer.” The “Star-Spangled Banner” was seriously sung, not mindlessly mouthed.
The “duration” lasted forever it seemed, four years in fact, and then, it was over. As the reeling world tried to right itself, students, older now in many ways, were coming back on the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” a plan which gave generous tuition and fees assistance to veterans. Beginning before the November, 1945 Armistice, the number of veterans returning under this plan steadily increased so that by the 1946 Fall semester, a limit had to be placed on enrollment. To provide campus living space for the enlarged male population, barracks from shut-down service units in Brownwood and Camp Bowie were moved in. For a while, athletic teams were so filled with veterans that in 1948, when the freshman basketball team was comprised entirely of players straight out of high school, they were dubbed, because of their comparative youth, Coach “Brannon’s Brats.”
In its one hundred and eighteen years, the university has seen its family through four major conflicts. The Memorial Columns, with their lists of dead heroes, bear witness to two. Please Providence, we won’t have occasion to add another.
©1991 Joan Hewatt Swaim