A War Story

I was thinking about my father yesterday. There are many stories I could recite, as I think about him. One of my favorite ones, one that gives a sense of the fiber of the man, is a story that I don’t think I ever heard him tell.  I only remember my mother telling me this.

World War II found my 20-something father newly married and living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He’d apprenticed seven years as a stone mason and was starting to practice his trade.

The war needed able bodied men. Either they marched down to the Army recruiter and signed up. Or they were drafted. Mitigating circumstances kept some men from the war. Family obligations, for one. Moral objections, another—the conscientious objector. Health another deterrent.

My parents soon started a family, but that would not have kept my dad out of the army.  And although my father had a Quaker father and Mennonite mother, he was neither and possibly could not have gotten a deferment for that reason.

So he tried to join the Army (or was to be drafted, I am not sure which was true.) But he was not accepted. Turns out he had a couple of physical defects that made him less than prime material. An enlarged heart was the main reason, my mother said. That and the fact that he only had partial hearing in one ear.

Somehow they ended up in northwestern Pennsylvania, my mother’s home.  And although he did not serve his country in the Army, my father’s contribution to the war effort was to serve as a civilian guard at a prisoner of war camp.

A fact that not everyone knows is that POWs were brought to the United States during the war. And these POWs were made available to local businesses for use as a labor pool. 

In the Midwest, POWs worked on large farms.  In Potter County, Pennsylvania, German POWs worked a logging camp, downing trees for chemical plants in the county.

And my father was a foreman for a logging crew. Now there was an Army guard but my father was required to wear a sidearm.

I wonder about that. I wonder how it felt for him to pack a pistol, knowing that he might have to use it on another human being.  (Many years later, vacationing in Mexico, he wouldn’t allow us to take it a bull fight because it was too cruel. Could he have used the pistol? Did he even load it?)

Logging is hard work. It’s hard work if you are using gas chain saws, but think of two men cross saws.

The POWs would be trucked out to the woods at day break and work there until night fall. Hours.

 They were fed a little gruel for breakfast, and a small lunch sometime during the day. But not really enough for the kind of physical exertion this work called for. Somehow, my soft-spoken father pestered the Army enough so that they finally allowed for two meals during the work day, as well as a supper when they got back to camp.

Once a prisoner was seriously injured while logging. My father insisted that the man must be taken into the county hospital for treatment. No, the Army guard said. “Just take him to the infirmary at camp.”

That didn’t sit right with my father. Maybe the Army thought the German would not be welcome at the hospital.  Maybe there were concerns about cost.

Whatever it was, my father could not stand to see that man in pain, possibly dying there on a rough cot in the camp infirmary. So he took matters in his own hands. He phoned the family doctor that they went to and asked him to meet him at the hospital. No one could refuse to admit a patient if a doctor brought him in.

Well, it worked. The prisoner was admitted to the hospital and was treated, and ultimately returned to the camp. And what happened to my father, who had clearly defied orders? I don’t know. What I do know is that this story represents the fierce fighter my father was for what he believed to be right.

Do you have a story, good or bad, that represents what your father is (or was) like?