WWII Memories: Watching the skies for bombers in Ridgewood, N.J.

A wartime account written by Mrs. Carolyn Hansen Roth, first published in the New Bern Sun Journal.

During the War, I was a child in Ridgewood, N.J. My father was the neighborhood Air Raid Warden. The men met on Saturdays and sometimes in the evening, either in our garage, or if it was warmer weather, they sat outside on our front stoop. They would drink gallons of my mother’s terrible coffee, and smoke like fiends, and regale each other with stories. It was serious business, though.

Our town was a small whistle stop on the Erie Railroad. In fact, the railroad was up an embankment behind our house. There were very few tall buildings, but a local school was designated as a place for “spotters” to scan the skies with binoculars for enemy planes. One time a suspected “incendiary bomb” fragment was found in someone’s house. Everyone had blackout shades or curtains. Sometimes we sat in the dark during air raids, or suspected raids. If you were out somewhere and you heard the siren, you ran home pell-mell.

[In retrospect, I find it amazing how well-organized and observant the US civilian populace became even without directly having to face the war as their European counterparts. W.B.]

There was rationing. People did not scrub pots — they left them black and often greasy on the bottom. Gas was rationed. My dad often turned the motor off and coasted down the hill to our house, or any other hill he could find. My mother drove a truck for the war effort and my grandmother worked for a time in a munitions factory.

[One cannot emphasize this point enough. One (of course, out of many) reason(s) the Axis lost was that it relied on plunder and not on the thorough mobilization of its civilian work potential. Though if your ideology considers women little more than breeding machines, I guess you're kinda reluctant to put them to work in factories... W.B.]

Everyone was involved. We all had victory gardens. We even raised chickens in our back yard.

[That's not a bad idea, regardless of the circumstances. Modern society is awefully reliant on "on-time" goods. W.B.]

As a little kid, this seemed like a big adventure to me and my neighborhood friends.

[I grew up near a cruise missile base in the 1980s. In fact, I grew up right in the center of half a dozen strategic targets. But we were innocent boys back then and thought all this - the low level jetfighter flights screeching by, the M113s rolling through fields on maneuvers, even the large peace demonstrations - was just great fun. W.B.]

My brother John was born in 1945, the year the war ended.

It was very common to pick up soldiers who were hitchhiking. They had perhaps come in from New York on a bus and gotten off, but still had a way to go to reach their destination. It was a very long walk from the bus station to Upper Ridgewood. There was no fear of being robbed or mugged — they were, after all, fighting the war for our freedom.

My uncle Phil was in the Army. He was a bombardier. His plane was shot down over Burma, and he was never found, though supposedly his dog tags were. My grandmother was of course devastated, as we all were. My uncle Bob, my dad’s brother, was a big cheese in the Army. He was stationed in Antwerp, Belgium. He eventually became a colonel and was in the military for many years. Luckily, he was never injured and came home safely.

I remember those years very clearly, very vividly, and those memories are tinged with sadness and joy, a curious mixture of what life was like back then.

John was just a baby, and it would be a number of years before my other brothers were born. My dad did his part, as did my mother, and grandmother. I was a very proud little kid to have such a patriotic family.

Carolyn Hansen Roth lives in New Bern.