Recently received in the North Carolina Collection, North Carolina’s Shining Hour: Images and Voices from World War II is a pictorial work published by Our State Magazine. Editor Mary Best intended it to be similar to the scrapbook of war experiences left by her father. Some of the material was previously published in the magazine, but other material is published here for the first time. The photographs and other illustrations are interwoven with memories and quotations from both famous and ordinary men and women.
Eighteen-year-old Richard Rushton, for example, was on a liberty ship in 1942 when it was torpedoed. “It was a pleasant life on merchant ships, but it didn’t seem to be a safe occupation, being torpedoed on my very first trip. So I joined the Navy,” he quipped.
This new book adds to many other personal reminiscences of the Second World War by North Carolinians available in the collection, such as To Karachi and Back on the William A. Graham. This memoir was written by merchant mariner Everett Ransom, who, at age 62, sailed on the liberty ship Graham, out of Wilmington. Liberty ships carried essential supplies to far-flung corners of the world. Normally these ships also carried a small contingent of Navy personnel for protection, and Ransom was surprised at howl arge the contingent was on the Graham—and no doubt grateful, too. Sometimesf riction arose between Navy and merchant crews, but on the Graham, he reports, they learned to get along.
The North Carolina Collection has memoirs of both soldiers and prisoners-of-war, as well as a good selection of works by the men and women who served in other capacities or held down the home front. In her book No Drums, No Trumpets: Red Cross Adventure, for instance, Mary Ferebee Howard, who later taught in Tarboro and Rocky Mount, records her service in the Red Cross. Guadalcanal she found to be “even more appalling than I thought it would be.” The first night she heard “the most awful crash over my small room. I jumped out of bed, thinking the Japanese had returned. It was only a large coconut that had fallen from the tree.”
Peggy Lovelace Ellis of Asheville was only five when the war began. But still she remembers the importance of ration coupons and mail, the severe shortage of gasoline, the fear caused by air raid drills, the making of artwork in school for patients in the Veterans Hospital, and the nightly ritual of blackout curtains. When the bells announcing peace rang, her mother’s shoulders slumped, she writes, “as she shed the weight of the world,” realizing that her young son, Peggy’s brother, in the military would be coming home alive. These memories are included in Challenges on the Home Front: World War II.
Perhaps the memoir from the most unusual point of view is Mrs. G. I. Joe, by Blanche Egerton Baker. Baker’s Goldsboro family took in boarders as people poured into town to work at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. “I never dreamed there were so many different kinds of people living right here in our United States,” she says. Some of the newcomers had trouble with the local language. One time, for instance, the Bakers took in a young couple of Polish origin. The young wife spoke the most correct English Mrs. Baker had ever heard but was puzzled by the Bakers’ use of the word “fixin,” as in “I’m fixin’ to go to bed.” A few days later, Mrs. Baker laughed and told her husband that she was not fixin’ to go to bed but preparing to retire.
Area residents as well as members of the East Carolina University community are welcome to visit the North Carolina Collection on the third floor of Joyner Library. For more information, call 252-328-6838 or see the website: www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/ncc/index.cfm.
Nancy Shires is a librarian in the North Carolina Collection.
