Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Germans are coming the Germans are coming!


If you are new to my blog I suggest you read “A Child of the Greatest Generation” published on 08-20-2009 to better understand why this story was written.

more reflections

It had just gotten dark. My brothers and I were playing in the back yard when the sirens started to scream. We instinctively knew what it meant, we instinctively knew where to go…in the house and into the front room den.

As we came in the back door father, wearing his air raid warden’s pith helmet, was heading out the front door. The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming. It was an air raid drill we had gotten quite used to ever since that fateful Sunday, December 7, 1941.

Mother pulled the den’s drapes closed, then turned off all the lights throughout the house. The closed drapes did little to soften the din of the air raid siren across the street, atop the East End fire station. We were at war and this was one of the things kids had to deal with. My three year old brother Gary was having trouble dealing, not so much with the sound, but with the dark and it was dark, it was really dark!

All of the street lights were off and there were no car headlights, because there were no cars on the streets. There was no light in the Feeny’s house, across the street nor the Church’s house on the corner. The O’Connell’s and Oliverio’s houses, down Philippi Street, were dark too. The Smitty’s Drug Store’s sign was off and the store, across the street from the fire station, was hardly visible through the pitch black.

There wasn’t a hint of light anywhere, including in our den and as usual, Gary was screaming like a banshee. He hated the dark so much mother had to put a night light in his bedroom so he could go to sleep.

On this night he was in rare form. Mother sprung into action. She went to his bedroom, got the night light and turned it on in the den. It worked. It got quiet…until there was a knock at the front door. It was an air raid warden. He saw a little light showing through the drapes and warned mother that if he saw it again she would get a citation.

Learning about WW II was a daily topic at Linden Grade School. There I learned a great deal about the war, about geography, about what our country was doing to fight the war, building ships on east coast ports, planes in California, and tanks in Detroit.

I had seen news reels at the Robinson-Grand movie house on Saturday mornings, pictures of B-17s bombing Germany and soldiers fighting on small islands in the Pacific. A little knowledge, for an inquisitive eight year old, is a dangerous thing.

Lying on the den floor, on those dark nights with Gary’s protests ringing in my ear, I kept wondering…if the Germans could fly all the way across the ocean why would they chose Clarksburg, West Virginia, of all places, to bomb?

However, I kept my thoughts to myself. It might be unpatriotic to ask my teacher!

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