Why I Wasn't There: A Soldier's Memoir of World War Ii Revised Edition

By Howard Pierson

Howard Pierson joined the US Army Air Corps to defend America against the intended exterminators of Europes Jews. However, he flunked navigation school and then repaired heavy-bomber machine guns. After the peace, he edited a GI newspaper in Germany, reported on trials of war criminals, and helped refugees. Decades later, he discovered to his surprise that his washout as a navigator was a dirty trick that a military intelligence officer had perpetrated in defiance of orders from Washington. The McCarthy era had begun early.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 19, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462819164

Howard Pierson

After his World War II service in the US Army Air Corps, Howard Pierson worked as a journalist and then was able to earn an MA in English and education, thanks to the GI Bill, one of several acts of Congress supported by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the purpose of helping veterans to return to civilian life and become successful citizens. He taught in New York City and Long Island schools, rising to chairman, dean, and principal. He then wrote a dissertation on a controlled experiment in teaching writing and completed the requirements for a Ph. D. degree. He also was an instructor and associate professor in literature and composition at several colleges. Prentice-Hall issued his book Teaching Writing in the 1970s, and he had a number of articles published in professional journals. After becoming a civilian again, Howard married a young woman who had come here from Poland with her family as a child; her many other kin were later murdered by Nazis during the war. The Piersons have two grown children, one a director of services for those with impaired vision, the other an elder care manager. In retirement, he studies birds and participates in the Nature Conservancy and a local Audubon society. He also edits a newsletter for retired school administrators and supervisors.

Book preview

Copyright © 1995, 2006 by Howard Pierson.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2006901551

ISBN 10:         Hardcover                          1-4257-0470-0

                       Softcover                            1-4257-0469-7

ISBN 13:         Hardcover                          978-1-4257-0470-4

                       Softcover                            978-1-4257-0469-8

                       Ebook                                9781462819164

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

32436

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Postscript

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WRITERS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY American history know a lot about the political turmoil in the 1950s that arose in the rivalry between the US and Russia and China. Their books echo the names of anti-Communists like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Karl Mundt, William Knowland, Herbert Philbrick, Elizabeth Chambers, J. B. Mathews, and Isaac Don Levine; of accused Communists Alan Nunn May, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, and the Hollywood Ten; and of convicted Russian agents like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They have cited periodicals whose circulations thrived by exposing alleged subversives, like Counterattack and Red Channels, and state investigators like the Moskoff and Denny Committees that fired suspected teachers and other civil servants who refused to name friends who had years before belonged to left-leaning student groups. This was a painful time for many innocents who suffered for their associations, not for crimes.

Some commentators trace the political witch-hunts of the McCarthy era to the fear of anarchists who figured in the Haymarket Riot and bombing in 1886 and the Palmer raids against aliens after World War I. Others hearken back even earlier to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which empowered President John Adams to bar dangerous aliens from entering the United States, in response to fears engendered by Thomas Jefferson’s endorsement of the French Revolution.

More recently, the 1930s and 1940s were also years of tumult over foreign influences. When Franklin Roosevelt gave diplomatic recognition to the USSR and supported the passage of laws allowing labor unions to organize and strike, business and patriotic groups warned that the nation was turning socialist. With the brutal ascendancy of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, refugees fleeing to America were seen by nativists as a baneful foreign influence, despite severe limitations on immigration begun in 1924. The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, further divided Americans into antifascists and interventionists versus anti-Communists and isolationists.

As Italy, Germany, and Japan invaded smaller nations, the USSR urged the West to join in collective security to stop such incursions. When Great Britain and France signed the Munich Pact in 1938 allowing Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia, the appalled Soviets made a non-aggression pact with Germany, grabbed eastern Poland while Germany took its west, and then Stalin wrested land from Finland by force. In the US, widespread revulsion against the Russians encouraged conservatives, including those in domestic intelligence, to ferret out and punish anyone even remotely connected with Communism and those suspected of favoring labor unions or racial equality. The hunt for Red subversion continued throughout World War II, even after Russia became our ally against Germany and Communists announced that capitalism was no longer the root of all evil.

Few scholars have examined domestic surveillance and punishment of alleged subversives in the Army during World War II. Agents evidently spent more time and energy investigating unionists, African-Americans and their white friends, admirers of Soviet successes against Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Socialists, and Communists than catching enemy agents and discouraging Axis sympathizers. (See Appendix A. ) It was not until many decades after I returned to civilian life that I learned secret operatives had intervened in my efforts to soldier against the nation’s wartime enemies.

During World War II, my youthful enthusiasm for stopping fascist Germany and Japan was not tempered by a sufficient realization that admirers here of Russia were too uncritical of their imagined Utopia. The enemy of our enemy simply seemed to be our friend. With a hindsight sharper than foresight, I now recognize that I might have avoided problems in the Army, had I steered clear of leftist students and had I not encountered and later corresponded with a union organizer when I was an aviation cadet. But left-wing students, naive and manipulated as they were, had been right about fascism, the rights of labor, and racial segregation when few others spoke up. And I had no way of knowing that my letter to Frank Roper would be illegally intercepted.

I have tried to report accurately the circumstances of my four-year military career, intelligence procedures, and pertinent national and world events. Conversations that occurred more than 60 years ago may appear fabricated, but they remain vivid in my memory, although not always verbatim. My aim has been to convey their essence without embroidery.

Some names of persons are fictional so as to avoid their or their families’ embarrassment. Historical names, like Franklin and Eleanor

Roosevelt, are already matters of public record, as are the names of persons mentioned in government files and cited in my listed sources. These files reveal some stateside functionaries’ wrongdoings, as I view them. The American cause in the war was just, nevertheless, so that such faults were not characteristic of those Americans serving abroad whose sacrifices helped to save us from unspeakable tyranny. I regret that I wasn’t there with them.

Now that we are at war with religious terrorists, I hope that our investigators will be more usefully employed than the men who wasted their time and my military career reading my Mom’s and Pop’s letters. The terrorists must be ferreted out, because, unlike my harmless parents, they are killing us and others. Terrorism is different from joining the IWO burial society, helping victims of Franco, or contributing funds to Russian War Relief in World War II, my family’s generous and innocent acts for which I, through kinship, was punished.

Permission is granted by arrangement with the Estate of Louis Untermeyer, Norma Anchin Untermeyer c/o Pofessional Publishing Services, and permission to reprint is granted with the expressed permission by Laurence S. Untermeyer, for the third stanza of Stephen Spender’s I Think Continually of Those in Louis Untermeyer, ed., Modern American Poetry/Modern British Poetry: A Critical Anthology.

Permission has been granted by Don Congdon Associates to reprint an excerpt from William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941. Permission has also been granted by the Oxford University Press to reprint some lines from Comus, a Masque in John Milton: The Major Works.

B-24 Liberator bomber cover photo by courtesy of the National Museum of the Air Force.

I also want to thank my wife Sally (Lamie) for her kindness and patience during the many long hours when I was unavailable while working on both the original, unpublished manuscript in the 1990s and on this revision. Thanks, too, to my son Robert for helping me to learn how to word-process on a laptop, also for his having grown to be a good friend. And thanks to our daughter Linda and her husband Dr. Leonard Stein for their caring and support.

CHAPTER 1

MINNA AND JACK

SINCE LETTERS FROM my parents were used as evidence against me, the kind of people they were belongs in this narrative. My mother Minna was born in New York County (Manhattan), New York City, on November 25, 1893, to Julius Berman, age 28, listed on her birth certificate as tailor and to Katherine Wilder Berman, age 23. (There was no space to list a mother’s occupation. ) Both parents were immigrants from what was then under Russia, probably from Kiev, now again in Ukraine, and lived at 98 Ludlow Street, New York, which was on the historically Jewish Lower East Side. My nephew Larry Zippin, whose Dad Leo had a store on Ludlow, says the street is now an upscale location with restaurants and discos and many residents of Chinese origin.

As a young woman, Minna worked in an uncle’s clothing factory. She told me that her parents made her wear shoes bought from a pushcart peddler. These were uncomfortably small, causing her bunions, she believed, and malformed feet that plagued her for a lifetime. I saw that her big toes were pointed inward. Nevertheless, she was quite good-looking to me, and I kept her photo with my belongings when I was in the Army. I recall, however, that, when I was a small child, while we lived in New Haven, she took me on a trolley car to the beach at Lighthouse Point. As we lay on the sand in bathing suits, I saw that her legs had large varicose veins, and I was repelled by the sight. While some adolescents are quick to dismiss their parents as ugly, they may be among those who earlier, as small fry, viewed Mom and Pop as perfect. It is often a disappointment to learn that one’s parents are human. I probably had caused the varicosity during her pregnancy.

Kate Wilder was Julius’ second wife. He apparently divorced the first. Besides Minna, their children were Gussie, Lily, Bessie, Mary, Morris, Larry, and Milton. In many parts of the world, even today, having numerous offspring can reward parents with a labor supply and support in old age.

In the early years of the twentieth century, women generally were housewives and mothers, as were Minna and her sisters, except for Mary, the youngest girl. I recall that, when my family lived during the 1930s in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, tenement owned by Kate, my Grandma, there were some attempts to interest a young radio repairman in Mary, but they failed. Although she seemed quite normal to me in our youth, I inferred in later years that she may have had learning disabilities.

Morris was severely impaired physically and mentally, brain-damaged when struck by a passing horse and cart and in a state institution most of his life. Larry worked for many years in a hospital, where he was very popular with his colleagues. Milton, the youngest sibling, was the only one in his family with a college degree, one in chemistry from the University of Georgia, whence he returned with a Southern accent and a distrust of FDR.

Jack, born Jacob, and his twin Albert arrived on December 15, 1888, in New Haven to John Herman Person and Annie. Both parents came from Vilna, also Russian-occupied, now Vilnius, Lithuania. A daughter, Ada, had preceded the twins by a few years. A third son was William, called Will. Their parents died, perhaps when Jack and Al were in their late teens or early twenties, so that the children lived with relatives in Connecticut. All of them apparently went to work after elementary schooling. Jack told me he had worked in an uncle’s junkyard, then as a shipping clerk, and once as an itinerant photographer’s helper snapping shots of children on the boss’ pony. At age 29 in 1917, he might have been drafted to serve in the World War I army but for severe astigmatism. Ada, a talented amateur pianist, married Herman Misheloff, a dairyman who later was a shopkeeper in New Haven; they had a son Norman, my contemporary. Will became a chiropractor in Davenport, Iowa, and never married. Neither did Al, who was a born comic and a gifted maker of cut-out silhouettes who never tried to profit from them.

Jack’s family moved to New York’s Lower East Side when he was young enough to learn to speak in what was then typical New Yorkese, which was influenced by the many Irish residents in the city (e.g., «Foist Avenue»). When he was a young man in 1914, friends photographed him at Walnut Beach, near Bridgeport, in a striped suit, tie, and white shirt, and high, laced shoes, sportswear not being available yet for the masses. His hair was black and curly, his nose prominent, his smile jaunty, his physique small and muscular. With no wife yet to monitor him, his long underwear showed a little under his trouser cuffs. During that same year, looking equally handsome and cheerful, he was snapped on East 21 Street in New York with Ada, slender and shy; twin Al, straighter of hair and thinner of body; and Will, smiling sadly and tired. The brothers wore Hoover-type collars, removable, and when not in use, stored in round leather boxes.

On April 29, 1919, the Reverend Fabian Light, Rabbi of Congregation Ateris Zvie, 178 East 108 Street, united in matrimony Jacob Herman Pierson and Minna Berman at 249 South Third Street, Brooklyn, in the presence of witnesses Max D. Gusowski and S. Blumenstein. In 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding, the Piersons’ first child Howard was born in Beth Moses Hospital, situated in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn but no longer there today.

The family lived briefly in a flat in Harlem, at that time, like Bedford-Stuyvesant, largely Jewish, in accordance with the custom of solidly ethnic neighborhoods. Our parents later used to tell us a story that a rat appeared in the bathroom there and that Pop, believing that ammonia would eliminate the intruder, poured some on. Instead, he almost suffocated himself. A broom handle finally did the job. Although my father’s gaffes made him the butt of our humor through the years, I, the smarty-pants-who-laughed, was not always above equal ineptitude, for example, inserting my foot into a paint can while backing down a ladder.

In the Twenties, we were a relatively happy family. It was a time of abundant, if not lucrative, jobs, stock investments by a nation of believers in ever-increasing prosperity, and a new fascination with images of celebrities touted in the print and film media and over the radio. We reveled in Lucky Lindy (Charles Lindbergh), crooner Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees orchestra, Yale quarterback Albie Booth, and cowboy actors like Tom Mix.

After Harlem, we moved to Vernon Avenue in Williamsburg. My grandparents lived nearby, and Grandpa kept geese in small stalls in his backyard. We then moved to New Haven, where Jack went to work selling clothing door-to-door for the Belmont Clothing Company. We first rented a flat in a house on Stevens Street owned by an Italian family, who fussed over me and plied me with sweets. Then we took a larger flat across the street.

I went to kindergarten at the Oak Street School and became very fond of my teacher, Miss Joyce. She seemed quite beautiful to me, but when I mentioned it years later, Minna insisted that Miss Joyce was plain. Once, my teacher was absent, and I was so distressed that I refused to go to school until she returned. We had stoves in our classroom and baked gingerbread men, but I didn’t fancy mine, so Jack ate it. After that first year, I usually enjoyed any school I attended.

Pop kept his merchandise samples at home. One day he decided to use one of them as a gift for Miss Joyce, evidently since I spoke highly and often about her. Maybe he, too, thought she was pretty. The gift was pink underwear. Neither my family nor I, age five, was aware that it was any different from hosiery or a sweater. At my parents’ suggestion I later asked the teacher if the item fit, since they innocently wanted to have chosen it properly. She graciously replied yes. In later years, I asked Mom and Pop why they had sent such a personal gift, and they responded with persistent simplicity that it was all they had. When I came of age and responsibility, I regarded them more as my pupils than as my mentors, but later events in this narrative will illustrate the naivete that I continued to share with them.

My childhood mischief caused them problems that were difficult to handle. The son of our landlord owned a truck from which he hawked fruit in season. Seeing it parked in the front yard, I dared to eat a peach. The vendor saw me, rushed out, and slapped me. Pop then came out and slapped the slapper. I stood by indecisively, while they wrestled. When the opposition was sitting atop my hapless father, who was saying, «OK. I give up,» I became enraged, but before I could add my mite, my mother appeared and smacked the fellow with her handbag. He then got up and departed, vowing revenge.

The next recollection I have is waiting outside a courtroom on Howard Avenue, while my parents and the fruit man were inside seeing a judge. It was tiresome for a child to stand there. In later years, my parents said a neighbor woman had testified for the plaintiff that they had assaulted him, so that the judge had admonished and fined them. I guess they didn’t think of having me attest that I had been the one assaulted. Also, they apparently didn’t consult a lawyer, when summonsed. Innocents, Pop in particular, they were cheated by dishonest persons many times. By the same token, they were guileless in their relations with others, and sometimes naively outspoken. I guess I wasn’t very different.

We visited with my aunt Ada and her family, who lived not far away, and I always looked forward to her warm welcome and solicitude. We also made enjoyable trips on a trolley car into the countryside and past the Yale Bowl to Derby, where Jack’s cousins, the Pearsons, lived. Uncle Sam Pearson, a jovial man with ruddy cheeks and full, white moustache, kept a horse and milk wagon in the barn in the back yard, which looked out across the valley of the Housatonic River, where, on the opposite bank, locomotives pulling trains sounded haunting and thrilling calls to an enchanted little boy. His large old Victorian house with a long veranda on Caroline Street adjoined a connected look-alike building whose rooms he rented to itinerant men only, «to avoid trouble,» Louise told me many years later.

Aunt Lena, also ruddy cheeked and always smiling, was equally friendly. Although born with Huntington’s disease and disabled in using their limbs and in speaking, daughters Anna and Elizabeth were jolly, too, never too busy to offer a child a fruit or ask him about school. Daughter Louise worked for a nursing home. One snowy winter when I was unable to walk back up the slippery incline of the back yard, Louise came out and rescued me. Her younger sister Ruth was a motherly schoolgirl who had tended me when my parents were busy looking for a place to rent. The only sister who attended college, Ruth became an elementary teacher and married a man named Harold Glaser, a charming blond fellow with a red face who looked and spoke like a real Irish Bostonian.

Lena and Sam had two sons, Ben and Mush. Always smiling shyly and also beset by Huntington’s, handsome Ben walked only by hopping. He would cycle daily to the grocery store he ran on nearby Minerva Street, where children would come and point out candies they wanted to buy from a long case in his counter. He would always give me some, and he and his sisters never failed to thrust a dollar bill into my pocket when I visited during the Depression. As a child, I occasionally saw Mush (Manuel) at the house on Caroline Street, while he was on vacation from college looking like one of the Jazz Age undergrads then featured in the papers, with saddle shoes and a raccoon coat. He later became an eminent psychiatrist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in treating alcoholic physicians.

Back on Stevens Street in New Haven, I ran home from across the street one day and was knocked down by a passing Model A Ford. The auto must have been moving fairly slow, because I recall no pain as I lay in the road looking up at the car’s bumper. The gray-haired driver carried me to the sidewalk in front of my house. My mother appeared and took me inside. Since there was no guile or greed in my parents’ makeup, there was no injury claim, and my mother said the driver was a nice man.

In 1927, Minna gave birth to my brother Arthur in St. Raphael’s Hospital, New Haven, and, unlike my Beth Moses, it still serves the community. For some reason never discussed, no relative, not even a Derby Pearson, was recruited to mind me during the week or so of her confinement; therefore, my parents placed me in an orphan asylum. I was lonely there but made the best of it, assuming that such an exile was a common practice. When I grew up and questioned their decision, they said they had no choice.

After over 75 years, I remember only sleeping in a crib among dozens of cribs occupied by other children, knowing I was not an orphan but feeling I somehow had become one and belonged in the group, and being promised I could attend an evening marshmallow roast with older boys and then not included. My father visited me during a weekend and asked how I liked the place. He might have felt guilty that he and my mother had tried to soften the prospect by making the orphanage seem like a summer camp. I told him I missed my home, and he took me with him. I was insulted when, gathering my effects, an attendant asked if a pair of garters were mine; this, I felt, associated me with mere infants, who wore such accessories.

When Minna got home with Arthur, neighbors told her that they had seen me often wandering the streets. She bawled Jack out, while he tried to explain that he could not tolerate my continuing in the asylum. During my wanderings, someone called out from a window, «Jew bagel!» At five, I did not know that I would encounter more anti-Semites in my lifetime and that a European nation taken over by them would succeed in murdering millions of