It's always temping to look back at an historic event and imagine "where would I have been". I have to admit, having an historical inclination and mindset, if you will, I do that often.
When I do, I usually imagine it with some calendar related restrains. I'm not sure why, but to some degree I don't think you can accurately imagine where you would have been, and what you would have done, but for that. The constraints of time, when you were born, and how that plays into where you are at anyone time, are an inescapable fact. I know that I tend to do that pretty strongly, when inserting my hypothetical self into past events.
Having said that, for whatever reason, in seeing something on the upcoming 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to some extent the real framework of "1941" struck me for the the first time, in a realistic sense just the other day. It's weird, as I've looked back to World War Two quite a few times, as I imagine nearly everyone with a sense of history, and imagination, and wondered "where would I have been"?
I graduated from high school in 1981; forty hears after. . . well not actually forty years after, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.* In May 1981 when I graduated from high school I was 17 years old. I joined the National Guard that following August, by which time I was 18, not even telling my parents that I had done it before I had. That, in some odd way, tend to have formed my frame of reference looking back, as that puts my actual military experience in context.
But in looking at the calendar of the United States in World War Two, the National Guard was mobilized in August 1940. So if I imagine myself 40 years prior, and apply a sort of calendrical lock to it so that I would have graduated from high school in 1941, instead of 1981, the National Guard would have been mobilized for a year.
Now, I also know that lots of high school men, and no matter how we might imagine it the story of service during World War Two includes women, but far more it includes men, had been in the local unit of the National Guard at that time. Indeed, the 115th Cavalry, Horse Mech, included not only a lot of high school students, a significant percentage in fact, but it included a lot of underaged ones. Would I have been in that number? Those too young to serve in the Army were discharged, along with those too aged and infirm to serve. Were the 17 year old sent? I imagine some where, some were not, depending upon their wishes and those of their parents, maybe.
I wonder. I like to think that I would have, and just knowing myself I probably would have joined the unit in high school, probably whenever I could have, but who knows. Maybe not?
Well, in my own actual life in my junior high years I was in the Civil Air Patrol and I did in fact join the National Guard when still a teenager. So my guess is that I probably would have. Almost certainly. I didn't, however, join high school JrROTC (which was mandatory for those in our local high school until some date in the 1970s), so maybe not. Indeed, at that time I conceived of myself as busy, so I may not have.
In August 1940 I would have been 17. So would that have meant that I would have been mobilized with the 115th?
Maybe. It's hard to know for sure. I know that the 115th discharged a lot of underaged soldiers, as noted above, right at the start of their mobilization, and I know that the U.S. Army required parents consent to enlist until you were 18. Contrary to what people typically think, the service itself wasn't too keen on teenage soldiers at the time.
I know that my father wouldn't have been, but it would have been just my father's consideration at the time, assuming my life otherwise played out as it did, my mother being horribly ill when I was 17. I'd have only been 17 for a few months at the time and also knowing myself I very well may have waited until fall to join, if I'd been planning to. I only joined the National Guard in August 1981 as I'd planned on going to the University of Wyoming that fall and joining ROTC but changed my mind and didn't want to be hypocritical to my stated desires, so I joined the Guard.
Indeed, looking back, I'm stunned how earnest I was in my convictions.
That plays a role here too.
So, on December 7, 1941, I might have been an 18 year old cavalryman at Ft. Lewis Washington, surprised, and not surprised, that the nation was finally at war.
Or I might have been an 18 year old University of Wyoming student (the community colleges didn't yet exist here).
If that was the case, and for reasons I can't quite define I think it more likely, I would have joined the service after that semester. And it would have been the Army.
If I'd gone to Ft. Lewis with the National Guard at some point I would have cadred out, almost certainly, and have been assigned to some other unit as an NCO. Likely armor, and that would have likely meant Operation Torch and the ETO in that branch. Most of the war. . . if a person survived it.
If it was UW and on to the Army, I wouldn't have opted for armor but rather for infantry, and maybe airborne, knowing myself. Same theatre and the like, but probably less of it. And again, assuming a person survived it.
All of which is interesting to imagine, and I'm surprised that I haven't really though of this retroactive counterfactual in this context before.
*This upcoming year, 2021, I will be as many years from my high school graduation as I was from World War Two at the time I graduated. A sobering thought. This effectively means that, at that time, high school graduates from the class of 1941 were men my present age, something that's stunning to imagine.
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