Talked with my guy who was in New York City College when Hitler took over in 1933. It is now Baruch University and he is their oldest, cum laude grad. He was of the opinion that WWI was "the last war" and that the United Nations would wisely handle anything threatening. As far as his memory serves, everyone he knew believed the same thing. So, it followed that it wasn't the United States' "place" to intervene. We were in the great depression and he says "we had problems of our own." He didn't see it as an "isolationist" policy, he thought all world issues were permanently taken care of by people wiser than he at the United Nations. In the ensuing 10 years before we did enter the war, he followed the Jewish persecution and Hitler's devouring of Europe but he says that the newspapers' "war correspondents" and the radio couldn't provide the "hands on" graphics that TV and the web offer us now and it was easier at that time to have it be an "over there" thing. When we entered the war, he was a young father of two and was passed up by the draft. It has since been proven that Roosevelt could have stopped the Pearl Harbor raid and didn't because he knew it was the only way to wake us up, get us into joining with the Allies and end it.
I was 6 years old when Hitler came into power and 15 when we entered WWII. I remember hearing the news and seeing the papers and finding it confusing and offensive...but I was self-absorbed in those years and it seemed like it was about another reality or planet to me. Also, at that time...females were not supposed to "worry their pretty little heads" about such things. (I kid you not!) My dad had such bad vision, he wasn't drafted and I had no brothers. My great uncle Paul was a West Point graduate and a general but I saw him infrequently and didn't really know him. The depression brought us terrible times and life was very much about survival in the late 20s and the 30s. I remember learning a song in grade school, "Garden, Garden for Victory" but we didn't. After Pearl Harbor, we had rationing and again I had a very subjective experience of that. My dad became an air raid warden and worked in a defense plant during the war. We lived in a suburb of Detroit and had air raid drills at school and at home. I lost two male cousins in WWII and in 1945, when I entered Nurses' Training, the only guys left around were 4F (unsuitable to serve), wounded or old. I joined the Cadet Nurse Corps and agreed to serve in the Navy after I graduated but the war ended before that and I was released from my commitment while being allowed to finish. I, too, had a naive concept of the people in power being wise and able. When they did something officially reprehensible like the concentration camps in our country for American-born people of Japanese ancestry...I couldn't see their rationale but I believed they must have something solid to go on and I trusted them. I was in college when the war ended and marched in the streets in Grand Rapids, Michigan...shouting with joy with everyone else. I married a mentally damaged WWII vet I had known since I was two years old, who had nightmares where he would stick an imaginary bayonet in my ribs and shout, " Comma ze out mit handi ho!" He was awarded the bronze star and then set adrift. He got 52/20. $20. a month for 52 months, if I remember correctly. Like Prissy's dad, he never recovered and no one knew anything about Post Traumatic Syndrome.
