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Five Stars in the Window (Grades 3-6)
I was five years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,
December 7, 1941. In that year, our nation declared war
on three countries, Japan, Germany and Italy.
As news of the bombing and President Roosevelt's
declaration of war on Japan came to our farmhouse in Northern Minnesota, my older brothers gathered around the huge radio. I had seven brothers, and they were talking about enlisting or waiting for the draft. Two joined the navy and three became soldiers. Five brothers went off to fight the war. My mother hung a small blue flag in our kitchen window. On the flag, set in a circle, were five white stars.
Most of my childhood memories were connected to war. The dramatic voices of news broadcasters came through our big
battery radio that sat squat and portentous in the corner of
the living room. I could hear bombs exploding, and the static of the shortwave transmissions sounded like the
roar of the oceans those airwaves crossed.
Even at home, our lives were affected. We were told to grow
Victory Gardens because food was rationed. Gasoline was
rationed too, and it was almost impossible to buy a set of tires. We had "black-out" drills where we put blankets
over the windows so the enemy couldn't see our house if they tried to bomb at night.
On Saturday nights the farmers went to town. The mothers sat on benches in the grocery store or in the cafe and talked about war; the men played cards in the tavern
and talked about war. The kids all went to the picture show. I liked Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but I was also fascinated with the newsreels, "The March of Times." I saw grim-faced soldiers staring out of muddy trenches, young sailors firing sixteen-inch guns off battleships, mothers holding babies at train stations waving good-bye to soldiers riding off on a troop train. "Time marches on."
My mother wrote letters to my brothers on special light-
weight stationary, like tissue paper. She walked up the dirt road to the mailbox and returned with the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She spread the newspaper across the kitchen table and called me to her side. I saw maps of places I had never heard of and listened to my mother as she pointed to ugly black arrows showing the advancing allied forces moving toward the Rhine, matching on Berlin. The Pacific maps showed more arrows, many little islands and drawings of tiny ships moving across the waters. She took a pencil and wrote in the names of my brothers on the maps, pinpointing their location as close as she could determine from their letters.
One day she showed me a copy of Life Magazine. She pointed to a picture of six mean-looking men, standing erect in their black overcoats. In the middle was a strange face
with a small black mustache. She tapped on his face with her finger and said, "That's the man your brothers are fighting against. He is very bad, and if God is not on our side, he might win the war." His name was Adolph Hitler.
My youngest brother, Arthur, was the last to be called into
the army, drafted out of high school at the age of 18.
Before they sent him to Europe, he came home for a
Christmas furlough. I was eight years old, December 1944.
There were five of us living on our farm then: me, my mom, two sisters, 12 and 17 and my brother Leonard who got a medical discharge and worked the farm. Arthur arrived in the middle of the night; one of his high school buddies had met him at the train depot and drove him to our farm. I woke up in the darkness and smelled shoe polish, chewing gum and moth balls. He crawled in bed beside me and was soon asleep.
At breakfast he sat in his uniform and answered all our
questions. I was fascinated with a shiny brass whistle
which hung from his jacket. He told me I could borrow it
while he was home, but I couldn't blow it in the house. I
put on my coat and overshoes, ran out into the cold morning
air and blew the whistle.
Then my brother Leonard called from down by the barn.
He was getting ready to butcher pigs and needed my help.
We took down my swing from the big oak tree branch and
hung a heavy block and tackle in its place.
Arthur had put on work clothes and carried a .22 rifle down
to the pigpen. I watched him approach a pig with the gun cradled in his right arm. In his left hand he held a corncob. The pig bit hard into the cob. Arthur held it firmly, placed the end of the barrel against the pig's forehead and fired. Leonard stuck a butcher knife into the pig's throat and I held the dishpan to catch the warm blood. My mother would use the blood to make blod klub, a Norwegian bloodcake.
In the kitchen my mother and sisters were boiling water
on the old Home Comfort stove. I carried in firewood and hauled milk cans of hot water on my toboggan down to the oak tree to fill the scalding barrel. Leonard and Arthur pulled on the rope and hoisted the pig by its hind legs
into the tree, then dunked it into the barrel of boiling
water. They leaned the barrel against the end of a flatbed bob-sled. My brothers pulled the pig from the water and slid it onto the flatbed. They scraped the hair from the pig's steaming skin with sharp knives.
After dark, I went to the barn to feed skim milk to the calves. I held my lantern to the pig hanging white and gutted in the oak tree. I saw the red meat inside and touched the smooth, frozen skin.
The next day, Arthur and I took the Swede saw and my toboggan to the tamarack swamp and cut a Christmas tree. My sisters and I put tinsel and garlands on the tree and carefully clamped on tiny candle holders, making sure the flame would not reach the needles. On Christmas Eve we lit the tree and watched the flickering light for only an hour. My mother said a prayer for the boys at war. Then Arthur blew out the candles, one by one.
On Christmas it snowed all day. By evening, the road to the mailbox was drifted over. We watched at the window and saw the headlights of Arthur's buddy coming on the main road to take him to town. They were going to have a party before he got on the train that would take him to his company somewhere in Missouri. I lit the kerosene lantern, and Arthur loaded his duffel bag on my toboggan for the trip up the road to the mailbox. I led the way with the lantern, and Arthur pulled the toboggan. The snow was so deep my lantern made a little trail in the snow. We said good-bye in the howling wind, and I returned the brass whistle.
I was the last person in my family to see Arthur alive. He was killed three months later, March 26th, 1945, crossing the Rhine River near Worms, Germany. Forty-five days later the war in Europe was over.
The depot agent brought the telegram. I remember that yellow envelope lying on the kitchen table for days after. My mother cried when Arthur died. She cried harder a week later when the news came that President Roosevelt had died.
He had been our voice of hope and courage through the long war.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered. The war was over. We went to town that night, Leonard, Mom, my two sisters and me. Farmers gathered in the tavern to celebrate and mothers made plans for parties to welcome the boys home. Fire sirens, car horns and train whistles wailed into the night. I have never seen people so happy in my whole life.
In the weeks to come newspaper and magazine articles
appeared with photographs of giant mushroom clouds. The
atomic bomb was used on Japan to end the war. I was reading by then and quite frankly those articles and photographs frightened me more than anything I had seen or heard before. They still do.
By Christmas, my brothers were all home. They didn't say much about the war, and my mother told me to stop asking questions. They got on with their lives. They dated their old girlfriends, got jobs, married and had children. But the flag with the five stars still hung in the window.
It was still hanging there when war broke out again.
This time it was a little country called Korea.
Note: "Five Stars in the Window" was first published in ECHOS MAGAZINE.
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