Commentary: Vivid memories from World War II

By Seymour I. "Spence" Toll

Since 1945, my annual anticipation of the month of April has triggered two memories whose perfect clarity has never been muddied by the erosion of accumulating years.

The first of them involves the leader of millions of fellow Americans. The second is my beloved mother and her expression of maternal devotion to me.

On April 12, 1945, I was a 21-year-old private first class, an Army combat infantryman who had sustained a wound to my right arm on Dec. 16, 1944. It was the first night of the Battle of the Bulge in the Luxembourg Ardennes. After hospitalization and surgery in Luxembourg City and Paris, I was moved to a U.S. Army hospital in England for more surgery. There the physicians decided that I was disabled for combat duty and should be hospitalized further in the United States.

Thus, on April 12, I was aboard the converted luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, headed for New York. Enchanted by the Atlantic, I was drawn to watch it from the ship's stern railing. I had two amiable Canadian Army neighbors with whom I was chatting casually until the public address system had the ship's captain report his deep regret at the news that President Franklin Roosevelt had died.

FDR was our president from 1933 to 1945, years when I was 8 to 20, with a reasonably developed adolescent sense of public life. In our middle-class Philadelphia neighborhood, the Depression was apparent everywhere, especially in the unemployment of so many respected neighbors. One day, I was sobered to see one of them, a businessman, fully clad as if for the office, standing on a street corner trying to sell bags of apples from a crate next to him.

The Depression was an ever-present, bitter reality, and it was vividly clear to this adolescent that FDR and his New Deal were engaged in a deeply moral effort to diminish the mass suffering of millions of fellow Americans. His stature as national leader grew dramatically when he condemned the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor as "a date which will live in infamy." Days later, we were at war with Germany and Italy. My Central High School classmates and I now looked most respectfully upon FDR as commander in chief as well as president. I felt that way as a soldier too.

That April day has been an unforgettable reminder of FDR's enormously constructive leadership in peace and war.

After our ship docked in New York on April 14, medical passengers were taken to nearby Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island. Those who could get around without support - the "walking wounded" - were given several days' leave before being moved to Ashford General, which in peacetime was the luxury resort the Greenbrier in West Virginia.

During the four months I was hospitalized in Europe, I often wrote to my parents. I was right-handed but had to use my left because of my wound and mentioned that to them. I didn't tell them about my transfer to America though. I had been in service long enough to know that at my low level, orders from above were subject to frequent last-minute changes. I didn't want to raise their hopes of my return only to have them wiped out at the last minute.

While on leave, I took the train from New York to Philadelphia and telephoned them from 30th Street Station. Mom answered and, because she was hard of hearing, I had to identify myself again. After gasping, she asked where I was, and when I told her, she shouted to Dad, who was in the backyard. He rushed to the phone and said they would drive down to the station right away.

They arrived in record time, and we had a wonderful, embracing, and tearful reunion. As soon as we stopped hugging and kissing, my physically small mom with an enormous heart gently took hold of my right arm, raised it slowly, and kissed it from the hand to the upper arm. That was the first time I learned that she thought I had actually lost the arm and was trying to spare them pain by using a false excuse for writing to them with my left hand.

As April nears, these two clear and heartfelt memories are with me again.

Seymour I. "Spence" Toll is a Philadelphia lawyer and author. spentoll@aol.com