My Small Part in WWII or How I Discovered St. Tropez Before Brigitte Bardot

By William D. Rouse

In what may be our last personal account of WWII, 91 year old veteran William D. Rouse has just released his memoir, My Small Part in WWII or How I Discovered St. Tropez Before Brigitte Bardot. Rouse's witty and sometimes darkly perceptive series of snapshots of the life of a sailor on a hospital ship, the U.S. Refuge, both offshore and on, brings an era to life through its dangers, its music, and its people. A vibrant addition to the social history of the period, My Small Part in WWII is both an entertaining, and an enlightening, read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William D. Rouse
• Release date: Oct 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310094132

William D. Rouse

It is never too late to fulfill a dream, something William Rouse knows well. The 90-year-old WWII veteran Rouse has just published his first book, an imaginative, witty novel called Plucked Again! in the sci-fi fantasy genre for teens to adults. Rouse is not new to writing, having first gone to college on a play writing scholarship. The demands of work and raising a family put his writing on the sidelines, but Rouse never gave up.An analyst with the U.S. Public Health Department, Rouse retired but did not slow down, learning carpentry and renovating old Virginia houses, working as a freelance antiques dealer, and even trying his hand at chicken farming while living on the Eastern shore, Virginia. While chicken farming was not for him, it did inspire Rouse to weave the entertaining and insightful Plucked Again! in the process.A highly original tale, Plucked Again! manages to be both funny and insightful as protagonist Flanker is given a second chance at life with the guidance of a surprising guru, Mac, an ancient, very wise, talking chicken. While Mac leads Flanker to making sense of his past and improving his future, Plucked Again! takes the reader on an entertaining journey that also proves to the rest of us that it is never too late to pursue your dreams.

Book preview

My Small Part in WWII

or

How I Discovered St. Tropez Before Brigitte Bardot

By William D. Rouse

Copyright 2015 William D. Rouse

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American participation in WWII started the day of Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941, but my own anticipation of American participation started years earlier. My eldest brother had long aspired to be a print journalist and positioned and proven himself enough to land a job with the local paper, the Newport News Times-Herald and Daily Press, after graduation from college. He returned home, and as a small luxury/career aide started subscribing to Time Magazine. Since he was my writing mentor, I read the magazine, cover to cover, starting at about eight or nine. So the sequence of events which started with the Spanish Civil War and led to WWII was somewhat familiar.

Even had I been ignorant of the larger events and context, there was chronic, unmistakable evidence within two miles of our home, when one was on one of the major overpasses over the dozen or so Chesapeake & Ohio RR tracks leading south to the deepwater loading terminal some four or five miles distant. Each weekend starting several years prior to Pearl Harbor, there would be eight or ten tracks filled with interminable, immobile trains, awaiting resumption of loading on Monday. The trains were all boxcars filled with scrap iron, bound for Japan, and I heard a number of older, respected townspeople say quietly that sooner or later that scrap iron would all be coming back at us. This was but the first of the many illustrations seen in my lifetime that the common sense of the people often exceeds the intelligence of its leaders.

All the evidence in newspapers, newsmagazines and at hand gave me an uneasy feeling that the Axis Powers could scarcely be defeated without American intervention, if then. After all, there had been an incessant drumbeat of losses and disasters in everywhere the war was being fought, on land, on sea, in the air. It seemed to me a near replay of Athens vs. Sparta, in which the nations who had prepared for war had brought war’s strategy and tactics, not to mention its technology, to heights previously unimaginable, and in the cases of Japan and Germany had been able to instill a belief in its warriors that death on the battlefield was the ultimate glory.

Eventually, it took the death of millions, the endless sacrifices of the Russian people, plus their dazzling feat of moving most of the heavy production behind the Ural mountains, American production capacity which in time helped offset German fighting skills and weaponry, and a host of other factors and innovative individuals too numerous to list. If there was one person who meant more to our success than any other, it was Winston Churchill, our Henry of the seemingly endless series of Agincourts that the Allies faced over more than four years, and in his magnificent rallying speeches and historical book series, its’ Twentieth Century Shakespeare.

Pearl Harbor Day: Shock, confusion, anger, and the sudden realization by every adolescent or older American male that sooner or later he would face the draft. The following day, there was a small radio in every classroom so that all students could hear Roosevelt’s a day which will live in infamy speech, asking Congress for a Declaration of War. Less than two months later, I graduated from High School one semester behind my class due to teen age hubris. A semester or so earlier, my home room and English teacher had informed our class that we would have to memorize a sonnet in order to pass her course. My thought: She’ll not flunk me - English is my best subject. So I didn’t, and she did.

After graduation, I went to work at the Newport News Shipyard, hand counting the inventory of various plumbing parts. I witnessed an example of credential over competence: Our respected guru, the man who knew procedures, practices, procurement, and