The Silent Generation, Part 1

 Cassidy spent last week in Tampa with Police Explorers from all over Central Florida. Below, a pic of what she brought home, including a First in Sharpshooting and a First for the drill team she commands.

 

A nostalgic moment, courtesy of Facebook Memories and shared by Susie:

Cassidy, Hailey, Riley

And an important message found on Facebook, one we all need to heed:

 

 

Tale of a Typo: 

 

During a months-long feud with Amazon Kindle (to be addressed at a later date), I have been re-reading books by favorite authors, including Jack Higgins; more specifically, his later books where Al-Qaeda was the prime enemy. And in each book the following phrase appears, usually several times over:  "There is only one God and Osama is his Prophet." And, suddenly, in one of the many repetitions something leaped out at me—something I'm sure I never noticed on first reading. Despite Higgins being a major author with professional proofreaders galore, the phrase read:  "There is only one God and Obama is his Prophet."

 

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Grace note:  There is some repetition below from previous posts, but I felt it necessary to set up my comments for "The Silent Generation, Part 2." 

 

 While enjoying my birthday lunch last week, my daughter got the notion to explore what "generation" she belonged to, discovering she was Generation X, and quickly tracking down my designation as well:  The Silent Generation. Which is exactly what we, the kids brought up during World War II, were. Why were we silent? Because we were so @#$% glad the war was over. It was like the sun shone for the first time in more than four years. Fathers, brothers, uncles were coming home—the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who had given their all for freedom in Europe and the Pacific. Mothers, sisters, aunts as well—from the nurses who worked in field hospitals barely behind the front lines to the women pilots who ferried airplanes to their needed destinations, to the vast number of the women who took over essential factory jobs during the war, keeping the war machine running. Or simply women like my mother, who did a weekly stint in the local command center and my father (aged out of the draft two months before Pearl Harbor), who manned an unheated shack on a hillside one night a week, as an airplane spotter. (I learned all existing airplane silhouettes before I was nine.)

And now it was over—there would never be war again! What could there possibly be to complain about?

Inevitably, as I heard the words, "The Silent Generation," I thought back to what the war years (1941-1945) were like. The towering wire enclosures erected so people could donate their aluminum pots and pans, every spare tire they could lay their hands on. Sitting on the sagging wooden stairs in my elementary school during air raid drills. The sad satin banners hanging in people's windows:  gold for the death of a loved one; silver for wounded; blue for Missing in Action. The newsreels before the double-feature on a Saturday afternoon—the only pics we had of what was happening—from the horror of the smoking wrecks at Pearl Harbor to the wonder of Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, the push against Rommel in North Africa, the invasion of Italy, D-day, the horror of the emaciated Jews stumbling out of the concentration camps, the first inkling most of us had about what is now known as the Holocaust. (And for anyone who doubts—I saw it on the big screen in my local movie theater. A sight impossible to forget—repeated over and over as each camp was liberated.)

[Interesting side note:  I recently subscribed to MHz and have been watching some German mysteries (w/subtitles). Quite incredibly, I found myself picking up words and phrases I learned from all those WWII movies. They were instantly understandable, even after 80 years.]

Back to 1945: The world being what it was in those days, I was allowed out on my own to celebrate the end of the war, a girl just-turned twelve mingling with the jubilant crowds on the street in our relatively small northeastern Connecticut town. It was over. Wow!

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Next week:  A look at what happened as the years 1930-1945 were analyzed during my high school and college years (and spread before us in movie after movie set during the war). And most of us continued in our naive belief that such a thing could never happen again. Even as we coped with "the bomb" and the Cold War, Democracy thrived; genocide was an ugly aberration that could never, ever happen again; and—Glory, Hallelujah!—women by the millions entered the job market . . .

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Hard to choose a Featured Book, as so many of them feature the Peninsular War or its aftermath. I recall wondering about the clearly deliberate omission of any mention of the long years of the Napoleonic wars in Jane Austen's books, the rare mention in Georgette Heyer books, as she pleased her publisher, not herself. (Because she did indeed sneak in a significant book or two about the war.)

Way, way back, before I learned any of the "rules" for writing for New York publishers, I sat down and poured out 140,000 words about the Peninsular War and its aftereffects. And The Sometime Bride was born. This was likely the only "old-fashioned" heroine I ever wrote (after all, she was only 14 at the start of the book), but by Part II she developed into the strong, independent heroine I enjoyed writing about in my 50+ books to follow. To this day, I consider The Sometime Bride my "magnum opus." And written almost entirely at night, as I had the care of my invalid husband during the day. So, once again, I recommend the entire Regency Warrior series. (Tarleton's Wife is still my personal best-seller, though The Secrets of Stonebridge Castle* is fast catching-up.)

*A Gothic tale set in the aftermath of the Peninsular War, both hero and heroine having suffered more than most.

 

 

The Regency Warrior Series (in order)

The Sometime Bride

Tarleton's Wife

O'Rourke's Heiress

Rogue's Destiny

The Lady Takes a Risk

The Abominable Major

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 For a link to Blair's website, click here. 

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Thanks for stopping by,

Grace (Blair Bancroft)