Interviews
Exclusive Author Essay
I was a month shy of my 9th birthday on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor -- old enough for the event to make an impression I can still remember, but young enough not to have to go fight World War II. I remember how we first heard about it. My folks were living in Baltimore then. With my sister Mary Ann -- she was two weeks shy of her eighth birthday (we were "Irish twins") -- I was attending a matinee performance of an old-fashioned minstrel show put on by Our Lady of Lourdes, the parish church our elementary school was attached to. There was an "interlocutor " in the middle of the stage, with guys with faces corked black to the left and right of him and "end men" left and right. It was the first minstrel show we had ever seen -- and, as it turned out, the last. We thought it was very funny.
But when show was only halfway through, a man came out on stage and told us that the Japanese had attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor. Nothing seemed very funny after that. The bombs that fell at Pearl Harbor that morning dragged America into the war, killed 2,300 people, sank or damaged 19 ships, and split the battleship USS Arizona in two. It split American history in two as well, dividing the past from the future. By the time the war ended four years later, the world had changed -- and so had America and American humor. For one thing, there would be no more minstrel shows.
Now -- 6 decades later -- I'm 68 years old, and the millions who did go into the service to fight the war were at least 8 years older than I. That means the youngest of them are now past 75. If you were 25 then, you'd be 85 now. You get the idea. We're losing them rapidly. Each day that passes claims more World War II veterans than were killed in combat on any day of the war.
On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, we originated the CBS News Sunday Morning broadcast from Normandy. There, in the American cemetery, I saw more than one old man weeping as he stood, head bowed, before a white cross marking the grave of some pal who didn't make it.
In his mind's eye, the old man sees not another old man, but a young one who never got to grow old -- someone he may have gone through a lot with, sharing not only painful moments but lighthearted ones too. The old soldier remembers a young man's voice and a young man's laughter. Yes, there was laughter in World War II, and it helped them get through all the rest of it.
I do hope the book Kilroy Was Here brings back some memories and lets a succeeding generation or two see another neglected dimension of those times, as the old soldiers of World War II fade away. (Charles Osgood)
