Marilyn Tompkins Bellert, A Family in Wartime

Private Tompkins Home on Leave and Marilyn

My parents, Wayne and Ellene Tompkins, spent most of World War II on the home front. Wayne had a high draft number and a draft classification of 4-A because of his job at Beech Aircraft, which started just after he graduated from Friends U in 1940. He was finally drafted in March, 1945 at age 29. By that time, three of his seven brothers and two brothers-in-law had been serving in the Armed Forces along with most of his college friends. Some were already back home, disabled, while the deaths of others had brought four years of shock and grief.

Between December, 1941 and March, 1945, the nation mobilized rapidly and went to war. At Beech, Wayne was part of managing the transition to full-time production of planes for the U.S. Army Air Force,  using the can-do spirit and ingenuity for which Americans were famous. The nation-wide coordination of industry and transportation systems generally operated fairly efficiently despite  SNAFUs large and small. This infrastructure inevitably impacted Wayne’s experience in the Army.

In 1940, Wayne and Ellene married and bought a 1936 Ford sedan for $200. No cars were manufactured for the domestic market during the war, according to my mom, so they drove that car until Wayne returned in summer, 1946. Tires were nearly impossible to find, causing them to patch and re-patch the tires for six years. Gas rations were limited to four gallons a week, which meant they did not drive very far. Foods were also rationed. My mom said that she managed just fine with only one pound of sugar per month, but really missed meat. Whenever news came of a butcher selling meat, she and her friends rushed to buy whatever they could get, usually hamburger. She knew hundreds of ways to cook hamburger, a staple at our dinner table for the next 10 years.

While my dad went to work at Beech, my mom stayed at home with toddler Marilyn, keeping house, sewing and knitting our clothing, growing vegetables, and taking courses at WU. My grandmother and aunts all had jobs and got by on their paychecks. With their husbands gone to war and the future uncertain, most of my many aunts managed to avoid pregnancy until 1945-46. My dad’s parents managed their wheat farm and still had four or five children at home.

Both avid readers, my parents kept close track of war news, worrying about family and friends in every theater, listening to Ed Murrow broadcasting from London, and coping with the deaths of close acquaintances in the war. They wrote and received streams of letters to encourage family and friends in the Armed Forces. Wayne was a great fan of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons. Having grown up with an authoritarian father and a very large family, he had a subversive attitude about authority and regimentation that resonated with Mauldin’s depictions of soldiers, officers, and enemies.

All exemptions and excuses ran out by March 29, 1945, when Wayne was declared 1-A and inducted as a private into the Army. Ellene was five months pregnant with their second child. They both described his departure as “gut-wrenching.” The war in Europe was clearly winding down, however, and Wayne did not expect to serve for long.  An April 1945 letter from his brother Carl, a naval officer, urged him to seek every opportunity for promotion in the Army, but Wayne seems to have intentionally avoided doing any such thing. For a take-charge personality, this was unusual, but he was determined to stay as far out of harm’s way as possible. He liked to tell us that he was promoted three times, but got busted back to private every time.

Wayne also enjoyed telling us about his unit’s methods for avoiding military orders, such as answering morning roll calls for fellow soldiers who were actually AWOL.  As the oldest member of a platoon of mostly 18-20 year-olds, he cheerfully played the angles.  He particularly despised peeling potatoes and would trade with other soldiers to avoid this duty; while someone else peeled potatoes, he spent days reading happily at the nearest library. He liked to describe himself as a slacker, which still seems to me to have been out of character. Perhaps it was a way of coping with his irritation at being in the Army when the war was officially over, and most of his buddies were already discharged. He wrote long letters at least once a day, sometimes more, throughout his service.

Assigned to the Signal Corps, he learned to use the teletype just fast enough to be certified, which was 30 words a minute. He used his Army pass to travel on trains along the West Coast, skiing near Seattle and visiting tourist sites in California. Here was a guy who had ridden to a one-room country school in a horse-drawn cart, now mastering the use of military trains. When my brother Dave was born in September 1945, Wayne was given two weeks leave and took the train from California back to Wichita. By the time he returned to camp in California, the Army was still figuring out how to deploy its post-war replacement troops.(Right, outside a South Carolina “hutment” that housed troops) Private Tompkins wound up in New York City and shipped out to Italy in January 1946.

How did a stay-at-home mother manage when the family’s breadwinner was away serving in the Armed Forces? Private Tompkins earned $21 a month. He was allowed to keep $10 as pocket money, and the remainder was sent home to his family. While she had one child, Ellene also received $90 a month from the Army. My brother Dave’s arrival meant an additional $10 a month, and Wayne’s service overseas added another $20. Total: $131 a month. Sounds impossible by today’s standards, but my mother says she managed very well. Sharing food, services, and expenses with a large extended family helped.

The farm boy from western Kansas, who had never before traveled by train, plane, or boat, relished being a tourist in New York and sent home many photos. Arriving in Naples, Italy, he was shocked by the war damage, the ravaged population, the filth, and the smells. He wrote that he feared being roughed up or robbed in Naples, especially as soldiers were mobbed by filthy beggars trying to sell any and everything, just desperate to survive.

On the other hand, he was stationed at Caserta Royal Palace north of Naples (right). Built by an Italian king as a residence to rival Versailles, Caserta served as the Italian West Point before the war. The opulence and splendor of the palace awed Wayne, who explored the huge buildings and elaborate gardens, read about it, and sent home photos of both the palace and the rough cold barracks where the soldiers slept. Plus, he did his duty as a Signal Corpsmen, transmitting censored communiques, which he said contained only trivial stuff that everyone knew about already.

Wayne wrote glowing reports about the Red Cross, which managed entertainment and travel along with many, many other services for soldiers. He decided he liked opera, a new experience for him, and took advantage of Red Cross hospitality to attend eight operas during his five months in Italy. The spectacular productions, complete with marvelous singers and musicians, horses and bonfires on stage, and splendid costumes were far, far away from western Kansas where he grew up. He relished the scenery and the history of Italy, traveling to Pompeii, the Isle of Capri, Rome, and Milan. For him, the highlight was a week’s leave in Switzerland. He wrote that he felt his wonderful travels were not deserved, because of his short, combat-free military service. But, he also liked to say that if he couldn’t go to heaven, he would be happy in Switzerland (Above, looking mighty pleased in Switzerland, 1946).

As far as the Army was concerned, Wayne shared the opinions of Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe about officers, training, equipment, discipline, and the endless SNAFU’s in operations. He finally shipped home in May, 1946, a very, very long trip, since the entire crew and 210 returning troops were quarantined in upstate New York for two weeks due to a case of polio on their transport ship.

I remember his homecoming and the gifts that he pulled out of his Army footlocker. An ornately carved nut-cracker from Switzerland and beautifully embroidered handkerchiefs from Capri are still with me. What I remember most, however, was how he clung to the threeof us and hugged us for days. Then, he moved back into his Type A personality and pressed on with life.

After his death in 1995, my mom divided Wayne’s hundreds of letters into three groups, one each for me and my two brothers, wrote a long story of their wartime experiences, and created scrapbooks about his war service for each of us. Reading his articulate descriptions of where he was and what he was doing, along with his boredom and loneliness, have helped me to understand my dad’s feelings, behavior, and perceptions during this time of his life. 

Cartoons by Bill Mauldin, This Damn Tree Leaks, Italy, 1946.

Editor’s Note: Bill Mauldin created six cartoons a week for Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ newspaper. His most famous cartoons depicted Willie and Joe, two bedraggled infantrymen who endure the difficulties and dangers of combat all across Europe. A sergeant in the Army press corps, Mauldin was known especially for understanding the tribulations of Willie and Joe, but also for making fun of the military’s spit-and-polish officers. He was still drawing in Italy in 1946, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his wartime cartoons.