Terry and Sledge

Peggy Terry wrote about the stereotypes of the Japanese and Germans during World War II.  She wrote, “In all the movies we saw, the Germans were always tall and handsome.  There’d be one meanie, a little short dumpy bad Nazi.  But the main characters were good-lookin’ and they looked like us.  The Japanese were all evil”  As we learned, the United States made sure everyone knew that the Japanese were evil.  Their were posters all over the streets and cartoons that portrayed the Japanese as evil.  Also, as Peggy Terry wrote, movies also made the Japanese look evil.  This was opposite for the Germans.  In movies, Germans were not the bad guys.  Unlike the Japanese, the government didn’t make an effort to get the news out that the Germans were evil.  This was because the government didn’t want to go to war with Germany.  They wanted the people on their side, so stayed away from negatively portraying the Germans.  It seems as if on the home-front, the talk was about the Japanese rather than the Germans. 
            E.B Sledge was a soldier during World War II.  One quote struck me the most.  He said, “I was nineteen, a replacement in June of 1944.  Eighty percent of the division in the Guadalcanal campaign was less than twenty-one years of age.”  I’m 17 years old.  Guys fighting were 18 and 19 years old.  That is me in one to two years.  I can’t imagine being thrown into a battle.  I couldn’t handle it.  This shows how soldiers were tested.  They were too young to fight, but they had to fight anyways.  They had the responsibility of protecting their country at the age of 18!  These 17 to 18 year olds had to mature fast in order to protect their country.

Introduction and Rasmus

I will like to focus my attention on Robert Rasmus.  Robert Rasmus was a rifleman in World War II.  His life was on the line every single day.  I want to focus on a single quote.  Robert Rasmus said, “You saw those things in the movies, you saw the newsreels.  But you were of an age when your country wasn’t even in the war.  It seemed unreal.  All of a sudden, there you were right in the thick of it and people dying and you were scared out of your wits that you’d have your head blown off.”  This quote really made me think.  When I watch war movies, I always think about how brave the men must have been.  The thing is, I really don’t know how brave the men must have been.  As Rasmus said, you see battle scenes in movies, but one can’t relate until they actually go into battle.  I can’t imagine going into battle knowing that I have a 70 percent chance of dieing.  There is no way to know how you would feel unless you go into battle.  There is no way to prepare.  As Rasmus said, it happens so quickly.  You think its all fun and games and don’t understand it until your first battle.  The quote also made me think about many of the video games we play today.  We play games such as Call of Duty and get this vision that War is so much fun.  The difference between Call of Duty and real war is; in COD if you die you hit restart, in life, its over.  One can’t really imagine what war is like unless they are in the heart of battle.  Rasmus and other war veterans need to be even more respected.  Next veteran’s days, I’ll try my best to reflect on what Rasmus and other men had to go through in order to protect the United States.

Jane Yoder, Tom Yoder, Peggy Terry, Mary Owsley

The stories of Jane Yoder and Tom Yoder show how bad times were in a Great Depression.  These were kids who lived during the Great Depression.  This story really went into the details of how bad the depression was.  For example, Jane said, “The cold that I’ve known.  I never had boots.  I think when I got married, I had my first set of boots.”  Jane lived in Chicago, and we all know how brutal the temperature is.  The problem for Jane and many, they couldn’t buy the proper gear to defend themselves.  They had to go outside in sub-freezing temperatures without the proper clothes.  I can’t imagine leaving my house when it’s below 10 degrees without a hat, gloves, boots, and a winter coat.  This had a cost on Jane as it would get her sick.  When she got sick she said, “If we had a cold or we threw up, nobody ever took your temperature. We had no thermometer.”  During the depression, getting sick was a huge fear.  People, like Jane, didn’t have the money to treat their sickness.  When I’m sick I get annoyed, but I know that I can go to the doctor and be treated.  Jane and others during the Depression were not able to be treated.  Jane and Tom helped show me how bad times were during the Great Depression.

We discussed for many weeks if World War 1 was just.  I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t just due to what the soldiers went through.  After the war, many were shell shocked, and perhaps worse than that, they came home into a Depression.  Mary Owsley said about her husband, “He’d say them damn Germans gassed him in Germany.  And he come home and his own Government stooges gassed him and run him off the country up there with the water hose, half drowned him.”  After World War 1, soldiers came back home to a brutal life.  While they were happy to be out of war, it was just as bad to live in poverty not being able to support their families.  War veterans are our biggest heroes.  They are supposed to be provided with honor and wealth when they come back for war.  The problem was, the country wasn’t in the proper state to provide them with money for their bravery.  This made it very hard on a lot of soldiers.  This adds on the why the War wasn’t Just.  Not only did the soldiers suffer brutal conditions on the war front, but they also came home to brutal conditions.  There wasn’t a good enough reason to fight to back up what the soldiers went through.

Robertson and Paulsen

Robertson was a wealthy white man who lived during the depression.  Throughout his writing, he reflected on the Great Depression.  He said, “On Wall Street, the people walked around like zombies.  It was like Death Takes A holiday. It was very dark. You saw people who yesterday rode around in Cadillac’s lucky now to have carfare.”  The change in life was so dramatic for people.  You went to bed rich one night, and broke the next morning.  I can’t imagine what husbands of families told their kids.  They must have felt demoralized that they couldn’t support their wife and children.  Robertson was one of the lucky ones during the depression.  He lucked out on Bank Holiday.  He said, “About eight weeks before the bank closings, we decided to take every dollar out of the banks. We must have taken out close to a million dollars.”  That is a million dollars he could have lost if he left it in the bank.  A million dollars at that time was a fortune.  Many people were not as lucky as Robertson and lost all their money in the banks.  The depression changed the life styles of everyone, but some did get luckier then others, like Robertson. 

Unlike Robertson, Paulsen lost everything.  Ed Paulsen was a farmer and in a different social class than Robertson.  While Robertson still had money, Paulsen had no money and no job.  Paulsen recalled going to the waterfront in San Francisco to look for a job.  He said, “You know dang well there’s only three of four jobs… a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there.” Ed Paulsen and other unemployed men knew there were no jobs, but they still had to try to find one.  It was that or continuing to live without proper food and housing.  Today, the media says that we are in a recession.  I always wondered about the difference between a recession and a depression.  While America is in hard times now, it isn’t as bad as it was in the 30’s.  There aren’t as many Paulsen’s today as there were in the 30’s.  American’s need to work together to try to get America out of the current recession, so we don’t enter another depression.