Driving home from the library with a new book is like a version of the marshmallow test where if you fail, you get rear-ended. I managed to make it home intact with the second, still wartime printing of Moss Hart's Winged Victory (1943) which I did not expect to come embossed with the winged star of the Army Air Forces or to credit all four pages of its named cast by their ranks in same, ditto the ensemble, the orchestra, the chorus, and the technical crew excepting the comparatively scant female roles, I guess because the U.S. was so chaotically terrible about women pilots in WWII. Names that leapt out at me included Don Taylor, Red Buttons, Kevin McCarthy, Barry Nelson, Edmond O'Brien, Whit Bissell, Victor Sen Young, Alfred Ryder, Karl Malden, Peter Lind Hayes, Martin Ritt, Olive Deering, and Lee J. Cobb. The play itself is essentially a recruiting ad on a grand scale, although the technical detailing is comparable to a training film and the general-issue sweariness is refreshing and no doubt stripped out for the 1944 film. It was commissioned as a fundraiser for Army Emergency Relief, ran two years as a wild success on Broadway and national tour, and has never been restaged. The internet had not misled me that it contained a codified version of the folk song I tracked it down for:
A barracks street at an induction training field.
The barracks are what every soldier would recognize as pure G. I. Plain wooden structures built quickly right out in the middle of nowhere, and they look it.
Right now, however, they are being taken care of as though each one were the Taj Mahal. Soldiers swarm all over them. It is the evening before the regular weekly inspection, and windows are being washed, floors scrubbed, footlockers turned inside out, mattresses being aired; every nook and cranny is being gone over with a fury that would astonish the mother of every son. The boys are mostly in fatigues, and those who are not are in shorts and shirts, washing out socks, brushing shoes, and doing all the chores a soldier knows too well. There is evidently not much time for talk, so they are doing a great deal of singing instead. It is a song they all know, and boys all over the place launch into another chorus as one chorus finishes.
THE SOLDIERS
The biscuits in the Army they say are mighty fine.
One rolled off the table and killed a pal of mine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The chicken in the Army they say is mighty fine.
One jumped off the table and started marching time.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
Payday in the Army they say is mighty fine.
They give you fifty dollars and fine you forty-nine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
Furloughs in the Army they say are mighty fine.
They put it down on paper, but where the hell is mine?
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The coffee in the Army they say is mighty fine.
It's good for cuts and bruises and tastes like iodine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The verse about payday was recognizably inherited by the versions performed by Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, which are frankly so close to one another that I count them as the same strand. I've never heard the verse about furloughs in the wild and suspect it died out as inapplicable for campers. The verses complaining about the food are the three that I learned from my grandparents with remarkably little drift, as opposed to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch whose coffee looks like soapy water and tastes like turpentine. The song can obviously go on as long as the singers can come up with gripes and rhymes, otherwise known as ad infinitum. I'm wondering if the concluding tag of "But they won't let me go" did not exist at the time of the production, since I was surprised by its omission and then charmed a few pages later by an add-on in similar spirit to the anthem of the eventual U.S. Air Force: "And nothing can stop the Army Air Corps—except the weather—nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!" Soldiers in the same scene also sing a local variation on "Mademoiselle from Armentières" and something to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which I recognized from Seeger's "Report from the Marianas: Notes of an Innocent Bystander" (1945):
When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
We will, like hell we will!
We were only, only, fooling,
We were only, only, fooling,
We were only, only, fooling,
We were, like hell we were!
Seeger classes it with "Gee, Mom/Army Life" as "also a classic, in its way" and associates the other song, relevantly, with "Air Force training camps." Then I got distracted by the line in the Marines version he collected of "Bless 'Em All" which ends the verse about the Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu–Tanambogo with "My god, what a fucked up stampede," a phrase I now feel keenly should make a comeback. Anyway, the partial punch line to this escapade of research is that in between getting the song stuck in my head a week ago and getting my hands on Winged Victory,spatch and I discovered a fifth-season episode of M*A*S*H in which the featured players of the 4077th improvise their own version during a breakdown of the projector on movie night, which I don't know why I didn't see coming. The rest of the punch line is that it's still stuck in my head.
A barracks street at an induction training field.
The barracks are what every soldier would recognize as pure G. I. Plain wooden structures built quickly right out in the middle of nowhere, and they look it.
Right now, however, they are being taken care of as though each one were the Taj Mahal. Soldiers swarm all over them. It is the evening before the regular weekly inspection, and windows are being washed, floors scrubbed, footlockers turned inside out, mattresses being aired; every nook and cranny is being gone over with a fury that would astonish the mother of every son. The boys are mostly in fatigues, and those who are not are in shorts and shirts, washing out socks, brushing shoes, and doing all the chores a soldier knows too well. There is evidently not much time for talk, so they are doing a great deal of singing instead. It is a song they all know, and boys all over the place launch into another chorus as one chorus finishes.
THE SOLDIERS
The biscuits in the Army they say are mighty fine.
One rolled off the table and killed a pal of mine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The chicken in the Army they say is mighty fine.
One jumped off the table and started marching time.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
Payday in the Army they say is mighty fine.
They give you fifty dollars and fine you forty-nine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
Furloughs in the Army they say are mighty fine.
They put it down on paper, but where the hell is mine?
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The coffee in the Army they say is mighty fine.
It's good for cuts and bruises and tastes like iodine.
Oh, I don't want no more of Army life,
Gee, Mom, I want to go home!
The verse about payday was recognizably inherited by the versions performed by Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, which are frankly so close to one another that I count them as the same strand. I've never heard the verse about furloughs in the wild and suspect it died out as inapplicable for campers. The verses complaining about the food are the three that I learned from my grandparents with remarkably little drift, as opposed to
spatch whose coffee looks like soapy water and tastes like turpentine. The song can obviously go on as long as the singers can come up with gripes and rhymes, otherwise known as ad infinitum. I'm wondering if the concluding tag of "But they won't let me go" did not exist at the time of the production, since I was surprised by its omission and then charmed a few pages later by an add-on in similar spirit to the anthem of the eventual U.S. Air Force: "And nothing can stop the Army Air Corps—except the weather—nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!" Soldiers in the same scene also sing a local variation on "Mademoiselle from Armentières" and something to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which I recognized from Seeger's "Report from the Marianas: Notes of an Innocent Bystander" (1945):When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
When the war is over, we will all enlist again,
We will, like hell we will!
We were only, only, fooling,
We were only, only, fooling,
We were only, only, fooling,
We were, like hell we were!
Seeger classes it with "Gee, Mom/Army Life" as "also a classic, in its way" and associates the other song, relevantly, with "Air Force training camps." Then I got distracted by the line in the Marines version he collected of "Bless 'Em All" which ends the verse about the Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu–Tanambogo with "My god, what a fucked up stampede," a phrase I now feel keenly should make a comeback. Anyway, the partial punch line to this escapade of research is that in between getting the song stuck in my head a week ago and getting my hands on Winged Victory,
spatch and I discovered a fifth-season episode of M*A*S*H in which the featured players of the 4077th improvise their own version during a breakdown of the projector on movie night, which I don't know why I didn't see coming. The rest of the punch line is that it's still stuck in my head.
