THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
December 4, 2005

The USO was started during World War II and has provided entertainment and a glimpse of home for lonely GIs in peace and war ever since. My mother, while still a teenager, served as a USO hostess in Pittsburgh during the early 1940s. My father, throughout his military career, attended many shows and enjoyed their services over the years.

Growing up as an Air Force brat, I saw my share of USO shows. The prevailing television impression of these shows comes from the Vietnam War, where the entertainers perform on a makeshift stage for a vast crowd of combat troops armed to the teeth while mortar rounds explode nearby but, in reality, most of these shows take place on established bases both in the United States and abroad and dependents and even local civilians may form substantial parts of the audience. All of the shows are entertaining enough but some seem like a revival of vaudeville with magicians, jugglers and drummers who "play" tunes on drums or chairs or even theater walls and an airman second’s head (all this and more was all featured in one show I saw). Other shows were sports-themed, like the time Dad took 11 year old me to see the Harlem Globetrotters, who I had not even heard of prior to that time. It was a night to remember; great fun. That was at Sidi Slimaine Air Force Base in Morocco, a former Strategic Air Command base that is now used by the Moroccan Air Force. Another sports spectacle was the "King and His Court," a four-man softball team that regularly defeated the best squadron softball teams on any base where they appeared. I saw them at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam as a high school sophomore. A real highlight was a series of squadron boxing matches refereed by none other than the legendary Jack Dempsey, who would screen parts of some of his classic fights in black and white between bouts. That was at Keesler Air Force Base during my senior year at Biloxi High School in Mississippi. The champ was old but still a tough-looking customer and, being a history buff even back then, it struck me that Dempsey’s first big championship fight had employed Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson for crowd security. That’s history!

Wreckage on the beach – Tarawa, December 1943

For all the quality and entertainment value of other productions, the USO "gold standard" was always a Bob Hope Christmas Show. Hope, who saw his one hundredth birthday before he died in 2003, in his heyday seemed as pervasive and inevitable as the weather. I have met some younger people who saw Hope only after he was long past his prime and seem to resent the pedestal to which he was elevated. To those people, I can only say, "You don't know; you weren't there."

Hope, a genuine American icon, was actually born in Great Britain and it was sceptered isle’s loss, our gain. He went from the live vaudeville stage to become a big radio star of the 1930s and was also popular for his movies, especially the series of "Road" pictures he made with Bing Crosby. After the Second World War, his movie career went into high gear - movies like "Paleface" are still funny and far superior to the movies he made later in his career. He was featured in his own comic books in the 1950s. Also in the 1950s, he became one of the biggest television stars, a status he enjoyed at least into the 1970s. However, through all this success, he continued to make his Tours to the bases overseas year after year; all through World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the quieter years of the Cold War. These trips became his classic "Christmas Shows" starting in 1948, when he toured the bases and entertained the airmen involved in the Berlin Airlift.

I still vividly remember a show he did on Guam in 1962. The island and its military and civilian facilities had been rather thoroughly destroyed by 200-plus miles per hour winds of Typhoon Karen on November 11, right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the B-47 wing stationed at the base returned and was back in operation only three days after the storm, most of the base was without power for two weeks, parts of the island did without electricity into 1963 and large parts of the military and civilian population spent months under canvas in twenty-man tents. Bob Hope’s Christmas Tour had been booked for many other Far East bases but he agreed to present an additional show on Guam. Half the stricken island turned out to catch Hope, the gorgeous girls and Jerry Colona as a confused Japanese straggler in a skit they had improvised just for the one show.

Powerful Japanese shore guns had been shipped from Singapore.

Bob Hope’s Christmas Shows’ formula of topical humor, goofy skits, music, dancing and pretty ladies remained remarkably unchanged through all the years. Now that he’s gone and we are still facing Decembers at war, I thought it might be interesting to share some pictures with all of you. I decided to write this column because my mother and I found these forgotten pictures during a three day nostalgia trip going through a forgotten box full of old family photographs during a recent visit home. If you find these pictures interesting, be sure to check out our December Cher Ami Newsletter where there is another article with even more of these previously unpublished photographs. My father took these pictures during Bob Hope’s first Pacific tour, over 61 years ago, on Tarawa, in early 1944. According to Dad, you could still smell the dead, as the island had just been stormed by the 2^nd Marine Division just the previous month before he arrived there, several months before the show. The Japanese commander had boasted that the island couldn’t be taken by 1,000,000 men in 100 years but 20,000 leathernecks had done it in three gruesome days. Over 5,000 Japanese and almost 3,000 Marines had been killed in  the Pacific War’s first ever assault on a fortified beachhead. The island had grown considerably more civilized before the entertainers arrived but most of the personnel there were still living in tents (Quonset huts were considered superior accommodations in the Pacific). Tarawa was not on Hope’s itinerary for the tour but apparently the show was improvised while stopping over after shows in Hawaii and while on the way to Eniwetok. There’s Hope, Jerry Colona and the pretty girl is Frances Langford. Thanks for so much!

An "Island Happy" flyboy		Langford and Hope		Colona and Hope