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Monday
As I was reading about the life of legendary singer Tony Bennett, who passed away Friday, I had a shock: some of his World War II experiences, along with their aftereffects, sounded a lot like my father’s. Scott Bates died ten years ago and I’m regretting that I can’t ask him about this.
According to a Washington Post article, Bennett was a member of the army regiment that liberated a Landsberg, Germany concentration camp, which was a subcamp for Dachau. Bennett later wrote,
“I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds…[T]hey had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe we were there to help them and not to kill them.”
Although my father didn’t liberate a concentration camp, he did see Dachau three days after the U.S. army freed the prisoners. One of his jobs in the summer of 1945 was to take Germans through the camp to show them what their country had been doing, proving to them that the camps were not just American propaganda.
The Bennett story that most hit home with me, however, was an officer’s reaction when Bennett tried to take a Black friend, an old high school buddy, to a Thanksgiving meal for servicemen. The Post has his story:
The pair got as far as the lobby of the building the Army was using as a mess hall when they were berated by an irate officer. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to be seen with each other at a military function, never mind share a meal together.
“This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there,” Bennett wrote. “He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Get your ass out of here!’”
Bennett was reassigned from Special Services to Graves Registration, where he dug up the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat for reburial in military cemeteries. The experience “was just as bad as it sounds,” he recalled.
My father, meanwhile, used to tell me about being teamed up with an African American and a white southerner when he was serving as an MP (military police) in Munich. It was there that he had his first first-hand encounter with southern racism (my father was from Evanston, IL), directed against a man my father liked and respected. Tensions arose amongst the three of them as they carried out their job, and my father refused the alliance that the White man wanted to form against the African American. If anything, the two of them held the southerner at a distance.
According to the Post, Bennett’s war experience shaped both his views on racial equality. In the 1960s he became a civil rights activist and later an outspoken critic of South African apartheid:
In 1965, his friend and singer Harry Belafonte asked him to walk in a civil rights march planned by King in Selma. Bennett accepted without hesitation.
“I kept flashing back to a time twenty years ago when my buddies and I fought our way into Germany,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It felt the same way down in Selma: the white state troopers were really hostile, and they were not shy about showing it.”
My father too became a civil rights activist, working with our local NAACP chapter to integrate Tennessee schools, including instigating a legal action on behalf of his children (I was 11 at the time) directed against the Franklin County Board of Education.
My father and Bennett also shared strong anti-war views. Bennett reports, “My life experiences, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to marching with Martin Luther King, made me a life-long humanist and pacifist, and reinforced my belief that violence begets violence and that war is the lowest form of human behavior.”
In addition to helping integrate both our county school system and the University of the South at Sewanee, where he taught, my father was also a lifelong member of the War Resisters’ League, several times editing their yearly calendars and producing the anthology Poems of War Resistance.
Reading about Bennett gave me a clearer sense of how the war shaped my father, who in turn shaped my own view of the world. I conclude today’s post with a poem my father wrote about his World War II experience in response to my son Toby (“Mike” in the poem) asking him about those years. I note that my father rejected the appellation “the greatest generation” and his use of quotation marks in the title indicate sarcasm:
“The Greatest Generation”
By Scott Bates
“What was the Second World War like?”
I am asked by my youngest grandson, Mike,
Who has just remembered that he has
To write a paper for his English class
And hopes his grandfather will tell him a story
Like Private Ryan, full of guts and glory.
“That’s easy,” I answer—I am the One
Who Was There, the Expert, the Veteran–
(Who has read in the paper, by the way,
That thousands of vets die every day),
“It was boring, mostly,” I say, “and very
Gung-ho.” I think. “It was pretty scary.
And long. And the longer it got, the more idiotic
It seemed.” I stop. “It was patriotic.”
How to tell the kid the exciting news
That we survived on sex and booze.
And hated the Army and hated the War
And hoped They knew what we were fighting for . . . .
And I remember my buddy, Mac,
Who got shot up in a tank attack,
And Sturiano, my closest friend . . .
It is still going on. How will it end?
“It was people surrounded by dying men.”
“But what was it like?” asks Mike again.
