Until I saw the episode, I had forgotten about the scrap drives for metal, clothes, rubber. I'd take my little wagon around picking up pots and pans and other items, worn-out kettles, say, in regular collection drives. (My wagons went from metal to wood during this period and after.) I don't remember much tinfoil except on candy and gum, possibly cigarette packaging, but I think we were asked to save that, as gum sticks were now wrapped in paper. For those so much younger, we didn't have aluminum foil until 1947, the year cited for Reynolds' Wrap's appearance, nor did we have anything like Saran Wrap, just wax(ed) paper. I know that several new plastic products had been created in the 1930s, mostly in our research laboratories; and these became much of the new synthetic reality, from nylon to Teflon. I've already mentioned that my toys became wood and plastic, not very durable plastic either, such as we have now. I even remember synthetic tires, rubber hard to come by.
I also remember pinups, not just the Betty Grable one. (Since I've always considered that Cyd Charisse had the most beautiful legs I ever saw, I never did understand the attraction of Grable, a popular platinum blonde movie musical actress who looks a bit heavy today.) Every Hollywood actress with big curves posed for such photographs, as Vargas paintings of big-bosomed sexpots in Esquire and elsewhere became GI famous in the days before Playboy and photographic nudity. I should mention here that I heard the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR, not very often but enough to ask about, but our well-censored times explained them with the euphemistic "fouled" rather than the obscene F-word so common among the GIs and, today, the rest of us. It wasn't until college that I learned the authentic GI version.
It's disturbingly curious how Omaha has an enduring place historically on both fronts, a deadly D-Day beachhead in Normandy and the manufacturing home of the Hiroshima Little Boy atom bomb's carrier, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay. (The Martin Company's manufacturing plant was where Offutt Air Force Base is today.)
I remember also FDR, the patrician Roosevelt, as a kind of minor deity. That's why he was voted in for an unprecedented fourth term and why I nearly filled a scrapbook with magazine and news clippings at his death just before my birthday in 1945, a 7-year-old crying over a dead President, how strange. While we had famous picture magazines like Life and Look, most of our news came in the newspapers, over the radio (Lowell Thomas being the most famous war reporter), and in the short newsreels preceding our movies, as if I'd ever forget those endless aerial clips of endless bombs falling in fatal diagonals to blossom into silent, billowing smoke and fire, as they destroyed cities and, mostly, civilians. Bill Mauldin's drawings, wry cartoons, and Ernie Pyle's columns kept us posted about the grunts, our very own hometown heroes. I am heartened that Burns has given the grunts the full credit their sacrifices are due--all those deaths, all those wounds, all those terrible memories--under several poor generals bluntly named.
Thus, it was enlightening that MacArthur's well-publicized wading ashore, when the American Pacific forces started retaking the Philippines, was merely a photo-op used by his propaganda corps, as the documentary put it, when his landing boat got stuck 75 feet out, just like Bush Leaguer's phony staged "Mission Accomplished" shot on the aircraft carrier on the California coast.
That our servicemen continue to suffer as being expendable, one of their most depressing discoveries according to various veterans in Burns' film, is not only part of the history of warfare and vainglorious politicians and generals but definitely a national open wound of recent history, as demonstrated in blurbs about David Halberstam's last (posthumous) book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. The History Book Club advertises it as "the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist explores the worst American military disaster since Little Big Horn." Max Frankel writes in The New York Times Book Review (23 September 2007), ". . . MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border . . . . ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history's greatest ambush. Halberstam writes: 'The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory.' . . . 'The Coldest Winter' still venerates the grunts on the ground and damns their feckless commanders." Korea, Vietnam, Iraq: "Korea was but the first of three American conflicts of his time that presidents ordered for dubious strategic ambitions, without the comprehension of either Congress or the public. Korea was where America first revealed its imperial ineptitude and where our military leaders vowed never again to wage a ground war in Asia."
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