Another contributor to Forgotten Heroes of WWII by Thomas E. Simmons has passed…
It saddens me terribly to announce that contributor to Forgotten Heroes of WWII by Thomas E. Simmons, Ed Anderson (Chapter 2 “A Bizarre Tale of April Fools”), flew West the day before his signed copies of the revised edition were delivered. Simmons explains, “He was so looking forward to seeing the new book for he’d lost his first edition during Hurricane Katrina. I visited him several times including the day before he left us. He always asked, “When will the book arrive?” We talked and laughed (rather all he could do was smile) about flying, his, mine and ours.
“I took two books to his home, one for the family and one dedicated and signed to him as the family expressed the desire to place his copy in his coffin, which they did. I’d like to say it gave him something to read on his last flight home. You see pilots never say a fellow pilot has died…we say they have “gone West…on a last flight into the sunset.”
An excerpt Forgotten Heroes of World War II: Personal Accounts of Ordinary Soldiers Land, Sea and Air, Chapter 2 “A Bizarre Tale of April Fools”):
“Spring is a season when young men’s thoughts turn to adventure. So it was on April Fools’ Day 1942 (three months after Pearl Harbor). At five that morning, Edward Hawkins Anderson, freshman engineering student at Mississippi State College, and three classmates took off from the campus bound for New Orleans in Ed’s 1930 Ford roadster.
After driving nearly eight hours on mostly gravel highways, the dusty foursome found themselves cruising Canal Street and primed for a good time. A few blocks shy of Bourbon Street, Ed’s roommate, Sumrall, called attention to a large poster of Uncle Sam in front of a recruiting center. “STOP!” Sumrall insisted. “Let’s go in and tell ’em we’re signing up.”
“Are you crazy? We have a college deferment.”
“Yeah, dummy. We’re in ROTC. We’ll be on active duty soon enough.”
“Remember what day this is?” Sumrall insisted. “Come on. I’ll yell ‘April Fools,’ and we’ll run like hell. Park this thing, Ed. Anybody doesn’t follow me in is a chicken. Just don’t trip on the way out.”
They walked in as a group, ready for the cue to run, but each man quickly found himself sitting in a booth separated from the others with a no-nonsense recruiting sergeant for company. Twenty minutes later the good-time boys had a discussion on the street.
“Sumrall, you dumb bastard, why the hell didn’t you yell ‘April Fools’?”
“When we all got separated by those guys,” he explained, “I couldn’t figure out when to say it.”
“Well the damn joke’s on us, you dimwit. We couldn’t just get up and run out like a bunch of cowards. We’re all in the army.”
“Not me,” Sumrall replied.
They looked as though they might kill him, then he grinned and said, “I’m in the marines.”
Following the recruiters’ instructions, Sumrall went in one direction while I drove the three of us army recruits to Jackson Barracks, where we filled out a stack of papers, passed physical examinations, and reported to a distinctly humorless sergeant. He told us it was too late
in the day to draw uniforms from supply and assigned each of us to a bunk. I told him I left my car out front and asked where I was supposed to park it.
“You won’t be needing it,” he said. “Better get rid of it while you have a chance.”
I hadn’t been in the army two hours, and I hated it already.”
(Three years later…)
“By the time we docked the tug at the Fifty-ninth Street Wharf in New York, it was late September 1944. A colonel met me at the dock and said that that things were looking good in Europe. “Can’t last more than six or eight months,” he said. “Fact is, Captain Anderson, they really no longer need your tug over there.” Then he asked a silly question: “How would you like to go home?”
I had been at war on small boats for three years, had sailed almost forty thousand nautical miles, had three vessels shot out from under me, and had survived a hurricane. Not much later I heard that Sumrall, my college roommate who started everything that April Fools’ Day, had been killed in action on some Pacific island. (I never heard what happened to the other two who had also signed up with me.) Then I learned that my best wartime friend, Zek Brandon, had been killed early on D-Day at Normandy. I was not quite twenty-two-years-old, but I was mentally and physically exhausted.
The first and only time during the entire war that I wore a complete officer’s class A uniform with proper insignia was the day I was relieved from active duty.”
***
Ed Anderson finished his engineering degree, got a pilot’s license (has owned several planes), and occasionally will even go out on a boat. He still follows the buoys to Ship Island. He came home from his wars (World War II and Korea) highly decorated, but he won’t talk about the medals. “I used to have a few in a cigar box, but I don’t know where they are now. I think maybe they washed away with my house during Hurricane Camille.”
God bless Ed Anderson, his family and all those who have ever served in the United States Armed Forces.
www.thomasesimmons.net Amazon new and used of the original edition Forgotten Heroes of World War II: Personal Accounts of Ordinary Soldiers (Cumberland House Publishing, October 2002)
For Forgotten Heroes of World War II: Personal Accounts of Ordinary Soldiers Land, Sea and Air (release date November 2014) Powell’s Books and Waterstones Pre-orders only Published by Taylor Trade/Rowman and Littlefield Publishing www.rowman.com/TaylorTrade.com Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency www.loiaconoliteraryagency.com
