Recollections

LITTLE ROCK — My apologies to the good members of the Northwest Arkansas Genealogical Society, whose group was misidentified here Wednesday.

Must have been a brain blip that caused me to refer to the organization as the Northwest Arkansas Historical Society, but to clear up any confusion caused by my error: It is the Northwest Arkansas Genealogical Society that is hosting this coming Monday’s program, “Life Interrupted: The Japanese Experience in WWII Arkansas,” at 6 p.m. at Bentonville Public Library. Admission is free.

Error and all, the column brought an interesting note from a reader named Perry because it mentioned that, besides the world War II-era Japanese American internment camps at Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas was home to a half-dozen German prisoner-of-war camps, one of which was at Jerome after it was closed to the Japanese Americans.

“I grew up in Watsonville, Calif.

and didn’t know our neighbors had been interred during the war until I was high school,” Perry wrote. “I just knew them as strawberry farmers who had the best looking front yard I’d ever seen.

“In college I did a paper on the Arkansas camps and was amazed at the hostilities directed towards Japanese.

When you mentioned the POW camps, it made me remember an article I read. . . . The prisoners were allowed to work outside the camps and got paid. They deposited their money on local banks, brought instruments at local stores for camp orchestras and school supplies for the camp classrooms. If their camp was in a wet county, they could buy beer.

“There was an excerpt from a letter a German wrote home. I’m paraphrasing. He had been working on a farm: ‘I can’t believe we’re losing the war. These people are so backwards.’

“Arkansas,” Perry continued, “had the second highest failure rate for draftees during the war; poor health and low IQs. South Carolina had the highest.”

I’ve never heard anything about this. Indeed, I’m not sure what Perry means by “failure rate.” Failure to report? Pre-induction examinations? Flunking out of boot camp? Wartime injury or death? If you know, please drop me a note.

My father, an Arkansas draftee who saw combat in the Pacific Theater of Operations, recollected a sergeant he knew who was, for all practical purposes, illiterate and had to have help reading and answering letters from home, but the poor fellow wasn’t from Arkansas, or even South Carolina.

Funny what you remember about long-ago events, particularly when most of what occurred you’ve tried to forget. Daddy rarely spoke about the actual war, but he did share a few incidentals (such as the illiterate sergeant) from time to time. His favorite, because he told it more than once, seems to have been the reaction of some Filipinos to movies his outfit was shown. Seems the screen on which the films were projected was very thin-I don’t know what was used, a sheet maybe-and let the light of the projector shine through.

Invariably, some of those who crowded around found themselves positioned behind that screen, and when this happened, cries of “Bok vu! Bok vu!” would ring out. Translation: Back view. They were viewing the images in reverse. >The retelling of this always made my father laugh, and thinking about that still makes me smile. There’s something comforting about the fact that he could laugh about anything related to his time in the Pacific when he was reticent about so much of it.

Yes, my mother said he shared a bit more information with her now and again, but I think that was because he felt the need to explain, or she demanded to know, why he thrashed about and cried out in his sleep for so long after he came home.

In recent years, I’ve managed to get a fairly good idea of what he went through at boot camp and at war thanks to the publication of several wartime diaries and memoirs of men who were in the same places at the same time as he, but I still wish he’d been able to speak with me about that period of his life. Maybe he really did put the experience behind him, forget the particulars of the battles in which he was involved. I’d like to think so, but he never did sleep very well, so I have my doubts.

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.