So Long for Now: A Sailor's Letters from the USS Franklin
432
So Long for Now: A Sailor's Letters from the USS Franklin
432eBook
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Overview
Write home often, the navy told sailors like Elden, thinking it would keep up morale among sailors and those waiting for them stateside. But they were told not to write anything about where they were, where they had been, where they were going, what they were doing, or even what the weather was like. Spies were presumed everywhere, and loose lips could sink ships. Before a sailor’s letter could be sealed and sent, a censor read it and with a razor blade cut out words that told too much.
So Long for Now reconstructs the lost world of a sailor’s daily life in World War II, piecing together letters from Elden’s family in Vega, Texas, and from his girlfriend, the untold stories behind Elden’s own letters, and the context of the war itself. Historian Jerry L. Rogers delves past censored letters limited to small talk and local gossip to conjure the danger, excitement, boredom, and sacrifices that sailors in the Pacific theater endured. He follows Elden from enlistment in the navy through every battle the USS Franklin saw. Flight deck crashes, kamikaze hits, and tensions and alliances aboard ship all built to the unprecedented chaos and casualties of the Japanese air attack on March 19.
“So long for now,” Elden signed off—never “Goodbye.” This moving work poignantly confronts the horrors of war, giving voice to a young sailor, the country he served, the family and friends he left behind, and the hope that has sustained them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806158778 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
So Long for Now
A Sailor's Letters from the USS Franklin
By Jerry L. Rogers
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5877-8
CHAPTER 1
The Telegram
"WELL, here comes Iva, and something is wrong!" said Grace Rogers on the morning of April 13, 1945. My older brother Gerald and I joined our mother in looking through the pane in the front door, past the red, white, and blue banner with the blue star in the center that told the world our family had a son in the war. Almost no one ever entered the house through the front door, but now a car was there, and our neighbor and Grace's longtime best friend was getting out of it, along with Dr. O. H. Lloyd and John Van Meter. Inside, one of them said, "We have some bad news," and handed Grace a small yellow paper. Our blue star was about to change to gold.
Telegrams in those days came to the Western Union agent, who also staffed the local depot of the Rock Island Railroad. Telegrams were costly. Good news could be conveyed in an inexpensive letter, so news urgent enough to be sent by wire was almost invariably bad. This was the telegram that war time families dreaded, and depot agent Cap Shelton was wise enough to know it had to be delivered by someone close to the recipient. In Iva Mathes he had chosen the right person, perhaps the only person, to bring the news. Van Meter presumably came along as a representative of the local draft board, and Doc Lloyd because the shock of bad news might be accompanied by a need for medical attention.
Telegram, Washington, D.C. April 13, 1945
Mr & Mrs Ancell Rogers
The navy department deply regrets to inform you that your son Eldon Duane Rogers seaman second class USNR is missing following action while in the service of his country The department appreciates your great anxiety but details not now available and delay in receipt thereof must nessarilly be expected To prevent possible aid to our enemies please don not divulge the name of his ship or station
Vice Admiral Randall Jacobs Chief of Naval Personnel 829 AM
It was the most important moment in the history of this generation of our family. We would never afterward be the same. Knowing the words almost before she read them, Grace glanced at the paper and said, "Elden's missing. Go get Ancell."
Our father, Ancell, was tending to our four milch cows and a few other animals before he left for his job at the Texas Highway Department. Gerald ran out the back door toward the cow lot and, not seeing his father, shouted the alarm, "Dad! Come in the house! Elden's missing!" Ancell did not come immediately. In all probability he had inferred an ill meaning in the car at the front of his house, and he may have taken three or four minutes to prepare himself while finishing his chores. Then, in the small, dim living room, lighted by a single window in the front and a glass in the door, he confronted the news.
"You'd better go on to school," Grace said to Gerald.
Gerald had a major part in a class play less than thirty-six hours afterward, with dress rehearsals that very day. Before the arrival of television, school plays were annual entertainment highlights attended by most of the community. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, so revered in this family that his photo graph hung on their wall, had died only the day before, already casting a pall over the fun people anticipated from a comedy called This Night Beware.
In small, close Vega, Texas, the pain of tragedy for one family was felt throughout the community, and soon visitors began to arrive, bringing the comfort of friendship, prayer, and an abundance of covered dishes that would keep the family from having to worry about cooking. We had joined a select few other local families, among them the McKendrees and Baleses, who were comforted in the collective arms of the community because we had suffered acute loss for the benefit of the country.
CHAPTER 2The "Westerers"
GOING down slowly and straining to stay erect, the slumping walls of the story-and-a-half frame house where Elden Rogers entered this world survived into the twenty-first century amid the aromatic lilacs and purple flags that his grand mother had nurtured early in the twentieth. It was March 19, 1926, at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the house stood smartly then. It had a bedroom on the south end, a living room in the middle, and a lean-to kitchen and dining room to the north. Above the main section were two attic rooms big enough to contain beds, and under it was a small unlined dirt cellar. Gutters channeled into a cistern rainwater that was raised by a hand pump for drinking and the house hold uses for which gypwater would not work. The house was too small to be proud, but with its white exterior and green trim it compared favorably with the sod house it had replaced and in which Elden's mother had been born, and especially with the dugout that had preceded the soddy. The Coin homestead was in the rural community of Cora, sixteen miles northwest of Alva, Oklahoma. Turkey Creek trickled past in a deep ravine, and a high hill just to the northwest was capped with a layer of alabaster — the source of the dissolved gypsum particles that made both the creek's water and the aquifer undrinkable.
Elden was the firstborn of Ancell Robert Rogers and Grace Evalena Coin, neighbors who had married eighteen months before. Twenty-seven-year-old Ancell and Grace, not quite twenty-one, were living on a rented farm two miles to the east. Both had sprung from families that had been in America for two hundred years, with long traditions of frontier hardship, risk, work, and potential. In the duality of the frontier, they were accustomed to getting along with little but were also ingrained with the optimism that had led nearly every generation of their American ancestors to pull up stakes and move farther west. When Elden was three years old, he had pulled an April Fool's joke on his uncle Charlie Coin. The uncle had played along, pretending to be fooled, and the tot botched his "April Fool!" punch line by exclaiming "Apricot!" Fondly remembered by his parents and that generation of adults, this little story was repeated for the next half century. Two months and ten days after this vignette, in the same house, Elden's brother Gerald Blane was born. Photo graphs of the two as children always show them together. Perhaps this simply reflects prudent use of expensive Kodak film, but they played together and shared the same formative experiences.
But something else was in the wind by the time Gerald was born. Ancell and Grace would soon imitate their ancestors in the westward movement. Several families of the Cora community, perhaps in response to a passing land salesman, had purchased unplowed virgin or newly broken prairie 240 miles southwest near Vega, Texas. Among the group was the extended family of Charles L. "Grandpa" Steward, who had employed Grace at the age of sixteen as a clerk in his general store. Ancell had followed the tradition of frontierspeople by buying a quarter section — 160 acres. He also bought a two-cylinder John Deere "D" tractor with lug wheels, a nine-foot one-way plow, and a drill for wheat planting. The mules and nineteenth-century farming methods he had used in Oklahoma were left behind, and both the move and the mechanical equipment symbolized this couple's new beginning. For the first year or two, with Grace's brothers Carl and Ernest Coin, Ancell would drive a Model T Ford down to Vega, plow the land, plant a crop, and then return to Oklahoma until harvest time. Once he even rode to Texas on a freight train to check on his crop, leading his children years later to declare with questionable pride: "My Dad was a hobo!"
The virgin land, as it almost always does at first, produced abundantly. Things looked good, and the young couple must have felt they were doing a great and daring thing when, in 1930, they moved their house hold to Vega. Their first home was in a small black shed just north of the MacDonald house on South 12th Street. It was covered with tar paper on the exterior and had actually been used before as a chicken house, but they bravely moved their little family and few possessions into it and set about making a go of things.
Vega was a new town. Although Grace and Ancell perceived a sense of being newcomers, in fact almost every one had arrived fairly recently. A short three decades earlier the town site had been an empty part of the great Llano Estacado, named four hundred years earlier by the expedition of Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. In 1849 U.S. Army captain Randolph B. Marcy, passing nearby, had called it the "Great Zaraha" of North America that had always been and must forever remain uninhabited. He was wrong about past, present, and future. Native Americans had been in the area for millennia, the powerful Comanche tribe lived very well there at the time, and in 1874 to 1875 the U.S. Army would remove them and make way for cattle ranchers. When the Rock Island Railroad arrived in 1909, it brought a wave of farmers to replace the ranchers. Grace and Ancell arrived toward the conclusion of that wave.
* * *
The oil for which Texas was legendary never amounted to much in the Vega area, but there was a big, booming industry only fifty-five miles to the northeast, and like mineral booms everywhere it was rough and tough — a mixed blessing if a blessing at all. Founded in 1926, the city of Borger, Texas, within a year had 45,000 residents of less than sterling character and was run by a "lawman" who was actually a member of an Oklahoma crime syndicate. From time to time, the Texas Rangers would raid the town, arrest a core bunch of bad men, and tell every one else who did not have a job to get out of town. They did exactly this in April 1927.
Billy Williams was no fool — he read the papers and had figured out that Borger's expatriates would become some other town's immigrants. He reckoned himself a good judge of character, he knew trouble when he saw it, and there it stood right in front of him. The very next day after the Rangers had begun their cleanout of Borger, three rawboned toughs were in his Vega Drug Store, asking questions about the town, peering out the windows and looking here and there, obviously casing the place. Their Ford roadster out front had Oklahoma tags. Billy could put two and two together. As soon as they left, he went straight to the sheriff's office in the Oldham County Court house across the street to report what he had seen. Soon every one knew, and as the day ended businessmen were dragging canvas cots out of closets and assembling them in their stores. Forsaking the comfort and companionship of their wives to snuggle instead with their shotguns, they slept little that night or not at all.
Ancell had left Grace and the year-old Elden at home in Oklahoma, and with Ernie and Carl made the two-day drive in a 1925 Ford to complete purchase of a piece of land north of Vega. The three of them noticed being treated with particular respect, as Vega people stepped off the sidewalk to let them pass. Small knots of townspeople gathered here and there in apparent conversation, but instead of looking at fellow conversants they seemed to be looking at the new arrivals. The next day, as the three drove a few miles north to visit with an acquaintance from home who was drilling a well in hope of finding oil, a big touring car followed at a discreet distance. When they headed back toward town by the same route, the car dodged off the road and waited behind a mesquite tree until they passed, then whirled around and followed.
As the boys ate bowls of chili in a café near the northwest corner of the court house square, men outside were peering through the plate-glass window. A town drunk, seemingly the only person unafraid of them, sat down and asked what was going on. When they asked what he meant by the question, he said, "The law is watching either you or me, and I don't think it's me."
The men at the window were the same ones who had been in the touring car — the sheriff, his regular deputy, the city marshal, and others who had been quickly deputized and armed as an old-fashioned posse. Eventually the lawmen took the three strangers into a form of custody just short of arrest and escorted them to the court house, followed by a crowd of somber onlookers. There a diminutive deputy wearing an undiminutive six-shooter demanded, "We know you three are up to something, and you had better tell us about it." Ancell replied that he had just bought land and "planned to make this town my home, but if this is how you treat every one I believe I'll change my mind." Flinty faces sagged, and the crowd evaporated faster than it had condensed. Soon all had slunk away, leaving only City Marshal Frank Smith to apologize and to offer reparations in the form of fountain drinks at the Vega Drug Store. Carl Coin observed, "I thought Texans were tough, but three Okies came down here and scared the hell out of a whole town of Texans."
Ancell never had another brush with the law in his almost eighty-eight years, not even a parking ticket, but if he had decided to take a walk that night from his room in the Vega Hotel, he might never have grown older than twenty-nine.
* * *
Young Vega and most of the region in which it was located were still in a stage of initial self-definition. The cattlemen had arrived after 1875 virtually in the dust of the Comanches reluctantly moving to reservations in Oklahoma. Afterward, and for not much more than a quarter century, the region was dominated entirely by cattle ranches — not small independent spreads but mostly huge outfits run by corporations, many of which were foreign. Cowhands came there from everywhere to work. They were Confederate veterans, former slaves, northern adventurers, and recent immigrants from overseas — more nearly wage slaves than the self-reliant individuals of mythology. They called themselves "hands," but the terminology that eventually evolved was meaningful: cowboys who owned little more than their horses and saddles worked for cowmen who owned the land and the cattle. They were not great in number because ranching did not require many people, and many of them only stuck with the work or the ranch for a few years before moving on in search of something better, or to elude someone in search of them. The ranching industry had sown the seeds of a national myth, but it had not jelled into a culture by the time farmers arrived with Ukrainian hard winter wheat that could be grown in this harsh land. Although some cowboys and small ranchers took up farming, a large percentage of the farmers arrived from wheat-growing states to the north and east, lands that had themselves been populated only recently from elsewhere. The 1940 census found in Vega 113 adults born in Texas, 150 born in other states, and 4 born in other countries. Of these adults, 65 had come from states outside the Confederacy. Like Ancell, 11 had been born in Kansas; and like Grace, 35 had been born in Oklahoma. Today, more than a century having passed, the non-Hispanic population of Vega has become more homogeneous, speaking with a more nearly uniform twang derived from Texas and the upper South. Indeed, even among families who have traditionally spoken Spanish, the twang has begun to replace the melodic lilt of Spanish-accented English. In the Vega of 1927, and even 1945, one heard a greater variety of accents and experienced the customs and mannerisms of a greater number of cultural backgrounds.
Building a new life on 160 acres had worked well enough in rainier lands to the east, but rainfall diminished with every mile westward, and Oklahoma itself was on the margin of where nature allowed for successful farming on such limited acreage without irrigation. Tens of thousands of small farmers carried the tradition too far west onto land that was too dry, and Ancell was one of them. Beyond the 100th meridian, and especially on the Staked Plains of Texas, four or five — even ten — times that acreage was necessary for so-called dry farming during good times. And good times were about to dis appear under the triple apocalypse of depression, drought, and dust. All too soon Ancell was no longer a landowner in an area where "steady" jobs were few, and he had to find what work he could day by day. Internally driven by his own ethics to give full measure or better for his wages, Ancell's motto and lifelong advice to his sons was "Make a hand," meaning "Earn your pay." But almost all workers were forced into idleness much of the time. Some were comfortable with loafing, but most took pride in work and found its unavailability humiliating.
The family moved to another rental house, and then another. They planted vegetable gardens; kept cows, chickens, and pigs; and scraped by. The boys helped out by caring for the animals and doing such "chores" as staking the cows on grassy vacant town lots each morning and bringing them in every evening. Grace and Ancell bought food in bulk directly from farmers when they could, and Grace canned fruits and vegetables, baked her own bread, churned butter, made clothes from flour and feed sacks, and pieced quilts from scraps of worn-out clothes to save money. To bring in a little cash, she took in ironing from women who could afford to pay for it, and she sometimes washed towels for barber Wallace Moore. Grace explained later that they were able to "hang on" only because almost every one was "in the same boat," and people helped one another. This was especially true among the network of people who had moved to Vega from the Cora community — several families of Stewards, and Cal and Iva Mathes, in addition to the Rogerses. When one of these families harvested corn or potatoes, or slaughtered a pig or calf, they shared the bounty with others. Grace, unable very often to afford transportation back to Oklahoma, grew homesick for her mother, who spent bits of her small pension to send postage stamps to her faraway daughter, but returning in defeat to Oklahoma and being a burden on relatives there was not an option. Ancell and Grace were determinedly, and eventually contentedly, at home in Vega. They are buried there now.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from So Long for Now by Jerry L. Rogers. Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Foreword, by Robert M. Utley,
Preface,
Prologue,
1. The Telegram,
2. The "Westerers",
3. "The Past Is a Foreign Country",
4. War,
5. What's the Matter with Kids Today?,
6. Hang Up Your Flags and Put On Your Pins,
7. The World in Seven Decks under an Airfield,
8. The Home Front,
9. Farewell, Fibber McGee,
10. Not a Holiday,
11. Fair Weather and Foul,
12. A Welcome Break,
13. Palau: This Time for Real,
14. Metamorphosis,
15. "Thirty Days Leave Coming in on the Port Side",
16. Three Strikes and Out,
17. Three Cheers — and the End of Cheer,
18. "Anybody Home?",
19. I Don't Think I'll Make It,
20. "Would You Like to Have a Transfer?",
21. "So Long for Now",
22. Fire and Water,
23. "There's Dead People in There!",
24. Holding On to Hope,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,