History-world-war-II and travel destinations.

      In Immigrant Soldier, Herman and his unit captured a young German soldier who hated the fighting and killing.  After Herman interrogated the youth, he sent the soldier to the prisoners’ infirmary.  “He hoped that the boy would be on the next transport to the coast and a ship to the United States. Maybe he would be picking cotton stateside by summer.” (page 300)       Herman and the other interrogators often used a promise of transport to America to entice prisoners to disclose all they knew. True to their word, they wrote notes recommending transport to the United States for cooperative POWs.   The interrogators knew well that life in an internment camp in the US would be better than in the holding camps in Belgium.       During the war years, 425,000 German and Italian military were interned as prisoners in the United States.  They lived [...]

        When I visited the Military Heritage Museum in Punta Gorda, Florida, last October, I paused in the meeting room after my talk to enjoy their display of World War II posters.  They reminded me vividly of the passion and self-sacrifice the American people were expected to display at that time in our history.  They also started me thinking about the art and effort that went into producing these posters, as well as the radio, newspaper, and magazine ads that infused US citizens with patriotism during World War II.         Most of the iconic war-effort ads of that time were the production of one organization–The War Advertising Council.  This Council was the brain-child of an advertising executive born in 1886, James Webb Young.  The Council itself was founded on February 18, 1942, as an organization that would invest the minds and hearts of Americans [...]

       The novel Immigrant Soldier is interspersed with letters Herman writes to his mother.  These letters are based on actual correspondence treasured by our family. One of these letters, the one Herman wrote during his Camp Ritchie training, is notable because it is composed on special stationery with the slogan, “Idle gossip sinks ships” printed at the bottom. (Page 218, Immigrant Soldier).        As a child of World War II, I was familiar with a similar slogan, “Loose lips sink ships,” a phrase that has evolved to carry the more general meaning that gossip can cause harm.  Many similar phrases were used on US government propaganda posters in the 1940s. At least two posters show an upended sinking ship and large print saying, “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships” on one version, and “Loose Talk Costs Lives” on the other.  These posters and many others that encouraged self-censorship appealed to [...]

The shifting Nazi directives regarding Jews married to Gentile Germans which I wrote about in my previous blog, also resulted in one of the few successful resistance efforts against Hitler’s Jewish policies. By the winter of 1943, the Third Reich was moving steadily toward the Final Solution. As a 54th birthday gift to the Führer who was offended that the nation’s capital was still home to so many Jews, Nazi Party Director for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, promised to make his city Judenfrei (free of Jews). It is interesting to note that statistically, most of the intermarried Jews in Germany were men whose wives were Aryan Germans. It may be that in the preceding years, when divorce in mixed marriages was encouraged by the government, the traditional family values of the National Socialist Party actually discouraged women from divorcing even Jewish husbands.   Also, legally the head of household was considered to [...]