Year 1944

 

__________

 

“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

__________

Going in for the landing: D-Day, June 6.

 

 

January 7: Norman Mailer and Beatrice Silverman are married (a union which will last eight years – the first of six marriages for Norman). The couple met at a Boston Symphony concert during Norman’s junior year in college. “Bea,” as she was known, 

was argumentative, a passionate lefty, and a proto-feminist; she was also profane and, in the appreciative slang of the day, “earthy.” They carried on in the mattressed trunk of a Chevy given to Mailer by his uncle, and, at Dunster, they became known for their lovemaking in Mailer’s dorm room. Bea would talk dirty in front of his friends; they were both showing off. They got married in secret…His draft notice arrived a week later.

*

January 11: In his State of the Union Address, FDR calls for a “second Bill of Rights.” His speech includes this passage:

 

We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men”. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

 

In our day certain economic truths have become accepted as self-evident, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed.

 

Among these are:

 

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

 

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

 

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

 

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

 

The right of every family to a decent home;

 

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

 

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident an unemployment;

 

The right to a good education.

 

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

 

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world. 

 

* 

February: Lt. Charles E. McGee of the 302^nd Fighter Squadron, of the 332^nd Fighter Group lands in Italy. His unit, made up entirely of African American pilots, crews and mechanics, will become known as the Tuskegee Airmen, or the “Red Tails,” a nickname they picked up for the red-painted markings on their aircraft. 

McGee will go on to fly 409 combat missions, during the course of three wars, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Flying the 440 m.p.h. P-51 for most of his missions in 1944 and 1945, he shot down at least one German fighter plane (his obituary isn’t clear), and escorted bombers over enemy territory dozens of times, often flying for six hours, round-trip. His plane carried the tag, “Kitten,” in honor of his wife. The Tuskegee men did excellent service – as has been often mentioned in recent years. 

As his obituary notes: 

Of the 992 Black pilots trained at Tuskegee during the war, 355 were deployed overseas, 84 were killed in action, a dozen died on training and noncombat missions, and 32 were taken prisoner after being shot down.

 

The Tuskegee Airmen’s record of protecting bombers was excellent, losing only 27 bombers on seven of its 179 escort missions, compared to an average of 46 bomber losses among all other 15th Air Force P-51 escort groups. The Tuskegee Airmen also destroyed 112 enemy aircraft in the air and 150 on the ground, as well as 600 rail cars, 350 trucks and other vehicles, and 40 boats and barges.

 

Captain McGee flew more than 130 combat missions in World War II. He returned to the United States in December 1944 to become an instructor for another unit of Tuskegee Airmen, the 477th Bomb Group, flying B-25 Mitchell bombers out of stateside bases. That group never got into the war. Mr. McGee served at Tuskegee Field until 1946, when the base was closed.

 

* 

March: Norman Mailer, newly married, 21 years of age, standing five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing 135 pounds, is inducted into the army. He is sent to Fort Bragg for training, and lands “in the great working-class Gentile world,” which he had never seen before, growing up a Jew in Brooklyn. 

Early the next year, Mailer, a cog in a mighty American invasion force, lands on the island of Luzon, He’s assigned to the 112th Cavalry Regiment, an outfit out of Texas. The regiment has already been in combat in the Pacific for more than a year and suffered heavy casualties. Mailer has much to learn. 

As a writer for The New Yorker explains, 

Mailer described those who remained as a little crazy, and physically messed up – some with open ulcers from jungle rot. The Texans were joined by men from other parts of the country, some of them bar fighters and casual anti-Semites (not by theory but by habit). “I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit,” he later said.

 

What Mailer did in the war was not heroic. At first, working at headquarters on Luzon, he typed reports, laid wire, built a shower for officers. Humiliated and bored, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He went on twenty-five patrols, many of them fifteen miles long, and he finally saw some combat: nothing much, as he admitted, but he knew what it was like to climb up a damp, rocky hill in the heat while burdened with a rifle, ammunition, grenades, two canteens, a steel helmet – perhaps forty pounds in all. His real mission was to see the worst and make an account of it. He wrote long letters to Bea (who had joined the Waves), some of which were detailed and harrowing. He was not just creating the book but creating himself as a man. In February, 1945, he entered a Japanese-held town that the Americans had overwhelmed with artillery and tanks. A letter to Bea chronicled what he saw:

 

Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. . . .

 

After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration – the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel – that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick handmaiden to time.

 

His observations and experiences, of course, were the framework around which he created his first and most famous novel, The Naked and the Dead. In real life, Mailer considered most of the officers  he had met to be “self-important stiffs,” as a writer for The New Yorker put it. Sgt. Croft, in the novel, modeled after some soldier Mailer knew, is a man “who could not have said…where his hands ended and the machine gun began.” The book, like the reality Mailer and his comrades experienced, is full of “harsh eventless days.” Sometimes, officers order the men to go out on idiotic missions – as in the book. In one scene, troops climbing a high mountain, through thick jungle, hope to capture a Japanese position by surprise. They are routed, however, when the officer in charge stumbles into a hornets’ nest, and they are forced to throw off their packs, toss aside their rifles, and run back down the mountain like children. 

In another scene, Mailer captures the pure misery and exhaustion men nearing the end of their limits. Soldiers carrying wounded buddies on stretchers strain every muscle: 

Through the afternoon the litter-bearers continued on their march. About two o’clock it began to rain, and the ground quickly became muddy. The rain at first was a relief; they welcomed it on their blazing flesh, wriggled their toes in the slosh that permeated their boots. The wetness of their clothing was pleasurable. They enjoyed being cold for a few minutes. But as the rain continued the ground became too soft, and their uniforms cleaved uncomfortably to their bodies. Their feet began to slip in the mud, their shoes became weighted with muck and stuck in the ground with each step. They were too fagged to notice the difference immediately, their bodies had quickly resumed the stupor of the march, but by half an hour they had slowed down almost to a halt. Their legs had lost almost all puissance; for minutes they would stand virtually in place, unable to co-ordinate their thighs and feet to move forward. . . . The sun came out again, inflamed the wet kunai grass and dried the earth whose moisture rose in sluggish clouds of mist. The men gasped, took deep useless breaths of the leaden wet air, and shambled forward grunting and sobbing, their arms slowly and inevitably bending toward the ground.                   

 

On a bad day, as the writer in The New Yorker notes, the men Mailer served with came to know “every wretchedness of skin, lungs, arms, legs, bowels, [and] kidneys.” The Naked and the Dead is “at times very moving; the men carrying the stretcher reach a state, beyond exhaustion, in which ‘they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence,’ and meet it with acceptance.” 

Mailer, himself, was relieved to have met the same kind of test – and passed it – despite all the horrors.

 

*

 

“Two months of ducking and dodging and hiding.”

 

June 6: Henry Parham, a private in the 320^th Barrage Balloon Battalion, and his unit come ashore on the Normandy beaches. Parham landed at Omaha Beach, other members of his unit coming in on Utah Beach. “We landed in water up to our necks,” Parham later explained. “Once we got there we were walking over dead Germans and Americans on the beach. Bullets were falling all around us.” 

The unit, 2,000 African American men will remain there for two months, dodging German sniper fire and air attacks. 

As The New York Times explains, 

His battalion hoisted large balloons to heights of up to 2,000 feet over Omaha and Utah beaches between D-Day and August 1944, carrying out the mission during the night hours so the balloons would not be spotted by incoming German planes. The balloons were tethered to the ground by cables fitted with small packets of explosive charges. German planes that became entangled in them were likely to be severely damaged or downed.

 

“It was two months of ducking and dodging and hiding,” he explained. “I was fortunate that I didn’t get hit. I managed to survive with God’s strength and help.” 

In 2019, in an interview on CNN, Parham said simply, “I prayed to the Good Lord to save me. I did my duty. I did what I was supposed to do as an American.” Parham, the son of a sharecropper, was drafted in 1943, and lived a long life, dying at age 99, in the summer of 2021. 

He had enjoyed 77 years of extra life, where so many others had been killed on those beaches. 

African American soldiers in an artillery unit.

* 

June 6: The newspaper correspondent Martha Gellhorn manages to talk her way onto a hospital ship headed for Normandy, and come ashore at Omaha Beach, late in the evening. First, she had to convince a policeman she had permission to interview nurses aboard the ship – one of nine that would be used after troops hit the shore. Then she locked herself inside a bathroom until she heard the clanking of anchor being raised, and knew the ship could not be turned back. 

Her then-husband, Ernest Hemingway, was not thrilled to have her so far away, once complaining, “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?” 

Gellhorn could write, and in dispatches home, she talked about the 422 beds aboard the vessel, all with clean blankets, “and a bright, clean, well-equipped operating room, never before used.” There were great cans of “Whole Blood” stored on the decks, supplies of plasma and drugs, and “bales of bandages.” Six nurses aboard, “fine girls,” Gellhorn called them, from Texas, Michigan, California, and Wisconsin, all about to learn about the horrific business of war. The young women had been working day and night to get the ship ready; but now in the hours before the storm broke, she watched two of the tired nurses paint their fingernails “with bright red varnish” and talk about lost foot lockers, filled with comfortable shoes and “unvital, probably never-to-be-used evening dresses.” 

Then we saw the coast of France, and, as we closed in, there was one LCT [Landing Craft Transport] near us with washing hung up on a line, and between the loud explosions of mines being detonated on the beach dance music could be heard coming from its radio. There were barrage balloons, always looking like comic toy elephants, bouncing in the high wind above the mast ships, and you could hear invisible planes flying behind the grey ceiling of cloud. Troops were unloading from big ships to heavy barges or to light craft, and on the shore, moving up brown roads that scarred the hillside, our tanks clanked 

…first it seemed incredible; there could not be so many ships in the world. Then it seemed incredible as a feat of planning; if there were so many ships, what genius it required to get them here. After the first shock of wonder and admiration, one began to look around and see separate details…a floating city of huge vessels anchored before the green cliffs of Normandy. Occasionally you would see a gun flash or perhaps only hear a distant roar, as naval guns fired [over those cliffs]…Small craft beetled around in a curiously jolly way. It looked like a lot of fun to race from shore to ships in snub-nosed boats beating up the spray. It was no fun at all, considering the mines and obstacles that remained in the water, the sunken tanks with only their radio antennae showing above water, the drowned bodies that still floated past. 

 

The first wounded soldier is brought aboard – a German, by chance, “closer to being a child than a man, dead-white and seemingly dying.” Other  ships “were as thick around us as cars in a parking lot.” Then six motorized launches begin bringing back loads of bloodied men.

The stretcher-bearers, who were part of the American medical personnel, now started on their long backbreaking job. By the end of that trip, their hands were padded with blisters and they were practically hospital cases themselves, for the wounded had to be got from the shore into our own water ambulances or into other craft, raised over the side, and then transported down the winding stairs of this converted pleasure ship to the wards. The ship’s crew became volunteer stretcher-bearers, instantly.

 

…

 

Belowstairs, for three decks the inside of the ship was a vast ward with double tiers of bunks. The routine of the ship ran marvelously, though four doctors, six nurses and about fourteen medical orderlies had to be great people to care for four hundred wounded men. From two o’clock one afternoon, until the ship docked in England again the next evening at seven, none of the medical personnel stopped work. And besides plasma and blood transfusions, re-dressing of wounds, examinations, administering of sedatives or opiates or oxygen and all the rest, operations were performed all night long. Only one soldier died on that ship and he had come aboard as a hopeless case.

 

It will be hard to tell you of the wounded, there were so many of them. There was no time to talk; there was too much else to do. They had to be fed, as most of them had not eaten for two days; their shoes had to be cut off; they needed to help to get out of their jackets; they wanted water; the nurses and orderlies, working like demons, had to be found and called quickly to a bunk where a man suddenly and desperately needed attention; plasma bottles must be watched; cigarettes had to be lighted and held for those who could not use their hands; it seemed to take hours to pour hot coffee, from the spout of the teapot, into a mouth that just showed through bandages.

 

But the wounded talked among themselves, and as time went on you got to know them, by their faces and their wounds, not by their names. They were a magnificent enduring bunch of men. Men smiled who were in such pain that all they really can have wanted to do was turn their heads away and cry, and men made jokes when they needed their strength just to survive.

 

All of them looked after one another, saying, “Give that boy a drink of water,” or “Miss, see that Ranger over there; he’s in bad shape. Could you go to him?”

 

All through the ship, men were asking after other men by name, anxiously, wondering if they were on board and how they were doing.

 

On a deck, in a bunk by the wall, lay a very young lieutenant. He had a bad chest wound, his face was white, and he laid too still. Suddenly he raised himself on his elbow and looked straight ahead of him, as if he did not know where he was. He had a gentle oval face and wide blue eyes and his eyes were full of horror and he did not speak. He had been wounded the first day, had lain out in a field for two days and then crawled back to our lines, sniped at by the Germans. He realized now that a German, badly wounded also in the chest, shoulder and legs, lay in the bunk behind him. The gentle-faced boy said very softly, because it was hard to speak, “I’d kill him if I could move.” After that he did not speak for a long time; he was given oxygen and later operated on, so that he could breathe.

 

The man behind him was a nineteen-year-old Austrian. He had fought for a year in Russia and half a year in France; he had been home for six days during this time. I thought he would die when he first came on board but he got better. In the early morning hours he asked whether wounded prisoners were exchanged, would he ever get home again.

I told him that I did not know about these arrangements, but he had nothing to fear, as he could see. I was not trying to be kind, but only trying to be as decent as the nurses and doctors were. The Austrian said, “Yes, yes.” Then he added, “So many men, all wounded, want to get home. Why have we ever fought one another?” Perhaps because he came from a gentler race, his eyes filled up with tears.

There was an American soldier on that same deck with a head wound so horrible that he was not moved. Nothing could be done for him, and anything, any touch, would have made him worse. The next morning he was drinking coffee. His eyes looked very dark and strange, as if he had been a long way away, so far away that he almost could not get back. His face was set in lines of weariness and pain, but when asked how he felt, he said he was OK. He was never to say anything more; he asked for nothing and made no complaint.

When night came, the water ambulances were still churning in to the beach looking for wounded. Someone on an LCT had shouted out that there were maybe a hundred scattered along there somewhere. It was essential to try to get them aboard before the nightly air raid and before the dangerous dark cold could get into their hurt bodies.

Going in to shore, unable to see, and not knowing this tricky strip of water, was slow work. Two of the launch crew, armed with boathooks, hung over the side of the boat and stared at the black water, looking for obstacles, sunken vehicles or mines…

Everyone was violently busy on that crowded, dangerous shore. The pebbles were the size of apples and several feet deep, and we stumbled up a road that a huge road shovel was scooping out. We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path, and headed for a tent marked with a red cross.

Ducks [DUKW — amphibious landing craft] and tanks and trucks were moving down this narrow rocky road, and one stepped just a little out of their way, but not beyond the tapes. The dust that rose in the grey night light seemed like the fog of war itself. Then we got off on to the grass, and it was perhaps the most surprising of all the day's surprises to smell the sweet smell of summer grass, a smell of cattle and peace and the sun that had warmed the earth some other time, when summer was real. …

Some American soldiers came up and began to talk. This had been an ugly piece of beach from the beginning, and they were still here, living in foxholes and supervising the uploading of supplies. They spoke of snipers in the hills a hundred yards or so behind the beach, and no one lighted a cigarette. They spoke of not having slept at all, but they seemed curiously pleased by the discovery that you could go without sleep and food and still function all right. Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker, and that it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here some time.

Then there was our favourite American conversation: “Where’re you from?” An American always has time to look for someone who knows his home town. We talked about Pittsburgh and Rosemont, Pennsylvania, Chicago and Cheyenne, not saying much except that they were swell places and had this beach licked every way for Sunday. Then one of the soldiers remarked that they had a nice foxhole about 50 yards inland and we were very welcome there, when the air raid started, if we didn’t mind eating sand.

My companion, one of the stretcher-bearers from the ship, thanked them for their kind invitation and said that, on the other hand, we had guests aboard the LCT and we would have to stay home this evening. I wish I had known his name, because I would like to write it down here. He was one of the best and jolliest boys I’ve met any place, any time. He joked, no matter what happened, and toward the end of that night, we really began to enjoy ourselves. There is a point where you feel yourself so small and helpless in such an enormous, insane nightmare of a world, that you cease to give a hoot about anything and you renounce care and start laughing. He was lovely company, that boy was, and he was brave and competent, and I wish I had known his name.

Gellhorn admitted that a person just coming aboard the next day would have been appalled by what they found. “Piles of bloody clothing had been cut off and dumped out of the way in corners; coffee cups and cigarette stubs littered the decks, plasma bottles hung from cords, and all the fearful surgical apparatus for holding broken bones made shadows on the walls.”

Some of the wounded groaned in their sleep. Others called out in pain, and “there was the soft, steady hum of conversation among the wounded who could not sleep. That is the way it would have looked to anyone seeing it fresh; a ship carrying a load of pain, with everyone waiting for daylight, everyone longing for England.”

Gellhorn was not the only female to cover the war – though there weren’t many – and all faced an extra level of difficulty. Clare Hollingsworth, a British correspondent, talked about going to war, packing only her “T and T,” her toothbrush and typewriter. Lee Miller was a fashion photographer, who now found herself covering the war for Vogue. And there was Sigrid Schultz, “who, fluent in five languages, endured surveillance and death threats to cover Germany’s descent into fascism for The Chicago Tribune, hiding all the time that she herself was Jewish.”

Schultz herself would later be one of the first reporters to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp. “So high were stacked the masses of corpses,” that Shultz “first thought they were piles of wood, while the living resembled walking skeletons so wasted that it was impossible to tell their ages.”

* 

Clarence Beavers, the last of a black paratroop unit dies in December 2017. He was one of 20 men who volunteered to be part of the first all-black parachute troop unit. Of those men, 17 passed training and formed a platoon that later became the model for the 555^th Parachute Infantry Battalion. Known as the Triple Nickels, they were given the job of smoke jumpers and sent to the Pacific Northwest. 

One black trooper remembered white soldiers taking bets that their black peers wouldn’t have the courage to jump at all. 

Beavers recalled, “Those that wanted to see us make it put forth their full effort; equally, those who didn’t want to see us make it did everything they could to see that we didn’t. While other trainees came through the front door and went to the counter for their food, we had to come in by the side door.” But “we were hopeful that if we did a damn good job, things for the African-Americans would improve after the war had ended.” Beavers’ wife, the former Edolene Davis, recalled: “They were very heartsick after all their training, that they had done everything and passed everything they had to do, that they were not able to go overseas to join the rest of the fighting me.” 

Beavers was discharged from the U.S. Army as a staff sergeant after the war. The 555^th was incorporated into the 82^nd Airborne and then ceased to exist after President Truman banned racial discrimination in the military. 

Japan had tried a new weapon, the Fu-Go balloon. Thirty-three feet in diameter, filled with hydrogen, they could be launched into the jet stream. In three or four days they would float across the ocean and reach the United States. As part of “Operation Firefly,” kept secret during the war to avoid panicking Americans, the Triple Nickels would fight any fires started by the incendiary devices the balloons carried. 

     The weapons were a failure: 9,000 were launched, but only 1,000 reached our shores. Crops and the nation’s lumber supply were not affected. One bomb did damage the Hanford Engineer Works, where plutonium was being processed. An antipersonnel bomb did kill a pregnant woman and five children in southern Oregon.

 

* 

     Bill Millin also makes a mark during the D-Day landing, after coming ashore on Sword Beach, with a unit of British commandos. The officer in charge asks him to play a few highland tunes on the bagpipes, to raise the moral of the other men. Millin, a 21-year-old private agrees – despite the risk of attracting enemy fire. 

     In his obituary, the scene was described:

 

   After wading ashore in waist-high water that he said caused his kilt to float, Private Millin reached the beach, then marched up and down, unarmed, playing the tunes Lord Lovat had requested, including “Highland Laddie” and “Road to the Isles.”

 

   With German troops raking the beach with artillery and machine-gun fire, the young piper played on as his fellow soldiers advanced through smoke and flame on the German positions, or fell on the beach. 

 

   In later years Mr. Millin told the BBC he did not regard what he had done as heroic. When Lord Lovat [his commanding officer] insisted that he play, he said, “I just said ‘O.K.,’ and got on with it.” He added: “I didn’t notice I was being shot at. When you’re young, you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when you’re older.”

 

   He said he found out later, after meeting Germans who had manned guns above the beach, that they didn’t shoot him “because they thought I was crazy.”

 

   Other British commandos cheered and waved, Mr. Millin recalled, though he said he felt bad as he marched among ranks of wounded soldiers needing medical help. But those who survived the landings offered no reproach.

 

   “I shall never forget hearing the skirl of Bill Millin’s pipes,” one of the commandos, Tom Duncan, said years later. “As well as the pride we felt, it reminded us of home, and why we were fighting there for our lives and those of our loved ones.” 

* 

__________ 

“Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.” 

Ernie Pyle

__________

  

June 7: Ernie Pyle lands in France, one of only thirty reporters allowed in the combat zone at that time. He had traveled widely across the USA during the Depression, talking to ordinary folk and honing his simple, straightforward style. By 1944, his columns were carried in 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies. He was a small man, weighing just over 100 pounds, resembling “a short scarecrow with too much feet,” as one Army historian put it. His first column about the attacks made the newspapers on June 12. His second, on June 16, had a new tone. Up until that point, Pyle had tried to paint a hopeful picture; but the carnage was now weighing on his mind. 

The New York Times explains: 

Pyle’s second report from the Normandy beaches, published 10 days after D-Day, was markedly different from anything he had ever previously filed. “It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore,” he wrote, reeling the reader in with a cheerful opening. “Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.” Pyle cataloged the vast wreckage of military matériel, the “scores of tanks and trucks and boats” resting at the bottom of the Channel, jeeps “burned to a dull gray” and halftracks blasted “into a shambles by a single shell hit.” Some reassurances followed to soften the unvarnished fact — the losses were an acceptable price for the victory, Pyle said — but he hadn’t shied away from showing his readers the corpses and “the awful waste and destruction of war.” Pyle was working up to something he hadn’t done before.

 

The next day, readers opened their papers to find his third column. For this story he focused on the debris left on the beaches—which told the story of the men who had carried the items in a unique way. 

“It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach,” Pyle wrote about the detritus of the battle. “Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home. . . . Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers and bloody, abandoned shoes.”

 

Pyle often included himself in his stories. Now, walking the shore, he is profoundly moved. The Times continues: 

“I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket,” he wrote. “I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.” 

By the end of the column, Pyle’s readers were confronted with outright horror: “As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach,” Pyle wrote, “I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood. They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.” 

Like the men he wrote about—and Pyle always focused on the experiences of the frontline men, the men in the ranks—the carnage began to haunt him. He told friends he had knots in his stomach from “constant tenseness and lack of sleep.” Writing home, he admitted that he had to “continually fight an inner depression over the ghastliness of it all.” “Sometimes,” he wrote to his agent on June 29, “I get so obsessed with the tragedy and horror of seeing dead men that I can hardly stand it. But I guess there’s nothing to do but keep going.” 

Soon after Paris was liberated, Pyle admitted he had reached his breaking point, after covering the war for 29 months. “‘I’ve had it,’ as they say in the Army. I have had all I can take for awhile.” By then he had written 700,000 words and survived almost a year on the front lines. “I’ve been immersed in it too long. The hurt has finally become too great.” He returned home; but the civilian world seemed strange. His wife attempted suicide.

 

Pyle decided to go to the Pacific to cover a new side of the war. At first, the war he saw on the other side of the world seemed easier. He was “interviewing bomber pilots on islands far from the fighting and sailors on Navy ships who seemed safe and comfortable compared with infantrymen on the front lines,” fighting the Germans. In a column titled “Europe This Is Not,” he let his feelings show, no doubt to the irritation of many of our men and women who had been fighting the Japanese. “The days are warm and on our established island bases the food is good and the mail service is fast and there’s little danger from the enemy,” he wrote. 

Anxious to do his part—to describe the real fighting again—he joined the Marines when they landed on Okinawa. Pyle was surprised to find that that Japanese had retreated inland rather than defend the beaches. But brutal fighting soon erupted. On April 18, 1945,  Pyle was shot in the head by a Japanese machine-gunner and killed. 

Before he was buried, a draft of a new column was found in his pocket. In his last story, he wrote, 

“Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead.”

 

The draft went on: “There are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches. . . . Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”

 

The Times summed it up this way: 

During his four years as a war correspondent, Pyle was embraced by enlisted men, officers and a huge civilian public as a voice who spoke for the common infantryman. With his trauma in France, he had become one of them. After sharing so much of their experience, he understood how gravely war can alter the people who have to see it and fight it and live it. He knew that the survivors can come home with damage that is profound, painful and long-lasting.

 

It was a truth that he found hard or even impossible to communicate to the readers back home — and it is a truth that is still difficult and troubling now, 75 years after D-Day.

 

* 

June 9: Guy Stern comes ashore in Normandy – and goes on to serve as an interpreter until the end of hostilities, on into 1946. Born in Germany in 1922, and a Jew, he had fled his home at age 15, and come to live with relatives in St. Louis. His decision to leave came as attacks on Jews rose, even at school, where he told his father that classes had become, for him, “a torture chamber.” 

Unfortunately, he was unable to find a sponsor to bring the rest of his family to the United States. His mother and father, and a brother and sister all died in the Holocaust. 

Stern – who changed his first name, Günther, to “Guy” at the suggestion of a high school girlfriend – tried to join the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor was bombed, but was rejected because he was not yet a citizen. Instead, in 1943, he was drafted by the U.S. Army, and became a citizen during training. 

He was soon enrolled in a secret unit, involving thousands of men who were trained to interrogate prisoners. At least 2,000 of the men were European Jews, mostly Germans who had escaped. 

According to The New York Times, “They learned, among other things, how to interrogate, interpret and translate for foreign officials; recognize the details of imprisoned German and Italian prisoners’ uniforms; and extract vital information from documents drafted in bureaucratic German.” 

“We were fighting an American war, and we were also fighting an intensely personal war,” Mr. Stern told The Washington Post in 2005. “We were in that war with every inch of our being.”

 

Stern won a bronze star for his service, and went on to graduate from college, using his G.I. Bill benefits to pay his way. He graduated from Hofstra in 1948, went on to earn a master’s degree, then a Ph.D. He then taught German for fifty years, at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio and other schools.

 

As the Times explains, Stern had one favorite tactic to squeeze information out of German POWs.

 

One of Mr. Stern’s strategies for forcing recalcitrant prisoners to cooperate was to pretend to be a fierce but erratic Soviet commissar named Krukow. He dressed in the appropriate regalia; spoke in a Russian accent (based on the voice of the Mad Russian, a character on the comedian Eddie Cantor’s radio show); kept a photograph of Stalin supposedly signed to Krukow nearby; and threatened to send the imprisoned Germans to Siberia.

 

No German prisoner ever wanted to end up in Russian hands.

*

 

“A 15-year-old pitches in the Big Leagues.” 

June 10: With the St. Louis Cardinals winning 13-0 in the ninth inning, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Joe Nuxhall was called to the mound in relief. Nuxhall was so nervous, he tripped and fell flat on his face. 

As Bob Fulton writes in The Ol’ Ball Game, “Moments later he uncorked a warm-up pitch that clanked off the screen behind home plate.” 

At age 15, you can understand why Nuxhall might be nervous, for on that day he became the youngest player ever to take part in a major league game. “That was only the fifth or sixth major-league game I’d ever seen,” Nuxhall later recalled. Baseball, during the war, was scuffling to find players. Brooklyn had three players over 40 that year, and four under the age of eighteen and Tommy Brown, 16, played 46 games for the Dodgers in 1944. (Carl Scheib pitched at age 16, for the Phillies in 1943.) 

Nuxhall remembered later: 

“I was scared to death just warming up,” Nuxhall recalls. “Then I tripped over the step in the dugout [on the way to the mound for the ninth], right in front of everybody. I fell flat on my face.”

 

Nuxhall explains what happened to him on the mound: “I got the first guy out on a ground ball. I went 3-2 on the second guy before he walked. The third guy popped out. I got a ball and two strikes on the next hitter [Debs Garms] then I realized where I was.” Nuxhall, consequently, came unglued. As he emphasized to a reporter later in his career, “A couple of days before I’d been pitching to 13-year-olds.”

 

After Garms trotted to first with a walk, the reality of the situation struck Nuxhall like a slap in the face. For approaching the plate was Stan Musial, the previous year’s batting champion and MVP, a player who unnerved even veteran pitchers as he assumed his characteristic corkscrew stance. Musial’s chief recollection of the moment is that Nuxhall “couldn’t understand why he was out there.” Nuxhall might have wondered why, too, after grooving a fastball

 

“He hit a frozen rope,” Nuxhall recalls. “I can still see that ball zooming by.”

 

Musial and his teammates knew they were feasting off a rookie, of course, but they were unaware that the victim of their assault was a record setter. “We didn’t know he was 15 years old, didn’t hear it mentioned even,” says former St. Louis shortstop Marty Marion, the National League MVP that season.

 

Saint Louis left fielder Danny Litwhiler, like many of his teammates, cast a wary glance at Nuxhall as he stepped into the batter’s box. “He could throw hard, but he didn’t know where it was going. Neither did I,” recalls Litwhiler…“I don't know who was scared the most, me or Joe. He threw about six pitches and walked me. I never lifted the bat off my shoulder.”

 

After the base on balls forced in I a run, pinch-hitter Emil Verban singled in two more to pad the lead to 18-0. Six consecutive batters had reached base. Someone else would have to nail down the final out, [the Reds manager] decided. He ambled to the mound and, addressing Nuxhall, said gently, “Well son, I guess you’ve had enough.”

 

Joe was shipped to Birmingham, a minor league team in the Southern Association, a few days later. He would not pitch in the major leagues again for eight years. (Ironically, he came on in relief in his next game in the big leagues, too, with the Dodgers already beating the Reds 15-0. This time he pitched four shutout innings, and his long-career finally entered a second act.

 

* 

“The Negro will give life for his country – but he will not be a slave.” 

July 10: A massive explosion at a naval base, Port Chicago, 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, at Suisan Bay takes place. Matthew Delmont, writing in Smithsonian magazine, tells the story: 

People throughout the Bay Area awoke to something that felt like an earthquake—a blast with the force of five kilotons of TNT. Sailors sleeping in their barracks a mile and a half from the port thought they were under attack from Japanese bombers. “Everybody felt at that point that it was another Pearl Harbor,” said Jack Crittenden, a 19-year-old seaman from Montgomery, Alabama. “People running and hollering....Finally, they got the emergency light together. Then some guys came by in a truck, and we went down to the dock, but when we got there, we didn’t see no dock, no ship, no nothing.”

 

One ship, the Quinault Victory, was lifted out of the water, spun around and shattered into pieces. Only tiny fragments of another ship, the E. A. Bryan, were ever recovered. All the people on the pier, aboard the two naval ships, and on a nearby Coast Guard fire barge were killed instantly. Three hundred and twenty people died, including 202 Black enlisted sailors. Only 51 bodies were recovered. It was the worst home-front disaster of the war.

 

Sailors raced to help injured crewmates and fought fires that could have triggered additional explosions. All of them were shaken by what they witnessed. “I was there the next morning,” Crittenden recalled in an interview with historian Robert Allen. “Man, it was awful....You’d see a shoe with a foot in it....You’d see a head floating across the water—just the head or an arm...just awful....That thing kept you from sleeping at night.” One of the seamen had been home in San Diego on leave after his wife gave birth to their son. When he returned to Port Chicago after the explosion and found all of his buddies had been killed, he said, “something just snapped” within him.

 

Black sailors at Port Chicago had repeatedly voiced safety concerns – while working in segregated units. 

They described themselves as a “chain gang,” “mule team” and “slave outfit,” and understood that they were cheap labor compared to civilian stevedores, who loaded and unloaded cargo from ships. A year before the explosion, a group of the sailors had written to a local attorney warning that morale had dropped to “an alarming depth” and asked for help. “We, the Negro sailors of the Naval Enlisted Barracks of Port Chicago, California, are waiting for a new deal,” they said in conclusion. “Will we wait in vain?”

 

In the wake of disaster, the Navy began an investigation, calling 125 witnesses, only five of whom were black. 

“The consensus of opinion of the witnesses...is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives,” the judge advocate concluded. “It is an admitted fact, supported by the testimony of the witnesses, that there was rough and careless handling of the explosives being loaded aboard ships at Port Chicago.”

 

White officers were given 30-day survivors leave to visit their families before returning to regular duty. Most of the African American sailors were transferred to Mare Island. In August, when officers tried to march the men to the ammunition depot there, to go to work, the men refused. Two hundred and fifty were arrested, held on a barge, and guarded for three days by Marines. Joseph Small, 22, a seaman first class, emerged as one of their leaders. Later he explained that he and his mates considered what they were doing to be almost like a wildcat strike. “We’ve got the officers by the balls – they can do nothing to us if we don’t do anything to them,” he told the men. “If we stick together, they can’t do anything to us.” 

The Navy saw it as a mutiny. 

“As far as we were concerned mutiny could only be committed on the high seas,” Small recalled. “We didn’t try to take over anything. We didn’t try to take command of the base. We didn’t replace any officers; we didn’t try to assume an officer’s position. How could they call it mutiny?”

 

Under intense pressure, 208 sailors reluctantly returned to work – and President Roosevelt recommended “nominal” punishment. 

Smalls and forty-nine others were eventually placed on trial for mutiny. Their lawyer, Lt. Gerald Veltmann, insisted, “Those men were no more guilty of murder than they were of flying to the moon.” The families of the sailors enlisted the help of the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall. 

“This is not an individual case,” Marshall argued. “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.” Marshall demanded a formal government investigation of Port Chicago, including why Black seamen were assigned to segregated labor units and why they were given no safety training before being required to move dangerous explosives. “I want to know why the Navy disregarded official warnings by the San Francisco waterfront unions – before the Port Chicago disaster – that an explosion was inevitable if they persisted in using untrained seamen in the loading of ammunition,” Marshall said. “I want to know why the Navy disregarded an offer by these same unions to send experienced men to train Navy personnel in the safe handling of explosives....I want to know why the commissioned officers at Port Chicago were allowed to race their men. I want to know why bets ranging from five dollars up were made between division officers as to whose crew would load more ammunition.”

 

All good questions, of course. 

The trial lasted six weeks. But when the jury of senior officers adjourned, “deliberations barely extended over the lunch hour.” All fifty defendants were found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to between five and fifteen years in prison. Marshall immediately began working on an appeal, and the NAACP published a pamphlet urging members to write to the Navy in protest. 

“The Navy has a slogan – ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ – a reminder of foreign treachery against democracy,” the pamphlet concluded. “There is another slogan the Navy should adopt. It is a reminder of what treachery to our own ideals within a democracy does to that democracy. The pointless, meaningless deaths of over 320 Americans must be given a point, must be given a meaning – for the living. Remember Port Chicago!”

 

Unfortunately, the prisoners spent the rest of the war in the brig. In 1946, under increasing pressure to integrate, the U.S. Navy shortened their sentences, and they were released. Freddie Meeks, one of the few survivors at the time, was pardoned in 1999. “The lesson is,” he said, at age 80, “was we stood up for our rights.” 

Carl Tuggle, who died at age 98 in 2023, may have been the last survivor of that larger group of 250, or so, who had  protested. After the war, he earned a degree from Wilberforce University, and then a master’s degree from Columbia. Tuggle went on to spend 38 years in education, including 36 with the Cincinnati Public Schools, as a teacher, counselor, coach and administrator. He and his college sweetheart, Jane, were married for 64 years. 

Almost until the day Mr. Tuggle died, he continued to fight to have the fifty “mutineers” exonerated – saying they had nothing wrong, and needed no pardon. 

There have been efforts in Congress to rectify this wrong. But it’s Congress. So nothing has happened. 

Delmont, who has written a book, Half American, highlights other examples of black service men and women having to fight for equal treatment during the war. All of his examples are bad, including one involving hundreds of Navy Seabees, who had served in the Pacific Theater for two year. 

This one seems particularly egregious: 

At Freeman Army Airfield, in Indiana, more than 100 Tuskegee Airmen officers were arrested when they attempted to integrate an all-white officers’ club. “I’d flown 67 combat missions in Europe,” Lt. Col. Clarence Jamison recalled. “As an officer of the United States Army Air Corps, who’d put his life on the line for this country, why couldn’t I use a United States Army officers’ club?” The Black pilots had endured racism at Tuskegee, from segregated bathrooms on base to violence at the hands of police in town. They had risked their lives and lost friends fighting for a country that treated them as less valuable than white citizens. Now they were fed up. Their protest happened to take place at an officers’ club, but it was about much more than that. “It was a slap in the face,” Jamison said. “It defiled the graves of [Black pilots]...who’d made the ultimate sacrifice for their country but couldn’t get into a dive club because of their skin color.”

 

Delmont also relates the story of a group of fifty-one female soldiers, stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts: 

[who] went on strike to protest racial discrimination in the Women’s Army Corps. Many of the women were college graduates and were enticed to enlist in the WAC by promises of skilled jobs, only to be assigned cleaning duty. Alice Young, a 23-year-old from Washington, D.C., who left nursing school to join the WAC, recalled that her hospital commander told her, “I do not have colored WACs as medical technicians. They are here to scrub and wash floors, wash dishes and do all the dirty work.” The four strike leaders—Mary Green, Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy, and Young—were court-martialed. “If it will help my people by me taking a court-martial, I would be willing to take it,” Morrison said.

 

Three years before he broke the color line in baseball, Jackie Robinson had to break the color line on a bus in Texas: 

Second Lt. Jackie Robinson was court-martialed at Camp Hood, in Texas, in the summer of 1944 when he refused to move to a seat in the back of an Army bus. Robinson was with the light-skinned wife of another Black officer, and the two had picked seats in the middle of the bus. “The driver glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw what he thought was a white woman talking with a black second lieutenant,” Robinson remembered. “He became visibly upset, stopped the bus, and came back to order me to move to the rear. I didn’t even stop talking, didn’t even look at him....I had no intention of being intimidated into moving to the back of the bus.”

 

[Robinson] was already a well-known athlete after starring in four sports at UCLA. Word of his court-martial would likely garner national attention, so after the arrest, Robinson wrote to Truman Gibson, who was chief civilian adviser to the Secretary of War. Robinson asked his advice. “I don’t want any unfavorable publicity for myself or the Army, but I believe in fair play, and I feel I have to let someone in on the case,” he wrote. “I don’t care what the outcome of the trial is because I know I am being framed and the charges aren’t too bad.” The court-martial trial moved quickly, and the Army acquitted Robinson, granting his request for exemption from active military service, and honorably discharged him in the fall. The unit Robinson was attached to, the 761st Tank Battalion, nicknamed the “Black Panthers,” went on to distinguish itself in the Battle of the Bulge as part of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army.

 

Delmont has other examples to relate, but notes that “the common thread that connected” these men and women who protested, “and thousands of other troops was their desire to serve their country without being discriminated against or degraded.” 

As the Chicago Defender put it: “The Negro will give life for his country – but he will not be a slave.”

 

* 

“None of us consider ourselves heroes.” 

August 20: Sergeant John Hawk, 20, is leading a squad of infantry from the 90^th Division and they have dug in along the edge of an apple orchard near Chambois, France. Hawk and his men are attacked by a large force of German soldiers supported by several panzers. Fifty years later, in an interview, he remembered the scene: 

“My God, the sky was falling down, the earth was blowing up, and if ever there was a hell on earth, this was it. I thought, honest to God, I won’t survive. My philosophy was, they may get me, but I ain’t gonna make it easy. It was absolute carnage: animals, people, equipment, an incomprehensible slaughterhouse.”

 

Hawk and his men blasted the German foot soldiers with a machine gun; two tank destroyers came to their aid; but they were having trouble seeing the Germans, who had retreated to a nearby wooded area. As the NYT describes it, “So Sergeant Hawk, though wounded in the thigh, climbed alone to an elevated spot in the orchard where he could see them.” 

In the next few minutes, Hawk directed fire by shouting—and then when the noise of battle was too much, hand signals. The tank destroyers knocked out two enemy tanks, while Hawk moved about from position to position to avoid being hit. (He was wounded three more times during the war.) Before the day was ended 500 Germans had surrendered. For his heroism, Hawk was awarded the Medal of Honor. 

The award was bestowed upon him in June 1945, by President Truman; but Hawk was still badly shaken by his war experiences. He was relieved during the award ceremony when Truman began talking to his father, Lewis, like the president a combat veteran in World War I. 

Hawk remembered years later, “I was really feeling very, very badly about me receiving a medal and with the serious memories of all the friends I’d lost. In six months, you lose so many machine gunners.” 

In 1990, he told the Chicago Tribune he had been in so many fire fights, when he got the call about the medal, he wasn’t even sure what event they were talking about. (Hawk had been drafted in 1943. After the war he went to college and became an elementary school teacher and principal.) “I am a common man who did the best I could in the time and place I found myself,” he told reporters. “I was home on R and R and had been wounded four different times when I got a phone call saying they were considering me for the Medal of Honor. I said, ‘Medal of Honor? For when? For what day? What place? What time? Are you sure you mean me?’ 

“You see, none of us consider ourselves heroes.” 

September 2: Lt. George H. W. Bush, the future president,
is shot down during a mission.

He spends several hours floating in the Pacific, unsure if he'll ever be rescued.

 

*

 

“Joe” Sakato wasn’t a good shot. 

 

October: George Sakato was 5' 4" and slightly built when he joined the U.S. Army in 1944. He wasn’t a very good shot, unable to hit the targets on the firing range during basic training.      

He was one of seven children, called “Joe” his whole life, because his parents, who spoke limited English, thought the abbreviation of George, “Geo.,” was pronounced “Joe.” 

In October 1944 he proved he could fight. Facing dug-in German defenses in the Vosges Mountains, Private Sakato killed five enemy soldiers, wounded two and captured four. Then he rushed enemy positions by himself, allowing his squad to follow and capture a hilltop position. His squad leader was killed. George took charge, killed another seven enemy soldiers, and he and his buddies captured 34 more. 

He received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest honor, but was denied a Medal of Honor, until President Clinton rectified that error in 2000. Sakato and nineteen other Japanese Americans were so honored. Another honoree that day was Daniel Inoyue. The only Japanese American serviceman to win the Medal of Honor during the war was Private Sadao Munemori, who fell on a grenade to save the lives of two comrades. Sakato, too, was a Nisei, an American-born soldier. 

An NBC story on Sakato notes: “Taking charge of the squad, he continued his relentless tactics, using an enemy rifle and P-38 pistol to stop an organized enemy attack,” reads his Medal of Honor citation. “During this entire action, he killed 12 and wounded two, personally captured four and assisted his platoon in taking 34 prisoners. By continuously ignoring enemy fire, and by his gallant courage and fighting spirit, he turned impending defeat into victory and helped his platoon complete its mission.” 

Explaining why he volunteered to serve, Sakato once told a TV reporter, “In order to prove our loyalty, I volunteered into the service. I’m an American and I want to be respected as an American, even though I look like the enemy.” His father had owned a barber shop and later a grocery store and meat market. Rather than be interned the family moved to Phoenix. Soon after Pearl Harbor was attacked, George volunteered for service. He was denied, his draft status, 4-C, or “enemy alien.” 

“Enemy alien? What do you mean, ‘enemy alien?’ I’m an American,” he remembered thinking.

 

In training, not only couldn’t he shoot, he claimed to be a lousy marcher, and said he couldn’t climb the ten-foot walls as required, so he joked, “I went around ‘em.” 

He later told his story in some detail: 

Sakato: They had a big door out there, target, 200 yards, height and windage, bang. And they had this red dot on the end of a pole, ten-foot pole, and that red dot would indicate target, part of the target to hit. One guy hit it up there, another guy would hit over here. When it came to me, I got this waving thing called Maggie’s drawers. I missed the target? I didn’t hit the target? I didn’t even hit the target. Oh my god, I couldn’t shoot that rifle. I didn’t know, too much windy or too much elevation...

 

Going up to Epinal, we took these trains, they go up five miles and then they would back up two miles and wait, then they go one, five, six miles and they’d back up. They finally put us on trucks and trucked us just this side of Epinal, and from there we had to start marching. So we marched towards the hills, raining, muddy, mud’s up this deep…So we got to the area, and then we had to climb that hill. But the damn thing’s about a forty-five degree angle, and you’re trying to pull yourself up, and I couldn’t get up and I had my pack, George Kanatani takes my pack, somebody else took my shovel, all I had was a rifle. Pulling myself with the tree roots, I was the last one up the hill. The damn hill, god, I couldn’t climb ‘em. I’d have to rest every feet I go, and then I get another ten feet. So when I finally got up there, everybody else was already up there...

 

Reporter: But they all helped you, though, Kanatani carried your pack, somebody else took your shovel... 

Sakato: Somebody else took my shovel. 

Reporter: And was that the spirit of the unit, that everyone would try to help each other out? 

Sakato: Oh yeah, helped each other out. 

So then first day of the battle, 1st Platoon and 2nd Platoon are ahead, but couple thousand yards ahead, and we’re back in reserve, 3rd Platoon. We had a new “90-day wonder” lieutenant join us named Lieutenant Schmidt. He was kind of worried, he’s pacing back and forth, everything’s quiet and he’s nervous as all hell. So I stuck my two fingers under my nose and I, “Sieg Heil in case we lose.” I thought he would laugh, he chewed me out. Then artillery shells started coming in...I tried to humor things, make people laugh. And other guys laughed but he didn’t laugh; he chewed me out for that. So artillery shells, now I hear this one coming in, boom. That was incoming. I found out what incoming was. But when you hear it, little fluttering, that’s outgoing, that was our guns going. But when you hear something go “vroom,” that’s incoming. So when that came in, blew me up and I was over there, ten feet, and ached all over, and got up…looked, and I got a nick here. But I looked down, Yohei Sagami from Wenatchee, Washington, was talking, we were talking what are we going to do when we get out and this and that. He’s laying down, facedown, I picked him up, turned him over, he got hit in the jugular vein, and the pulse, blood was coming out every time he’d, pulse beating. And I couldn’t stop it without choking him. I tried to put a pad on there, but still, he couldn’t breathe, and had relaxed, but blood was coming out. Medics came, but he died, he’d lost too much blood, he died. So that was my, one of my first buddy dying.

 

With German tanks approaching, Joe dug for cover while checking for landmines. “I had to think back,” he said, “Why, what am I doing here? I volunteered for this? So I went, kept on going, then we had, finally took the hill. I Company is down below, they had to go around and they went into the town of Bruyeres, hand to hand combat, house to house.” 

Exhausted after the bloody fight to liberate the towns of Bruyeres and Biffontaine, the 442nd was within days sent back into combat. They were ordered to save a trapped unit of the Texas National Guard. The “Lost Battalion” was encircled by German forces, cut off from supplies. Two attempts to free them had failed when General John Dahlquist ordered the Nisei soldiers to save the Texans. On October 25, 1944, the 422nd advanced in the dark and foul weather, fighting from tree to tree. Joe’s E Company was ordered to circle behind enemy lines in an attempt to secure a hill where Germans were firing down on the advancing Nisei troops. They marched single file, silently in the night, to surprise the Germans at dawn. 

Sakota tells the story again: 

We chased the Germans off, and then artillery shells started coming in. So then we had to jump into the German foxholes now. So I’m on the bottom, ran to one foxholes, and artillery shells are coming in. Another guy from F Company, he jumps in. I didn’t know who was jumping in with me, pretty soon I recognized him. “Hey, you’re Mas Ikeda from Mesa, Arizona.” He said, “Yeah.” “What’d you hear about home?” We talked about home and the artillery shells were... boom, bang, didn’t bother us a bit. We were talking about home. It’s good to hear somebody talk about home. Artillery’s going off, somebody else is hollering for medics, somebody else was... but it didn’t bother us.

 

Artillery shells stopped, counterattack, so Mas Ikeda had to jump out of his foxhole, go to F Company and regroup… Next thing you know, I ran out of ammunition, both clips were gone. One German wanted to come up, going to throw a grenade at me. So I took the pistol, I couldn’t get the other clips out, so I got the pistol, and pow, pow, stopped him. Then no more troop movements, and so I got down in the hole and started filling my clips up. Pretty soon I’m looking uphill, Germans would be down below. But they went around me while I was down in the hole, I didn’t see ‘em, and they started climbing that hill, they started taking the hill back. “Oh, my god,” I started hollering at the guys, “watch out for the machine guns, they’re taking the hill back.” And Tanimachi, for some reason he got up and says, “Where?” and he got shot. So I crawled over to his hole and picked him up, “Why did you stand up?” And he’s gurgling and he’s trying to say something, blood is coming out of his... and he just, then he just went limp. Then he went, body went limp on me and then I knew he died. And I cried, hugged him, and, “God, why?” Laid him down and looked at all the blood in my hands and I said, “You son of a bitch.” Picked up, threw the pack off, picked up the tommy gun and I got out of the hole and I zig-zagged back up, run this way and I’d run that way. I shot two or three guys, and then pretty soon the guys with white handkerchiefs were waving them, group of ‘em coming out, and I made sure that nobody behind ‘em had a gun, otherwise I would have had to shoot him. So the rest of the troop came up and took the hill.

 

The soldier who had so much trouble ascending hills explains, “If I was in my right mind, I don’t think I would have done that. I’d have stayed in my hole and shoot, but then to go up and charge the hill was something else that I, I wasn’t quite in my right sense of mind. But I was just mad, crying, I was crying.” 

 

* 

“I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. Why did they blame us?” 

They were on a mission to rescue 275 soldiers from a Texas unit, cut off behind German lines. (Only 211 were left to be rescued.) Saburo Tanamachi, tried to get a look at enemy soldiers preparing for a counterattack. A bullet caught and killed him and Sakato lost it. “I was going to get the guys that killed my friend,” he explained in a 2011 interview. At that point, he almost choked up. 

Sixty years after the war he still had nightmares. 

On the way home, after being wounded, he went into a restaurant for coffee and two waitresses wouldn’t even serve him. 

He said he wasn’t sure he deserved the Medal of Honor; but the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team was always in the midst of fighting. “We didn’t ask questions. We just did our duty. We were willing to die for our country.” 

Fourteen thousand men served with the 442^nd (Motto: “Go for Broke.”). They were awarded 10,000 Purple Hearts, 560 Silver Stars, 4,000 Bronze Stars, 52 Distinguished Service Medals and 21 Medals of Honor. Barney Hajiro and James Okubo, won Medals of Honor for their courage during the same mission to save the “Lost Battalion.” 

President Clinton, in 2000, said during the awards ceremony: “Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill-treated.” 

Their Medal of Honor citations read: 

Private George T. Sakato distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on 29 October 1944, on hill 617 in the vicinity of Biffontaine, France. After his platoon had virtually destroyed two enemy defense lines, during which he personally killed five enemy soldiers and captured four, his unit was pinned down by heavy enemy fire. Disregarding the enemy fire, Private Sakato made a one-man rush that encouraged his platoon to charge and destroy the enemy strongpoint. While his platoon was reorganizing, he proved to be the inspiration of his squad in halting a counter-attack on the left flank during which his squad leader was killed. Taking charge of the squad, he continued his relentless tactics, using an enemy rifle and P-38 pistol to stop an organized enemy attack. During this entire action, he killed 12 and wounded two, personally captured four and assisted his platoon in taking 34 prisoners. By continuously ignoring enemy fire, and by his gallant courage and fighting spirit, he turned impending defeat into victory and helped his platoon complete its mission. Private Sakato's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the United States Army.

 

Private Barney F. Hajiro distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on 19, 22, and 29 October 1944, in the vicinity of Bruyeres and Biffontaine, eastern France. Private Hajiro, while acting as a sentry on top of an embankment on 19 October 1944, in the vicinity of Bruyeres, France, rendered assistance to allied troops attacking a house 200 yards away by exposing himself to enemy fire and directing fire at an enemy strong point. He assisted the unit on his right by firing his automatic rifle and killing or wounding two enemy snipers. On 22 October 1944, he and one comrade took up an outpost security position about 50 yards to the right front of their platoon, concealed themselves, and ambushed an 18-man, heavily armed, enemy patrol, killing two, wounding one, and taking the remainder as prisoners. On 29 October 1944, in a wooded area in the vicinity of Biffontaine, France, Private Hajiro initiated an attack up the slope of a hill referred to as “Suicide Hill” by running forward approximately 100 yards under fire. He then advanced ahead of his comrades about 10 yards, drawing fire and spotting camouflaged machine gun nests. He fearlessly met fire with fire and single-handedly destroyed two machine gun nests and killed two enemy snipers. As a result of Private Hajiro’s heroic actions, the attack was successful. Private Hajiro’s extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon him, his unit, and the United States Army.

 

Technician Fifth Grade James K. Okubo distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on 28 and 29 October and 4 November 1944, in the Forest Domaniale de Champ, near Biffontaine, eastern France. On 28 October, under strong enemy fire coming from behind mine fields and roadblocks, Technician Fifth Grade Okubo, a medic, crawled 150 yards to within 40 yards of the enemy lines. Two grenades were thrown at him while he left his last covered position to carry back wounded comrades. Under constant barrages of enemy small arms and machine gun fire, he treated 17 men on 28 October and 8 more men on 29 October. On 4 November, Technician Fifth Grade Okubo ran 75 yards under grazing machine gun fire and, while exposed to hostile fire directed at him, evacuated and treated a seriously wounded crewman from a burning tank, who otherwise would have died. Technician Fifth Grade James K. Okubo's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the United States Army.

 

For his Medal of Honor video, Sakato recalls hearing news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. First came word: he and his family, like all the others, could not travel more than three miles from their home. That lasted a few months. 

Then came word they’d have to go to relocation centers. Naturally, he calls them “prison camps.”

He volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps, was sent to Florida for training, “And I’m looking for the planes…and ‘Where’s the planes?’ ‘Well, I’m sorry, you’re in the infantry.’” 

He and the 442^nd were sent to take a hill not far from the German border, a position from which the enemy “could see for miles.” He remembered marching all night, waiting near the top of a ridge, to make a dawn attack and catch the enemy by surprise. 

    Sakato saw only ninety days of combat before he was badly injured and had to spend eight months in a hospital. 

 

UPDATE: When Hijaro died, in 2011, his obituary added a few rich details to the story of how he won the Medal of Honor. He had, for example, charged up the hill, shouting, “Banzi,” despite being hit four times by enemy fire.  

    Born in Hawaii, in 1916, the oldest of nine children, he had dropped out of school in eighth grade and gone to work on sugar plantations. His biggest regret, he said later, was that he had to give up his dream of running track. 

    Barney was drafted in 1942 but assigned to dig ditches – a type of duty he resented, because he wanted to fight. “I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” he told an interviewer many years later. “Why did they blame us?” 

    As for the courage he would display in combat, he explained humbly, “I couldn’t run backward. I had to run forward. That’s the job of a soldier.” 

    Still, he never forgot the sting of prejudice entirely. On the day he was finally awarded the Medal of Honor, he could not help but remark, “Even after the war, they still called me a Jap, you know.” 

 

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Sam Glanzman, the comic-book artist dies in 2017. Many of his stories had scenes based on his experiences in World War II. In one, he describes the attack of a Japanese kamikaze: “Every gunner had his sight trained on the ‘meatball’ – and speared it in midair. The flaming ball etched a high arc – and disappeared in a violent eruption like the instantaneous flash of a camera!” (NYT 7-22-17)

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October 29: Max Fuchs came ashore with the First Infantry Division at Omaha Beach. Four months later, Fuchs, a Jew, helped liberate Aachen, the first German city to fall to Allied hands. On October 29, with fifty Jewish soldiers gathered round, Fuchs sang the traditional Sabbath songs at an emotional gathering near the ruins of the city’s old synagogue. His performance was heard across America the next day on NBC radio. Later, it was broadcast in Germany. “The emotion was tremendous,” Fuchs said years later. “The soldiers had heard of all the atrocities. Most of them had families that perished in the Holocaust. We had so many of my family.” 

Mordechai Fuchs was born in Poland in 1922; his family fled to New York City in 1934, when Max was 12. He sang cantorial music as a youth, got drafted, joined the First Infantry and suffered shrapnel wounds at Normandy. He used the G.I. Bill after the war to go to college, and worked for 39 years as a diamond cutter. The New York Times reported that Fuchs had nightmares about the war for almost twenty years and was reluctant to talk about his service. He did hang a photo of a soldier with a prayer shawl draped around his neck, while a radio reporter held a microphone in front of him. Not until 2000, when one of his daughters began investigating, did he admit the man with the shawl was him. 

After the 1944 service, the Jewish rabbi present, Sidney Lefkowitz, was joined by Roman Catholic and Protestant chaplains who spoke on the recording. “How sweet upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger of glad tidings. The light of religious freedom has pierced through the darkness of Nazi persecution,” Rabbi Lefkowitz says. 

Fuchs is seen, second from left, below. 

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November 7: FDR wins a fourth term, defeating Thomas Dewey (who will be defeated a second time four years later), with 53.4% of the vote, compared to 45.9% for the loser. This is the narrowest margin of victory, in the popular vote, since 1916. The electoral vote, however, is 432-99. (1127-65)

 

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The Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coins the word “genocide.” He combines “geno,” Greek for race or tribe, with “cide,” Latin for killing. He says later that the killings of Armenians in 1915, and Jews in the Holocaust informed his thinking. Later examples include the mass murder of Cambodians (1975-1979) and the slaughter in Rwanda (1994).

 

 

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U.S. Army - Sherman tank.

November: Lt. Gene F. Walker of Richmond, Indiana is commanding a Sherman tank, fighting inside Germany, when his tank is hit by an enemy anti-tank round. It will be 79 years before his few surviving family members learn exactly what happened. In November 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency explains: “The hit caused a fire and is believed to have killed Walker instantaneously. The surviving crew bailed out of the tank, but when they regrouped later were unable to remove Walker from the tank due to heavy fighting.” Military authorities notified his parents that their son had been killed – but no one ever reclaimed his remains. 

Finally, using modern DNA information, Walker’s remains were disinterred from his unmarked grave and identified. 

More than 72,000 Americans from that war remain unidentified.