No 'home for Christmas' in 1944: Column

That December in 1944 began full of hope for those of us in the small row house in Philadelphia. The war in Europe had been going well since D-Day and the hopeful slogan "home for Christmas" had lofted our spirits because the Nazis seemed finished and the Japanese couldn't be far behind.

My mother, my older 18-year-old sister and I turned on our old Emerson radio and set to work around the dining room to do our part to win the war. My sister — married the year before to Harvey Clement who was about to go overseas — would write him letters on toilet paper so that the greatest amount of her longing could be crammed into an airmail envelope that didn't need extra postage.

My mother would lovingly place a fruit cake into a box lined with waxed paper, send it to an A.P.O address and hope that it would arrive more or less intact at that vague location designated by the military censors "somewhere in the Pacific." Mom had taken it into her head that he liked fruit cakes. Harvey told me confidentially after the war that he hated them but that they were great for swapping for cigarettes.

Our war was defined by the empty spaces in our lives. My sister's husband who, at that time, was probably still on New Guinea, would soon be on a troop transport for the Philippines where he would eventually find himself fighting the Japanese hand-to-hand in the streets of Manila. He would relive those experiences every night for the rest of his life in terrifying dreams.

On our street alone, several families had loved ones involved in the war effort. There was Leo Lister, the Marine from next door who, a year before had been fighting on the Pacific atoll at Tarawa. Bill Pearlstein from across the street was in the Aleutians. My first cousin, Isidore Lieberman, a gunner on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific would soon be facing the mad assault of kamikaze suicide planes. And my dear uncle Marty Lieberman, my mother's youngest brother, was in the Vosges Mountains on the border of France and Germany with the 100^th Infantry Division where he would earn a Purple Heart and a case of what today we'd call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then, inevitably, there were the absences that were not temporary. My mother was on the front porch when the Western Union messenger arrived and got no answer when he rang the bell of the Katz family across the street. Nellie and Abner Katz were working in their restaurant downtown when the telegram from War Department arrived. Seeing my mother sweeping our porch, the messenger asked her to sign for it, and burdened her with bringing to Mr. and Mrs. Katz the message that their youngest son, Roddy, a navigator on a B-26, was missing in action on New Guinea.

Our hope that at least some of the men would be home by Christmas vanished with news of a German offensive in eastern Belgium that quickly came to be known as "The Battle of the Bulge," which began 70 years ago Tuesday. So we continued to send the letters and pack the fruit cakes and listen to Christmas music on the radio.

Then came a moment when one particular song by Bing Crosby came on the radio. When Crosby sang, "I'll be home for Christmas; you can plan on me," he united the hopes of those of us around the dining room table and our far-flung loved ones.

But as Crosby crooned into the final poignant line, "I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams" the tears in the eyes of my mother and sister told me that nobody would be coming home for Christmas.

And some, not ever.

Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and the author of the upcoming bookIs Bipartisanship Dead?

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