THIS MEMORIAL DAY will see far fewer living veterans of World War II, with just over 60,000 still alive in the U.S. today. An article in The Mendocino Voice leading up to Memorial Day 2023 reported that Fort Bragg American Legion Post Sequoia #96 no longer had any living WWII vets among its membership.
For most of us in the Baby Boomer generation, the Second World War was never very far away. Although there are lots of theories — aside from the obvious — as to why people started making babies like bunnies in 1946, there’s no dispute that the birth rate spiked immediately after the war and stayed high until falling off in the mid-1960s. When someone referred to “the war,” we all knew which war they meant.
Now the Greatest Generation is fading into history, but we have their stories.
All four of my grown sons’ grandparents served in the military. My dad went into Navy pilot training in 1941, at the age of 17. He had grown up in a small town in northern Louisiana with his older brother Bill. Their mother, Mabel, raised them on her own, scraping by as a schoolteacher whose salary was sometimes paid with chickens. The Navy gave my dad many things, not least of which was three square meals a day and eight inches in height. If not for the GI Bill, he could not have gone to college or ever imagined that all three of his children would eventually earn graduate degrees.
My mother, desperate to escape an abusive stepfather and a limited future in California’s Central Valley, joined the Navy at age 19, under a statute signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 creating the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). The law established that women would be an integral part of the Navy, not auxiliary to it. My mother mainly did clerical work, typing at the speed of light and wearing her elegant uniform proudly. Years later she could still bounce a quarter off a bed after she made it.
My children’s paternal grandmother grew up in Norway and became part of the underground resistance after the Germans invaded. She told a hair-raising story of sitting on a bus with a smuggled rifle and trying to remain calm as a German officer sat down beside her. At some point she fell asleep, only to wake with the officer gone and the gun poking out from under her coat. She would later be awarded the Norwegian Defence Medal 1940-1945 by King Haakon VII.
My sons’ much older paternal grandfather served as a rifleman and played the cornet in the U.S. Army band in World War I. His doughboy helmet somehow survived the rubble in the recent Pacific Palisades fire.
They are all gone now, but there is so much more I want to know.
Gliding into danger
Growing up in Southern California, my parents shared mostly happy memories about their military service. They met and fell in love at a base in Georgia. Neither went into combat, as my dad got his wings just a few months before the Japanese surrender. Wrapped up in the post-war culture to push their kids into financially secure paths, my parents cut most of their ties to the past.
It was left to Uncle Bill, my dad’s older brother, to record the most harrowing tales. An Army pilot who flew three glider missions, including the Normandy landing on D-Day, Bill left a long unpublished memoir. I have to read between lines written in his matter-of-fact tone to see the number of times he shrugged off near-certain death.
The gliders carried troops and equipment — even jeeps — directly into the battlefield and behind the lines. Military planes known as sky trains towed the gliders as close as they could get, then cut the ropes and released the gliders for their pilots to maneuver the landing. The gliders that flew into Normandy on D-Day landed in the dark, onto fields covered with trees and “Rommel Asparagus” — thick wooden poles meant to sabotage the flimsy “flying coffins” that had no engines, no offensive weapons, and no communications systems.
After successfully completing his own Normandy landing, Bill tried to pull some of the poles out of the ground to make way for gliders still to come. “I was not successful,” he wrote, laconically.
Meanwhile, other soldiers were setting explosives to blow up some of the trees. “They blew the bark off of several trees but no tree either fell or was severely damaged. That project was abandoned,” Bill wrote.
He later looked back at these efforts from the vantage point of a civil engineer: “Now, as an engineer, I could get the poles out of the ground and in a fairly short order and clear the trees on the approach. Someone with experience should have been there to take charge of a group of kids doing the best we could but needing a hell of a lot of guidance.”
The waiting is the hardest part
But it was my dad’s and Bill’s mother, Grandma Mabel, who wrote the most gut-wrenching entries in her diary, chronicling what it was like to stand and wait when she heard, and didn’t hear, from her two sons in the service.
She waited as Bill flew his third glider mission, a massive military operation code-named Operation Market Garden, into the German-occupied Netherlands, in 1944. Bill sent her a quick note: “The sky trains started into Holland on Sept 17.” News that he survived finally arrived in the form of a terse telegram on Sept. 25: “Made out OK.”
“Three times he has gone into terrible danger and three times God has brought him out,” Mabel wrote.
Bill was remarkably lucky, although he didn’t see it that way. Having survived those three glider missions, he moved into France for the Allied invasion of Germany in March 1945. But later he wrote, “Dear Mom, didn’t go, darn it.”
There is humor. As my dad was finishing up his naval training, Mabel recorded his letter: “Bitsey wrote saying he survived his survival test — with the aid of several candy bars.”
“Bitsey” was my dad’s nickname, it being the South, and one of the reasons he eventually fled Louisiana.
A package from Bill to Mabel contained “two pieces of white parachute silk, a German pen, an ash tray from Brussels, a pair of Dutch shoes and HIS AIR MEDAL,” a medal that, in Bill’s words, “some fool general insisted on giving” him.
Bill also sent Mabel French perfume, nylon hose, and a bracelet from Egypt. Both sons sent home money whenever they could.
After Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, Mabel eagerly waited for news that Bill was on his way home: “The Queen Mary docked in New York, and I thought he was on it,” she wrote.
On July 11, she was still waiting: “No news at all from Bill. He should be home by now.”
It’s hard to imagine now what it was like to live with that kind of communication lag.
Finally, on July 24, Bill called. “He will be home in three or four days,” Mabel wrote. “Thank God for caring for and keeping him.”
Many forms of courage
Technically, Memorial Day honors those who died in the line of duty, but we still place flags on the graves of all who served.
We honor their courage, not just the kind it takes to make the ultimate sacrifice but the kind needed to enlist in the first place, to deal with the daily logistics of wartime, to stay home and wait for news, to sit calmly beside an enemy soldier, to send sons and daughters off to face impossible dangers.
We honor them by telling their stories.
For more information about organizations keeping World War II stories alive, visit the Department of Veterans Affairs, the commission on the 75th Commemoration of the End of WWII, the National World War II Museum and The Greatest Generations Foundation.
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