My grandparents got married in California in August 1942 right before my grandfather left to go overseas as a newly commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Army. My grandmother worked as telephone operator in Los Angeles, living there with her half-sister Frances (I think. I can ask Uncle Dick if I talk to him again before he dies).
My mom was born the following May back in Nebraska, where had grandmother had returned while she was pregnant. At one point, when my mom was an infant, they lived on Long Island near Jones Field. My grandfather tried to undertake flight training, but he "fortunately washed out" as my Uncle Mark put it. The causality rate among fliers was so high. As such he made it through the war with only one significant injury, having been strafed by a German fighter plane while he was on the ground in Italy. He earned a Purple Heart that was displayed in small array on framed green felt in the den of their house in Ames during the time I grew up. Later he was buried with his metals when he died in 1993 in Florida. My grandmother spent the rest of her life wanting to join him in Heaven. When she died in 2007 she was buried next to him in the military ceremony between Tampa and Orlando.
Years ago, when studying the history of World War II, I learned an interesting thing about the month my mother was born, May 1943. In many ways it was the true turning point of the war in Europe. It is not too much of exaggeration to say that the theater of war changed drastically from the start of the month to the end. By the start of June, a full year before D-Day, the war had essentially been won from a defensive point of view. That is, although Nazi Germany was not yet defeated, they were no longer a threat to most of the rest of the world. The Allies had set the stage for the final victory.
At the start of May, the "front line" of the war was the coast of the United States. These were the days when those submarine observation bunkers were sorely needed.
Any American ship venturing out to sea, even half a mile, including a fishing boat, could be sunk by patrolling U-Boats. German submarines were a threat to land on the coast to unload spies (something that actually rarely happened) or to launch an invasion of the North American mainland. A month later, this threat had largely evaporated. The front line of the war had been rolled completely across the ocean to the shores of Europe. It was an enormous, stunning victory.
What had happened? In short, in the short weeks of May 1943 the U.S. and Britain won the War of the North Atlantic. Among other things, they had closed the "Greenland Gap" in air coverage that had allowed German U-boats to continue to sink Transatlantic shipping. After May 1943, the U-boat fleet was essentially defeated and the German navy was driven from the open ocean. The Allies had control of the high seas. This allowed Britain to become the "forward base" of the war in a way that it couldn't before, during the dark days of the early part of the war.
After May 1943, crossing the Atlantic became a lot less scarier. There were much fewer telegrams sent to homes saying that their sons had died at sea crossing the ocean. Without this victory, there would have been no D-Day invasion of the European mainland. It took a year after this development for that invasion to take place.
Anyone who knew my late mother well would tell you that she was obsessed with the war. Towards the end of her life, especially after the death of both her parents, she practically lived in that time in her head. This was especially true about her father's service in North Africa in Italy in the Army She would almost always find a way to link the subject of any conversation To say that she was a child of that era is an understatement. I miss hearing her talk about those things. How I miss that.
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