Honoring My Father’s WWII Service Through Poetry

By Jane McKinley

Jane McKinley is a prize-winning poet and Baroque oboist. Her debut poetry collection Vanitas received the 2011 Walt McDonal First-Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Five Points and Tar River Poetry among others. Mudman, her upcoming poetry collection, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. The title recognizes her father’s service in Italy during WWII. To find out about Jane’s work go to janemckinley.com. Two poems from her Mudman collection follow this essay.

As a small child, I was aware my father fought in World War II. His musty wool uniform hung in the attic where we played. His dark green helmet sat on a shelf nearby. I remember standing on a chair in the dining room to look at the lithograph that hung on the wall. It showed four soldiers in a trench. Two of them held guns. One surveyed the distant hills where the enemy was. The fourth was on a field telephone. That fourth soldier was my father although if someone hadn’t told me, I never would have recognized him.

Looking back, I wonder if he ever glanced at the lithograph while we were eating dinner. Was he haunted by it? The picture felt worlds away from our family gathered around the table. I was the fourth of six kids, born ten years after the war’s end. In our small town in Iowa, where my father managed the family farms, we were surrounded by cornfields and soybeans. No mountains rose up in the distance.

Eventually I learned the lithograph was drawn by Austrian-born artist Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper. Like my father, he served in the 34th Infantry Division during the Italian Campaign and in North Africa. A one-time combat artist, von Ripper trailed my father’s platoon, making sketches. After the war he turned them into lithographs. In 1946, he sent my father the one that hung in our dining room.

Other details hinted at my father’s time in the Army, though, as a child, I didn’t always make the connection. Whenever we took the bus to go swimming, he’d roll our suits into our towels—they never came undone. I think of the hundreds of times he rolled up his pup tent and blankets in mud and snow in Italy, his feet numb with frostbite. He never joined us at the public pool. According to my mother, he felt self-conscious about his feet, which had suffered three bouts of trench foot. How lucky he was not to lose them.

With one exception, my father never talked about the war. I was eleven or twelve when he shared a seemingly harmless anecdote from his time as a German prisoner in North Africa. The guards grew suspicious when he asked for “ein Stück Brot, bitte” (a piece of bread, please) and thought he was fluent in German. That amused my father. It wasn’t until decades later that I learned the full story from my uncle. While in Tunisia, my father’s company was sent on a mission at 3 a.m. They lost their way and ended up in No Man’s Land, caught in the crossfire. The Germans rounded them up like cattle, forced them to march for two days to Tunis, then locked them up in an old French fort. The Allies nearly bombed it. In leaving that part out, I believe my father was shielding us from the horrors of war.

In high school, when we studied World War II, I asked him about his experience. Instead of saying anything, he drew a bald-headed man with a big nose, peeking over a fence. He added the caption: “Kilroy was here.”

Today we would call it a meme. During the war it was drawn by American GIs to boost morale and show they were everywhere. Some say it originated with James J. Kilroy, a shipyard inspector who signed his finished work with it. The drawing went viral, as they say now, appearing wherever American GIs had been, from ship holds and bathrooms to missiles. When I asked more about the war, he told me to look it up in the encyclopedia.

In 1976 my father died of heart-related issues. He was only 56. I was a college junior studying oboe performance and music history. By the time I arrived at the hospital he had already lost consciousness, so I never had a chance to say good-bye. My mother told me he’d said, “Is that Jane I hear playing?” He was buried on my twenty-first birthday with full military honors, including a 21-gun salute. He loved the sound of the oboe and had always encouraged my playing. Without him, I felt as if I’d lost my sense of direction.

When my mother died in 1991, I became the keeper of my father’s war letters. There were 101 of them in an old shoebox.

I put them away and didn’t think of them again until I saw Saving Private Ryan in 1998. It was dusk when we exited the theater. I kept wanting to duck behind cars in the parking lot for cover. I stayed up half the night reading his war letters, frustrated they were so heavily censored. On August 6, 1944, he wrote, “I cannot write the truth of what I’m doing or what I’m going to do. If we have hard-boiled eggs for breakfast that would be classified as military information.” For the first time, in a visceral way, I began to grasp what my father had endured.

In the years that followed, my deepening understanding of what my father went through coincided with my emergence as a poet. In 2011, the night before I mailed off the manuscript of my first book of poems to a contest, my father came to me in a dream, covered with mud, “like a soul from a bog in Dante’s Inferno.” At the end of the dream, he smiled at me, “his eyes burning blue like stars.” My manuscript won the top prize and half a year later that dream became the poem, “Mudman,” the title of my second poetry collection.

By now, I’d read the letters several times and was immersed in Rick Atkinson’s excellent volumes, An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, which covered the North African and Italian campaigns. I made timelines to put the letters in context. In 2016, my siblings went to Italy to retrace my father’s steps. Since I couldn’t join them, my husband and I scheduled a trip for the fall of 2020 then the pandemic hit. The lockdown left me more time to focus on writing. That June I wrote a poem based on von Ripper’s lithograph. The next year I revised a sonnet I’d written about my father being captured in the desert. By combing through his letters, I created “found” poems, taking lines from three of his letters and arranging them as poems.

I completed Mudman, my second book of poetry in 2022. Named in memory of my father, it was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. When writing these poems, I felt as if I were speaking to my father, finally having the conversation we were never able to have.

My husband and I traveled to Italy in 2024. Before we left, we planned our itinerary by mapping out the places my father had been, with the help of my brother Bill. Once we were there, the poems I’d written about my father kept going through my head.

We traveled to Anzio Beach where so many Allied soldiers died and then to Venafro. On the way, we stopped at the Abbey of Montecassino, a Benedictine monastery founded in the 6th century.

From the monastery we had a 270° view of the surrounding mountains and countryside. Not far to the south lay the Gari River, called “Rapido” by the Allies, the site of a disastrous battle in January 1944 with huge numbers of casualties. My father was crossing it when the makeshift bridge blew up, throwing everyone into the icy water with their heavy packs. My father thought it was the end. Many drowned. He survived because he was such a strong swimmer.

We also visited the tiny village of Pantano—a few houses, really—at 600m elevation. From there it was a steep hike to the peak at 1200m. The only signs of life were two dogs and two cats. We went into an abandoned house that had served as the command post for the battle.

My father spent “four days in Hell” on this mountain in 1943, ascending inch by inch while being bombarded with bullets and shells by Germans entrenched near the crest. Clear weather quickly changed to fog and drenching rain and snow, making the trails and mountaintop a slimy mire. The soldiers hadn’t even been issued winter uniforms. Because of the conditions, it was difficult to retrieve the wounded. The dead were left in place, and no rations or water were brought in. Many had “trench foot so severe, they could hardly walk. The feet of hundreds had to be amputated.” It was perhaps the fiercest battle of the bitter Italian campaign.

What struck me most throughout the trip was how lucky my father had been to survive and, by extension, how lucky I am to exist at all, to give voice to my father’s experience. It could have been otherwise.

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In the Trenches (Italy, 1944)

By Jane McKinley

After a lithograph by the Austrian artist, Baron R. C. von Ripper, 1946
“Our positions along the Mussolini Canal in Anzio were dug into the bank of the canal;
from there we looked over the flat Pontine marshes toward the enemy on the hills.”

In a dugout shored up with sandbags,
four soldiers prepare for another onslaught.
One peers through binoculars, the second
talks on a phone. The third reloads his rifle
while the fourth sits at ease, a semi-automatic
between his knees. No sound escapes, but
two apparitions rise from the earth. Shellfire.
Nearby, a row of tall, spindly trees, their leaves
battered. In the middle ground—marsh,
cypresses, old stone farmhouses lying in ruins.
Beyond, a small village is nestled in the hills
where the enemy waits in its lairs. Unseen.

When I was a child, this lithograph hung
in the dining room. I would climb on a chair
to stare at the man on the phone—my father,
his thin face so furrowed I didn’t know him.
The artist, a walleyed, “one-man army”
known as Rip, had trailed dad’s platoon
from Salerno up the boot to capture Rome.
No stranger to war, Rip had joined the French
Foreign Legion, fought fascists in Spain,
was keen on having a go at the Nazis.
In ’33, after torturing him for his satirical
cartoons, they offered him a cigarette,
stuffed his mouth with a handful of lit ones,
then cooled the burn with a splash of urine.

After the war, working from sketches,
Rip transferred his drawings to limestone

with a greasy crayon, creating lithographs.
He sent one to my father. I try to imagine
my father’s reaction when it arrived. Did he flash
back to Anzio Beach, those hellish weeks
without a rock to hide behind? The carnage?
Around the time the sketch was made, he wrote:
I was on my 11^th major battle when I went
to the hospital near the city X. It was rough going.
Hunger, exhaustion, his third bout of trench
foot. My hair has stood on end so much, it snaps
to attention each time a shell comes. He kept
his secret—three Bronze Stars. We found out
by chance some thirty years after he died.
Before the debacle of Anzio, he wrote: Yes,
we may have some fame, but the price is terribly high,
and we will be old men when we get back.