The Ozarks' Golden Egg:
Memories of the War Years
"Old Biddy Does Her Patriotic Duty"
H.E. Hammil from the Hilltop community brought us in two eggs the other day, one 8 inches by 8 1/2 inches and one 6 7/8 inches by 8 1/2 inches; one weighed 4 1/4 ounces, the other 4 ounces. The old biddy had been laying this kind of an egg off and on all winter, doubled yolk. Mr. Hammil said he was going to trap her to find out for sure what hen was doing the patriotic job of egg providing. In addition to their being large, the eggs were good fried too. We sampled them.
(from Taney County Republican 2 March 1944)
To those not old enough to remember World War II, a patriotic appeal such as this one might seem merely a quaint, albeit humorous, piece of nostalgia. To others, especially those directly affected by the war, such a passage evokes a barrage of memories of an era unsurpassed in American history: a time when an entire nation--right down to the hogs and chickens--were summoned to support a common cause. Those memories create a rich oral legacy of the ways in which Ozarkians responded to the war.
While Taney and Stoney counties, because of their isolation and agricultural economy, ostensibly changed very little during the war years, the area could represent any number of rural farming communities throughout the nation. Billie Gooch, a longtime Stoney and Taney county resident, like many women in the Ozarks, worked at the side of her husband Hamp on his family's farm. Deferred from enlisting because of farm duties, Billie's husband raised tobacco and produce to sustain his family. Other families in the area contributed to the war through similar efforts--raising cattle, hogs, and produce--or working in the canning factories that provided much needed supplies for other areas of the country. And, of course, many people did without certain commodities because of rationing of such supplies as sugar, coffee, flour, gasoline, and tires. Though she emphasizes the area's isolation during these years when electricity had not yet been run to most farms, Billie's memories of sitting by the radio for news of the war are shared by many: "All people knew about the war was what they read or heard. We'd listen to the old battery-operated radio for any news we could get about what was going on overseas."
As in most communities, the count newspaper played an important role in shaping public opinion. The weekly Taney County Republican was filled with regular appeals to patriotism from 1941 to 1945: Advertisements for war bonds, reports of the rationing board, updates on war relief efforts, and news of soldiers abroad were only a few of the weekly features that kept the war at the forefront of people's minds. Even W.E. Freeland's scathing editorial denunciations of President Roosevelt as a "dictocratic, incense-burning, hornswaggling, tax-wringer" who started a "rage of waste in building monkey houses, shipping Taney County eggs to Maine and at the same time shipping cold storage eggs to Taney county. . . [who] killed the little pigs and piggy sows, burned wheat, killed cattle and left them to rot and plowed up cotton" contributed to the regional fervor (Taney County Republican 30 March 1944).
Especially in the public schools, the war efforts were intensely promoted. Dr. Beulah Winfrey, professor of business at College of the Ozarks, remembers well the patriotic spirit that imbued her high school. During the four years before her 1945 graduation, she recalls students eager to participate by buying war bonds and stamps, if they could afford them, and collecting scrap metal. "Classes would compete to see who could collect the most scrap metal to salvage. They'd gather up car bodies, old bed springs, stoves and stove grates, flat irons, engine parts, pipes, pots and pans, wheels and anything else. The metal was then sent to be used in defense factories."
Pledges to support the war were inculcated in many classrooms. From a January 1945 high school newspaper, Beulah extracted one such pledge that summarized the sentiments of similar verbal contracts:
I will buy only what I really need;I will pay no more than ceiling prices, and I will pay my ration points in full;I will save--I will buy and hold all the War Bonds and Stamps I can--and then some;I will save my things--make them last longer;I will save materials--by salvaging paper, metal, fats, etc.;I will save manpower for Uncle Sam--by working or helping with home chores;I will save transportation--by walking wherever possible to save tires and gas;I will speed victory by helping to check rumors and propaganda;I will encourage my family and friends to abide my this pledge.
Pledges such as this one articulated the ideology of most citizens--both in and outside the area. Eager to do what they could, many residents left the area, either to enlist or work in shipyards, defense plants, and factories on the East and West coasts. Edward Bray, who was drafted in 1944 and spent 511 combat days in Europe, remembers the exodus many people took to California. "It was the Promised Land. Most of Oklahoma was in California, and several people went from this area, too. A lot of them came back after the war, but some of them never did."
Kathleen Van Buskirk, a Missouri native who enlisted in the U.S. Navy almost as soon as she turned 20, remembers similar enthusiasm. "Almost everyone was behind the war effort. Many did strange things trying to get into it. It took the U.S. a long time to get into it. I was 14 when the fighting started in Europe, but it took a long time for people to realize what was really going on. When people began coming back from Europe, telling of the war and the prison camps . . . most people were eager to do something--anything--to have it over with." Working as a reporter covering recruitment efforts in Decatur, IL, she eagerly awaited the time she herself could enlist. "When a recruiter came from the Navy, I sold myself. I saw it as an opportunity to do something. . .instead of being stuck out in the middle of the boondocks cut off from everything." Her assignment in communications took her to Washington, D.C., where she felt she was more vitally involved in winning the war.
In varying degrees of intensity, the wartime experiences are relived time and again by those men and women who served in the military. Though some recall more pleasant events, depending upon the degree of suffering to which they were exposed, "the war remains deeply embedded in the psyche of everyone," Kathleen postulates. "When the men came back, those that made it back, most of them had a lot of things to work through." The memories of those veterans add to the area's oral legacy.
For Jack Justice, a native of Taney County, the war years were a time of excitement and self-discovery. "My sixth-grade teacher read us the story 'Richard Haliburton', and that is who I felt like during the war. My tour was more of an adventure than anything," he recalls. Not yet 20 years old, he left Branson for San Francisco in 1941, planning to work in the shipyards until he could enlist. The hub of activity, the diversity of people, and the massive China Clippers, he marvels, "were pretty impressive for a Branson boy."
Of his assignments over Canada and Alaska--a tour which earned his unit the nickname of "Mad Mapper"--Jack remembers the majesty of the terrain, as well as the painful 40-degrees-below-zero temperatures: "The planes were made to fly at high altitudes. We wore felt boots and parkas, and it got pretty cold. Sometimes we'd get so cold we'd want to jump out and get it all over with."
When his tour over continental North America ended, Jack's duties took him south, from the Caribbean and South America across the Atlantic and over to India. Two years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed Calcutta, 70 miles from where he was stationed. He recalls with ironic humor the close calls his plane had with enemy aircraft. "A week after the bombing, the Japanese flew photo recognizance planes over the area. Ours were just aerial mapping planes. Once in a while, we would meet a Japanese plane as we ducked into the cloud covers. Once we almost hit one of their planes head-on. They were as shocked and surprised to see us as we were to see them."
Other memories of his tour in India are exhilarating in different ways. The novelty of the Taj Mahal and elephants as ground transportation fascinated him, though he regrets missing the opportunity to view the Maharajah with the rest of his unit. Photographing Mt. Everest and the Himalayas affords him an appreciation of their geographic splendor. Yet from these experiences, Jack believes the greatest thing he gained was self-confidence.
Against this backdrop of adventure, less pleasant memories also haunt him. Along with the ever-present threat of death from direct military conflict were constant reminders of the far-reaching repercussions of the war for both soldiers and natives of India. Many people died from disease and famine. Along the road to Calcutta, he frequently saw bodies lining the roadway. Within a day's time, those bodies would be picked to the bones by buzzards and wild dogs, who ate the soldiers' boots for the salt.
When he returned from India in 1944, Jack was sent to Salinas, KS, to complete his enlistment period. The 54 members of the Third Photo Mapping Squadron received air medals and CBI ribbons for photographic over 700,000 square miles without losing a single aircraft.
Not everyone remembers the war years with such enthusiasm. For Wade Meadows, Taney County Commissioner and former Branson mayor, memories are much less pleasant. His years aboard naval ships and his involvement in several major battles meant long, lonely days at sea--monotony broken only by the harsh, cacophonous roar of life-threatening combat. In the war for its duration, Wade fought at Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa Bay, and Tokyo Bay. The death and carnage are painful memories that he tries not to think about.
Anchored at Pearl Harbor during the bombing, Wade recalls the hopeless battery that the crew of the destroyer USS Monaghan and other U.S. ships endured before defense efforts could be mobilized. "For 20 to 25 minutes there was nothing we could do but sit there and take it [the bombing]. We weren't ready for that kind of attack." When the gun captain secured ammunition, anti-aircraft gunners fired 250 rounds from 5" x 38' guns in rapid succession. By the end of the barrage, 41 enemy planes had been shot down, but the cost in American lives was far greater: 2,086 naval officers and enlistees and 237 army men were killed.
Leaving Pearl Harbor in April 1942, the Monaghan joined four other destroyers, two cruisers, and the carrier USS Lexington in Task Force 11, headed for the Coral Sea. For 89 days and nights, the Monaghan's 250-member crew alternated shifts of four hours on duty, eight hours off. The breaks in the mind-numbing monotony came in the form of enemy conflicts and storms. Wade remembers the ship's being caught in the middle of a typhoon: "Sailing on a destroyer is a lot rougher than on the carriers. We passed through a typhoon whose high winds and mountainous walls of salt water rolled the destroyer from side to side."
On May 8, 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea raged full-scale. The Lexington was sunk, and the USS Yorktown badly damaged, Wade recalls. But this battle marked the first occasion during the war in the Pacific that a major Japanese force was significantly crippled. Less than a month later, the Monaghan was involved in one of the most decisive naval battles of the century: The Battle of Midway. The already damaged Yorktown was put out of commission and had to be sunk. Three hundred and eight American officers and enlistees were killed; Japan lost four carriers, two large cruisers, three destroyers, and several auxiliary crafts.
Constant destruction and deprivation taught most people to appreciate whatever small pleasures came their way. Jim Evans, house manager of the American Legion Post in Kimberling City, learned the lesson early. As they are for many farm boys who went off to war, memories of crossing the Atlantic in November 1943 on the Queen Elizabeth are still very vivid to him. "We were triple 
loaded with 23,000 men, and we slept three to a bunk for four days and nights. I remember the night we landed at the Firth of Clyde. It was dark and rainy, and the British Red Cross was there with tea and biscuits. I thought that was the best meal I had ever tasted in my life."
The severity of rationing throughout Europe and the number of refugees are also distinctive memories for him. "The British were allowed two ounces of meat per person per week. All food and clothing rationing was much tighter than in the U.S." When he and his wife Hazel, a teletype printer for the women's Royal Air Force, were married, "she collected all of the clothing rations from all five of her sisters so that she could outfit herself and buy me a pair of pajamas. Then, one time I took my mother-in-law a 25-pound tub of lard. Why, she thought, I'd just brought her Fort Knox. Tnings like gasoline were almost impossible to get."
"The number of refugees created by the war was unbelievable. Coming back from Germany, you'd see people pushing baby carriages, wearing backpacks or tugging anything they could. They were going every which way--trying to get out of the way of troops, trying to get home, or trying to find someplace to get to if their homes had been destroyed," he adds.
Stationed in England and France from 1943-46, Jim served a Mustang outfit of P-47s and P-51s near Colchester, England, before he was transferred to an advanced landing ground in Kent. He recalls with humor the ways in which people made do with what they had: "That landing ground was really a pig farm. We had chicken wire, or pig wire, as it's called. In the mornings, we'd run the pigs off of the field, spread out the wire, and the mission would take off. Then along in the afternoon or evening, we'd go back out, run the pigs off the field again, and spread the wire so the planes could land."
When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the war was virtually ended. Soldiers and civilians alike were dumbfounded that such power existed. "I cried when my first child was born because I kept asking myself, 'What have we wrought for our kids' future?" Kathleen Van Buskirk sighs. Those who survived the war attempted to begin their lives afresh, attempting, as Kathleen puts it, "to find an identity for ourselves outside the national need."
Even still, Taney and Stone counties would never be the same. "The area changed a great deal. A lot of people had moved out of the area and returned after the war with new ideas and new ways of doing things. Lots of families, though, didn't come back," Kathleen recalls. "There was a push in Branson for small industry after the war so that those returning would have jobs, and there was a push for more tourism. . . . They began building the dam in the 1950s, and many retirees began coming into the area during that time."
In spite of these changes, or perhaps because of them, Mr. Hammil's patriotic laying hen with her 8" x 8" eggs represents far more than simple nostalgia; they represent the richly textured memories of those who, 50 years after the war, are willing to share the legacy with a new generation of listeners. As Jim Evans warmly cautions, "Don't ever forget."
Images of plane, destroyer, and war poster from http://www.arttoday.com, July 1999.
Other photos and artifacts provided by Billie Gooch, Wade Meadows, and Jack Justice, courtesy of Gaye Lisby, Branson Living Magazine
