World War II (Part One)

Noticing that Ken Burns has a new series on PBS tonight about World War II, helped me to lift my writer’s block long enough to write this entry.

My father, the late Robert E. Olsen, had a very unusual set of experiences in WWII. When the war started, he was well on his way to a degree in Accounting. When he went into the service, he might have tried for OCS, but he never had the chance, which was a shame because he was tall, athletic and organized. He would have made a fine officer.

The camp where he received his basic training was run by an over-aged general with a notorious sweet tooth. The cook for the headquarters company that fed the general was headed by a former pastry chef at a fancy restaurant in New York City. Unfortunately, the former pastry chef had a bit of a problem with the bottle. Military discipline didn’t work very well here, since the general discovered that busting his cook produced really nasty, inedible pastries.

So, out of desperation, the general decided to “draft” someone to oversee the kitchen when his cook was indisposed and look the other way as long as the chef cranked out the goodies. So, one day my father was put in charge of the kitchen.

The fact that my father had no rank and hadn’t completed basic training was no impediment to this because the kitchen was actually run by the cook’s helpers anyway. All that the person in charge had to do was to be able to read. Since military recipes were all by the pound and gallon, my father had no problem running the kitchen.

He stayed at this job for months, until the system finally caught up with him. Since he hadn’t finished basic training and putting him into a new basic training class would require some tapping dancing if the IG’s office ever found out what had happened, the Powers That Be decided that his next stop would be some place to the west of the base in Texas where he was then.