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MAKING SOLDIERS: THE BOYS WHO BECAME THE MEN


On December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized public opinion in favor of war. In June 1942, a “New York at War” parade up Fifth Avenue attracted about 500,000 participants and 2.5 million spectators. The parade was intended, according to The New York Times, to “visualize the magnitude and intensity of the city’s contribution to all phases of the war program.” The Times pointed out that the crowd was larger than in “any other single American city with the exception of Chicago, and there were twice as many people along Fifth Avenue as live in Detroit or Los Angeles.”1 By 1943, it was estimated that 600,000 New Yorkers were in the armed services.2 By one account, some 800,000 New Yorkers served in the military overall during the war years.3 For many children of these World War II veterans, their parents’ military service was a conspicuous point of pride.
The New York veteran Ed German is a painter and the host of a public radio jazz program that airs on WPPB, on Long Island. He lives comfortably on Long Island, in a home filled with works of art and the music he loves so much. He is both a public and a private personality, carefully sharing stories that reveal bits and pieces about himself and the world he grew up in. Recently, he published his autobiography, Deep Down in Brooklyn. He says of himself, “I don’t consider myself an African American. I am an American Negro. We’ve been Slaves and Nigras and Niggers and Colored and Spades and Spooks and Coons and Splibs and Afro Americans and Blacks, but Negro conclusively describes for me who I am and the journey that my continental ancestors took.”4
German’s parents, originally working in agriculture, were from Georgia and came from a large family: Between my mother and my father, he says, I had twenty-two aunts and uncles, eleven on each side of the family.
German’s family left the South in the early 1940s, as part of the great African American migration to the North. They moved first to southern New Jersey, where his father worked as a sharecropper. The African American population in New York City had more than doubled from 1900 to 1920 and then doubled again in the 1920s. By 1940, African Americans represented 6 percent of the city’s total population.5 They would make Harlem famous as a cultural enclave, but they also populated many other neighborhoods, like Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
Eventually, the German family moved to Brooklyn. Ed’s father got a job as a building superintendent there, and his mother did domestic work. German was born at 533 Halsey Street in Bed-Stuy. His father, born in 1916, had fought in both the European and the Pacific theaters as part of a quartermaster company, picking up some French and German language skills along the way. All his uncles served in the war as well. German has never forgotten learning about his father’s service.
When I was a little boy living on Willoughby Avenue and my parents used to leave the house, we kids often would do what my mother and father [called] plundering. We’d just go up into their room and just looking at stuff, you know, opening doors and closets. And I remember one day I looked in my dad’s closet, and I saw his old Army uniform. It was in a clothing bag. I unzipped it, and I looked, and I said wow. I was only about eight years old when I saw it. I saw the medals on the outside of it, and then I looked in the inside jacket, in the inside pocket of the jacket, and there was a little leather folder in there, and I pulled this leather folder out, and I looked in it, and his Honorable Discharge was in there.
After the discovery of his uniform, German senior began to share stories of his war experience. They left a lasting impression, especially the story of his war wound.
He got shot one day in the wrist. And he told us the story. He said while he was in Germany, I think, he said he had bought a new watch. I forgot the name of the watch, but it was a really stylish kind of watch to have at that time, and he said he bought a new watch. And he was driving the jeep and he had his left hand holding on to the top of the window of the driver’s side window and he was showing off his new watch, you know, because he was—that’s what he said, he said he was showing off his watch. And he was just driving along and a bullet hit him in his wrist. And he used to show us a small bullet mark on his leg, too. I don’t know how he got that one. But he was over there from 1943 to 1946. He came home in 1946.
German would later write in his memoir: “I can see from all of this that he’s been somewhere far away and done something important.”6 By the time German returned home from Vietnam in June 1969 with his own military discharge papers and the Purple Heart medal he’d earned for being wounded in action, the idea of the uniform as a symbol of pride had changed drastically for him.
The historian Joshua Freeman writes, “In the memories and memoirs of working-class New Yorkers, the neighborhood looms large.”7 This certainly seems to be true for the Vietnam veteran John Flanagan, who was born on November 6, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He recalls his home and the surrounding area with a degree of bitterness mixed with anger. In his memory, the block was mainly Irish, although there were a significant number of Puerto Rican families too, and the overcrowding was intense, with as many as four families sharing a two-bedroom apartment and adults sleeping in shifts.
I was the fifth child of first-generation Irish. All four grandparents came from Ireland. Most of the uncles worked “longshore” or became policemen … my father worked for the city in the Parks Department. We lived on Fortieth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. It was my grandmother’s house. My grandmother lived on the top floor. We had the second floor and the basement. We didn’t have a lot of money at all. Money was tight, and I mean all the time. Having a grandmother living on the top floor who owns the house didn’t make it any easier. She was a widow and always had one or the other of her sisters that were maidens that were living up there.
Since we lived in the house with her, we were always no good, and all of my cousins, since they didn’t live there, they were always so good. So we were always being told how bad we were and how good they were.
Flanagan had two sisters and a brother, who was two years older than he was. Shortly after Flanagan’s first birthday, his brother died.8
That sort of destroyed my father. He was just bitter, drank an awful lot, and we had some really terrible times with him. Although I recognize all of the things he went through—what I had to go through with him—I just absolutely hated him. I hated the house and to be there with him.
When they got the autopsy, they found that [my brother] had some kind of lead poisoning. It wasn’t until my mother died [and] we were going through some stuff that I came across the letter from the doctor and the results of the autopsy.
I got a remembrance of the funeral; he was laid out in my...