DURING ALMOST ALL of 1941 we were still at peace, although it was beginning to seem inevitable that we should enter the war. England, which had seemed fated to go under in 1940, had survived thanks to the heroism of the Royal Air Force, and most of my friends were either applying for military commissions or actually in training for them.
Much earlier I had applied for a commission as an ensign in naval intelligence on the theory (not yet wholly discounted) that we might never get into the war and that this would be the most comfortable way to avoid the draft. It was, however, widely regarded as a way of seeking a noncombat position, and I'm afraid this was a factor in my thinking. Mother was active in "America First" antiwar activity—anything to spare her sons the risk of gunfire—and I had tried to persuade myself that the best way to end the European conflict was by a stalemate. It would also be the safest and easiest solution for myself.
As the war clouds darkened the skies at home, I began to feel ashamed. A weekend spent with Bill Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, convinced me that shame, indeed, was what I should be feeling. Bill's mother, a remarkable woman and a great Republican leader in her state, made no secret, although never offensively, of her poor opinion of men who in any way sought to avoid combat in the coming conflict.
Mrs. Scranton to me was a kind of saint. All the servants in her large household were ex-convicts for whom, when she deemed them ready to return to society, she used her considerable political power to get jobs fitting their skills. But her old butler refused to go, telling her, "When I leave your service, Ma'am, it will be feet first."
Returning home I put in an application to the navy to change the commission sought from IVS (Intelligence Volunteer Special) to DVG (Deck Volunteer General), which meant that I should be sent for sea training, with so many of my friends, to the old battleship Prairie State, moored up the Hudson. Its graduates were ensigns known as "ninety-day wonders," and I slept easier at night now that I thought I had removed a blot on my character.
But the imps of comedy, who are always on the watch, were not going to let me get away with anything as easily as that. Sea duty I should have, a couple of oceans of it, but I should pay first with a year of misery. Pearl Harbor struck, and with it came the unwelcome intelligence commission and orders to proceed to the Panama Canal Zone. To protest that I was waiting for a different commission would look like avoiding an overseas assignment and was impossible.
***
Before actually leaving for the Canal Zone I was briefly on duty at 50 Church Street interviewing persons who had endorsed applicants for intelligence commissions. Were such endorsements based on a true knowledge of the candidate or were they simply family or business favors? Often the endorsers were men or women of public importance whom we interviewers were anxious to meet, and there was a good deal of swapping of names behind the scenes.
I remember an eager young lawyer swapping the lyric soprano Geraldine Farrar for two justices of the Appellate Division. It was all mildly diverting, and I still hoped for a reprieve to the Prairie State, but no. Orders to the Canal Zone duly arrived and I found myself for wretched months in a tropical office, a bureaucratic nightmare, where my job was to check Americans passing through the zone to South America against lists of semisuspects, including people who had Japanese servants! And all the while my friends were transiting the third lock of the great canal nearest our office on their way to battle and sometimes to their death. Oh, the imps of comedy knew their job.
Even when they finally relaxed and let me go to sea, it was for some months a touch ludicrous, for it was aboard a former luxury yacht, essentially useless to the war effort. The navy didn't know what to do with us, so we were sent, in the interest of the Good Neighbor policy, to Guayaquil to train Ecuadorian midshipmen. While there, for some unknown reason, the cruiser Concord steamed in on her way to a Far East destiny, and we fell under her jurisdiction. As senior officer afloat, I was assigned the duty, with shore patrol of four sailors, of cleaning out the Guayaquil cathouses at midnight. Of course they were full of the Concord's crew. I would be entertained by the madame with a rotten native brandy while my men roused the sailors upstairs. It was easy work, for in wartime naval discipline really operated, and when it was over I and my foursome posed for a fine photograph, which I sent to my mother without explaining what it was.
Father had an aunt, Jane, widow of his mother's brother, Charles H. Russell. He had been somebody special to us as a founder of Stetson, Jennings, and Russell (later Davis Polk), Father's firm. Aunt Jane, a tremendous war hawk, was a great character and someone on whom it was incumbent for me to call when I came home on leave. All visitors had to view respectfully a huge cardboard hoisted on an easel in her living room, on which were pasted articles and photographs relating to the heroic deeds of her relatives and friends in the war. My photograph, taken in these somewhat compromising circumstances, soon appeared on Aunt Jane's easel. This led the imps, who knew the tale behind the photo, to laugh their fill, but by this time, my application for amphibious duty successful, I had more pressing concerns for I had been given a glimpse of reality on the Normandy beaches.