X
Eighty years ago, with victory within grasp, many Americans observed Thanksgiving, on the home-front and battlefields, with hearts full of hope.
Thanksgiving in 1944 was the third Thanksgiving celebrated by Americans during the war. Many families dared to hope it might be the last time their loved ones were absent. Around the world, so very many of those who were sorely missed - the millions of men and women in service - also did their best to mark the quintessential American holiday.
In a devastated Europe, where many cities lay in ruins, the cold November rains and ever mounting casualties were momentarily forgotten as chaplains held services and cooks did their best to get hot chow to men on the line. In POW camps, so-called “Kriegies” – American prisoners – shared rations from their Red Cross parcels. From Holland to the Alps, GIs knelt and prayed, thanking the Lord that they were alive, unlike so many of their comrades.
In Europe, there had been more than 150,000 US casualties since 6 June, D Day. The beleaguered soldiers, some enduring their third winter of combat, had been told the war would be over by Christmas, such was the hubris and complacency of their senior commanders. But the Siegfried Line and Rhine had yet to be crossed and bad weather and supply problems meant another long winter surely lay ahead. With luck, perhaps, they would get to go home at some point in 1945.
Thanksgiving 1944 was celebrated on the 23rd of November in most of America. Some states held it on the 30th due to Congress declaring in 1941 that the holiday should be marked on the fourth Thursday of the month. In New York, there was no Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – it had been cancelled due to acute shortages of the helium and rubber needed for balloons. Record-breaking crowds would line Manhattan’s streets a year later after the guns had finally fallen silent in the Pacific and Europe – after the loss of more than 400,000 American lives.
It was a sober, somber nation in November 1944. There was no great enthusiasm for football games. Few Americans traveled to visit relatives given the strict rationing of gasoline. Public information posters in fact encouraged people to avoid unnecessary travel and turkeys were in any case scarce: Uncle Sam had bought up so many for delivery to servicemen abroad that there precious few available at home.
In an effort to lift the nation’s spirits, President Roosevelt, with less than six months to live, issued “Proclamation 2629 – Thanksgiving Day 1944.” He had summoned the nation most famously to prayer in his deeply moving address on the evening of 6 June 1944. Now he called on Americans to give thanks for the victories, so hard won, that promised national survival. Evil had yet to be defeated – the righteous had yet to prevail, but there was nevertheless so very much to be grateful for.
Roosevelt pointed out that in 1944, “this year of liberation”, millions of Europeans had been set free “from tyrannical rule.” Indeed, since D Day, the Allies had swept across France, liberating much of Western Europe, pushing into the Third Reich itself, after successful landings in Normandy and Provence. Rome had fallen on 4 June and Paris had erupted in euphoria that August 25th after more than 1500 days and nights of ever-increasing terror.
Roosevelt continued: “It is fitting that we give thanks with special fervor to our Heavenly Father for the mercies we have received individually and as a nation and for the blessings He has restored, through the victories of our arms and those of our allies, to His children in other lands.”
It was in those other lands that Thanksgiving had particular poignancy eighty years ago. In the hell of the Hurtgen Forest, where the longest battle for Americans of WWII was ongoing, Lt. Paul Boesch was summoned to a field telephone. A hot turkey dinner would be delivered to his men even though they were on a hill at the heart of the “meat grinder”, as the Hurtgen Forest was otherwise known. Hot turkey, cranberry sauce, and a cigar for each man were indeed ferried to the frontlines but then a German barrage erupted and many of Boesch’s men were badly wounded or killed. The turkey went cold and prayers were for the dying, culled in yet another harvest of death.
In England, where American troops had been based since 1942, special efforts were made to bring a modicum of cheer and comfort to wounded GIs and those bound for combat. In small churches across the nation, as well as in the majestic Westminster Abbey, services were held. GIs returned the favor, inviting war orphans to their festivities, even passing up their helpings of turkey so young “limeys” could taste real meat for once. By war’s end, some fifteen million children had lost their parents across the United Kingdom and Europe.
In the face of such devastation and immeasurable tragedy, so very many were in need of spiritual and material support. Peace would finally arrive in 1945 but before then would come long, lethal months to test the soul as never before in the war. The Battle of the Bulge, the deadliest for the US of WWII, was just a couple of weeks away. The horrific ordeals of Iwo Jima and Okinawa loomed in the Pacific.
FDR would die on 12 April 1945, having worked himself to an early death, having led his countrymen out of the depths of the Depression and toward victory in the greatest conflict in history. His faith had never wavered, not once. That Thanksgiving of 1944, he urged every American, of whatever creed, to bolster their own faith, to find “a renewed and strengthening contact with those eternal truths…which have inspired such measure of true greatness as this nation has achieved.”
