The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (37 page)

In early January 1945, Kitty glanced out of the window of her home. Her heart beat furiously. A Western Union boy was parking his bicycle in front. Like most Americans, she knew that the War Department advised the next of kin of death, wounding, or disappearance of a loved one by Western Union.

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With trembling hands, Kitty took the telegram from the boy and opened it: “The War Department regrets to inform you that . . . ” It was a terrific jolt, even though it said that Charley had been seriously wounded instead of killed.

A gentle young lady, Kitty also had steel in her fiber. So she took upon herself the thorny task of breaking the distressing news to her husband’s parents and other family members.

As was customary, the telegram had provided no details. So Kitty would not learn until much later the agonizing pain and mental anguish Captain Boswell had endured after the Sherman tank in which he was riding was struck by a German shell and exploded.

Boswell had blacked out. Medics carried him from the battlefield, and his first conscious reaction was hearing a voice say, “Good morning.” It was an 84th Division chaplain.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in an Army hospital.”

Boswell could feel gauze bandages covering the upper part of his body, which was racked with pain. In an alarmed voice, he whispered, “I can’t see! Chaplain, why can’t I see?”

When the doctors paid a visit, he again asked, “Why can’t I see? What’s wrong with my eyes?”

One physician replied, “You got an overdose of burns, steel splinters, and dirt. We’ve taken a lot of foreign matter out of your eyes, but we don’t have it all yet.”

“Will I be able to see?” Charley asked in a whisper.

“We’re doing our best,” a doctor stated.

Later Captain Boswell was taken aboard a large C-54 cargo plane that had been remodeled to carry wounded men on litters and flown to the United States. A few days after landing, he was driven to Valley Forge General Hospital, near Philadelphia. The Army had converted the medical facility to specialize in treating eye patients.

After a series of tests, an eye specialist came to his room. “Captain Boswell,” he said. “Everything possible has been done to restore your sight. I’m sorry, but you’ll never see again.”

That night, Charley, a courageous man on the football field and in battle, plunged into deep depression, convinced that he would always be a little more than a vegetable. He was gripped by the fear of spending the rest of his life in a veterans’ home.

A few days after Boswell reached Valley Forge, he asked for a telephone and called Kitty. Nothing in the letters he had written her (with the help of Red Cross women) after his wounding gave any indication that he was blind. And he had no intention of breaking the news to her over the telephone. Somehow, Kitty knew. But she gave no indication of that fact.

A few hours later Kitty climbed on a Greyhound bus that took her to Valley Forge. Arrangements had been made for someone to meet her at the main entrance and escort her to the captain’s room. There was a mix-up. No one met Kitty. Instead, she meandered around the miles of corridors for a half hour, trying to find her husband. At one point, she walked through a section of the large hospital where blind soldiers were being treated. Many of the patients she saw had been in surgery and their faces were concealed by yards of gauze.

Kitty felt faint. Was Charley one of these men? She was almost in a state of shock when she finally found his room—by opening one door after another and calling out his name.

It was a joyous reunion. The couple talked far into the night. Charley’s eyes were never mentioned. He couldn’t think of a gentle way to tell her the news, so he rambled on about other things. In the early morning hours, Kitty left for her lodging place in a nearby town.

On the following night, Kitty walked across the room to where Charley was sitting in a large chair, sat on his lap, put her arm around his neck, and said softly: “Why don’t you tell me about it? It won’t make any difference.”

Both of them cried for many minutes. Never in the future would Kitty or Charley talk of his sightless situation. There was no need to do so.

When it became known that Charley would be at Valley Forge for at least six months, Kitty rented a house in the country nearby. Then her parents drove up from Birmingham to deliver little daughter Kay to the couple.

On arrival at the house, the child scrambled excitedly from the car, eager to greet her father. She ran toward him, then halted abruptly a few yards away and hurried back to her grandparents. Somehow, Kay had sensed that her father was “different.”

In the weeks ahead, Charley tried every trick he could think of to win over his daughter. Only gradually would she “accept” her father. All the while, he tried to conceal from Kitty the heartbreak he was suffering from the child’s rejection of him.

In the days and nights ahead, Charley became steadily more despondent. He spent hours lying idle on his hospital bed. How does a blind man get by? He would have to make a living to support Kitty and little Kay. But the only sightless civilians he had ever seen were guitar players standing on street corners and holding out little tin cups. Was that to be his destiny?

Valley Forge General had done all it could for Boswell, and he was transferred to Old Farms Convalescent Hospital near West Hartford, Connecticut. Boswell’s morale plunged; he thought he was being sent to some kind of old folks’ home. But it proved to be dedicated to taking blind Army men through programs to make them as self-sufficient as possible.

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Old Farms had about two hundred sightless Army men on hand for rehabilitation and skill-sharpening courses. Advanced courses in Braille, mental arithmetic, and various crafts were taught—along with music. Charley told Kitty: “You don’t know what cacophony really means until you hear fifteen or twenty boys trying to struggle through a John Philip Sousa march with instruments they had never played before!”

In the all for one, one for all, spirit of America in those war years, many of the industrial plants nearby took on blind soldiers from Old Farms as temporary workers in order to accelerate their training and to build their confidence. A surprise result was that the sightless men were more productive than anyone had expected. Unlike sighted employees, they had fewer opportunities to be distracted. Moreover, the blind soldiers took great pride in doing their jobs well.

Young men at Old Farms, sadly, were regarded as curiosities by some of the town folks. While two of the soldiers were in West Hartford with a sighted counselor one day, they overheard two women talking nearby. One said to her companion: “The Army must be hard up for soldiers, taking in blind men.”

Weeks later Captain Boswell was discharged from the Army and returned to Birmingham to establish a home for Kitty and Kay. He tried to mask his worries. A modest government pension was all he had to meet family needs. Moreover, he was grieving the loss of vision far more deeply than most people, including Kitty and the couple’s parents, thought. For a powerfully built man who had known success on football and baseball fields, it was infuriating for him to be groping around the house, bumping into objects, unable to find items he wanted.

Charley made a great pretense of being self-sufficient, determined to make things easier for Kitty and Kay by seeming to show that being blind was no great problem. Actually, blindness was an agonizing difficulty—and always would be.

Through perseverance and pluck—and Kitty’s loving help—the former sports star and war hero eventually became a successful businessman—and a role model for countless sightless people.
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“Franklin Died Like a Soldier”

S
PRING WAS BREAKING OUT
over Washington. The mood of the city was upbeat. Allied armies were closing in on Berlin. Soon the war in Europe was bound to end. It was April 12, 1945.

Vice President Harry Truman was in the Capitol, presiding over a session of the Senate. Bored by listening to a long speech, the peppery Truman began writing a letter to his mother and sister in Independence, Missouri:

Dear Mama and Mary:

I am writing this letter from the desk of the President of the

Senate while a windy Senator [Alexander Wiley] is making a

speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar.

Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time to hear

[me] make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think it’ll be on

all the networks. It will be followed by President Roosevelt, whom

I’ll introduce.

Eventually, the curtain fell on Wiley’s speech and Truman adjourned the Senate at 4:45
P.M.
He then strolled to the office of an old crony, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who handed the vice president a glass of bourbon and water. The Speaker suddenly remembered that Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, had telephoned and wanted Truman to call the White House immediately.

Early told the vice president, “Please come right over.” Truman presumed that Roosevelt had returned unexpectedly from his Georgia retreat, a six-room clapboard cottage called the Little White House in Warm Springs.

Truman arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at 5:25
P.M.
and was escorted to Eleanor Roosevelt’s study on the second floor. A few moments later the First Lady, dignified and composed, came into the room and put an arm around Truman’s shoulder. “Harry,” she said solemnly, “the president is dead.”

There were several moments of silence, then the First Lady said quietly, “Franklin died like a soldier.”

One minute after the announcement was made to White House reporters, the blockbuster news was flashed to the home front on radio. Unlike newspapers, the networks refused to accept advertising for three days.

In the White House, hasty preparations for swearing in the new president were rapidly completed. Soon after 7:00
P.M.
Truman, with his wife Bess and daughter Margaret at his side, faced Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone. Truman picked up a Bible that had been put on a table, and the chief justice began reciting the oath of office. But Truman had failed to raise his right hand, and the jurist calmly reminded him to do so.

At 7:08
P.M.
Harry Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States.

Reared on a farm near Independence, the sixty-year-old Missourian had been unable to afford college, and he was denied admission to West Point because of poor eyesight. So he became the only president in the twentieth century who was not a college graduate, which, his admirers held, was the reason he was always able to tackle knotty problems with a commonsense approach.

After the swearing-in ceremony, Secretary of War Henry Stimson remained, saying he had an urgent matter to discuss. “Mr. President,” the World War I Army colonel who saw heavy combat said, “I want you to know about an

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immense project that is underway—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of unbelievable destructive power.” Stimson said he could discuss the matter no longer.

When President Truman left a few minutes later for his apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, he was puzzled. What did Stimson mean by this remark? Only later would Truman be told of the atomic bomb project.

Truman was now saddled with the woes of the free world. On the way to the White House the next morning, he gave Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press a ride. The reporter thought: How many such powerful men in history would ever have given a journalist a ride to work?

Vaccaro thought the president seemed deeply occupied, perhaps awed by his new role. “Few men have equaled the one into whose shoes I’m stepping,” the president declared. “I’ve silently prayed to God that I can measure up to the task.”

Later that day Truman went to the Capitol to arrange to speak to a joint session of Congress. Page boys and reporters lined up to shake Truman’s hand. “Fellows, if you ever pray, pray for me,” he said in his Midwestern twang. “I feel like the moon and the stars and the planets have fallen on me.”

In the meantime, Eleanor Roosevelt had flown to Georgia and was aboard a funeral train winding its way to Washington with her husband’s body. Much of the day and into the night she lay in her berth, looking out at the throngs of people that had gathered at stations and in the towns to pay their final tribute to the president.

At ten o’clock on the morning of April 14, the train pulled into Union Station. Harry Truman, his wife Bess, and other top government officials got onto the train to pay their respects to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Later thousands crowded onto both sides of Constitution Avenue as a caisson drawn by six white horses carried the flag-draped coffin to the White House. Many wept openly. Others watched, grim and stoic, as though in a daze. President Truman noticed an elderly black woman, apron held to her eyes, sitting on the curb and crying as though she had just lost a son.