Russell Robinson: War Years

When I was 17, I was still living in Jamaica Plain, up the hill, in a rather large apartment, and I graduated from Boston Latin school, which I had been attending for six years, since the age of 11.

We were still sort of in the depression, but it wasn't as bad as it was with the soup lines and so forth. But. about a month after I graduated, in September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

America was extremely isolationist at that time; people like Charles Lindbergh going around the country, lecturing and preaching. And they had a significant number of US senators who were on the right, generally, who were preaching to stay out of foreign wars, and Roosevelt had great difficulty with this.

As a matter of fact, until Pearl Harbor,  I could never see any role for me in a Hitler-French-English war.

And although most people favoured the British, and most people didn't care much for Hitler, there was some admiration for Hitler, after he swept through with the blitzkrieg and conquered France. People were saying "Wow, what a guy!"

But there was no hatred except from maybe the Jewish community, who were aware that he was prejudiced against the Jews. But nobody in the United States that I was aware of had any idea of the Holocaust, or the ovens, or that kind of thing. And there was a lot of continung talk about "The war in Europe." But that's what it was, it was the "war in Europe."

And although Roosevelt, who was planning for his third term—although we didn't know it—in mid-'39, couldn't possibly have dragged the United States into the war given the general mood, If it hadn't been for the Japanese and their gross miscalculation at Pearl Harbour.

As far as how it affected me personally, well, it intrigued me. I was always a close student of political science, politics, history, internationalism, and I followed the war quite closely. But . . . with discernment; I wasn't feeling any trepidation, or feeling any direct involvement, like pretty much everyone else at the time. Except, as I say, for the press, some of whom were quite exercised about it. Notably, the more liberal press, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, et cetera.

Now this was June 1939, as opposed to December, 1941, which was two and a half years. Nobody was conscious of Hitler's program of extermination, unless it was the CIA, MI5, and people like that, and they weren't saying.

There wasn't a big "Oh, look at the poor refugees fleeing . . . " but you saw a lot of pictures of the French roads clogged with refugees going south, as Hitler advanced through the Netherlands and Belgium. People said "Oh, isn't that sad!" but you know, war is war!

World War I had a lot to do with our thinking at the time. We felt that we'd pulled France and Britain's eggs out of the fire, or whatever the phrase is, and we felt in a way that we were dragged in. I'm talking about the country as a whole, not myself. We helped, and what did we get for it, and there was a lot of hue and cry during the 20s about "Finland was the only country to pay its war debts!"

Because we lent Britain and France and all those countries a lot of money during the war and then we had the "War Debts," and it was almost like an annual column! They showed that  Britian still owes us 942 million dollars and France owes us 897 million, and people, notably the Republicans, who were in power all through the 20s, with Harding, and Coolidge.