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by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE ROLL CALL
JEROME "J.D." SALINGER
January 1, 1919 - January 27, 2010
On Jan. 27, 2010, celebrated author and former Army counterintelligence agent Jerome “J.D.” Salinger passed away at his home in New Hampshire. An Army draftee during World War II, Salinger’s wartime experiences influenced several events and characters across his numerous works of fiction.
Born in Manhattan on Jan. 1, 1919, Jerome David Salinger grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family. At fifteen years old, he was sent to the Valley Forge Military Academy, where he learned French and German, language skills he would use frequently during World War II. While attending the academy, Salinger informed friends and schoolmates that he wished to be a writer.
Salinger graduated from the military academy in 1936. He then enrolled and dropped out of university twice in the late 1930s and briefly traveled to Europe, staying in Austria and Poland and honing his language skills. After returning to the U.S. in late 1938, he attended Columbia University where he met Story magazine editor Whit Burnett, who published Salinger’s first story in 1940.
In 1941, 22-year-old Salinger began submitting pieces to The New Yorker magazine. That December, his short story “Slight Rebellion off Madison” was accepted but then pulled from publication after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The story’s main character, Holden Caulfield, was a young man dissatisfied with the world around him, an attitude contrary to the new wartime atmosphere. The story was eventually published in 1946.
Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1942. He initially applied to attend Officer Candidate School but was rejected and instead sent to the U.S. Army Air Force (AAF) flight school in Bainbridge, Georgia, where he taught English. He would remain in the AAF until October 1943, when he was selected to join the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). According to his daughter, his transfer to the CIC “put to good use his own intelligence and the German and French he’d learned at Valley Forge.…” He attended basic instruction at the CIC staging area at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and then specialized instruction in prisoner interrogation at the Military Intelligence Training Center at nearby Camp Ritchie.
Salinger was assigned to the 4th CIC Detachment attached to the 4th Infantry Division. As part of this division, Salinger landed on Utah Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy, France. He served as an interrogator throughout the war and helped liberate the Kaufering IV concentration camp in April 1945. He remained in Europe on occupation duty during denazification, temporarily assigned to the 970th CIC Detachment and, by 1946, was discharged as a staff sergeant.
Over the next two decades, Salinger’s works appeared in numerous publications. His wartime experiences and postwar reintegration into civilian life inspired many of his stories’ themes and characters. In “For Esme—with Love and Squalor,” Salinger followed the fictional Staff Sergeant X, an Army intelligence agent, through his training for the Normandy invasion and occupation duties in postwar Europe. In his most famous work, "The Catcher in the Rye," Salinger explored themes of angst, trauma, and loss of innocence through the perspective of protagonist Holden Caulfield, feelings which permeated postwar America. The first chapters of "Catcher" were written in Europe during the war. Biographers David Shields and Shane Salerno stated:
"[The Catcher in the Rye] can best be understood as a disguised war novel. Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel … Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel."
His last publication appeared in The New Yorker in 1965 before Salinger stepped back from public life permanently. He passed away at his home in New Hampshire on Jan. 27, 2010, at the age of ninety-one.
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| Date Taken: | 01.24.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 01.24.2025 14:13 |
| Story ID: | 489630 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 59 |
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