Every Veteran's Day, I look through photos of my Dad during World War II, and I have taken a pass on posting this photo for several years now. I thought that if I posted it today, maybe I could figure out why. It’s a great picture of my dad and it looks like him but it seems uncharacteristic. He was a gentle, peace-loving man. But did his bit during World War II to fight the Nazis. And he worked on munitions. And here is is wearing them.* (There’s another picture of his friend Ray doing the same thing). It seems…well…inappropriately lighthearted to say the least. But then, most of the photos my father sent home were for his wife and his mother and his siblings, and were "sanitized" moments from his war experience: here I am on the boat heading overseas, here I am with my buddies in front of our tent, here I am on leave In London, here I am playing piano in the band. (As a child all I knew was that my dad played piano in the army. Between that and all the talk of USO dances, I pictured World War II as a kind of musical.) Well, it is true that my father played piano at Army events during the war but that’s not all he did. He worked in munitions that were used against the Nazis. That’s hard truth to reconcile with my gentle, peace-loving father. So maybe that’s why I didn’t want to post this photo. I don’t like war, but neither did my father. And the Nazis had to be stopped. I turned the photo over and what my Dad wrote on the back helped me: “April 1944 Pass the 50 cal ammunition.”* This is a reference to a popular song written in 1942 by Frank Loesser after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Supposedly the song was inspired by a phrase uttered by a chaplain:
“Praise the lord and pass the ammunition…and we’ll all stay free”
*like a Tallis, it occurs to me.
**used in anti-aircraft machine guns I believe.
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