When Heroism Had A Voice

Wherever and whenever they marched, the young men training to be officers in the Army Air Corps would sing. The streets around my house in Miami Beach, Fla., would resound with their music long before dawn. I didn’t mind, since I was only 12 and full of hero worship for the marchers. Their songs impressed me enough that I still remember most of the words, not that they were memorable of themselves. It was the first full year of World War II, and I knew that for some of the men, the songs were the only breathing part of them that would survive the next few years.

I would be fishing for jack crevalle in one of the saltwater canals and a distant sound would swell as a squad marched nearer: “I’ve got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence, I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life.” The verses went down the line, and by the time the squad was out of hearing the song would be getting low on money: “I’ve got tuppence to spend and tuppence to lend and tuppence to send home to my wife, poor wife.”

When I was walking to school with no one near, I tried the songs in my changing voice. But I mumbled at strategic points so as not to utter forbidden words, as in, “When this war is over we will all enlist again, we will, like hell, we will.” I had the same problem with the last stanza of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” at least the way the Officer Candidate School sang it: “Around the block she pushed a baby carriage, She pushed it in December and in the month of May, And when I asked her why the hell she pushed it, She pushed it for her lover who was down in OCS.”

The candidates took every opportunity to get OCS into the songs, and never mind the rhyme. One song with an Ivy League sound to it - I have forgotten most of the words, unfortunately - ended like this: “We’ll smash the Axis, Hirohito, Schickelgruber and Benito, Hail to OCS, Hail to OCS.” The original probably had Yale or somebody being smashed instead of the three dictators and ended with a hail to Harvard or whomever. It’s sad to reflect that at that point, soldiers thought of the war as a big football game.

Not all the songs were rousing. Heading in at the end of a day, the marchers would give a haunting rendition of “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” A little guy in one platoon had a baritone that rang out expressively over all others, especially in that song. Everyone in town must have known his sound. I wonder if he survived the war and found his way to a larger audience.

Officer trainees still sing, I was told a while back by Maj. Jeff O’Leary, commander of the Basic Officer Training Squadron at Maxwell AFB, Ala., though O’Leary, being only 39, didn’t know the World War II songs I named to him on the phone. Trainees’ songs today, he said, express “pride in the Air Force and their unit and what they’re accomplishing.” He also volunteered that “we’re always very careful to make sure there’s nothing in what they sing that has, you know, sexual references or innuendoes.”

But don’t they sing anything that’s just fun? Sure, he said, and with a little coaxing he sang a sample into the receiver: “They say the food in the Air Force, they say it’s mighty fine, But Mom, this morning, It killed a friend of mine, Oh, Mom, I wanta go, Yes, Mom, I wanta go, Please, Mom, I wanta go home.”

Better, better. True, the song has a Boy Scout ring to it - but after all, airmen aren’t necessarily much more than boys. Some of the singers I used to hear may have been jerked right out of Scout troops back in 1942 by the activities of Hirohito, Schickelgruber and Benito.

Well, as the song said, hail to OCS. Hero worship has a long life, and though those men would seem like kids to me now, I haven’t lost my youthful admiration of them. I’ll bet they fought just as well as they sang.

xxxx