Questions of mortality were very much on Tom Ainlay’s mind during the month of February 1945. Just 18 years old and a private first-class in the U.S. Army, he had recently been transferred from a training camp in Texas to temporary quarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. He was now awaiting the embarkation orders that would send him to Europe and his destiny in World War II, along with tens of thousands of other young men who were stationed there.
In many ways, Fort George G. Meade was more like a city than a military camp. With dozens of miles of paved roads and hundreds of buildings set on a broad expanse of land half way between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., it had grown considerably since its establishment as one of 16 cantonments built when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. About 100,000 men passed through the installation for military training during that war. During World War II, it would be used by more than 200 units and some 3.5 million men. By the time Tom Ainlay arrived, the fort was approaching the highest population in its history: 70,000 personnel, including civilian employees and family members as well as young soldiers preparing for possible death.
Tom might have suspected that this crescendo of troops was a prelude to the War’s climax. The conflict in Europe had been raging since Germany invaded Poland in 1939. America had been involved since December 1941. The Allied Forces invaded Western Europe on June 6, 1944, so-called “D-Day,” and pushed the line of fighting as far as the Rhineland. But an attempt in July to assassinate the German leader, Adolf Hitler, had failed. The Allied thrust had stalled by November. Then, a month-long German counter-offensive began on December 16 and took a heavy toll on both sides: the Battle of the Bulge. Now the newspapers were reporting that V-2 missles launched from the Netherlands were still falling on England, as they had been since September. Even if the young private never entered the fighting itself, he could still be killed by the “buzz bombs” or rockets. What a terrible fate it would be to die as one of the last casualties of the War. Tom had plenty of reason to reflect on life and death.
On February 9, 1945, the very day he would leave for his last U.S. post, Camp Shanks in New York, Private Ainlay picked up a pen to write to his mother in Chicago. It was not a letter but a poem that he sent her to express the many feelings he had about going to war. Ruth Swartzendruber-Ainlay would keep that poem from her son until her own death, 32 years later.
No Title
Tomorrow at the break of dawn my buddies and I
Go into battle; some live, some to die.
And we silently pray to the Lord above
To watch over home and cherish our love.
None of us hate, none of us are brave,
But in doing this we hope to save
The privlidge of our daughters to live in happiness
And the right for our sons to earn success.
We all love the land in which we live
And none of us are to proud for our lives to give,
But all of you please remember back home
The ringing of the victory bell & its heavenly tone.
We have fought for that day and never lied
We gave it to you, but some of us died.
So honor those of us who fought to save
Youre freedom; and now lie peacefully in their grave.
For the next week, time must have hung very heavily on Private Ainlay’s hands. Every news headline seemed to have direct bearing on his future. On February 11, President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded his meetings in Yalta with the leaders of Russia and England, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, who discussed how to divide Germany into occupation zones once the war ended. On the night of February 13, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) began a series of five aerial attacks on Dresden with 800 aircraft. That was followed by daylight raids by 400 U.S. planes on February 14 and then 200 more missions the very next day. It was said that 35,000 persons died in the Dresden bombings and resultant fires, although some estimates put the toll at over 100,000.
On February 16, Tom boarded a ship, the Louis Pasteur, bound for England. The tension during the eight-day journey must have been unbearable at times. The enlisted men would talk to each other of their hopes and dreams, their girlfriends and families. If Tom was in the mood for sharing his own story, he could tell them a tale of childhood in the Midwest during the Great Depression. He could talk about growing up at a military academy away from his parents most of the year, of the sports he loved and the girls he dated, and how he started a college education, only to have it curtailed by induction into the Army just a matter of days after his 18th birthday. He might even gripe about being accepted for Officer Candidate School, then denied admission due to quotas.
He could also talk about his ancestors, who had originally come from Europe. In fact, Tom’s veins carried a mixture of both English and German blood. It would be ironic if he had to spill it on what he considered foreign soil. Whatever else might be said about him, Thomas Ernest Ainlay was a red-blooded American patriot. If necessary, he would prove it on the battlefields of his forefathers’ birth.