Students' film documents seaman's WWII experience

Rowan University senior Christopher Holzschuh hadn't heard his grandfather's entire World War II story until he made a documentary about it.

"I didn't think of him as a war hero," said Holzschuh, 22, a history major from Marlton. "It was a side to my grandfather I don't think I ever saw."

The powerful 20-minute film, Change of Tides, was shown publicly for the first time Friday at the DIY arts space in downtown Flemington, N.J., and Holzschuh and his three Rowan collaborators were on hand.

So was Holzschuh's grandfather William Roberts, who pulled three fellow sailors out of the water when the USS Emmons came under kamikaze attack off Okinawa on April 6, 1945.

More than 50 crewmen were killed or missing, and 65, including Roberts, were wounded. (His injuries included two ruptured eardrums.)

He later was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. The Emmons, damaged beyond repair, was sunk by the Navy.

"All this [attention] surprises me," Roberts, 90, told the audience in Flemington.

The Toms River resident described himself as "just one of the 12 million" Americans who served in the war - an experience, he added, "that never really leaves you."

The filmmakers - Holzschuh, Josh Hersch, Evan Moore, and Joseph Bottino - got the idea for what became Change of Tides during a late-night conversation last fall at the house they rent near Rowan's Glassboro campus.

All four have studied or been involved in documentary filmmaking, and they also share an interest in history.

"I had heard snippets of my grandfather's experiences, but he was never really vocal about it," Holzschuh said. "A lot of people from his generation didn't talk much about the war."

When Roberts, who grew up in Carbondale, Pa., enlisted in the Navy in early 1942, he was 17 and had never seen the ocean.

He served for three years aboard the Emmons, which reports of the time said was the first American ship to fire its guns - and the first to be fired upon - as Allied forces landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

Later, with the war in Europe essentially over, the Emmons was fitted for minesweeping. The ship and its 254-member crew were deployed to the South Pacific in early 1945.

"We wanted to get his story down before it's too late," said Hersch, 21, of Flemington. Like Holzschuh, he has a close family connection to the war: His paternal grandparents, about whom he made a documentary as a bar mitzvah project, were Holocaust survivors.

The morning after the late-night session, "Chris called his mother, she called her father," and the project was rolling, said Moore, 22, of Whitehouse Station, also in Hunterdon County.

"I thought the interview was something my grandson needed to do for his college course," said Roberts, a retired civil engineer whose wife, Helen, died five years ago.

But when the four collaborators showed up at his home with lights, cameras, and recording equipment, he graciously agreed to commit his memories to digital video.

The result is a series of vignettes about life aboard the Emmons - a pie-stealing episode is among the lighter moments - and a sense of what the war was like for the Americans who fought it.

"We're telling a story, from the mouth of a guy who was there, that you might not hear in a history book," said Bottino, 21, who is from Gloucester Township.

In the film and in person, Roberts is low-key and wryly self-effacing, describing himself as a man who was eager to serve his country, and happy to resume civilian life once the war was over.

Only when he is talking about what happened in Okinawa does his voice betray emotion. "You didn't know where the killing was coming from," he says in the film.

Roberts - who lives independently, walks regularly, and enjoys good health - told me he was proud of his grandson but "a little embarrassed" to be singled out for praise.

"Men were blown off the ship when it was hit," he recalled. "One guy was holding on to a second guy yelling, 'I can't swim,' so I jumped over the side and got them and put them on a life raft."

Sitting next to Roberts in front of the Flemington audience was Edwin L. Hoffman, 89.

The Northampton, Pa., resident is secretary of the Emmons Association, which curates the ship's legacy and holds reunions for the dwindling number of crewmen still alive.

On March 25, the association will participate in the installation of an Emmons memorial plaque at the U.S. Navy Memorial Heritage Center in Washington. A pair of shipmates named Roberts and Hoffman plan to be there.

Holzschuh noted that while the film is "a neat historical story," it's also deeply personal.

"It's my grandfather's story," he said.