Failure to Heed

© 2018 William Lee Burch All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-54393-988-0

eBook 978-1-54393-989-7

This book is dedicated to a generation

that fought and too often died in a forgotten war.

Contents

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Chapter One A NEW WORLD DAWNING

Chapter Two PARANOIA

Chapter Three PICKING UP THE PACE

Chapter Four RETURNING

Chapter Five THE BOMB - SECRETS, LIES, AND OTHER FAILURES

Chapter Six WHERE THE HELL IS KOREA?

Chapter Seven CHAOS AND COUNTERATTACK

Chapter Eight GOING WHERE?

Chapter Nine TURNING POINT

Chapter Ten COUNTERATTACK AND TELEVISION

Chapter Eleven THE BRITISH ARE COMING

Chapter Twelve TURNAROUND

Chapter Thirteen BEHIND THE SCENES

Chapter Fourteen COUNTEROFFENSIVE: BRIDGES TO CROSS AND ORPHANS TO SAVE

Chapter Fifteen DECISIONS AND ANOTHER EPISODE OF BRIDGES TOO FAR

Chapter Sixteen CROSSING THE LINE OF SANITY

Chapter Seventeen DEEP FREEZE AND DISASTER

Chapter Eighteen IF ONLY THEY’D LISTENED

Chapter Nineteen A TIME FOR THANKS?

Chapter Twenty THE LONGEST WINTER

Chapter Twenty One RUNNING THE GAUNTLET

Chapter Twenty Two HUNGNAM OR BUST

Chapter Twenty Three CHRISTMAS TIME MIRACLE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Although we see and hear endless tales about World War II, most people today know little or nothing about the often turbulent five years after that war ended. Before tackling this subject, an unofficial survey turned up the surprising result that hardly anyone knew enough about the Korean War to give the dates of its happening.

While the Korean War is sometimes referred to as the Forgotten War, while doing research for this book it soon became obvious that an entire five year period of significant American history, from 1946 until the end of 1950, was mostly forgotten. Since I grew up during that era and have long been enthralled with the significance of those years and their relationship to our planet today, Failure to Heed is a brief journey into a forgotten past. That past, you will soon realize, was the driving force that has taken all Americans and most of humanity into their current wobbly state of existence.

This is a story of one family and their friends, all expecting a more peaceful world after World War II, but soon finding the events of the new atomic age has something else in store for them as well as all of mankind. It is my sincere desire that the reader be enlightened as well as entertained. For many of us old timers who once clung to hopes of leaving this planet in a better state than we found it, discovering that history really does keep repeating itself is a condition we least wanted to find.

I know not with what weapons

World War III will be fought,

but World War IV will be fought

with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

Chapter One

A NEW WORLD DAWNING

In early July of 1947 a strange but significant news event reached the front pages of the Sacramento Bee, the Roswell Daily Record, as well as other newspapers across the United States. In a rather barren desert area near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, what was first reported to be the wreckage of an alien spacecraft had been discovered by rancher William Mac Brazel. That wreckage, scattered over a wide area of the desert, had turned up less than a hundred miles from the site of the first nuclear tests conducted during the ultra-secret Manhattan Project only two years previously.

The day after Mac Brazel’s reported discovery, the 8th Air Force at the nearby Roswell Army Airfield began an intense campaign to take back what was reported the previous day. That supposed spacecraft wreckage, reported by the media as possibly originating somewhere in outer space, had suddenly become only the earthly remnants of an Air Force weather balloon.

While one branch of the U.S. military struggled with a Roswell public relations nightmare in July of 1947, military and civilian intelligence agencies had been left to ponder on the possibility that the Soviet Union had developed a secret weapon capable of spying on or destroying nuclear facilities. Since the Soviets were reported to be years away from developing atomic weapons, a spy scenario seemed the most logical explanation. World War II was over, but the nightmare possibility of another adversarial military power possessing nuclear weapons was still in its infancy.

Although the Soviets were suspected of clandestinely gathering U.S. nuclear secrets in 1947, proof of such activities was still several months away. With the Roswell incident, whether alien or human, the subsequent disinformation and controversy stirred by the press would add yet another page to the early chapters of a burgeoning Cold War. Disinformation and secrecy was fast becoming the norm within a country touting itself as shining light of democracy.

During the same time frame as the Roswell incident, a far less newsworthy event was taking place far to the west of New Mexico. Marcia Bartlett Hammer, a former World War II flight nurse and a trusted employee of Bakersfield’s General Hospital, gave birth to Kate Monica Hammer. The baby girl, weighing a little more than seven pounds, entered the world just after one in the morning of Independence Day in 1947. The next generation of the Hammer clan, another of the many millions of Baby Boomers of a most fertile postwar era, had joined the growing population of the San Joaquin Valley.

Of the three Hammer boys, Henry, Martin, and Lee, only Martin’s wartime service would lead to wounds requiring hospitalization. While Henry’s admin assignment in England would leave him unscathed, not so for his wife. Marcia’s wounds would fester until after the war and only be treated by mental health professionals after the birth of Kate. As an Army nurse serving on the front lines after the D-Day invasion, Marcia’s experiences with the liberation of Nazi concentration camps would be almost impossible to come to terms with.

After giving birth to Kate, postpartum depression and recurring nightmares would severely limit Marcia’s ability to become the the mother she’d often envisioned herself as being. Like most wartime nurses, Marcia had been trained well by the military, but had received no formal training on dealing with the horrors of war once receiving her discharge papers. For the most part, the military expected its World War II medical people to simply forget the horrors of war and move on with their lives. After all, hadn’t all doctors, nurses, and medics been trained to look past all the gore and do their job?

With the help of her mother-in-law, Gretchen Hammer, Marcia had weathered the storm of giving birth and subsequent depression rather well. Gretchen, herself a German Army nurse who served in WWI before coming to America as the bride of George Hammer, would be a godsend for Marcia while she was mired in the depths of depression. To put icing on the recovery cake, Marcia’s mother, Betty Bartlett, would also be instrumental during her daughter’s recovery period. Despite the vociferous protests of her unbending husband, Betty would regularly travel the 15 miles to Shafter to help with the baby on those rare occasions when Gretchen had other commitments.

Betty and Marcia’s problems with Cyrus Bartlett had first erupted during the early months of World War II. Cyrus, long infected with the good old boy notion that women volunteering to serve in the military were of lesser morals, had refused give his daughter permission to join the Army. After going on a lengthy tirade, Cyrus played his last hand by threatening to remove Marcia from the family will.

After telling her father she didn’t give a damn about his money, Marcia had quickly made her way to the office of the Army recruiter in downtown Bakersfield. While she hated the thought of leaving her mother at the mercy of Cyrus Bartlett, Marcia was even more determined to become an Army nurse. Within a few weeks, she said a tearful and heartfelt good-bye to her mother and turned away from the sprawling house in Stockdale Estates. Only with the birth of Kate would there be words exchanged about a father and daughter reconciliation.

For Henry Hammer, Marcia’s postpartum depression had been the most difficult time of his life. Along with a new baby and a nine year old son to contend with, the stress of becoming Frank Graham’s General Manager had required too many hours at work and too little sleep the night before. Although he sometimes felt like a zombie upon arriving at work, Henry was finding his new job to be a welcome challenge. Frank Graham’s growing empire, with a modest beginning in the local mortuary and a few acres of farmland, had recently expanded into real estate.

While Frank had at first resisted his wife’s desires to jump into the postwar real estate boom, Mary Jane saw the move as a way to become more involved with Frank Graham Enterprises. As an outspoken advocate for female rights, Mary Jane also expected her role in expanding Frank’s empire would strike a victory chord for the country’s overlooked females.

While the pay for managing the Frank’s growing empire was better than Henry expected after the war, he soon found Frank and Mary Jane’s busy world was too often on the edge of being unmanageable. Like those dry tumbleweeds caught up in a dusty San Joaquin valley whirlwind, Henry was often left to feel like he was being sucked into world beyond human control. Although he admittedly loved his job, Henry Hammer was constantly feeling guilty about spending too little time with Marcia and the new baby.

In all reality, Frank Graham had become a most generous benefactor for the oldest and youngest sons of George and Gretchen Hammer. Acting as a mentor as well as an employer for Henry and Lee, Frank had taken both men under his wings, vowing to help them adjust to postwar civilian life. Unlike so many of the returning vets across the U.S., Henry and Lee Hammer would soon be employed and well paid after shedding their military clothing.

Shortly after the Christmas season of 1945, Lee Hammer would be the first to accept Frank’s offer of employment. Although the job offer, helping out and learning the mortuary trade, wasn’t to his liking, the youngest Hammer son had already seen his share of dead bodies while serving in the Navy and certainly needed the money.

For the first few months in Frank’s mortuary, Lee eagerly threw himself into his work. Eventually, however, latent wanderlust and the boredom of dead people dragged the high spirited Lee Hammer into a world of daydreams. In Lee’s mind, working in a mortuary and living in the San Joaquin Valley was tantamount to being just another corpse for his boss to slide into the back of that black hearse. Somewhere out there, Lee was thinking, there has to be something more exciting for someone like me. Among his recurring visions, Lee could see his seabag tied above the rear wheel of his Indian motorcycle, and feel the wind blowing past his youthful face as he headed east.

While eating a lunch of baloney sandwiches beside a very expensive mahogany casket containing the latest subject of a Shafter Press obituary page, Lee eventually confided in his boss that he was ready to move on.

I have this restless urge to hit the road while I still can, Lee said to Frank Graham. Since I’ve seen the Pacific Ocean from one end to the other, it’s probably time to see what the hell the rest of this world is really like. And, I might add, do it without a Navy troop ship under my feet. And, before someone like you plants me in one of these shiny wooden boxes that you keep around for your customers. I ain’t like my steady old man, Frank. Don’t hanker to be tied down on a farm and never having enough time to go anywhere . . .

Frank, with his usual philosophical aplomb, had simply chuckled before saying, A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. And, like you have so eloquently put it, do it before some tied down nut like me or your steady old man has to plant him in a mahogany box. I’d go with you, Lee, but my ass won’t fit on the back of an Indian motorcycle. That black hearse outside is more my style these days. Give me a week’s notice before you go, and I’ll have your check ready, along with a little bonus in it, just for the road.

I appreciate that, Frank, Lee had answered.

Frank had simply nodded at his employee before saying, I have always wished that I’d done some of that traveling and carousing before I got too goddam old and tied up with business and family. Time moves faster than a speeding bullet, my boy. And don’t ever forget it. Chase your dreams before you begin to fall apart and don’t see nothin’ but this god forsaken valley - like me and your old man.

As soon as the spring season of 1947 fell upon the San Joaquin, Lee was convinced that the weather along Route 66 had warmed enough for he and his baby blue Indian to go about anywhere in the good old US of A. After that near fatal winter trip from Seattle after his discharge from the Navy, Lee had decided freezing weather and an Indian motorcycle were not compatible, making April or later a better time to hit the road. Before the month of April got a good foothold on the San Joaquin, Lee kissed his tearful mother on the cheek then hurried to the mortuary to gather up his bounty. A few hours later, Lee and his baby blue Indian motorcycle were traveling up a winding grade toward Tehachapi. He would not take a rest until he reached Barstow.

Upon departing Shafter that day, Lee had yet to give much thought to where he was going or what he would do once he arrived somewhere. With a brisk spring wind whipping at his blonde hair and cooling his face, Lee had already convinced himself that whatever might happen, wherever he wound up, he was ready for the transition.

More than a week later, his youthful face sunburned and his backside raw from countless hours sitting on the hard motorcycle seat, Lee Hammer purchased one three cent picture postcard. After scribbling a few words onto the backside of the card, he slipped it into the first New Orleans mailbox that caught his eye. Simply stated, he wrote for Gretchen, "Arrived in the city of New Orleans, found a job in a mortuary. Will write again when time allows. Lee."

Lee’s choice of a picture postcard showing some bawdy joints on Bourbon Street was undoubtedly not popular with his Seventh Day Adventist mother. Nevertheless, that Lee had notified anyone of his whereabouts was a step up for Gretchen’s youngest son. During the many months of his World War II service with the Navy, he’d written only a few letters home.

While Lee was at least somewhat truthful about the new job in a New Orleans mortuary, he failed to mention that his stated employment was only part time. For the time being he would simply not inform his mother about the second job he’d taken. To fortify his by then shrinking budget, Lee had taken an infinitely more interesting position serving drinks in a popular Bourbon Street night spot featuring plenty of jazz music and exposed bosom. In short, Lee Hammer, the adventurous WWII vet, was then spreading his wings into real adulthood. Until that restless urge to move on descended on him again, Lee Hammer had found a place to roost, gather his thoughts, mingle with the natives, and shake out the motorcycle dust. His saddle sore rear end would also need time to heal.

Martin, the Hammer’s middle son, had been accepted for officer candidate school in March of 1946. After a couple of months in the Army’s Fort Riley training facility, Martin was commissioned a second lieutenant. At the time of that commission, the U.S. Army’s growing need for men and women with knowledge of the German language had reached a critical stage. Although Martin’s mother used German curse words on occasion, other experiences with the use of the language was limited to what he’d picked up during his unit’s march to Berlin in 1945. Regardless of those or any other shortcomings, after becoming a second lieutenant, Martin volunteered for language school.

All too aware that a divided German nation would eventually spell trouble as time went on, The U.S. Defense Department was seeking people who spoke German as well as Russian. With the Soviet Union occupying East Germany and tensions building among the two emerging superpowers, recruiting intelligence officers and interpreters was high on the list of U.S. Army priorities. While World War II was officially over and the immediate threat of battlefield confrontations was diminishing, a more clandestine kind of war seemed to be emerging.

Martin’s career as a officer essentially began after his assignment to the Army’s Presidio of Monterey language school. While still the gung-ho Army type who preferred ground pounding or jumping out of airplanes, a new and yet thought of opportunity was opening up for him as friends in military high places took note of his many accomplishments. Afforded a few days leave after OCS training and with his reporting date only hours away, Martin ended his family visit in Shafter and was driven to Bakersfield to board a northbound Greyhound.

A new postwar saga had thus begun for the middle Hammer son, and would eventually wind its way through a good bit of world history. Often to the chagrin of Gretchen Hammer, her second son always seemed to be too near the front lines of history. In her mind, Martin was certainly handsome and quite manly, but far too susceptible to injury and illness. Probably the favored son among the three boys, a unique bond had formed between mother and son while Martin served in war torn Europe.

The youngest among the Hammer family, Freda, having recently dropped out of college to take a reporters job with the Shafter Press was undoubtedly the most independent of the Hammer clan. After shunning a second marriage proposal, she told Gretchen that she didn’t intend to marry or give birth until reaching her 30’s, if ever.

While many of the country’s women had been forced out of wartime jobs in defense plants and were expected to become housewives again, Freda Hammer had no such intentions. Quite frankly, she once told Gretchen, I see myself as being a career woman. Being tied down with a husband and houseful of screaming kids kind of ties an independent woman down.

Freda would work for the Shafter Press for only a few months, then become a hard working cub reporter for the Bakersfield Californian. Her ultimate goal was to shine for a big city newspaper, and leave the San Joaquin Valley to roast without her. Writing a novel, or at least some good short stories, also seemed to be on her to do list. She did date occasionally, but was seldom asked out a second time, which was no big deal in her mind. She was, in short, a young woman with a stated purpose in mind. Over time her romantic encounters had left her with the opinion that most men were somewhat shallow, and had little interest in women possessing above average intelligence.

And, what of Louis Hammer, the then nine-year-old son of Henry Hammer, conceived out of wedlock with Lori McCune among a pile of potato sacks in a shed beside the town’s railroad tracks? After a rather dubious beginning to his school years, by the time of the fourth grade Louis was finally blending in. Somewhat blending in, anyway. Since many of his classroom friends were from Oklahoma, like the mother he had never seen, Louis had fallen into many of the cultural habits of those friends.

Most of the Okie kids around the Bakersfield area had eventually found that a perpetual facial scowl was enough to frighten away those who looked down on those dirt poor Okies. It was generally accepted throughout the valley that those downtrodden Okies arriving during the hard times of the 1930’s were an unwanted blemish upon the San Joaquin Valley social order. Thus despite working long hours for meager wages and hoping to blend in, most of the Okies had been assigned to the bottom rung of the prevailing pecking order.

To say Louis was fortunate to have escaped all the hardships to be endured by his mother’s family, the McCune’s, would be an understatement. The Hammer clan, not rich by any means but certainly compassionate, had willingly taken him in as a newborn when the McCune’s went south for the war effort. George and Gretchen, with Freda’s help, fed and clothed him, sometimes doted altogether too much over him. After the war broke out, taking the Hammer boys into military service, those holding down the fort at home kept Louis on a path toward respectability. Although that path often took some youthful detours, especially during the summer months.

Despite being constantly warned not to wander too far from the farm, during summer vacation all those adult warnings were soon forgotten by Louis and his two sidekicks, Harlan and Davey. With wiggly heat waves of summer rising from the scorching valley floor, it was time to explore. Nearing the end of a typical day of exploration, about a mile before reaching the Hammer Farm, Mr. Melancon’s watermelon patch had become a magnet for three tired and thirsty boys.

Although Melancon was known around the Shafter as a relatively quiet man, when his prize watermelon patch was in imminent danger of being violated by animals or humans, he’d been known to fire his 12 gauge shotgun toward the intruders. Nevertheless, as another scorching summer wore on and the Melancon watermelons ripened, three thirsty nine-year-olds would soon find it near impossible to resist temptation. With each new step toward the Melancon watermelon patch, the thoughts of three near ravenous boys had narrowed down to reaching their grimy hands into the very heart of one of nature’s finest delicacies.

Probably ninety percent of the time, Louis and his two sidekicks would successfully satisfy their thirst. However, if an angered Theordore Melancon did happen to see the ongoing thievery, it was time for three busted boys to sprint full speed toward a nearby tail water reservoir on the next farm toward home. Although the three boys would never hear the shotgun wrath that Melancon was known for, Louis could expect his Grandpa George to get a lengthy phone call that evening.

The next morning after a failed watermelon raid would invariably bring Louis face to face with his somewhat solemn Grandpa George. Despite yet another terse warning issued to his errant grandson, Louis would never be told that Henry Hammer had raided that same watermelon patch with his sidekicks at the age of nine.

1947 was also the year that Louis, like his father, became hooked on the grand old game of baseball. With the stifling heat of August settled into the valley, a Sunday morning trip south would end at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. Inside the sprawling stadium, surrounded by tall buildings, streetcars and noisy automobile traffic, Henry and George would introduce Louis to the world of professional baseball, AAA style. Five hours later, after a double-header split by the Los Angeles Angels and San Francisco Seals, Louis Hammer was convinced he’d had a most satisfying look into his own future.

Not long after the Sunday trip to Wrigley Field, George, Henry, and Frank Graham were locked in a Sunday night discussion inside Frank’s Place on Shafter’s pool hall row. Although it was customary to have their Sunday meetings at Frank’s rambling north side home, this evening Frank opted to host his two best friends at the old haunt on pool hall row.

Despite Mary Jane’s adamant wish that her husband sell what she thought was the most evil and immoral part of his expanding empire, Frank was holding out, not ready to move completely into the showy social circles of the San Joaquin Valley’s rich and famous.

As the three men sipped beer in a booth on the edge of an unoccupied dance floor, lamenting western music eased from a juke box nearby. Only a couple of Sunday evening customers occupied a line of bar stools while the tall bartender resisted yawning with boredom. When the evening’s discussion turned toward baseball, Frank was quick to offer his perspective on the grand old game. Although he was admittedly not much of a baseball fan, Frank soon noted that a trip to St. Louis in 1944 included watching a Yankee vs. Browns game with Mary Jane.

I really kind of enjoyed the game, Frank said, but Mary Jane couldn’t have cared less about baseball. She was more concerned with what was going on in the stands. According to her, the men on the field were better at spitting brown tobacco juice and scratching at their crotches than playing a game.

George, eager to add his feelings on the grand old game, then spoke his piece, I read somewhere that Hank Greenberg, an old fart spending most of his time on a Pittsburgh Pirate’s bench, is making more than a hundred thousand dollars for this season. Seems most of the other ballplayers are making more than ten thousand a year. All that, in my opinion, is too damn much for playing a kid’s game for six months and spitting tobacco juice all over the place. Those guys need some real old fashioned farm work. Let ‘em see what it’s like to really work for their damn money.

Henry chuckled with that, now eager to enter the conversation. And, of course, you two old farts, should you happen to own a baseball team, would have ‘em work for fifty cents an hour. Let’s face it, you old dried up dinosaurs, the world is changing. Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore.

So, what’s your point, Henry? You sayin’ playing a damn kids game is worth a hundred grand? That ain’t the way me and George see things.

Henry took a sip of beer before answering. In case you haven’t noticed, Frank Graham, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, even that damned war we just fought are history. We are now in the Atomic Age. Baseball, in my humble opinion, is a damn fine way to live out your youth. And, I might add, doing so without calloused hands while earning a few bucks to pay the bills. Playing baseball beats bucking hay bails or driving a tractor for some old fart like the two of you.

Frank, always respectful of Henry’s opinions, chuckled before continuing. Yeah, Henry, it’s definitely the atomic age. You can rest assured that the Russians are doing all they can to steal our secrets and make their own damn bomb. Pretty soon, and mark my word, every damn nation, including the Ruskies, will have stolen the plans for their own version of the bomb.

Probably so, Frank, Henry replied. All progress has a downside.

Frank chuckled. Pretty big downside at that, Henry Hammer. A bunch of booms and mushroom clouds, and planet Earth simply disappears from the celestial charts. No more humans, and, god forbid, no more baseball. Only the tiny but indestructible cockroach will then be left to enjoy the spoils of technology. Such a misguided rush for splitting the atom doesn’t bode well for the future of mankind.

George, long since familiar with Henry’s intellect, was eager to put forth his own slant on this new age. Like you’ve often said, Henry, the politicians have missed a good chance to declare real peace. Instead, we’re all becoming so paranoid that any peace on Earth is about as likely as making a railroad hobo into a millionaire.

Chapter Two

PARANOIA

Few Americans would argue the fact that the Roosevelt administration had done a masterful job of mobilizing an entire country to fight a war. However, with the president’s death early in 1945, Vice President Harry Truman had inherited a bundle of problems besides deciding on what to do with those A-bombs being put together in New Mexico. Being a veteran of the first world war himself, Truman undoubtedly knew a lot about those festering veteran issues in 1946, but his administration then had more than just a full plate of other problems to deal with.

In true American fashion, all the mobilization and technology created by WWII had pretty much ignored the side effects that were bound to happen afterwards. Simply asking the country’s working women to give up their jobs so the vets could return to the workforce just wasn’t cutting it. Old fashioned American resolve by both men and women had helped win the most destructive war in human history, but the home front war needed more than just words and promises. As nearly 5 million working Americans joined a year of almost endless labor strikes during 1946, veteran issues were being put on the back burner.

For a some rear echelon vets, like Henry Hammer and his friend Harm Windridge, a junk dealer’s son from Gary, Indiana, the peacetime transition to civilian life had been comparatively smooth. However, for more than 2 million other returning vets, whether having served on the front lines or with the rear echelons, their transition was too often another story entirely. Without the peacetime skills to find paid work nor having a supportive family, the adjustment to civilian life wasn’t going all that well for them.

For too many vets, 1946 would find them unemployed. Their short period of postwar euphoria had morphed into a bad case of discontent, not to mention a shrinking wallet. With a wave of strikes sweeping across the country, thousands of discontented vets were more than willing to join in. For them, money wasn’t the primary problem. Their goal was to bring attention to all the festering veteran issues being ignored by a fickle public and government focused more on slashing the military budget.

By joining the strikers and protesting their own unhappy situation, WWII vets across the country were suddenly being given plenty of attention by the media as well as a bevy of sometimes oblivious politicians. While most of the disgruntled vets would protest peacefully, there would soon be some near violent exceptions. Down south, in Alabama, several angry vets had grown tired of being ignored, and rushed past barricades to take over and then occupy a government building. The unrest, it seemed, carried all the elements of exploding into a bona fide home grown war.

In one respect, a few outbursts of anger might have been just what some of the country’s combat vets needed. For many of those often derailed souls, suppressing what needed to be shared with someone who understood their plight was creating all sorts of psychological problems. For them, outbursts of pent up anger were often taking the form of some kind of violence and soon leading straight to jail or the bottle, if not both. Then, with the bottle in charge of their lives, divorce and even suicide was almost certain to follow. But, even as the rates of alcoholism and divorce continued to soar among the country’s vets, and psychological problems were given a new official title of psychoneurotic disorder, promises rather than positive action had become the norm.

A big part of what was needed after the war was how to handle the country’s psychoneurotic patients. Besides more than 20,000 amputees being treated in American hospitals in 1946, more than half of the other patients were being treated for psychological problems. Described primarily as shell shock during the WWI era, a new medical term was essentially only a name change for a veteran with the impaired ability to bring his mind to grips with what they’d seen or done.

Whatever the vet’s psychological problems were being officially called, a good many of them didn’t have access to treatment or even show up for treatment if they did. For those front line vets who thought they’d gotten through an ugly war without significant psychological damage, those problems had most likely been saved for later. For many of them, sometimes after long periods of denial, those haunting images of death and destruction would almost certainly come calling.

When the postwar calendar turned to 1947, the Truman administration was still battling organized labor and still hearing about disgruntled vets. Although legislation was in the works to curtail some of the power being overused by the country’s labor unions, President Truman did not favor the intent of the legislation. In his mind, curtailing the power of the labor unions would be contrary to the rights of free speech. Near the middle of the year, Truman would veto the legislation, but his veto would be overridden and the Taft-Hartley Act would become law. An act that all the disappointed labor unions across the land would call the slave labor bill.

As for the country’s vets in 1947, many of them were continuing to struggle as well as joining in the strikes and protesting. When the Academy Awards were presented on the 19th of March, their plight was finally being showcased when the Oscar for the best picture was awarded to The Best Years of Our Life. While the Hollywood version of the country’s veteran dilemma fell far short of addressing some of the most pressing issues of the time, the public was at last being made aware that those issues existed.

Besides the ongoing labor and veteran troubles that continued to plague the beleaguered Truman administration, several disasters during 1947 would take center stage. In Los Angeles, on the 20th of February, the massive explosion of an electro plating company would kill seventeen, and leave a crater of 22 feet in depth. That explosion, however, would pale in comparison to another even more massive and devastating explosion on April the 16th in the port of Texas City.

Tied to the docks of Texas City on that fateful April morning, the 437 foot long SS Grandcamp, a converted WWII Victory ship with 2200 tons of ammonium nitrate onboard, erupted with largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen in the United States. The blast was so powerful that a resulting 15 foot wave began spreading across the Gulf of Mexico along with creating a chain reaction throughout the port and the adjacent city. In all, 581 people within the harbor or nearby would be reported killed, and more than a thousand buildings leveled. All but one member of the city’s fire department had been among those lost that day.

Undoubtedly the most insidious disaster to take place in 1947 and several years beyond would be the rise of a bad case of Communist Paranoia. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man with all the looks and demeanor of mob hit man, would, before the end of the year, lead the way toward what was perceived by he and some of his cronies as clearing the country of all those damn communists.

Spurred on by McCarthy’s anti-communist obsession, on the 24th of November, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to issue citations for Contempt of Congress to people who later become known as the Hollywood 10. Having refused to answer questions about people with Communist leanings then working in the movie industry, those ten men, including the distraught screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, would be only the first of many to be put on a growing blacklist by the country’s film industry.

Like a bull with a burr under its tail, McCarthy and his henchmen would become a ravenous pack of commie hunters, intent upon exposing anyone of note to the unsubstantiated charges of being or having been connected to the communist movement. Throughout the next several years, the truth would be cast aside as several lives and careers became fair game in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. For the most part, the allegations were never backed up with facts, but the spreading paranoia would go on regardless.

Among those who would join McCarthy’s witch hunting binge were Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy, both caught up in the whirlwind of misplaced accusations. Both of these men, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, had cast aside common sense in favor of joining what was being touted as patriotism. Like is usually the case in Washington, D.C., appearances are everything.

On September 18 of 1947, a little more than two months prior to the blacklisting of the Hollywood 10, President Harry Truman’s National Security Act became effective. With this new legislation, the United States Air Force, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) came into existence. Less than three weeks earlier, and adding to the spreading McCarthy paranoia so rampant then, the Communist movement in Russia seized power in Hungary. With this rather bold move, Josef Stalin’s vow to spread communism throughout the planet was at last being seen as more than the idle threats of a ruthless dictator.

Although substantial proof of Soviet espionage was still some months away, a Russian spy ring headed up by Julius Rosenberg, chartered with stealing U.S. atomic weapons secrets, remained hard at work throughout 1947. This small but highly successful network of Soviet backed spies had quite effectively infiltrated the super secret Manhattan Project, placing its