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Boxed WWII memories
Not much, I suspect. Though he landed in Europe in the fall of 1944, went into the line, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was there when the Germans surrendered, in recent years he has made it clear that he really doesn't want to talk about it anymore. Not that he ever talked much about it in the first place. So my memories of his war consists of fragments of a few stories he told when I was a boy: the V-mail he sent Mama; a little journal, which he kept against all orders; a tape recording we made of him telling when and where, but not much about what or why. And the box. As long as I can remember, the box has been on a top shelf in a bedroom closet. It was not easily accessible, but that was OK, because I would never have dared take it down without Daddy there. But now Daddy's reaching-high days are behind him, so when my children ask to see it, they ask me, and I ask him, because it is still his box, and he says "go get it." The box is wooden and you can tell from the finish that it was military issue, though no one can recall its original purpose. And it is just big enough to hold what Daddy put in it when he came home. Once they were souvenirs. Now they are memories. There is a metal-cased New Testament and an English-to-German phrase book, handed out in full anticipation of invasion and conquest. A few German coins and an insignia from a German uniform. A German paratrooper knife, a remarkable bit of Teutonic engineering designed so that with the flip of the wrist out comes a double-edged blade for cutting the parachute lines when you hit the ground. And folded into one side is an awl-like metal rod, the size of a pencil, tapered to a sharp point, which Daddy once said could be used with lethal efficiency by the man from whom he took it. And a Nazi banner. Bright red still after all these years, with the white circle in the center and in that a black, twisted cross, the swastika. The banner was one of a hundred or more that hung from light poles along the main street of a town Daddy "liberated." Even today, by itself, more than half a century later, it evokes an involuntary shudder, just as it was meant to. But of all the things in the box, the one Daddy always paused over, and pauses over still when I bring it out, is the Jugend knife. About the size of what I strapped on my belt when I was a Boy Scout, as decorative as practical, it was the sort of thing that might be given as a prize in some contest or competition. Like the banner, it still has its luster - the black enamel sheath and handle and on the pommel, the same contorted symbol. Hitler Jugend. Hitler Youth. "I took it off a boy no older than you," Daddy told me when I was hardly in my teens. "He and some others his age had been sent out to dig fortifications. This and a shovel was all he had." I didn't ask if any were killed. I didn't want to know. And I don't think he would have wanted to tell me. Not the way he looked at me then. Like a father wondering what he would have done if that boy was his boy. And the way he looks at my son, who is 14, when he holds the knife today. But these are my memories of his memories. After watching the series Burns created, I think I understand why Daddy didn't watch it. And why he hasn't, to my certain knowledge, watched a movie about war since I can recall. I don't know why my father kept these particular souvenirs - likely as not, they were not chosen so much as blundered upon. He also sent home pistols and a shotgun. A soldier could do that back then. And a picture, a watercolor, he found rolled up in the gutter of a shelled street. It hangs in his house today. We owe a lot to our veterans. We need to honor them. And remember what they did for us. And do what they want us to do. Which in my father's case, is to do what we can to keep from creating any more veterans. Now that would be a tribute. Harvey H. Jackson is a professor and chairman of the history department at Jacksonville State University. He grew up in Grove Hill, the son of Harvey and Elizabeth Jackson.
E-mail him at: hjackson@jsucc.jsu.edu
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