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In the wartime context, pinups of film stars in troops’ barracks, as well as artwork and women’s names on the fuselage of aircraft, symbolize an alternative world of predictability and nurture.
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Les Cleveland is a veteran of both
the Pacific and Italian campaigns in
World War II. He has been a member
of the New York Folklore Society
since 1984, when he was researching
military folklore. He was granted a
Smithsonian senior fellowship, which
enabled him to write Dark Laughter
(Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996),
a comparative study of soldiers’ songs.
He is currently working on an archival
compilation of this material. |
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P.O. Box 764
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As a young New Zealand soldier in the
Pacific campaign, I first encountered
an imagined New York in 1943 in the
jungle of New Caledonia, where the U.S.
43rd Infantry Division had its headquarters
before moving north. Outside one of its
temporary hutments, a painted signpost
bearing an image of a horse-drawn cab
and the legend “Lil Ol’ New York,” along
with a daunting distance in miles, seemed
a remote and mysterious whimsy. The deserted
site was like a frontier ghost town.
All that remained of its former occupants
were empty pathways, skeleton buildings,
and a suggestive relic of exotic, far-off
attractions.
Armies are total institutions with tremendous
power over the lives of their incumbents.
The army environment is rich in signs,
emblems, acronyms, and the symbols of rank
and authority that define every aspect of the
soldier’s life in a highly integrated, hierarchical
community. However, wartime soldiers
are also citizens in uniform. They can seek
individual relief from the oppressive influence
of military regimes in the enjoyment
of whatever recreational sports, games, and
entertainment might be available.
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A signpost reconstruction at the War in the Pacific walk in the Admiral Nimitz Japanese
Garden of Peace at Fredericksburg, Texas. Photo: Les Cleveland
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With the aid of mail and telecommunications services,
they may try to sustain alternative identities
as sons, husbands, lovers, and absent warriors.
They can also experiment with humor,
jokes, pranks, and whatever informal diversions
and distractions they can improvise in
their free time.
The New York signage that I encountered
was a whimsical expression of nostalgia for the distant lures of an American
homeland. It seemed to represent the spirit
of a transient community that had vanished
like a tribe of gypsies. One of the many
inconveniences of military life in the field
is that you no sooner get attached to a
temporary location than you have to move
on and reconstruct yourself in some new,
unfamiliar, potentially hostile space.
Men chatting in the barracks during World War II. Photo: Library of Congress | This
is why tanks, guns, aircraft, ships, armored
vehicles, and trucks become surrogate
homes adorned with women’s names or
other tokens of affection.
In the wartime context, pinups of
film stars in troops’ barracks, as well
as artwork and women’s names on the
fuselage of aircraft, symbolize an alternative
world of predictability and nurture. Such
images signify a binary opposition of
life and mortality, personal fantasies and
austere actuality, amorous liaisons and the
deprivations of life in field locations, sexual
pleasures and stern duty, the assurance of
routine domesticity and the hazards of
combat, and a lingering tradition of chivalry
in the face of ruthless totalitarian power.
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The 69th New York regimental band on a troopship in World War I. Photo: National Archives
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The feminine gender of this nomenclature
may also be seen as a ritual invocation of
Dame Fortune and Lady Luck, who are still
with us. Such naming not only humanizes
the harsh, utilitarian machinery of war, it
locates the individual soldier in a refuge
from the brutal landscapes of battle and
imposes a semblance of order on what is
otherwise a hostile wilderness.
“Lil Ol’ New York” was a rite of displacement
that signified the continuity
of an alternative world of cities, homes,
and the rich potential for diversion and
excitement that existed outside the bleak
military scene. But such workplace art was
more than just a metaphor for homeland
fleshpots. It was an iconic representation of
what was at stake in the Pacific conflict. It
implied a stark dichotomy of battlefield and
homeland, rampant violence and law and
order, collective necessity and individual
hope and liberty, and frontier wilderness
and civilized society that typified the nature
of the times.
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U.S. 5th Army troops in a rear position on the Italian front in World War II. Photo: National Archives
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I do not have a photograph of the sign
that so impressed me in 1943, but the accompanying
illustration is a typical example
of the kind of construction that was often
seen. I am told that in 1944, in the middle
of Dimapur on the Burma front, a three-fingered
signpost pointed to New York
(11,500 miles), Tokyo (5,300 miles), and
London (8,300 miles). Similar gestures to
distance and memory seem to have been part of the nostalgic cultural baggage of
U.S. and Allied troops wherever they found
themselves in World War II. |
Les Cleveland in 1942. Photo: Les Cleveland
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Of course,
today’s warriors do not have quite the same
need to fabricate visual reminders. They
are now enmeshed in a complex web of
satellite TV relays, the Internet, cell phones,
and an intricate array of telecommunications
equipment that augments the armed
forces’ efforts at morale building and the
close cultivation of news media linkages
with the homeland. Nevertheless, in spite
of all this technological sophistication, an
individual soldier still needs the reassurance
of the homely, implicit in the iconography
of familiar objects.
My personal perceptions of American
power and its cultural ramifications began
intuitively with the New Caledonia experience. Such experiences are part of what the
New York Times in its 2004 New Year’s Day
editorial described as “the strange propulsion
of time that carries us through life.”
The symbolic power of New York City as
a cultural frontier of the Western world
appeals to me in a dramatic complex of
memory and heritage that imparts meaning
to time and to the life journey of us all.
A U.S. soldier in Vietnam plays a Vietnamese flute, to the amusement of a Vietnamese soldier guarding the outpost on Black Virgin Mountain. Official U.S. Army photo. |
In the light of the Blacksburg carnage
and the Omaha rampage, perhaps every
American city or town has become a potential
frontier battlefield, where the forces
of law, order, and progress are involved in
a deadly struggle to conquer and subjugate
the contemporary forms of what Richard
Slotkin in The Fatal Environment identified
as “wild nature” and “savage enemies.” But notwithstanding the implications of
this foreboding interpretation of American
cultural history, I continue to see both the
43rd Division’s modest jungle construction
and today’s glittering mass of the New
York skyline as enduring components of
a powerful symbolic system.
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The signpost
typifies the spirit of American World War
II soldiery in the face of danger and uncertainty,
and its accompanying image of
New York City is a lasting celebration of
the boundless talent and creative energy
that is central to the American experience,
no matter what anxieties, tribulations, perils,
barbarity, and savagery a turbulent future
might hold.
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British Army regimental aid post behind the lines in Italy in World War II. Photo: National Archives | |
“Frontier New York: A Personal Experience by Les Cleveland was published in Voices Vol. 34, Spring-Summer 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.
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