Today is January 11.
In 1942 the war wasn’t going well for the Allies. The US tightened rules for its draft, requiring all able-bodied men to register. My grandfather duly registered, listing his birthday as 11 January, which in fact was not his birthday.
Perhaps he felt that having avoided service on behalf of Britain in WWI and having lived through the Irish Civil War that enough was enough.
What my grandfather was up to during those years is not entirely clear. He could have fought for the British, the Nationalists or the IRA. Or he could have fought for no one. In those days, not to take a side was to take a side.
The family story is that he stayed away from these conflicts by working on the family farm. But he could also have been in prison. In Ireland, to say that a family member was “working on the farm” was a euphemism for a prison stay.
My grandfather was engaged to an English woman he met in 1914. He returned to Ireland to seek the blessing of his own parents. Shortly thereafter, war broke out. He was warned that if he returned to Liverpool, he would be drafted. He stayed in Ireland. Even though Ireland then was part of the UK, the British did not extend their wartime draft to Ireland until 1917.
The story is that this young couple forgot about each other after WWI broke out. I do not believe this. My grandmother was 21 and in love. If my grandfather could not return to England, there was nothing stopping his intended from traveling to Ireland.
Even during the war, there was a daily ferry from Liverpool to the Irish port now called Dun Laoghaire. She could have reached him if that were possible. When a woman wants a man, a world war is no obstacle.
Did she write to him while they were apart? She was a great letter writer but none of her letters survive.
Prison or service in any one of these armies would have discouraged her from paying him a visit. If he really was working on a farm, that work would have presented no obstacle to a visit or their nuptials in Ireland. She didn’t go because she couldn’t go; she knew what was going on.
When the Irish Civil War was over, they were married; an act the IRA was unlikely to approve.
In 1925 he came to Al Capone’s Chicago, leaving his wife and my toddler aunt in Liverpool. At that time, Chicago was the murder capital of the world. He already had a good job in England and had purchased a home.
Wife and child came later, my aunt persuaded to leave Britain with promises of chocolate. When they were reunited, she had already forgotten him and asked her mother, “who is that man?”
What he did in Chicago wasn’t entirely clear either. He didn’t get a job in the stockyards, like most poor immigrants and especially one who supposedly had agricultural experience. Somehow he ended up working at a mobbed-up hotel. My mother recalled that “Daddy had a crew,” which suggests he did more than just take reservations at that hotel.
In the 1920’s, the Outfit, the name given to organized crime in Chicago, was known for bringing in Irish talent for the occasional hit. I can’t say that there are enough dots to connect.
My grandfather had no birth certificate. He claimed he was only given a baptismal certificate, a document which was lost when the local parish church in Galway burned down.
Curiously, Jake Factor (brother of Max Factor, he of the famous cosmetics brand) also claimed, when the US tried to deport him to his native Poland, that in fact he had been born in England where his parents had him baptized, despite the fact that they were Jewish.
The baptismal certificate was lost, Jake explained, when the church where the document was kept burned down. The claim was credible enough to block the US government’s efforts to deport Jake to Poland on account of his involvement in organized crime, specifically, the Outfit.
January 11 was the birthday of my father, whom my grandfather was not to meet until the 1950’s, a decade after registering for the draft. That the dates coincide is due to mere chance.
In 1941, when he was only thirteen, my father made a clumsy effort to alter his birth certificate by spilling ink on it in an effort to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but the US Navy was not fooled. They told him to come back with a parents' permission slip when he was 17, but the war surely would be over long before then. But it wasn’t.
Four years later on now 17, on January 11, 1945, he returned to the Navy recruitment office and enlisted. He finished basic training at Naval Station Great Lakes, north of Chicago on Lake Michigan.
Like all sailors, he was preparing for the invasion of the Japanese homeland when the Imperial Japanese government surrendered, ending the Pacific War.