Al McIntosh's War

World War II is a frequent topic in our house, especially with the two men in my life, both of whom are history buffs. I've been reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and loving it, and I would definitely recommend it to fiction lovers. It's set in England just after World War II, and much of the story deals with the characters' recounting of their experiences living on Guernsey Island when it was occupied by the Germans during the war.

So it's not surprising that one morning this week while Henry was waiting for me to come downstairs for breakfast, he picked up one of Jonathan's favorite books, The War, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns. He read this brief passage from the book and had to share it with me. And now I'm sharing it with you. This brief account comes from Al McIntosh, an editor of a small-town newspaper in Luverne, Minnesota, at the time of the war. On April 26, 1945, he wrote about an incident he observed while he was waiting for a train in Milwaukee.

He watched as an MP walked up to a soldier standing at a ticket window. He couldn't see well--a pillar was blocking his view--but he thought that the MP was frisking the soldier, for liquor perhaps. With a grim face, though, the MP then walked away from the soldier. McIntosh was puzzled about what was happening until the young soldier turned from the window and walked past him.

April 26, 1945. A lot of us are chronic complainers but I learned my lesson last week . . . [The soldier] was a kid about 22, chin up with a big smile on his face and his chest covered with sevice ribbons. And then I knew what the MP had been doing at the window. He had been putting the soldier's ticket and change in his blouse pocket. The boy had no hands, you see, just two steel hooks, instead. And I said to myself, then, "McIntosh, if you ever complain again about 'having your hands full' when that kid can grin without any hands, then you ought to be kicked."

from The War, p. 426

The greatest generation indeed . . .