"for the sake of humanity"… A small town American high school history project changes lives worldwide. These are the observations of a veteran teacher- on the Power of Teaching, the importance of the study of History, and especially the lessons we must learn, and teach, on the Holocaust. Click on "Holocaust Survivors, Liberators Reunited" tab above to begin.
A girl smiles while recuperating from the concentration camp Bergen Belsen sometime following liberation in the spring of 1945.
Tomorrow in central New York I am presenting at a workshop for teachers about Project Based Learning, which I was doing 30 years ago with my students before it even had a name. My books are a result of that today, to keep the history alive. The story below is of a good example of that. Happy Mothers Day!
A Holocaust survivor recounts how she got a message to her mother that she was still alive, a beautiful anecdote that can also be found in my book ‘A Train Near Magdeburg’. There are no coincidences.
It was a beautiful, balmy morning in April 1945, when I entered Major Adams’ makeshift office in Farsleben, a small town in Germany, to offer my services as an interpreter. It made me feel good that I could show, in a small way, the gratitude I felt for the 9th American Army, which had liberated us as we were being transported from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Orders found by the Americans in the German officer’s car directed that the train was to be stopped on the bridge crossing the Elbe River at Magdeburg, then the bridge was to be blown up, also destroying the train and its cargo all at once. The deadline was noon, Friday the 13th, and at 11 A.M. we were liberated!
With the liberation had come the disquieting news that President Roosevelt had died, and while I was airing concern that the new President, Harry Truman, (a man unknown to us) could continue the war, a sergeant suddenly said, “Hey, you speak pretty good English. I am sure the major would like to have you serve as his interpreter.”
Major Adams had not been told of my coming, so he was startled when he saw me. No wonder! There stood a young woman as thin as a skeleton, dressed in a two-piece suit full of holes. The suit had been in the bottom of my rucksack for 20 months, saved for the day we might be liberated, but the rats in Bergen-Belsen must have been as hungry as we were and had found an earlier use for my suit. For nine days we had been on the train, and this was the only clean clothing I owned.
Major Adams quickly recovered from his initial shock and seemed delighted after I explained why I had come. He asked how his men had treated us, and I heaped glowing praise on the American soldiers who had shared their food so generously with the starving prisoners. Then he took me outside to meet the “notables” of the German population, and with glee I translated orders given to them by the American commander. The irony of the reversal of roles was not lost on me nor the recipients; I was now delivering orders to those who had been ordering me around for so long! The Germans were obsequious, profusely claiming they never wanted Hitler or agreed with his policies and hoped the war would soon be over.
When asked to come back the next day, I was delighted but hesitated, wondering if it would be appropriate to ask a favor. Major Adams picked up on my hesitation, so I asked him to help me contact my family in America. We had emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, but after six months I returned to Holland to join my fiancé who was in the Dutch army. My parents knew that eight months after we were married my husband was taken as a hostage and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp where he was killed in 1941, but they did not know if I was alive, not having heard from me in more than two years.
Major Adams gave me a kind glance, saying, “Give me a few handwritten lines, in English, and I will ask my parents to forward the letter to them.”
When he saw the address on the note he looked at me, his mouth open in total amazement, and then he started to laugh – his parents and my parents lived in the same apartment building in New York City!
And so it was on Mother’s Day that his mother brought to my mother my message:
“I am alive!”
Lisette Lamon was a Holocaust survivor liberated on the Train near Magdeburg on April 13, 1945, and later in life became a psychotherapist at White Plains Hospital outside of New York City, a pioneer in the treatment of trauma back in the days when the field was in its infancy.
5 – 6 MAY 1942 | THE FALL OF CORREGIDOR — AND THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER ORDEAL
Eighty-four years ago today, a young man from the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York was spending his 25th birthday under relentless Japanese bombardment — fighting for his life, and for an island that could not be saved.
The hell would come soon enough.
Joseph Minder 1941. Color restoration by Matthew Rozell.
Private Joseph Minder of the 803rd Engineer Aviation Battalion had been fighting and surviving since the Japanese attack on the Philippines in December 1941 — retreating across Luzon, digging foxholes on Bataan, watching friends die, eating whatever he could find. By the time Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, Joe had made it across the water to the fortress island of Corregidor, where the shelling never really stopped.
He kept writing it all down — on cigarette paper and scraps, hidden from his captors.
May 5, 1942:
“Plenty of fireworks to celebrate my birthday today! The Japs have been shelling and bombing continually since early this morning. All communications have been cut off from the other end of Corregidor!”
11:00 p.m.:
“For the past three hours, there hasn’t been a single break in the hundreds of shells which hit this end of the island!”
11:30 p.m.:
“INVASION!”
That night, Joe and a group of men loaded into a truck — its tires flat from shrapnel — and drove over a shell-blasted road to set up a machine gun on a small hill overlooking the beach. They held through the night. One of his close calls came when an American soldier, mistaking him for a Japanese sniper in the darkness, opened up on him with a tommy gun.
Then came daylight.
May 6, 1942 — 8:00 a.m.:
“By this time we have suffered many losses; we managed, however, to continue holding back the main force of Japs until they started landing tanks. With no guns left to combat the tanks, we were forced to surrender at noon. Then is when I received the bad news of Drake’s and Bailey’s deaths, two very close buddies of mine.”
General Jonathan Wainwright had already radioed President Roosevelt: “There is a limit of human endurance, and that point has long been passed.” The formal surrender on May 6 marked the complete fall of the Philippines — the largest surrender of American-led forces in U.S. history. Joe Minder, exhausted, scratched, and now a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army, climbed on top of a stack of empty ammunition boxes and slept until the Japanese came and stripped him of his belongings.
What followed was a descent that is almost beyond comprehension. The 92nd Garage holding pen. Starvation and disease. By July 1942 — early in his captivity — Joe weighed 115 pounds, and things would only get worse. He would endure the horrors of the hellships — crammed into the holds of unmarked vessels dodging American torpedoes and bombs — writing in his diary as he crossed the seas: “I hate to think of dodging those torpedoes and bombs on the open seas again, but God saved us on that last trip and if he answers our prayers, we will make this okay, also.”
Eventually he ended up slaving in a freezing copper mine in northern Japan, carrying 70-pound bags of ore on 16-hour days while being beaten by guards. By 1945, men were passing out on the job — walking skeletons, in their own words. Nearly forty percent of the 27,000 American slave laborers did not survive captivity.
Joe did.
August 20, 1945:
“War’s end was officially announced by interpreter, ‘Mosiki,’ at 1:15 p.m.! Still hard to believe!”
Two days later came a moment he would carry for the rest of his life. The camp tailor had worked through the night to construct an American flag — blue from a GI barracks bag, red from a Japanese comforter, white from an Australian bed sheet. Joe walked out of the barracks and saw it flying.
August 22, 1945:
“After three and a half years of starvation and brutal treatment, that beautiful symbol of freedom once more flies over our head! When I came out of the barracks and saw those beautiful colors for the first time, I felt like crying! I know now, like I never did before, what it means to be able to live in a peaceful nation like the U.S.A. with its unlimited amount of liberties and freedom.”
The B-29s dropped supplies. Joe ate his first doughnuts since May 1942. He gained 13 pounds in 19 days, packed his belongings — stuffed into old barracks bags that had come all the way from Bataan — and boarded a train for the coast. He sailed home past Corregidor on October 10.
The joyful reunion was tempered by the news that his mother had died while he was in captivity.
Joe Minder came home to North Creek, New York, married Hazel Allen in 1948, raised two sons, worked at the local garnet mine, and became a beloved ski instructor — patiently teaching the community’s young people the sport he had loved since the age of seven. He gave back through his church, his fire department, and countless civic organizations.
Despite everything he had endured — the beatings, the starvation, the years of brutal captivity — he never harbored bitterness or hatred. His ethos of patience, kindness, and compassion for others shines forth in every page of his diary, and was confirmed in the way he lived out his days. That, too, is something we cherish as Americans — the capacity to suffer greatly in freedom’s defense, and then come home and quietly build something good.
When Joseph Minder passed away in 2006 at the age of 88, the entire community grieved. The local ski bowl lodge was named in his honor.
April 30 1945 Headlines, on display in my classroom.
Eighty-one years ago today, American soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions arrived at Dachau, in southern Germany. This is a post I have shared in the past. I think it is important.
Today, if the anniversary is brought up at all, some of us might respond with a vacant stare. More might shrug and turn away. I suppose that is to be expected. But you know me. I just think that as a nation, sometimes we allow things to slip from memory at our peril.
It was real, and it happened. And it was American GIs who overran this camp and many others in the closing days of World War II.
The men of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Division arrived independently of each other, here, in southern Germany, at Dachau, on this day. A concentration camp, they were told. Their noses gave them a hint of what they were about to uncover, miles before the camp appeared in sight.
Read the headlines, above. Note the subarticle:
Boxcars of Dead at Dachau. 32,000 captives freed.
American soldiers view the bodies in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train. USHMM
And so after some resistance, into the camp they entered. Life changing events were about to unfold for the American soldier.
***
For me, it’s not about hero worship, or glorifying the liberator or any World War II soldier by placing him on a pedestal. Our time with them is now limited, but many of the liberating soldiers I know push back at this, to the point of rejecting the term, “liberator”- “It all sounds so exalted, so glamorous” said one. But they will all accept the term, “eyewitness”.
Witnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world.
So instead I think it is about honoring their experiences, their shock, the horror, the puking and the crying, the rage-and then, the American GIs recognizing that something had to be done. And they did suffer for it, for trying to do the right thing. Many tried to help by offering food to starving prisoners who just were not ready to handle it, only to see them drop dead. Or having to manhandle these emaciated victims who were tearing away at each other as food was being offered.
Some guys never got over it. How could you?
I have learned so much over the past few years from these guys, just through the way that they carried themselves and tried to cope with what they witnessed. In my World War II studies and Holocaust class, we discuss these issues at length. I’m so lucky to be able to teach it.
A few years back, I was privileged to teach a lesson to my high school seniors for NBC Learn, which was shared with other districts across the nation. Later, I stumbled upon this piece by the late author Tony Hays, who writes about his liberator father and his own encounter with the past. Thanks to the Get It Write folks; the original link is at the bottom.
***
Dachau Will Always Be With Us
by Tony Hays
This is not so much a post about writing as one about a writer’s education, about one of those experiences that molds us, shapes us into storytellers. I read yesterday the story of Joseph Corbsie, whose father, a World War II veteran, left him with a special legacy from the war, from the hideous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. I feel a particular kinship with Mr. Corbsie.
My father, Robert Hays, was the son of an alcoholic tenant farmer in rural west Tennessee. If the appellation “dirt poor” fit anyone, it fit my grandfather’s family. Daddy served in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 30s. He and my mother, who was in the woman’s equivalent of the CCC, working as a nurse’s aide at Western State Mental Hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee, met on a blind date in early 1940 and married in September of that year.
But just over a year later, Pearl Harbor happened. America was in the war. My father was among the first of those drafted in 1942. I won’t bore you with the details, but he participated in the North African, Salerno, Anzio, and southern France invasions, saved by the luck of the draw from Normandy. But they slogged through France and on to Germany. On April 29, 1945, Allied troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I don’t know whether he entered Dachau that day or the next, but that he was there within hours of the liberation is beyond dispute. A few months later, after more than three years overseas, he came home.
In later years, he would talk occasionally about the war, providing anecdotes that showed the chaos and random chance of battle. He spoke of driving through Kasserine Pass in North Africa just hours before the Germans killed thousands of Allied troops in a stunning attack. He spoke of a friend, defending his position from a foxhole, who was thought dead after an artillery shell landed right next to him. When the dust cleared, the friend was buried up to his neck in dirt, but did not have a scratch on him. He spoke often of Anzio, where he was wounded, and of the massive German air assaults on those soldiers clinging to that tiny sliver of beach along the Italian coast.
But he never spoke of Dachau.
The bodies of former prisoners are piled in the crematorium mortuary in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April 29, 1945. USHMM.
Ever.
When he died in 1981, we found a photo in his wallet. An old sepia-toned shot like others he had taken during the war, pictures that he kept in an old brown bag. But this one was different.
It showed a pile of naked bodies. Well, really more skeletons than not, with their skin stretched pitifully over their bones. On the back, as had been his habit, was typed simply “Dachau.”
I was confused. Why would he keep this one photo in his wallet all of those years? Especially a photo of a place and event that he never spoke about. It obviously had some deeper meaning for him than the other photographs. If it had been a shot of the building he was in when he was wounded (hit by an artillery shell), I could have seen that. A reminder of his closest brush with death. Yeah, I could buy that. But this macabre photo? That, I couldn’t see.
So, for the next fifteen years, I remained puzzled.
Until the fall of 1996. I was working in Poland, and I had some time off. I took an overnight bus from Katowice, Poland to Munich. It was an interesting trip all in itself. We sat in a line of buses at midnight on the Polish/German border, waiting for our turn to cross, next to a cemetery, as if in some Cold War spy movie. I remember passing Nuremburg and thinking that my father had been there at the end of the war. And then there was Munich.
I spent a day or two wandering through the streets, drinking beer in the Marienplatz. I’m a historical novelist, so the short trip out to Dachau was a no-brainer. Of course it was as much my father’s connection with it as anything else that spurred the visit. But I’m not sure that I was completely aware of that at the time.
Dachau literally sits just on the outskirts of the Munich metropolitan area. I looked at the sign on the train station with a sadness, wondering for how many people that had been one of the last things they saw. It was only later that I discovered there had been another depot for those passengers.
The Dachau Memorial is a place of deep emotion. In the camp proper, mostly all that are left are the foundations of the barracks. One has been reconstructed to give an idea of how horrible life must have been. The camp was originally intended to hold 6,000 inmates; when the Allies liberated Dachau in 1945, they found 30,000. The museum and exhibits are primarily in the old maintenance building. I looked with awe at life size photos of prisoners machine gunned, their hands torn to ribbons from the barbed wire they had tried to climb in a futile attempt at escape.
I followed the visitors (I can’t call them tourists) north to where you crossed over into the crematorium area. It was there that the full brunt of what had taken place at Dachau really hit me. A simple brick complex, it seemed so peaceful on the fall day that I stood before it. But as I read the plaques and consulted my guidebook, as I stepped through the door and actually saw the “shower” rooms where the prisoners were gassed, as I stared into the open doors of the ovens, I felt a rage unlike any I had ever known consume me.[i]
That night, I went to the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich, to wash the images of the ovens away with some beer. I hadn’t been there long when an elderly American couple sat at the table. They were from Florida, a pleasant couple. He had been a young lieutenant in the American army on the push into Munich. In fact, it had been his pleasure to liberate the Hofbrauhaus from the Germans.
Of course, I asked the question. “Were you at Dachau?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds, tears glistening in the corners of his eyes as his wife’s hand covered his and squeezed. Finally, he nodded, reached into a back pocket and pulled out his wallet.
With a flick of his wrist, a photo, just as wrinkled, just as bent, as the one my father had carried landed on the table. It wasn’t the same scene, but one just like it.
Here was my chance, the opportunity to ask the question I had never been able to ask my father. I pulled the photo from my own wallet and lay it next to his. “Why? Why have you carried it so long? To remind you of the horror of Dachau, of what had been done here?”
His face carried the faintest of smiles as he shook his head. “No, son, to remind us of the horrors that we are capable of, to remind us not to go down that road again.”
The difference was subtle, but in that moment, I learned two lessons invaluable to a writer, subtle differences are important, and when you want to know the truth, go to the source.
As I sit here now and look at that same photograph, I realize that it was my father’s legacy to me, of Dachau. Joe Corbsie’s father left him something more tangible, a reminder of the same thing for the same reason, but more forcefully stated — a tiny box of human ash from the ovens.
Dachau is still with us, and I hope the legacy left by our fathers always will be.
The late Tony Hays.
[i] Where the prisoners were gassed- “In 1942, the crematorium area was constructed next to the main camp. It included the old crematorium and the new crematorium (Barrack X) with a gas chamber. There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings. Instead, prisoners underwent “selection”; those who were judged too sick or weak to continue working were sent to the Hartheim “euthanasia” killing center near Linz, Austria. Several thousand Dachau prisoners were murdered at Hartheim. Further, the SS used the firing range and the gallows in the crematoria area as killing sites for prisoners.” Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Dachau” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau
Eighty-one years ago today, a young man sat down somewhere in central Germany and wrote a letter to his minister back home in Dayton, Ohio.
He had not written in months. He apologized for that. And then he described something that had happened four days earlier — something so shattering that he could not bring himself to write his mother about it, not yet, not that night.
“Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try.”
He tried. And the letter that emerged from First Lieutenant Charles M. “Chuck” Kincaid — spare, honest, written in the plain language of a young man still working out what he had just witnessed — has become one of the most remarkable documents in the entire archive of the Train Near Magdeburg story. I want to share it again today, on its 81st anniversary. But this time, thanks to Chuck’s daughter Judi and her husband Mark, I can finally introduce you more fully to the man behind it. And what a man he was.
Chuck was born on June 20, 1918, in Dayton, Ohio. His father ran a garage and body shop, and as a boy Chuck made himself useful hanging around the mechanics, handing out wrenches, learning how things worked. When Chuck was about ten, his father expanded and took on the Essex car dealership to challenge Ford and Chevy. Three years later, the Great Depression arrived and the business went bankrupt.
And then — though Chuck would never speak of it, not once, not to his own children — something harder than the Depression happened that effected the whole family. His father left. And so Chuck, at twelve years old, became the man of the family.
Somehow his mother kept the house. She turned one of the bedrooms into a rental, taking in two college students from the University of Dayton at ten dollars a week — she made their breakfast and did their laundry. And Chuck, by age ten, had already gotten himself a paper route. By the time he was in junior high he had a morning route and an evening route. He tells it matter-of-factly in the brief autobiography he wrote in 1986: “I can remember at one point, around 1933, that the $3 to $4 that I earned weekly put food on the table.”
He graduated from high school in 1936, in the upper ten percent of his class, and got a job at National Cash Register for ten dollars a week. When that slumped, he found work at Standard Register, and saved over four hundred dollars in two years — which he describes, with characteristic understatement, as “no mean trick those days.” He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 1938 in an engineering co-op program. He worked jobs in between semesters to pay for the next — at a factory, at a restaurant, at a plating control plant making 35 cents an hour. When the co-op program fell apart as the country converted to wartime production and U of C raised tuition to $650 a year, he transferred to Ohio State, where the tuition was twenty dollars a quarter. He took ROTC because it paid twenty dollars a month and supplied a uniform — and he needed the uniform.
He entered the Army from OSU at the age of twenty-five. He was an older soldier. He had earned everything the hard way, one semester at a time, since the age of twelve.
By April 1945, Chuck had fought from Normandy across Europe with the 30th Infantry Division. He was no stranger to danger — he had earned an Air Medal at the Battle of Mortain the previous August by doing something extraordinary: climbing into a small Piper L-4 observation plane and flying it over four attacking Panzer divisions to call in artillery adjustments. He earned a Bronze Star at St. Lô. He was, by any measure, a brave and capable young officer. And he had seen things no human being should have to see:
On April 17, 1945, Chuck Kincaid came upon the train.
That evening, he wrote to his minister:
Not one of them, Chuck wrote, could walk a mile and survive. The army improvised what it could: watered-down C-rations served as soup, force used to keep people in line because they had, as Chuck put it, “no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.” He believed that a few weeks of decent food would restore them to something resembling human dignity. He was right. But he also understood, with a clarity that comes through even in his plain soldier’s prose, that the scars on their minds would last the rest of their lives.
Chuck wrote: “No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.”
He meant it. He had earned the right to mean it. But history, which rarely moves in straight lines, had something else in mind — something Chuck Kincaid could not possibly have foreseen from that ravine in April 1945. Today, it is young Germans, three kilometers from where he stood, who have become among the most devoted keepers of this memory. Johanna Mücke, who first wrote to me as a sixteen-year-old in 2018, went on to correspond with combat medic Walter Gantz in the last year of his life, and on the 75th anniversary of the liberation — alone, during a pandemic that had cancelled the planned ceremony — walked to the site at Farsleben and placed flowers on the bare concrete foundation of the unfinished monument. Her teacher, Karin Petersen, and community members like Daniel Keweloh have continued to build and sustain that memorial presence, ensuring that what Chuck witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened. What fanaticism and fascism had done to ordinary human beings — the devastation Chuck could barely find words for — these young people have chosen to carry forward not as shame to be hidden, but as a responsibility to be honored. Chuck couldn’t have imagined it. I find, whenever I think about it, that I am still moved by it.
And then, with a gentleness that reveals everything about who he was:
“I was going to write Mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.”
He protected her. After everything she had given — keeping the house, taking in the boarders, feeding her children through the Depression while her husband was gone — he didn’t want to add to her burden. He’d write something better for her when he could find the words for that, too.
I never met Chuck Kincaid. He had passed before I found his letter, which came to me in March of 2009, brought by his son-in-law Mark, who had connected that old family document — transcribed by Chuck’s sister Helen and passed around in copies — to the photographs of the liberation on our school website. I have since had the privilege of meeting Judi and Mark, and learning more about the man her father became after the war. He went to work for the American Can Company and spent thirty-five years there, much of that time with Anheuser-Busch improving the beer can and its handling equipment. His name is on the patent for the aluminum pop-top can that most of us have been opening our entire lives without ever thinking about who made it possible. He was, as Judi says simply, “a very brilliant man.” But also a man who had been the man of his family since age twelve, who worked his way through college a semester at a time, who flew over four Panzer divisions in a tiny observation plane, who stood beside a train in a German ravine and watered down C-rations for people who had been reduced to something barely alive, and who wrote to his minister about it because he didn’t want to upset his mother.
That is who these men were. That is the America that showed up at Farsleben on April 13, 1945.
Since I first shared Chuck’s letter on this blog, the story has continued to unfold in ways I could not have imagined. The young people of Wolmirstedt, Germany — a half-hour walk from where Chuck stood that April morning — have taken up this history with a commitment that moves me deeply every time I think of it, and the tenacious Ron Chaulet working from the Netherlands, alongside so many dedicated community members, have continued to build and sustain the memorial presence at the liberation site — ensuring that what Chuck Kincaid witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened.
And then there is the film footage.
In July 2023, US Army Signal Corps footage of the train at Farsleben — filmed on April 14, 1945, just around the time Chuck’s letter was written — surfaced from the National Archives after 78 years. A German museum associate in Wolmirstedt noticed just a few seconds of it in a documentary and wondered to me if it was our train. Our film team made the inquiry to the National Archives and within weeks the full reel arrived. James Bulgin, head of public history at the Imperial War Museum in London, told us that when he first saw it he stared in silence and played it over and over. He had known this story for years through photographs — but the film restored what photographs can never quite give: motion, life, the physical reality of those people in that ravine on that April morning. Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who helped build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has described the arrival of the American soldiers as occurring at “11:59 and 59 seconds” in the lives of the prisoners. The film shows you what that means.
And in it, you can see the words chalked on the side of car number 16: THREE CHEERS FOR AMERICA. VIVE LES U.S.A.
Someone on that train wrote those words. Someone found a piece of chalk in the hours after liberation — and soon after Chuck was composing his thoughts to his minister — and scratched their gratitude onto the side of the shabby train car that had carried them to the edge of death. They had no idea anyone would see it 78 years later. Neither did Chuck, when he put pen to paper.
The letters we write, not knowing who will one day find them. The words chalked on a train car, not knowing they will be seen by the world. The boy who became the man of the family at twelve, who flew over Panzer divisions at twenty-five, who could not find adequate words for his mother but managed to find them for his minister — all of it now part of a story that refuses to end.
I am so grateful to Judi and Mark for trusting us with Chuck’s autobiography, and with the parts of his story that he himself, with characteristic modesty, left out.
He said he’d be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.
I think he was. I think he always was.
— Matthew Rozell, April 17, 2026
The full text of Chuck Kincaid’s letter is posted here. The US Army Signal Corps footage of the train liberation, recovered from the National Archives in July 2023, is viewable at my YouTube channel. The film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production and coming in 2027. To learn more about the progress of the film, visit MagdeburgTrain.com and to support, the Augusta Chiwy Foundation.
April 17, 1945
Dear Chaplain;-
Haven’t written you in many months now, its funny how a few moments are so hard to find in which to write a letter way past due; it’s much easier to keep putting it off the way I’ve done. I’ll try to make up for it in this letter.
Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try. Between 2400 and 3000 German refugees were overran by my division during our last operation; most of them were, or had been, inmates of concentration camps, their crimes the usual ones, – Jewish parentage, political differences with der Fuhrer, lack of sympathy for the SS, or just plain bad luck. Not one of these hundreds could walk one mile and survive; they had been packed on a train whose normal capacity was perhaps four or five hundred, and had been left there days without food.
Our division military government unit took charge of them, and immediately saw what a huge job it was going to be, so they sent out a call for help. Several of our officers went out to help them organize the camp they were setting up for them. The situation was extremely ticklish we soon learned; no one could smoke as it started a riot when the refugees saw the cigarette, and we couldn’t give the kiddies anything or they would have been trampled to death in the rush that would result when anything resembling food was displayed. The only nourishment they were capable of eating was soup; now the army doesn’t issue any of the Heinz’s 57 varieties, so we watered down C-ration[s] and it served quite well. It was necessary to use force to make the people stay in line in order to serve them. They had no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.
A few weeks of decent food will change them into a semblance of normal human beings; with God willing the plague of disease that was already underway, will be diverted; but I’m wondering what the affect of their ordeal they have been through, will be on their minds; most will carry scars for the rest of their days for the beatings that they were given. No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.
I was going to write mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I’m only a few dozen miles from Berlin right now, and its hard to realize the end is in sight. I’m always glad to receive your scandal sheet. You perhaps missed your calling, as your editorial abilities are quite plain.
World War II · 351st Bomb Group · B-17 · July 29, 1944
The Ripples Go Forth: A Message Across Eighty Years
By Matthew Rozell
March 30, 2026
It started, as so many things do now, with a Facebook message out of the blue. A stranger’s name in my inbox, but then a few lines that stopped me cold.
Her name was Eileen Kaynan. She had been searching for her uncle online — the way people do today, typing a name into a search bar, half-expecting nothing — when the internet handed her something extraordinary. A photograph.
The same photograph that had hung in her grandmother’s living room for as long as she could remember. Ten young men in front of a B-17 Flying Fortress. And there, labeled now in someone else’s handwriting, was her uncle: Sgt. Guido Signoretti.
I just recently bought the book The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. 2. I became aware of it when I did a Google Search of my Uncle's name. He was one of the aircrew that Clarence McGuire and John Swarts were part of. His name was Guido Signoretti. Imagine my surprise to see the same photo of the aircrew that hung in my Grandmother's living room all the while I was growing up. My Mother — Guido's sister — is 91 and I shared the information with her. We had been contacted by the Army a few years ago to provide DNA to aid in their search to identify remains. His story is one of the reasons I served in the United States Navy. We should never forget them. — Eileen Kaynan, March 19, 2026
Read that again. Ninety-one years old. The Army, still searching, still trying to identify remains. And a niece who joined the Navy — many decades later — partly because of a young man she never met, whose photograph watched over the family home like a quiet vigil.
I had to sit with that for a while.
The Photo That Haunted Two Houses
When I wrote the introduction to The Things Our Fathers Saw, Volume II, I described the crew photo that had followed me through childhood. It hung somewhere in the background of memory — ten men, young, smiling, someone’s hand having placed a small cross over the head of one of them, Clarence McGuire, my father’s cousin. Dead at twenty, on his sixth mission over Germany, July 29, 1944. Clarence’s grieving mother probably drew that cross, in our household picture, that I stared at in wonderment as a young boy and teen. Just look at the smile on him, the tallest one in the back row.
What I never knew — what I couldn’t have known — was that the very same photograph was hanging in another home, in New Jersey, watched over by another grieving mother. Guido Signoretti’s mother. Standing near in the back row to Clarence in that picture. Friends, it turns out. Close ones. And look at the smile on him!
Two families. Two homes. One photograph, reproduced and carried and kept. And for more than eight decades, no connection between them.
Until Eileen typed her uncle’s name into a search bar.
Who Was Guido Signoretti?
Born December 18, 1921, in Leonia, New Jersey. The family later moved to Dumont, NJ, around 1939. His sister — Eileen’s mother, now 91 — was born when their mother was 40 years old, meaning she was only about nine years old when Guido was killed. She has outlived all of her siblings. She is the last one left who remembers him from those years.
Eileen told me she has digitized letters Guido sent home during his training stateside, before he shipped out to England. Letters from a young man who didn’t yet know what was coming. Letters that a family kept, carefully, for eighty years.
The Army contacted the family in recent years requesting DNA — still working, still trying to bring people home.
John Swarts Remembered Him, Too
When I finally tracked down John Swarts — the original tail gunner, the one who survived because flak had burned his eyelid two days before and put him in the hospital — he sent me photographs and scrapbook pages. Among them was a picture of five young men, standing together, candid, playful. Cousin Clarence in the white tee, left arm around his pal, Maurice, the Jewish kid from Port Jervis, N.Y. (Clarence hailing from the Bronx, the only two New Yorkers on the crew).
Left to right: Clarence McGuire. Maurice Franzblau. Guido Signoretti. Fenton Strohmeyer. John Swarts.
Guido is there, right in the middle of John’s best friends. He is in the photo that opens the book. He is named, placed, remembered — by a man who by then had lived ninety-three years and still called July 29, 1944 the worst day of his life. And John is in the background. He is giving a wan smile in the photograph, almost conveying a sense of sadness to me. That’s his handwriting in the caption, this photograph being one that would haunt him the rest of his days.
When Eileen’s message arrived and I told her about John’s photograph, the caption, the handwriting — My Best 4 Friends of our crew all killed in action But me — she had no idea until she opened the first page of my book. She had never seen that image in her life, and neither had his little sister. A photo of her uncle, captioned by a grieving friend, sitting in a scrapbook in Missouri, now Florida, for eighty years. She was seeing it for the first time.
Does It Bring Closure?
I’ve been turning this question over since her message arrived.
I don’t think history works that way — not cleanly, not finally. Eileen’s 91-year-old mother studied the labeled crew photograph “pretty hard,” Eileen told me. She was nine years old when her brother died. She has spent a lifetime with a fragment of that story, knowing only what a child could piece together from siblings and letters and a photograph on a wall.
To learn, now, that her brother was one of John Swarts’ best friends, that he stood in the middle of a picture captioned with grief and love, that a historian’s cousin and her brother were crewmates, perhaps friends, killed on the same mission on the same plane — that the photograph that watched over one family’s living room was the same one that haunted another family’s memory — I don’t know that “closure” is the right word for what that does.
Maybe it’s more like “”recognition”. The feeling that someone’s life, however brief, left marks that lasted. That the people who loved him were not alone in remembering, that across eight decades and two family lines who never knew each other — that the weight of that July morning in 1944 was being carried by more people than anyone realized.
✦ ✦ ✦
I wrote in the epilogue to that book: The ripples go forth. But they also come back. I meant it about John Swarts calling me out of the blue in 2017. About my students leaving memorial pebbles at a grave, about the way history, if you let it, keeps moving through time and finding new people to touch.
I didn’t know then that the ripples were still traveling. That a woman in New Jersey would type her uncle’s name into a search bar seventy-three years after the plane came down, and find her way to a book, and find her way to me, and that I would find my way back to her — and that together we would find Guido Signoretti standing in the middle of a photograph, surrounded by friends, remembered.
Eileen wrote to me: We should never forget them.
She is right. And the extraordinary thing — the thing that still moves me, sitting here at this keyboard — is that forgetting has proven harder than anyone might have feared. These men keep finding ways to be remembered. Through books. Through search engines. Through families that kept photographs on walls. Through a daughter who joined the Navy because of an uncle she never met.
“I get a little emotional. I’m almost 93; I hope to see them all again in heaven.” — John S. Swarts, tail gunner, B-17 “Pugnacious Ball”
John Stanley Lee Swarts, passed away at the age of 97, March 27, 2022, at his home in Summerfield, Florida. (Is it a coincidence that I wrote this remembrance on the anniversary of the weekend of his passing? I think not.) The last of the crew, plagued with guilt for years, standing on the tarmac July 29, 1944, waiting for his plane and his friends to return. But the ripples return. The wonders don’t stop. They just keep going.The story is not finished.
Eileen Kaynan has generously offered to share letters and photographs of her uncle Guido Signoretti, which I hope to present here in a future post. If you have any connection to the 351st Bomb Group, 511th Squadron, or to any of the crew of B-17 #4238146, please reach out. I have tagged them all by name in this post.
Jimmy used to come to my classroom with his bride of 65+ years, Mary. She would joke with him, and us, and call him by his high school nickname, “But”. Maybe it was “Butt”, I don’t know, but they had fun playing around with each other in front of 17 and 18 year olds.
The two of them, and Danny Lawler, another First Marine Division veteran of really hard fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa, came to my room for an afternoon. Later, I came home to an email from one of my senior girls, telling me how meaningful meeting Jimmy and Mary and Danny was to her and her classmates.
Jimmy, of course was blind and hard of hearing. Mary had to yell at him, he would crack a grin under the dark glasses and flirt with her. The high school girls loved it.
You see, Jimmy Butterfield got struck not once but twice in the head by enemy fire at Okinawa on May 19, 1945. He was evacuated first to Guam, then to Hawaii and later stateside for over 18 months and as many for reconstructive surgery. It was clear early on, though, that he would never see again.
To everyone but Jimmy.
When he eventually was ‘informed’, he told us that he instructed his high school sweetheart to leave him be. Not to get attached to him, a blind man.
Well, she told us what she thought of that. They ran a small mom and pop store back in Glens Falls together until they retired.
Mary passed in the fall of 2013. Jimmy died at home the following spring. What obstacles they overcame together. Below, from Vol. 1, they recount how Jimmy learned, weeks after the battle, that he would never see again.
Jimmy: I didn’t know, until they told me there [in the hospital in Hawaii].
So here’s the climax. Every morning there was inspection with the doctors. So the doctor came around that morning. He said, ‘How are you, Jim?’
I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘You need anything?’ I said, ‘Nope, I’m doing fine.’ He says, ‘Well, are you used to the idea?’ I said, ‘Used to what idea?’
He said, ‘That you’re not going to see again.’
Well, you could hear a pin drop. I said, ‘I don’t think I heard you, Doc.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to see again.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Didn’t they tell you in Guam?’
I said, ‘No! But it’s a good thing that [first] doctor isn’t here, because I’d kill him!’ I got so mad! I couldn’t really grab the idea. I’m not going to see again? … What the hell did I know about blindness? Nothing!
I said, ‘How about operations?’
He said, ‘You’ve got nothing to work with, Jimmy.’
So a pat on the shoulder, and he just walks away. The nurse comes over and says, ‘The doctor wants you to take this pill.’ I said, ‘You know what the doctor can do with that pill?’
Mary: Don’t say it.
Jim: I’m not going to, Mary.
So I had a hard… two months, I guess. I kept mostly to myself. I wouldn’t talk to people. I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do when I got home. How was I going to tell my mother this? You know what I mean?
So they come around and said, ‘You’ve got a phone call.’ So I went in to where the phone was. They were calling me from home. They got the message, see…
This one here was on the phone [points to Mary].
I said, ‘Looks like things have changed, kiddo.’
She said, ‘No, we’ll discuss this when you get home.’ She was already bossing me around. [Laughter] But that’s how I found out, and that’s how it happened. And after a while, I just started to live with it.
There are not days—even today—I go to bed and I wish I could see. So much I miss. I miss watching a nice girl walking down the street. I miss seeing my daughter, my wife. I even miss looking at Danny. [Laughter]
Mary: But you see, I’m only seventeen to you now. That’s a good thing.
Jim: Since we got in the conversation, when I dream, and I do dream, everything is real. Everything I knew before, I see it as it was then, not today. My wife and daughter would never get old in my eyes. When I dream of Mary, she’s still seventeen years old.
Mary: But you never saw your daughter.
Jim: I dream about my daughter. Mary’s caught me doing this. We lost our daughter a year and a half ago. But I sit right up in bed and I’m trying to push away that little cloud of fog in front of her, but I can’t quite make her out.
Mary says, ‘What are you doing?’ I say, ‘Just dreaming.’
Jim Butterfield was nineteen years old at the Battle of Okinawa. In the final push at the Shuri Line that cost him his eyesight, the Marines lost over 3,000 men and the U. S. Army even more. When the island was declared secure near the end of June, in Lawler’s K/3/5, only 26 Peleliu veterans who had landed with the company had survived Okinawa. It had been the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific, with over 12,500 Americans killed or missing and nearly three times that number wounded. For the Japanese, no accurate counts are possible, but perhaps 110,000 were killed.
25 or 30 years ago, during a symposium with Pacific veterans in the Hudson Falls High School library, I overheard local Pacific veterans discussing among themselves during a break about a kid, Randy Holmes, from Hudson Falls who was killed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. I asked them more, and snuck down to the ‘vault’, and dug out the 1942 yearbook. His classmates had dedicated it to him as he had left school early to join the Navy. He was killed on the Oklahoma. Yesterday, his finally identified remains were interred at Arlington 83 years later. Trishna Begam, local Albany anchor and reporter, knew of my connections to WW2 and HF, and told me after getting a press release from the navy, and found Randy’s great niece. Then she took the time to come up to Moss St. Cemetery to interview me, and Randy’s great-niece, also in the story below, contacted me. Though my lifelong mission was to bring him back to HF to lay next to his parents, Arlington will do! I am glad he is remembered, but my students and I never forgot. No one called him Harry, by their way. He was Randy to his friends and family in our hometown of Hudson Falls. He opens and closes my first [2015] book.
Pearl Harbor sailor from Hudson Falls buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
HUDSON FALLS, N.Y. (NEWS10) — The remains of a local Navy sailor who died 82 years ago were laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery Thursday afternoon. The U.S. Navy says Harry R. Holmes was aboard the USS Oklahoma during the attack on Pearl Harbor. His local connection is still cemented in his hometown of Hudson Falls and well documented by retired high school history teacher Matthew Rozell.
At the Moss Street Cemetery in Hudson Falls, Rozell showed NEWS10 the marker that sits in place for the hometown hero who was almost lost to time.
Rozell explained, “His grave is right here. He left school early. He would’ve graduated with the class of 1942.”
The young sailor died in action at Pearl Harbor. “My big question was ‘Where is his body? Where is he?’” Rozell wondered for years.
The Navy answered that this year. According to Capt. Jeff Druade, the director of the Navy Casualty Office, Project Oklahoma was started in 2015 to identify service members lost on the Oklahoma during the attack. Three hundred eighty-eight service members were unaccounted for — among them Fireman 3rd Class Harry Randolph Holmes. On December 7, 1941, Holmes was aboard the USS Oklahoma when Japanese torpedoes hit the hull and capsized the battleship in less than 12 minutes. His remains were identified eight decades later through DNA profiling.
“He was loved. He had a mother, father who are over there behind us. And they were never able to bring their son back,” Rozell added.
Letter reveals what soldier who inspired ‘Saving Private Ryan’ left at Normandy This October, 82 years after his death, his country was determined not to forget the young sailor’s sacrifice. He was brought to his final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery.
“A young boy at 19 years old, set foot out to protect our country,” said Rachael Bubbs, a great niece to Holmes.
Bubbs was present, along with her father, to honor her great uncle’s bravery and service. Through DNA profiling and matching samples with surviving family members, the Navy tracked down Bubbs in Florida.
“He was buried in the Punch Bowl for so many years, but now he’s going to one of the greatest cemeteries,” she said. “When everything was presented to me, it was an honor to be truly connected back to that true piece of history.”
It’s history that’s been etched into the stone in his hometown. Rozell explained, “It’s an important moment in the North Country because he was one of the first killed in WWII from New York. He was only 19. He didn’t get to graduate with his classmates.”
Those classmates knew Holmes by his middle name, Randy, as Rozell would learn from members of the class of 1942. “Listening to his friends, WWII vets, all gone now, they are no longer with us — it was Randy, Randy, Randy. H Randolph Holmes.”
They helped keep his life of service alive. “I dug through the archives, found the yearbook. That’s when I saw the picture of him taken in the backyard of his family home in Hudson Falls.
It’s the only photo of Holmes from a full page from the high school yearbook. He was known as a popular student with a sterling character. Bubbs said, “He went to war for our country, to fight for it. Pearl Harbor is the start of where we are today.”
His country ensuring that Holmes is revered for the generations to follow.
Project Oklahoma has individually identified 356 crew members of the Oklahoma through DNA and matched with surviving family members.
I recently finished my 10th book in The Things Our Fathers Saw series. It covers a pretty much unknown aspect of American involvement in World War II, the China/Burma/India arena of the war.
In the writing of this series, I have been approached by people, generally children of combatants, and sometimes in slightly indignant fashion, wanting to know ‘why there is no CBI Theater’ focus in my books, as if I considered these men and women who served in that arena somehow less worthy of recognition and study. The ordinary unfortunate explanation was simply that comparatively few Americans served there, a complex and confusing pocket of activity that technically is not even classified a ‘theater’ of operations in the sense of, let’s say, the European or Pacific Theaters. It did not have a unified combat command per se; there weren’t any conventional U.S. infantry divisions slogging it out in China, Burma, or India—most of the ground fighting was done by British, Indian, and Chinese troops. Only about a percent and a half of Americans in uniform during World War II were engaged here, most in supporting roles; less than 3,000 U.S. ground troop volunteers made up legendary long-range fighting forces known as Merrill’s Marauders and others, who were pushed to the brink of extinction after just five months of combat.
Yet I found some amazing stories, from a nurse who was just one of two accompanying Claire Chennault’s famed mercenary ‘Flying Tigers’ taking out Japanese bombers over China and Burma, to the men who flew dangerous high altitude cargo missions from India to China over the Himalayas, to the Marauders on the ground and the fighter pilots who supported them from the sky. It clocked in at 362 pages of narrative oral history, and I hope it closes this gap in the knowledge of World War II; the last Marauder died just as I began writing it in January. You can get it at my direct store above in the SHOP MY BOOKS tab, or look it up at that behemoth, Amazon. The TOC is pasted below. Thanks for reading and your support.
In VOLUME 10 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series,‘Over The Hump/China, Burma, India’, we will visit with the veterans of most overlooked theater of World War II as they prepare to fly over and march through the most inhospitable terrain on the planet, from the Himalaya Mountains to the jungles and mountains of Burma, battling elite Japanese forces, sickness and tropical disease. Ride with the cargo pilots as they are buffeted by 200 MPH+ winds over some of the highest mountains in the world; join fighter pilots taking to the skies to attack Japanese bombers and other aircraft as the enemy tries to disrupt the flow of supplies from India to China. Accompany the long range American penetration forces as they go deep into the heart of enemy held territory to stem the Japanese onslaught. Gain a better understanding of why these forgotten men need to be remembered and celebrated today.
AUTHOR’S NOTE INTRODUCTION COMMUNISTS AND NATIONALISTS WORLD WAR II BEGINS IN ASIA ‘VINEGAR JOE’ STILWELL ‘WE GOT A HELL OF A BEATING’ THE AVG STATIONMASTER ‘WE WRECKED A LOT OF PLANES’ NO REPLACEMENTS CHENNAULT’S EARLY WARNING SYSTEM THE BURMA SALWEEN GORGE MISSION CONDITIONS OTHER MISSIONS ‘I WENT AROUND THE WORLD’ THE MARINES BOOZE FOR SPARE PARTS THE SLIT TRENCH ENCOUNTER HOME THE FLYING TIGERS NURSE ‘I FELT LIKE ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ A ‘FOREIGN DEVIL’ GETTING BACK TO CHINA ‘THESE KIDS, THEY’RE GOING TO FIGHT?’ SPENDING TIME WITH CHENNAULT WAR THE WARNING SYSTEM MARRIED WITH A BLACK EYE ‘WHEN THEY CAME BACK, THEY WERE MEN’ ‘THAT’S WHEN I LOST HIM’ HOME ‘WOMEN DIDN’T TALK ABOUT THOSE THINGS’ THE CARGO PILOT THE LIFELINE OF CHINA HAZARDOUS DUTY MEDALS THE COMMUNIST CHINESE THE GRAND PIANO THE CHINESE PEOPLE GOING HOME THE HOSPITAL SHIP THE RESERVES KEEPING IN TOUCH CIVILIAN LIFE THE B-24 RADIOMAN SHIPPING OUT TO INDIA MISSIONS WEIGHTLESS ANOXIA DETACHED SERVICE COMING HOME THE B-29 RADARMAN THE B-29S RADAR MISSIONS SINGAPORE BOMBING JAPAN ‘WE LOST OUR PILOT’ A SECRET WEAPON AFTER THE WAR THE ACE PILOT TRAINING INDIA FIRST KILL ‘I BELIEVE I’M GOING TO GET KILLED TOMORROW’ PURPLE HEART ‘PETE, DON’T SHOOT!’ 87 MISSIONS THE CHINESE WAR’S END JAPAN OCCUPATION DUTY THE THUNDERBOLT PILOT THE TEST CALLED UP PILOT TRAINING THE THUNDERBOLT TO THE CBI BURMA MARAUDERS’ SUPPORT THE NATIVE PEOPLE WAR’S END HOME ‘THEY WERE SOLDIERS’ THE VIRGINIA FARMBOY ‘I LIED LIKE A RUG’ FORCED MARCHES AT HIGH SPEED STILWELL’S GOALS WINNING SUPPORT OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES INSPIRED TO LEARN THE HEAVY WEAPONS COMMANDER ‘I’M NOT ASKING YOU’ ‘A MINIMUM OF 90% CASUALTIES’ LIVING CONDITIONS THE IMPERIAL MARINES FIGHT AT WALAWBUM WOUNDED HOME ‘GENERAL STILWELL JUST LAUGHED’ GOING BACK ‘YOU VOLUNTEERED FOR THIS MISSION’ ‘I’LL TAKE CARE OF IT’ REUNIONS THE ENGINEER DEPRESSION DAYS ‘YOU’LL GO WHERE I TELL YOU TO GO’ INDIA COMBAT TEAMS THE RIVER CROSSING ‘WE WERE THROUGH’ THE END OF THE WAR ‘HE BELONGS TO ME’ SOUVENIRS STILL ALIVE THE 4-F VOLUNTEER UNIT ‘GALAHAD’ ‘EVERYBODY WAS A MARAUDER’ THE NATIVES GENERAL MERRILL ‘WE HAD NO DANCING GIRLS’ GOING HOME OBSERVATIONS THE RADIO WIZARD ‘I WANTED TO DO MY PART’ THE ‘SONG OF INDIA’ MULES SHOOTING ‘THEY WOULD GO WILD’ MARCHING PAST THE HOSPITAL FOOD AND SICKNESS ON THE MOVE HOME LAST WORDS THE IMMIGRANT ‘YOU BECOME A FATALIST’ POINT MAN ‘WE DIDN’T GET DECORATED’ ‘KILLED IN ACTION’ THE CHIEF THE LEDO ROAD ‘A VERY TOUGH THING’ HOME THE COMBAT CAMERAMAN I DEPRESSION DAYS BECOMING A CAMERAMAN ‘WE NEED THE FIVE DOLLARS’ ‘THE WAR WAS ON TOP OF US’ ‘I WON WORLD WAR II’ GOING OVERSEAS THE VOLUNTEER ‘YOU HAVE TO STAY HOME AND FARM’ ‘YOU’RE THE SON OF A GUN THAT WENT AWOL’ IN THE BRIG ‘MY GOD, A TORPEDO!” PICKING UP THE DEAD ‘ONE DAY THE SALVATION CAME’ ‘MY SQUAD LEADER WAS A CONVICTED FELON’ ‘POOREST GODDAM EXCUSE FOR A MULE SKINNER’ THE LETTER ‘WE CAN DISAPPEAR IN THE JUNGLE’ COMBAT WOUNDED ‘I CAN SAVE THAT LEG’ THE NISEI INTERPRETER ‘THE MEN WHO ALTERED MY LIFE’ RECONNECTING WITH TRUCK ‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT A HERO IS’ THE COMBAT CAMERAMAN II GETTING TO INDIA GETTING TO STILWELL’S HEADQUARTERS THE CHINESE NEWSREEL WONG GOING AWOL TRAVERSING THE MOUNTAINS ‘I’M NO DAMNED VOLUNTEER’ ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THIS OUTFIT’ HIT BY A C-47 AIR DROP ‘I HAD NEVER CRIED IN MY LIFE’ “YOU’RE THE GUY I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR’ THE LAST WORD
Just finished my 10th book in the Things Our Fathers Saw series, on the CBI theater of the war. I wrote this at the end, thinking about my time with the veterans of World War II.
“It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.”
—Remarks By General Douglas MacArthur, Surrender Ceremony Ending The War With Japan And World War II, September 2, 1945
“Can’t we just let go of this war? My father spent four years in, [and] my uncles four years; they NEVER talked about it! Long dead soldiers, long ago war!”
-American commenter on one of the author’s social media posts, highlighting the series, The Things Our Fathers Saw, September 2024
Was it really that long ago?
Seventy-nine years ago last month, Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey’s flagship USS Missouri was in Tokyo Bay awaiting the arrival of the Japanese delegation with General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz aboard, positioned near the spot where Commodore Matthew C. Perry had anchored his ‘Black Ships’ on his first visit to Japan in 1853. On display aboard the battleship that morning was the flag that flew on December 7, 1941, over Hickam Field at Pearl Harbor, and the 31-starred Old Glory standard of Perry’s flagship from nearly a century before, now accompanied by hundreds of American warships. The Japanese delegation was escorted promptly aboard at 9:00 a.m., and at MacArthur’s invitation, signed the terms of surrender. As if on cue, four hundred gleaming B-29 bombers roared slowly by in the skies overhead, escorted by fifteen hundred fighters.[i]
Surrender ceremonies, 2,000 plane flyover, USS MISSOURI left foreground. National Archives. Public domain.
In the United States and Europe, it was six years to the day that the bloodiest conflict in human history had begun; after those six years of savage fighting, the devastation was unprecedented and incalculable. Between sixty and eighty-five million people—the exact figure will never be known—would be dead. Overseas, the victors would be forced to deal with rubble-choked cities and tens of millions of people on the move, their every step dogged with desperation, famine, and moral confusion. American servicemen, battle-hardened but weary, would be forced to deal with the collapse of civilization and brutally confronted with the evidence of industrial-scale genocide. Old empires were torn asunder, new ones were on the ascent. The Chinese Communists were victorious in China before the end of the decade; the British and other colonial powers began shedding their colonies in South Asia and elsewhere. In 1952, American occupation ended, lasting nearly twice as long as the war with America itself.
Now, the ‘American Century’ was well underway. American power and leadership of the free world was unparalleled and unprecedented. The Marshall Plan literally saved Europe. Enemies became allies. Former allies became adversaries. The Atomic Age began. And the United States of America rebuilt, reconstructed, and remodeled Japan. Of course, this ‘American Century’ was not free from hubris, error, and tragic mistakes, but all of this is part of the legacy that shapes us to this day.
In regards to the end of World War II, I can recall, in the early 1980s as a young history teacher in training, observing a veteran teacher describing the end of the war with Japan by making an analogy to his eighth graders:
‘It’s like two brothers who had a fight. The winner picks up the loser, dusts him off, and they go on as brothers and friends.’
Overlooked, perhaps, were the eight million Chinese civilians and millions of others in Asia slaughtered by Japanese troops in their imperial lust for conquest, the Allied prisoners of war brutalized and worked to death or executed in slave labor camps, the Allied seamen shot while foundering in the water at the explicit orders of the Japanese Imperial Navy, to say nothing of the deceitfulness of Pearl Harbor. I’m sure my twenty minutes observing the teacher in action left out what he hopefully covered in class; he must have known World War II veterans, just as I did. And these are things I suppose you learn later in life, as I did—but only because I wanted to know as much as I could learn. I was born sixteen years after the killing stopped, but ripples of that war have never ended.
If you are a reader of this series, you know how I got our veterans involved once I found my footing in my own classroom. My fascination with World War II began with the comic books of my 1970s pre-teen days, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company bursting off the pages in the bedroom I shared with my younger brothers at 2 Main Street. As a newly minted college grad a decade later, I was drawn to the spectacle of our veterans returning to the beaches of Normandy on the black-and-white TV in my apartment for the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. I was reading the only oral history compilation I was aware of, Studs Terkel’s euphemistically titled 1984 release, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, over and over. I studied that book, planting the seed for my own debut in the classroom. And in retrospect, I think I reached out to my students asking them if they knew anyone in World War II, yes, as a way to engage them in the lessons at hand, but also to satisfy my own selfish curiosity: just what ‘resources’—really national treasures—did we have in our own backyard, surrounding our high school? I was going to find out. Man, was I going to find out!
Of course they ‘never talked’ about it! Why would they bring ‘The War’ up with their wives, their sons, their daughters? And frankly, most of the civilians they returned home to and surrounded themselves with at work, in the community, and even in their own families, weren’t really all that interested in hearing about it. It was time to get on with life.
But then those guys headed back to the Normandy beachheads, now approaching retirement age, most in their early sixties, if that (about my age right now) …
Somebody was now listening! Somebody gave a damn! And maybe the old soldier could talk about that kid who was shot and lingered on for a while in the far-off jungles of Burma, the country boy far from home who was proud to be a soldier, the eighteen-year-old who wondered now if he was going to die. The combat photographer David Quaid spoke to his interviewers until he was too exhausted to go on. But somebody was interested, and he had things to say—things to get off his chest—before he would no longer be able to say them; like David, a lot of the guys I knew opened up like a pressurized firehose after all those years of silence. It was frankly cathartic, and maybe now they could ‘let go of this war.’
Should we?
I didn’t respond to the commenter in the thread, but another person added,
“I understand, but if there is no conversation, nothing gets shared—nothing gets learned! May your family all rest in peace!”
I know in my heart that opening up to others, even complete strangers, but especially to the young, finally brought our veterans peace.
[i] Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York, W. W. Norton & Company. 1999. P. 43.
Teaching History Matters 