Story that appeared in the Summer 2007 Issue of
New Horizons Magazine in New York City

 

It was a time of unspeakable horrors. The bodies of millions of young men and women torn apart by merciless metal. Whole towns firebombed out of existence.

By the time it was over tens of millions would be dead. Tens of millions more wounded. The bloodiest confrontation in human history.

And after years of blood and bombs, of fear and courage, of witnessing hell, the explosions stopped and the Americans who took part went back to the states, back to civilian life. They went back home. There they took up their old jobs, began new ones. They took advantage of the GI Bill, went to school. They took their $20 a week for a year and spent it in bars and pool halls. They married. Had kids. In short, the soldiers returned to their lives. And what so amazes the younger generations, the ones of Vietnam and of the Gulf War and of the Iraqi War, is how seemingly easy they made the return home look.

The soldiers of World War II witnessed in the most vivid colors possible the inhumanity man can visit upon man, and when it was over they just went back home and took up where they left off. No crying. No whining. No talk. They just did it.

Now the very youngest of those sent to war is 80 years old, though their median age is nearly 85. That’s eight years older than a typical American can expect to live.

In other words, the greatest of generations is quickly passing. At the time of its last study in 2004, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs found that over 1,000 WWII veterans were dying each and every day. While that pace has slowed some in the last couple of years, it is expected that about 325,000 WWII veterans will die this year, with about 20,000 in New York State alone.

Out of the 16 million individuals who served in WWII, only about three million are still alive today.

Faced with a fast-disappearing generation, the current generations are being called to a different kind of service: Preserving the stories of WWII veterans.

All across the nation, a number of organizations are doing what they can, formally and informally, to capture this rich history directly from veterans’ mouths and to record their stories on video before the opportunity is lost forever.

One such effort is the New York State Military Museum’s Veteran Oral History Program. Established by former Governor George Pataki on Veterans’ Day in 2000, the program records on video oral histories of veterans, capturing the recollections of those who fought in wars from World War II on.

“I would say about three quarters of our interviews are WWII veterans,” program coordinator Mike Russert said. “Our goal is to collect as many of these memories as we can before they’re lost. We’re not putting them on the Web or anything like that yet. Our job is just to collect them.”

It’s less important what role a person played in the war effort than it is getting people to relate their memories, said Russert, who over the last seven years, has traveled the state collecting and videotaping veterans’ recollections – some mundane, some horrific, some funny. Most are inspiring, he says.

“It’s hard sometimes thinking about some of the stories and some of the things these guys have gone through,” Russert said, recalling one veteran whose unit was pretty well wiped out in his first battle, the Battle of the Bulge. The man related in his interview that to this day, sometimes in the winter he looks out his back window into the yard and thinks, “I know the Germans are still waiting for me out there.”

“There are times that the stories bother you,” Russert continued. “You hear some really horrible stories. And at the same time, here is humor, even though it is sometimes dark. Such as one Air Force vet who related a tale about a B-24 coming in that had lost hydraulics and couldn’t get its landing gear down, so all the guys on the plane are urinating in the reservoir trying to unlock the wheels.

Imagine the pressure of trying to do that as your coming in for a landing with no wheels, Russert said.

Ted Koszarski has also heard his share of humorous and horrifying stories from WWII.

In 1995, Koszarski started videotaping veterans stories after a local Staten Island television show he was producing at the time, “50Plus,” aired an episode about Merchant Marine veterans. He was so inspired by their stories that he couldn’t help but record more.

He established the nonprofit Veterans Memorial Archive, through which he’s recorded about 550 veterans’ interviews and has posted many of them on Google Video under the keyword “Vetarchive.”

“It just seemed to me these incredible national treasures were being lost,” Koszarski said.

He’s written a couple of biographies and says having this kind of access to history is priceless. Capturing these oral histories gives the experience a whole new dimension, Koszarski said, adding: “In the 1930s we had the technology to record veterans from the Battle of Gettysburg, but no one did and now it’s lost. Imagine hearing the story of that battle – the Battle of Gettysburg – from people who were there. How valuable would that be?”

He would like to post more of his interviews online but lacks the resources to do so, and he has to concentrate on the more important task at hand. “I think the priority has to be the collection,” Koszarski says. “We don’t have that much more time.”

One program that does have the resources to do both is the Veterans History Project at the American Folklife Center of Library of Congress. It has collected more than 45,000 histories in its seven years of existence and receives about 200 interviews per week. It’s the largest oral history collection in American history, most of which is searchable through an online database.

“It’s a fading generation,” said retired Army Col. Bob Patrick, director of the project, who feels that preservation of the oral histories is important for a couple of reasons, the first being research.

“It provides a whole different aspect of looking at war, what happens at the foxhole level, the soldier level, what actually went on,” Patrick said.

The other purpose is an intergenerational one, inspiring later generations with what others have done, the sacrifices they were willing to make, and instilling a sense of duty, thereby demonstrating “the importance of doing something a little bit bigger than themselves, in some way serving your nation, not necessarily in the military but in some other capacity,” Patrick said.,

Both the New York oral history program and the national program partner with nonprofits of all kinds from all over to find their stories, including veterans hospitals, veteran associations, historical societies, libraries and high schools.

Established by Congress, it didn’t take long for the national Veteran’s History Project to go from an idea in Wisconsin House representative Ron Kind’s head to law.

“After Father’s Day dinner in 2000,” Kind has said, “I sat with my father and uncle as they recounted for the first time to me their experiences serving overseas during the Korean War and World War II. Realizing that my two sons were too young at the time to appreciate these recollections…I thought families across the country should be recording their loved ones’ own stories…to preserve this important part of American history.”

President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law three months later, lightning speed by Washington standards.

Russert said that many times it is a family member who comes to him seeking to have a father’s story preserved for grandchildren or great grandchildren. Sometimes veterans want to tell their stories of war to their family, but don’t know how.

“We’ve had quite a few that have never told the family before they told us,” Russert said, including one man from Long Island who related that he made. DVD copies that are in his safety deposit box that will go to his family after he’s deceased.

“He has never told the family the stories,” Russert said.

In the state program, every veteran who is interviewed gets a video copy of their interview for free.

“We’ve gotten letters from family after a family member has passed on thanking us for this interview because it’s the only video record they have of their father or grandfather, Wayne Clark, the program’s videographer, said. “It’s something the family will treasure for generations.”

Besides sitting for interviews, veterans donate photos, guns, decorations, uniforms and every other relic of war.

Russert said that one of the best collections he’s received came from a veteran who was one of three remaining survivors of a tank destroyer unit.

“They had made these huge scrapbooks. They’re huge. And everybody donated photographs and letters and daggers, unit flags, captured German flags,“ he said.

Since there were only three of them left, they voted to donate them to the oral history program because they worried that after the last of them died the scrapbooks might be thrown out, or end up on eBay, Russert said.