My uncle Larry died yesterday, the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Now, I know he was a WWII vet, but I never thought about what job he had, whether he was stateside, overseas, or what. I never once heard him mention his service at all. Until 1-1/2 years ago he and my aunt were in California, but still, there were visits.
My uncle, that short, skinny guy, who died in an Alzheimer’s unit at a nursing home, was in a tank battalion that went ashore at Omaha Beach June 7th, the second day of the invasion. My uncle, that guy who made a living as a printer, and donated hundreds of hours of volunteer transcription services to the Lutheran Braille Workers, was involved in the Battle of the Bulge. I never knew until three hours ago that he was in the Netherlands at the end of the war, and so it’s possible he was there on May 5, 1945.
I knew him as a friendly guy who liked gardening, loved his wife, my aunt(she died in January) and would have been a great father, if he and my aunt had ever been blessed with children. I have never imagined him being in some of the hell he must have seen, and I wish I could have heard about his service. Now I never will. Damn.
A couple years ago, when the D-Day Museum here opened its “War in the Pacific” exhibit, they had a big parade with flyovers (it was kind of weird seeing all those planes flying at strafing level over Poydras Street). We had taken chairs out to a street corner, and an elderly gentleman wearing a Navy cap and his wife joined us, so we offered him a chair and started talking about his service during WWII.
Turned out he was aboard the ship that did almost all the filming of the attack on Pearl Harbor that we have today. He talked about all the death and destruction that he saw, the ships sinking and the bombs falling, and how hard it was to not race back in to try to help, but to stay where they were so they could continue to film. And then he went on to talk about all the other action he’d seen during the war, which was a lot.
It was a really moving experience. And it was amazing to see how his adult daughters hung on his every word – I’m not sure they had ever heard the tale before, either. And yet he told it so calmly; it was just part of his life. I think that’s one thing that made those guys so special. They had a job to do, they did it and came home, and went on with their lives. They didn’t dwell on it or even share much of it with anybody.
I’m sorry you never had a chance to talk with your uncle, Baker. But take comfort in the fact that he really did help to save the world. What an amazing epitaph!
I went to college during the latter Vietnam era and met a lot of V-Vets going to school on the GI Bill, etc. (An unusual number of them had less-than-honorable discharges. That tells you something.) None of them ever wanted to talk about what happened There. None.
I ascribed this to the peculiarity of Nam, but in recent years I’ve seen more and more stories about WWII Vets who never talked about what happened either, just like the OP.
One of my uncles was shot down over Austria and had a rough time (to say the least) as a POW. I knew quite a bit about the story since my grandmother kept a scrapbook, etc. But during Bush War I he was interviewed by the local paper about the treatment of prisoners compared to his experience and when the article appeared he was inundated with calls from loooong time friends who never heard that he had been a POW. (His wife worked for the paper, so that’s how the paper found out about him.) Even guys he went to school with and the like.
People’s “memories” of WWII parades and such aren’t really the common way things happened. (And most of the guys in the few parades never went overseas.) He was discharged from a base in Nowhere Utah, took the bus, got in late, called home to ask for a ride. That was it. He just went on with his life.
Since then, he’s realized that people really need and want to know about such matters and he’s written a small book on it, did a living history video interview, etc.