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.
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.”
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| Junkers JU 87 “Stuka” |
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| 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.
