Limited Duty

By Tadeous Furlepa

Limited Duty is a uniquely compelling memoir of my father's life leading up to and through WWII. His personal triumph of overcoming a severe physical disability as a child, to eventually changing others perception of him and his handicap, and proving himself worthy of serving his country. As a soldier from the north he witnessed first hand the racial tension between the whites and those blacks he befriended. His surviving a botched appendectomy, operating a lucrative gambling enterprise on base, dancing with Judy Garland at the Hollywood Canteen, experiencing the initial test of the atomic bomb to his discharge from the military in January 1946. These are just some of the historical events that provided a fascinating, and often times humorous look into his military career of a stateside soldier.

Limited Duty was selected for inclusion by both the National WWII Museum and Texas Historical Commission to be used as research material available for staff, visitors, and researchers to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the American experience during World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tadeous Furlepa
• Release date: Mar 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781513639291

Tadeous Furlepa

Tadeous Furlepa is a first time author with a passion for World War II history. His journey into writing started when he decided to chronicle his father’s World War II experiences as a soldier who was given the designation, “1B” Limited Duty. What started out as a personal desire to learn about his father’s military service, eventually lead him to write his father’s biography. His intent is for the reader to find his father’s life story as inspirational, humorous, and as genuine as the man who lived it, his father. In his spare time he and his wife enjoy traveling to historic venues.

Book preview

FORWARD

I started this project in the summer of 2006 when my parents came to celebrate the birthdays of my oldest and youngest children (their birthday’s are seven days apart). It was during this visit that I sat down with my father and asked him to share some of the stories with his grandchildren. The same stories he shared and fascinated me and my sisters during our youth. As we all listened the thought crossed my mind that I needed to chronicle his own World War II experiences in order to share them with his other family members and future generations.

He was eighty-six years old at this time, and he reminded me and others that more than one hundred World War II veterans died each day. He was a member of the Honor Guard at the Villages community in Florida, and when we spoke he often would tell me about the passing of another veteran from that group. The passing of each veteran silences their stories known only to them or a select few.

Over the next several years I made it my mission to conduct numerous interviews both on the phone and in person, and when available record each discussion. After each interview I personally would research historical text books, contact libraries in Galveston, Hitchcock, and El Paso, Texas requesting access to their newspaper archives, as well as countless internet inquiries to corroborate and verify his accounts of historical events. From start to completion it would take me more than twelve years. An adventure at times that was unique and unbelievable as the stories my father shared.

During this period I went through a divorce that would take more than three years to complete. As a result I would experience the complete loss of material gathered. A legal battle ensued for the return of my computer and all material relating to my father’s life story, but in the end every saved CD copy of the manuscript was destroyed. Upon the return of my computer I discovered that it’s hard drive had been reformatted and all data lost. The most devastating loss were the hours of recorded audio tapes of my interviews with my father. Thankfully he was still alive and able to allow for replacement recording to be made. I meticulously and painstakingly was able to recreate all my previous efforts and finished the writing of what has become my father’s memoir. We are both delighted to share and bring to life the stories of his World War II experiences as a stateside soldier.

Author’s Preface

I am the son of a World War II veteran. As a child I thought my father’s was a heroic soldier who fought in epic battles that defeated the Germans, Italians, and Japanese To me he was every war hero in every World War II movie.

The truth was my father was none of this. As World War II raged around the world, he served his time stateside, mostly in Texas, as an Army sergeant. He never fought in any battles, as he was designated 1B—Limited Duty—because he had lost his right eye in a freak accident as a child.

He never embellished any of his stories. In fact he was almost apologetic when he discussed his time in the Army, simply implying that he wasn’t worthy to be counted among those who actually saw battle. He was never unclear that he didn’t serve overseas. However, as a small child of six (or younger) I had little concept of geography or the term overseas and where the war was fought. I understood that my father was a soldier, and that he had served in Texas, so I rationalized that he was fighting the Germans there.

Learning that my father was not the military hero I had pictured did not lessen my impression of him or his contributions as a soldier. If anything it encouraged me to probe deeper into his past and understand the events that would shape his life.

Over the course of my own life my intrigue with WWII grew. From my early teenage years through college and beyond I devoured all things World War II-related. I was adamant about not missing an episode of the television series "World at War," and I spent hours in the Michigan State University library paging through the entire Life Magazine collection from 1933 through 1945, time that probably would have been better spent studying my coursework. I was obsessed with learning about every aspect of the war.

It was also during this period that my interest in my father’s military service was rekindled. My youthful illusion of him having fought in combat had been replaced years earlier by the reality of knowing he served stateside, but I still wanted to learn more. Reminders from his service such as the German binoculars he had been given from a friend who served as General Patton’s chauffeur for a time to his old military backpack, belt, and eighteen-inch bayonet all fascinated me and are now cherished family artifacts.

They are all we have left. An uncle’s old military footlocker that was stored in our basement, large enough for a small child to hide in during games of hide and seek, is another item I remember from my youth. Unfortunately it was discarded by my parents when I was eight years old and my family moved to a new home. My uncle declined their offer to return it to him, and it was never to be seen again.

As my father relived the stories he told, I was drawn to his humility. It was a characteristic shared by many of the men who served, judging from the many books on the history of World War II I have read and the interviews with veterans I have seen over the years. Rarely did these men ever utter an I or me when discussing their involvement. Instead, they used the terms we and us to describe their participation. Someone always seemed to be worse off than them.

Maybe it was just the generation these men were a part of. Maybe it was because they felt a sense of responsibility to honor the memories of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. In any case, my father is a proud WWII veteran, and though he chooses to deflect the praise he receives for being a surviving World War II veteran, he sees it as a privilege and an honor to have served his country in the capacity that he did.

Despite my interest in World War II, for most of my life I didn’t inquire into his service to our country, gleaning information only from the few stories he had shared. They didn’t offer much insight into his past, though. It wasn’t until I decided to sit down with my father when he was eighty-six and record him retelling his many stories of his military experience that the idea for this book was born. His experiences as a soldier in the United States Army were nothing like I had read or heard others relate. Though his experiences did not take place on foreign soil, or on any battlefield, I found them incredibly interesting and often humorous.

During our talks he took me on a fascinating discovery of the people he met, the places he went, and the experiences he had. I had opened a door into my father’s past that he allowed me to pass through, and the more he spoke about his life before, during, and after the war, the more I began to understand how his many experiences had influenced his postwar life. What started out as a casual two-hour audio recording session gradually expanded into what at times became an exhaustive search for information about the places and events he mentioned. I was given a unique opportunity to travel back into my father’s past. It gave me a totally different perspective of him as a soldier, man, and father.

It has now been more than seventy years since the conclusion of hostilities between the Allies and the Axis, and there are fewer and fewer World War II veterans left to tell their stories. How I wish I had started my investigation earlier, when my father’s memory was clearer, to recall the dates, names, places, and events that formed his nearly four years in the United States Army. I believe that this book, however, provides a very good clue.

This is the account of one of those few remaining veterans, my father, Theodore Francis Furlipa.

> Chapter 1

Learning about My Father

My father is a very analytical man. That’s the engineer in him. He is, to use the old carpenter’s adage, the kind of person who measures twice and cuts once. He prides himself on being precise. Things have to be accurate for him. He doesn’t just go through the motions to complete a task, he makes it his personal responsibility to do his best regardless of whatever he has to do. He instilled that same mentality in each of his three children.

The man I grew up with was an automotive engineer at Ford Motor Company. I’ve never met a person who loved their job more. He spent a great deal of his career in the Experimental Vehicle Division—specifically, engine development. His job entailed developing engines for prototypes that in the future could actually become production automobiles. He was responsible for working on these prototype vehicles and getting the bugs out, and if all went well they would be manufactured within the next several years. Of course, he worked on many a prototype vehicle that never got beyond the concept phase. It was all part of the job.

He would spend forty years at the Ford Motor Company before retiring in 1986. Along the way he worked on the original 1955 Thunderbird, or T-Bird as it is more commonly known. He also was one of three engineers who developed the prototype that would eventually become the 1964 1/2 Mustang. They were two of his favorite cars.

That was my understanding of what my father did for a living. Apart from this, I really didn’t know much else about the man. Though our relationship was as strong as a father and son could be, as an adult I realized it was very much a surface-level relationship. I didn’t know him as a person. I was always able to talk to my father about anything, and I often did, but I never really bothered to get to know the man, to learn about what made him who he is. The experiences that shaped his opinions, his morals, his tenets were of little interest to me.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how the different experiences that shaped my life had influenced and impacted my beliefs—and how the same must have been true for my father, despite our vastly different lives. His professional life was automobiles and the automobile industry, neither of which I couldn’t have cared less about. He desired to impart his knowledge of how to gap and change sparkplugs, change oil, and tune an engine—all useful talents mostly forgotten by me over the years, as I just had no interest in such matters (though I do still change my own oil). Our childhoods were even more different. His deep level of responsibility for the wellbeing of his family as a boy growing up on a farm was inconceivable to me; my biggest responsibility through my teen years was keeping my room clean, mowing the lawn, and taking out the garbage. My sisters and I were never expected to help ensure the financial survival of our family.

When he retired I was able to attend his retirement party. It was a day I will never forget: January 28, 1986, the same day that the Challenger space shuttle exploded. My father took it personally. One, because he was an engineer and very proud of his profession, and he knew the catastrophe had to have been caused by an engineering failure. Two, he was upset because it happened on his special day.

At the party that evening I heard stories of my father’s exploits and how he was the engineer you went to when you had a very difficult problem to solve. One of his former coworkers mentioned the time that the engine development group was having difficulty with a certain vehicle stalling whenever it went through a water hazard test. No one could determine where and how the water was getting into the carburetor, causing the engine to stall. The problem was turned over to my father, who realized the only way to determine where the water was coming in was to somehow place himself above the engine compartment. He requested a Plexiglass hood be made in the exact shape of the car’s metal hood. When the Plexiglass hood was installed on the vehicle, my father strapped himself to it and had another engineer drive him through the water hazard. It took two runs before he was able to determine where the water was coming into the engine compartment. He quickly became known as the King of Plexiglass, as he used this material to solve several other problems. I can also remember my mother commenting during the telling of these stories that she finally realized why my father ruined so many suits.

The man I knew had a quiet confidence in his abilities. Whether it was athletics, his professional career as an engineer, or do-it-yourself projects around the house, he always exuded confidence, enthusiasm, and a can-do mentality. He was named All-City in football in high school, and earned a college scholarship to play the sport. At Ford he was selected to be a member of the team of engineers responsible for the development of the presidential limousine, a position he took great pride in.

He instilled this same quiet self-confidence in his children. His method of teaching was to instruct us on how to do something, then allow us to figure it out on our own. He had a great deal of trust in our ability to succeed at whatever task we were given. When I was five, for example, my father instructed me on how to operate our riding lawn mower. Having me learn to safely operate and cut our acre-and-a-half backyard on Saturday mornings freed him up to handle many of the other Honey do projects my mother needed completed. He obviously taught me well because I never had an accident with the lawn mower, and I still have all my fingers and toes. He had a great deal of trust in me as a young boy. I just thought it was cool being allowed to operate a riding lawn mower when I hadn’t yet mastered a two-wheel bicycle.

I don’t want to give you the impression that my father was perfect, or without his flaws; he had more than his fair share. But he was always a loving husband to my mother. A special son and brother to his parents and sister. A terrific uncle to his nieces and nephews. And a wonderful father to my two older sisters and me.

* * *

Life in America was changing from the idyllic Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver stereotype to a more turbulent time. The Cold War hit a fevered pitch in October of 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis. The country would witness the assassination of President John Kennedy a year later. There was the call for Civil Rights by Dr. Martin Luther King, and the end to Jim Crow laws and segregation. All these events ushered in a new era of American society.

I grew up in Allen Park, Michigan, in the 1960s. It was a suburb of Detroit that did not have any black families. In fact, the only black person I can recall seeing in our neighborhood during this time was the maid who cleaned our neighbor’s house. Other than that you didn’t see any black people in our area.

My sisters and I attended a private parochial school, Saint Frances Cabrini. There wasn’t a single black student in any grade from first through twelfth. That’s just the way it was.

I don’t remember my father having any black coworkers; if he did, he never mentioned them. There were a couple of mechanics assigned to the Experimental Vehicle Division that my father mentioned, but other than that he worked in an all-white group. I don’t recall my father having an opinion one way or another about black people, since he had so little contact with them. That would all change as I would learn his opinion as the racial turbulence of the sixties hit closer to home.

In the summer of 1967, in late July, Detroit erupted in a race riot. It made national news, but the reverberations were felt locally, including in Allen Park. Neighbors started keeping loaded firearms near the front door of their homes. The black maid that cleaned our neighbor’s house stopped coming. Filling gas cans was not permitted, resulting in my father having to siphon gas from one of our family automobiles to allow me to operate our riding lawn mower. Most of the area was under a strict curfew, with no one being allowed on the streets from sundown to sun up. Parents in our neighborhood made sure that their children were in the house and behind locked doors before night fell. The whole atmosphere was one of tension and fear, fear that the riots would reach our neighborhood.

I can remember conversations that my father had with neighbors and the prejudice they harbored against black people for ruining Detroit. My father took the stance that he wasn’t worried about the rioting reaching our neighborhood. He had always maintained the opinion that you could only judge a person on an individual basis and not lump them in with an entire group. He often reminded me that there were good and bad in all races, and one bad apple shouldn’t be used as the basis to judge all. I would later discover that his experiences during the war had a large part in shaping this view.

After the riots ended, the racial tension between blacks and whites was increasingly evident. Things weren’t the same. My mother no longer ventured into downtown Detroit to go shopping at Hudson’s Department Store, and my father stopped taking me to Red Wing hockey games at Olympia Stadium. The safety one felt when traveling to Detroit was lost as violent crime in the city began to escalate. Within a year we had moved out of our suburban Detroit neighborhood to the village of Oxford, Michigan, located about an hour north of the city. My parent’s felt it best that we leave and relocate to this rural hamlet that was dotted with cornfields and new housing developments. It was part of the white flight from Detroit that would see the city lose a great deal of its population. For many who left the city and its environs, the best way to deal with the racial tension was to avoid it, and my parents were no different.

We settled into life in Oxford, but my world would change on a late autumn evening in 1969. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of those teachable moments that made a lasting impression on me. I can remember the details from the evening as if it were yesterday. That Friday night, my father had been assigned the duty of picking up my sisters and I and three of our friends from the movie theater and returning everyone home. The weather was like something you would see in a Sherlock Holmes–type movie, with a mist in the air and a light fog that had descended upon the ground. My father was behind the wheel of our Country Squire station wagon. The car was noisy with the conversations of six exuberant children packed inside.

As we drove down Seymore Lake Road, we passed one of the new subdivisions filled with homes under construction and in various stages of completion on the left-hand side; on the right were the brown and withered corn stalks in Mr. Spezia’s cornfield that had yet to be cut down. Traffic on the road was nonexistent for the most part, especially at night. It was a two-lane country road, devoid of street lights, and only traveled by those living off of it.

Without saying anything, my father slowed the vehicle down and pulled over to the shoulder. He had angled the station wagon ever so slightly so that the headlights shone into the cornfield. None of us could see anything past the first several rows of the tightly compacted cornstalks. We wondered what was happening, but failed to ask my father why he had stopped.

My father got out of the car and walked several feet into the field, before disappearing into the fog and cornstalks. He emerged a few seconds later, but he was now escorting a young black girl out from the field. She appeared to be an older teenager, older than my oldest sister who was twelve at the time. Her clothing was a bit disheveled, and she was obviously scared. My father opened the passenger side door to the front seat and instructed me and my friend Pete Rickets to move into the very back of the station wagon. We quickly scrambled out of the car, and my father seated the young girl in the front passenger seat. He closed the car door, got back behind the wheel, and proceeded driving.

The six of us in the car sat in stunned silence for the rest of the ride. The only audible noise was the young black girl softly sobbing. With our friends safely home, we began the final leg to our house on Spezia Drive. I can still remember walking through the garage door and entering our family room. My mother was sitting in her chair reading the newspaper and the television was turned down low to something that she wasn’t paying much attention to. My sisters and I emerged from the doorway, but before my mother could ask us how the movie was she gave us a startled look as the young girl entered our house, followed closely by our father. The first words out of his mouth were, Helen get me the telephone book. We need to call the sheriff.

My mother did as she was asked, and then she instructed my sisters and me to get ready for bed. I can remember changing into my pajamas and brushing my teeth in record time before racing back to our family room to sit and stare at our unexpected guest. My father was still on the telephone speaking with someone from the Oakland County Sheriff’s office. My mother was trying to comfort the young girl as best as possible. She poured a glass of Coke, and then handed it to her. The young girl’s hands shook so much I thought she was going to spill the drink all over the family room rug. Eventually an officer arrived and took a statement from my father before leaving with the girl.

What me and my sisters didn’t understand at the time was that this young girl had been assaulted, possibly raped. The only thing my parents would later say about the matter was that the girl had been walking home from school when she was abducted by three men and forced into their car. They made their way to Oxford, where they kicked her out of the car in what to her must have seemed like the middle of nowhere. She was walking down the road toward the lights of the houses in the subdivision when she saw our car approaching. Thinking it was the men coming back for her, she quickly ran off into the cornfield to hide.

What amazes me still to this day is the fact that my father saw this young girl that night in spite of the fog and only having one operating eye. Somehow he managed to catch a glimpse of her and then stop. I will admit that the sight of a black person in Oxford, Michigan, in 1969 was a very unlikely event. There just weren’t any black people living there at this time.

The following week our local paper, the Oxford Leader, ran an article about the assault and mentioned my father by name as being the one who came to her assistance. The article ran in the police blotter section of the paper. The day after the story appeared my sisters and I were mocked in school by some of our classmates. Those few uneducated types called us nigger-lovers.

That same weekend my father was confronted by a man at a local store. He ridiculed him for what he had done. My father didn’t stand down; he confronted the man right then and there. He asked him, What if it had been your daughter? Would you have been upset if a black man had come to her rescue, or would you be thankful? Right then and there I learned a lesson that my father would reinforce throughout his life: You never looked at the color of a person’s skin if they needed help. He said you help people in need because it’s the right thing to do.

As I thought back to this incident and several others during my recorded conversations with my father I wanted to learn more about him and his character. I wanted to know if he had always felt this way about people of different races and ethnicities, and if not, when it started, and what changed his opinion. Before these conversations about his experiences in the military, I now realize, I truly did not know the life events that shaped his character.

As I probed my father’s life his world unfolded before me. He would take me on a journey into his past—a journey that would make clear to me that his values and character were deeply rooted and have not changed over the years. I would learn that he did in fact practice what he preached when it came to judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It was his philosophy long before Martin Luther King Jr. uttered those words in his famous I Have a Dream speech.

It was a privilege to sit down with him and hear him respond to all the questions I wanted answers to, as well as explain his military service. Answers that would allow me to learn so much more about the man I knew as Dad.

> Chapter 2

The Early Years

1920’s

My father was a first-generation American. His father Jan Furlepa arrived at Ellis Island from his native Poland on February 23, 1913, seven years before my father was born. The clerk at Ellis Island who processed his paperwork changed the e in Furlepa to an i and Jan to John. Immigrants typically didn’t question these changes for fear they would be denied entry into the United States.

The new John Furlipa would later meet, and marry, his wife Anna before eventually settling in Detroit, Michigan. He initially came to the Detroit area to work construction on the Detroit/Windsor tunnel that ran beneath the Detroit River. When that ended he was able to get a job at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Open Hearth Steel Plant. His furnace was number seven, and it was understood by just about everyone at Rouge that nobody worked that furnace except him.

Theodore Francis Furlipa arrived September 1, 1920, the second child of Anna and John. He weighed in at thirteen pounds, a size that almost killed his barely four-foot, ten-inch-tall mother. She would never bear another child.

I ruined the poor woman. I was such a big baby, and she was such a tiny woman. I’m surprised that she didn’t die giving birth, said my father. "I was born at home, not in a hospital,