Red Oak
By early 1943 the United States had been at war for just over a year. So far on the home front the war was remote and felt mainly as a void, with the absence of many friends, family members, and consumer goods. Little was known about the details of early setbacks in North Africa. The battle for control of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia was fought in late February and proved disastrous for the Allied forces. There was no inkling of this at home until the Western Union telegrams began to arrive. Particularly hard hit was the little Iowa town of Red Oak, population 5,600.
On March 6 more than two dozen telegrams arrived, almost at the same time, with the dreaded words: “The Secretary of the Army desires me to express his regret that your son…” A historian described the effect on this small town: On March 11, the Express printed a headline no one could dispute: “SW Iowa Is Hit Hard.” The photographs of missing boys just from Red Oak filled four rows above the fold on page one. “War consciousness mounted hourly in Red Oak, stunned by the flood of telegrams this week,” the article began. The busiest man in town was a boy, sixteen-year-old Billie Smaha, who delivered wires for Western Union. “They kind of dreaded me,” Billie later told the Saturday Evening Post . A New York Herald-Tribune reporter calculated that “if New York City were to suffer losses in the same proportion… its casualty list would include more than 17,000 names.”146
Red Oak was a microcosm of what was happening across the nation. Instead of an abstraction, war had finally become real. Instead of newsreels of ships and tanks and newspapers with maps and arrows, war had become a matter of dead, wounded, and missing boys. War was finally experienced by the American public for the human disaster that it was then and will always continue to be.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God.“
—Psalm 46:9–10