World War II

World War II is a hinge in the history of the Breitsprecher-Duke family and its timber business: it brings Conrad into military service, returns him from the South Pacific changed, and leaves the company dependent on plywood as its products and markets shift. The war also renews the novel’s contrast between human cycles of destruction and the slower work of growing and maintaining forests.

War and a Generational Pattern

In 1939, the approaching conflict appears to older people less as an entirely new crisis than as a recurrence. They see another war emerging after enough time has passed to raise a new generation of young men, and the narration identifies a roughly twenty-five-year rhythm of conflict and human expansion followed by devastation. That pattern makes the war part of the book’s longer account of boom and bust rather than an isolated historical backdrop.

The Breitsprechers and Dukes have escaped military service for generations, but Conrad is called up. Unlike Raphael and Claude, who know the people able to help them, Conrad has connections only to Al McErlane and some forestry professors. His work raising nursery seedlings is not considered a vital agricultural occupation, leaving him without an exemption through that line of work.

Conrad’s Service and Return

Conrad returns from the South Pacific in 1945 with his face, body, thoughts, ideas, and beliefs changed. The account does not detail his wartime experiences, but it makes the alteration plain through the contrast between the person who left and the man who comes back.

On returning, he shakes Al McErlane’s hand and walks again through the seedling greenhouses. The young pines, in ordered rows, now seem to him more beautiful than anything he has seen. The moment binds wartime change to the nursery’s patient cultivation: after military service, the seedlings register not simply as a business undertaking but as a renewed object of attention.

The Company During and After the War

Breitsprecher-Duke’s survival depends on plywood and fiberboard. During the war the company experiments with interior and exterior hardboard siding, but two years of moisture problems defeat the product. One unsuccessful recipe uses seaweed and corn-husk pulp; the firm abandons the siding and focuses instead on Brite-Ply, made from culls and timber salvaged after forest fires.

After the war, the company catches the tail end of the building boom. Larger competitors using cheaper Canadian wood then push it into decline. For a time, the appearance of a productive, energetic wood-products company persists through James Bardawulf Breitsprecher and Andrew Harkiss, who pose for photographs beside logs or the rotary peeler. The narration compares that public image to plywood’s surface layer: an impressive exterior concealing weaker material beneath it.

Historical and Environmental Significance

The war years place the family’s business within a longer chain in which forests become industrial products, from timber and paper to plywood made with culls and fire salvage. Earlier in the company’s history, its leaders had argued for preserving forestland because future timber and paper wealth would depend on its continuation. The wartime experiments and postwar decline show that such long-range confidence does not remove the pressures of product failure or cheaper competition.

Conrad’s return to the greenhouses offers a quieter counterpoint to the company’s market story. The business measures survival through products and sales, while the seedlings embody growth on a timescale beyond the wartime emergency. World War II therefore marks both a family rupture and a transition in the company’s fortunes: a generation is sent to war, a survivor returns changed, and an industrial enterprise endures by adapting before entering decline.