Photo by Larry Caldwell
Ray Call talks about wartime life in the small rural town of Sedan Kansas during the World War II Roundtable Spring Meeting on the Emporia State University campus Thursday night.
Members of the audience saw World War II through the eyes of youths Thursday night when three Emporians recalled their memories of the war at the spring World War II Roundtable at Emporia State University.
ESU history professor Christopher C. Lovett moderated the program, which featured Sally Holliman, Ray Call and Chuck Hanna.
Call, former executive editor of The Gazette, talked about the war from the perspective of a 9-year-old living in Sedan in Chatauqua County.
“Back then, as now, 9-year-olds lived in a different world than adults,” Call said.
His first evidence of hardship was the disappearance of a favorite treat because of shortages and rationing.
“No more Snickers, no more Milky Ways, no more Hersheys,” he said.
Instead, confectioners brought out a coconut-based bar, striped in red, white and brown.
“They were as tough as a leather belt and tasted like one, too,” Call said.
Another alternative, however, the Bit-O-Honey candy bar, made a hit with the children.
Call speculated that the federal law that mandated a 35 miles-per-hour highway speed limit had a long-lasting effect on his and future generations.
“I think my generation of kids originated the phrase, ‘Are we there yet?’” he said.
Living in Sedan, a rural community, had an advantage over big-city living. Residents routinely had cultivated gardens and relatives outside town had beef and hogs to slaughter, so a good supply of food was readily available.
Photo by Larry Caldwell
Over sixty were on hand Thrusday night to listen to speakers for the Would War II Roundtable Spring Meeting.
The war changed the children’s heroes, though, from comic book, radio and movie cowboy stars like Superman, Jack Armstrong and Hopalong Cassidy to stars of war movies like John Wayne and Robert Montgomery. The youngsters cobbled together military uniforms, make-believe hand grenades and battlegrounds, and waged war as they played. Boy Scouts learned to march in close-order drills as a parallel to the military exercises.
News reels that showed German planes being shot down fascinated and excited Call and his pals. They heard about the Japanese invading Alaska and sinking ships not far off the American coast. The Japanese launched perhaps 9,000 paper balloons containing highly explosive incendiary devices from Honshu and floated them across the Pacific to start wildfires in America. In Oregon, Call said, five children and one adult were killed as a result of the balloons. Newspapers were asked not to publish information about the fires, so the Japanese would not realize their success and send more balloons toward the U.S.
“There was plenty to be afraid of,” Call said. The children were less worried than the adults, though.
“We could hardly wait to be old enough to fly the planes, fire the machine guns and save the world,” he said.
But the day-to-day lives of the children in Sedan were not as affected as those of youngsters in larger cities. Sedan was small enough to walk anywhere citizens needed to go, so the gas rationing and rubber shortages were not as serious there. The sugar shortage was pervasive nationwide, though Call and his family may have suffered more than others when, briefly, his grandfather tried to make a sugar replacement from sorghum.
Call noticed that women’s skirt styles were becoming progressively shorter — likely because of a fabric shortage, he remarked — and some wives and girlfriends of sailors and soldiers grew lonely; “Dear John” letters to servicemen overseas became more common.
“But we knew all about this,” Call said. “There were no secrets in Sedan.”
The war provoked social phenomena that was reflected in the music of the era, Call said, pulling out a duck call to imitate a rude sound in the lyrics, “Heil, (pbbbt) Heil, (pbbbt) Right in Hitler’s Face.”
Call also recalled celebrating V-J Day — victory over Japan — at his aunt’s house in Wichita when the Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945.
The end of the war brought an unexpected change, as servicemen and women and their families sought work or adventure or higher education through the G.I. Bill in other areas of the country instead of returning home to Chatauqua County.
Call described the change with a line from another song, this time from World War I: “How’re You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?”
Chuck Hanna, at 12, was three years older than Call when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
“I remember being in the living room in our home ... when the announcement came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed,” Hanna said. “The next day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appeared before Congress and asked to declare a state of war.”
The war already had been going on for more than two years in Europe, after Germany invaded Poland and marched into France and other European countries, and south into Libya and Egypt in northern Africa.
The U.S. was supplying planes and pilots as volunteers to help Great Britain, he said, and in 1940, America initiated the draft to bring up the Army’s manpower levels.
“Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were among some of the first drafted,” Hanna said of the movie stars.
In Miss McGlinn’s class at Lowther Junior High School, Hanna and his classmates read newspapers daily and followed the war as part of their study assignments.
Enrollment at ESU, then Kansas State Teachers College, dropped as men were drafted or enlisted for the war effort. Some women took their places on campus, but many women had to go to work to replace the men who had left.
The war brought some economic boons in Emporia. A tent and awning company made canvas goods to supply the military, both U.S. and European. The AT&SF Railroad hauled car after car of military supplies, as well as soldiers.
“At that time, Emporia was really a hub of the railroad,” Hanna said. “... The railroads were the basic transportation means for commodities.”
Automobile plants ceased turning out cars and trucks and instead began manufacturing products like tanks and military trucks and trailers.
“As a result of that, there was a lot of necessity for scrap iron,” he said.
In eastern Kansas, Lawrence and Parsons benefited with their munitions plants, and Wichita saw increased demand for manufacturing airplanes. Some of them were sent to Europe through a lend-lease agreement between governments. European countries were to repay America for the planes after the war ended.
“I don’t think we ever got paid, but we did it,” Hanna said. “We were paid by winning the war.”
At his father’s grocery store, some commodities like sugar, coffee and cigarettes were in short supply. Citizens were limited to a rationed two pounds of beef each week.
“Everybody had a garden,” Hanna said. “They were promoted by the government. We had a grocery store, but we had a victory garden, too. We wanted to be patriotic.”
Patriotism had spread across the nation, he said, comparing the atmosphere in World War II to the open opposition to war seen during the Vietnam era and now, in Iraq.
“There was no comparison, the attitude of the country backing the war effort,” Hanna said. “ ... It was not just lip service, but they supported it.”
Soldiers and sailors could hitchhike anywhere in the United States and rely on someone being willing to pick them up and deliver them to their next destination.
“The government made the attempt to get citizens to help fund (the war) as much as they could, not by taxes but by war bonds,” he said.
The bonds paid about 4 percent interest and gained considerable support across the country.
“That was, again, a patriotic thing to do,” Hanna said.
Seventeen-year-old Sally Holliman moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the summer of 1944.
“This was a secret community, and it was created in a rural and isolated part of Tennessee,” Holliman said.
Oak Ridge was the largest of three communities in the U.S. that were dedicated to developing atomic weapons under the code name of the Manhattan Project.
The city, built “from the ground up,” she said, was nestled in the Tennessee Mountains.
Holliman recalled Oak Ridge’s dirt streets, wooden sidewalks and ever-present dust, except during rainy times, when the streets turned to mud.
The complex was 17 miles long, 7 miles wide, enclosed by a tall barbed-wire fence, and guarded by 750 military police officers, she said; only seven gates were installed to enter or leave Oak Ridge.
The MPs routinely searched residents who passed through, going through luggage and purses each time.
At first, trailers and dormitories had been used for housing but, over time, pre-fabricated houses were built on stilts to keep them away from the mud.
Schools provided excellent educations, with many of the teachers holding master’s degrees.
The city was like many others of the time, with theaters, schools, grocery stores, a hospital, barbershops and one church, which the different denominations shared by reserving certain days and times for worship. Much was done to help maintain morale and normalcy for the citizens of Oak Ridge.
“But, nevertheless, it was still a glorified Army camp,” Holliman said. “Every man, woman and child had to have a badge” for identification.
Military police officers guarded the town from towers and checked residents as they came and went.
“Every worker there had to have a security clearance,” she said.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents checked on residents of the community about every six months.
Holliman recalled that her mother was having coffee at a neighbor’s home when an agent knocked on the neighbor’s door. He wanted to know more about the family next door — Holliman’s family.
“My mother heard all the questions and all the answers,” Holliman said.
Residents knew that something secret was happening in Oak Ridge, but within a short time, they accepted the situation. They knew little more than the basic fact that the industry in Oak Ridge was dedicated to making a defensive weapon.
Oppenheimer and Fermi were among the scientists who worked there on the Manhattan Project.
“You could always tell who the scientists were,” she said. “They had two briefcases and usually their socks didn’t match.”
The secret kept in Oak Ridge was revealed on Aug. 5, 1945, when residents heard that 100,000 people had been killed by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Days later, the same scenario was repeated in Nagasaki, with 40,000 people killed.
Holliman described the reactions she observed as people gathered in the town — surprise, wonder, shock, apprehension and some fright.
“People were kind of proud, too, that we had done this,” Holliman said.
She recalled car horns blaring, whistles tooting and people shouting as they celebrated the triumph over their enemy. Soon, residents began to worry about the aftermath of the bombings.
“The newspapers showed burns on these people, and there was talk of radiation,” she said.
The radiation aspect made them uneasy. When a radiation leak happened at Oak Ridge, before the bombings, officials announced instructions for residents to cleanse themselves.
“We were all to go home and take a shower,” she said.
The people of Oak Ridge, however, knew their city had made a “major and permanent contribution to a peacetime world,” she said.
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