My Family: World War II & The Cold War

By Tom Harrison

My family has three generations that have been impacted in some manner by

World War II, The Cold War, or both. The eldest members have transmitted this

experience across the generations to the youngest. Speaking with family members, as

well as recalling stories of those who have since passed on, I have learned a great deal

about their experiences, and am able to relate them to my own as well.

On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather, Thomas C. Swick, from

whom I was given my first name, fought in the U.S. Army against the German and Italian

forces in North Africa. The details of this service are hard to come by, as he passed

away in 1976, nine months before I was born. That I know anything about him and his

wartime experience is due to my grandmother (now in her 80s), who has told me about

his stint there, as well as shown me some of his medals and the North African

tchotchkes that he brought home from the war which were used to decorate the

African-themed den in her old apartment. Among other, more legitimate cultural art

objects, she had a small coffee table he had shipped back to America that was shaped

like a camel with a platform on top. As a small child I used to enjoy riding on the camel’s

neck, which I broke twice, much to my grandmother’s dismay! After the war he later

went on to become a successful attorney, and advanced to the arena of state politics in

the early 1950s, when he was elected to the NJ State Legislature. As a Democrat in state

politics, he often had the opportunity to hob-nob with some of the biggest figures in

national politics during the 1950s and 1960s. Signed and personalized portraits of

generals, Supreme Court Justices, congressmen, and even such presidents as Kennedy

and Johnson, some of which he and my grandmother appear in, used to hang on the

walls of the den as well.

On my father’s side of the family, my other grandfather also participated in

World War II. However, Ira Harrison had a much more limited role in the war.

According to my grandmother, he never left the U.S. or saw any combat. He enlisted in

the Navy and worked in Philadelphia at the ship yards, while maintaining a nascent

relationship with my grandmother. He was supposed to ship off overseas but the war

ended before his time came. I suppose he was one of the lucky ones in that he wasn’t

exposed to the danger of war, but unfortunately he came down with Parkinson’s

Disease in his mid-30s, a condition that would gradually destroy his body for the rest of

his life, until he finally passed away in January 1999. Because of the Parkinson’s, I never

really got to develop a meaningful relationship with him, as his speech was extremely

difficult to understand. I wish things had been different, and that I would have been

able to fully experience the stories he would have been able to tell about his younger

life.

As far as the Cold War is concerned, my entire family lived in the U.S. during

those times and experienced it from that perspective. My mother, stepmother, and

father (born 1951, 1946 and 1950, respectively) can absolutely recall being given

instructions in school to “duck and cover” under their desks in the event of an air raid

siren or bright flash, as if that action would somehow save them in the event of a

nuclear attack. Although children when it happened, they all remember the tension of

the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the nail-biting days surrounding the Cuban Missile

Crisis. My family tends to skew more liberal in its political thinking, so I was also taught

about the ruin that Senator Joseph McCarthy brought upon countless lives here in the

United States with his generally baseless communist witch hunts, and of the cementing

of a nation-wide ‘red fear’ that become a part of life for them as they grew up.

Finally, by virtue of having been born in the 1970s, I too grew up during the Cold

War. As a child in the 1980s, I was exposed to nightly news about the dealings of

Reagan and Gorbachev, nuclear arms reduction treaties, and images of the Soviet

military on parade in Red Square. The movies that shaped my childhood consisted of

such films as Red Dawn, The Day After, and War Games. All of those films, along with

others, drove home a real fear of either nuclear destruction or invasion by the U.S.S.R.

It wasn’t uncommon for me as a child to have dreams where far in the distance a

mushroom cloud erupted in a flash of light, and I’d spend the rest of the dream running

away in an effort to escape, until it finally consumed me and I’d wake up. Nuclear war

with the Soviets remained a very real threat for me until things started to change in

Eastern Europe in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ultimately, I will never forget the

day that the Soviet empire crumbled. My grandmother and other family members and I

were riding out Hurricane Bob on Fire Island in August 1991, and had only a radio with

batteries available as the storm had knocked out power. All we could get was

Newsradio 88 AM, but it was enough. In the dark, with candles lit and a storm whipping

around outside, we listened as news was spread that the coup attempt in the U.S.S.R.

against Gorbachev had failed. It took a little while for me to realize the gravity of what

this meant, and how earth-shattering a revelation it was, but when it did, like that of

many other people, my whole world changed.

I’m grateful to have been a part of a family that was present for two of the most

impactful conflicts of the 20th century. As one for whom history is a personal passion, I

enjoy being able to tell people who didn’t have the same experience as I about what

things were like during a time when at any moment our world could have literally

ended. I’m finally old enough to understand what it felt like for my parents to tell me

about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example, as I now impart my own

experiences to those who have come after.