The Ballad of Rodger Young is an American war song by Frank Loesser, written and first performed during World War II in March 1945. The ballad is an elegy for Army Private Rodger Wilton Young, who died after rushing a Japanese machine-gun nest on 31 July 1943, [1] and is largely based on the citation for Young's posthumous Medal of Honor.
Loesser wrote the Ballad of Rodger Young while enlisted as a private in the Army's Radio Production Unit, a unit staffed with top Hollywood talent and equipped with a dedicated orchestra, whose task it was to produce two radio recruiting shows a day. [2] There, Loesser was charged with editing song sheets [3] and writing songs designed to aid in recruitment. [4] How Loesser came about to write the song is not entirely clear. [5] There is some agreement among sources that the Army asked Loesser to write, in his daughter's words, "a 'proper' infantry song", but according to others the request came from E. J. Kahn Jr., an infantry public relations officer and friend of Loesser's. [6] [7]
Loesser decided to write the song about a Medal of Honor recipient, so he obtained a list of awardees and searched them for a name that would scan. [8] After dismissing many "wonderfully unwieldy melting-pot names", [7] Loesser found "the perfect WASP name" [9] at the end of the list: Rodger Young. Later, when the Army mounted a publicity campaign for the song, Loesser was asked for background material. As it would not have been politic to say that he chose Rodger Young simply because the name sounded good, Loesser agreed to publish a fictitious story about how he was told of Young's musical experience by the noted harmonica player Larry Adler. [2] [8]
The Ballad, sung by Earl Wrightson with only a guitar accompaniment, was first broadcast in early 1945 in the radio program of Meredith Willson. [10] The song was apparently considered unlikely to become commercially popular initially, as Burl Ives recorded it only on the B side of his hit single The Foggy, Foggy Dew . [11] The Ballad does not appear on any charts and there is therefore no concrete evidence for its actual popularity. [11] [12] According to World War II veteran and historian Paul Fussell, the song "proved too embarrassing for either the troops or the more intelligent home folks to take to their hearts." [13]
But several events gave the song, according to William and Nancy Young, a "much-needed boost": [12] LIFE magazine devoted pages 111 to 117 of its March 5, 1945 issue to Rodger Young and Loesser's ballad, also reproducing the sheet music, and the Army created the Combat Infantry Band specifically to play the Ballad. [12] [14] The return of Rodger Young's body to the U.S. for burial in 1949 accelerated interest in the ballad again, with "best-selling" recordings of it being made by "a host of singers" before the end of the year, [10] including Burl Ives, Nelson Eddy and John Charles Thomas. [2]
Consequently, several writers attest to the song being well-received both during and after the war. John Bush Jones writes that this "singularly moving", "simple but affecting song" [14] "had a powerful impact on Americans at the time". [11] M. Paul Holsinger notes that Wrightson's recording became one of the most requested songs of the war years. And according to then Army bandsman Frank F. Mathias, it became "the best loved theme" for American infantrymen. [15]
While Loesser's melody emulates folksong, [6] a normally pacific genre, the text of the song unapologetically glorifies military valor. About this, Loesser once commented: "You give [the folks at home] hope without facts; glory without blood. You give them a legend with the rough edges neatly trimmed." [13] Despite its overt militarism, the text has been noted for its "narrative detachment and absence of sentimentality", [11] as well as its "poignant urgency." [16]
The text plays a prominent role in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers , in which the ballad is associated with the eponymous ship and its crew. [17]
The lyrics are reproduced here in the form they were first published in Life, with minor changes in capitalization and punctuation. [18]
The Royal Welch Fusiliers (Welsh: Ffiwsilwyr Brenhinol Cymreig) was a line infantry regiment of the British Army, and part of the Prince of Wales' Division, that was founded in 1689; shortly after the Glorious Revolution. In 1702, it was designated a fusilier regiment and became the Welch Regiment of Fusiliers; the prefix "Royal" was added in 1713, then confirmed in 1714 when George I named it the Prince of Wales's Own Royal Regiment of Welsh Fusiliers. In 1751, after reforms that standardised the naming and numbering of regiments, it became the 23rd Regiment of Foot (Royal Welsh Fuzileers). In 1881, the final title of the regiment was adopted.
Frank Henry Loesser was an American songwriter who wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, among others. He won a Tony Award for Guys and Dolls and shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for How to Succeed. He also wrote songs for over 60 Hollywood films and Tin Pan Alley, many of which have become standards, and was nominated for five Academy Awards for best song, winning once for "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
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Rodger Wilton Young was a United States Army infantryman from Ohio during World War II. Born in the small town of Tiffin, Ohio, in 1932, Young suffered a sports injury in high school that led to his becoming nearly deaf and blind. Despite this, Young was able to pass the exams necessary to enter the Ohio National Guard. Soon after the United States entered World War II, Young's company was activated as part of the U.S. Army. Soon after his activation, in 1943, Young was killed on the island of New Georgia while helping his platoon withdraw from a Japanese ambush. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the United States' highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor.
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The 47th Infantry Regiment is an infantry regiment of the United States Army. Constituted in 1917 at Camp Syracuse, New York, the regiment fought in the Great War, and was later inactivated in 1921. Reactivated in 1940, the regiment fought during World War II in North Africa, Sicily, and Western Europe, then was inactivated in 1946. During the Cold War, the regiment saw multiple activations and inactivations, with service both in the Regular Army and the Army Reserve; it fought in Vietnam. Ultimately it was reactivated as a training regiment, and as of 1999, it has been assigned to Fort Moore and consists of two active battalions.
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