To Hell and Almost Back: Life of a Seriously Disabled Wwii Veteran

By Sam Jones

These are the memoirs of a Wisconsin farm boy that grew up during the Great Depression accompanied by a great drought where many of the lakes dried up and much of the Midwests farmland simply blew away. The Depression ended abruptly the year I graduated from high school when WW II was declared and I was drafted into military service where I spent 3-1/2 years. I was critically wounded and spent the first 30 hours in a morgue followed by almost 1-1/2 years in military hospitals before I was discharged as a permanently disabled veteran. Because of my disabilities, I could never be a farmer and had to go somewhere else and develop new skills so I would be able to support my family. Jobs were hard to get because at the end of the war in Europe, 12 million healthy veterans had just been discharged and the economy was in limbo while industry was converting from wartime to peacetime economy. The story deals with how I started out as an apprentice electronic technician, became an engineer through home study, worked and lived on all continents and finally became Chief of the Navigation Engineering Branch at the Federal Aviation Administration Headquarters in Washington DC. It is a story of how I dealt with serious wartime disabilities and managed to develop a productive career at the same time

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462878635

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Copyright © 2011 by Sam Jones.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4628-7862-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-7863-5

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Contents

I BRIEF HISTORY

II WORLD WAR II

1. TRIP TO THE FRONT

2. THE BATTLE OF THE RINELAND

3. THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

4. RECOVERY IN EUROPE

5. RECOVERY IN USA

III CAREER DEVELOPMENT

CD-1 CINCINNATI, OHIO (MY FIRST JOB)

CD-2 REDWOOD FALLS, MN

CD-3 MINNEAPOLIS, MN DISTRICT & AREA OFFICES

IV THE VIETNAM WAR

VN-1 THE VIETNAMESE ADVENTURE

VN-2 ARRIVAL IN VIETNAM

VN-3 THE 1968 CAAG PROGRAM

VN-4 SAIGON TOURIST

VN-5 HEW HOUSING

VN-6 VIETNAM JUSTICE SYSTEM

VN-7 TET OFFENSIVE

VN-8 EXTENDED RANGE COMMUNICATIOM

VN-9 SUPORTINMG THE VN DCA

VN-10 CORRUPTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

VN-11 PEOPLE OF VIETNAM

VN-12 HOME LEAVES

VN-13 VIETNAM WAR VS. WW II

VN-14 POST VIETNAM CHICAGO

V LIFE IN THE ANDES

LP-1 PREPARING FOR NEW JOB

LP-2 ARRIVED IN LA PAZ

LP-3 URGENT PROBLEMS WAITING

LP-4 TRANSMITTER PROBLEMS

LP-5 GETTING SETTLED

LP-6 OFFICIAL TRAVEL

LP-7 OUR EMBASSY IN BOLIVIA

LP-8 WEEKEND/HOLIDAY SIGHTSEEING

LP-9 VISITORS IN BOLIVIA

LP-10 PROJECT SUMMARY

LP-11 RETURN TO CHICAGO

LP-12 TRANSFER TO LANSING, MICHIGAN

LP-13 TDY IN WASHINGTON

VI UN IN AFRICA

UN-1 INTRODUCTION TO THE UN & AFRICA

UN-2 MASERU, LESOTHO

UN-3 BOTSWANA

UN-4 TOUR OF DUTY IN BOTSWANA

UN-5 MOVED INTO A NEW HOUSE

UN-6 NEW TECHNICIANS

UN-7 FEMALE TECHNICIAN ARRIVES

UN-8 PRESIDENT’S FUNERAL

UN-9 VACATION TRAVEL SOTHERN AFRICA

UN-10 RADIO BEACON CONTRACT

UN-11 PROJECT SUMMARY

VII FINAL RETIREMENT

RT-1 TRIP HOME TO USA

RT-2 NEW HOME

RT-3 BUILD LAKE HOME

RT-4 MEDICAL PROBLEMS

RT-5 HOUSE BURNS

WHAT THIS STORY IS ALL ABOUT

These are the memoirs of a Wisconsin farm boy that grew up during the Great Depression accompanied by a great drought where many of the lakes dried up and much of the Midwest’s farmland simply blew away. The Depression ended abruptly the year I graduated from high school when WW II was declared and I was drafted into military service where I spent 3-1/2 years. I was critically wounded and spent the first 30 hours in a morgue followed by almost 1-1/2 years in military hospitals before I was discharged as a permanently disabled veteran. Because of my disabilities, I could never be a farmer and had to go somewhere else and develop new skills so I would be able to support my family. Jobs were hard to get because at the end of the war in Europe, 12 million healthy veterans had just been discharged and the economy was in limbo while industry was converting from wartime to peacetime economy. The story deals with how I started out as an apprentice electronic technician, became an engineer through home study, worked and lived on all continents and finally became Chief of the Navigation Engineering Branch at the Federal Aviation Administration Headquarters in Washington DC. It is a story of how I dealt with serious wartime disabilities and managed to develop a productive career at the same time.

After I had retired from a productive career, the physical and emotional wounds of WW II came back to haunt me every night. A high school classmate suggested that I write the story of those horrible years and once I had written them, it may relieve me of having to think about those things. I am not a writer, and was reluctant to engage in such a project but I did write the story of WW II more or less to give my children and grandchildren the prospective of what war is all about. My crude factual story served as a storage place for those memories so I could get on with my life without being tortured every night.

In the last few years, the schools have become alarmed because our school system has not taught students anything about WW II. This war was the main event of the last century and the 16 million veterans were dying off at 1000 a day. Vietnam era draft dodgers and flower children that were learning to be academics in the ultra liberal colleges during the Kennedy War are the people that wrote today’s history books. They devoted 5 times as many pages to Marilyn Monroe, who was Kennedy’s mistress, as they did to WW II. As the last of the 16 million veterans were dying off at 1000 a day. The school system became alarmed and asked WW II veterans to come into the schools and tell the students about their WW II experiences. I had the opportunity to participate in those programs and it was immediately apparent from the questions that they asked, that they were totally ignorant of not only WW II but of the Korean and Vietnam wars as well. The Vietnam veterans of President Clinton’s generation took this opportunity to omit all wars from American history probably in an effort to camouflage their own un-American guilt.

They are not even aware that this war determined such basic things as the freedom they enjoy or whether they speak English or German today. At the same time, I don’t have either the time or ability to write the history of the 20th Century. Instead, I decided to use the brief unbiased history of events from the World Almanac of what happened during every American president that has served since the war as a thumbnail sketch of 20th Century history. I also briefly commented on other significant events that I personally observed and experienced during this period. Also, I am now fully aware that events like WW II don’t begin and end on any particular date but have a major impact on the entire life of every combat veteran. This is especially true of physically or mentally disabled veterans, affecting the type of work they were able to do, if any rather than what they wanted to do. The war is not over for them until they die and even then it continues to affect their family if they were lucky enough to have one. My original 1990 WW II story has been expanded to cover my entire life, to provide a first person account of how my WW II experience has affected my entire life. WW II will not be over for me until the day I die.

HOME ON THE FARM

I am a farm boy from rural Wisconsin born in 1923. My Minnesota parents were married about 5 years before I was born and bought 80 acres of heavily wooded land, which they made into a small dairy farm. They lived in what they called a shanty while my father cut enough logs, and had them sawed into lumber to build a barn, chicken coop and a house that was completed enough to live in before I was born. He also had to clear the land so they would have fields to grow crops to feed a few cattle. By the time the Stock Market crashed in 1929 when my brother was born, he had cleared more land, pulled or dynamited out the stumps and everything was going well. My grandparents lived next door on an adjacent farm. They bought a new car and gave my parents their old Maxwell which was their first car. I recall my mother taking me to see President Coolidge when his train stopped in Lewis where he stayed at Seven Pines. We struggled through the Great Depression which was accompanied by the worst drought in history, where many lakes dried up and farmland actually blew away. We survived by bartering chicken eggs, strawberries and cucumbers to get sugar and other essentials that my mother needed to can tomatoes and other vegetables. We survived because my grandfather cut our mortgage payments on the farm to $10 a month. Almost all the farms had for sale signs on them because they couldn’t pay their mortgage or taxes.

When Roosevelt was elected president, he did some good things such as the Bank Holiday that closed all banks until they were audited to determine if they were solvent, so people would stop withdrawing their money and burying it in their back yard. The Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) was also a good program but the WPA, better known as the Weary Papa’s Association was the hallmark of his administration. It was a socialist program that was the father of deadbeat’s welfare as we know it today. It also led to the establishment of socialist coops like the Inter-County Leader and the REA (Polk-Burnett Electric Coop) that were subsidized to the point that private industry could not compete with them and they became a monopoly. War clouds were looking down on us from every direction and these people could have been salvaged, preparing us for the war that was inevitable. This war stole the youth from 16 million American boys and the lives of 407 million of them.

Powerful Mafia controlled labor unions also went on strike so there were 2 million additional families in the US unemployed as there were, when he assumed office. Unions were powerful enough they could shut down any or all industry overnight.

You never thought of yourself as being poor because everyone was poor. Those of us that had the initiative managed to survive without government welfare. We were also the young men that were drafted into the war that would end all wars that we hadn’t made any effort to prepare for.

My mother’s health failed shortly after my brother was born with what they called rheumatism, which is like they now call Lyme disease. She never complained but she did have to spend the last half of her life in a wheelchair or nursing home.

I went to a one room country grade school and graduated from Fredric High School in 1941, the year WW II was declared. We didn’t get electricity until I got out of high school and we never did get running water. I had to go to Chicago to get a job because once you had registered for the Draft no one would hire you because they know you won’t be around very long.

House cattle.jpg Cow.jpg

OUR HOUSE WITH THE BARN IN THE BACKGROUND

AND OUR CATTLE GRAZING IN THE PASTURE

Sam.jpg Wife.jpg

MY HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PICTURE AND THE GIRL I

MARRIED 2 YEARS AFTER WE WERE ENGAGED WHEN I WAS

TRANSFERRED FROM A HOSPTAL IN EUROPE TO A US HOSPITAL.

I

BRIEF HISTORY

I. EVENTS LEADING TO AND FOLLOWING WW II

In order to understand the events leading up to WW II, we have to take a brief look back at the WW I peace treaty and events that followed. The peace treaty carved up various countries in central Europe and imposed such stringent financial penalties on Germany, it was destitute. During the years that followed, the German Jews gained control of a considerable amount of the national wealth, exercising unwelcome control over the lives of the general population. This and resentment for the war debt imposed on Germany to repay war damages, infuriated German people, causing considerable unrest that resulted in the formation of the ultra-militant Nazi Party.

After WW I, U.S. President Wilson was instrumental in establishing the League of Nations, an organization much like today’s United Nations established following WW II. The U.S. became an isolationist country, more or less divorcing itself from world affairs and the U.S. Congress refused to join the League of Nations that their president had been instrumental in establishing.

About 10 years later in 1929, the U.S. Stock Market crashed primarily as a result of uncontrolled credit and runaway inflation following the war. The good life after WW I, known as the Roaring Twenties was so good it triggered off events that devastated the nation, throwing it into what was known as the Great Depression. People, who had saved money, lost it when the banks failed. Factories closed leaving millions unemployed and many people lost their farms, homes or businesses because they didn’t have money to pay their mortgage or taxes. During this time, there was a great drought that lasted for several years. Farmers couldn’t grow crops and much of the topsoil on their farms dried up and blew away. The Great Plains became the Great Dust Bowl.

Franklin Roosevelt, an undistinguished New York Governor was elected President in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. He initiated some important programs like Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and declared a bank holiday, closing all banks until examiners declared they were solvent. Roosevelt also initiated a number of socialist programs that laid the foundation for our present welfare state. His Civilian Conservation Corp. (CCC) that set up camps for young men from impoverished families that planted trees or did other unskilled work was a good program. They no longer had to eat at soup kitchens, which were common at that, time but both the youth and their destitute parents received a small amount of money each month.

Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) unlike the CCC was a complete failure. This was our first universal welfare program, which provided make work jobs for the unemployed, which was almost everyone at that time. The work part of the program became a national joke overnight but was the foundation for the national welfare program we have today. The more industrious people who had the pride and initiative to survive without welfare made jokes like, How many shovel handles did the WPA crew break today?. That was by leaning on the shovel rather than by shoveling dirt. Roosevelt’s recovery program relied entirely on socialized government welfare programs providing jobs rather than the private sector. Today, few people realize that 2 years after Roosevelt became President; 2 million additional people had become unemployed. When you consider the U.S. population was small at that time and women had not yet entered the workforce there was only one worker for each household, which resulted in a catastrophe of enormous proportions.

Socialism flourished, leading to the rise of powerful labor unions, coops, and a host of other social programs. Interest free or taxpayer subsidized money resulted in the failure of private enterprises that couldn’t compete with subsidized coops. Powerful labor unions, like coops had the power and often used it to shut down industry and bring transportation to a standstill. Mafia controlled unions had a firm grip on the entire country. Farm subsidies and other farm welfare programs were established, which are still inexistence more than 70 years later. The drought finally ended but the new social programs were well established so we didn’t emerge from the Great Depression until we entered WW II several years later.

In spite of all the socialist programs implemented, Roosevelt had been somewhat restrained by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1937 he tried to get approval to appoint six additional Supreme Court judges, who would re-interpret the Constitution so he could overcome the objections of the present judges and expand his socialist revolution. His request was denied by Congress at that time but because of his long tenure in office, he was later able to pack the court with newly appointed socialist judges.

Radio broadcasting, which was new at the time, was rapidly becoming the primary source of information at the time that Roosevelt was elected in 1932. He used it to its fullest and everyone with a radio listened to his weekly fireside chat broadcast from the Oval Office. He was not only like Santa Claus with gifts for everyone but a great orator and almost everyone had full confidence in him. He told people only what he wanted them to know and the inevitable, approaching war was not something he wanted to talk about. People had so much trust in Roosevelt that they never envisioned him getting us into the raging war in Europe. After all, when he ran for his third presidential term, his slogan was Keep American Boys out of Foreign Wars.

Most Americans were so engaged in their day-to-day struggle for survival that they couldn’t see the war clouds on the horizon. During the second half of the 1930s, Spain was engaged in a bitter civil war, Italy had occupied Ethiopia and Germany had rebuilt its huge war machine, which was not permitted by the WW I peace treaty. Germany had occupied one small country after another in central Europe and Russia was also occupying small European countries, dividing them up with Germany. England and France had military forces positioned along what the French called their invincible Maginot Line on the French/German border in an effort to hold back the mighty German war machine. Highly mobile German armor made an end run through Holland and without any resistance entered Paris a few days later. Most of the invincible French army threw away their arms in front of the rapidly advancing German armor and got lost in the crowds. Many of them were part of the crowds welcoming the Germans into Paris. A few who called themselves, Free French lead by General De Gaul and all British forces retreated to Dunkirk. From there, they were evacuated across the English Channel to England, leaving behind all their war material, completely abandoning the Continent. Germany and Russia, having come into conflict with each other over dividing up the small countries of Europe were now at war with each other.

Einstein advised President Roosevelt in a top-secret letter dated August 2nd 1939 that he and a group of scientists had reason to believe Germany may be developing an atomic bomb. He suggested that we initiate a research program to determine the feasibility of developing such a bomb of mass destruction before Germany. In September 1940, the U.S. transferred 50 overage destroyers to Britain. Although the U.S. pretended to be neutral, in March 1940 we started shipping massive amounts of war material to both England and Russia, under what we called the Lend Lease Program. Obviously if a German submarine would have sunk one of our ships, we would have been in war with Germany and we didn’t even start drafting men for military service until 1940. The first peacetime draft was not approved until September 14, 1940.

There were also black clouds on our western horizon and the average American hadn’t paid much attention to that either. The Japanese had already taken Manchuria, Korea (where they had appropriated prostitutes for solders in other theaters), and were in the process of capturing China where they raped and murdered women and children at will. The Japanese were still continuing to buy shipload after shipload of scrap iron from the United States which they were using to build ships, tanks, guns and planes to enlarge their already massive modern war machine. Roosevelt was running for his 3rd term for president at that time in 1940, using the slogan, Keep American Boys out of Foreign Wars.

Japan was badly in need of oil to operate their huge war machine and was in the process of negotiating with President Roosevelt regarding its oil shortage problem. Finally, as a last resort, they requested a summit meeting with Roosevelt in Hawaii. Although our Ambassador in Tokyo advised him that it was of utmost importance that he honor their request, he refused. This resulted in the replacement of their more moderate prime minister with a hard line militant and Japan was secretly committed to an all-out war with the United States. Soon after that, the Japanese fleet left Japanese ports, and were not seen or heard from for more than a month. They maintained radio silence and we didn’t have any idea where they were. During this period, Japan was carrying on negotiations with the U.S. State Department through their Washington Embassy.

On December 5th and 6th, 1941, a U.S. direction finder station near San Francisco picked up radio signals from what they thought was the Japanese fleet, located somewhere north of Hawaii. There was a flurry of long multipart messages being received by the Japanese Embassy in Washington, which unknown to them, we could decipher because we had broken their code. When the Japanese Ambassador finally delivered the messages to our State Department that they were declaring war on the United States, we had already decoded the messages but the Pearl Harbor attack was already underway. Information regarding the location of the Japanese fleet and the flurry of messages should have sounded a red alert to our president and his cabinet but it didn’t. Our entire Pacific fleet was bottled up in Pearl Harbor like sitting ducks with most officers with authority on shore leave. None of them had been advised of the recent intelligence information and had not been alerted for a possible surprise attack that occurred early in the morning of December 7th, 1941. The attack destroyed or severely damaged the Pacific fleet about a year after Roosevelt was re-elected on his Keep American Boys out of Foreign Wars third term slogan. The Pearl Harbor attack also came about a month after Roosevelt refused to meet the Japanese in a summit they requested in Hawaii.

While Roosevelt was nurturing his socialist revolution, converting the U.S. into a welfare state, he failed to acknowledge that the rest of the world was rearming and it was inevitable that we would be involved. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s socialist revolution still had not brought us out of the Great Depression and he had done nothing to prepare us for the war we were now in. He had been sending war material to England and Russia in American ships for years and now he refused to sit down and negotiate with Japan. Our country was totally unprepared for war with only a few obsolete airplanes, ships, tanks and no trained troops to fight a war with Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and Japan in the Pacific. We didn’t even have the design of a modern tank or airplane on the drawing board. Any intelligent person should have had the foresight to build a war machine to defend our country, rather than providing make-work WPA jobs for the millions of unemployed. Americans could not believe that the father of our new socialist welfare society could possibly do anything wrong because after all, hadn’t he provided welfare to almost everyone.

Looking at intelligence information available to the president at that time, there was considerable speculation that President Roosevelt deliberately did nothing, enticing Japan, which he considered an inferior nation to attack our fleet. This would arouse public opinion justifying our entering the war, which he was not in a position to do for political reasons. He had just been re-elected on a Keep American Boys out of Foreign Wars platform and it wouldn’t have been creditable to get us involved in a world war, a month after the election.

II. EVENTS FOLLOWING THE WAR

U.S. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Russian dictator Stalin formulated the Yalta Peace Conference in February 1945. This treaty was completed just before the end of the war in Europe, which ended on May 8, 1945. It plagued the world for the next 50 years. The war with Japan finally ended September 2nd, 1945, when Japan surrendered after we destroyed 2 Japanese cities with newly developed atomic bombs.

By the time Japan surrendered, 16.3 million had been recruited off the streets of America; 407,000 were killed on the battlefields of the world and 671,000 of us came home seriously disabled. After the war, 12 million men were discharged from military service into a society that could not provide either jobs or housing for us returning veterans. Undoubtedly, Roosevelt’s failure at the peace table was the premier failure of his presidency. Roosevelt, in failing health at the time of the Yalta Conference was at the mercy of his chief advisor, Alger Hiss. In 1950, Hiss was convicted of spying for Russia before the Yalta Convention. Also when Roosevelt died on April 12th, shortly before the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, Truman his vice president hadn’t even been advised that we were in the process of developing an atomic bomb. Truman, who was almost unknown to the American public, made a wise decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war and saving an estimated 500,000 American lives.

Truman a senator from Missouri that few Americans ever heard of became Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate when he ran for his 4th term as president. Few Americans knew Roosevelt’s health had deteriorated to the point that it was unlikely that he would be able to serve very much of his fourth term. Even so, they needed to keep his name on the ballot to insure that Democrats would retain the White House. They wanted to replace Vice President Henry Wallace, who ran against Roosevelt on the Socialist ticket. A few powerful Democrats got together in a smoke filled room and selected Truman as their vice-presidential nominee. Finally, it came down to a choice between Harry Truman who was supported by the Kansas City Pendergast machine and Joe Kennedy who had been Roosevelt’s Ambassador to England and later as the father of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was well known for his Mafia controlled bootlegging empire on the East Coast during Probation like Al Capone was in the Chicago area. Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion and later died of syphilis in prison. Joe Kennedy, being a powerful Democrat that had influential friends in Washington was able to avoid prosecution for tax evasion and was fortunate that none of his mistresses give him syphilis. His bootlegging fortune and the Catholic Church was later instrumental in getting his son, John F. Kennedy elected president.

TRUMAN BECAME PRESIDENT

Truman, who became president at a crucial time in history, turned out to be one of our greatest presidents. Perhaps, no president ever inherited a worse mess from his predecessor at a more difficult time in history. It would have been fortunate for all of us, if Roosevelt’s death could have been timelier, permitting Truman rather than Roosevelt to represent the US at the Yalta Peace Conference. Alger Hiss, who was Roosevelt’s principal advisor at Yalta also helped create the United Nations and served as its temporary secretary general when it was formally established in 1945. Although the development of the United Nations organizational plans were established before Truman became president, he formally endorsed the organization which established a homeland for the German Jews in Palestine that were rescued from the Nazi death camps. He also implemented the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of war torn Europe, had to cope with 12 million returning jobless and homeless veterans; converting the wartime economy to a peace time economy and finally the Korean War which was a direct result of Roosevelt’s failure at the Yalta peace conference. The Koran War early on established the fact that the United Nations was a farce.

Congress amended the US Constitution so a president could not serve more than two, four-year terms. This resulted from a president being able to assume so much power that he couldn’t be replaced. These problems resulted from Roosevelt’s failure at Yalta; the vice-president not being informed of the affairs of state when he had to assume the presidency without prior notice. Also, it became a requirement that the state of the president’s health be made public information.

The United Nations was patterned after the League of Nations President Wilson tried to establish after WW I. The US Congress refused to ratify the treaty at that time because it would infringe on U.S. sovereignty. The United Nations seemed like a good idea but over 50 years of experience has proved it too is a failure. After I retired, I worked for the United Nations for 2 years and I could write a book on why organizations of this type are unworkable. Without going into detail, it involves Third World country personnel that can’t manage a small program at home, taking over a world program. They fill most of the jobs, all of which are exceptionally well paid, with their countrymen who just aren’t competent to do the job. Graft and corruption are rampant and there just isn’t any way to control it. The U.S should limit our international support to programs that we can manage, control and support with our own people, using resources we presently give to the United Nations.

Establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was and still is a very controversial program with blame and credit shared by many countries. Rightly or wrongly, the general population for a number of reasons disliked Jews in Europe. Dislike for the Jews was at least one of the principal factors that lead to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany that was responsible for WW-II. Jews from Germany and most other countries in Europe were interned in what was known as death camps because either many or most of them were executed in gas chambers. This is accepted to be a fact but it is also a fact that almost half of those interned in labor camps or executed in death camps were not Jews. Many of them were Gypsies or others the Nazis just wanted rid of. U.S. Jewish Holocaust propaganda taught in our schools and published by the Jewish owned or controlled news media has led most Americans to believe that only Jews were involved. Through their wealth, this very small minority group in the U.S. and their Israeli brethren who also have dual U.S. citizenship, control who we elect for president and can defeat any congressman that is not sympathetic to their cause. The very people we fought and died for in WW II are now killing their neighbors, stealing their land and have made the U.S. their colony to support and protect them from their enemies. President Truman was a man of integrity and I don’t think he had this in mind when he helped establish the Jewish State.

General Marshall was President Truman’s most capable Secretary of State. He initiated a massive program for the reconstruction of war torn Europe. For example, major cities like La Havre were completely destroyed and not a single building was left standing. The plan included everything from food to feed the starving to the material required to rebuild their infrastructure. Germany proper had been divided into 4 parts: British, French, Russian and American. Berlin the capital city, located in the Russian Zone was also divided into 4 parts with a corridor, permitting British, French and American access to the capital. Flaws in Roosevelt’s peace treaty first showed up when Russia denied other ally’s access to Berlin through the corridor isolating Berlin in the Russian Sector, forcing a showdown with Russia. The U.S. established the Berlin Airlift to fly necessary supplies of food and material to rebuild the devastated city. The Russians lost the fight after an extended period of time and reopened the corridor. They later built the Berlin Wall to separate the Russian Sector of Berlin from the rest of the city, which was occupied by the U.S, England and France. The wall was primarily to keep the people in the Russian Sector from escaping to the more prosperous West.

The U.S. and countries of Western Europe formed NATO, a mutual defense organization, primarily as a defense against Russia that they already had reason to fear. Initially, NATO headquarters was in Paris but General De Gaulle who controlled France decided to get out of NATO and forced NATO to move their headquarters out of France to Brussels. General De Gaul, who had failed to defend France, escaped to England with a few French soldiers that didn’t defect before they were pushed back to the sea at Dunkirk. He was arrogant and acted like a spoiled child. This was a thorn in the side of the Allies throughout the war. American forces that had fought their way from the bloody beaches at Normandy to the outskirts of Paris had to stop and wait for De Gaul’s forces to parade through Paris, which the Germans had already abandoned. This was a political move made at the highest level to make him look like the liberator of Paris to enhance his prestige at home. After Allies liberated France and all the help the U.S. give them through the Marshall Plan, he kicked NATO out of France. This is how he showed his appreciation for the Americans and other allies that died on French soil, recapturing his homeland.

At the end of WW II, 12 million Americans were discharged from military service in a few months’ time. Six hundred and seventy-one thousand of us were seriously disabled and the entire nation mourned the 407,000 that give their life for their country. American industry that had been engaged exclusively in production of war