An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation

By Tom Brokaw

A seventeen-year-old who enlisted in the army in 1941 writes to describe the Bataan Death March. Other members of the greatest generation describe their war — in such historic episodes as Guadalcanal, the D-Day invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and Midway — as well as their life on the home front. In this beautiful American family album of stories, reflections, memorabilia, and photographs, history comes alive and is preserved, in people’s own words and through photographs and time lines that commemorate important dates and events. Starting with the Depression and Pearl Harbor, on through the war in Europe and the Pacific, this unusual book preserves a people’s rich historical heritage and the legacy of the heroism of a nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 31, 2001
• ISBN: 9781588360052

Book preview

Part One

FROM THE DEPRESSION TO PEARL HARBOR

Timeline

BETWEEN 1929 AND the end of World War I in 1945, the world was in economic, political, military, and cultural turmoil on a scale unprecedented in recorded history. Earlier periods of great disruption brought on by the ambitions of the Roman empire or Genghis Khan, the bubonic plague in Europe or the changing of a dynasty in China, were largely regional events. But by the third decade of the twentieth century, air and sea transportation, communications technology—the telephone and radio—and trade had made the world a much smaller place, where regional events had global ramifications. As the United States would learn in painful and costly fashion, the presence of two great oceans east and west did not insulate America from the ravages of economic chaos, the cruelty of nature, and the winds of far-off wars.

The American stock market collapse in 1929 was the beginning of a radical change of fortune for the United States, and it coincided with the rise of sinister political forces in the heart of Europe and in Asia. In Europe, Adolf Hitler was plotting to take over Germany with his National Socialist Party, the Nazis. In Asia, Japan was preparing to extend its political and military ambitions well beyond that tiny island nation.

To the average American, however, those distant developments were of little consequence when measured against the frightening state of the U.S. economy. The numbers were staggering. In three years stocks lost 80 percent of their value. The Ford Motor Company employed 128,000 workers in 1929; by 1931 that number had dropped to 37,000. American farmers who had sold a bushel of corn for 77 cents in 1929 were getting only 32 cents a bushel by 1932. By then the American economy was in a free fall. The sad effect was a plague of unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and broken dreams, from Wall Street to main street and beyond. Zelpha Simmons writes about the hardships her family faced during those years. As a young woman, Simmons held a full-time job as a bookkeeper, earning fifteen dollars a week. The only wage earner for a family of five, her family made it with a milk cow, garden and chickens and hard work.

A patrician confined to a wheelchair, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination to run against the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, a brilliant engineer who had had a distinguished career in public service and in the private sector before he entered the White House just in time for the calamities that led to the Great Depression.

As FDR was awaiting his inauguration in 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of the German Republic. In the United States, small and large banks were collapsing. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the new president assured a national radio audience, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Given what was to come, it was an especially bold and inspirational affirmation of the new leadership in the White House.

When President Roosevelt set out to rebuild the American spirit and economy with what he promised was a New Deal, he could not ignore the ominous developments in Europe and Asia. As the 1930s wore on, tensions rose around the globe. The inability of the League of Nations to respond to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 weakened the organization. The League ordered Japan to withdraw from Manchuria in 1933; instead, Japan withdrew from the League. In 1933 Germany withdrew from a disarmament conference, then from the League itself. By 1934 Austrian Nazis seemed poised to reconnect Germany and Austria. On July 25 the Austrian prime minister, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated by Austrian Nazis. Italy, not yet a German ally, rushed its troops to the Austrian border, and a show of force prevented the union. In 1935 Hitler began to rebuild the German army, navy, and air force. It was widely known that Germany was violating the arms limitation clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I. Still, German aggression went unchecked. In 1936 Hitler gambled on the Western unwillingness to fight and sent troops into the Rhineland. The French and British did nothing.

Meanwhile, the Italians practiced aggression of their own. A skirmish in the desert in December 1934 served as public pretext for the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. The League of Nations responded by prohibiting the sale of war materials to Italy, and while most countries went along with the embargo and it caused some hardship, the war did not stop. Oil, the most important item of all, had been left off the list of embargoed items. Ethiopia was defeated in 1936 and combined with Italian Somaliland and Eritrea into an Italian East African empire.

Spain too proved to be a flash point. In 1936 a group of military men led by Francisco Franco mounted an insurrection against a legally elected republican government, and the country descended into a civil war that would cost more than 500,000 lives.

In Great Britain, Winston Churchill, deep in the political wilderness, was increasingly alarmed and characteristically pugnacious in his warnings to the English government. He was ignored.

Then, in a rapid succession of events, the situation deteriorated. During the next three years Hitler took control of the German military and forced Austria to become a part of Germany. He moved on to Czechoslovakia, prompting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to make increasingly desperate attempts at appeasement, ending with the infamously flawed Munich agreement. Czechoslovakia was betrayed, and Chamberlain secured his ignominious place in history by returning to England to proclaim peace in our time.

Hitler quickly followed with a formal military alliance with his fellow fascist Benito Mussolini of Italy, then startled the West by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, pledging not to invade Russia in exchange for Russia promising not to intervene if Germany was attacked by a third party.

Americans would watch these developments in the newsreels when they went to the movies for a little relief from their personal struggles against the ravages of the Depression. Or they would read in the newspapers of Hitler’s ruthless ambitions and hear about them on radio, the new medium that became the central nervous system of the country. But the news out of Europe and Asia was not a call to arms for the United States. It remained fiercely isolationist, fighting its own war against the Depression at home.

The United States was determined to remain on the sidelines internationally, bound by the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937. But FDR, who had so skillfully led the nation through the economic crisis with a patchwork of government aid programs, banking reforms, and iconic optimism, was deeply worried about the overseas developments. By the autumn of 1939, in one of his radio fireside chats, the master communicator assured the American people, This will remain a neutral nation. Then he added, But I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. He was nudging the United States into the fight.

Within a month President Roosevelt was working with Congress to repeal the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act. The repeal, which would permit England and France to buy arms from the United States on a cash-and-carry basis, passed in early November, just eight months before the German invasion of France and the Netherlands.

United States defense preparedness efforts were stepped up. In September 1940 the American government conducted the first peacetime draft in its history. By the end of 1940, with FDR reelected, Congress had approved $37 billion in military spending. In March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Bill, which permitted Roosevelt to lend, lease, or in any way dispose of war materials to any country considered vital to American security. Although the initial appropriation was $7 billion, by the end of the war the United States had spent roughly $50 billion on Lend-Lease. It was understood this would provide material assistance to the Allied cause.

As the Battle of the Atlantic raged, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22. At first few believed the Soviets could survive more than several months. By winter, however, even though Nazi troops were not far from Moscow, it had become clear that the USSR would not collapse. Roosevelt announced that Marines would occupy Iceland as a step in the defense of the Western Hemisphere, and he began military Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union in November. By the end of the war, the USSR would receive $11 billion worth of this assistance.

At the same time, American relations with Japan soured. The United States had watched unhappily as Japan seized larger and larger slices of Chinese territory during the 1930s. American power was insufficient to halt Japanese aggression, and anyway, Japan was a larger trading partner than China. Still, Japanese movement in Southeast Asia in 1940 pressured the administration to do something. In July 1940, Roosevelt placed an embargo on aviation fuel and the high-grade scrap iron wanted by Japan. In September 1940 Japan seized northern French Indochina. Five days later came the news that Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Each nation pledged to aid the others if attacked by a nation not currently involved in the war. Because the Soviet Union was explicitly exempted from the pact, Washington was the clear target. Roosevelt later extended the embargo to all scrap metal. In July 1941, when Japanese troops moved into southern Indochina, the president froze all Japanese funds in the United States, effectively stopping trade with Japan.

The diplomacy of the remainder of 1941 was ineffective. In October a new Japanese government was formed, headed by General Hideki Tojo, and the next month negotiations began between the two governments, with the Japanese demanding that the United States release their assets and resume normal trade relations. The United States’ response was to insist that Japan remove its troops from China and Indochina, and recognize the legitimacy of the Chinese nationalist government headed by Chiang Kai-shek. By the end of November negotiations had effectively broken down. On November 26, the Japanese carrier force that would strike Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, set sail. Without warning, the Japanese attack began on December 7, 1941. Emery Morrison was standing watch on the USS Raleigh that morning when enemy planes roared overhead. Within minutes, the Raleigh’s electrical compartment was hit by a torpedo, and water and oil began gushing into the ship’s hull. Morrison describes the crew’s frantic efforts to save the badly damaged ship, and finally their long swim to shore through oil-slicked waters, fearing that at any minute the Japanese attackers would return.

By the end of that fateful morning, all the world was at war.

Bob Cromer (right) with his mother and brother Earle, 1928. This is how we dressed: high button shoes, long stockings, and hated garter belts.

Bob Cromer in 1930, age three.

Bob Cromer playing with a homemade toy gun, 1934. Tire inner-tubes were all over the place. We used the rubber for guns and slingshots.

Bob Cromer (center) and childhood friends, 1935.

Bob Cromer with sister Betty and dog Rinnie in Roundlake, Illinois, 1934. We had a summer cottage there with no running water. We had to walk about a mile to the pump with buckets.

(All courtesy of Bob Cromer)

Dear Mr. Brokaw:

I went to war as a replacement, in the 309th Infantry Regiment of the 78th Division. My youth was snatched away from me when, at age eighteen, I went into combat and was forced to grow up overnight. I spent my nineteenth birthday in a small hospital in Vaals Holland, convalescing from my first wound. Combat was terrible and I lost many friends in battle, and yet I think that ours was one of the most fortunate of all generations.

We were privileged to grow up in a time when honor, truth, loyalty, duty and patriotism were real and meant something.

What made the generation great? We were simply a product of our times. Growing up in the Depression was not a great honor, but it was a classroom that taught us to be independent and innovative. We made our own toys out of orange crates and roller skates. We made our kites from newspapers and we melted lead to pour into molds to make soldiers, cowboys and Indians. We made rubber guns from a piece of 2 × 4, a half a clothespin, and a section of inner tube from a car tire. When we played hockey we made makeshift goals and played on the ice on the river, some wearing hockey skates and some wearing racing skates. Whatever games we played we didn’t have adults supervising us; we made up our own teams and played by our own rules. I think that this knack for innovation later helped our generation, as soldiers, to devise new and unheard-of ways to overcome unforeseen obstacles in combat.

The Depression was a leveler too. I grew up in what was considered a middle-class family—by today’s standards we would be considered poor, but nobody came around to tell us so. Everyone was in the same boat, and extended families helped each other. I wore many clothes that had belonged to one of my cousins or my big brother. Getting some bit of clothing of your own that was new was a big event. There were many people who had much less than we did, but they never let on and we never knew. The community sort of stuck together and family was very important. Parents were role models. I remember getting into a lot of mischief when I was growing up but nothing really bad. In the back of my mind was always the thought, Don’t ever do anything to bring disgrace to your family. I never thought of me first or do your own thing, and neither did anyone else. I am sure that these traits helped us in combat to stick together and look out for each other.

All of these things stayed with us after the war was over (though, really, the war was never over). It changed us all. Somewhere in the deep recesses of the mind there is a little voice that reminds us from time to time, You survived. You are alive. Don’t waste your life. Do something with it.

While I was convalescing once again in a hospital in Paris, after being wounded the second time, I began to think of my future. It was there that I first started to think about becoming a doctor. I wanted to make my life count as one that was worthwhile. But after the atom bomb was dropped (which, incidentally, I believe with all my heart saved me from certain death in the invasion of Japan), for a while I was at loose ends. I thought that perhaps the world would end in a few years, so why not live it up while I could. But that little voice was still there and it said to me, You must live your life as if the world will go on. You’re alive. So, with the help of Public Law 16, I finished college and went on to medical school. I then went to a small rural town where I could be a real doctor. I married, and my wife and I have five children. After 44 years I am still practicing medicine.

I don’t know about the Greatest Generation stuff. In my mind we were the most fortunate generation, especially in the things that really count. Who could ask for anything more.

Robert Cromer

Dear Tom:

My name is Elias Hellerstein (my friends call me Ellie—a nickname I picked up during the Depression years from my family).

I’ll give you a short family background. Both of my parents were born in the 1880s on the East Side of New York. I was the youngest of four children. I was born in 1927 and, growing up, we didn’t really want for anything. My father was a bartender who had a steady job in the Depression years. In fact, he worked 50 years as a bartender, right up to the day he passed away in 1959. Of course, things were tight for everybody, even for people who had a steady job. I remember, when I was 8 years old, I used to sell newspapers. I would buy the papers off the truck (the Daily News and The Daily Mirror) on 157th St. and Broadway in New York. I would buy 10 of the News and 10 of the Mirrors off the truck when they came to make their newsstand delivery. I paid a penny apiece, and for 20 cents, I had 20 papers. But I wouldn’t sell them for 2 cents, as the newsstands did, because that wasn’t enough profit for me—just a penny on each paper. So I would go down to the subway. On the train, I would sell my papers for a nickel apiece. I usually sold every single one of them by the time I got back to 157th St. Pretty good profit in those days. Of course, that was at night. I used to get the papers at 8:30 or 9:00 at night, and by the time I rode downtown a half hour and a half hour back, I was home by 10:00 or a little after. It wasn’t that bad. I also sold magazines during the day. I used to sell Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. I hustled. I was a hustling kid. Right up to now, even in retirement.

Thanks a lot. Bless you.

Elias Hellerstein

Dear Mr. Brokaw:

I also was a member of the greatest generation, born January 25, 1914. I am now 85 years of age. As a small child I remember the end of World War I. Church bells were ringing and guns were being fired in celebration.

Zelpha Simmons standing next to a Ford that she and her husband, Johnny, bought in 1937 for five hundred dollars.

(Courtesy of Zelpha Simmons)

Zelpha Simmons ready for church, 1930s.

Zelpha Simmons, wearing a dress that she made, around 1940.

(Both courtesy of Zelpha Simmons)

I vividly recall the struggles of the Depression years. I finished Bessemer High School at age 16 in May of 1930 and went to work in the fall at S. H. Kress store in Bessemer, Alabama, for $9.00 a week as a salesclerk, hours 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., on Saturday until 9 p.m. If you had a dime you could buy a box of face powder or a small can of paint. After seven years my salary as bookkeeper was $15.00 a week. I was the sole support of a family of five. We made it with a milk cow, garden and chickens and hard work.

During World War II, the Birmingham News daily listed the men who were killed. I read the names of classmates. I wondered will it ever end.

My husband and I did not get higher educations, but we started a business in Bessemer [that lasted] for 40 years. However, our son, John, now has a Ph.D. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University.

May God bless.

Yours truly,

Zelpha P. Simmons

Dear Mr. Brokaw,

I was eight years of age in 1936, living in Rumford, Maine. My father was a house painter. One day he fell off the old scaffolding, three stories high. The scaffolding fell on him, crushing his leg and ribs. He was laid up for almost a year and in a cast from his toes to his neck, and was unable to work. This was a very hard time as work was very scarce.

This forced the family to go to the town for support. We were 6 children to feed and clothe. The oldest was 14. Every week my mother had to walk to the town hall and sign up; literally beg for food, rent and clothing. Some weeks she would receive a pair of shoes or a check made out to a certain grocery store for food. The town also doled out some flour, cornmeal, turnips or potatoes, but not much of any of these.

I always felt the town manager was a mean old man. He gave my mother such a hard time; she would come out of his office with her eyes red from crying. It made me feel so bad that I couldn’t do anything to help.

One day I will always remember, my mother and I were walking home from the town hall with a bag of potatoes and cornmeal on a sled. It was cold, windy and snowing. I told my mother I would find some kind of work so I could give her money each week.

I got a paper route and delivered papers 7 days a week; working from 6 a.m. to finish in time for school. I delivered the Grit for 2 cents a week per customer and I had 30 customers; the Rumford Falls Times at 3 cents per customer; and on Sunday I received 5 cents per paper and had 50 customers. Everything I earned went to my mother for our family.

There were times we had no electricity because we had no money to pay the bill. We had a couple of kerosene lamps, which were used for light to do our homework for school.

In 1938, we had the best Christmas ever. My Aunt Anna from New Haven sent us a large box of toys and clothes. Also that year, the different clubs of the town of Rumford, Maine, gave our family baskets of food, fruit and nuts. The church, Elks, and VFW helped us through this Christmas season. We usually got a pair of mittens for Christmas and were very proud of them.

When my father had the cast removed and was able to move around on his own, he couldn’t work but he had enough strength to cut rubber tires for fuel to heat the house. My sister and I and our friends would go around to all the garages and bring home the used tires. We would push the tires like hoops to make it fun to do. My father and oldest brother would slice the tires up for the stove. My father would say that the smell of rubber burning was much better than being cold.

Helen Ryan in front of the café where she waited tables for fifty cents a day to earn money for college.

Helen Ryan in 1935.

Helen Ryan in front of her parents’ home in Houghton, South Dakota, 1930.

Helen Ryan, senior-year high school photos.

Helen Ryan in 1935, outside her parents’ home in Houghton. There were about five hundred people in that town when I grew up, and I don’t even know if it is there anymore.

(All courtesy of Helen Ryan)

In 1936, my oldest brother joined the CCC. This gave my mother some money each month for expenses. We were able to get off the town support. He joined the Army in 1938 and was killed in the Philippines in 1945. I enlisted in the Merchant Marines when I was just 16, so my mother had to sign the papers for me to join. The day I left for the service was the day they held a Mass for my brother.

Sincerely,

Armand J. Beauchesne

Dear Tom:

My husband, Bill, and I lived through the Depression, hoping someday to have a good job when we graduated in 1939 and Bill got in the F.B.I.

My children of eight, now seven, can’t believe I worked for $.50 a day to save for college. My parents had all they could do to get $35.00 for tuition. I worked in Citizen Bank for $35.00 and paid my room and board. I went to college with one skirt and sweater and one dress for parties. Today, young ones can’t believe it.

I remember the day my mother called and said FDR closed the small bank in Houghton where my father worked. Something like [if] today one goes to work in the morning and by noon he doesn’t have a job. My husband went to Inland Steel with Industrial Relations after 11 years in the F.B.I. Steel people are feeling the dumping of steel from other countries. I worry as I have three sons in steel.

Memorial Days are not celebrated like [they were in] days gone by. That was the thing we did on Memorial Day—go to the cemetery.

God bless.

Sincerely,

Helen L. Ryan

Dear Mr. Brokaw,

I have some memories of my parents talking about hard times during the Depression (as I was born in 1935, my childhood memories of outside events really begin with Pearl Harbor—not so oddly, that is still very clear in my memory, as are other WWII memories).

I remember, without being able to put a date on it, my parents arguing about money. At night I could overhear them, as my bedroom was just above the dining room and sound carried extraordinarily well through the heating system vents. I don’t remember the details of those arguments—just the tense and, on occasion, raised voices, and the feeling of worry and fear that seemed to fill the air. This was true despite my father being well placed financially (relatively speaking). He had been an aviator in World War I and returned to go to college and then begin teaching at the University of Virginia in the mid-1920s. As a university professor of architecture he was on a state salary, and although there were salary reductions in the mid-30s, I believe, as he told me once, he was never richer after than he was then. On his $2,000 a year or so, he was able to provide for us comfortably, and what’s more, to build a new house out in what then were the suburbs, which meant he had a car as well to get to work. He told me that he was able to hire master carpenters, plumbers, and bricklayers for ten cents an hour, and they were overjoyed to get the work.

Not all my parents’ friends were so well placed, of course, and I am sure some of the anxiety they felt spread to my family. My mother told me, sadly, of the number of good lawyers who had to keep up the pretense of success (who wants to employ an unsuccessful lawyer?) but if you looked closely you could see how frayed their collars and shirt sleeves had become and how shiny the seats and knees of their dark business suits were. She often would choke up and cry when she would talk about those times: I remember her saying once, A person shouldn’t have to be ashamed to be poor, but we are. All of us are.

Living as we did in a predominantly rural area, with the biggest two businesses being the university and the hospital, the Depression as such had done all sorts of damage to the farmers since the very early 1920s. My father came to Charlottesville from Indiana, and he told me how when he first got to Virginia, he was stunned at the terrible damage done to the soil. As he put it, the Blue Ridge Mountains were not blue, they were a dull brown, from having been cut to the bare rock and soil. All the local streams (we called them creeks) would run a dark reddish brown from eroded soil anytime it rained at all. Once at my grandmother’s farm, I saw the red water spread all over the hay fields during a spring flood. I didn’t realize then that the water wouldn’t have been that color had it not been cutting deep ravines in all the farmland.

Just as the forests had been cut down, the farms had been overworked. According to my mother, it was during this time particularly that many of the smaller farmers lost their farms either to the larger enterprises around them or to money coming in from out of state—or, as my mother phrased it, Yankee money. And this was the beginning, ironically, of Charlottesville and Albemarle County becoming fashionable’ as horse country and a place for well-to-do northerners to retire to become gentleman farmers.

All the best

Stan Makielski

Dear Tom:

My name is Steve Kish, born in Duquesne, PA, 1920, August 1. My parents were immigrants from Austria-Hungary. Mom [was] from the Carpathian Mt. Country and my dad’s homeland was the Transylvania area. Their native tongue—Hungarian.

Your book brought me back thoughts of my youth, particularly after my father, Louis Kish, died in 1937, at the age of 42 from an illness stemming from typhoid he contracted as a youngster.

I was the oldest at home and had just started my senior year in high school when he passed on in October of 1937. At the time I was employed as a grocery clerk working after school and weekends. $7.00 a week. My mother was going to take me out of school, but the principal and football coach talked her out of that, promising to get me work if she let me graduate.

They were good to their word. I was [one of] four out of ninety students who went to work. I worked steadily until Sept. of 1942, when I was drafted into the service.

When I was called before the Draft Board, they asked me what I contributed to my family’s upkeep. My entire paycheck from the factory, I answered. Where do you get your spending money. From a second job at the grocery store.

I was to go in November of 1942. But a young man broke his leg, and they were kind enough to send me in September. All my friends went with me, and I was elated to go. Learned more during the next two and one-half years than I did in twelve years of schooling.

Steve Kish, age twenty-two, in 1942.

(Courtesy of Steve Kish)

Spent my time as an M.P. until I was injured (bad leg) and received medical discharge at the end of 1944. From then until now [I’ve] had many forms of employment—steel mills, machine shops, catering company, and finally for seventeen years a bridge estimator.

Publically [I] was a union president, president of Hungarian Social Club, board member of Greek Orthodox Church. My wife is of Greek parentage. Got involved in politics as a councilman and was president of Council for ten years or so.

We have a daughter, special ed teacher, and two good grandchildren, one girl and one boy.

Two things make me proud and happy. If I could not help anyone, I would not harm them with words or deed. I am successful because I am going to leave it better than I got it.

With great sincerity,

Steve A. Kish

Dear Mr. Brokaw:

My husband was in the Navy at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. He was 17 years old, and it was, of course, a life-changing experience. Bob retired from the U.S. Navy after 30 years and immediately went to work for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He retired from the FAA after 25 years of service. I have attached a copy of what I said at his retirement party. It gives you some background on Bob and his personality.

Bob Barrigan at Ford Island Air Station, approximately 4:30 P.M., December 7, 1941.

(U.S. Navy Archive photo)

    I have thought a lot about the kind of man my husband, Bob Barrigan, is. All of the Barrigan men are a little stubborn. But all of them have a great patriotic love for their country. The first time I met Bob’s dad, the thing I noticed most about them was how patriotic they were. There were five daughters and