Our last link to the Great War vanishes

With World War II veterans in their late 80s and beyond, it’s hard to believe that until the last year a few vets of the First World War were still around.

This month its last known survivor  died – 110-year-old Briton Florence Green, who signed up with the new Women’s Royal Air Force in September 1918 and served two months on active duty before the Armistice. Her job was waiting on tables in the officers’ mess at Narborough Airfield and RAF Marham, Norfolk.

In 2011 we lost the last known combat vet of the war, Claude Choules, who was born in Britain and died in Australia, and the last known American non-combat vet, Frank Buckles of West Virginia.

With Florence gone, so is all modern memory of the Great War, which broke out almost a hundred years ago.

Isn’t it amazing that it hung on for so long?

For the ages: Medal of Honor holders from WWII

Alton W. Knappenberger

A friend recently handed me a few pages from Pennsylvania magazine, dated August 1992, about the state’s Medal of Honor recipients from World War II.

Of 35 Pennsylvanians who got the nation’s highest military award for bravery, 20 received it posthumously. As of the publication date, four were still living in the state and four were living elsewhere.

I wondered if any of them survives to this day, so I did a quick Google search. The answer is no: All are gone.

One of the eight was Alton W. Knappenberger, a Coopersburg native I interviewed in 2004 at his home near Boyertown. He died in 2008. My story on him appears on the Arlington National Cemetery website at http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/awkappenberger.htm.

Three of the others listed as living in the state were Gino J. Merli of Peckville, who died in 2002; Leonard A. Funk Jr. of McKeesport, who died in November 1992; James M. Burt of Wyomissing, who moved to Pennsylvania after the war and died in 2006.

Four were from the state but living elsewhere: Mitchell Paige and John J. Tominac were in California — Paige died in 2003 and Tominac in 1998; Freeman V. Horner was living in Georgia and died in 2005; and Jay Zeamer Jr. was living in Maine and died in 2007.

They belong to the ages, but their names and what they did will live forever.

 

 

 

 

A final salute to an extraordinary WWII soldier

Dick Richards at Fort Benning, Ga., on April 30, 1942

The war veterans I interview are in their 80s and beyond, so you’d think I’d get used to losing them. Nearly half of the three dozen vets in my book War Stories: In Their Own Words have died, and that was in a period of 12 years.

But it doesn’t get any easier, and that point was driven home yet again over the weekend.

Dick Richards, a World War II vet I first met with early in 2010, died about 6 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 4, 2012) in Easton Hospital. He was 95. I got the word later that night in a phone call from Morris Metz, president of the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, who had introduced me to Dick.

Dick’s longevity was all the more amazing when you consider what happened to him in the war. A soldier in the 99^th Infantry Division, he crossed the Remagen bridge into Germany’s heartland in March 1945 and shortly afterward lost his jaw to an enemy shell. For two years and seven months, he was a patient at Valley Forge General Hospital, where doctors built him a new jaw. But they couldn’t give him teeth, so he could never again eat solid food.

For more than a year, Morris had politely pestered me about doing a story on Dick, and on a rainy spring day, March 29, 2010, took me to see him. Dick lived alone in the house he grew up in on Morgan Hill in Williams Township, with an orchard out back and a big, lovable dog name Ginger. His wife had died the year before. When Morris said I was there to do a story on him, Dick shot back, “My name’s not going to be in the paper, is it?” Morris laughed. I winced, concerned about whether he’d talk to me.

That didn’t turn out to be a problem. I ended up meeting with Dick many times, usually for two hours or so in the afternoons, with my digital recorder running. When the story was in shape to run in The Morning Call on Memorial Day, staff photographer Kevin Mingora shot nice portraits of Dick, who called Kevin “Mumbles” because he had trouble hearing him. Kevin still laughs about that.

Morris has told me that the story perked Dick up and boosted his pride. Here’s the link to it: http://www.mcall.com/news/all-dickrichards,0,6369554.story Dick started coming to Bulge vets luncheons, and I couldn’t keep him supplied with enough extra copies of his story to give to friends and family. Last October, after my War Stories book came out, he bought six copies for his children.

We continued to meet from time to time, just chatting in the afternoons in his living room. He liked to talk about growing vegetables and how much he enjoyed sharing them with friends, who always came back for more. One day he insisted I go home with some of his cucumbers.

In the summer of 2010, Morris, Bob Faro of the Lehigh Valley Military Affairs Council and I visited Dick on his 94^th birthday, and I visited him on his 95^th birthday last July.

A few weeks ago, Morris called me and said Dick had been moved to Manor Care nursing home in Easton and probably wouldn’t be going home. I went to see him on Jan. 23 and he chattered for an hour, just like old times. He seemed fine. But then a week later, he was admitted to the hospital, where he lay semi-conscious. When I called his room on Friday and spoke with his daughter Kathy, she said his condition was not good.

The next day was his last.

Dick had been a member of the Greatest Generation who had answered the call to arms and suffered a terrible, disfiguring wound, but said he would put on a uniform again if the nation needed him.

I’ve lost a friend who was the definition of courage. It hurts that he’s gone.

Touring WWI battlefields, the Michelin way

The First World War was over but still an open wound in 1920 when the Michelin Tire Co. came out with a three-volume collection called The Americans in the Great War, with the header, “Michelin Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields (1914-1918).” Published by Michelin & Cie, Clermont-Ferrand, (France), it’s dedicated to “the Michelin workmen and employees who died gloriously for their country.” At the time, each volume cost $1.

The doughboys are heaped with praise in what is otherwise a dry recitation of the facts of the American engagement in France. “The Americans fought bravely,” it says. In the volume on the Meuse-Argonne battlefields, I read that the “splendid fighting spirit of the [U.S.] troops was remarked by all, and their fine comradeship, both on the firing line and at rest, won the widest possible admiration.”

I guess folks needed to hear that less than two years after the war ended, to help them come to terms with the sacrifices that had been made – the terrible losses of life, limb and sanity.

Touted as “A panoramic history and guide,” the books are sprinkled with photos that show generals, battlefields, towns and villages in ruin, but no graphic reminders of the staggering human carnage. There are maps showing the movement of armies and directions on how to tour the battlefields by car, as well as suggested itineraries.

The three volumes I have once belonged to Jack Davis of Easton, a World War II veteran whose account of his experience in the Battle of the Bulge is in my book War Stories: In Their Own Words. Jack died more than a year ago. His daughters gave his collection of several dozen military history books to the Lehigh Valley chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, of which he’d been a member. At the last meeting, those books were divvied up by lottery. As an associate member, I was lucky to get the Michelin books.

Jack’s copies appear to have been owned at some point by a Michelin agent. The title page of Volume 1 is stamped “C. Everett Hesselgrave, agent, 109 White Bldg., Seattle. Phone Main 289.” Hesselgrave signed the copy.

One of the most interesting aspects is the advertising – full-page ads with spare line drawings of cars and maps.

Here’s the text for one:

You don’t know what a
Good Road Map
is, if you haven’t used the
Michelin Map.
The tourist finds his way about easily in a town, if he has a plan giving the names of the streets.
He gets about with the same ease and certainty on the road, if he has a Michelin Map, because it gives the numbers of all the roads.

And here’s another:

The Michelin Wheel
BEST of all detachable wheels because the least complicated
Elegant: It embellishes even the finest coachwork.
Simple: It is detachable at the hub and fixed by six bolts only.
Strong: the only wheel which held out on all fronts during the war.
Practical: Can be replaced in 3 minutes by anybody and cleaned still quicker.

So, the books don’t just tell you about the American battles of World War I. They tell you about 1920.

 

 

Remembering an American flier in the RAF

Douglas MacGillvary Brown in the Lehigh University Class of 1941 yearbook

Some stories just keep coming around for another turn.

Almost 12 years ago, The Morning Call ran a story about Douglas MacGillvary Brown, a young American flier who left Bethlehem to fight for England before the U.S. entered World War II. He was killed before he got the chance.

The story was written by Kathy Lauer-Williams, with me as the editor. It told how Brown, a 21-year-old Lehigh University graduate, was on a Royal Air Force training flight on April 5, 1942, when his Spitfire Mk1 crashed into a mountain in North Wales.

The story’s peg – the reason Kathy wrote it – had to do with a woman who lovingly tended the pilot’s grave in the village of Tubney, England, for 45 years until she died.

Kathleen Barner was a stranger to Brown. She was married in Tubney’s St. Lawrence Church the day before he was buried, and made it her mission to keep the grass around his grave neatly mowed and the headstone clean. She often wondered about Brown, the only serviceman buried in the churchyard.

After Barner died in 1987, church member Briony Blackwell and others in the congregation wanted to learn all they could about Brown to honor Barner’s memory. Their search led to details of his life, how he came to fly for the RAF and what happened the day his plane hit North Wales’ Cwmbowydd Mountain.

Blackwell hoped to preserve Brown’s story with the church parish records. “It’s so tragic,” she told Kathy. “It’s sad that he died away from his country. In this way, we can help a brave man to be remembered.”

Kathy’s story ran on Page 1 on Sunday, April 2, 2000, to mark the 58^th anniversary of Brown’s death. Here’s the link: http://www.mcall.com/news/all-tubneygraves,0,3008866.story. It was paired with a story I wrote about another American who flew for England and also died in a training accident in early 1942, Robert Riedy of Allentown.

We haven’t had anything about Brown in the paper since Kathy’s story. But that could soon change as a result of an email we got last week, informing us of another U.K. effort to remember Doug Brown.

The message was from Mel Thomas in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales, who described himself as project leader of a “loose group of enthusiastic historians and archaeologists” who plan to put up a memorial plaque near the site where Brown’s plane crashed. He emailed The Morning Call because his group found a photo of Brown on the paper’s website.

When I asked Mel what this was all about, he said his group is cataloging “the history of a now derelict community in a hidden valley above our town – a valley called Cwmorthin.”

“Earliest settlement goes back to the 1500s and the last resident left in 1948. Part of its timeline involved a crash of a Hawker Hurricane flown by a Canadian pilot who was killed in the crash,” Mel wrote. “We decided to do a plaque in his memory and then realized that others had died near the town during the war. Hence the move now on to remember Doug.”

I asked Mel about the other deaths, and he wrote that a twin-engine Vickers Wellington Mk1c bomber hit a mountain coming back from a raid on the German U-boat pens at Lorient in Brittany, France.

“Five of the six crew were killed. The tail gunner survived when the turret detached on impact. When he came to with the rescuers around him, he presented his pistol, thinking he was in France because he could not understand their language. They were in fact speaking Welsh!

“He was in the local hospital for five weeks with a broken leg and bad bruising, getting daily visits from local schoolchildren.”

Mel said the plaque for Doug Brown will be placed at the starting point of a mountain bike course that’s under construction and expected to be completed by April. Watch The Morning Call, http://www.mcall.com/, for an update.

20 miles from bin Laden, and not knowing it

“We all have moments we look back upon and shudder because we had no idea how much danger we were in.”

That’s the start of a message I got Saturday from my friend Steve Lester. We went to Downingtown High School in eastern Pennsylvania in the early 1970s, and he joined the Army as a musician, a guitarist. We’ve stayed in touch.

In 2006, he and some 20 other members of the 10^th Mountain Division Band from Fort Drum, N.Y., spent about six weeks in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. Osama bin Laden was holed up only about 20 miles away, in Abbottabad. He had reportedly been there since the year before. Last year, Navy SEALs hunted him down in his hideaway.

While Steve was still overseas, he wrote an article that was published in The Morning Call through his connection to me. It was titled “Confessions of an Army guitarist: How a musician pulled guard duty in Pakistan.”

Here is his story of how he got to Muzaffarabad, as he told it over the weekend in the emailed message from his home in Lake Placid, N.Y.:

“The first step occurred on the night of Feb. 5, 2006, when about 350 10^th Mountain Division soldiers herded into the terminal at FortDrum’s expansive Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield bound for Afghanistan.

“Winter had arrived late that year to this remote outpost about 30 miles from the Canadian border above Syracuse. The day before had been another unseasonably warm one as few people wore so much as a windbreaker. On this night, however, a cold front was sweeping through, bringing the bitter wind off Lake Ontario along with the season’s first measurable snow.

“The division’s senior non-commissioned officer, Command Sgt. Maj. Ralph Borja, gave a rousing speech speckled with threatening language about no sex or booze once you get there, or else. Then the division commander, Maj. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, gave a similar speech but with no threatening language.

“Within minutes all the 350 soldiers secured their M-16 rifles and personal carry-on baggage as they headed for the terminal door amid a roar of excited chatter.

“Freakley and Borja stood in the chilly vestibule and shook every soldier’s hand as they departed the terminal for that endless walk out on the cold, blustery flight line to the long stairway-on-wheels leading to the relative warmth and sanctity of the hatch near the back of the chartered civilian jumbo jet, where they would spend the next 17 to 18 hours en route to Kyrgyzstan, the plane’s final stop.

“As the guitar player for the 10th Mountain Division Band at the time, in my final full year in the Army at age 51, I was one of those soldiers. Although I was just a staff sergeant, the commanding general and command sergeant major both recognized me as we exchanged broad smiles and warm hand shakes.

“Our flight stopped in Shannon,Ireland, for fuel in the dead of night when the small terminal was virtually empty.  We left our weapons on the plane and spent about 45 minutes lounging and stretching.

“Upon being summoned to re-board, we walked down a glass-enclosed hallway to the boarding gate as a commercial flight discharged its civilian passengers into the glass-enclosed hallway next to us. I don’t know where their flight originated from, but they all cheered us through the glass walls as we passed each other.

“Our plane stopped again at a U.S.airbase in Incirlik, Turkey, for a longer stop in a much smaller terminal where the plane changed crews in addition to taking on more fuel for the final push across the Caspian Sea to Manas International Airport in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

“Our version of retrieving checked baggage in the wintry darkness took the form of roaming through piles of duffel bags that were brought to us on pallets by forklifts. Your objective after finding your duffel bags was to find a warm tent where you could lie back on a bunk bed until your final flight was called.

“I climbed into the top bunk next to the tent’s heater above the entrance where it felt good to lie back and stretch out after having spent most of the previous 18 hours in a cramped airline seat. The intermittent action of the heater had me sweating one moment and shivering the next.

“One of our sergeants first class, a percussionist, had been to drill sergeant school and conducted himself with a bluster and swagger that our battalion sergeant major liked.

“When word came down through the chain of command that the division had to send a security detail to Pakistan because of a visit by President George W. Bush, the band got the call through this sergeant major’s influence.

“Some of us shimmered with glee at the thought of walking alongside the president with M-16s locked and loaded, ready to blast anybody who threatened our commander-in-chief. We got bumped to the top of the priority list for a flight to Bagram Air Base and had to be ready to go when the call came. (The nine guys and one female who went to Islamabad to guard Air Force One did not see the president. He was only there for one or two nights.)

“As I remember it, the call came in the middle of the night to board a bus for an Army C-130 transport plane. The division command wanted to make sure there were no repeat broadcasts on CNN of anybody getting off a plane in Afghanistan carrying a pink teddy bear and otherwise looking like anything other than The World’s Most Intimidating Fighting Machine.

“So we piled up our duffel bags onto a pallet, then piled ourselves two to a seat onto a pseudo-school bus wearing full ‘battle rattle’ with helmets and flak jackets while holding weapons and carry-on luggage on our laps. The cold dark bus full of silent, weary-eyed soldiers crawled its way from the small compound through a security checkpoint and onto the flight line where it stopped and waited before turning back and saying, in effect, ‘Never mind.’

“Eventually we found our way onto a daytime flight to Bagram, where less than a week later we became the first unit in the battalion to convoy out the gate into the populace — in full battle rattle with weapons and live ammo.

“We had been told that the Pakistanis were none-too-comfortable with U.S. soldiers in their midst for fear of our turning Pakistan into another Iraq. So before we could leave for there we had to learn how to shoot a weapon small enough to stuff into the back of our pants – gangster-style — while on patrol and thus conceal them from view.

“Our convoy of armored Humvees and trucks with machine gun turrets was to take us out to a desert weapons range. We had been told to ignore the children in the outlying village because they liked to give U.S. soldiers the thumbs up, which was said to be a gesture similar to a U.S. middle finger.

“Our first sergeant, the highest ranking non-commissioned officer in the band, had an easy-going southern gentlemanly manner about him — except when he got upset. He was a known taker of antidepressants, and you never knew whether he was going to behave as if he were on his meds or off them.

“Earlier in his career, while serving as the first sergeant of The Fort Lee Army Band near Richmond, Va., he’d had the unfortunate task of looking into the residence of one of his soldiers who had mysteriously not reported for work, only to discover that the soldier had died in his home of natural causes.

“Now, as he was about to lead a convoy of soldiers out the gate of the safe confines of Bagram Air Base into the land of the Taliban, the last thing he wanted was to have to inform another family of one of his soldiers that the soldier had died. It was an off-the-meds day for the first sergeant.

“We rolled out the gate, the Afghan children lined the village street giving us a thumbs up, and the rest of the day went without incident. We shot up our 9 mm ammo supply aiming at nothing in particular.

“A few days later 20 of us boarded a transport plane bound for Islamabad. The plane took off, circled around, and came right back down. The crew said it had a problem with the hydraulics and couldn’t fly.

“A day or so later we were on another flight that made it the whole way. But instead of having a forklift carry our duffel bags from the plane on a pallet on a wintry night, we carried our duffel bags, one in each hand, along with a backpack, a 9 mm pistol and an M-16 nobody was supposed to know about some 200 yards off the flight line to a grove of trees on a summer-like day.

“At roughly 145 pounds dripping wet, I must have been hauling three-fourths of my body weight. At 51, I was definitely too old for this kind of work.

“An attractive female liaison from the embassy met us and told us to hang tight in the tree grove until our helicopters arrived, which they did in short order. And, once again, we gathered up all our gear in full battle rattle and hiked 200 yards to the choppers where, as on a C-130, you use your Army-issue ear plugs, close your eyes and zone out until you arrive.

“One member of the chopper crew, however, had to have a conversation with one of our guys, which you could only do shouting at the top of your voice.

“WHAT UNIT YOU GUYS FROM?”
“THE BAND.”
“THE WHAT?”
“THE BAND.”
“THE WHAT?”
“THE BAND,” he said, this time mimicking playing a trombone.
“THE BAND?!”
“YEAH.”
“HOLY MOTHER F—!!!”

“By this time our mission had become twofold. Pakistan had been hit by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on Oct. 8 that killed more than 80,000 and left about 3.5 million homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“Our first stop was in Muzaffarabad, the epicenter of the quake where the Army had set up the 212^th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) on Oct. 22. A platoon from the European command had been pulling security there and following our progress in arriving to relieve them. As our first plane took off from Bagram, they rejoiced proclaiming, ‘The 10^th Mountain Division is on its way!’

“Then, after our plane turned right around and landed with its hydraulic problems, it was, ‘The 10^th Mountain Division is not on its way!’

“A few days later: ‘The 10^th Mountain Division is on its way again! We’d better look good and squared away for these guys because they’re supposed to be pretty hardcore!’

“Upon our arrival it was, ‘Yup, we’re the band all right.’

“Our first mission was to pull security at the MASH, where every day Pakistani earthquake victims, and even non-earthquake victims, would gather under a crude bus stop-style shelter outside the hospital gate. We would wait until about a dozen people had gathered and then file them in one at a time.

“We searched every person for weapons, including the women who were led to a tarp draped over makeshift supports off to the side where female soldiers searched them in private. From what little I could see, no women had a problem with being frisked. However, one man, the husband I presume, demonstrated considerable anxiety over his wife’s being led away to the tarp. He tried to follow and would not let her out of his sight. A male soldier had to gently stand in his way.

“I frisked my share of men before gathering up a few lines of people and, using my new two-word Urdu vocabulary, led them into the MASH. The young Pakistani boys found this all very exciting and offered me as much help as possible. After receiving treatment, each citizen received a package of food to leave with. The young boys found this very exciting also.

“The Army turned the MASH over to the Pakistanis in mid-February after it had treated more than 20,000 patients. The 212^th was the last of the Army MASH units dating to World War I before the Army switched over to what it calls the Combat Support Hospital, or CASH.”

“By this time I and nine others had ridden up a narrow, partially washed-away mountain pass alongside a raging river with no guard rail to the Muzaffarabad airport with its small terminal and 3,000-foot airstrip. This would be our home for about the next five weeks. An international fleet of helicopters spent the days, weather permitting, ferrying relief supplies to Kashmir earthquake victims.

“The Pakistani military (“Pak-Mil”) lined the perimeter of the airfield with sandbagged bunkers and automatic weapons. A platoon of petroleum specialists from Fort Lee,Va., meanwhile, had set up a fuel depot for the helicopters.

“Their continued mission involved monitoring the quality of the fuel being delivered by private contractors via what we called ‘jingle trucks,’ or colorfully painted tanker trucks with coins attached to short chains dangling from the bumpers. We were brought there to provide added security for the petroleum platoon.

“In addition to patrolling on foot, we spent the next five weeks or so patrolling in three-passenger Polaris ATVs, vehicles that we soon discovered could go from zero to 40 in about three-tenths of a second.

“For the first few days, we were hell on wheels zipping up and down next to the landing strip until a very tall Pakistani soldier – very politely – asked us to ‘go slow,’ which we did from then on.”

    

Tribute to a newsroom librarian

In my writing about war veterans, I’ve always felt relief when a researcher helped me. Researchers can get accurate information or steer you in the right direction, even in this age of Google.

At The Morning Call over the years, newsroom librarian Ruth Burns backed me up countless times. She was my right hand in 2002 when I worked on a two-part series about Bataan Death March survivor Joe Poster, making sure I got the history right.

She would always help my colleagues or me when we needed resources or fact-checking. Beyond that, she was a really neat person and fun to be with.

We in the newsroom learned last week that Ruth had died at age 68. A Lehigh County deputy coroner pronounced her dead of natural causes at 4:35 p.m. Jan. 2 in her residence on Lehigh Parkway East, Allentown. She hadn’t been working at the paper for several years. We knew she had health problems.

Ruth and I had made a good team. In early 2004, she came to my desk and asked me if I knew there was a World War II Medal of Honor recipient living on the edge of our circulation area.

His name was Alton W. Knappenberger. He had gotten the medal for extraordinary heroism against the Germans in Italy, soon after the Anzio landings.

As I recall, Ruth had come across some old clippings about him, looked him up and found him still living. He was in eastern Berks County, near Boyertown. She had his address and phone number, and passed the info to me.

Her tip led to a long story I wrote about “Knappie” for the Memorial Day 2004 edition of The Morning Call. I think it was 110 column inches. I had spent hours interviewing him in his trailer in the woods. He had been a quiet country boy, a reluctant hero, and was not a big talker.

Knappenberger died four years later, at age 84, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. My piece on him is posted on Arlington’s website, http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/awkappenberger.htm

It’s the most personally satisfying story I’ve ever done.

I owe that to Ruth. It wouldn’t have happened without her.

Battle of the Bulge veterans toast the new year

For the last six years, Morris Metz has invited family members and fellow World War II veterans to his home for a New Year’s toast.

It’s a tradition for Battle of the Bulge survivors, he says, to raise a glass at 3 p.m. for the more than 19,000 British and American troops who died in the fighting from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.

Morris is president of the Bulge veterans’ Lehigh Valley chapter. This is the first year I could make it to one of his events.

My wife, Mary, and I showed up 20 minutes before the toast and joined several dozen guests at the beautifully restored 19^th century farmhouse Morris and his wife, Dot, own on the line between Forks and Plainfield townships. The couple’s son, Doug, and daughter, Debbie, were there, as well as grandchildren and a great-grandson.

Mary got to meet some of my friends – Ray and Irene Christman, John and Linda Caponigro, Harold Kist, Mark and Jean Kistler, Lou Vargo and Minotte Chatfield. (I’ve done stories on Ray Christman, John Caponigro and Vargo.)

David Colley, author of Safely Rest and other WWII books, was there with his wife, Mary, a photographer.

Jack Davis, who died last year and is in my War Stories book with Christman and Vargo – was represented by daughters Sharon Davis and Janet Kobler. (Janet’s painting of Morris at a military cemetery in Europe hangs on a wall. Her father and Morris were close friends.)

When the clock chimed three times, we raised our glasses for those in the Bulge who sacrificed their lives or have since died. It was a somber moment for the vets around us, who had lost 11 comrades in the last year.

Still, this New Year’s Day was a happy time for these men in their late 80s and beyond, evident in their crinkly smiles. The Greatest Generation yet lives, and will go on.

A proud leader of veterans is gone

Word of Vincent B. Vicari’s death on Dec. 5 was announced at the Christmas party of the Lehigh Valley chapter, Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge. He had been a member.

I knew Vinny, but not well. Our paths crossed at veterans’ events, where he was always front and center. Plus, he had a physical connection with my in-laws, who lived in Bethlehem Township: Their back yards met. My wife, Mary, described him as expressive and high-energy.

Vinny, who was 92, was never a subject of my series “War Stories: In Their Own Words” in The Morning Call. I did consider interviewing him, but our archives contained a flurry of stories about him, so I passed.

During the Bulge, Vinny was an officer in the Army’s 101^st Airborne Division and an aide to Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe, who famously responded to a German surrender ultimatum at Bastogne, Belgium, on Dec. 22, 1944: “Nuts.”

The stretch of Route 33 between Route 22 and Interstate 78 is named after McAuliffe as a result of Vinny’s efforts.

The veterans’ community will miss his proud leadership.

This year also saw the deaths of several World War II veterans whose stories ran in my series: fighter pilot Frank Speer, March 1; Army medic Jack Davis, May 12; sailor Horace Rehrig, May 21; Pearl Harbor survivor Warren Peters, Sept. 29; Alfred Taglang, another Pearl Harbor survivor, June 12; and bomber pilot Harry Yoder, May 8.

Speer, Davis, Rehrig and Yoder are in my book, War Stories: In Their Own Words.

I counted them all among my friends. They are gone but not forgotten.

 

Books I’d like to see under the tree

The book about the silent film star

Two new books are on my Christmas wish list, even though I already have enough unread books on my home-office shelves to keep me busy until I croak.

One of the new ones is Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean. It tells the story of the German shepherd pup who was found in battle-scarred France’s Meuse Valley during World War I by an American corporal and went on to become a silent film legend.

I’ve seen Rin Tin Tin movies and remember thinking, this dog is fantastic! As a kid, I watched the 1950s TV show The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Now I can get to know all about him. Plus, I’m a sucker for animal tales. Remember Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World? Yep, couldn’t put it down.

A review in The Christian Science Monitor that I clipped calls Orlean’s book “an eloquent, powerful inquiry into ‘how we create heroes and what we want from them’ and about what endures in our culture.” Here’s the link to the review: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/0927/Rin-Tin-Tin-The-Life-and-the-Legend

The other new book is What It Is Like to Go to War, in which Vietnam War vet Karl Marlantes wrestles with the idea of killing and urges his fellow veterans to talk openly about their experiences as a way to heal. Non-veterans like me can read this work and appreciate the impact of combat on a person’s soul.

Again, what I know about this book comes from the Monitor, and you can read the review at http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/0926/What-It-Is-Like-to-Go-to-War.