Flags of Our Fathers Page 6

  His friend Jules Trudel knew him for years; they attended St. George’s together. They played together, walked to school together, sat near each other in the classroom. But when asked to describe Rene or to recall any remarkable incidents, Jules could only say what people would say about nondescript Rene all his life: “He was a nice guy.”

  The mill. Of all the six flagraisers, it was Rene Gagnon whose life was the one most defined, if not overwhelmed, by forces far larger than himself. Among these were the forces of massed corporate labor: regimented and mechanized, and given architectural form by Rene’s hometown. He was born in Manchester, a heavy and sprawling industrial metropolis on the decline in the 1930’s, but still the home city to the largest textile-mill complex in the world.

  In this regard Rene and his future sergeant, Mike Strank, two young ethnic Americans, shared a powerful formative experience—at least on the surface. Each came of age in a kind of living Thomas Hart Benton mural: a teeming workers’ hive that typified the sprawl and belch of American industry in the 1930’s. But in fact the two mill towns were vastly different. Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania, where Strank grew up, was a tough coal miner’s and steelworker’s town, masculine and riotous with fire and smoke and noise. The Manchester mills covered even more territory—triple lines of dark redbrick buildings, each six stories high, stretching for miles below the Amoskeag Falls. But no smoke billowed, no sparks flew from these mills. For nearly a century they had hummed sedately, turning raw thread into gingham cloth—five million yards of it a week at prime production, enough to put a band around the earth every two months.

  Rene probably didn’t reflect on it, but he was in on the final years of Manchester’s century-long epoch as a cradle of industry. That epoch indirectly shaped much of the boy’s sense of himself in relation to the world.

  The Amoskeag Mills had thrived since 1819, when the advent of the power loom made the complex the largest of its sort on the globe. Manchester itself was a creature of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company; plotted out by its entrepreneurs in 1837, just as Weslaco was plotted out for the citrus boom in 1919. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Amoskeag drew swarms of textile workers to its site on the Merrimack River about fifty miles north of Boston. Many of these were French Canadians. They poured down in trainloads, tens of thousands over the years, lured by a market for skilled labor that tapped their cultural roots.

  In the process they improvised a kind of technocorporate community flavored, and protected, by the dictates of mass commercial production. Accepting the benevolent control of their gigantic employer, content with its definition of them as the “corporation’s children,” these rural men and women (and their children) adapted themselves to the terrain—both physical and psychological—of their new urban life. They molded to the almost medieval landscape: the harsh mill yards, the endless solid walls of factory buildings, the heavy wrought-iron gates, the dwarfing scale of architecture. They took for granted the social regimentation of their lives; they accepted the notion that a kind of unseen but always attentive power ruled over them.

  It was the perfect spawning-ground for life in a mass society—civil or military.

  By Rene Gagnon’s time, Amoskeag had lost its grip as an industrial monolith. The main product of its mills was cotton gingham, and by the late 1920’s consumer demand for gingham had shifted to the emerging synthetic materials, such as rayon. Amoskeag never saw it coming and was too unwieldy to adapt. The mills shut down. In 1937 much of the infrastructure was bought up by a group of Manchester citizens and sold off to more than twenty small, independent industries.

  The largest of these was the Chicopee Manufacturing Company, makers of gauze and cheesecloth for such products as medical bandages. Irene secured a job at Chicopee and later brought Rene with her. The fortunes of the city declined, but the lucky workers at Chicopee clung tightly to their jobs, grateful for the security of employment in one more large, paternal, benevolent corporate system. None was more grateful than Irene Gagnon, who told her son how “lucky” she was that “they” had given her a job.

  Life inside the corporate fortress had its pleasures. A boy growing up there could bask in the glitter of company-town commerce, the long shopping streets with their glowing lights and snazzy entertainments, their metropolitan bustle and flair.

  Thursday nights were shopping nights in Manchester, as in other workers’ towns in mid-century America. Paychecks were issued on Thursdays, and the stores and banks stayed open late those nights. People got dressed up and went promenading along Elm Street, where the shops beckoned under the streetlights.

  I can imagine Rene Gagnon combed and spiffed up and checking his reflection in the plate-glass windows, hurrying along to meet his friends at the Palace Theater on Hanover Street. He would have walked from his mother’s house on Hollis Street, where the rows upon rows of “corporation” houses were always in view. “Layered living,” somebody called it. Very much like a vast military camp.

  At the Palace, ten cents apiece would buy the boys three hours of cowboy double features, a Gene Autry and a Roy Rogers if they were lucky, plus cartoons and maybe a Buck Rogers serial. On a Saturday morning his gang might have joined seventeen hundred shrieking, jostling kids at the State Theater, an art deco palace with terrazzo floors, to see a special showing of Shirley Temple’s new movie.

  He might have taken a trolley car, but he wouldn’t have been driven: Manchester in the 1930’s was not a car town. As a boyhood pal of Rene’s recalled to me, “On a hot summer day, if you had ten cars come through town, that was a lot of cars.” Horses and wagons still filled the streets back then, the rubberless steel-rimmed wheels grinding on the cobblestones and giving the city its distinctive noise.

  In the summer, after school let out in June, short pants and brush haircuts would replace knickers and pompadours. Then it would be a season of baseball, track meets, local talent shows. Peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch and homemade fudge at night.

  Winters were even more fun. It snowed a lot in New England in the 1930’s, just as it did in Wisconsin and Kentucky; and Rene Gagnon made as much out of the snow as John Bradley or Franklin Sousley did. The town fathers used to block off hilly Sagamore Street with wooden horses after a snowstorm, and hang out kerosene lanterns for illumination, and people would come there with their sleds. Mostly children, but some grown-ups, too. On a good night or weekend afternoon maybe two hundred boys and girls would be flashing down the hill in stocking caps on their Flexible Flyers.

  When Rene was old enough, Irene brought him to the mills in his free time so they could be together more. He worked alongside his mother and many other women in the same vast room, performing the same repetitive tasks day after day. He was a “doffer.” Doffers took care of the bobbins. Bobbins were cylinders, placed on spindles to receive the cotton thread as it spooled during the mechanized weaving process. There were about 700,000 spindles, servicing some 23,000 looms, humming along in the rows of buildings during the Manchester mills’ peak years. When a bobbin was fully wound with thread, the doffer would lift it off its spindle and replace it with an empty cylinder. It was unchallenging work Rene could do.

  Irene was happy with her secure life in the mill and her tidy home. She sang the praises of this life to her son and encouraged him to come to work with her whenever he could. Rene began to join his mother during her lunch hour, abandoning his friends in the school cafeteria. After two years of high school, he dropped out so that he could concentrate on being a doffer full-time.

  Rene worked alongside his mother and her friends now. Having her boy by her side night and day must have pleased Irene. But there were other women there, younger girls who were attracted to her dark, handsome boy.

  Irene was particularly concerned by a young, aggressive girl who had her eye on Rene. Her name was Pauline Harnois and she seemed to cast a spell over Irene’s boy, ready to take control, which she was used to having. As her sister Anita later remembered, “Our dad got sick at a
young age and my mother had to work in the mills. Pauline was the oldest in a family of four and she had to take a lot of responsibility at a young age. She liked to be in control. Her position in the family, her responsibility formed her. She was always in control.”

  Like a leaf in the tide, Rene was swept along with whatever current took him and he spent more time with Pauline than Irene would have liked.

  One December afternoon when he was sixteen, the world beyond the mill town broke through the routine clip-clop and spindle-hum. A bunch of the guys were all in somebody’s den, listening to a football game on a big Halson radio, when the voice of President Roosevelt interrupted and started talking about a date that would live in infamy. The next day the Manchester Union-Leader paperboys were brandishing editions whose headline was just one word: “WAR!”

  Rationing began not long after.

  Rene Gagnon listened to this news, read about it, shrugged, and went back to the mill and his mother and Pauline Harnois. It was all beyond his control. He kept on working. Life went on: the mill, his mother, Pauline, the bright lights along Elm Street.

  Rene Gagnon kept on working right up until his Army draft notice arrived in May of 1943. Then he enlisted in the Marines and submitted to the third large, outside influence that would mold his life.

  Irene didn’t want to lose her boy, but she thought it would do him good to get away from that Harnois girl. What Rene didn’t tell his mother was that he had already made a fateful decision. At the age of seventeen he comforted the sad Pauline with the promise that he would marry her when he returned from the war.

  Mike Strank: Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania

  He was the enigma: the immigrant who became the ultimate fighting Yank; the cerebral little boy from the tough mill town who grew up to be the protosergeant; the physical intimidator who turned out to be the tough shepherd of his flock. The “old man” of his company, who would not live to see twenty-five. Of all the six, I find him the most complex, the most elusive study in contrasts. That is, until I study the small part of him that is visible in the photograph: his right hand. Mike Strank’s right hand tells me everything I need to know.

  He is behind and to the left of Franklin. His right shoulder is pressed against Franklin’s left. Their torsos are conjoined; their arms are reaching upward. Each boy has his left hand on the flagpole, and Franklin has his right hand on it as well. But the key to the image, at least for me, is Mike’s right hand closing on Franklin’s wrist. It is an image of almost unbearable delicacy and gentleness. That is Mike: the protector. The veteran Marine in the group, helping the tyro. When that shutter clicked on Suribachi, it caught Sergeant Mike in an absolutely characteristic moment. He was reaching out to give support to a younger boy in the critical chain of action.

  Among the flagraisers, Mike is the one larger-than-life hero. When old comrades talk to me about Mike they become young men again. “A Marine’s Marine” is the phrase they all get to sooner or later. They speak of the strapping man. Yet violence is not the key to Mike Strank; it is not what men valued about him. What they valued—what makes their spines stiffen in admiration fifty years after the battle—was his leadership. That, and his quality of love.

  “He was the finest man I ever knew,” said one platoon-mate who went on to become a national business leader. “The best of the best,” said one who went up Suribachi with him. “The kind of Marine you read about, the kind they make movies about,” said another.

  A Marine’s Marine. But not because of his ferocity in combat—although he was a cool and deadly fighter. Not because he screamed, “Follow me and we’ll kill a lot of Nips!” or ranted about “dying for your country.” Mike Strank earned respect by emphasizing the well-being of his young charges, at least to the extent possible in the face of torrential gunfire.

  “Follow me,” Sergeant Mike used to tell the boys in his squad, “and I’ll try to bring all of you back safely to your mothers. Listen to me, and follow my orders, and I’ll do my best to bring you home.”

  He was born Mychal Strenk on November 10, 1919, in Jarabenia, Czechoslovakia. A friend of the family, Ann Basophy, who was born in the same small farm village, recalled that Vasil and Martha Strenk subsisted in a one-room house with a dirt floor, along with Vasil’s parents and grandparents.

  The following year Vasil emigrated to America and changed his last name to Strank. Sponsored by an uncle, Alex Yarina, he passed through Ellis Island and made his way to the Pennsylvania mining and steelworking town of Franklin Borough, on the Conemaugh River sixty-five miles east of Pittsburgh and two miles east of Johnstown.

  Franklin Borough, chartered in 1868, was at its peak population in 1920: 2,632 people. A complex built in 1898 by the Cambria Iron Company and soon to be taken over by Bethlehem Steel offered plenty of hard work for gritty, industrious immigrants: twenty-two open-hearth furnaces, two mills for rolling sheared plates, a universal plate mill, and a continuous bar mill. Three years later Bethlehem would add business offices, five blast furnaces, a billet mill, a slab mill, a powerhouse, boilers, a chemical laboratory, a sintering plant (in which iron could be heated into a steely mass without melting), and a steel car department.

  At their height, the Bethlehem mills and mines around Franklin Borough employed more than 18,000 workers. They clustered in soot-caked towns and villages throughout Cambria County and along the western slope of the Alleghenies. Franklin Borough became a safe haven for East Central European immigrants and their offspring; by the early 1930’s they would form a majority in the little town, a village-within-a-village, really. They would provide three of the town’s six civil officers and half the members of the Franklin Fire Department.

  Vasil worked the mines for three years before he could afford to send for Martha and the baby. They followed him to America in early 1922. Three-year-old Mychal passed innocently under the portals of Lady Liberty, the most recognizable image of America until he and his comrades supplanted it twenty-three years later.

  By the end of that year Mychal had a brother, John. Pete would follow in 1925, with sister Mary still eight years in the future.

  The family lived in a two-room rental apartment inside the Slavic enclave. The rooms were a kitchen and a bedroom. To Martha especially, this was luxury: a castle, she said, compared with what they had endured back in Jarabenia. Mike, John, and Pete shared one bed; their parents slept close by in the other. Vasil trudged off to the mine at three P.M. every day in his lamp-hat and fatigues, carrying a pail that had a thermos of water in the bottom and his lunch on top. He wore the same clothes all year round, returning home black with coal dust from head to toe. But proud. This was progress!

  Franklin Borough offered the Strank family a symbolic vision of America, but a far different one than quiet Appleton offered the Bradleys. Here was a fiery, noisy landscape of New World mechanization. The whole town could see the vast skeletal structures of the mills. Many families lived virtually next door. The mines, cut into the banks of the hills, completed the enveloping industrial view. Night never came to the mill town; the blast furnaces with their open hearths blazed away twenty-four hours a day.

  The day, on the other hand, could seem like a perpetual twilight. The coal-dust haze from the mines formed a thick presence in the sky, blotting out the sun. The first duty for any Franklin family upon waking was to sweep the front and back porches free of the soot that had fallen overnight like black snow. A woman who grew up there remembered walking through “an inch of crunch” on her way to school every day.

  Life in the town reflected this pounding, gritty pace of constant sweat and production. When the Stranks arrived, Franklin boasted fourteen beer gardens, but no church, and no doctor. Yet the Eastern Europeans who toiled there did not see any of this as deprivation. For them, it was a new chance in a new and vigorous land; a chance to rise, or at least for their children to rise. They preserved their culture and their religious values in the two-room rented dwellings where they lived under the steel mills’
glare, each little apartment building a link in the improvised chain of a new community.

  Without realizing it, Vasil Strank might have begun the molding of his eldest son into a Marine’s Marine right in the bosom of his tiny household.

  Mychal—now renamed Mike—shared a bed with his brothers John and Pete. Returning from his late shift at the mine as he did, at about one in the morning, Vasil seldom saw his three little boys awake—they would leave for school while he was still sleeping, and he would be gone to begin his shift by the time they returned. This routine could not have been easy for Vasil. “His family was really the boys,” his son John recalled.

  And Vasil abided by a strict Old World value system. Discipline in the family was paramount. When one of the boys had misbehaved, Martha would report it to Vasil upon his return home at night, and he would wake up a few hours later, along with the boys, to administer punishment.

  Vasil insisted on a special rule for this punishment: No matter which boy had committed the offense, all three would be disciplined equally. In this way, Vasil thought, he could transfer the burden of discipline from himself to the boys; make them see that they had a shared interest in the good behavior of each.

  Vasil probably did not know that he had intuited one of the fundamental principles of military training; in particular, Marine training. Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator. He is remolded into an integer in a team. Shared responsibility—an abiding sense of the unit—is essential to survival in combat. Thus, if a recruit should faint from exhaustion during a forced march, the rest of his unit is trained to run in circles around his body until he comes to. Equal discipline.