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NINETY DAY WONDERS
O.C.S. was a crash course in everything a newly-minted army officer needed to know. Sixteen million people served in the military during World War II. Somebody had to teach them, train them, and lead them.
Abe was in Fort Knox, at Officers Candidate School for three and a half months. He told me a few times about his stint.
“They called us Ninety Day Wonders,” like he was cracking a joke.
But the training was no joke.
August 31, 1942, Fort Knox
“Well, Honey, tomorrow I start on my sixth week. I trust I have as good luck in the next eight weeks as I had in the past. Saturday I received a very lovely grade in Gunnery. We have two more weeks of it and I hope I can maintain the same average. There are a million formulas and a hundred types of sights and guns that we have to know. My hopes are not diminished one iota.”
Gunnery, Tactics, Tanks, Military Law and more. All in three months. The class schedule looked like a routine day in high school, except the course work was literally about life and death.
The Officer’s Guide, a fat textbook the size of an encyclopedia volume, had all the dope in it. But would a soldier, even a First Lieutenant pack that with his gear? It had 484 pages and weighed two pounds.
Sept. 4, 1942
“Today I received some news that I didn’t like. I got a failing grade in Military Law. I checked with my C.O. (Company Commander) and he says not to worry about it. It is such a tough course, but if I maintain my average in my majors as I have been, everything will be okay. I have to stay ‘on the ball’ from now on.”
ABOVE: A class schedule and textbook from the Officers' Candidate School Abe attended in Fort Knox, KY.
Abe, once accepted as an officer candidate, every week of schooling, every test was critical. Pass this course and then that one-- you’re on a roll. Flunk military law, it may not matter. But Abe saw some of his fellow students flunk out entirely. No stripes, no privileges, back to being an EM, an enlisted man. Canned food, cold showers.
Never in his life did getting good grades mean so much.
Oct. 13, 1942
“Can’t write too much. For one, I’m too excited and the other, well it has to do with marks. Today we received our grades on the two exams we took Saturday. We saw so many failures that by the time they got to me, my heart was in my mouth. I passed out for a certain extent when I was told that my marks were 70 and 76, which here is as good as 100. So for the time being I’m on a cloud.”
Sorting and reading the hundreds of letters my mother received from the man who was first her boyfriend, and then her husband, we came across some other items that pointed to aspects of my father's military service more intriguing than his class schedules and exam results. s
A pocket sized six ring looseleaf notebook was one of them. In it were Abe's handwritten notes: two letter codes and double-digit numbers. A telegram type communication on yellowed paper has text in all caps with a reference to Hitler.
Would we learn a little more about this man's time in the army by looking through more of his correspondence?
He came down from his cloud after four days, and wrote this letter home from Fort Knox.