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  More direct efforts to hit specific industrial targets fell primarily to the American air command. By the end of 1943 there were more than a million Yanks in Great Britain laying the groundwork for the destruction of Nazi Germany, with the American air bases dotting the eastern English countryside. From here, the Eighth Air Force mounted raids with her heavy bombers, the formidable B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator.

  Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress "Shoo Shoo Baby" at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Credit: USAF. Public domain.

  The first mass produced model, the B-17E, was heavily armed with nine .50 caliber machine guns mounted in Plexiglas ‘blisters’ and could carry a 4000 lb. bomb load.[9] Subsequent models made various improvements and from the beginning, the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’, was a workhorse of the American air campaign over the skies of Germany, with nearly 13,000 manufactured for the US Army Air Corps. Improvements would gain the crews of the B-17 the capacity to carry three tons of bombs to the target, up to 2000 miles armed also with 13 .50 caliber guns.[10]

  Consolidated B-24 Liberator from Maxwell Field, Alabama, 1940s.

  Credit: USAF, public domain.

  The B-24 was the most heavily produced bomber in history, with 19,000 manufactured. It sported a twin tail and four engines, with a top speed of 303 miles per hour, ten .50 caliber machine guns, and able to carry 8,800 lbs. of bombs. It was also used in a variety of capacities thought the war. Complex tight bombing formations kept these bombers together to increase their accuracy and firepower against German fighters rising up to attack them, and several missions involved more than a thousand bombers carrying 10,000 or more airmen into enemy territory.

  Manning these planes and others, it would be up to the boys of the United States Army Air Forces to get the job done. They would come from the depths of the Great Depression, and they would become men.

  Hudson Falls, on the Hudson River, in 1946.

  Source: Hudson Falls High School Yearbook, 1946.

  chapter Two

  Hard Times

  Andy Doty was born in 1925. A 1943 graduate of Hudson Falls High School, he compiled the memories of his World War II experience at the fiftieth anniversary of the war, remembering growing up during the Depression and the inevitability of entering the service. Andy became a B-29 tail gunner, completing 21 combat missions in the skies over the Japanese home islands (detailed in my first book on the Pacific War) and even surviving an emergency crash landing in the vast Pacific—all before his 22nd birthday. He recounts the tempering experience of being raised in small-town America during the Great Depression, an experience that played out all over the United States:

  ‘I present to the reader my memories of that era—the impact of ‘hard times’ and a world war on a quiet village, the experiences of one of the last truly innocent generations of Americans, and the transition of a young man who hated fist fights into a seasoned tail gunner. Throughout my wartime training, I was aware of what was being done to prepare me to kill or to be killed.’

  Andy Doty

  Our town stretched for nearly two miles along the high east bank of the Hudson River, fifty miles north of the state capital at Albany. Main Street runs parallel to the river; along its length during the 1930s were the public library, the village fire and police stations, five churches, three department stores, a bank, three drug stores, one hotel, the tiny Strand theater, the high school, the post office, and a mysterious ‘cigar store’ where you could buy cherry bomb fireworks and where men ‘played the horses’ in a dark, smoky poolroom in the back.

  Extending east at right angles to the main thoroughfare were the usual small town streets—Maple, Elm, Willow, Chestnut. By pedaling a single speed bike half a mile out Maple Street you could see far across the broad valley to the Green Mountains of Vermont, thirty miles away. Looking down from Main Street, you saw the wide river, tumbling along the long terrace of rocks that gave the village its name.

  Hudson Falls, formally known as Sandy Hill, was a peaceful place where there were no serious crimes, scandals, or disasters to mar the slow pace of life. Snow sifted down onto the homes in the winter, lilacs bloomed beside long porches in the spring, katydids chirped on soft summer nights, and the scent of burning leaves filled the air in the fall. The best part of the village was the tree shaded streets at the center of town, at right angles to Main Street. The poorer sections were at the north and south ends of town, and ‘under the hill,’ an area near the falls and the Union Bag and Paper Company mill.

  My fraternal twin Chuck and I were born on October 12, 1925. Our family lived at the south end, seven of us, in a large, two-story rented house. A porch ran along the front and one side. Inside were a parlor and front room, the kitchen, dining room, and several bedrooms. The furnace stood in the center of the cellar like a huge oak, its big pipes spreading upward to the hot air registers in the rooms above. A dark coal bin stood nearby; there was a small garden in the back of the house.

  My father was a lean, angular, quiet man, proud of the fact that he had become a night shift ‘back tender’ on one of the paper company's big machines. He made sure that wide swaths of paper rolled smoothly through without tears or wrinkles, and he wrestled huge rolls that were half his height in diameter. He earned eighteen dollars a week and was happy to have it.

  Mom was a pretty, pink-faced, somewhat disorganized woman who engaged in long, dull monologues that we learned to let slip by. She was a not a gifted cook; she would become so engrossed in reading the Ladies Home Journal that countless smoking dishes had to be hurriedly retrieved from the oven. Mom would scrape away the burned portion, telling her children that carbon was good for them. She raised a large family while taking in sewing from the local shirt factory to augment Dad's income.

  Three older children and a set of twins lived in the house—Bill, a taut, wiry replica of his father; Agnes, who continually drank coffee and smoked cigarettes; and Ann, as pretty as her mother. The twins—Chuck and I—came along years later, no doubt to the great dismay of their parents. Two older sisters, Betty and Ruth, had left home earlier after dropping out of school to go to work.

  Chuck and I turned out to be quite different. I did all the ‘right’ things—finished my chores, studied hard in school, and earned Boy Scout merit badges. In high school, I played on four sports teams, had leading roles in dramatic productions, and was named president of our senior class. I was the fair-haired son, and knew it—something I still feel guilty about. Chuck marched to his own drummer. He was taller and stronger than I but he cared little about sports. He was self-taught in many ways; I was amazed by the store of information he acquired about nature, animals, electricity, and many other subjects. He quietly handled the lighting and other electrical details of our high school drama productions.

  It was not at all unusual that my older brother and sisters had dropped out of school early. The vast majority of Depression era children did not proceed beyond eighth grade, for they had to work or marry to ease the economic burden on their families. Agnes proudly showed us the razor sharp, crescent-shaped blade attached to a ring that she wore on her finger while working on a production line at the paper company. Her job was to bundle paper bags as rapidly as she could. She tied up the batches, and then cut the cord with a sweep of her razor, losing little time in the process. Ann, Chuck and I were the lucky ones in the family; we were able to continue into high school, thanks to our older brother and sisters.

  Our family was poor, but lucky to have jobs. Forty million Americans had no work or regular income in the mid-1930s, and unemployment ran as high as 80% in some cities. Fortunately, the paper products of the mills were in demand. Dad worked six days a week and Mom sewed when she was not cleaning, washing or scorching dinner. We had no car, no telephone, no family vacations, and no bicycles for many years (the Montgomery Ward model cost a staggering $29). I have a clear memory of dinners consisting of a slice of bread in a soup plate, covered with milk and sprinkled with sugar. At one time
we ate dandelion greens that Dad dug up from a field. We complained about the bitterness but were told that the greens, like charred cake, would make us strong. We needed only to add some butter and salt.

  Doctors were too expensive for casual use. One winter night I was sliding down a hill at the same time a girl was pulling her Flexible Flyer sled up the slope. The sled was behind her, trailing at the end of a long rope. Without her realizing it, the sled strayed out into my path. I was flat on my stomach, hands extended out to the steering handles as I sped down the hill. There was no time or room to turn. I smashed into her sled, the bridge of my nose catching the steel frame at the front. I rolled off my sled as blood spilled onto the snow. My companions placed me on the sled and pulled me home, where my mother applied her favorite remedy, a ‘cold poultice’—a bandage soaked in cold water. No doctor was called, nor did we ever visit one. I still bear the scar and skewed nose.

  Chuck and I asked Dad for a dime apiece one Saturday to attend the afternoon matinee at the Strand Theater. ‘I just don't have it, boys,’ he said, and turned his pockets inside out to show us. Although disappointed, I felt an even deeper sadness for him. Waitresses were averaging $520 a year in income, construction workers $900, textile workers $435, and secretaries, $1,000. Wages were routinely reduced at the same time work weeks were extended, and no one dared complain. In fact, Dad had been ‘let go’ from an earlier paper mill job in another town when he dared talk about the need for a worker's union.

  Christmas brought few gifts. Chuck and I could expect a new penknife each year from Betty, knitted mittens (with our initials on the cuffs) from maiden Aunt Gertrude, and an article of clothing or two and a homemade toy from Mom and Dad.

  The announcer during the ‘Fibber Magee and Molly’ radio show would tantalize us with his descriptions of Mars candy bars. He spoke in slow, mellow tones of the ‘rich, creamy caramel,’ the crunchy almonds,’ and the ‘smooth chocolate’ that made up the candy we could not afford. As we walked the sidewalks of Hudson Falls our eyes scanned the pavement ahead, searching for lost coins. A penny was great, a nickel was a real find, and a quarter would send the finder into ecstasy. I dreamed of finding that much money.

  The Delaware and Hudson railroad tracks were not far from our house. My father called the D & H the ‘Delay and Halt,’ but it did succeed in carrying some of that era's one million homeless—men called ‘hoboes’—into northern New York. They stole rides in railroad boxcars, cooked food in tin cans over wood fires, and slept in ‘jungles’ in the woods. They chalked secret codes onto village curbs and sidewalks to direct others to hospitable homes—or to warn them away from unfriendly ones. Some made their way to our house, where my mother gave them a slice of bread and butter when it was available. They were courteous, grateful, and subdued as they sat on our back steps. Chuck and I stole glances at their bearded faces, grimy clothes and worn shoes.

  ‘Where are you from?’ we asked one.

  ‘From all over. You name it, I bin there.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Wherever I can catch onta something.’

  When we were able to go to the theater, we watched the Fox Movietone News coverage of bloody strikes in automobile and steel factories. There were other scenes of men in black overcoats standing stoically in block long bread lines, and of former executives selling apples, pencils and shoestrings from tiny sidewalk stands. There were dirty, seamed ‘Okies’ fleeing the dust storms that had over whelmed their farms. We saw an army of World War I veterans march on Washington to demand early payment of bonuses due them in 1945.[4] Those were ‘hard times’ indeed.

  A new president came into office, his cigarette holder cocked at a jaunty angle, and announced a ‘New Deal’ of relief, recovery, and reform to lift the nation out of the Depression. Among Franklin Roosevelt's programs was the WPA (Works Projects Administration). It created jobs for the unemployed all over America. An empty corner lot near our house that lacked sidewalks and curbs was targeted for improvement. One day a truck and a dozen men arrived, hammered a WPA sign into the ground, and began shoveling. They worked leisurely that summer, stretching out the job as long as possible. ‘Do you know why the WPA needs a crew of eight and a portable outhouse to hoe a field that two men can handle?’, my father would ask with a slight smile. ‘Because there are always two coming, two going, two peeing, and two hoeing.’

  Our village was the perfect place for boyhood. The river, vacant lots, and nearby ponds and wooded areas were our playgrounds. Riding two on a bike and carrying a scruffy football, we challenged other gangs to Saturday morning battles. We tangled in the dust and mud without benefit of Pop Warner League helmets, padding or cleated shoes. There were no obnoxious ‘high-fives’ nor show-off victory dances after a touchdown. Neither a coach nor a parent was in sight. Our school classes were small, and our summer vacations were delicious. Sprung free in June like colts turned out to pasture, our gang of boys hiked across a bridge to roam the wooded Fenimore banks, named after James Fenimore Cooper, whose Last of the Mohicans was set in our area. We tried to run silently along paths through the trees and walk with our toes pointed straight ahead, as we were told the Indians once did. We swam naked in the river at a remote shale beach. An old row boat washed up onto the shore after a storm; we lugged it home, where we replaced broken bottom boards, pounded rope into the cracks, and sealed it all with chunks of tar melted in a tin can over a small fire. We paddled about happily on sunny afternoons in our resurrected craft; we fished for slippery, long whiskered bullheads. My father told us his favorite recipe for preparing river carp; ‘You put the carp on a board, bake it in the oven for an hour, pull it out, throw the carp away, and eat the board’.

  The seasons dictated our activities—football in the fall, ice hockey and basketball in the winter, baseball and track in the spring. We entertained ourselves in many ways—by building, defending, and storming snow forts in the winter, by racing match sticks down a street gutter in the spring runoff, or by nudging a small wheel along the street with a T-shaped device we had hammered together. A kite could be built from strips of wood, string, newspaper, some paste, and a tail of torn rags. It was serviceable and was no great loss when it tangled inevitably in a tree or telephone lines.

  We believed our gang to be unique. ‘McGoosey’ Walsh was a freckled imp who could drop two-handed set shots into a hoop almost at will. Bob Burns was a skinny Irishman. He was a choir boy in the Catholic Church, but was far from angelic. Bob could swear with the best of us, but he could go to confession on Saturday to be absolved of his guilt. As a Methodist, I envied the protection he gained by dipping his fingers into the water to cross himself before we went swimming or before he took a foul shot in basketball. Later in life I wondered if a controlled experiment would show that Catholics who crossed themselves drowned less often or made more foul shots than Methodists who did not.

  Bill DeCamillo could not look more Italian than he did. So we called him ‘Irish Bill.’ Later on, in high school, he affected a ‘zoot suit.’ He wore a bright yellow, absurdly long jacket. His lavender pegged pants, supported by bright suspenders, reached up to his rib cage. A key chain drooped nearly to the ankles. His wide brimmed fedora hat would have done justice to a Chicago gangster. His were the first male fingernails I ever saw that were an inch long.

  ‘Bud’ Reed was devilishly inventive. One dark night, as we were liberating apples from someone's backyard trees, the owner heard us, turned on a light, and looked out the door. As we ran away, Bud called back: ‘Get down out of that tree, Mark LaRue, son of Reverend LaRue.’ Mark was a popular boy who of course was not with us. The next day, his kindly father received a phone call from the angry owner.

  Although we grew up in a small village and came from humble stock, we were surprisingly literate. We prided ourselves on the nicknames we devised for village characters—‘Shufflefoot’ Gleason, ‘Choo Choo’ Trayne, ‘Carstairs’ Lethbridge (after his favorite whiskey), and ‘Commodore’ Logan. The Comm
odore was tall, handsome and distinguished in his castoff clothing. He had no job, and, as far as we could tell, no home. He was allowed to sleep at night in a barbershop chair or in the back of Harry Baker's Square Deal Drugstore.

  Our days were enlivened by the arrival on our street of the ice man, the rag man and the vegetable man. Their coming was announced by loud calls, bells, or whistles. The ice man's truck was piled high with large, clear blocks covered by bits of sawdust and wet canvas. He snagged the blocks down with his tongs, chipped them to the right size, hoisted them onto a leather patch on his shoulder, and bore them to the ice boxes in our homes. While he was away, we sucked on the ice shards on hot summer days.

  The rag man was a shrewd old fellow who offered a few coins for all the cloth and scrap metal we could collect. ‘Rags, rags, rags’ he called, and we dragged to his truck a burlap bag half filled with rusted nuts and bolts we had dug up from the Sandy Hill Iron and Brass Company yard. He was engaged in recycling long before the word was invented.

  A ringing bell told us when the vegetable man was in our neighborhood. His wares were displayed on slanted racks in the back of his truck, shaded by an awning. A scooped scale dangled from a chain. Our mothers came out, wiping their hands on their aprons, to select from the fruits and vegetables when they could afford them.