大象传媒

"Happy Days Are Here Again"
And now let鈥檚 move ahead to the summer of 1942. How could anybody feel anything else but good knowing this was a time of rising prosperity, even though it took a war to bring it about? I don't like to say it, but I have to admit that in this respect, war was a godsend, a real godsend, at least in the economic sense. By the third year of the war practically every factory in the city hummed on a three-shift basis churning out the goods of war. Few were there in 1942 that didn鈥檛 have a job. Any able-bodied man who didn鈥檛 have a job was just too damn lazy to get one. Even women were now working in factories, a domain that was, until then, populated strictly by men. Now, with their hair neatly protected by turban-like headwear they worked on production lines making everything from machine-guns to shells, to wiring harnesses for army vehicles. Some even became welders. About the only place where the women of Windsor weren鈥檛 working was in the foundries or in other heavy industries like stamping plants and forges. Yeah, It was a great feeling for the breadwinners of the households to be finally bringing home pay envelopes or cheques every Friday. "The day the eagle shits" was the common expression one heard on Fridays in those days. Pay-day! Equally happy were the merchants around town whose cash registers were ringing to the delightful tune of money rolling in. It filled the tills as people went on spending sprees buying what they hadn鈥檛 been able to buy ever since hard-times hit in '29. Although in those days we kids enjoyed our young years in a way kids of today could never hope to match, we didn't know or else pretended not to know that our mothers and fathers we're forever worrying about where the next dollar would come from to put food on the table, or to pay the rent, or to pay the taxes. Far too many lost their houses during the hungry thirties. And we weren't that far from it. In fact our father lost property he owned on the eastern side of the city for non-payment of taxes.
To say the war years made life once again worth living again, was only speaking the truth. No more sitting down to a plate of pork & beans for supper or a bowl of clear broth soup with a few small chunks of meat floating around in it. Now we sat down to steaks, pork chops, roasts, and chicken every Sunday. No more 鈥榟and-me-down shirts', corduroy relief trousers and cheap running shoes. Now the heads of the household could plunk down money for good clothes and better running shoes and boots from Grey鈥檚 on Ottawa or Wilkinson鈥檚 downtown. The elite Smith鈥檚 Department Store and every other store in the weeks before Christmas were finally doing a land-office business, and people were buying appliances, furniture, clothing, shoes and everything else they had coveted for so long but couldn't afford. Good times were back, and whether it was right to think this way or not, is not for me to say. All I know is that that there was a heck of a lot of people around who were supremely glad they were earning the kind of money that could bring them all the necessities and comforts that had been beyond reach before. Regardless there was a war on; they were indeed good times. It was a good excuse to sing that lively song, 'Happy days are here again,' I don't think there were all that many war workers who lost sleep or suffered guilt pangs over profiting from the avails of war. After all, the war was almost a half a world away, and as far as most Canadians were concerned, we hadn't really gone to war yet.

There was plenty to read about the war every night in the Windsor Daily Star, as was its official name in those days. The pages every day were full of the events happening on sea, on land, and in the air. In 1941. The only heartening news was the fact that the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign against London and other major English cities had been largely defeated. And then, things also looked good for awhile as the British 8th Army drove Mussolini's million bayonets back across the sandy wastes of the North African desert. That is, until General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps came on the scene, and things started going the other way. Back and forth the battles in the bleak landscape went on between the British 8th Army and the Afrika Korps. And then came the monumental defeat of the British at Tobruk, by now a household name. Tobruk fell, and with it, a huge supply of equipment, guns, fuel and supplies became German property, while 15000 men went into captivity.

The situation suddenly became pretty grim, but then came a change in the command of the British 8th Army, a man by the name of Bernard Law Mont-gomery. Under his leadership, it wasn't long before the resurgent 8th Army began to roll up the Germans and Italians, pushing them back all the way across the face of North Africa and eventual defeat in Tunisia. All this made great reading later on. Up until the time the fortunes of war slowly turned in our favour in May of 1943, the Germans and the Japanese had everything going their way. Where Canadians overall should have been deeply concerned about the way things were going on the land battlefronts and at sea, this, outwardly at least didn't seem to show. You wouldn't know it if you stood by the gates of the city's factories at end-of-shift time and observed the smiles and the general feeling of well-being as the workers with lunch-boxes in hand were on their way home. "Another day, another few dollars earned" had to have been what was on the minds of these people, more so than the progress of the war itself.

As for the Canadian Services, only the Air Force and the Navy was taking the fight to the enemy. British Bomber Command had a lot of Canadian Air Force personnel manning the planes in the nightly raid over Occupied Europe. While on the high seas Canadian sailors were in almost daily contact with U-boats as they helped escort convoys on their way to England and Murmansk in the frozen wastes of norther Russia.

As for the Canadian Army based in the U.K. it was a well-known fact that it hadn't done much of anything except chase over half of England's picturesque landscape on endless schemes and exercises. It was nothing at all that made for great reading or that it could stir the country up into an outpouring of patriot-ism. In other words, war hysteria, at this stage or so it seemed, hadn't yet taken hold of the Canadian people by and large. Granted, we did lose a couple of infantry battalions in an outrageously stupid attempt to placate the British by bolstering the defences of Hong Kong. Most likely because the Regiments that were based at Hong Kong were from the prairies and Quebec, the grievous losses somehow didn't hit home with the people in Windsor and district with anywhere near the same depressing impact as it did in those sections of the country whose sons, brothers and fathers did the bleeding and the dying. For this reason at least, Hong Kong was soon forgotten hereabouts. A selfish feeling had taken over the minds and hearts of the people in Essex County, or so that's the way it looked to me. 鈥淚f it doesn鈥檛 affect me, why should I worry about it?" This sort of outlook was the heartless way a good many Windsorites were thinking about the war in general.

Except for the first year or so of the war, patriotism slackened its jingoistic grip on Windsorites by early 1942. Most of the so-called patriotic types, adventurers and sundry others had long since gone into the services, most with good intentions, others just to see what they could get out of it. The remainder of the service-age young men were either too busy making money to answer the country's call or were waiting for Ottawa to come calling. Patriotic fervour World War I style hadn't seized the imagination of Canadians overall quite as much as it did in that other war. The early rush to the Colours when war was declared in September 1939 was the result, at least it seemed to me, to be one of desperation on the part of men of military age to escape the dreariness of the depression. To take on a uniform would mean no more hand-out clothing, no more soup-kitchen food, no more hopelessness, with one dreary penniless day leading to the dreariness of another. It was these negatives of life that thousands upon thousands of young Canadians put behind them as they flocked to the Armouries in every town and city across the country to join up. Patriotism, for most was only part of the reason for their willingness to serve their country. Of course, this is only my interpretation of what prompted young Canadians to serve their country in war, I could very well be wrong in good part.
The young men waiting in long line-ups at the recruiting centres knew that from their first day in uniform whether it be Navy blue, Army khaki, or Air Force blue, they'd be well taken care of. They knew they鈥檇 be sitting down to three square meals a day, their clothing needs met, and there'd be a comfort-able bed to sleep on鈥攏ot quite as soft as most were accustomed to, but comfortable nonetheless. They could also be assured of their recreational needs. How could they go wrong? The services spelled security, and that鈥檚 what really mattered most. The 鈥渄ie for your country outlook鈥� the WW I generation had been hoodwinked into, was clear-y absent this time around. Modern youth was getting to be a little too smart to be taken in by flag waving politicians and other assorted jingoistic types. Giant posters urging them to serve their country and reminding them of their duty to fight for freedom didn't sway all that many into rushing to the enlistment centres. If personal security wasn鈥檛 the whole reason for a lot of boys doffing their civilian clothes and replacing them with khaki, Navy or Air Force uniforms, then it had to be the simple lust for adventure to motivate them into joining up. What else? In whatever branch of the Services they chose adventure in plenty awaited them, Few, it seemed to me, gave much thought to the very real possibility that they might not come out of the war alive or in one piece.

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