B0737M5NDQ Read online

  ‘Near Falls-Finch, Pruyn & Co., Inc. on Left’

  Glens Falls-Hometown USA—LOOK Magazine, 1943-44.

  Credit: Crandall Public Library, Folklife Center, Glens Falls N.Y.

  Esthetically and demographically, it seemed an apt decision. The counties on either side of the waterfalls on the Hudson River, Washington and Warren, give rise to the Adirondack Mountains and the pristine waters of Lake George to the north. To the east lay Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont; just to the south, Saratoga with its historic racetrack, a summertime destination for over 100 years. Beyond Saratoga lay the industrial city of Troy and the state capital of Albany, less than an hour away by rail or automobile. In the early days these counties played pivotal roles in the formation of the United States, given their geographic strategic importance on the Great Warpath, the almost unbroken stretch of water linking New York City with Canada. It was around the vicinity of the ‘Falls’ that watercraft had to be taken out and portaged. Two major fortifications were constructed here by the British during the French and Indian War, and this was the setting for James Fenimore Cooper’s classic The Last of the Mohicans. Half a generation later, a British army sweeping through here would be repulsed by county sons at the Battle of Saratoga.

  Following the American Revolution, the early settlers engaged in agricultural pursuits such as dairy farming and later, sheep raising. Mill based operations on the river were centered around the upper falls at Glens Falls and the lower falls just downstream at Hudson Falls and evolved into significant lumber and papermaking operations. With the opening of the Erie and Champlain Canals two generations after the Revolution, new worlds opened up, but the ‘North Country’ counties remained relatively small in population. Living here required hard work in all four seasons, but it was a quiet, close-knit place to raise a family, like many rural areas across America.

  Then the war came.

  *

  Like most every other community in America, from the outside this region seemed untouched by the war. As documented by LOOK, life went on to its rhythmic beat—children went off to school, the mills hummed, department stores filled their storefront windows, and farmers sowed and reaped according to the seasons. The beat quickened as young men and women stirred to volunteer, notices arrived in the post box, and many left town for the first time in their lives. Life went on but was now accentuated by rationing, victory gardens, blackouts, and paper and scrap drives. Soon, the arrival of telegrams announcing sons missing or captured, teary phone calls from military hospitals, or worse, the static rings of the front porch doorbell would drive this war home into the heart of ‘Hometown USA’ with the fury of hammer blows. Things would never be the same again. Like the ‘hard times’ of the Great Depression in the decade preceding, this war affected every family. Few American communities would remain unscathed by the emotional detritus of World War II.

  Glens Falls-Hometown USA—LOOK Magazine, 1943-44.

  Credit: Crandall Public Library, Folklife Center, Glens Falls N.Y.

  John Norton: There was a family that lost two sons in World War II. The family got a telegram on a Monday that one of the boys was killed, and that Thursday they got another telegram saying that his brother had been killed. There were about 35 young men from [this town] who were killed in World War II, and I knew every one of them.

  Thus the war came, and went. Of the sixteen million Americans who donned uniforms, nearly three-quarters of them went overseas. Most returned home to a nation on the cusp of a change not imaginable to their younger selves who had struggled through the Great Depression. The GI Bill of Rights brought new opportunities everywhere and the economy began to boom. It was best to forget the war and to get on with normal life.

  Art LaPorte, U.S. Marine at Iwo Jima: I’ve had a nightmare down through the years. When I worked at the paper mill sometimes I would be working on something, with all the noise and whatnot, and I would go back in the battles and I could almost smell the gunpowder. I would see all the action for a few seconds. If you had waved your hand in front of me, I would not have known you were there. I was right back there.

  ‘Normal’ life. Except that maybe it was not going to be that easy.

  *

  Twilight

  Nearly seventy-five years after the beginning of those dark days, the twilight of living memory is now at hand. Day after day we open the newspaper to see that more American veterans have passed on, and we are suddenly on the other side of the ‘bell curve’ of deaths per day—the downhill slope. By September 30, 2018, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that fewer than 450,000 will remain with us; in just 20 years, the World War II generation will have all gone the way of the veterans of World War I and the Civil War.

  I don’t know exactly when I was struck by the notion that that this day would come, though on some cosmic level I have been planning for it for years. I was born sixteen years after the killing stopped, and I grew up in the company of men and women who fought in World War II. Probably like most kids my age, I had no idea of what they did, and like most kids, I did not think to ask. I was raised in this sleepy hamlet on the ‘Falls’ in many ways not unlike their generation, an innocent in an intact home surrounded by brothers and sisters and community-minded parents. I seemed to draw strength from the study of history at a young age, spending my summer mornings wandering in the woods down near the waterfalls that gave the town its name, searching for evidence of colonial skirmishes and settlements of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. As I got older I became interested in the conflicts of the twentieth century but remained blissfully unaware of the veterans who were all around me. Some of my teachers in school were veterans of World War II but I don't remember anyone ever specifically launching into a story about their time in the conflict. It's also possible that they did, but I was not paying attention.

  In the late spring of 1984, all of that would change. On television I watched as the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings was being commemorated over in France. Thousands of American veterans joined their Allied and German counterparts for a solemn tribute and reunion tours of the battlefields where they had fought decades earlier. Many of these men would have now been just hitting their stride in retirement. It was also the first time in nearly 40 years that many would be back together to ruminate on their reawaking past. And here it was that I woke up, and was moved.

  I returned to my high school alma mater in 1987 as a teacher of history. I found myself spending a good chunk of time each spring lecturing enthusiastically about World War II, and it was contagious. There was a palpable buzz in the classroom. All the students would raise a hand when I would call out for examples of grandparents or other relatives who had served in the war—frequently two hands would go up in the air. Every kid had a personal connection to the most cataclysmic event in the history of mankind—and the late eighties, many of the soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors who came home from the war were still with us.

  A few years later my students and I watched as the nation observed the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. After that we had the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings, which again attracted much interest. The films Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan were released to much fanfare and critical acclaim. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a work in progress for over a decade, opened its doors on a cold April day in 1993. These events signaled to those who had lived through World War II that it was okay to begin to talk about these things, that maybe people were finally ready to listen.

  Building on that blossoming interest, I created a simple survey for students to interview family members. I had hit upon something that every teacher searches for—a tool to motivate and encourage students to want to learn more, for the sake of just learning it.

  I was haunted, though, by one survey that was returned. When asked to respond to a simple question, a shaky hand wrote back in all capitals:

  I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU COULD MAKE YO
UNG PEOPLE TODAY UNDERSTAND WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO GO THROUGH A NIGHTMARE LIKE WORLD WAR II.

  He was right—nobody can interpret history like those who were there. Maybe I took that as an unconscious push to bring the engagement into the students’ lives even more personally. Every spring we produced themed seminars and veterans’ forums and at every step of the way students were actively involved. We began to conduct videotaped interviews, inviting veterans into the classroom, and I also conducted dozens of interviews on my own outside of school. It seemed that for every facet of the war, if we dug deep enough, we could find someone who had lived it and would be willing to share his or her story. Young people who despised school stopped me in the hall to voice appreciation after listening to the veterans. I learned a lot about World War II, but I also learned a lot about teaching.

  Shortly after the 50th anniversary of the end of the war we initiated a dedicated project, and to date, young people have fanned out into the community and collected nearly 200 stories, forging bonds and bridging generational divides, bringing happiness and companionship to their elders. They became ‘collectors of memory’ and brought back much of what you will read here, improving their ‘people skills’, honing their capacity for sustained concentration and analytics, and sharpening their writing chops for college in the process. Just as importantly, students of history had a hand in creating new history, adding an important tack on the scholarship of World War II that would have probably otherwise been lost. In that regard, the books in this series are unlike other World War II titles on the bookshelves today.

  The Ripples

  Still, as we recount these stories, the overarching question for some may be—‘So what? Who cares?’—and I suppose in our busy world that is to be expected. But somehow I believe that there is a higher purpose to this endeavor. There are always the lessons of sacrifice and service, of duty and honor, and that is enough to warrant a work like this. But in the end it comes down to simply listening, and pausing to consider all we have gone through together in a broader scope as a nation. It helps us to understand the essence of the eternal truths of the human condition, and ultimately, ourselves. World War II brought out the worst in humanity, but it also brought out the best. In studying World War II and the Holocaust, the ripples created generations ago remind us that history is not static, that these events will continue to flow and reverberate down through the ages.

  Most of the subjects for this book have now passed on. Thirty years after it all began, sometimes I will lie awake at night and wonder about it all; it appears that the past beckoned, and we channeled a portal. Here are the stories that a special generation of Americans told us for the future when we took the time to be still, and to listen. In these narratives I hope you can draw your own lessons.

  8th AF B-17 Flying Fortresses, 396th Bomb Group, 1943.

  Credit: USAF. Library of Congress, public domain.

  Chapter One

  Air Power

  The transition of the young men in this book from the Great Depression to aerial combat, from boyhood to manhood, paralleled the American development of air power and the emergence of new tactics and philosophies of coordinating and waging ‘air war’ on a scale that had never been done before in history. The concept of waging war from the sky on a large scale after World War I was not a novel idea, but it was met with resistance by the established branches of the U.S. services. During the 1930s, proponents like Billy Mitchell, Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Lindbergh made gains at home, as did the Royal Air Force in Britain. The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe under Air Marshal Herman Goering increased in size and range with the growth of Nazi militarism; these terrible weapons were tested during the Spanish Civil War and then the invasion of Poland to great effect. During the lull in the fighting between the fall of Poland in September 1939 and the German attacks in the west the following spring, Germany and Great Britain geared up for the battles that loomed on the horizon. The British had established the Royal Air Force, or RAF, as an independent wing of their armed forces. Led by independent thinkers who believed that air power and strategic bombing would be the key to winning the next conflict following the its emergence in the First World War, RAF Bomber Command began their first missions with daylight attacks on German warships in the North Sea. In the course of a December 1939 daylight raid, half the bombers sent out as a force of 24 were shot down by the faster German fighter planes. The RAF quickly switched to experimenting with flying at night; survival rates for the planes dropping propaganda leaflets and the occasional bombloads thereafter improved dramatically, although bombing results were far less satisfactory.

  After the German invasion of the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a cautionary warning to the Luftwaffe that any attack on civilian populations would lead to an ‘appropriate’ response.[1] On May 14th, the Germans bombed Rotterdam in the Netherlands, killing 800 civilians. Although part of the rationale for the Allied use of airpower was precisely to avoid the constant slaughter that ground on and on along the stalemated Western Front for four long years in the First World War, no one could predict how much air power, once unleashed, would be difficult to contain. The first strategic targets were aircraft factories, synthetic oil plants, and marshalling yards for rail transport.[2] Wildly inaccurate, bombing by night led to much collateral damage.

  After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone. Hitler’s plan, in simple terms, was to have the German Luftwaffe wreak havoc and terror from the skies, and have the U-boat fleet blockade the island country. Once Operation Sea Lion’s first phase was completed, an invasion by navy barges and infantry troops could occur.

  It never got that far. While London was initially avoided by German bombers, on August 24th, 1940, two German pilots veering off course jettisoned their bombloads before heading home, hitting areas of the city. This gave Churchill the opportunity to order up an 81-plane retaliatory nighttime mission on the German capital. Though it did little damage, it was a public relations success, and was also sure to bring German retaliation, which would in turn garner American public opinion towards helping Britain in some way.[3] Outnumbered four to one, the pilots of the RAF, the use of newly invented radar, and effective antiaircraft flak kept the German bombing campaign at bay.[4] In the ensuing Blitz of London, where German bombers appeared over the city in a daily parade of terror bombing, the RAF claimed 56 bombers over the city on a single day in September.[3] Even the royal family’s quarters were not spared, but Londoners did not fold. Hitler called off the invasion indefinitely two days later, though the onslaught would go on at night for the next two months. Forty thousand had been killed in the Battle of Britain, and the notion that ‘civilian populations be spared’ rendered almost quaint. The strategic air offensive against Germany would last for five years, ‘the most continuous and grueling operation of war ever carried out.’[5] Hitler turned his attention to the East, convinced that the conquest of the Soviet Union, with its teeming agricultural lands and resources, were paramount to Germany’s ultimate victory in the war.[6] He could return to finish Britain off later. And now on December 6th, 1941, with Hitler’s legions literally at the gates of Moscow, came Marshal Zhukov’s massive Red Army counterpunch. A world away, Japanese fliers were conducting last minute preparations for launching their strikes against a place most Britishers, or Americans for that matter, had ever heard about—Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on the United States on December 12th, and the sleeping, lumbering giant stirred. The Americans would finally be on their way.

  *

  In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, French Morocco, to hammer out a rough blueprint for the Allied invasion of Europe. One of the first priorities was to destroy the German Luftwaffe, and as such, a ‘Combined Bombing Offensive’ was to be undertaken, with the Americans bombing German targets during the day and the British following at night in an unrelenting bid to soften German resistance. The go
als were clear—in order to bring the war to an end, the effects had to be total and overwhelming. That meant bombing not only industrial targets, but also densely populated urban centers where the working people lived; a skilled worker was more difficult to replace than a machine, and the fact was that many machines escaped destruction in the bombing raids. Euphemistically termed ‘de-housing’, British strategists in Bomber Command never denied that those efforts constituted an effort to terrorize the population.[7] Many pointed out that the Germans had begun it with their raids over London during the summer nights of 1940. In Operation Gomorrah, the repeated attacks by the Royal Air Force and the Eighth Army Air Force targeting Hamburg during the last week of July 1943, more than 45,000 people were killed and 400,000 left homeless in conflagrations that resulted in manmade ‘firestorms’—howling tornado-like updrafts which conducted superheated air skywards, drawing oxygen out of subterranean bomb shelters and incinerating human beings by literally sucking them into the flames.[8] In this one raid alone, more German civilians died than in all of Germany’s air attacks against English cities, though neither Bomber Command nor Churchill felt any moral qualms; many pointed out that the Germans had begun it with their raids over London during the summer nights of 1940. Given the brutal nature of initial German attacks and the necessity of defeating Hitler, this is hardly surprising.