A Child's View Of World War II

By Dan Summerfield

From December 7, 1941 to September 2, 1945 when the Japanese surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, America was consumed with the war fronts in Europe and the Pacific. But because those years were spent in the relative isolation of an orphanage, this child's view of the war was necessarily limited to a very small portion of the home front. Despite that limitation, the war affected every aspect of my life and the lives of all the children at the orphanage.

For the civilian population World War II was a time of giving, though we children in the orphanage had nothing to give. It was a time of sharing, but all we shared was a poverty stricken environment with thirty or forty other children. When the war was finally over our celebration was short lived because while the rest of America went on to unheard of prosperity our poverty continued.

That poverty, however, was the simplest part of the equation. The complexities came with the memories of the war and how it affected each of us, now as well as then.
This then is a child's view of World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Summerfield
• Release date: Apr 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458188045

Dan Summerfield

A retired broadcaster, Dan Summerfield lives quietly in West Michigan with a friend. The friend is a cat named Dollar whose greatest wish is to use the symbol $ in place of his name. That way it will become the symbol of a feline formerly named Dollar.

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A CHILD'S VIEW OF WORLD WAR II

Dan Summerfield

Copyright 2011 by Dan Summerfield

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover photo courtesy Department of Defense

Cover art by Dan Summerfield

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God makes three requests of his children: Do the best you can, where you are, and with what you have now.

African proverb

FOREWORD:

From December 7, 1941 to September 2, 1945 when the Japanese surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, America was consumed with the war fronts  in Europe and the Pacific. But because those years were spent in the relative isolation of an orphanage, this child's view of the war was necessarily limited to a very small portion of the home front. Despite that limitation, the war affected every aspect of my life and the lives of all the children at the orphanage.

Whether child or civilian adult, the war determined the relationships one had, where one lived, what one had to eat and what clothing to wear, and where he or she worked or went to school.

For the civilian population World War II  was a time of giving, though we children in the orphanage had nothing to give. It was a time of sharing, but all we shared was a poverty stricken environment with thirty or forty other children. When the war was finally over our celebration was short lived because while the rest of America went on to unheard of prosperity our poverty continued.

That poverty, however, was the simplest part of the equation. The complexities came with the memories of the war and how it affected each of us, now as well as then.

This then is a child's view of World War II.

CHAPTER 1

It is strange living in the 21st century knowing that an event directly influencing my life took place in an early year of the last century.

The year was 1917 and the event was the United States entry in the Great War, which later became known as World War I. Though we were involved in those European battles for just over a year and a half, the U.S. took its share of casualties, among them my father who didn't get his gas mask on in time and inhaled some of the dreaded mustard gas. He would spend over a year in a military hospital before being declared recovered and discharged. The recovery was never complete however, and the mustard gas inhaled in France in 1918 would cause the cancer that killed him in the early 1940s.

I have few memories of my father, Charles Allsbury Summerfield. I’ve been told he had an eye for the ladies and loved a drink, but I have no first hand knowledge of these. One thing I do remember quite clearly is the large cancerous goiter that hung from the side of his neck like an overripe honey dew melon.

In 1937, the year of my birth, America was still in the Great Depression. The times continued to be very hard, little money was circulating and the word poor was no longer commonly used to describe a person or family. What Americans had once called poverty was now the median condition in the United States, as it was in most industrialized countries. But even given the acceptance of a certain level of poverty as the norm, our family was known as poor.

Dad and my mother came to Michigan from the coal and