The Pittsburgh Press (January 16, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
Hard times
By Florence Fisher Parry
Not long ago, President Truman released from our federal prisons unnumbered men with criminal records; and at the time there were many of us who felt that it was a questionable recourse.
Today in the little town of Wallington, N.J., an American family is enduring the agonies of shame and heartbreak at death sentence imposed upon a 20-year-old son, Private Joseph Hicswa, for the murder of two Japanese.
It is hard to reconcile this extreme penalty with the military indulgence shown the organized overt demonstrations of our G.I.’s which, in the occupied areas of the Pacific and in Europe, have furnished disgraceful commentary upon United States military discipline. Never has our authority, both at home and abroad, been so flouted as in these past few post-war months; and we are discredited in the eyes of the world for the chaos we have permitted abroad and at home.
Extreme
For one boy io be singled out and sentenced to death for killing two Japs would seem to be an extreme method of exercising military discipline. There isn’t a boy home from the Pacific War who isn’t shocked at this case. It is to be devoutly hoped that the death sentence imposed upon young Joe Hicswa will be commuted.
Sudden violence against a despised enemy can be looked for, and of course must be dealt with; but we simply have to remember that we can’t change our boys’ feelings about the Japs. There isn’t an American boy who has served in the Pacific who hasn’t been conditioned to regard the Japs as little better than insects, to be stamped cut as one would stamp out a roach or a rat. They simply weren’t regarded as human beings.
Call it a part of our war propaganda if you like! Our boys despised the Germans, but fought them man to man. Not so the Japs, who were looked upon as less than human, no more than animals. No arrogant Nazi could have looked more coldly upon the corpse of an exterminated foe than our average G.I. regarded the carcass of a dead Jap.
Let’s be realistic. We know this was true during the war and we know that V-J Day couldn’t cure it.
Joe Hicswa, an American boy, carefully conditioned to war, could kill two Japanese in a fever of loneliness. frustration and sudden fear. The fine line between the military killing of a hated enemy and murdering him in peacetime is but faintly drawn in the minds of bewildered adolescents catapulted into the brutal violence of training and warfare, and the lonely monotony of occupation.
The reports of the massed rebellion of some of our forces of occupation in Europe is shocking, but not nearly so shocking as the behavior of those strikers at home who set our Army its example.
What must the world think of us, Allies and enemies alike? The other day the entire front pages of the newspapers held nothing, nothing, but news of strikes impending: strikes and demonstrations from our boys still serving in the Armed Forces. What secret hope must such admission of our internal chaos and foreign botching foster in the breasts of Germans?
Our peace, so hardly won, is crumbling in our fumbling hands, and pessimism sits brooding in all intelligent minds.
Our great hope
The other day a returned G.I. was arrested for knocking down a picket. His honest confession was good for our souls. He admitted he had made up his mind before he was discharged from the Army that upon arriving home, he would smash the face of the first picket he saw. And he did.
It would be unbecoming for any law-abiding citizen to applaud his demonstration; but I suspect that his action inspired many an American citizen with the fond hope that maybe our returned veterans might turn the tide now threatening to engulf us, and their organized stand against our nation’s terrifying strikes effect some kind of economic reform before it is too late.
In line with this hope, let me express another: I sincerely hope that this might of the veterans may not be dissipated by too thin and numerous a distribution of veterans’ organizations.
Already there are springing up a number of veterans’ groups who are offering the returned veterans their own particular benefits. Let us hope that our boys will not be too quick to join up with these unproved organizations: but will instead concentrate their strength in one of the established veterans’ organizations, such as the American Legion, and thus, bound together with one great hoop of steel, present to the forces of destruction a solid wall of united resistance.