Jim Bradshaw: A long time between Christmases

During the week before Christmas 1940 several hundred young men from Lafayette, New Iberia, Breaux Bridge and other south Louisiana communities boarded a train that would take them to Fort Blanding, Florida.
The National Guard soldiers expected to be gone from Louisiana no more than a year, with regular opportunities to get home on leave.
Indeed, the Lafayette newspaper reported in April 1941 that “ruddy, khaki-clad boys” were strolling the streets, home to spend the Easter holidays with their families.
“Sturdy health and excellent bearing predominate in the appearance of each,” the account said, “their smiles are pleasing and happy, and their reports of camp life are most satisfactory.”
By August 1941 the trainees had been made part of the “Dixie Division” of the IV Army Corps and were “engaged in their first maneuver action as a combat unit” in the Kisatchie National Forest in central Louisiana.
“Corps maneuvers will be followed by Army exercises and then in the last two weeks in September will come the climax of the greatest peace time war games in the country’s history,” the newspapers reported.
But the games turned real in December 1941, when the U.S. was thrown into World War II by the attack on Perl Harbor. The ruddy, khaki-clad young men who were due to come home that month were told they would serve for the duration of the war. Instead of going home, they were sent far, far away, to places that most of them had even heard of.
Editors of the Lafayette Advertiser reminisced on Dec. 20, 1943, “Memorie of a night exactly three years ago will filter [tonight] into the memories of many mothers and fathers and sweethearts. …
"On this December 20, three years [later], we know [the young soldiers] have learned their lessons well …for [they] are now fighting in the North African theater of war, and many … have already covered themselves with glory on the field of battle.”
By V-E Day, when victory was declared in Europe in April 1945, men from the old Dixie Division were scattered far and wide.
Thirty-one of them who were still together in a military police battalion stationed at Marseilles in September, when they got the news that they were heading home.
They made it back a month later.
“When Johnny Came Marching Home,” The Advertiser reported (paraphrasing the words of a famous war song), “the whole darned town turned out to greet them, even though it was midnight. There was quite a drama enacted … in the middle of the night. The doughboys had been gone a long, long time.”
The soldiers had seen action in North Africa, Corsica, Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, “and in general all of the major theaters of the European war,” according to the news account.
That Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1945, almost exactly five years after their departure, the newspaper reported on a day that “filled the heart with joy unknown for many years,” unlike “the lonely, dreary seasons when our young men and women shared the feast in strange lands with strange peoples.
“The significance of the brilliant feast … is more deeply realized … for peace on earth, good will toward men, seems suddenly more precious, more cherished than ever before.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.