The Story of the Lone Wolf Patrol

Kearney Smith

Description

This book described what life was like for country boys on the farm growing up in the beginning of WW II and how they helped their families until they were drafted into military. The book is dedicated to the memory of Ernest Leroy Outen who was killed in Okinawa Japan.

Sujets

• Diary
• Biography
• Patrol
• Nissan Patrol
• Autobiography
• Association

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669863021
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Story of the Lone Wolf Patrol


From The Minutes of LWP Meetings, 1941-1947 And The Diaries of Lawrence Smith, 1942-1943 With Appended Commentaries and Photographs







Kearney Smith



Copyright © 2023 by Kearney Smith.

Library of Congress Control Number:
2023900975
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-6301-4
eBook
978-1-6698-6302-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.






Rev. date: 01/20/2023





Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
833611
















This book is dedicated to the memory of
Ernest Leroy Outen
(July 20, 1925 - May 10, 1945)



Table of Contents
Introduction

Chapter 1 Beginnings of the Lone Wolf Patrol LWP Minutes: May through December 1941
Chapter 2 Lawrence’s Diary and the LWP Minutes January, February, and March 1942
Chapter 3 Lawrence’s Diary and the LWP Minutes April, May, and June 1942
Chapter 4 Lawrence’s Diary and the LWP Minutes July, August, and September 1942
Chapter 5 Lawrence’s Diary and the LWP Minutes October, November and December 1942
Chapter 6 Lawrence’s Diaries and the LWP Minutes January, February, and March, 1943
Chapter 7 Lawrence’s Diaries and the LWP Minutes April, May, and June 1943
Chapter 8 Lawrence’s Diary and the LWP Minutes July, August, and September 1943
Chapter 9 The Last Recorded Meetings of the LWP March 17, 1944 through September 27, 1947

Supplementary Material

A. The LWP Families
A. The Families
B. Enochville, North Carolina
C. The Enochville Pioneers:
D. Comments and Remembrances by LWP Members
E. Photographs
F. Maps
G. Glossary



INTRODUCTION
I. The Diaries
About twenty-five years ago my brother Lawrence wrote us, his brothers and sisters, a message entitled “What Was Happening 40 Years Ago.” His message, dated December 31, 1981, was typed on the first page of about thirty sheets of 8 x 14-inch paper. Attached to the message to us were selected entries from the diary he had written in 1942. He had also kept a diary for 1943 up to the time he entered the Navy in late summer. When he began the 1942 diary, he was a sixteen-year-old high school student and a school bus driver. He lived on a fifty-acre farm in the southwest corner of Rowan County, North Carolina, with his parents, six younger brothers, and an infant sister. For Christmas in 1941, Lawrence had been given a little diary book. His first entry in the diary was written less than a month after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
I had known about his diaries before, but this was the first time I had read them. After reading a few pages, I was hooked. When I finished, I began to think about the diary’s appeal. I decided it was good reading not just because he was my brother and the matter was so much a part of my heritage. I had a hunch that other people would find it interesting reading too. It was an account by a narrator who was interesting as a person. What reader could fail to appreciate Lawrence’s passion for enumerating details and his compulsion to keep track of his experiences?
The material in itself is compelling. True, some of the things he reported of his daily life--- such as the weather--- are repetitive. But along with these are arresting details and images that portray a way of life strikingly different from that of the late twentieth century. In 1981 Lawrence clearly had those contrasts in mind when he distributed selections from his diaries to his brothers and sisters. Those differences are even more pronounced in 2005.
The way of life that Lawrence records in 1942 and 1943 has virtually disappeared. Some of the differences since the 1940’s is due to changes in technology. The absence of television in 1942 meant a greater reliance on radio and movies for world news. The automobile was used when rationed gasoline permitted, but most country roads were unpaved, making any rural travel a slow, dusty experience. Students rode school buses or bicycles to high school, rarely cars. Most people lived on farms where horses and mules were still commonly used for cultivating the land. My home, the Smith home on a farm near Enochville, had no telephone. And instead of a refrigerator in the kitchen, we had an icebox by the back door, replenished a couple of times each week by the itinerant iceman. In winter our house was heated with wood. Our mother cooked on a wood stove. And many man hours were needed to keep a supply of wood ready for these purposes, especially for a family whose tools were limited to axes and a two-man crosscut saw.
But it’s not just a matter of technology. People have changed too. In many ways we are less daring, more security-conscious, than Americans in the 1940s. Sixteen-year-olds do not drive school buses today, to say nothing of pulling each other’s buses out of snow banks and mud holes. In one entry (1/6/1942) Lawrence writes that in the morning, “I got to school alright but had no brakes on the bus,” and in the afternoon, “Brakes were not fixed at school, so on my third load in the evening, I had Mr. McCreary [ Assistant Principal ] call up the mechanics.”
Moreover, we are less willing to be deprived of material goods. Articles of clothing like shoes were rationed during the War. So were food items like sugar. Few cars were built for Americans in 1942, none in 1943, 1944, and 1945, but there were no protest rallies about it. People then willingly recycled metals and kitchen fat; and, at the urging of movie stars who came to small-town theaters, they bought bonds for the war effort. Neither were they too proud or too lazy to work at menial tasks. Threshing wheat and shocking corn are hot, sweaty, uncomfortable labor and there were no immigrants--legal or otherwise--for farmers to hire to do that kind of work in North Carolina in 1940. Some of these chores were turned into entertainment like corn shuckings at the farm of a neighbor or relative.
And because life moved at a slower pace, entertainment included regular day-long visits with uncles, aunts, and cousins. On these leisurely Sunday afternoons, adults sat talking and laughing under shade trees in the yard while their little girls played nearby; and their boys wandered, barefoot with trousers rolled up, down the creeks, looking for frogs, minnows, and snakes. And people still commonly made their own musical entertainment at family reunions or in the parlor where relatives and friends gathered around the piano to sing.
Lawrence’s diaries sketch brief images of such a life. In many ways he presents a picture of an idyllic, peaceful childhood. But the scenes he records are not without troubles. Almost daily there are, woven into the fabric of the picture, flashes of disturbing news from around the country and the world: coal miners on strike, race riots in Detroit, a nightclub fire in Boston, and the sound of distant battles on land and sea.
Day by day World War II made a larger claim on the lives of those named in the diaries and others in the country. In rural Enochville and vicinity, people adjusted to the rationing of goods and the preparation for war. Even the schools participated by adapting their curriculum to the realities of the world. January 14, 1942: “I heard today at school that defense courses in radio, mechanics, and electricity are to be taught. . . . All boys of 16 and over are expected to take these courses.” And schools adjusted in other ways: January 7, 1942: “We got a new Economics teacher since John White Bostian has gone into the Navy. We are to start practicing air raid drills at school.” As he records the variety of things that demand his attention each day, Lawrence provides an irresistible narrative with the texture of juxtaposed personal activities and worldwide conflicts. One by one his relatives and acquaintances are called to take part. And boys who prepared for manhood by playing at war are, before long, initiated into the world of the real thing.
II. The Minutes of the Lone Wolf Patrol
In this book, the history of the Lone Wolf Patrol, later to be called the Lone Wolf Chapter of the Open Road Pioneers Club, is found in two primary documents written in the 1940’s by members of that boy’s club. One of these documents is Lawrence Smith’s Diaries, described above.
The other is the Minutes of the meetings of the Lone Wolf Patrol. This record of their meetings is expressed in the words of Lawrence and other Secretary-Treasurers of the club who followed him. Lawrence recorded 86 meetings from May 23, 1941, the date of the organization’s beginning, to July 3, 1943, shortly before he entered the Navy. Next Billy Beaver was elected secretary-treasurer, and he recorded two meetings; before he went into the Navy. Beginning on June 1, 1945, Carl Outen served as secretary-treasurer until he went into the Marines in 1946. He recorded 24 meetings. Carl was succeeded as secretary-treasurer by his brother, Eugene Outen, who had returned from Germany where he served in the Army. Gene recorded the last 17 meetings of the LWP from September 2