"Answering Their Country's Call: Marylanders in World War II"

http://www.sunspot.net/features/bal-to.memory30nov30,0,4411611.column?col l=bal%2Dfeatures%2Dheadlines

Book collects vets' recollections: WWII veterans share stories with author Michael H. Rogers

Frederick N. Rasmussen

November 30, 2002

They are the surviving voices and faces from a terrible time and place. And they're fading fast.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,063 a day nationally.

During World War II, 288,000 Maryland men and women served their country, and of that number, 6,454 lost their lives defending freedom.

Michael H. Rogers, a 33-year-old writer who lives in Mount Washington, recalled the genesis of his first book, Answering Their Country's Call: Marylanders in World War II, recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

A 1987 Park School graduate who earned a bachelor's degree in English from Rutgers University in 1991, Rogers listened anxiously to his father's memories of World War II.

"He was a kid during World War II and always gets very sentimental whenever he reads about these guys," Rogers said. "Also, I've always been fascinated by living history."

On Election Day 2000, Rogers was standing in line waiting to vote when he turned around and saw an elderly gentleman wearing a baseball cap that said "I am a World War II veteran."

"He told me he had been at the Battle of the Bulge," Rogers said in a recent interview.

"'No one cares what we did back then,'" the man told Rogers. "'Everyone has forgotten.'"

Moved by the encounter, Rogers offered to take down the veteran's account of his experiences fighting with the 2nd Infantry Division at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.

He gave the veteran his telephone number and told him to call. He never did. Unable to forget the old soldier's comments, Rogers began to lay the framework for his book, determined to record the experiences of a cross-section of Maryland veterans who luckily survived World War II when so many didn't.

To find the veterans he so desperately wanted to interview, Rogers searched on the Internet and sought help from the Maryland Veterans Commission. He even walked up to men on the street who looked old enough to have fought in the war.

"Every day I cringed when I picked up the newspaper and read that another local World War II veteran had died," Rogers said. "Or when the phone rang bringing news of the death of a veteran that had become a close friend of mine."

Armed with a tape recorder, Rogers crossed the state for many months conducting four-hour interviews with the veterans in their homes.

Often, said Rogers, it was the first time since the end of the war that these combat-hardened survivors were able to open up and relate what happened to them in the greatest detail. Many were reluctant to discuss their experiences, Rogers said, but he would tell them that it was important for their families and future generations to know what the veterans had accomplished and at what price.

"I opened the interviews by telling the participants that this was their opportunity to tell the world about themselves, their generation, the war, and perhaps someone they knew who did not survive but whom they wished the world to remember," Rogers writes.

During his research, a number of common themes emerged.

"This generation gave no quarter in combat until they died. They feared being maimed more than death. And the real heroes were those who didn't get back home," Rogers said.

William S. Kirby of Annapolis, who fought with the 29th Division, told Rogers: "I had seen the collateral destruction of war, but nothing could have prepared me for my first personal encounter with war. It was indescribably horrible."

"Words cannot adequately describe the sight of shattered bodies, the sound of incoming shells, the noise of exploding mortar and artillery shells, the rattle of small arms, the 'pop' of bullets that came too close, the whine and zip of shrapnel, the roar, clank, and squeak of tanks, the hiss of high-velocity flat trajectory shells, the cries for medics, the smell of powder smoke and torn-up foliage, earth and bodies. And the fear, the overwhelming, belly-wrenching, almost paralyzing fear."

Former U.S. Sen. Daniel B. Brewster of Glyndon, who served with the 6th Marine Division and was decorated with the Bronze Star for valor during fighting on Okinawa, observed, "Unless a person lives through such horror, I don't think you can understand what it is like to experience a trauma of seeing men you know killed and sometimes blown into little pieces."

Joseph W. Purnell, a school bus driver from Berlin, served with the Army's 366th Regiment, the first and last all-black outfit, in the Italian campaign.

Recovering from wounds, a nearby white soldier confessed to Purnell, "I was taught by my parents a Negro was no good. When I get home, I am going to change my ways."

"I said, 'Roy, you know what? Those Germans don't care if you're white or black. Those 88 shells kill no matter what color you are.'"

Dorothy E. Steinbis Davis of Rockville, a registered nurse who served with the 57th Field Hospital and survived the Battle of the Bulge, recalled the first question asked by a wounded soldier entering a field hospital: "How's my buddy?"

The semiconscious patients called the nurses by the names of their mothers, wives or girlfriends, she said.

"When a patient was struggling to hang on and death seemed close, we did try to be there and hold their hand during their last moments. A lot of times we had done everything we could and had to accept the situation. We had to keep moving from one patient to another," she told Rogers.

Of the 31 veterans whose recollections are in the book, three have since died.

The emotional impact of Rogers' book is best summed up by Lt. Roland G. Gittelsohn, 5th Marine Division chaplain, at the dedication of the division cemetery on Iwo Jima in 1945.

"To swear by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will that their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their job well. They have paid the ghastly price of freedom."

[ 21. December 2002, 09:14 PM: Message edited by: Crapgame ]