Can We All Keep Getting Along?

It’s remarkable how well people are cooperating with government orders about how to conduct our entire lives. If you’d asked me hypothetically a few months ago to predict how the public would react, I would never have imagined the degree of collaboration we’ve seen so far. Driving back and forth between Maine’s rural mountains and coastal areas each week I see hardly anyone on the roads.

Oxford Street Shelter (From Portland Press Herald)

There are exception, however. I noticed homeless men congregating closely together near Portland’s Bayside neighborhood where soup kitchens and shelters are located. They were commiserating in small groups of six or eight on the sidewalks and touching each other frequently. And, we’ve all seen footage of college students at Florida beaches. These two otherwise dissimilar groups are both wholly absorbed in their own desires and oblivious to the needs of the public at large. Everyone else I observed was maintaining government-advised social distance.

During a community TV show “Left & Right” episode in the early stages of the pandemic, my guests and I speculated on the degree to which the issue might become politicized. One guest was sure politics would influence governmental policies but I expressed cautious optimism that political camps would put aside rivalries for the good of the country. That slim hope has shown little fruition, however. At all levels — local, state, national, and international — many politicians and media personalities have been indulging their animosities.

During daily presidential press conferences on the virus most questioners are looking for facts, but there are many caustic, snarky questions from the usual suspects. Never one to let a real or perceived slight go unanswered, the president responds in kind. Resulting exchanges more closely resemble those of squabbling siblings at the supper table than professionals dealing with a crisis.

No one doubts the virus originated in China but it’s given different names. I first heard of it as the Corona Virus, then as COVID-19, then Wuhan Virus according to the city in which it was first detected. Then Trump called it the China Virus around the same time Chinese government officials claimed it originated in the USA — although there’s no evidence to support that. Then Trump-hating media personalities in the US accused Trump of racism for calling it the China virus.

Although some in media and politics have compared the pandemic to World War II, any student of history would consider that a stretch. There was precious little politicization of WWII. Before Pearl Harbor there was, yes, but afterward American patriotism was so strong hardly anyone dared utter a critical remark. Longtime-leftist radio broadcaster and author Studs Terkel wrote a book calling it “The Good War” because everyone in America, regardless of political stripe, agreed that it had to be fought and won. It won a Pulitzer.

Virtually every historical event since WWII, however, has been politicized, so I guess I was naive to hope this pandemic wouldn’t be. There was a short period of non-partisanship following September 11, but it only lasted  a week or two. That TV show I mentioned was only a month ago but it seems like a year. I speculated that if I was wrong and partisanship did emerge, whoever was guilty of it would pay a political price on election day.

There are seven months to go before the first Tuesday in November, an eternity in political terms, and I think both sides will pay a price. Recent polls indicate mainstream media, together with their Democrat allies, will pay the most. Expect accusations in the form of snarky questions to escalate and be echoed by Democrats in Congress. Trump will continue his fake news accusations and political polarization will exacerbate. 

The $2 trillion bill passed last week was delayed by attempted Democrat add-ons that had no connection to virus relief. Although it was the most expensive piece of legislation in history, still more such bills are predicted before the election. So far, there has been little civil unrest in spite of unprecedented restrictions on public freedoms and increased public distress due to the economic effects of shutdown. Will that continue through April or beyond?

There are signs of fraying. High-end stores have been closed for weeks but lately owners are boarding them up in several cities. Do they expect looting? Will printing $2 trillion cause an inflationary spiral? Will $4 trillion? $8 trillion? There was a mile-long food line in Pittsburgh the other day. Police and food store workers are front-line with medical personnel and they’re getting fatigued.

If we all lose someone in a mounting death toll, perhaps our shared grief will strengthen community bonds. That’s one good thing that can occur in war against a common enemy.

Pineland to D-Day

Phillip Kupelian at his home in Falmouth 2018

Ninety-four-year-old Phillip Kupelian lives alone in the Falmouth, Maine house he built himself. Last Saturday I interviewed him there about two things: Growing up on the grounds of what was then called the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded in Gray, Maine, and his experience in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Pineland Farms today

Phillip was born at what’s now called Pineland Farms in1924 because his father was a doctor on staff there when it was renamed the Pownal State School. Phillip couldn’t attend local schools because roads were bad and horse-drawn sleighs were his only transportation. He and his older brother were sent to stay with their maternal grandparents in Randolph, Maine (near Augusta) to attend school until Gray constructed plowable roads.

Phillip’s father, Nessib, had fled Ottoman Turkey around 1915 to escape the Armenian genocide. Out of 2 million Armenian Christians in Turkey, 1.5 million were slaughtered by Muslim Turks. The rest, including Nessib, took flight. In Maine, Nessib attended medical school at Bowdoin College and practiced at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. He was made superintendent from 1938 to 1953. “Coming to Maine, to America, was the greatest gift a father could give his son,” said Phil.

Scene from Armenian genocide

When I asked about eugenic practices at Pineland, Phillip didn’t know what eugenics was. I explained it was sterilization of the “feeble-minded” which was done at Pineland and many other venues in early 20th century America. He said he remembered hearing it discussed, but that’s all. In 1912, eight mixed-race squatters forcibly evicted from Maine’s Malaga Island were sent to Pineland. There they were probably sterilized along with several hundred other Mainers. Eighteen bodies from Malaga’s cemetery were re-buried there as well.

From its inception in 1908, Pineland was designed to be self-sufficient, a town in itself almost. It had an operating farm, a coal-fired steam generator, its own water system, and laundry. Phillip became quite interested in all of that so after high school he went off to study steam and diesel engineering at the Wentworth Institute in Boston. Then World War II broke out and he was drafted. After boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island he went across the Atlantic to England on the crew of LCI 506 — one of over 900 LCIs, or “Landing Craft Infantry” built in the USA for amphibious invasions. They were flat-bottomed, 158 feet long, and 23 feet wide.

No one on the 26-man crew of the 506 had any experience beyond US territorial waters when it set out in January, 1944. At a 1996 reunion, Ensign Phil G. Goulding, described his first time aboard the 506 being greeted by its 31-year-old skipper, a Lieutenant J. G. named Albers:

“Goulding, do you know anything?”

“No sir,” I said. “I just got out of midshipman's school. I don't know anything at all.”

Al Albers smiled. He pounded the wardroom table with his open hand. “Thank god for that,” he said. “Nobody on this ship knows anything and I was afraid those idiots were going to send me someone to spoil it. Siddown and have a cup of coffee.”

He turned to the others. “By God that's great,” he said. “He doesn't know anything. By God that's great.”

The crew that didn’t know anything nonetheless made it to England across the stormy Atlantic, seasick much of the way. Then, assigned at the last minute to a British command, they crossed the English Channel six months later on D-Day and delivered two hundred British infantry to Rose Beach — right between Omaha Beach and Juno Beach. The 506 hit a German mine just as it hit the beach which blew off one of its two ramps and tore a big hole in the bow. Soldiers got off safely though, and the ship limped back to England for repairs carrying wounded Allied troops and German POWs with them.

LCI 506 circled

Fifteen million Americans fought in World War II but there aren’t many left today. Phillip, one of the few, was modest about his wartime service. Most of what I learned about LCI 506 and what it did came from my online research. My own father was aboard one of the other 5000 ships that crossed the channel on D-Day, so I have a personal interest in that largest invasion in history of the world.

Cafeteria at Pineland School

Phillip returned to Pineland after the war and met his wife, Margaret, who lived nearby. They were married from 1947 until she died in 2012. They had one daughter who lives in Colorado now, and three grandchildren. Phillip is still quite active and goes back to Pineland every couple of weeks to take part in a veterans program housed there. “It’s quite different now,” he said, and invited me for a guided tour after all this snow melts.

My Father Would Be Pissed

Eugene James McLaughlin, Sr. 

Last January, I found a file labeled “World War II” in my father’s block printing. In it are his enlistment and discharge papers, and court martial proceedings against him in November, 1943. For background: in June, 1943, he persuaded my mother, then eighteen, to elope with him. They had only one night together, so being a Yeoman 3rd class, he wrote himself passes to see my mother again before shipping overseas. Shore Patrol caught him, then he broke out of the brig for one more visit.

USS Bunch

Lieutenant Commander A. A. Campbell, U.S.N.R. inserted a note saying: “McLaughlin is guilty of all charges set forth by the facts in the specifications. Furthermore, his attitude toward his misdeeds and his predicament is one of calloused indifference… I do not consider any punishment authorized by the Summary Court Martial to be of sufficient severity for this case.”

USS Rich going down

He proceeded to England where his ship, the destroyer escort USS Bunch, started across the English Channel for the D-Day Invasion but had to turn back when damaged. It was replaced by its sister ship, the USS Rich, which was shelled by Germans, hit a mine, and went down with 27 killed, 73 wounded, and 64 missing.

USS Suffolk

From England, he went to the Pacific on the attack/cargo ship USS Suffolk for extended combat in the Battle of Okinawa. He described several days and nights of attacks by kamikaze planes, one taking out the mast. After watching an episode about it on “Victory At Sea,” he told me that’s when he was most scared.

Uncle Bobby became a cop in Medford, Mass after the war

In the file is a May 10, 1945 letter to his brother, my Uncle Bobby, serving in the US Army in Europe: “Received your letter dated 3rd of April and was very glad to hear from you, particularly after all this good news of the war being over, over there.” Then he described seeing our infantry fighting on Ie Shima, near the big island of Okinawa: “Battlewagons, cruisers, cans, etc., were pounding the hell out of it and you couldn’t see a go***** thing for the bursting shells, debris, smoke, etc…. The Japs didn’t have anything outside of a few mortars so all [our] ships were anchored in pretty chose… within 500 yards of the beach where we could see the Japs through our long glasses… pouring fire into our infantry. Ch****, it was awful. Have you fellows got a big surprise coming to you when and if you ever come into this Pacific War. It’s positively the most gruesome thing you ever saw.”

Famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle on Okinawa

“These f****** Japs are veritable maniacs,” he continued. “When we take a place we usually find hundreds of civilians dead, suicides. The Japs fight with a frenzy heretofore unknown in any form of warfare and when they’ve exhausted everything they have, they wait until night and then come up with a Banzai charge with nothing more than bayonets and knives. There’s no such thing as capturing a Jap or having one surrender. They run up to our positions with grenades and dynamite strapped to their bodies. When they’re in their planes they load up with extra gas tanks, bombs, etc. so they can barely take off. They do this in bunches because they’re not very maneuverable… Those that are not shot down just come in on the ships in suicide dives, and you ought to see it Bob, it’s just a huge column of smoke and flame." 

Battle of Okinawa

"I’ve seen quite a few ships get it so far and they sink a good percentage… We’re not supposed to tell anyone about this as it’s bad for morale… the reason I’m getting this out is that I’m mailing it in San Francisco… Of the six ships in our division, four of them were hit with either suicide planes or suicide boats.”

Ernie Pyle's body on Ie Shima

Okinawa was a preview of what to expect during an invasion of the Japanese home islands, then imminent. As I grew up, my father said again and again how relieved he was that we dropped those bombs on Japan to force their surrender, and I thought about it last week when President Obama gave his sanctimonious speech in Hiroshima.

My father would be pissed

Breitbart.com summed it up best: “Obama, a native of Honolulu who grew up near Pearl Harbor, said nothing about the fact that Japan started the war; nothing about the fact that the Japanese were responsible for the slaughter of millions of civilians throughout Asia and the Pacific; nothing about the fact that the Japanese refused to surrender after hundreds of thousands had already been killed in conventional bombing… he left out the moral case for ending the war, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths avoided because of Hiroshima. The contrast to President Harry S. Truman could not have been clearer. Reflecting on the decision to bomb Japan years later, Truman declared: ‘That bomb caused the Japanese to surrender, and it stopped the war. I don’t care what the crybabies say now, because they didn’t have to make the decision.’”

Addendum 7-18-16: This letter ran in The Bridgton News on July 4th:

My Family in the Twentieth Century

Mary McLaughlin 1969

At 91 my mother, Mary McLaughlin, told us she didn’t want to go through another winter in Lovell. She did not want to move in with any of her children, several of whom invited her, and picked an assisted-living facility in Quincy, Massachusetts near my sister, Kathy. We persuaded her to just take her essentials and move in there last November, after which we would sort through and pack up whatever else she wanted to keep. Then, we would each take whatever items we each wished to have and leave the rest for our nephew, who is leasing the house, to keep or dispose of as he wished. 

I took a steamer trunk, a suitcase, and boxes — all filled with family memorabilia. Now the musty smell of pictures and keepsakes permeates my house. On my dining room table and in my office are piles of photos, some professionally produced in cardboard frames now crumbling with age, and some smaller, curled-up, black-and-whites from now-extinct Polaroid cameras. When I’m done, I’ll take them all to Quincy so my mother can identify the people, places, and times depicted. If I don’t, that information will die with her.

I remember my father’s friend, Gerry Hurley, pulling them from his Polaroid, peeling off a layer, then swiping a pungent, chemical-soaked cylinder over each photo’s surface and waiting for it do dry. Sections the chemical didn’t cover have turned brown, but I can see my brother Danny and myself swimming in Little Sebago Lake where our two families rented a huge camp for two weeks around 1959 or so.

There were few photos of my mother or her siblings until she was a teenager and her brothers were in uniform during World War II. Maybe they couldn’t afford a camera. I’ll have to ask her about that. There’s a Medford High School yearbook from 1942, the year my mother graduated, but no wedding photos — because she eloped with my father while he was home on leave in 1943. There were faded shots of my older brother and sister when they were toddlers, then several professional group shots of our growing family with five, then six, then seven, then eight of us through the fifties and sixties. I remembered posing for those and trying to hold a smile as my cheeks cramped.

That's me in the middle

In one photo were assembled guests at a wedding from the late forties or early fifties. My mother and father, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, as well as my Uncle Joe and his wife Pat. Seated front-row-center is great-grandmother Kate McDonnell, who died around the time I was born. She married my great-grandfather, Peter Haggerty, after each had emigrated, separately, from County Mayo, Ireland in the 1870s. They met in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and married. Peter worked in the coal mines there and died of black lung at 40, after which Kate moved with her young son, my grandfather, John Haggerty, Sr., to the Boston area so he wouldn’t work in the mines. The oldest item from the trunk is a diploma from Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Roxbury, Massachusetts earned by John Haggerty in 1903 when he completed eighth grade. There’s also an American flag, but I don’t know if it’s from his funeral in 1957 or my father’s twenty years later. In 2009 when John Haggerty’s son, my Uncle Joe Haggerty was 90 and my mother 85, I took them to Ireland to try and find where Peter and Kate had come from. It was a grand trip and we found two places we believe were where they lived in Crossmolina, County Mayo.

My mother and father top right

There are copies of the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle editions from August 14, 1945 with the bold headlines: “JAPS QUIT!” and “TOKYO SAYS ‘WE WILL QUIT” respectively. My mother had moved there to work because my father’s ship had departed from there to Okinawa months earlier and would soon return. Next to the paper was a scrapbook with receipts, menus and other souvenirs from San Francisco venues, most of which had come unfastened from its crumbling pages. My father had told me how scared he was during kamikaze attacks off Okinawa as we watched it all on “Victory At Sea” in the early sixties.

Teaching 20th century US History, I emphasized that WWII was that century’s pivotal event politically, of course, but also personally for millions. It’s possible my mother and father would not have married and produced me or my siblings if my father hadn’t pressed her before going off to combat with the plea so many other young women heard: “Let’s marry now because I might not live through it.” She’s told me since that she didn’t really want to get married but gave in when he told her that. My father and fifteen million other surviving American soldiers and sailors were discharged in 1945 and set about begetting us Baby Boomers.

Don't Fight Without It

President Truman was right to demand unconditional surrender from Japan. After we destroyed their navy and were bombing them daily, they sought negotiations. Truman refused, and warned them he had a fearsome new weapon he would use against them if they didn’t surrender unconditionally. Teaching US History again to a group of ten high-school aged home schoolers, I’m showing them “Hiroshima.” It’s a wonderfully produced historical film depicting events, both in Japan and in the United States from FDR’s death in April, 1945 to the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.

Unconditional surrender is what the United States should demand whenever we go to war with anyone. Soldiers we send to fight and die deserve nothing less. We do them a disservice if we send them without a clear sense that it’s absolutely right to declare war, and with the commitment to see that war through to a victorious end. Otherwise, we shouldn’t go to war at all.

We shouldn’t fight without a declaration by congress either. The last time that happened was 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. We’ve fought in dozens of places and circumstances since - large and small, short and long - and how has it worked out? Korea is still divided; North Korea is still hostile, threatening the US with nuclear weapons they developed while we were “negotiating” with them. Vietnam is reunited, but under communist rule. That development went against the Truman Doctrine of containing communism rather than defeating it outright as General George Patton wanted to do after the Nazis surrendered in May, 1945. President Obama claimed to end the war in Iraq, but did he? Looks like it’s still raging, and we’re going back in.

We went into Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks to get Osama Bin Laden, who planned the attacks from there. Americans supported that effort wholeheartedly, but Bin Laden escaped across the border into Pakistan. President Bush decided not to pursue him there. Big mistake. Bush should have said to Pakistan: “Give him over or we’re coming in after him,” but he didn’t.

Instead, we continued the “war” in Afghanistan that was really nation-building. Could we realistically expect to build a democratic nation in a region ruled for millennia by tribal warlords? Could we expect to even hold Afghanistan after the British experience there? The Russian experience? Another big mistake. We were after Bin Laden and we took our eye off the ball. War is war. It’s what we do when negotiations fail. It’s brutal. People get killed and things get wrecked. Often, it’s innocent civilians who are killed. War is hell, as General Sherman observed and that’s no less true today than it was when he said it. That’s why we shouldn’t conduct it unless congress declares it. When we do go to war, we should go all-out until it’s over — and it’s only over when the other side gives up unconditionally. Absent that, it’s just going to flare up again like a smoldering ember.

We’re not capable of nation-building anywhere else but right here. Only the people who live in a place are capable of creating a nation there. That’s how ours was built. Have we forgotten that? I think we have. We should have searched out al Qaida and destroyed it — wherever it went to hide. If things got wrecked and people were killed? Well, that’s war. Don’t start if it you’re not willing to finish it. It’s not our obligation to clean up afterward either. It’s the job of the people who live there. They’ll be more careful of who they let in next time.

Teaching again, I’m reminded of how idealistic young people are. As we study each of America’s wars, I say: “Now that you understand what caused the war, how it was fought, and how it turned out, imagine you were an 18-year-old male when it started. Would you volunteer to fight?” The only way to decide is to ask themselves if they were willing to risk their lives in pursuit of whatever the goal was. If it was ill-defined, the answer was usually no. Defining the goal is the job of our elder statesmen and women. If they can’t do it in simple terms, it’s not worth dying for.

Surviving relatives should be able to say something more than “He was killed in WWII.” Rather, they can say: “He died to defeat Nazism.” Veterans can say: “I lost my leg fighting the Japanese who attacked us.” What can the last soldier maimed by an IED just before the scheduled Obama pullout from Afghanistan say? Our soldiers shouldn’t have to think more than a second about why they’re fighting, but today our president refuses to even mention our enemy by name.

Harry S. Truman was an ordinary American thrust by circumstances into a position where he had to make a momentous decision in only a few weeks: whether to use an awesome new weapon on our declared enemy — and thereby bring the most destructive war in history to an end, decisively, with no smoldering embers. Truman said he never lost a minute’s sleep after making it, and today, Japan is one of our closest allies.

The Past Is Always With Us

The old man sat alone on a bench with a cane propped against one leg. We rode past on bicycles and he said something I didn’t understand. I stopped and pedaled back to tell him I didn’t hear him right.

“He’s afraid of losing you. He keeps looking over his shoulder,” the old man explained as he looked toward my six-year-old grandson, Alex, who’d been pedaling furiously in front of me. The old man’s battered cap visor shaded intelligent eyes surrounded by wrinkles. “Pearl Harbor 1941” was sewn in gold thread above the worn visor.

“You were at Pearl Harbor?” I asked.

Alex at his great-grandfather's funeral last December
 Arlington National Cemetery

“Yes,” he answered.

“You must be in your nineties now.”

“Ninety-four.”

Turning to Alex, I asked, “Do you know what happened at Pearl Harbor?”

He shrugged, so I explained that the largest war in history began for the United States when the Japanese attacked the US Navy there back in 1941, ten years before I was born. “This man was there when it happened.”

Suddenly shy, Alex only stared at the old man with wide eyes. The old man’s eyes silently conveyed that he understood how Alex was feeling and seemed grateful for our attention during our short interaction.

Tankers offload at dusk in South Portland Maine

The bicycle trail we’d been riding on was laid out along the Portland Pipeline right-of-way that stretched from where we stood straddling our bikes all the way to Montreal, Canada. There was a huge, ocean-going tanker tied up about three hundred yards from where we were talking as it offloaded crude oil from some other part of the world. Behind us were huge, cylindrical tanks that stored the oil until it could be pumped northwest to refineries in Montreal.

It occurred to me that the pipeline had been completed in1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet it was Canadian involvement in World War II - which pre-dated US involvement - that caused the pipeline to be built. War had broken out in Europe when England and her empire, along with France and its empire declared war on Germany in 1939 following the German invasion of Poland. German submarines had been attacking Canadian shipping in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada needed a more secure method of delivering crude oil to Montreal refineries.

We said good-bye to the old man and pedaled the short distance to the waterfront where there was a  full-size model of a “Liberty Ship” bow a few yards from the bow of that big tanker. We turned our bikes into an outdoor display in which there were photographs of what is now “Bug Light Park” as it looked during World War II. The War Department had seized and torn down a residential neighborhood and constructed enormous shipyards on the site to build hundreds of Liberty Ships. These hastily-built, cargo vessels kept the enormous Allied war effort in Europe and North Africa supplied. Tens of thousands of men and women from all over New England worked there. Each woman was a “Rosie the Riveter” in the parlance of the day. They built the ships that would keep their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons equipped with whatever they needed to fight the Nazi war machine.

We looked at the old photos and I explained as much as I could for as long as I had Alex’s attention. Six-year-old boys, and especially Alex, like to keep moving on sunny, September afternoons, so we soon continued our pedaling along the waterfront toward a huge cruise ship tied up to the International terminal across the harbor in Portland. It dwarfed everything around it.

Portland Pipeline Pier at sunrise last month

As we pedaled back toward our South Portland house through what had been sprawling shipyards, I recalled reading the thousands of interviews I assigned my students to do over the decades I taught history. I’d send students out each year to interview someone over seventy years old. Most interviewed grandmothers and great-grandmothers, many of whom were women who had worked at the South Portland shipyard. On that windy Saturday afternoon though, huge kites flew over large expanses of green grass overlooking Casco Bay on what had been an enormous industrial site. I imagined being there seventy years before. Our bikes glided over old railroad tracks, barely poking up through asphalt here and there, remains of what had been.

Moonset over Portland from Bug Light Park last week

History teachers know the past is always with us, especially retired ones like me. Driving back toward our Lovell house in the western Maine mountains, my wife and I pass by other sections of the Portland Pipeline’s 236-mile route to Montreal. Images of men digging it went through my mind along with images of women whose lives were being transformed by their experiences doing what had been exclusively men’s work in the huge shipyard where the pipeline began. Most of them were underground now, like the pipeline, like the old man would be fairly soon, like all of us will be sooner or later.

Today, however, sun is shining. Let’s see what the day brings.