In my last blog entry I related some of the experiences of my father, Morris Alma Thurston, in World War II. Of course, the hardships of war were also felt by women, especially the wives and mothers of servicemen. My mother, Barbara Ashcroft Thurston, had married my father on July 8, 1941, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
She became pregnant with her first child (me) in early September 1942. Five months later, in February 1943, Morris received his notice to report for active duty as a Navy SeaBee in Norfolk, Virginia.
When the notice arrived, Barbara and Morris were living in an apartment in Morgan Hill, California, a little village about seventy miles southeast of San Francisco. Morris was working for the Soil Conservation Service and they had been married about nineteen months. They had been wildly happy during that time--Barbara said it was like an extended honeymoon. Morgan Hill was a country town in those days and the measured pace suited two people who had both grown up in farm towns. With the war raging in Europe and the Pacific they knew, of course, that Morris would eventually be called to active duty, but they had made the most of the time they had together.
When the orders arrived they packed their meager belongings--clothes, dishes, linens, card table, and a small lamp table--and shipped them to Barbara's parents' home in Hyde Park, Utah. Then they took the bus to San Francisco to buy Morris's uniforms. They didn't own a car.
In this documentary we’re reminded again that that war is basically a young man’s game—young men under the control of a few old men. It takes the kind of disregard of danger that only the young have to staff a war machine. As one of the talking heads featured in “The War” said about his enlistment, “And then suddenly you could be a pilot or a submariner or an artilleryman or any damn thing, but it was something exciting and it was something adult. It has nothing to do with patriotism. It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is. It’s the opportunity to be somebody more exciting than the kid you are.”
