Lockdown notes from 1944 -- "My bonnie ambivalent bivalve"

Staying at home during COVID-19 times gave me more time to spend with the family correspondence. In many ways, these letters seem from a different world, but some challenges of being cooped up sounded familiar. 

Murray spent a year and change posted to the Aleutian Islands in World War II, as a cryptographer and correspondence censor. He got there in the spring of 1944, and though the Aleutian chain is famously wet and windy, he spent much of his time off hiking and bird watching. He preferred working graveyard, which gave him more daylight hours outside. 

When not fogged in, the views were great.

Come winter, of course, all that changed. Wind squalls became blizzards. Just suiting up to get from the communal Pacific huts (basically a Quonset built of wood rather than steel) to the mess hall took a good twenty minutes with the Army-issue cold-weather gear of that era. Then you crawled through a snow tunnel to the surface and skittered across the snow crust to your destination, occasionally on all fours. Most huts kept a stash of food for times when they would burn more calories getting to a meal than they could take in once they got there. One of the many hazards of walking around on winter nights, was tripping over the chimneys of the buried huts. And there is a lot of winter night above the 50th parallel.

Chimneys were tripping hazards.

The huts had 16 x 36 feet of floor space and housed up to nine men apiece. Since hut assignments were not made by shift schedules, someone was pretty much always trying to sleep during someone else's time off. You could listen to the radio, at low volume; you could talk, likewise quietly; you could play cards. You could drink, if there was a beer issue or you could afford gray market hard liquor, but then you had to consider the certainty of navigating back up the slippery tunnel to the latrines or at least to the snow.


Murray spent most of his hut confinement reading, and writing letters or articles. He wrote almost daily to Rosa, and one way to chart the procession of dark months is to look at his salutations. Back in boot camp and his first island posting, on Adak in the spring, most of the letters started with variations on Dearest Nunny, My darling, Nunny darling, and the occasional Little Lover. By the time he reached Attu, at the western extreme of the Aleutians and the last months of his tour, he had branched out. Here's a selection:

My willowy one,

My quiet curassow,

O most delectable,

My Hemingway hating honey,

My pleasant capybara,

My incredibly loved infant,

My delectable darling

My wonderful wapiti

My passionate ptarmigan,

My adorable apple pie,

My favorite photographer,

My luscious little one,
My weird little watermelon,

Hello bodacious and beloved,
Allo my quaint little cabbage,

My cool charmant,

My bonnie ambivalent bivalve,

My pretty piltzer,    
My consummately constructed consort,

      

and in the last few weeks  before he was sent back to Seward on the mainland where she could join him (posing as his sister)

            My soon to be rejoined Rosita.

When she wrote to him she called him Butch.

31 December 1939 -- Shirer, Hitler, Trump, and Godwin's Law, plus a guest appearance by George Wallace

This is apropos of nothing in this blog's regular subject matter except that I've been reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary lately. He was reporting around Europe at the same time my folks were honeymooning down the Danube in 1939. He was more experienced and much better informed than they were, and his takes on the impending war are a contrast to their sunny predictions.

I'm guessing he and Murray met in 1941 when both were back in New York working for CBS, because the copy I have is autographed to Murray.

Berlin, December 31 

A flood of New Year's proclamations from all and sundry -- Hitler, Göring, Himmler, etc. Hitler holds out hope of victory to the people in 1940. Says he: "United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history ... May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory." 

He goes to extreme lengths to justify his war, and if the German people were not so poisoned by propaganda and suppression of the slightest factual news from abroad, they would laugh. He says the "Jewish reactionary warmongers in the capitalist democracies" started the war! Words have no more meaning for the man nor, I fear, for his people. He says, "The German people did not want this war." (True.) "I tried up to the last minute to keep peace with England." (False) "But the Jewish and reactionary warmongers waited for this minute to carry out their plans to destroy Germany." (False.)

...
Cold, and a coal shortage. The office boy said tonight we were out of coal at the office and that there was no more coal to be had. [bolding mine]

--Berlin Diary, p. 270-271 

One question I had when reading this entry on New Year's Eve 1939 was, what if Hitler and crew had Twitter? When Shirer says "words have no more meaning for the man," I can't help but think of a current "wartime president."And though I know Godwin's Law about bringing Hitler into a discussion, I am also aware that Godwin himself recently retweeted this, which is worth a read:
https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136

And while I'm on the topic of demagogues and how to know them, here's Hunter S. Thompson on George Wallace in 1972:

"The root of the Wallace magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy -- and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant, overnight cure for all their worst afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? Army worms killing the turnip crop? Whatever it was, Wallace assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn't want the problems solved, so they wouldn't be out of work. The ugly truth is that Wallace had never even bothered to understand the problems--much less come up with any honest solutions--but the "Fighting Little Judge" has never lost much sleep from guilt feelings about his personal credibility gap. ..." 

[bolding mine]

--Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, p. 275

Seward, Alaska, 14 June 1945 -- "my conscience hurts already"

Rosita my love, 

This is my second day at the Seward office [ACS] and gradually I am being I am being initiated into the mysteries of the telegraph rates. With me the computation is not, as yet, an exact science but I manage to approximate the toll. The characters for whom the Morgan tolls are really quite wonderful. One old Alaskan came in today and misspelled seven words out of seven, including his own first name. I am assured that this only ties the local record. In fact it seems unlikely that the editor of the Seward Polaris could do better.

The paper is surpassing strange, in which it resembles the editor. Hunt, who puts it out, is an old time job printer from Medford, Oregon. More recently he worked in the back shop of a Fairbanks weekly. He is not very good on printing and his newspaper experience is negligible and absurd….

The paper only comes out twice a week—Wednesdays and Saturdays. I’m going to see Hunt and suggest that his time is very valuable and that he would be saving himself a great deal of money and bother if he would turn all the editorial direction of the paper over to me (for $200 a month) and put his time on getting ads and setting type. There are no floormen at all in this town, and he literally drags people in off the street to help him set heads, make ads, and make-up the paper on press days. I doubt very much that he will see the need for my superb services, however, as he fancies himself a crusader. Even if he does, there is still another problem. Because of his crusading, he has deeply offended the local Army officers and on them depends the final decision of whether I can work for the paper. If the business gets that far, I would present it to them as an assurance of better cooperation between the press and the military (don’t say it—my conscience hurts already) were I to take charge.

In the meantime I am back at my writing. I have started again on “Shadows Fall” [first published in 1949 as The Viewless Winds, based on the still-unsolved Laura Law murder case in Aberdeen in 1940; republished by OSU Press in 1990.] and though I don’t particularly like the start I have I think I’ll just bull along until I get into it. I usually get a temporary enthusiasm after about ten thousand words of anything. Lord, Nunny, how I need the encouragement of selling something again. It has been a very long time. 

In doing “Shadows Fall” I’m going to set myself a bit more ambitious goal than before. I want to try telling it in the first person and show, in the development of the story, not only the impact of the crime on the community, its disruption of the social fabric, but also to underline the developing awareness of social problems of the young city editor as he follows the story. Besides which I intend to soup the thing up with enough gonadal doings so that Miss Windsor will have to drop down the scatological ladder and we move up into the upper income brackets.

The weather today is soft and beautiful, almost too warm. Everyone is roaming around in shirtsleeves as, they say, they have been for nearly two months. The last winter was quite mild, and even the bad ones are not too bad…. The mosquitoes are huge but, so far, infrequent.

Food prices are high, but there is a pretty good assortment. We cook our own at the quarters, on a nice electric range. Milk is 30 cents a quart, butter 65 a pound, lettuce 30 a head, oranges 60 a dozen, steak 60 to 80 a pound, pork 50 a pound, bread 20 a loaf. Those are the only prices I’ve seen so far. The boys say it costs about forty bucks a month to eat very, very well. 

Write me long and often about your plans, my little love. Everything looks better all the time from this end. 

You are adored,

M

Attu, 25 April 1945 -- Who's the daddy?

EFM telegrams were designed to streamline standardized messages for Armed Forces use. They used numeric stand-ins for words and phrases describing news common to separated families: packages mailed, birthdays, anniversaries, and babies. Rosa sent one to Murray to let him know of the arrival of their friends Phyllis and Otto's first child. It didn't occur to her that he wouldn't immediately know who had given birth to little Johanna, but Murray wasn't much interested in babies and had forgotten the birth was imminent. He thought the telegram was a not-funny prank. 

EFM example: http://atlantic-cable.com/CableCos/Services/index.htm

My wonderful wapiti...

Your EFM caused considerable excitement and not a little confusion here at the office. I was putting in a shift in the Inner Sanctum [Murray was a censor and a code specialist for the ACS, and took turns on those jobs. Coders were locked in to a special room while on duty] which is really another way of saying that I was working on the Aleutian opus, when Bill Ross, the saxonish censor on duty, stuck his head in the door and asked, "How long have you been up here now?" I told him a year and a day and he backed out looking puzzled. A little while later he came in and handed me the telegram, neatly translated and typed out with the EFM figures down at the bottom so I could confirm them personally. He then asked for cigars. 

I was pretty deep in the Aleutian opus. A little while before our OIC, Hoban, had been talking with a couple of friends about sending an EFM and I rather thought that Ross had overheard them and decided to play a joke. It seemed a little corny to me and I said so. Bill said the telegram had really come in and I said "Oh hell yeah, I don't doubt you a bit." He left. I could hear the boys talking in the other room, but I couldn't figure out what they were saying. Whenever I put my head out later in the evening, they kidded me but not much.

Gene came over round eleven. I told him about the bum gag, and he grinned and said they were trying to rope him in on it. It seems that Ross had phoned him at the other building and told him about the telegram and asked if it could possibly be true. Gene had assured him no. But Gene, too, thought the whole thing was something that had been cooked up in the office. Ross said that I seemed upset and that he had been afraid maybe he shouldn't have said anything. Gene told him that I was probably upset at being interrupted in my writing. 

Ronnlund, who is in our hut and is a pretty good friend, told me that the message really came in. Since all such gags are ridden pretty hard, I thought he was kidding too. I'm afraid I was a bit impolite. That evening Gene and I were playing chess on my bed and talking about the gag. Gene said it was just possible that someone in the states had sent the telegram as a gag. I said no, we didn't have any friends who would be doing something like that; none of our friends thought having kids a joking matter. And then, of course, came the dawn. I don’t know how I happened to forget about P and O, except that I've been thinking only of you and the book. 

Phyllis and Johanna, after the war

The next day I spent apologizing to Ross and Ronnlund. I also sent Phyllis and Otto a telegram (EFM) refraining from using number 119, which, translated, is "Good luck. Keep it up."

...

For the last few days I've been getting ready so I can get out of here as soon as my orders arrive. Niel Atkinson, who is at another station but as you will remember came up with me, got his orders the other day, and so did another of the men who came up. So mine should be along at any moment. I can't really expect them to arrive until this weekend, but I keep hopefully watching the teletypes. When they come in I have to pass a routine physical examination, an examination in military courtesy, and turn in my equipment to supply. That usually takes two days ... After that I turn in my request for transportation, and from then on it is just a question of whether the weather is good enough for the planes to get in and out. I'll phone from Anchorage on my way down. ...

You've mentioned in your last couple of letters that I shouldn't change, Nunny, and I've been trying to figure out if I have changed much in the past year. I really don't think so. I think I'm a little less exuberant in conversation, and I know that I am a little more anti-social. I've developed a passionate hatred for radio and a pretty strong hatred for most popular music except Latin-American and, upon occasion, real swing. I know better than ever before that I have no use for popular opinion, of me or of anything else, and that most important thing in the world to me is you. But all of these things are just intensifications of old attitudes. I can concentrate a bit better than before, and I believe I take more pleasure in writing. I think you will recognize me. Somewhere between now and Seattle I must take the precaution of removing my camouflage. It is really quite luxuriant now, and Jimmy Maceda, a new man in our hut, refers to me as Uncle Joe, because of the full-lipped foliage. [With his wavy dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin, Murray did slightly resemble Stalin.]

I'll write to Bill [Fett], explaining that I did not mean to be facetious in my reply to his Fourth Dimension letter. But I can't say a lot more than that because, re-reading it, I still can't figure it out at all. ...

A letter came from Carmen [Fett] a couple of days ago, but there was a mistake. She enclosed one she had written to Alfredo. I'm sending it back down to here and, since it has to go through military censorship and the base censor's (it's in Spanish) I read it. I was surprised at how little trouble I had with the Spanish. It was pretty much like a letter to me anyway, for it dealt mainly with the American attitude toward Spanish and Latin-American writers, and with Steinbeck and Hemingway. The line I liked best was that the Mexicans shouldn't feel superior to American literature because Americans know only machines and money. That is not true, said Carmen: their business is one thing and their literature another. 

That reminds me that I haven't told you about the wonderful, drunken bullsession that Dave and Gene and I had a few nights ago. Dave was doing a diabolic word portrait of a kid who was up her for a while who had pretensions of culture with the C upper-case. Dave defined his attitude as being, "If it isn't art, fuggat." A little later Dave was asking about the cost and time of a Mexican divorce. He wanted to know how long after a Mexican divorce one could marry again. I said I didn't know but I believed immediately. Dave said "Oh, gloryosky! A double ceremony."

And now I must write a couple of other letters that I have delayed for months, my love. Oh so soon, so soon. Hasta prontissimo.

                                                                                                                Your adoring,

                                                                                                                 M

Attu, 12 February 1945 -- "such a feeling of waste about this year"

1 a.m.  

Darling, darling darling...

I feel six times lower than a sturmtroopen oberfuhrer, my pretty piltzer, for it must be almost a week since I wrote last. It is partly your fault for I have been expecting a letter from you for three weeks now and, not getting any, getting more and more frustrated as each mail call has brought heaps for everyone else and nothing from you for me, I have had a difficult time in not moaning and groaning. On three successive days I tore up letters I started because of their deep blue quality and then I developed a superstition that if I didn't write it might bring a letter. 

Last night I even sent a wire to you about mail, for each time I have wired it has brought mail the next day. But even that totem failed. Today there was no mail for anyone. I came very near crying about it today -- once before when Gene got three letters and I got none I had to get out of the room fast -- but Dave came to my rescue with a bottle of brandy from somewhere and now I am warmly convinced that tomorrow will bring manna from the mail plane...

If it were not for Gene and Dave I would be very unhappy here. We are as crowded as at Station One and other of the same complications which went into the "Change of Station" story are present. But I have finally got back to my writing, Gene is everpresent in off hours to brew tea and bullsession, and Dave is around from time to time to join in the chess, the music, or the bullsessions. 

As I told you, Dave is our first sergeant. He gets some very strange orders to carry out. Today, for example, he was told to find the depth of the snow in all parts of the ACS area. This would entail considerable digging, which of course Dave eschewed. How he came by his estimates I don't know, but late in the afternoon I saw him standing on one foot in a snowdrift, his right leg raised and his knee serving as a shaky desk, while he wrote down figures on the snow. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls: love minus politics

Earlier he and Gene and I went to see "For Whom the Bell Tolls." ... The movie was, naturally, completely devoid of political content. In fact, it was so much so that it may have defeated the very purpose for which it was emasculated. At one scene in the middle of the picture, where a troop of enemy cavalry is seen approaching in the distance, the boys behind us began a subdued argument about whether they were "American" or "German."

I'm still reading War and Peace, which is something of a life's work. Last night I got past the halfway point. I hate to agree with the critics on anything they are unanimous about, but it seems, at the half way mark, to be the best novel ever written. And the funniest thing is that nearly every sequence is essentially corny and could fit into a soap opera. At the end of each could be the question "Will Natasha marry Prince Andrew," "Will Pierre kill or be killed in the duel?" "Will Boris be promoted?" But it is wonderful. Oh darling darling how I wish we could be reading it together. 

I have such a feeling of waste about this year, so strong a feeling of what I am losing by being away from you. That is why it is so bad when there are no letters. They are my only compensation, this new medium of communication with my beloved, and when they don't come I feel trapped and frustrated and I pound the wall with my fist until it hurts too much and now my hair is long enough so that I can again get hold of it to pull. 

USS Essex in 1943, a blimp's eye view: National Archives

Dad forwarded a letter from Vic in which he mentions that his ship, the Essex, is "the fightingest ship in the Navy." It has wrought more destruction on the enemy than any other vessel and holds practically all records. From the articles, Vic says, "you will learn that I have been present at the invasion of the Palau Islands, the raids on and invasion of the Philippines, the raids on the Ryuku Islands and Formosa. We were very much in evidence at the second Battle of the Philippine Sea when so much of the enemy fleet was destroyed." 

 

The Essex was hit by a kamikaze pilot in November 1944. 

 

Little lover, it's only ten weeks now, and while "only" seems a strange adjective to apply to ten weeks away from you, it does seem possible that we will make it. For a while I did not think the year could ever end. Look both ways crossing the streets -- I worry about you so much, and get some sleep and eat three meals a day and be very very healthy for me. ..

My nunny, you are adored. Please keep loving me,

M