Choosing to Fight: “This time I am not gonna tell her.”
August 2024
The fires from the attack on Pearl Harbor were still smoldering when my dad and his buddy volunteered to travel there and help with the clean-up. That idea was quickly squashed by his distraught mom who cried that it was too dangerous for her “baby boy.” She made him wait until he was at least out of high school. When that day arrived, my father and his same friend went straight to a recruiting office to join the Marines Corps. The Marines liked my dad, but told his friend that he was not in good enough condition. My dad told them that he wasn’t joining without his pal. Their next stop was the Army, and both were accepted. The two young guys told the recruiter that they would only join if they could be together. Soon after they signed up, they were dispatched to different basic training camps; a good first lesson in the ways of the Army. Irving Berlin wrote a wonderful little song that spoke to this and thousands of other moments like it:
This is the Army, Mister Jones!
No private rooms or telephones
You had your breakfast in bed before
But you won't have it there anymore.
My father liked to sing a slightly different version whenever I complained that the universe was not cooperating with me. It went something like this:
This is the Army, Mister Jones!
No private baths or telephones
There’s no use complainin’ ‘cause we don’t care,
‘Cause you’re in the Army Mr. Jones!
Life for my very anxious grandmother was about to get even more interesting. The war was on and each of her four children, Mim, Ed, Paul, and Rick, chose to serve in their nation’s uniform. My father really wanted to get into the mix of the war, and once he started to learn about this shocking new culture called the military, he realized that there was room for an ambitious and adventurous young man to have some say. Of course, the official policy of the Army was “go ahead and ask and we can say no if we please, and you will learn to like it.” Now, the problem was that he did not know what he should do, so he made a common-sense decision. He looked to his oldest brother as an example.
Ed was the first of the four Hoffman kids to join up and led the way by jumping into the Army Air Corps. He was born on October 3, 1917 in Lemoyne, Pa. and had a lot of traits, personally and physically, that were similar to my father’s. They both had jovial, outgoing personalities, broad chests and were crowned, in their middle ages, with full heads of gray hair that still drew the attention of quite a few ladies. Married with two children, Ed became a professional baker and an accomplished one at that. During the war, he was trained to be a tail gunner in a B-17 bomber in the Pacific Theater.
Tail gunning was one of the most dangerous jobs in the war with a four to six-week life expectancy. Perched in the tail of the Flying Fortress, the gunner, surrounded by armor plating, sat with his two .50 caliber machine guns looking out through a rear window. His job was to defend the bomber’s “six o’clock” at all costs. There are stories of gunners who were separated from the rest of the aircraft and spun crazily to their deaths. One story detailed how an airman did not even know he had broken off from the rest of the B-17 until he smashed into the ground. He actually survived!
Ed served honorably and was wounded near the island of Palau in the South Pacific. He spent some time healing in a Pacific field hospital. My dad thought it all sounded like a good idea and followed suit. He applied for and was accepted for aerial gunnery school. You can imagine what my grandmother thought about her youngest son following this path. She was hysterical and insisted again that he change course. He certainly had a wild, independent streak in him, but he did not want his “crazy” mom to lose her mind.
In the effort to calm his poor mother, he told her that he would see what he could do and somehow convinced the Army to change his orders so that he could choose a more “reasonable” path. And what exactly was that more reasonable path? Well, he volunteered to go to airborne training with the relatively new 101st Airborne’s Screaming Eagles. Rather than riding in a plane like his brother, my dad chose to jump out of one.
Riding in the tail of a mass-produced bomber while being fired upon by Japanese Zeroes was not a stable job to say the least. The same can be said of being a paratrooper! Choosing such assignments speaks to the all-out and wild personalities of these two brothers. This wildness, though later tempered with a touch of wisdom, was something that I saw in my father his entire life.
In case, you are interested, Mim, who was the oldest sister to all three of the “boys,” chose the Navy and served honorably stateside through the duration of the war. She turned that it into a successful civil service career with the Department of the Navy. Paul, the third child of the four, was in France where he served the cause by keeping the planes flying. He had a very successful career and rose to the rank of Tech Sergeant in the Army Air Corps as an aircraft mechanic. He left the service at the end of the war, but the confidence and leadership he learned turned his life around after suffering a very challenging adolescence.
And how did my dad become a paratrooper given his mother’s hysteria over her youngest son’s safety? Well, he twice made the mistake of telling his mother of his intentions; first to travel to Pearl Harbor and second, to sign up for aerial gunnery school. She was wild with fear, and he managed to wiggle his way out of both to help allay her nerves. Eventually, my father went to an officer to request that he be allowed to apply for airborne training. The officer asked him what his mom thought about all this. “Oh, that won’t be a problem, sir. This time, I am not gonna tell her.”