The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
Studs Terkel
Language: English
Pages: 608
ISBN: 1565843436
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Chapman-Andrews and the Emperor
A Short History of World War II
Famous Ships of World War II (Colour)
just cut off his pants and gently washed him all over, so he wouldn’t be humiliated at his next stop. I was very calm in laying my battery. We got our first order to fire. There’s 6,400 degrees in an aiming circle. We were 90 degrees off. We’ll never know where those shells came down. I just hope and pray I didn’t hurt anybody who was out of the war. I hope it went into the ocean. This was the first day, all the first day. A lifetime in one day. I wasn’t scared until the third day. When we
studies were based on statistics. I don’t know how to build a machine tool. I barely knew one machine tool from another. (Laughs.) They insisted I make a tour of the machine-building industries. I accepted the invitation. I came back with my report: the Machinery and Allied Products Institute was wrong. I had visited factories across the street from each other, one working three shifts, one working one shift. Now they wanted me to take over planning and controls for the tool industry. (Laughs.)
not tragic. There’s no tragedy because there’s no human element in it. It doesn’t teach you any lesson except to watch out for earthquakes. The hard lesson of the tragedy is that ordinary people can be brought into a condition to do these things. That’s much more dangerous. ARNO MAYER He is a member of the history department at Princeton. I was born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. We left there May 10, 1940, the morning of the German invasion of France, the big push. We were Jewish.
said, “I want you to produce at least two, three pages every day.” He claimed he had one hundred informants in the field. At the end of the first month, my boss gave me an envelope of money to give him. I opened it up and counted seventeen hundred good green American dollars. I said, “Jesus Christ, this guy is really gettin’ paid for that. For this kind of money, he ought to produce.” One day I saw him copy a news report from a Yugoslavian news agency. I said, “Listen, Barbie, I can read that
down. Since we lived in this town that made airplane parts, we were bombed constantly. I found her in a chain of women passing buckets from one to the other. There were no men. There were only women and old people. The whole neighborhood had really been bombed out. I’m now six, this is ’44. We were standing outside in the gardens looking at these planes flying over. I remember waving at the American pilots. They came very low and escaped the flak. Flew so low that they practically touched the
