October 19, 1944
EXTRA POST
Daily Newspaper of
U.S. Armed Forces in the European Theater of Operations MONDAY, Oct. 16, 1944
Home is Lights,
Legs, Steaks;
Strikes, Black
Markets, Too
After
three years overseas, Bud Button Stars and Stripes staff writer, pulled
out of the line in France on D-50 and
went back to the States for 60 days of
leave
and
duty, travelling through New England,, the East and the South, some of the Mid-West, and talking to combat veterans
from every corner of the nation
Now
he is back in the ETO. Herewith a report on life back home.
By Bud Button
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
How is it back
there, back home! You
get off the plane, less than hours from home, and it's the first thing
folks in the ETO ask you. How is it back there? They pause a little
before they say "back there" and their eyes go kind of bright
and they lean forward. You've known this was coming; for 6 days you've
known it and for the last 30 days you've wondered how the. Hell you
were going to answer it. So you wait for the questions:
Lot
of food! Steaks, huh!
There is a lot of food back home,
all anyone wants. Meat is rationed, but there are steaks, and the rationing
isn't pinching anyone's gut. And if your butcher doesn't heap on the measure,
as most do, you can—if you are like a very, very large number of the folks back
home—get any kind of meat you want on the
black market. Some canned foods
are scarce, but not very as far as I could make out.
They don't have
any blackout, do there Are the lights bright! Theaters' Night clubs'?
There was a so-called dimout in
part(Continued on page 2) of the
country for a while. It's gone now Maybe there aren't as many lights as there
used to be, but it was awfully bright to eyes which have squinted through England's
nights for a year 'with the Canadians and another two with the
Americans.
Night clubs are roaring and from
the few I was in—in New York and Washington— about one-quarter of the patrons are
servicemen, mostly men stationed in
the States. Liquor has gone up in
cost but you can get bourbon, rye and gin for less than $4 a 'bottle, and
Scotch—good Scotch—for something more. Most bars charge half a dollar a drink
for straight whiskies, 'beer is still ten cents but the glasses are smaller.
Good corn is S4 a gallon in Missouri.
How are the
women?
Mac, it's hard to realize how
beautiful American women are "until you get back to them and -see those
lovely long legs swinging down Fifth Avenue, or coming out of the Statler door,
or going into the Beverly-Wiltshire. The shops don't have silk or nylon hose
for them anymore, but you can get nylons on the black market for six or seven
bucks a pair.
Everybody
staying home, though, eh?Petrol—/ mean- gasoline—-rationed and not
much driving?
Gasoline is rationed. In the East
il costs 19.9 cents a gallon and twice that on the black market, where anyone
can buy all he wants. Some people are staying home and some aren't. In the
country lots of folk got out old buggies and horses.
What about those
strikes? How come?
The government says there have
been less than one per cent of the nation's workers on strike. I guess they
know. Every day I was home there was strike news of some kind in the papers.
Mostly it's because the workers want more money and the employers don't give it
to them. 1 don't know who's to blame.
Guess with all
those chocolate malted and ice cream and all that stuff you hated to come back,
eh Hard to leave, eh!.
There's all the chocolate malted
milk you can drink. A lot of soda fountains will sell only one pint of ice
cream to a customer. I was glad to come back.
Only one pint of
. . . Did you say you were glad to come back! You're nuts. Why!
This is the way it is . . .
Tomorrow:
Why the returned
combat veterans Button met back home wanted to get overseas again.
Daily Newspaper of
U.S. Armed Forces in the: European
Theater of Operations TUESDAY, Oct. 17,
1944
'How'd
You Like It Over There,'
Folks
Ask—They Don't
Know
This
is the second article in which Bud Hutton, Stars and Stripes staff writer who
spent 60
days in the U.S. after three
years
overseas, reports on~how things are
back there.
By Bud Button
Stars
and Stripes Staff Writer
You say you
asked to come back? You're glad to be here? Why? It's hard to put
in words. I:'s hard to be specific. It's hard not to –exaggerate some
bitterness. It's compounded of a lot of things. Maybe it's best to tell
how some of the others found it, fellows who had seen combat over
here and found, after they'd been home a while, that they wanted
to go'back to the war. Wait a minute, first. You can't blame the folks back
home because they haven't been bombed, you know. No, you can't blame them
because they don't know what war's like. But you can blame them
for not caring.
Tom Kelly was a technical
sergeant, a gunner who finished up his tour of missions back in the early days,
when there weren't any fighter escorts and losses
used to get up around five per
cent a haul. He went home a year ago. The second day he was home in Boston
a fellow said to him, "Boy! I'll bet you're gonna miss all that good.
Scotch you got over there now you're home." A couple of weeks ago, Tom,
who had been trying to get a waiver for his eyes so he could go back to the
war, was in a bar in Oakland. N.J. - He got talking to some people and finally
one of them said. "Well, you fellows have had a tough time all right,
but it hasn't been any picnic for
us back here, either. The cost of living has gone right out of sight." Tom
got his waiver last week and ought to be in the Pacific any day now.
Just an Isolated
Case
Yes, but those
are just isolated instances. There always have been jerks like that.
Okay, maybe Tom was just unlucky,
and maybe I was just unlucky one day on the Erie ferry from New York to Jersey City
when I heard one woman say to another, "You know, Ella, if this war'll
just last two years more my husband and" I aren't ever going to have to
worry again." And maybe I was just unlucky when I went to dinner in the home
of some folks who knew I'd spent a fair share of the first 50 days of 'he invasion
eating K rations; the husband, who was in the last war, said. "We're having
canned pineapple tonight because you're here. You'd never know how hard it's
been to get decent food back here."
In Atlantic City, on Labor Day
night, Sylvester Dudek, a staff sergeant gunner who flew with the Polish Air
Force and then the American, stood on the highway leading out of town and
watched a procession of cars, solid without a break, pass for three hours and
they were still coming when Dudek said' to hell with it and went back to the
rest home there with a strained, hard look on his face.
Okay, maybe those are just
isolated instances. I guess it was so with a Kid named Howard Hartney, from Tuskaloosa,
Ala., a Liberator gunner, who stood outside the railroad station in' Washington
and watched people going past and said with a face that was too young to be
hard, but was hard, nevertheless,
"I been back three days and
if the rest is like I've seen so far I'm going back to the goddam war just as
soon as I can."
And maybe it's an isolated
instance with a kid named Eddie Foulds; Eddie was on the New Haven, going home
to Stamford, Conn. He ran into a fellow he'd
known in England, and the fellow
asked him how did he like it at home. Eddie had been laughing, but then his
face, straightened and he said : "All right, I guess. Good. Boy! Those milk
shakes. But some of it I can't understand." He shook his head slowly and
frowned, staring down at his shoes, then looked up, and his words came fast:
It's Not So
Fresh
"When I got home everything
was good and I didn't stop to think what anyone was saying. They were saying
hello, I guess. But now it's not so fresh and I'm beginning to listen to them,
and I don't always know, what they're talking about. At least I hope I don't. "They
come up to you and they look at the ribbons and ask if you've been overseas, or
maybe they can tell, so what's, the first thing they ask you: " 'How do
you like it over there?' •
"Can you imagine that? How
do I like it over there. They ask you that? Sure, I know. And there's one kind
that's worse. That's the guy that comes up to
you—and mind you I don’t begrudge
him the dough he's making in some defense job with nobody shooting at him ; I
don't begrudge him that a bit. But anyway, he comes up to you and, the worst
thing that's happened to him in the last year is maybe his butcher speaks real
cross to him, and anyway he comes up and says, " 'Tough over there, eh,
bud?' and he leans forward and kinda taps you on the chest and nods his head.
"Jeest!" ; Well, all
right. Maybe some of It is that way. But what are you going to do about
it? How is it going to be any different? And do you think it's going
to do any good telling the guys who are in the war over here about it? Won't
it just worry them? Isn't it bad for morale,: granting that's the way it is?
That's not so hard to answer. . .
.
Tomorrow: The
last article of A Report on Home.
Daily
Newspaper of U.S. Armed Forces in the European
Theater of Operations WEDNESDAY, Oct. 18, 1944
Report
From Home
Fighters
Resent U.S. Attitude;
Why?
Here's One Man’s Opinion
This
is the third article of a report on America by Bud Hutton, Stars and Stripes
staff writer who has just returned to the ETO from 60 days of leave and
duty
in the U.S. which followed three years overseas with the Canadians and Americans.
By Bud Hutlon
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
So okay, that's
the way you found things back home. But do you think it’ll do any good to tell
the guys here about it, and anyway, what do you coinage things back there?
Well, Time Magazine about a month
ago reported on "the hard-faced young men" ^who stood on the
boardwalk outside the Air Forces, rest home in Atlantic
City and waited bitterly to go
back over seas. Time said they were fed up with the attitude of folks at home.
Some guys overseas wrote in to demand by what right
Time had told them about those
things about the lack of morale on the home front. Others wrote it made them
mad.
Not the Only
Worry
Well, this story is just -the way
things are. And just as a precautionary note: Not everyone in America is worrying
only about the paycheck. Not everyone
is uncaring about what happens.
Who? The people
in the small towns, the country people?
No. Country folks are about the
same as city people. They've been working very hard because of two factors:
Prices are high and labor is scarce.
The folks who have relatives
overseas naturally are not uncaring about the war. They have a personal stake
in it. But most of them, as everyone else, seemed
to think that on the day Paris
fell the whole thing was all wrapped up. They started planning celebrations for
peace. They have forgotten that Nazi garrisons
still are holding out in Lorient,
500 miles behind the front, and that when the bombers go over and lose 40 or 45
planes, that's 400 or 450 American kids for whom the war is far from won.
Well, what can
you do about it?
One opinion is no good. But while
1 was home I talked to a lot of folks back from overseas. What they 'thought
and had to say boils down to about this,
which was published in the New
York newspaper PM:
". . . we were impressed
(overseas) by all the tanks and the guns and the planes and everything else
that came rolling out of American production and got there so that our burial
details wouldn't be so busy each time we pasted the Germans. "But just for
my own dough, why the hell shouldn't the tanks and planes and guns come pouring
out? The guys who have been making them weren't" doing anyone a favor by
making them. They were doing their assigned jobs in the war to keep the country
free. "And they were "getting paid for it and no one was shooting at
them.
Weren't Shot At
"Nobody I ever knew who was
getting shot at in this war was anything but glad and happy that no one at home
was getting bombed or strafed. The guys who've been bombed and shot at know
it's not good, and they don't want it happening to the folks back home. As a
matter of fact, that's why the guys who are getting shot at are getting shot
at.
"But what I've been trying
;o get at is making guns and planes and tanks isn't enough. Neither is buying
War Bonds to make the world safe for democracy at
three per cent interest or whatever
the rate is. My very humble personal opinion is that anyone has got to want to
do those tilings; want to do them more than anything else in the world, and not
think they're doing anyone a favor by it.
"My idea is that anyone has
got to
want to do those things so hard
that they'll never say to their kids home from the other side that they've been
having a tough time with rationing, and that they've been buying War Bonds to beat
hell: want to so hard they'll never have time "or a little harmless flirtation
because what the hell he'll never know and it doesn't mean anything, anyway ;
not really.
"Maybe it's like this: If
you're in a war for conquest; if you go into it to make your lands bigger than
the other guy's, then it doesn't matter how you feel.
"But if you announce that
you're in a war because somebody is trying to take way the most valuable
possession you have; if you declare you're in it because you want your people
and all the other people of the world to be free and because you're against
tyranny and prejudice and intolerance and brutality—then
you're in a war
on moral grounds, and either you fight that war on moral grounds or you're a
phony about it and for my dough it's no good."
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