by *written in 1983
Jim Wade is my father. He was 12 when World War II began for the United States.
Anyone who was alive then remembers what they were doing on that fateful December 7, 1941.
Dad was enjoying a Sunday matinee with his grandfather in downtown Evansville, Indiana. After the movie, Shadow of The Thin Man, with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, he and Grandpa Henry Harper walked over to Woods Drugs for a soda, only to find a crowd gathered inside around a shop radio listening to the initial reports from Pearl Harbor.
From this tender age, my father became a devotee of all things military — especially all things that involved the British Army. It became a lifelong pursuit of his, culminating in the collection of more than 1,700 books on warfare, biography, and world history, many of them specific to the British military and tradition. He even researched the Gurkhas and maintained correspondences with authors A.J. Barker and John Keegan.
Initially, said Dad, “America thought it would take 30 days.”
But when Day 60 came and went, the idea of war for a Midwestern kid became far less cinematic and far more serious. During the war effort, Evansville was a major manufacturer of aircraft parts, and he recalled that the factory workers who built the plane components were sure to be found in the town theaters most every night.
He spoke fondly of going to the movies often during the war years. Everyone went to escape the grind. For Dad, the newsreels before the movie were as fun as the feature attraction. The crowd would applaud the Yanks and hiss the Nazi villains.
Dad remembered the death of famous Hoosier war correspondent Ernie Pyle (killed in 1945 on a tiny island near Okinawa) as a sad day. Pyle was the favorite son of my home state during the war and had been a student in the 1920s at Indiana University at the same time when my granddad Jimmy Wade was enrolled there. According to Dad, Pyle and Jimmy even sat together on the front steps of the Delta Upsilon house one evening.
Evansville underwent only one blackout during the war, and Jimmy was an air-raid warden. Dad remembered with amusement that Jimmy had fallen off his bike in the dark that evening while on his patrol.
In the summer of 1943, the military conducted paratrooper maneuvers over Evansville. Dad said that the troops tore up the downtown bars and raised all kinds of mayhem, which angered some townspeople.
Dad was 15 when FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945. He remembers sitting in his bedroom doing homework that afternoon when his mom came up to tell him the news. During a memorial assembly for FDR held that same night in Bosse High School auditorium, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
At war’s end on V-J day, Dad and Jimmy were driving home from spending the day in Indianapolis. He and my Granddad talked a lot about the whole war and what it held for the US from start to finish.
The Second World War made my father, who later served in the U.S. Army, instantly interested in history and especially a follower of military history. Since then, Dad has read nearly everything he could get his hands on regarding the war. Today he probably knows more about specific campaigns than most. His was an experience of growing up as the War progressed as well.
Stuart Wade 