Army Brat: World War II

By Laura Gutman

The lives of Army brats have always been a core component of the US military. Scarcely described until now, Army Brat: World War II is an essential account that fills a major gap in history.






Author Laura Thurston Gutman lived deeply embedded within the US Armed Forces from before the United States’ earliest entry into World War II through the Vietnam era. Chronicling pivotal events during those years, this historical autobiography describes a life inextricably intertwined with the military. From her birth at West Point’s hospital, to her cobbled-together education, and witnessing her father’s many military honors, Laura’s childhood was one of intense awareness of the danger her father faced and the courage her mother displayed. As she grew older, she lurked in the background during long evenings of intense discussions of policy. Through the constant upheaval and disruption so familiar to military families, Laura developed a radical independence, a determination to gain control over her life, and a fearless approach to her own education.






Chronicling the experiences of a strong military family as they witness and participate in the unfolding of history in a dangerous and challenging world, Army Brat identifies consequential insights into the critical importance of a strong religious foundation; an educational system dedicated to core concepts of nation and loyalty; and leadership that prioritizes sovereignty, national defense, and military support.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781662943850

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Pathways

I was born an Army brat through and through, from my first breath at the station hospital at West Point. Once an Army brat, always so, and this is an account of my life as a Brat from World War II until my father’s death in 1999.

Where did this label come from? The history of Army brat is fuzzy but may have had an origin in the British military. In 1921, British regulations referred to British Regiment Attached Traveler to define children who were allowed to travel abroad with their officer parent. Or as a two-word fusion, in 1936, the poem Old Soldier Sahib describes the children born in British barracks in India or Burma as Barrack Rats. In the early 1900s, the US wives and children of serving men and officers were officially designated to be dependents, and that term lasted through World War II. Many Army wives resented the implication of that label, and even some of the children disliked the term. As an alternative, in the 1942 text The War Dictionary, children of Army officers were termed Army Brats as an endearment. The term stuck even though a brat is usually a pejorative, and the label is now avidly embraced by Army brats to include those of us who grew up as children on Army bases or other military installations. We even have an online registry, Military BRATS Registry, to provide us with a permanent home mailing address. We Brats own that name.

This is my true story of a long life, basking in the unearned glory of being born and raised as an Army brat. To this day, a core aspect of my self-identity remains Army brat. In that amazing world, my entire childhood through early adulthood was encompassed by World War II and its early aftermath. I write this with deep respect, loving memory, and intense recollections of the life we lived and of the ways we fulfilled our duty to our nation. Indeed, as children, we were also among those who actively served our nation. We were aware that our families depended on us to be strong and resolute, and as such we genuinely believed we served the nation along with our parents, to our own considerable honor.

By now, many decades have passed since those days, and I now appear to be a very comfortable and mainstream old lady. However, we all know that childhood life experiences never leave us. I have slowly come to realize that there are very few written autobiographies by other Army brats of that era, so the life we lived is largely unknown, much less understood. It was a life of intense chaos, extreme involvement with the fortunes of our Armed Forces, constant changes, soul-wrenching losses, great satisfactions, and amazing adventures.

By the time I graduated from high school I had lived in West Point, New York; Schofield Barracks, Hawaii; San Francisco, California; Fort Benning, Georgia; Camp Blanding, Florida; Washington, DC; Babson Park, Florida; Minneapolis, Minnesota (two homes and attending two schools); Fort Hamilton, New York; Hoechst, Germany; Heidelberg, Germany; Wilderswil, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany; Fontainebleau, France; a second tour in Heidelberg, Germany; Augusta, Maine; Readfield, Maine; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. That is twenty homes and schools in sixteen years. This is probably a complete list, although I hadn’t remembered one of them until this writing.

I have had a long and happy marriage. We have two lovely daughters who are my best friends and passed through their own youth without ruining themselves. I have friends; I am a committed Jew; and I have now lived in the same city for fifty-two years. I am retired from a consequential career in medicine. Viewed from here, that earlier world from which I came looks as far away as the mythical planet Zog, but the world I did come from is a core part of the nation’s history, and that world is what guided my own life. I enjoy the reflected glory of being directly related to at least ten men who have served in the military: my husband (wartime Navy); my brother (career Navy); my father (career Army); my son-in-law’s brother (career Army); the husbands of two aunts (wartime Navy); two grandfathers (wartime Army); and two great-uncles (career Navy). During my childhood, particularly when I was living on an Army base, many friends shared that sort of familiarity with the nature of life in military families. Those bases were, and might possibly remain, my true homes.

Portrait of my father, Lt Col Benjamin E. Thurston, painted by W. Dikel-Salvius, 1948

I was born in the tiny and now-dismantled station hospital at the West Point Military Academy. Dad was then a mid-level career officer in the US Infantry. As a graduate of West Point, he taught English, Math, and Civil War strategy, and he coached chess there. My parents were natives of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and both of their families had arrived in the Upper Midwest several generations earlier. Both of my mother’s parents were Scottish in background with Robb and Baxter branches. Family history asserted that Viking blood runs in our veins, and given the Scottish ancestry, that is certainly plausible. My father’s background was English. There were many families of farmers on both sides, as well many who prospered in businesses. The family had slowly migrated across the Northern Midwest and by the centennial had reached Indiana. Other brothers of my great-grandfather were also by then in Minneapolis.

Dad’s great uncle, fourth from left, also Benjamin Thurston, when the family was slowly migrating across the Northern Midwest. This was taken in 1876 in Madison, Indiana

As an aside, the reader will hear of several Benjamin Easton Thurstons. Three, to be exact. My father, my brother, and my great great uncle (seen in the 1875 photo). In addition, my relationship to an earlier and fourth bearer of that name is lost in the mists of history. Benj refers to my brother, born in 1941.

Neither of my parents was individually wealthy, but prominent Minnesota families were on both sides of the family, including the Pillsbury and Winston families. Throughout my life, when asked where I came from, I usually chose to answer: Minneapolis. My mother was a graduate of Smith College at a time when few women were college educated. Julia Child was there at the same time and may have been a classmate. Mother was also Phi Beta Kappa and always joined the base club for college women wherever we were stationed, providing her with an immediate clutch of ready-made friends and fellow spirits. From an early age, I was allowed to sit in on their meetings and events.

My given name was that of my mother’s mother, who had died a few weeks before my birth. Her own mother, my maternal great-grandmother, lived her life as a grand adventure to the very end. Late in her life, she embarked on a long ocean voyage through the Pacific, to the outrage of her wider family. Two months after she boarded the ship, she died and was buried at sea. Tossed overboard, that is, and that escapade reverberated down the generations, as you can well imagine. Her granddaughter, my mother, had lovely, classical handwriting; sang beautifully; had skills at piano; and was an advanced cook. As a true daughter of the Northern Prairie, she had a distinctive style of cooking. Was the dessert in need of help? Nothing that a large splash of brandy wouldn’t cure. Was a main dish lacking in appeal? Red pepper, black pepper, butter, and cream to the rescue. As an Army wife, she was infinitely resourceful, and truly loved her family.

Elizabeth Gay Baxter Thurston at her engagement to my father.

My mother’s father, Dockie, as we called him, was a surgeon who at one time was Chairman of the Minnesota Board of Surgery and had served in World War I. He once owned his own hospital but lost it as well as other properties during the Great Depression. He was the quintessential dour Scot, devoid of humor or warmth as far as I could tell. Mother described her life as a child as cool, calm, regimented, and unemotional. After my mother’s mother died, Dockie remarried with Lynn. I knew her as his wife, a grandmother to me whom I enjoyed visiting, but did not really know very well.

My father was the oldest of four children and the only son. He had wanted to be a farmer, and everywhere we were stationed we always exercised some of those crafts. We usually kept bees, raised rabbits, and had a small kitchen garden, which provided chores from which I learned the necessary skills and expertise. Nevertheless, his parents felt that farming was too risky for an only son and insisted he enter a profession. His mother was very active in Minnesota affairs and was pivotal in the enactment of child labor laws. She was also an opium addict. She knew her senators and arranged for Dad to be awarded a position as a plebe at West Point. In 1926, he graduated high in his class of 128 cadets and was the class historian throughout his schooling. He first served in Indochina and the Philippines, then married my mother when he was thirty and she twenty-three. From the tour in Indochina, he brought home the full pelt of a tiger, complete with a stuffed head and glass eyes. That sad relic turned up on the floor from time to time, becoming more and more tattered, and finally disappeared after many moves. I have a deep love of felines, and from an early age was sad to know the violent end to which that beautiful animal had come.

Photo of Dad’s family, around 1915 (L to R): Benjamin, Mary, Alice with Muffin the cat, and Helen

A formal photograph of my father and his three sisters was taken when my dad was about twelve; Alice around ten; Helen was eight; and Mary, just four years old. Dad’s cat is in the foreground of that photo. My cousins and I suspect that Dad learned his leadership skills during the rumpus of his childhood. In that photo, Dad is in charge, Alice is plotting, Helen is ready, and Mary is enjoying. What Alice was plotting begs description, but it included introducing lice into the hair of Muffin, Dad’s huge and dearly loved long-hair cat, so that she, Alice, could open the bedroom window and call out to his friends: Ben can’t come out to play today because he has to clean his lousy cat. Helen was always Alice’s loyal collaborator and Mary, the family baby, lived in the happy knowledge that she was always folded into the action. Those four lived a thoroughly unruly life and had far less supervision than most children of that era. Several neighboring families forbade their children to play with Dad or his sisters because of their bad influence. They had a goat and little goat cart to hot-rod around the neighborhood, and at an early age Dad was fully responsible both for the care of the goat and for repairs of the cart.

My father’s father died during World War II while we were stationed in Georgia. At the time, I had not yet lived in Minnesota so didn’t know him well. Dad’s mother, May, lived through the 1950s in downtown Minneapolis, and in the 1940s we visited her often. She was very well-cared for—a nice grandmother. She warned us against getting crumbs on the carpet, always had delicious treats for us, and forbade us to say Yeah or Yah because that is what the Krauts say.

Looking back, I am profoundly aware that I had, without exception, all the essentials for a happy childhood. I had a full-time mother whom I could count on in absolute terms. She would be there when I came in the door at the end of the day. She loved me and helped me. She made life fun. I had a father. He was very often absent, but I was always, in every situation, aware that he was doing his duty to protect us and that he was making our family life possible. I knew I needed to help him to be the man he needed to be. I had a family with brothers from whom I found out how to be a big sister. I had parents who knew how to live a difficult and challenging life. God loved me and spoke to me in tiny whispers; angels protected me at night.

We were old-timey, classical Episcopalians and were attached to Old Testament stories and beliefs. Only for pressing reasons would we fail to be present at Sunday church services and my dad ensured that we all had a donation to slip onto the offerings plate. However, during the war, his dog tags identified him as a Druid. He did so to secure some control over the call that military pastors could have on his time and allegiance.

I was myself a deeply committed believer in Moses’s accounts of the Word of God. To this day, I believe that a religious foundation is the basis for the strength and courage needed to face life in this flawed world, but New Testament beliefs did not take firm hold in my soul. Later, in college, I would date Jews, become comfortable with all things Jewish—eventually converting to Judaism, marrying a Jew, and raising our children as unambiguous Jews. As a child, however, I was unaware of ever having met a Jew, and if asked, I would probably have said that they were a great desert tribe from several thousands of years past with whom God had chosen to speak. The idea that Jews were an active population of people whom I might actually meet and who now lived among us never crossed my childhood mind.

It was not until high school when we were stationed in rural Maine in the early 1950s that I met a living Jew. Zeta Levine was a classmate, and we became close friends. Her family lived a few miles away from ours, in another one of Maine’s farming towns. Much later, I realized that there must have been a very interesting story behind her family’s choice to come to such a remote place. I doubt there were a dozen other Jewish families within fifty miles of there. She is one of the people who came in and out of my life too quickly and whose friendship I regret not having understood more fully.

CHAPTER 2

Pearl Harbor

In 1939, my mother was initiated into her first relocation as an Army wife when my dad was assigned to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Schofield was the major Army base in Hawaii, located toward the middle of the island. It is now seldom realized how truly tiny the 180,000-man pre-war US Army was. By size it ranked ninteenth in the world and was smaller than the army of Portugal. At that time, the US Army also included the Air Force as a branch. In Hawaii there were two major military airfields: Wheeler Airfield at Schofield Barracks, and Hickam Airfield close to the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. At Schofield, we lived in a comfortable, two-story home that abutted the end of Wheeler Airfield where planes were parked when not being serviced or in use. Separating our house and the airfield was our modest grassy backyard and a thin wire fence. I was used to seeing planes taxi back to park and men working on the planes.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I was four years of age, old enough to have crisp memories of that era. Life on any Army base was always a Shangri-la for children, and in this instance, it was a balmy, tropical, gorgeous paradise. There were plenty of other children in our area. Bases were safe, cars drove cautiously, and parents allowed their children to roam at will. Everyone knew where the children were and what they were doing. My days were filled with free-form play, helping my mother with house tasks and errands, and riding behind Dad on his motorcycle. On some Fridays, the barracks held a formal review with all families invited to see the marching, national songs, mounted patrols, and flags. One Friday, my very own dad commanded a large section of the review. Our house had a large, open, breezy porch on the second floor devoted to household tasks such as ironing, me working at my little desk, Mother’s correspondence, and so forth. It also directly overlooked the back end of Wheeler Airfield.

Early memories of that paradise began considerably before the attack and include many vignettes of our life. Several examples come to mind. One day when I was sick, Mother came in with her special smile, cuddling something furry in her arms. It was a kitten—my very first—and the start of a lifelong delight with all cats. From her I learned all I needed to know about the spears carried on the tips of her soft, furry toes. Since then, I have had many dozens, each owning a large piece of my heart. On another day, I was playing with the scrum of neighborhood children, most of whom were older and bigger than I was, who decided to tie me to a tree. They gleefully roped me to a small tree, secured the rope ends with a dozen simple granny knots, and ran off expecting to hear my wails and tears. In my smugness, I realized that to escape I only had to undo each easy knot one after another. So, laughing, I got to rejoin the ruffians. On yet another day, I overheard Mother and her friends quietly talking about the people who had survived horrible injuries from being dragged across beach coral by the retreating water of the tsunami that had occurred a short time earlier.

One memorable artifact from my earliest childhood survived those pre-attack days. It originally hung on the wall above a chest in my Hawaiian bedroom and now hangs in our front hall. It is a masterpiece of the early twentieth-century Japanese art of woodblock printing. This is the earliest edition of the 1927 Kawase Hasui print Hachirogata Lagoon. The highly atmospheric print shows a teahouse beside a lake on a soft summer evening. Leaves appear to rustle in a light breeze. I loved that scene. My parents bought it from a small shop near us that sold Japanese art, and in 1940, the prints by Hasui were considered to be contemporary art. My parents had excellent taste in art, bought a few of the prints, and over the years we managed to neither lose nor damage them. Several decades later, I would realize that great art was hanging on our wall and developed an intense interest in that art form.

Before the attack of December 1941, Schofield Barracks had responded to escalating concerns about the international situation by digging foxholes into the front lawns of the base housing areas. Naturally, the rabble of local children made the most of them, but I used the foxholes in a particularly spectacular way: I made a flying crash into one and broke my arm. It was a complicated fracture for which I was casted over my entire upper body for six weeks.

The attack was early on a Sunday morning. I always got up enthusiastically and early, often before my parents, and was on the upper porch when Wheeler Field was attacked. It was right before my eyes on the other side of our backyard. Resting planes on the ground went up in oily smoke, bullets hit parked planes, noises and explosions, airmen ran to planes. Flying airplanes zipped in and out of view. I was unsure what I was seeing, but was used to seeing training exercises around the airfield and assumed that it was likely such an event. The actual barracks that housed the troops on the post were a short distance from us, and planes seemed to be swooping to and from that general direction. And then, they all left. There were several waves of attacking planes, and by the second wave, Dad had moved us outside our house to the side opposite the airfield and huddled us on a blanket beside the house’s concrete foundation. My next younger brother, Benj, had been born in June 1941, so Mother’s two young children included an infant. Mother was calm, sheltering Benj in her arms. In truth, I didn’t have the experience of fear since both parents seemed to have a plan.

Schofield Barracks as seen from a Japanese attack plane, Dec 1941. (permission by Alamy Inc)

As an aside, decades later, when my husband and I happened to be in Hawaii, we sauntered along Waikiki beach and happened upon the small Army Museum (formerly Fort DeBussy) that is smack in the middle of the most prominent part of that marvelous beach. It is a low, unobtrusive, and mostly subterranean concrete building. I thought that the displays might have photos of the attack and, if the photos showed the attack on Wheeler Airfield, I could see if my memory of our home was accurate. The museum did have those photos, taken from just the right vantage point, and they showed my former home just exactly where I had remembered and have described.

Dad was a senior officer for both the fire department and military police for the post, and so he left very quickly after he told Mother and me what to do. We saw little, if anything, of him for several weeks. After an hour, Mother came back into the house, and we spent the rest of that day packing a small suitcase for ourselves. The airfield remained a mess, with men seen pushing planes around and working on the runway. In the midafternoon, a convoy of Army troop transport trucks with canvas covers began arriving in our neighborhood and all the women and children slowly climbed onto them. Because of my cast, everyone assumed I was a tragic, heroic victim of the attack and made much of me. Armed escorts on motorcycles guarded the convoy that snaked through the housing areas. We eventually ended the pick-up from Schofield and headed to the families in housing near Pearl Harbor. By then, it was dusk. As we drove by the harbor area, the lurid fires, smoke, noise, and smells from the waterfront were extremely and memorably dramatic. My mother said to turn my head away, so of course I took it all in with the enthusiastic intensity of an alerted 4-year-old, missing little.

The entire convoy eventually ended at what I now know was a college, where we slept outside on a huge, open, mosquito-infested porch. There was a general sense of grinding fear and whisperings of a landing by the Japanese. Mother remained stalwart and calm, assuring me that we would be fine. Always infinitely adept, first thing the next morning she managed to contact one of her Phi Beta Kappa friends who had a palatial villa at the top of the mountain. Her friend invited us and about six other families to stay with her while everyone awaited the next hours and days, so by evening we were tucked into a luxurious bolt hole. Staying at that home were about eight Army wives, probably a dozen or more mostly young children, and no men.

All the men were mobilized so we neither saw nor heard from them for over a week. Communication to the mountaintop was sparse. The telephones were not functioning to the mountain, and neither mail nor newspapers were being delivered. The harbor was visible from the living room, and the women spent the days sitting around, drinking tea and no doubt other even more comforting drinks, and quietly discussing any provisions they might make for various contingencies. It had the aura of a very nervous extended slumber party spiced up with fear and the sudden separation from the men. That separation, with the likelihood of a