Oakford at War

Oakford at War

We knew about the war. We were old enough to read and make some sense out of the newspaper. The comic books were certainly full of it—at least the ones I read.

 The radio serials—Hop Harrigan, Captain Midnight, and even Tom Mix—simply incorporated the war into the neighborhood, the city, the ranch. My friends and I chased each other with toy pistols, making guttural gun noises (not BANG! like our little brothers did) and arguing and fighting about whether we were shot. When it rained we sat on each other's porches and built models of P47 Thunderbolts and P38 Lightnings, stretching the delicate thin tissue paper over fragile balsa wood ribs. Our tongues tripped uncomfortably and self-consciously over words like dihedral angle and bulkhead. 

We were able to identify enemy aircraft from the silhouette sheets included in the model kits.  Our vocabularies expanded to even more uncomfortable words. We knew the German divebomber, the Junkers Stuka; the Japanese fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero—the “Zeke.”

 

Messerscmitt ME 109

Junkers JU 87 “Stuka”

Mitsubishi Zero

Each of our homes had "blackout" shades, ours on the big windows in our sun parlor that faced Oakford Avenue, and every few weeks there was an air raid practice. I asked my father why the shades were green if they were for "blackout." He taught me the word "opaque." Sometimes the air raid practice would come after I had gone to bed, and I would lie there wondering if the plane flying over our house was a Messerschmitt ME 109. I looked at the empty bed next to mine. My big brother was in the Army Air Force. I could draw a Boeing B17 without looking at a picture.

The war movies and the newsreels filled us with the images and sounds of bombing raids, and of men running—half-crouched—through woods and fields. Some of these men were our fathers, or our uncles, or our older brothers. We could never recognize their faces on the screen. Everything was too grainy, too fast, too scary. We talked about the war in school, on the playground, at Cub Scouts. But we learned to avoid “war talk” around Johnny Frazier—at least for a while—after his father's submarine disappeared in the Pacific.

Playing at war didn't seem quite substantial enough to me. There was no blood. We fell to the ground, clutching our stomachs, shouting lines heard at the movies, but making sure not to scrape our faces in the dirt. And then, in June and July of 1945, in that last summer of the war, we learned to become authentic—methodical—killers. We destroyed the Japanese in our own version of the War of the Roses.

I lived in an apartment building. Sylvan Richter lived across the alley, on Ridgewood Avenue. His house had a porch, and a long yard to the street. And all along the pavement to the front steps, Sylvan's mother grew roses.

The roses were also victims of the Japanese. Japanese beetles wearing iridescent purple and brown armor had invaded Baltimore, chewing holes in the leaves and petals of every rose bush that lined the walks to our homes. And we fought back.

The beetle traps were metal cans, painted a bright yellow or green, hung from hooks at the tops of long metal rods staked into the dirt at the foot of each bush. We didn't know what was inside the cans—just that it was "poison" and we were not to touch it. Of course we did touch it. And smell it!

 A strange odor emanated from the cans—a mix of gasoline and sweet perfume. The beetles were attracted to the aroma, and they entered the traps through holes that ringed the top of each can. In the morning we would look into the bottom of the trap and see a mass of drowned, poisoned beetles. What satisfaction—we were winning the war. But for some of us it was too passive a victory. We were not content on the sidelines, counting the kill. We went on the attack.

We were capable of such cruelty. Did the war do that to us? I don't think so. It was the recognition, at a gut level, that we had no control over our lives.  We were eight and nine years old, but we knew that someone—something—was pulling our strings and we flopped helplessly at the ends.

It was easy to capture a Japanese beetle. There were two methods. With care, you could pick a beetle off of a leaf between your thumb and forefinger, gripping it by its sides. It was a delicate task. If your grasp was off just a bit, the beetle was able to turn sideways and grab on to your finger. Beetle legs were clawed and strong. You could not separate the beetle easily from its hold on the ridges of your fingerprints. There were two choices at that point. One was to transfer the beetle into the palm of your other hand and keep it trapped within a loose fist. This could lead, after a while, to a handful of scrabbling beetles, tickling and squirming to break free.

The alternative was to take the single beetle, still between two fingers, and throw it onto the cement pavement—to disable it. This was rarely successful. If the beetle's grip were strong enough it would not be flung easily to the ground. Instead, it would be released from between our fingers at a much-reduced speed, and it would fly away before it reached the walkway.

We honed our skills through the spring and into the hot Baltimore summer. We learned that the beetles were lethargic early in the morning. We belted our holsters to our waists and crept through the jungles of the neighborhood. We met under the wooden back porch of 4008 Oakford Avenue and compared prisoners.

The beetles were transferred to small cardboard cartons—usually the boxes that our mother's kitchen matches came in. In answer to the periodic question—why are all the wooden matches loose in the sink drawer?—we just shrugged without even looking up from our comic books. The beetles scrabbled, agitated, within their prison, and we prepared our "flame-throwers."

Our garages, our basements, were virtual arsenals in the war against the beetles. We had access to paint thinner, lighter fluid, gasoline—if it burned we brought it. In small quantities so that it wouldn't be missed. The boxes containing the "prisoners of war" were placed in a pile and we sat, usually three or four of us, cross-legged, surrounding them. We couldn't stand; the headroom under the porch was no more than three feet, and in places much less. If we stood we were at risk of hitting our heads on the support rafters of the porch, or worse. The underside of the wooden decking was the breeding ground for huge black and gray spiders. They sat in dusty webs waiting for ants, bees, roaches...and small boys playing at war.

We soaked the boxes with the flammable liquids. The intensity of the scrabbling rose to an easily heard frantic scratching. One of us, assigned as a lookout, gave the "all clear" signal. No mother was on the porch above. We opened our matchbooks. We did not close the cover before striking. Flaming matches were tossed into the middle of our circle. With a low "woof" the flammable vapor exploded and the small containers began to burn. We shouted obscenities at the "Japs" and elbowed each other. We were doing our job.

I don't know what the others felt, but I was scared—there was a scrabbling inside my stomach, as if a beetle was in there, clawing to get out. Our outward reactions were varied. We shared the need to be quiet so that we would not attract attention from above, but the excitement of the moment usually overtook us. I remember making bombing noises as I tossed matches into the fire. Sylvan always whined like the siren that announced the air raid practices.

 Johnny Frazier never made a sound; he stared at the pile of destruction until the last flame went out. 

And we glanced at him quickly and then away, and recorded in lasting memory his silence, and though we were just boys we understood that he was the only one among us who knew what the war was all about.