A Different Kind of War Story: A Conscientious Objector in World War Ii

By Edward M. Arnett

Summary of A Different kind of War Story-
a Quaker conscientious objector in WWII
The book carries the writer through his experiences in WWII as a draftee into Civilian
Public Service ( CPS ), the official structure for handling conscientious objectors ( COs ) . Among his various assignments to CPS camps and projects are that to the Forest Service Smokejumper unit where he parachuted into remote areas of the Rockies to put out small forest fires before they become big.
Also , of special interest is his description of transferring
1, 200 wild horses on a cargo ship to Poland as aid for reestablishing Polish agriculture and some observations on Poland under the Soviet occupation during the early years of the cold war .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469198026

Edward M. Arnett

Edward M. (Ned) Arnett was born in Philadelphia , in 1922 . He grew up in the Quaker pacifist environment and served as a conscientious objector during WWII on projects described in this book . From the age of ten he cultivated an interest in chemistry and spent most of his life as a teacher and research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and Duke University . He was elected to the National Academy of sciences for his research in organic and physical chemistry . He and his wife Sylvia have raised five sons and now live in Durham , North Carolina .

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Edward M. Arnett .

Library of Congress Control Number:   2012906577

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.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

Introduction

One    College under Conscription

Two    CPS Camp # 42: Big Flats, NY, Eastern Induction Center under American Friends Service Committee and U.S. Soil Conservation Service

Three    CPS # 94 Trenton, North Dakota, under AFSC and U.S.Reclamation Service

Four    CPS # 103: Missoula, Montana, The Smokejumper Project under the Mennonite Central Committee and the U.S. Forest Service

Five    CPS # 132: Laurel, MD, under AFSC and Selective Service

Six    The Cattle Boat Project: A Cowboy in the Merchant Marine, under the Brethren Service Committee, Church World Service and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

Introduction

In 1998, Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation reminded Americans of the thirteen million young men who served this country in a war that had the almost universal support of its citizenry. It was also a war that could be remembered as basically the Good War in the years following, as the U.S. has stumbled from one increasingly dubious and unpopular military engagement to another—Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on.

This book attempts to tell the much less familiar story from the viewpoint of the twelve thousand conscientious objectors who refused to join the military and were drafted to do work of national importance under Selective Service in a variety of Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps and special projects. Of those who refused to join the war effort, the largest groups came from the three historical peace churches—Mennonite, Brethren, and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)—who have stood stolidly against participation in war ever since their establishment in the Anabaptist movement during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which attempted to follow the precepts of simplicity and pacifism that they believed typified the early Christian church.

The peace churches were also the ones who hammered out the arrangements with Selective Service that established the different types of alternative service for those who refused to join the armed services. Objection to military service is as old as the Christian church, and as the attached table shows, members from 228 other denominations than the three peace churches were in CPS camps and projects. All of the mainline churches were represented regardless of their official positions on war and a plethora of smaller less familiar ones can be found on the list.

The decision to take the position of a CO in America during the Second World War would have been a poor tactic for dodging the draft. The life of a conscientious objector and his family in a small patriotic American town, neighborhood, or church could be extremely unpleasant and even dangerous.

Nonetheless, there were very few men who had established their positions with Selective Service and became registered as COs, who later reversed their positions and joined the military. However, a significant number walked out of CPS in protest to being government slaves and spent the rest of the war in prison. The majority of COs were very strongly motivated by their opposition to war on religious grounds. In addition, a number were objectors to conscription or on the basis of one or another political ideology; a few were even sympathetic enough to the fascist cause to be assigned to CPS camps.

Although there are a number of good books that discuss objection to WWII from a variety of religious and political viewpoints, I know of none that describes the experience through the eyes of an ordinary religious objector negotiating the Selective Service/Civilian Public Service System. This account attempts to fill that niche.

I was born in Philadelphia, the Quaker City, in what is properly called the Quaker State, the inheritor to William Penn’s Holy Experiment. This was a heroic attempt to establish a new colony founded on Christian principles of religious freedom, democratic governance, and nonviolent resolution of conflicts as presented in the New Testament and other documents describing the early church. Some of Penn’s principles anticipated the development of the U.S. Constitution a hundred years later in Philadelphia.

My mother’s family had Quaker roots that were strongly liberal and pacifist. My father’s family was upper middle-class Episcopalian with little sympathy for Quakerism. However, when my father came out of World War I as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Service, he had a deep-seated disgust for war and for the support that many American churches had given to this most un-Christian activity. He was sorry he had not refused to serve in uniform.

I grew up close to my two grandmothers and to my parents in an atmosphere that was strongly religious—not only as steady churchgoers, but as people who considered all the decisions that life brought to them from a religious point of view. I was baptized as an infant in the Episcopal Church and grew up in a family that cared deeply about music, politics, and in living out their Christian commitment. Although there were frequent disagreements, especially about participation in war, there was a real atmosphere of mutual respect and love.

My father was a family doctor who lived in his car as he paid house calls to his patients. He was an ardent activist for world peace. My mother was a dedicated peace worker for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. My parents’ social concerns and especially their attitude toward war soon brought them to enroll me in the Germantown Friends School, a Quaker school operated under the care of Germantown Friends Meeting. Educationally, it is generally listed among the very top schools in the country. It also maintained a strong Quaker environment. Every Fifth Day (as Thursday was called in proper Puritan style), everyone—faculty and students, from seniors to kindergarten—went to meeting for worship. There we all sat in silent worship for an hour in the well-known manner of Friends.

Primary school students and kindergarteners were introduced to silent worship in their homerooms, the rest of us in the spacious meeting house. This style of worship appealed to me more than did the Episcopalian service, and I joined the Religious Society of Friends when I was twelve. Soon thereafter, my parents left their Episcopal Church and joined the Friends Meeting where I worshipped.

Meanwhile, the world was sliding toward the Second World War, and I was fully expecting that I’d have to take a position in opposition to it following the historic peace testimony of the Religious Society of Friends as shown in the following page. This describes with clarity the perennial conflict between ultimate loyalty to the state and the individual Christian conscience as guided by the Gospel. I was brought up with an ideal of service to my community and country. I was fully aware that America had granted an unusual privilege to conscientious objectors by providing alternatives to prison, concentration camp, or death that would have been their fate in many other countries. I felt a strong patriotic desire to help the war against the proclaimed enemies of Western civilization. Still, I felt that I owed a higher loyalty to the testimony of the Society of Friends and the ancient Christian commitment to peace.

Distribution of Conscientious Objectors by Denomination

Data taken from Directory of Civilian Public Service Published by The national Service Board for Religious Objectors, 941 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington D.C.

The Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends

(Quakers) from Faith and Practice of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, A Book of Christian Discipline (1955)

Since all men are children of one Father we are called to love and respect all persons, to overcome evil with good, and to meet with positive good will those with whom we disagree.

The Society of Friends has consistently held that war is contrary to these principles. this position has been stated and restated at frequent intervals.

We affirm the supremacy of conscience. We recognize the privileges and obligations of citizenship; but we reject as false that philosophy which sets the state above moral law and demands from the individual unquestioning obedience to every state command. On the contrary, we assert that every individual, while owing loyalty to the state, owes a more binding loyalty to a higher authority—the authority of God and conscience.

One

College under Conscription

There are events that happen in everyone’s life that mark such an important transition in the world around them that they will remember until the day they die just where they were and just what they were doing when the news reached them. Such a recent event was the suicide attack on the World Trade towers at about eight thirty on the perfect autumn morning of September 11, 2001, which we witnessed in real time on television as we were eating our breakfast.

The three most important dates that mark the lives of people in my generation are September 17, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and started WWII; December 7, 1941, when the Japanese navy sank much of the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor and brought America into the war; and, finally, August 6, 1945, when WWII was effectively ended, and life under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation began by the atom bombing of Hiroshima. The news of all three of these events came to us by radio, public television being about twenty years in the future.

When the war began, I was starting my senior year at Germantown Friends School. Quakers had been particularly interested in the murderous buildup to the war in Germany from its beginning, partly because of their relief operation to save the Germans from starvation after WWI and, more immediately, because of their close contacts