A survivor of the Liscome Bay
Submitted by Francis X. Daily, Jr.

I am one of the few survivors of the tragic sinking of the USS Liscome Bay. We were torpedoed and blown up on november 24, 1943. There were only 264 survivors with 646 men lost, tied with the uss indianapolis for the highest loss percentage in world war II. The survivors were put aboard the troop transports returning to pearl harbor following the gilbert islands invasion. Four days later, the navy delivered a blow that floored us. We knew that the navy never announced the loss of a ship until all casualties were known and relatives notified. We knew there was no radio contact with pearl, so no one but those on our two ships knew who the survivors were. Our goal was to notify our loved ones by mackay radio as soon as we reached pearl.

Twenty-four hours out of pearl harbor, we were sitting around listening to a morning newscast out of san francisco and were stunned to hear the sinking of the Liscome Bay announced and the statement that the list of casualties was unknown! we were incredulous. We were frightened for parents with weak hearts, pregnant wives and a whole list of other concerns. We just didn't need this too!

The navy was under big pressure from the associated press, united press and others to release news earlier. It seems dnb, reuters and other foreign news agencies were beating U.S. Agencies because they were under no obligation to american citizens, and the british admiralty was giving them the newsbreaks. The navy never did it again. The chaos in washington that night was unbelievable. My wife was returning to home on a commuter train from her work in philadelphia. She glanced at the front page of the philadelphia evening bulletin of a seat partner and read "Liscome Baygoes down in flames. Few survivors expected." She nearly fainted and had to be helped from the train. She does not remember how she covered the quarter mile from the strafford station to her home. Then started a long series of frantic calls to the philadelphia navy yard, to washington, to anybody who might be able to help, including a retired rear admiral my father knew - absolutely no help. For twenty-four hours, effectively all the survivors were missing in action. (one personal note i must inject here. My wife was talking to my mother that night, and mother said, "gloria, are you pregnant?" Gloria replied, "no, mother, I'm not." And mother said, "that's too bad." Women!)

Aboard the Leonard Wood, I had learned a startling story from ensign Leonard Black, who had given Gloria away at our wedding in Seattle. Unknown to all of us, he was the nephew of Captain Wiltsie, as also was Ensign Eill Schmidt, who did not survive. All of us were faced with the dreadful problem of notifying our families, but how to do it when we knew they were expecting the worst kind of a telegram from the secretary of the navy? But Blackie had a triple problem. He had to notify his wife, his aunt and his cousin's wife. He hit on the idea of sending telegrams to next door neighbors or close relatives of all three. I jumped on the idea and, sent my telegram to my parents' next-door neighbors, who had known me for years. The telegram read, "perfectly all right. Expect to be home soon. Tell mother and dad." It did the trick, nothing but jubilation all around.

Floating down from the sky
Submitted by Irv Pliskin

I never pulled the ripcord.
I was in a parachute, 15,000 feet over Nazi Germany. My face, my hands, my wrist were bleeding profusely.
I can remember throwing my hands up over my face as the B-17 F nosed over in a dive and headed straight for Mother Earth.
I was unconscious when she blew up, blowing me out of the navigator's nose compartment. Miraculously, my chute opened.
I looked around. The air was full of pieces of airplane. A section of the tail floated lazily past me.
Four fierce engine fires flamed on the ground.
I saw no other chutes.
I looked up and could see the rest of the bomb group, on their way home to England, making perfect contrails behind them.
I looked up again. There was a huge hole torn into my chute, and the gravelly voice of my sergeant instructor came immediately to mind:
"Your blankety-blank chute will hold you even if is torn almost to shreds. If it don't, bring it back, we'll give you a new one, get it?"
I hoped he was right, and I didn't look up again.
Looking down, I thought I was about to straddle some high tension wires, and so I was busily working on pulling on the parachute risers, trying to slip the chute to one side, when I passed the wires well to my left, and then landed in a snow-covered farm field.
Leaving tracks behind me, I ran to a haystack to hide, when a German with a gun came over the hill and pointed it at me.
I stopped, put my hands in the air and stood, waiting.
For me, after twenty three bowel-wrenching bombing missions, my fighting war was over and my POW life began.

Seeing shell shock come home
Submitted by Jules Tasca

During World War II, I was one of many six- and seven-year-olds who collected scrap metal and newspapers to help the war effort against the Germans and the Japanese. I imagined my collected cans, clothes hangers and other metal cast-offs being forged into bullets to be fired at our enemies. I recall wanting to participate in the signal concern of all the adults around me.
But the war came home to me most vividly where I lived on South Mole Street in Philadelphia one autumn day. A neighbor, a young soldier who had fought in the European Theater, came home on leave. My father, always generous, invited him into our home and shook his hand and asked him to sit and relax. My father then offered the boy with the soft cap folded on his lap a drink of whiskey.
The soldier-neighbor accepted, but when he took the proffered drink he could not hold the shot glass steady. His hand shook uncontrollably. No one needed to explain to me, even at such a young age, that this soldier had been through the terrible trial of war. Although I did not fully understand the term "shell shock," I could see its horror before my callow eyes.
The boy in his Army uniform apologized to my father for spilling some of his drink. My father got him a saucer to hold under the vibrating shot glass. The glass and the saucer rattled against each other like some doleful drum roll at a funeral.
The neighbor in khakis apologized once more for his unsteadiness.
"Why are you apologizing? You're a hero to us. Drink heartily," my father said. The Corporal took up his drink and swallowed it in one gulp as if he needed the drink - and the chance to know that his fellows on Mole Street were aware of how difficult it had been for him in Italy, where he fought, and to realize also that they cared.
I remember this event - not the neighbor's name - and that subsequent Saturdays of collecting scrap metal for the war effort made me feel more strongly that in such a World War the whole nation had to help, even kids.

Wrong guy, wrong ship - right wife
Submitted by George Emmons

After three years and seven island invasions in the Pacific, my ship, USS Belle Grove, a landing ship dock, was at anchor at Okinawa, an island 400 miles off Japan, awaiting the inevitable invasion of the enemy's homeland. While there, I received a letter - the most important letter of my life.
It was a letter from a girl, a girl unknown, a girl from Brooklyn, a girl named Betty. And it was addressed to George Emmons. My name. Wrong rating, wrong ship, wrong George Emmons.
And, since I had long since run out of girls to correspond with, I immediately wrote her, explained the mix-up and asked her to continue the correspondence.
She did.
Many letters followed, pictures were exchanged, a promise was made to meet after the war.
From my home in New Jersey, still in uniform, ruptured-duck insignia on my sleeve, I traveled to the Brooklyn Public Library, her place of employment. We met, agreed to date, and the rest, as they say, is history.
We have been married for fifty-nine years.
Not your typical war story.

The war would finally end, but some battles would linger on
Submitted by Carol Shultz Vento

"HUT - TWO - three - four. Hut - two - three - four." The cadence of my childhood.
Echoing footsteps on the wooden floors. Memories of a spindly, pale child with purplish under-eye circles marching behind her athletic, paratrooper dad. Up and down the narrow Philadelphia rowhouse steps, past the shoebox-sized bedrooms, the stark no-sink bathroom, and the musty coal bin, the 6-year-old girl's mission was to not give up - just like Dad.
In 1952, my father, Arthur "Dutch" Schultz, was in his late twenties and had the physique of the welterweight boxer and baseball player he once was. Tall, with mercurial blue-green eyes and light brown hair, Dad had a rakish smile that charmed every woman he met.
I didn't know at the time, but he had been the boxing champion of his 82nd Airborne regiment, and a combat survivor of the European Campaign in World War II, including a bloody and confused D-Day and nightmarish Battle of the Bulge. To me, he was just Daddy - and my hero.
In appearance we were a study in contrasts - the All-American young man with his little Italian waif of a daughter. I inherited my mother's Mediterranean looks, but in temperament and interests, I was just like Dad.
Our marching game was all I knew of my father's war during my early years. Because Dad was silent about his war experiences, only later did I realize that his war wasn't all fun and games. The traumas that he experienced during his war years would haunt him for decades.
During his life, he fought two wars. When the young paratrooper descended from a flak-ridden plane into the dark Normandy sky on June 6, 1944, little did he realize that his survival of D-Day was only the beginning.
Battling Hitler and the German Army would be finite. Not so the struggle for his psyche.
The World War II exploits of Dutch Schultz have been documented. Dad's stories have struck a responsive chord - he has been cast as "everyman" and symbolic of the citizen soldier.
Cornelius Ryan's 1959 book, "The Longest Day," depicted Dad as an eager, confused, and sometimes lost paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day.
In the 1962 movie version, he was portrayed by a hyperactive Richard Beymer.
Ryan further followed Dad's march through Europe by including him in the 1966 chronicle of the final days in Germany, "The Last Battle," and the saga of Market Garden in the 1974 book, "A Bridge Too Far."
Decades passed with little recognition for the veterans of "The Good War." However, as they aged, nostalgia took hold, spurring increased interest in World War II victories. Noted historian Stephen Ambrose's book, "D-Day - June 6. 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II" was published on the 50th anniversary of the attack.
Dutch Schultz was again a prominent figure. Television, with its visual impact, presented an ailing Dutch Schultz as one of a select group of World War II veterans who are featured in documentaries on D-Day anniversaries. The old paratrooper with the craggy, lined face, expressive body language, and oxygen tubing in his nose was still a compelling symbol.
All the glory focused on Dutch Schultz and his fellow World War II veterans in their waning years can be counterpoised to the invisibility of the combat vet in immediate postwar America.
Only about 25 percent of the Army was assigned to ground combat divisions. In those divisions, only about half the soldiers actually were in battle and exposed to life-threatening situations. Many in World War II had not felt the fear and terror of loss of their lives, had not seen or caused death and destruction, had not lived exposed to the extremes of weather, constant enemy shelling and seeing the torn and bloody bodies of their buddies like my paratrooper dad did.
He was recognized as a hero but he never identified as one. He tried hard to let go of the traumas but continued to fight a war within himself for years.
He left the killing fields of Europe, but Normandy, Holland and the Ardennes never completely left him.
When I was a little girl, Dad hid the memories except in the still of the night. He would relive the horror of the war in his nightmares. Bolting from a sweat- soaked bed, he would start to fire his imaginary machine gun, while alerting his buddies of the enemy presence. The daytime repressing of his war trauma took its toll in my father's alcoholism and my parents' marriage, and when I was 12 dad and mom divorced.
Dad was gone from the home, but not from my life. Our father-daughter bond remained strong and endured through his many life changes including his recovery from alcoholism and his lifetime work of helping those young men and women who had the same problems he once had.

A stroll in the Philippine moonlight
Submitted by Carl H. Bove

I have memories of some stories from World War II, some funny, some sad, some gruesome. The story I'd like to share took place in Leyte, Philippine Islands, early 1945. I was a paratrooper, U.S. Army, 11th Airborne; we were called the Blue Angels.
Having seen frequent combat against the Japanese, we received information that our communication lines were being cut by unknown personnel. Myself and nine other soldiers were instructed to "shoot to kill" anyone seen on our overnight stakeout. The people in the village were warned not to venture out in the night or risk being shot.
We were staked out, two to a hut, about 100 yards apart, waiting for a perpetrator. I was positioned second in line down the main road. About 3 a.m. I was able to hear and then see a tall man gingerly walking down the middle of the road, wearing a white jacket/trousers along with a Panama hat.
The moon was bright that night as our subject was clearly whistling a John Philip Sousa tune. I set up my rifle in the sill of the hut having Mr. Panama Hat directly in my sight. I would wait to see if he stopped to cut our communication wires which would necessitate my taking him down.
I waited about 2-3 minutes seeing him walk past while he continued to whistle. I took note that he was a professional looking man - maybe a doctor or professor. He went right through our patrol area without wavering from the road. He had no idea of the precarious position he was in.
My thoughts turned to the first hut he had passed. My fellow soldiers let him pass unharmed as did I. However, an order was an order. We were trained not to question or reason with our orders. Shoot to kill was the command. And yet, we found out the very next day that all our five outposts permitted this man to pass by unharmed. It was obvious that he was innocent and knew nothing of our restricted curfew. Next day, our lieutenant inquired from all ten of us if we had seen anybody last night, and we unanimously replied negative. This incident was a credit to the American GIs who, despite some negative press then, showed compassion to our innocent intruder.
About two months later during an assault, I earned the Purple Heart by being shot through the left lung. Fortunately, after a couple months of hospitalization and therapy I was discharged and returned home.

One day in Pearl Harbor: A 12th birthday to remember for a lifetime
From Helen Bowles Nicholson

Dec. 7, 1941 was my 12th birthday. My younger brother and I were destined, nonetheless, to attend Sunday school. As we stepped out the door, "Those aren't American planes," said my father as some planes approached. Their wings displayed the rising sun, and we could see the pilots' faces as they flew past our hillside home at eye level.
As we made our way to our Sunday school, we could see large columns of black smoke above Pearl Harbor.
Our minister brought a huge console radio into the church and said, "Something terrible has happened" and we learned of the attack.
We could not go home. Daddy, a physician, was called to Tripler Army Hospital. We learned later he had spent the entire day standing in one spot performing amputations as victims were wheeled to him on gurneys.
Our minister gathered us kids and we set out on foot to the nearby home of our aunt and uncle. It was then we heard the whistle of a bomb and were ordered to lie face down. I can still taste that dirt.
Eventually a neighbor delivering meat to army bases for a meat company took us home. Grandfather placed black curtains in the windows of one room of our house so we could use lights there. The blackout continued for four years; for four years we moved no furniture in the house.
Two months later we returned to school. We carried gas masks with us at all time for four years. Air raid drills were part of our routine.
Although none of my friends could come to my 12th birthday party, the ice cream man had delivered the ice cream on time!

Trials of the Canberra
Submitted by Frederick J. Maurer

I served aboard the USS Canberra, CA-70 and participated in 18 engagements as part of both the 3rd Fleet and Sib Fleet. We were awarded 7 battle stars and were hit by a torpedo 90 miles off of Formosa.
We lost 23 men and with the USS Houston were used as bait to draw the Japanese fleet out of port. We were towed by the USS Wichita and later the fleet tug Munsee.
Due to the extent of the damage, we could not distill the saltwater into fresh water. Captain Early ordered them to serve the beer we had on board for the first couple of days. It was warm and we had it for breakfast, lunch and supper. One can each. Then they had a destroyer come alongside and they transferred fresh water to us from their tanks. To accomplish this they had to use the hoses that were used to refuel the destroyers.
We were allocated one Dixie cup of water at each meal time. Marines were stationed at each drinking fountain to enforce it. We were each given 2 Dixie cups. You would fill one and let it stand for a few minutes and the oil would float to the top. You would then punch a hole in the bottom and let it drain into the second cup. Needless to say, the water had the odor and taste of the fuel oil. Plus, we all got diarrhea.
The other problem was bathing. It took us two weeks for them to tow us to Ulithi. It's hot in the Pacific and we had no fresh water to bathe. So when we would encounter a squall line, the captain would direct the Munsee to head for it and they would announce over the loud speakers that we would be entering the squall and prepare to undress for a shower. All of the crew that weren't on duty would strip and prepare to soap up.
It was like seeing a ship load of nudists. A couple of times, when we cleared the squall, we were stuck with being soaped up. We would then have to throw buckets over the side and rinse off with salt water. After a couple times, it felt like your skin was turning to leather.
There were a couple other problems that we encountered. We didn't have enough fresh water to wash the food trays and utensils, so they used salt water and they all began to rust as they were not Type 300 stainless steel.
And the last problem was that the flour to make the bread started to get bugs in it. So the cooks/bakers utilized raisins to camouflage that fact. So we ended up with raisin bread, and, in fact, we got extra protein.
But the best part of it all was that we were still alive after passing through the Valley of Death, and we will always remember the 23 shipmates that were not so fortunate.

War through a child's eyes: When your town becomes the front lines
Submitted by Irene J. O'Connor

I grew up on the outskirts of a small town in Alsace, France. Our house was surrounded by meadows, woods and in the distance by the Vosges Mountains.
When I was six years old, my job was to feed the hens. The only red hen we had became my pet.
In the summer of 1944 my perfect childhood suddenly came to an end. As I was looking out the kitchen window admiring the landscape, I could see an airplane approaching. As it came closer, I could hear the machine guns. My mother grabbed me and we ran down to the basement. Later on, we found bullet holes sprayed just below the kitchen window.
Sometime in October, some families had left their homes for a safer place. When our next door neighbor left, the Germans occupied their house. They did not bother us. Sometimes in the evening they would invite themselves over, just to talk. We were not German sympathizers but we tolerated them out of fear.
By mid-November the Germans ordered us to vacate our home because they wanted to install radio equipment. We left for a three-story building four blocks down the street.
When we arrived at the building, the Germans had already occupied it, but they let about 10 families use the basement. As time went on, it was difficult to get food. One day when a horse got killed in front of the building, once again we had food. Because of the unsanitary conditions that developed, we wound up with fleas and lice with no medicine to be had.
As the weeks continued, bombs fell all around us. The noise was deafening, the building shook and for the first time I trembled. I thought we were going to die.
In May 1945, as the war was coming to an end, the French surrounded the building. One German soldier went berserk and attached hand grenades all over his body. He was ready to blow himself up and the building but his commanding officer talked him out of it.
As other German soldiers were brought to the building, one smug soldier came in carrying my pet hen. I leaped toward him, screaming "GIVE ME MY HEN! GIVE ME MY HEN!" He was ordered to give me back my hen.
As we left the building to go back home, we saw for the first time the devastation of war. It was heartbreaking.
Our house had a big hole in the roof from mortar shells. It was right over my bedroom. It was a blessing that we weren't there at the time.
Also after the war, General Charles DeGaulle came through many of the towns to inspect the destruction. As he came past our street I waved to him and he waved right back.
The war affected me for a lifetime.

War from W. Philly
Submitted by Beatrice M. Welmon

It was Sunday evening, Dec. 7, 1941. I was an eight-year-old African-American residing in the racially integrated section of West Philadelphia.
I was startled when my father entered my bedroom and excitedly informed my mother that a radio news flash had reported a Japanese attack on the United States Naval Forces based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Being young, I could not imagine the impact of this event on mine and other families, much less its impact on world affairs
The next morning, classmates remarked, "My parents say not to worry because the Boy Scouts can beat the Japanese."
No one imagined this war would involve the world and last four difficult, heart-breaking years.
Within a few months, male youth, on the threshold of their lives, were drafted into the armed services, some never to return to our community.
During assemblies, patriotic songs were sung. Teachers read stories of heroes President Franklin Roosevelt and Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. Minority generals were never mentioned.
My father packed rubber items and flattened tin cans for distribution to my school for the war effort.
Parents used rationing books for food items and gasoline purchases.
Every Saturday, children went to neighborhood "movie houses" to view motion pictures as they were called in this era. This was a "treat" since there were no television sets in our homes. News was reported by radio or movie-house newsreels which never recognized nor portrayed minority military heroism.
War ended in 1945, and all veterans returned to their respective homes. However, it was 20 years later during the Civil Rights Era, when minority veterans began to experience a more equitable society for which they had sacrificed their youth.