By Mickey Dunaway | Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine | NOV 23 | Cornelius, NC.

As this month’s column hits magazine stands strategically placed by the buggies, it will do so a few days before or after the nationwide November Day celebrated by school children and organizations with flags and salutes for the veterans wearing the uniforms they wore on active duty.  This is as it should be.

However, I want to tell you about another group that equally deserves to be recognized annually on Veteran’s Day.  I will introduce you to a group of women who fought to survive at home while their husbands were at war—the journey of my family’s Warwives of WWII.

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I will introduce you to five family members who scraped and scrapped to survive in impoverished southern Alabama as their husbands served overseas in World War II.  

They were four young aunts and my mother: Aunt Gal was the oldest, followed by Aunt Oma Lee.  My mother, Annah Catherine, was next, followed by Aunt Mildred and the youngest of the group, Aunt Hazel. 

These men and women knew a great War was coming.  All the signs were there.  The men were all draft age, and thus, they acted.  

My mother, Annah, and my father, Glen, eloped and were married on June 28, 1941, in Lucedale, Mississippi.  Lucedale, Mississippi, unlike Alabama, had no waiting period.  My mother was 19 and my father was 23.

Almost a year later—the day Aunt Hazel graduated from high school—she and Uncle Roy also eloped to Lucedale with my Mother and Daddy as witnesses before the justice of the peace of Lucedale, Mississippi.

This need to act proactively was imminent when uncertainty was absolute.  As a result, this group of Warwivesgave birth to children just before or while their husbands were at war.  The first was born in 1938, followed by 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944.

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My Aunt Hazel is the last living member of that group of Warwives.  She is 97.  I spent two hours with her last summer, hoping Aunt Hazel could fill in the gaps in my knowledge of how these five women with babies survived the war.  She repeatedly amazed me with her memory as she told me how these women were connected by family and marriage throughout the war.

Two of the War Babies remain—Bill, who is now 81, and Liz, who is 80.  A third died this summer at 83.  Several cousins and I are baby boomers, but we are no spring chicks ourselves.  If you have family members the age of Bill and Liz or baby boomers such as me, find out how you might recognize and celebrate your family’s Warwives.

I know that as you celebrate Veterans Day 2023 and beyond, you will include the wives and mothers who went to war back home—as heroes on this day.

Epilogue

From pre-first grade through junior high school, I grew up in a shotgun house at the end of a short, no-name sandy dirt road in Wilmer, Alabama.  The fine sand of that road was a deposit of the Gulf of Mexico that once covered all of Alabama—receding and leaving a fine layer perfect for bare feet.  We lived beneath giant oaks (at least to me), shading the house’s tin roof and providing the ideal setting for the many family reunions that would come later and be held beneath those spreading limbs.

This is the same road where the Warwives were often provided sustenance, a place for rest, and receive assurance as they struggled with new babies and to keep up their faith and prayers for their loved ones at war.  By the time I lived on the sandy dirt road, only a few houses remained.  But the spirit of kinship endured.

Today, I am convinced that the alluvial sand of that road was infused with a spirit—by those five Warwives and their families who helped raise their war babies—and was what brought our extended family back year after year.  Those family reunions did not openly celebrate our mothers, aunts, and wives as war heroes.  Or did they?

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A woman is like a teabag.  You can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. –  Eleanor Roosevelt