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In April of 1941 Abe Sacks wrote home from Fort Benning, Georgia to his girlfriend, Beatrice Goldman in Brooklyn, New York.
“We hiked for six hours with a 30-pound pack on our backs and reached our destination after dusk. The tents had to made in the dark and we eat then. Was put on Guard duty in the woods for four hours. Had to lie on my belly. The mosquitos gave me the once over. They gave us one hour to sleep. This is the U.S. Army.” And he had been a soldier for less than a month. Abraham Sacks was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. He had three older brothers and a sister. His father, an immigrant from Latvia, scratched out a living as a salesman, at times supplying produce to resort hotels in the Catskills. On the 1920 census, Solomon Sacks listed his occupation as “vendor” and his business street address as “Bread Wagon.” After a year at Brooklyn College, Abe got into sales himself, not perishables, like his dad, but men’s wear -- shirts, neckties, cufflinks, belts. In the trade, men’s suits were clothing. What my father handled was called men’s furnishings. He worked both sides of the counter, as a salesman in department stores, and as a rep for manufacturers. He liked the products, and he liked the hustle. By the time he joined the army in 1941, he was 28 years old and had been around. But never hiking thirty miles into the dark of night. For a trip like that in New York City where he grew up, you’d take the subway. In 1941, a subway token cost a nickel and, day or night, would take you anywhere the 650 miles of track were laid. The motivating force for my father to enter the army was patriotism and a sense of duty to his country, a place on earth with a government that gave his mother and father, immigrants from Latvia, refuge and hope for the future. |
Abe Sacks ready for business1940.
Below: Brooklyn College campus in the same era. 
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Not so fast Buster
In the army, like the good soldier he would describe later in his letters as “Joe private,” he followed orders. Today we would say he stayed in his lane.
But another motive force, and maybe the laws of inertia came into play. Newton wrote centuries ago that a body at rest tends to stay at rest while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. At the age of 28 years young, Abe Sacks was the body in motion. And the direction of that motion pointed toward Officers Candidate School.
The youngest of five kids in his family he both benefited and suffered from that last born child syndrome. He writes about it in a letter from June 1942:
“I saw some of the boys that came out of that school and they are swell. They’ll make good officers. It’s a tough struggle, but there are two reasons for me to make every endeavor to succeed.
“One reason is that I made a promise to Mom, and my grandmother that I’d get ahead in the Army. The other reason is that I’m in love with the grandest little girl and I want her to be proud of me.”
Initially, he had committed himself to serving one year in the army. But after December 8, 1941, when Congress declared war against Japan, that one-year commitment became elastic, and open-ended.
By December 11, 1941, Congress had declared war on Germany, and the United States was officially at war with two powerhouse nations. Life In the United States was markedly different. Rationing was invoked and was in place that spring. You couldn’t buy gasoline, groceries, shoes, or cement without presenting ration coupons at the store. Homes on the East and West Coast of the United States had blackout curtains, to disguise and protect them from Japanese and German bombers.