Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406070015
SECTION: THE GREAT CRUSADE PAGE: D-DAY9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: |By BEN BEAGLE| |STAFF WRITER|
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The valley is a part of a country grown accustomed to shortages and to casualty lists and telegrams. It still remains much the same as it was before this war and its aftermath begins to change it forever.
There are streetcars that take you right to your corner from downtown, which is the center of commerce and business. Downtown is perhaps unsightly; with above ground electricity and phone lines fastened to scrubby-looking poles; with the coming and going of trains and the coal-dust grime of a railroad town before diesel engines.
But it is a pleasant and reassuring ugliness in a time when Americans need reassurance. It is business as usual as far as that is possible in such times. And stores still have awnings that stockboys crank down every morning. And in grime and smoke and overhead lines, there is something worth remembering here.
The people who endure these times - the families getting the telegrams and with gold stars in their windows included - are honest, patriotic folks. They sing songs with inane lyrics: "He's One-A in the Army/And He's A-One in My Heart." They go to see Randolph Scott in "Gung Ho!" and leave the theater inspired for more struggling through the war at home.
Mary Martin laments in song that the males left on this side of the ocean are either too young or too old, which makes it easy for her to be good.
Women don't have enough stockings and men find they must go with uncuffed pants. And some smokers are killing themselves with a desperate vengeance by smoking a brand called Pinehurst - which may or may not be made of tobacco.
Most of them are resigned to rationing: Meat, gasoline, butter, tires, sugar, shoes. They somehow learn the complicated ways of a rationing system that, 50 years later, seems terribly complex. Red meat points, for example, were understood by every housekeeper worth her ration books, but confusing a half-century later..
Some turn rationing into personal profit, although these are times when a young man dreads his failure to pass a draft physical more than he does the distant guns of World War II. Few males, even if missing an arm or leg, really wants to be 4-F - which means you are so unhealthy the armed forces don't want you.
But it is also a time when an honest man can park his car on the street in front of the house and wake up the next morning to see it standing, without tires and wheels, on blocks. The tires, of course, are parted from the wheels in another place and time and the tires are sold to other dubious patriots on the black market.
Roanoke lawyer Arthur Smith, who was a government prosecutor during those times, remembers seizing 50,000 stolen tires in a Harrisonburg warehouse. Five thousand auto wheels are found dumped in a Kentucky hollow.
There is counterfeiting of ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and people buy them, even though there is a war on. Gasoline is the key to freedom of travel. Sugar is the overwhelming necessity for the moonshine whiskey industry - which has survived any number of wars.
Shoes are rationed but, as Smith recalls, "Nobody could find any reason to bootleg them."
The invasion of Europe shouldn't surprise people who read the newspapers. A May 3 picture in The Roanoke Times shows Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower posing with war machines in an "invasion power preview."
Plans are being made everywhere for church services when the word comes from Europe that the Allies have landed on the continent. These ceremonies are set for "I-Day."
Life goes on with "10-point steaks" and "three-point quarter pounds of butter" and Jeanette MacDonald comes to Roanoke for a concert. In an interview with the Times' reporter, she recalls her last visit when a National Guardsman accidentally set off a tear gas canister during her performance.
It may be that this guardsman will be with the 29th Infantry Division when it assaults Omaha Beach on D-Day. (It will be June 9 before The Times reports a radio broadcast from a Nazi-run Calais station that the 29th - with men from Roanoke and the Shenandoah Valley on its rosters - has hit the Normandy beaches.)
MacDonald captivates the sames Times' reporter with her performance at the Roanoke Auditorium.
Civilians are told they may be able to get the precious drug penicillin that has been saving the lives and limbs of American servicemen.
State liquor stores are saying they have run out of paper bags and discreet buyers might want to bring their own if they want to avoid carrying unwrapped liquor bottles off the streetcar.
About that same time, invasion headquarters in Europe broadcasts the first orders for the underground movement when the invasion begins. The underground is told of a "huge and revenge-thirsty army" that is coming.
There is a war on and an invasion imminent, but the newspapers aren't above cheesecake - as in a picture of the queen of the annual Roanoke College swimming carnival.
On June 5, the Allies are in Rome and the next morning, Secretary of Way Henry Stimson, like other Americans, hears on the radio that an Allied communique has announced the invasion of Europe.
Most Virginians would hear it a trifle later than the secretary, however.
Stimson explains that he awoke at 4:20 a.m. and turned on his bedside radio.
"I-Day" goes into effect and churches in the valley are full.
There is no flush of victory; no dancing in the streets.
Hunter Akers, a retired advertising man, recalls the invasion "was, at the time, touted as being quite iffy."
There is word that the landings "had been quite competent" but the feeling is that "it was more or less in the lap of the gods.
"While there was hope, there wasn't a great confidence that it was going to be successful."
Times reporter Dick Sutcliffe gauges the mood in the city of Roanoke and finds it muted; even strange.
He talks to a theater manager who seems to be proud that his house is empty on the evening of June 6: "I can tell you before you go in there that there's no one there. People are all at church."
Sutcliffe writes of this rather cool, high-70s day in early June: "A state of nervousness - an unnaturalness bordering on eeriness - was evident throughout the day."
He writes that the "boisterous hub-bub" of the downtown shopping district is missing.
Jefferson High School cancels its prom and there is a full-page newspaper ad pushing bond sales. It says the invasion is on and there is a drawing of a bayonet piercing "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler's book that laid out a plan for world domination.
Blood spurts from the book.
Bond sales pick up.
On D-Day, Virginians listen to the discordant bong of the cracked Liberty Bell, funneled to the country on a nationwide radio hookup.
On June 8, the Associated Press reports an interview with an unnamed soldier who describes a "withering German crossfire" on a French beach. It may be Omaha Beach, where the 29th came ashore.
On June 9, the wire service reports that a Nazi-controlled radio station in Calais has identified the 29th as one of the assaulting divisions.
The casualty lists and the unwanted telegrams come later.
by CNB