Morey Moseson didnt know what he wanted to be when he grew up. Not for lack of options the world seemed impossibly full. He was the class valedictorian, and the class clown. He loved to dance to Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. His sister, Lee, two years older, taught him how to do the Lindy hop. Theyd practice the eight-count step late at night, big band swing notes at 78 r.p.m. filling the rooms of their home in Jamaica, Queens.
When Moreys parents wanted to conceal a conversation from their prying kids, they spoke Yiddish. Ever resourceful, their son took up German to help him interpret the adult exchanges. His linguistic training proved prescient. When he turned 18, in 1944, he joined the legions of young American men serving the war effort, as a translator for the 318th Infantry Regiment.
One summer my father came across a vinyl that Morey, my great-uncle, recorded with his mother, father and sister in a Midtown Manhattan studio, just after his training at Fort McClellan and before he shipped out to Europe.
Youve grown a lot in the last few months, said his mother, Florence, to her 5-foot-10, 170-pound son. Maybe youll help do the yard when you get home.
The warll be over in just a few months, Morey replied. His voice was buoyant, assured of sanctity of mission and certainty of success. Then you can put me on the payroll again, but I want more than 50 cents an hour.
It was the fall of 1944, and it was true that the war was nearly over. The American troops were about to see their last great battle in the last good war. The Battle of the Bulge was Adolf Hitlers final offensive. It was an ill-fated attempt to split the American, British and French forces pushing toward Germany, named for the bulge that the Germans created 60 miles into allied territory. It lasted six frigid weeks across the densely wooded Ardennes Forest. And it started 75 years ago this week.
Winston Churchill called it undoubtedly the greatest American battle of World War II. My mental images of the war front are gray and grave shaped by Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk but Moreys letters home are mostly gossip, jokes and jabs at his sister, Lee, who became my grandmother. You cant forget that hes 18, his dispatches home written like those of a college freshman.
The youthfulness in his letters and the epic proportions of the battle feel almost impossible to square. I found myself reading them like a code-cracker. It wasnt his terminology that was hard to decipher, though I tripped over dollink for darling. Nor was it his elegant longhand, the work of someone raised on pen and paper. What I puzzled over was the tone. Brimming with optimism, he told his family of fun nights spent with the boys in his battalion. Had a riotous time, he said. And to his sister, What exactly did you mean by that remark at the end of one letter, and be good?
World War II stories have always seemed to me heavy with all the cultural and moral weight we attach to them its the good war, as Studs Terkel cites in his oral history. Its the end of tyranny.
To Morey, though, World War II was also fast friendships, spats with fellow troops and sometimes missing home. Since you asked for it by telling me how nice I was to paint a rosy picture for the parents, Ill unload my woes on you, he wrote to Lee, after his closest friends were transferred out of his division. Every time I see a movie or hear some music (youd be surprised how rarely I do hear music, much less listen to radio) I get kinda lonesome and a bit homesick, but that wouldnt bother me if I had someone to pal around with.
On Feb. 15, the fighting mostly over, German troops clearing out a village fired an artillery shell that hit Morey right in the head. He died instantly, three days short of turning 19. Theres a Valentines Day card for his mother, Florence, in the letter box, dated one day before he was killed. Covered in smiling stick figure cartoons, it reads, Gee mom, youre swell!
Moreys parents were too devastated to handle the sight of their sons body, so they had him buried in a military cemetery in Luxembourg. My family traveled there 15 years ago. Amid a sea of 5,000 white crosses, there were 118 Stars of David marking Jewish graves. Moreys was the only star without any ritual mourners stones on top, because no one had ever been able to visit.
I wasnt raised in a generation close to World War II. I grew up among millennials attached to irony and air quotes when we said things like patriot, the eye roll was implied. But when I think about wandering those long cemetery rows, I feel something between pride and an ache for the loss of boys, younger than I am now, who blinked back their fears and wrote corny letters home. They seemed to serve their country without complication, simply because they knew it was right.
Of course, wartime images are always softer in their sepia tone. If you look hard enough, the complication is there. Toward the bottom of the letter box, I found a note from my grandmother Lees new boyfriend, Arthur, who was soon to be her husband. He told Morey that as a socially conscious person he believed in the war effort, but that he had misgivings about the violence.
I wonder whether what I believe in is what Im supporting, Arthur wrote.
His note is full of plans for the future, excitement about meeting his girlfriends kid brother after the war. Theres a bit about politics, but mostly its about family and new love. It is postmarked Feb. 19, four days after Morey died.
Go here to see the original:
What Was Lost in the Last Good War - The New York Times
