Serving America 2019

SERVING AMERICA

“America without her soldiers would be like God without His angels.”

— Claudia Pemberton

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The history of Memorial Day Every Memorial Day, Americans across the country recall deceased family members who served in the military by placing flowers on their graves. The origins of the May holiday go back some 150 years.

By most accounts, the practice of honoring the war dead first arose in the South in the last days of the Civil War. Because of the availability of flowers, ceremonies honoring the dead were held in spring but were not restricted to any particular date.

The establishment of an official day of commemoration of the war dead was the handiwork of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an influential organization of Union veterans which at its height had nearly half a million members. The main force behind the Memorial Day campaign was John Alexander Logan (1826-1886), a former Union general and commander-in-chief of the GAR. General Logan’s official proclamation read as follows: The 30th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the last rebellion and whose bodies now lie in almost every city village and hamlet churchyard in the land.

With the help of the GAR’s extensive network of state and local affiliates, Decoration Day, as it was first called, quickly entered the constellation of national holidays, along with the 4th of July and Washington’s birthday.

Because newspapers regularly covered Decoration Day activities, they represent a key source of information on the holiday as it evolved. A valuable aid to researchers interested in this and other historical

Bulletin file photo

A member of Boy Scout Troop 423 places a flag at the grave of William Allen, a Union Civil War veteran buried at East Union Cemetery in Manteca. Scouts helped place flags at the gravesites of all veterans buried in the cemetery

topics is Chronicling America, an online resource consisting of more than 2,100 American newspapers, dating from 1789 to 1924. Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and maintained by the Library of Congress, Chronicling America is freely

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available to the public. Searching the phrases “Decoration Day” or “Memorial Day” yields thousands of hits--testifying to the wide popularity of the holiday in the aftermath of the Civil War. To narrow your focus, you can also search SEE MEMORIAL, PAGE XX

ON THE COVER Vietnam War veteran Michael Carroll, who served in Vietnam, reflects on comrades that did not return including his best friend Brock Elliott during previous Memorial Day ceremonies.

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Serving America

Saturday, May 25, 2019

WWII plane rescued from boneyard to join D-Day anniversary

Pilot Tom Travis sits in the cockpit of the World War II troop carrier That’s All, Brother during a stop in Birmingham, Ala. The C-47 aircraft, which led the main Allied invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, is returning to the continent to participate in events marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day in June

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Filled with paratroopers, a U.S. warplane lumbered down an English runway in 1944 to spearhead the World War II D-Day invasion with a message for Adolf Hitler painted in bright yellow across its nose: “That’s All, Brother.”

Seventy-five years later, in a confluence of history and luck, that plane is again bound for the French coast for what could be the last great commemoration of the Allied battle to include D-Day veterans, many of whom are now in their 90s.

Rescued from an aviation boneyard in Wisconsin after Air Force historians in Alabama realized its significance, the restored C-47 troop carrier that served as a lead aircraft of the main invasion force will join other vintage planes at 75th anniversary ceremonies in June.

After flying over the Statue of Liberty on May 18, the plane embarked for Europe with other vintage aircraft along the same route through Canada, Greenland and Iceland that U.S. aircraft traveled during the war. There, it and other flying military transports are expected to drop paratroop re-enactors along the French coast at Normandy.

“It’s going to be historic, emotional,” said pilot Tom Travis, who will fly That’s All, Brother to Europe for the event. “It’ll be the last big gathering.”

Air Force historian Matt Scales said there’s no question that the twin-engine plane is the same one that led the main D-Day invasion.

It’s now operated today by the Texas-based Commemorative Air Force, which preserves

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military aircraft.

“There’s not a doubt in my mind. We have three separate documents that prove it,” said Scales, who found the aircraft with help of a colleague.

Scales tracked it down a few years ago while researching the late Lt. Col. John Donalson of Birmingham, who was credited with piloting the lead aircraft that dropped the main group of paratroopers along the French coast in preparation for the assault on June 6, 1944.

The night before infantry squads hit the beaches, Donalson’s aircraft and about 80 others were watched by news crews and military brass, including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as they took off, according to an official history by the 438th Troop Carrier Group. That’s All, Brother was at the tip of about 900 planes that made the flight across the English Channel to drop some 13,000 paratroopers in all.

Donalson’s plane was in the lead partly because it was equipped with an early form of radar that homed in on electronic beacons set up on the French coast by a small group of paratroopers in “pathfinder” aircraft, Scales said. Some mountings of that electronic system remain on the C-47’s fuselage.

Scales found wartime information about Donalson’s That’s All, Brother aircraft and matched records from both the military and the Federal Aviation Administration to determine the plane, manufactured by Douglas Aircraft Co. in 1944, still existed.

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PLANES

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The aircraft was sold on the civilian market in 1945 and had changed hands several times before Scales found it. At one point, it was painted in a camouflage scheme similar to C-47s that flew during the Vietnam War. “It had never crashed, it had never been damaged,” Scales said. “All the dozen owners who had it between the end of the war and when I found it had taken pretty good care of it.”

The aircraft was tracked down using identification numbers to a company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and purchased by the Commemorative Air Force in 2015 following a fundraiser that brought in some $250,000, Scales said. It was badly corroded and partially disassembled, but all the main parts were there.

With rebuilt piston engines, modern navigation and radio equipment and a fresh coat of paint, the reborn That’s All, Brother made its inaugural flight in February 2018. A crew now travels with it, offering flights to veterans and others.

The austere interior is lined with long metal benches for seats and the airframe is exposed for all to see. There’s no insulation, so the engines’ roar makes communication difficult when the props are spinning. A cable used to deploy paratroopers’ chutes runs along the top of the cabin.

Donalson, who retired with the rank of major general, died in 1987. But during a recent stop in Birmingham, two of his grandchildren were among those who climbed aboard the resurrected aircraft. Granddaughter Denise Harris sat in one of the seats occupied by a paratrooper for the ride to France.

Harris struggled with the thought of being inside the same airplane her grandfather flew for the invasion in 1944.

“It’s unbelievable to think that all those men were in that plane also, and to hear the stories, and to know some of the people that came back,” she said.

Chronicling America by newspaper title and date, as well as by city, county, or state, thus revealing how the holiday was celebrated over time and in different parts of the country. What’s more, the Library of Congress has assembled a resource page containing links to a number of newspaper accounts of Memorial/ Decoration Day, along with helpful tips for searching the database.

A good place to begin the search is the long article on the history of Decoration/Memorial Day that appeared in the May 30, 1909 edition of the Omaha Sunday Bee. This account and others underscore the key role of the GAR in staging Decoration Day events. In the early years, Decoration Day ceremonies focused exclusively on the sacrifices of Northern soldiers and sailors and underscored the righteousness of the Union’s cause. Activities were sometimes spread over several days and often included addresses by military veterans to school children, public orations, church services, and musical performances. They culminated on May 30 with a formal procession of Union veterans, dignitaries, and members of the public to the local cemetery, where participants reverently placed flowers on the graves of the war dead. The impressive scale of many of these celebrations is evident in a 1873 report from the New York Tribune, which describes the massive procession of veterans and civic groups through New York City. The combination of stirring patriotic rhetoric and poignant memories of losses of loved ones that were still fresh enhanced the holiday’s popularity and encouraged its spread.

Even in smaller towns, Decoration Day became an occasion for demonstrations

FROM PAGE 4

FROM PAGE 3

of civic unity and engagement. A rare note of discord was sounded on May 30, 1870, when according to the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, a group of African American marchers unceremoniously dropped out of the Decoration Day procession in that West Virginia community after being ordered to take a position “at the rear of a string of carriages, buggies, and horsemen.”

Given its association with the triumph of the Union, it is no surprise that most people in the South ignored the new holiday, holding their own memorials for the Confederate war dead at different times of the year. However, there were signs of change. A national survey of Decoration Day events that appeared in a North Dakota newspaper in 1884 noted that in Wheeling, West Virginia, both Union and Confederate veterans took part in the commemoration that year (although each group held its own separate ceremony). The same article noted that in nearby Maryland, another border state, former adversaries actually came together on May 30 for a joint celebration.

With the inevitable passing of the Civil War generation, other aspects of the holiday began to change. In 1909, the Omaha Sunday Bee reported, for example, that many of that city’s Decoration Day ceremonies had been moved indoors, “because of the advanced years of the old veterans who cannot stand the fatigue of the parade or the prolonged exercises at the parks.” Moreover, the general cessation of business activities on May 30 caused Decoration Day to take on the features of a general holiday.

Newspaper reports from the 1890s, for instance, underscore the popularity of recreational activities on that day, such as bicycle races in Pittsburgh and public dances in Akron. Furthermore, with the onset of spring citizens used the oppor-

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tunity to participate in outdoor activities. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer commented in 1899 that Decoration Day had become an occasion for “picnics, outings, and other amusements,” despite the best efforts of what it called the “Grand Army boys” to uphold its original purpose.

As memories of the Civil War began to fade, so too did the sharp regional divisions that helped to inspire the formation of the holiday. The great outpouring of patriotic sentiment following the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 did much to overcome sectional animosities. In 1902, a small Louisiana newspaper published a report of Decoration Day activities held across the United States. That year, President Theodore Roosevelt presided over the festivities in Gettysburg, paying homage to the men from the North and South alike who fought and died in the great battle 39 years earlier. The same newspaper reported that citizens in Chicago honored their former adversaries by decorating the graves of Confederates who died in a prisoner-of-war camp.

With the mass mobilization accompanying America’s entry into the World War I, Decoration Day shed once and for all its distinct association with the Civil War. Now celebrated in every part of the country, the holiday honors the contributions of all veterans, past and present. Of course, the venerable custom of “decorating” graves persists to this day, although the name of the holiday has been changed. The term “Memorial Day” had been in use as early as the 1880s and became increasingly popular after the Second World War. In 1967, an act of Congress made the new name official. A final break with the old tradition of Decoration Day followed a few years later, when Memorial Day was moved from May 30 to the last Monday in May.

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had to offer was smiling broadly with a tear streaming down his left cheek. Adults and children alike were unashamedly teary-eyes as the two men embraced.

“We became brothers in Vietnam,” Davis added, as he truth — and what makes a man — is often strong applause continued to provide the music for the found in the most horrific situations. emotion-choked moment.

Sammy Davis understands that. And so do It didn’t matter that one was white and the other countless other men and women who have black. All that mattered was the fact they were both served under this country’s flag defending the fraghuman beings caught in the most trying of circumile concepts encompassed in two Recliners! stances. words that most Americans take for Recliners!

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Nor did he worry about Wall ceremonies at Manteca High.

33Colors Colors choose the fact he couldn’t swimto or that heavy incoming fire As 5,000 teary-eyed people to choose DENNIS threatened to end his life at any second. watched, Davis dressed in his Army WYATT David helped fire rounds back at the enemy located best embraced Gwyndell Holloway Editor some 25 meters away when mortars hit American who was wearing his old Army BACK SUPPORTER positions and gravely injured hisENCASED comrades. fatigues. Applause drowned out BACKartillery SUPPORTER FOAM PLUSH SETS FOAM ENCASED PLUSH MATTRESS SETS PLUSH OR FIRM Between valiant efforts to keep the enemy from what wordsMATTRESS the two were exchangPLUSH OR FIRM advancing, Davis grabbed an air mattress and struck ing. The two hadn’t seen each other for 26 years.

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Serving America

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WYATT FROM PAGE 6

count. What matters are the things that unite us. They both probably knew that deep down before being sent to Vietnam as 19 year-olds.

But it took the horror of war to drive the point home.

Days later in a military hospital, Holloway had the chance to return the favor. Davis’ body temperature was at 106 degrees. His blood was curdling. The Army hospital was low on blood. The doctors were about to give up on Davis and were going to wheel him into a corridor for what they thought was an inevitable fate.

But Holloway would hear nothing of it.

He demanded that the doctors give Davis a direct transfusion from his veins. As the fever threatened to tighten its grip on Davis, the precious gift of life flowed from Holloway to the former Manteca resident.

They never saw each other again until 26 years later when another incredible man retired Manteca High teacher and fellow veteran Harry Nagy — brought them together

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for that inspiring spring afternoon on the same field where Davis once played football for the Buffaloes.

Davis has dedicated his life to one clear and poignant message — the freedoms we cherish, yet take for granted, in this land exist only because of the men and women who have been willing to spill their blood for them over the past 240 years.

Freedom isn’t something you get for free, nor is it automatic, and it certainly isn’t a forever thing unless someone is willing to stand up against the forces that threatened to take it away from not just us but all of America’s brothers and sisters around the globe.

The forces of evil may ebb but they never vanish.

All it takes is for good men to stand idly by for evil to extinguish the flickering flames of liberty and freedom.

Those two concepts are an aberration in the history of civilization.

Evil, left unchecked, will snuff out those flames.

When the final tally is taken, all that really matters is that we’re in this together.

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Saturday, May 25, 2019

Things could be worse EDITOR’S NOTE: The following editorial by George Murphy Jr. first appeared in his column, “Batting the Breeze,” in the Dec. 28, 1950 issue of the Manteca Bulletin. Murphy, who has since passed away, was publisher of the Bulletin at the time. He also was a serving on board a ship when Pearl Harbor was attacked 76 years ago on Dec. 7, 1941.

W

e would like to apologize to all servicemen — it seems we have been developing a case of civilianitis.

And that means a lot of crying about life on the home front, in case you

GEORGE MURPHY JR. Pearl Harbor survivor

“And you’re worried about the price of eggs. Quit worrying. Forget it. You never had it so good.”— the late George Murphy Jr. didn’t know what civilianitis means.

We were lying in bed the other night worrying about this and that — then we heard our conscience open fire. Our conscience made a little speech like this: You’re worried, aren’t you, Murph?

You’ve got big problems. Things look tough next year. No new cars, maybe; so perhaps there’s no automobile advertising. And that’s a good chunk of your revenue, isn’t it. And you’ve got big payments at the bank to meet, and maybe you can’t get enough newsprint to put out enough pages to make the payments. Things are sure rough.

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Well just remember one thing. Those guys are just about the same as they were the last time. And they’re having the same horrible things happen to them, and you don’t give a hoot because you’re busy worrying about life on the home front.

Think back a few years, Murph. Yeah, those guys are just the same. Remember Sam Neville? He was the first man you saw die at Pearl Harbor. You remember Sam, he was that guy in C Division you always thought looked awfully old to be only a third class radioman. Remember how you were standing on the second deck and watched Sam run down that ladder? He slipped, didn’t he, and was wedged between the ladder steps flat on his back. And the guys at Pearl Harbor were panicky, weren’t they? And they came down that ladder behind Sam, and one by one they stepped in his face. And you watched them crushed by his own shipmates.

That was panic, Murph, and don’t you think for a minute that there wasn’t plenty of panic when the Chinese broke through in Korea. And there was some nice old guy like Sam Neville there, too, and don’t forget it.

Remember Terlizzi? Always good for a laugh — the ship’s comedian. But he wasn’t laughing the last time you saw him, was he? Remember when that tor-

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But how about the boys in Korea, Murph? What have they got to lose? Not much. They don’t own anything. No, they haven’t much to lose — just their lives.

Yeah, you sure got it rough. Worried about the Roe Bowl and whether Cal can win one for a change. That’s a big problem, Murph. How many people in the Rose Bowl? About a hundred thousand, maybe? That’s about one person in each 1,500 in this great nation. Pretty small percentage, isn’t it?

Ever stop to think that about one in each 1,500 is saving your comfortable neck? That’s right. There are only about 100,000 of our men in Korea. And how many men are 42,000? Why, that’s no crowd at all. But that’s a lot of men to stop bullets in a little place like Korea.

And that’s how many casualties we’ve had over there so far.

It might be a tough year all right. Just as you’re thinking — no gasoline, shoe shortage, high prices for eggs, coffee and so on. You don’t think there’s much to look forward to, do you, Murph?

The trouble with you is, you forget too easily. You forget that this war is just as tough as the last one — or maybe tougher. But you don’t think it’s so bad because you’re not in it. What does a casualty list mean to you? Nothing but a bunch of figures. Just a bunch of guys you don’t know and never heard of before.

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Saturday, May 25, 2019

MURPHY FROM PAGE 8

pedo plane hit and its gas tank blew up?

You looked up quick to secondary aft when you felt the heat. He was swaying back and forth on the gun platform, his mouth working like he as trying to talk. He still had his phones on, didn’t he? But no clothes. They were burned off and his flesh hung from his body in strips. He was dead when you got up there, wasn’t he?

Somewhere in Korea is a guy just like Terlizzi. Maybe he burned up in tank, a jeep, or an airplane. It doesn’t matter where or how — but he got burned up.

Maybe he was just number 31,467 on some casualty list but to some people he was a nice guy with a sense of humor and had a name like Terlizzi.

And Boats Powell. You remember him. A quiet guy with a crooked smile, but one of the best little gunners in the business. That torpedo plane got him,

9

too, didn’t it Murph? And you took a chipping iron and scraped him away from his 20-millimeter gun where his flesh had fused with the metal. A lot of guys in Korea have been scraped up by their buddies, and you might remember that once in awhile.

And what about Smooge Scroeder?

Used to be a wrestler in a carnival and just as tough as they come. But he was always good fort a laugh when the going got rough, wasn’t he? Take that night when you guys on the fantail heard your first big shell scream over your heads.

Smooge shouted: “I’m a lover, nit a fighter”, and your nerves felt better after a good laugh at his joke. And when that shell hit, Murph, you both went down together. Remember? Only Schroeder didn’t get up. He was cut in two by a big chunk of hot metal. And you thought you were a dead pigeon because you didn’t know that most of the blood and bits of flesh on you were Schroeder’s and not yours.

SEE MURPHY, PAGE 16

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Serving America

Saturday, May 25, 2019

A separate war: USA’s pioneering black Marines endured, prevailed GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — It was the dress blue uniforms that drew John Thompson to join the U.S. Marines, where black men were not welcome, so he could defend a country that denied him the rights he wanted to fight for.

“I said, ‘Wow, that’s a real pretty uniform,’” recalls Thompson, now 94.

It took President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 executive order banning discrimination in government and defense industry employment because of “race, creed, color, or national origin” to give the teenage son of black South Carolina sharecroppers a chance to serve as a Marine during World War II. Just not alongside whites.

The first African Americans admitted to the Marine Corps after Roosevelt’s order were put in segregated units, starting with their training. At a swampy, buginfested camp called Montford Point, adjacent to but separate from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, they endured indignities — but they also paved the way for others who came after.

Thompson, who enlisted in 1943, was among them.

The Marines were the only military branch for him, after he saw their uniforms on newsreels at the black theater where he sold popcorn and after two of his friends joined the Corps themselves.

“The Marine Corps is an elite group. I wanted to belong to an elite group. That was my feeling,” said Thompson, who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Thompson, now a retired teacher, is one of an estimated 400 still living from among the approximately 20,000 men who trained at Montford Point.

In Jim Crow-era Kannapolis, North Carolina, where Thompson was raised, black men were mostly relegated to low-paying jobs at a textile mill and black women Former Montford Point Marine John Thompson talks about his training during an interview at his home in Greensboro, weren’t hired at all, he recalled. Blacks had to go to a N.C. It was the dress blue uniforms that drew Thompson to join the U.S. Marines, where black men were not welcome, so he could defend a country that denied him the rights he wanted to fight for.

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As his friends were drafted, one by one, Thompson told his father he wanted to join the service.

“There had been only two blacks in town to go to the Marine Corps, and that had been within the last five or six months before I first started talking to my dad about it,” he recalled.

But racial segregation ruled out Marine training for black recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, where whites were trained.

“During that time, they didn’t want blacks to belong to elite groups,” Thompson said. “I wanted to belong to an elite group because, at the time, I didn’t think there was a teenager anywhere in the nation any more physically fit than I was.”

Thompson and the other black would-be Marines were sent to Montford Point. Separated from Lejeune by railroad tracks that they weren’t allowed to cross, Thompson said it was like the racial separation back at home.

“Mind you, I was in a segregated society,” Thompson said. “I knew nothing else. It was a way of life.”

The new recruits’ fatigues weren’t folded and didn’t fit, Thompson said. When their first day’s training was done, they had no real barracks either.

“We had huts to live in. The walls were one board thick, and they looked as if you could ram your fist through a wall,” Thompson said. “In the middle of the hut was one oil stove. We had to supply that stove with buckets to keep that stove going.”

When their training began, the black recruits served entirely under the command of white men.

“We had white sergeants ... Most of them were Southerners with heavy accents. We only had two or three sergeants from the North,” Thompson said. “It was because they

Saturday, May 25, 2019 wanted to treat us less than any white person who had ever been in the Marine Corps.”

Thompson said the sergeants didn’t use outright racial epithets, but they would often refer to the black recruits as “you people,” which he considered “subtle expressions” of racism.

Yet in a training course notorious for weeding out all but the strongest, Thompson endured their rough tutelage and even thrived.

“This training lasted for two months,” he said. “I was made a squad leader. I never did have to do any KP while I was in the service because I was a squad leader and squad leaders didn’t go to the kitchen.”

He said he and his comrades helped one another stay strong in the face of challenges.

When off duty, they would compete against each other on the drill field to see who was fastest.

“I always tried to outdo the other guys,” Thompson said.

But even a Marine uniform won a black man no respect.

“Everything was done separately. At the bus station, we would get in line to get on the bus. We had to go all the way to the back of the bus,” he said. “We never could sit up front unless the bus was completely full of black people.”

The black Marines’ duties in World War II were confined mainly to dispensing ammunition and retrieving the wounded from the front lines. Thompson didn’t see combat, but others did.

Historians say the government initially planned to discharge the black Marines after World War II. But in 1948, President Harry Truman issued an order fully desegregating the U.S. armed forces. Today the Marine Corps is about 11 percent black — still low among the services, but a seismic shift ahead of the World War II-era.

Montford Point Camp was decommissioned on Sept. 9, 1949. On April 19, 1974, it was renamed Camp Johnson in honor of the late Sgt. Maj. Gilbert H. “Hashmark”

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Johnson — a Marine legend and one of the first black men who eventually were trained as Marine drill instructors. Today it’s the only Marine Corps installation named in honor of an African American. A memorial honoring the pioneering Montford Point Marines was dedicated there in 2016.

In 2011, then-President Barack Obama

signed a law awarding all Montford Point Marines the Congressional Gold Medal.

Some of those medals were awarded posthumously.

“We went through a lot and we realized we went through a lot,” Thompson said. “This is just a small token of what we went through.”

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Serving America

Saturday, May 25, 2019

One by one, D-Day memories are fading as war’s witnesses pass away PARIS (AP) — One more funeral, one less witness to the world’s worst war.

Bernard Dargols lived almost long enough to join the celebrations next month marking 75 years since the D-Day, 75 years since he waded onto Omaha Beach as an American soldier to help liberate France from the Nazis who persecuted his Jewish family.

Just shy of his 99th birthday, Dargols died last week. To the strains of his beloved American jazz, he was laid to rest Thursday at France’s most famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise.

An ever-smaller number of veterans will stand on Normandy’s shores on June 6 for D-Day’s 75th anniversary. Many will salute fallen comrades from their wheelchairs. As each year passes, more firsthand history is lost.

Four weeks from now, U.S. President Donald Trump and other world leaders will pay homage to the more than 2 million American, British, Canadian and other Allied forces involved in the D-Day operation on June 6, 1944, and the ensuing battle for Normandy that helped pave the way for Hitler’s defeat.

Dargols outlived most of them, and knew the importance of sustaining their memory.

“I’m convinced that we have to talk about the war to children, so that they understand how much they need to preserve the peace,” he wrote in a 2012 memoir.

Until the end, Dargols battled complacency, intolerance and Holocaust deniers who claim that D-Day was “just a movie.”

In recent years, “seeing any type of violence, of anti-Semitism and racism, either in France in Europe or in the U.S.” really upset him, grandSEE D-DAY, PAGE A11

Bernard Dargois is shown in left photos at Omaha Beach and shortly before his death and on the roiht as an American GI.

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Saturday, May 25, 2019

D-DAY

FROM PAGE A12 daughter Caroline Jolivet said.

Normandy schoolteachers, veterans’ families and military memorials are laboring against time to record survivors’ stories for posterity.

In history’s biggest amphibious invasion, on that fateful June 6, some 160,000 Allied forces came ashore to launch Operation Overlord to wrest Normandy from Nazi control.

More than 4,000 Allied forces were killed on that day alone. Nearly half a million people were killed on both sides by the time the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944.

It’s unclear exactly how many D-Day veterans are alive today. The survivors are now in their 90s or 100s.

Of the 73,000 Americans who took part, just 30 are currently scheduled to come to France for this year’s anniversary. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that about 348 American World War II veterans die every day . All but three of the 177 French forces involved in D-Day are gone.

Every day, the names of the departed accumulate, tweeted by veterans groups, published in local newspapers.

Dargols might have made it to Normandy this year. It meant a lot to him.

His story is both unusual and emblematic: Born in France, he left Paris in 1938 for New York to learn his father’s sewing machine trade. He watched from afar, sickened, as the Nazis occupied his homeland. His Jewish relatives were sent to camps, or fled in fear.

Determined to fight back but skeptical of French General Charles de Gaulle’s resistance force, he joined the U.S. Army instead.

With the 2nd Infantry Division, Dargols sailed from Britain on June 5 and only made it to Normandy on June 8, after three interminable days on choppy seas. The road he took inland from Omaha Beach now carries his name.

The battle to wrest Normandy from the Nazis took longer than the Allies thought, but for Dargols the prize at the end was invaluable. When he made it to Paris, he went to his childhood apartment and found his mother — unexpectedly alive.

For four decades, he didn’t talk much about the war. But as more and more survivors died, and at his granddaughter’s urging, he realized the importance of speaking out and sharing his stories with schools and journalists.

Friends and family remembered him Thursday as shy but courageous, a lover of oysters and pastrami sandwiches, known for his mischievous smile.

Jolivet, his granddaughter, told the AP of his yearning for leaders who “bring people together, instead of divide them.”

Dargols would have had a clear message for the D-Day anniversary, she said: “Never take democracy for granted. Dictatorship is always a bad solution. Violence is always a bad solution. Keep democracy alive. Fight for democracy, for freedom, for peace.”

The cultural director at Normandy’s World War II memorial in Caen, Isabelle Bournier, frets about this fading message, as she watches schoolchildren cycle through her museum every day.

“The parents and grandparents of 13-yearolds today didn’t experience the war, so the family stories, the family history — where helmets are brought out, where we spoke about what it was like — has been lost,” she said.

“They don’t know the names of the landing beaches,” she said. “Pupils spend less time studying World War II than they did 30 years ago, and so the role of D-Day has been reduced.”

Dargols himself worried about the day when all the veterans will be gone.

“It could start again,” he wrote in his memoir. “We must be vigilant, at all times.” ___ John Leicester and Jeffrey Schaeffer contributed.

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Serving America

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Virginia town remembers the high price America paid on D-Day BEDFORD, Va. (AP) — Marguerite Cottrell remembers the summer day 75 years ago when a Western Union telegram was delivered to her family farm as her mother was hanging clothes on the line to dry.

Her mother read it, sat down and wept.

Cottrell’s older brother, John Reynolds, had been killed in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on the coast of France.

“I knew something bad had happened,” said Cottrell, who was 4. She remembers her mother telling her: “Well, little Jack has gone to heaven. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

All over the little town of Bedford, Virginia, nestled next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, similar telegrams were delivered that summer — nine of them on one day — with the same opening line expressing the secretary of war’s “deep regret” that a loved one was killed or missing.

Twenty men from Bedford or the surrounding area were killed on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Nineteen fell while trying to take Omaha Beach as members of Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment. The 20th man was in a different company.

The decisive World War II invasion took a horrific toll on Bedford, a town of about 4,000 at the time. Its D-Day losses were among the steepest, proportionally, of any community in America.

The dead were country boys who came of age during the Depression and joined SEE VIRGINIA, PAGE A11

Marguerite Cottrell, sister of John Reynolds, speaks during an interview at a recently opened tribute center for the Bedford Boys in Bedford, Va. Reynolds, had been killed in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on the coast of France. The 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy has a solemn significance for the small town of Bedford, who lost 20 local men.

To those in uniform serving today and to those who have served in the past, we honor you Today and Every day.

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VIRGINIA FROM PAGE A14

the National Guard before the war for extra income and uniforms that local girls thought looked sharp, according to author Alex Kershaw’s 2003 best-seller “The Bedford Boys.”

Frank Draper and Elmere Wright were local baseball standouts. Wallace Carter worked at the town’s pool hall. Earl Parker left behind a young bride and a daughter he never got to meet. Twins Ray and Roy Stevens hoped to run a farm after the war, but only Roy survived.

Their time in combat was short. Among the first waves in the assault on Omaha Beach, Bedford’s soldiers were wiped out

by Nazi machine guns and mortars within minutes after their landing craft hit the sand.

“They were waiting for us, the minute the ramp went down, they opened up,” said Elisha Ray Nance, one of the few Bedford Boys who survived that deadly beach landing, in comments recorded in “Bedford Goes to War,” a book by local historian James Morrison.

In 1996, Congress designated a plot of land next to Bedford as the site of the National D-Day Memorial, a monument to the more than 4,000 Allied troops who lost their lives in the battle.

“When people come here, it is important to see the town as the monument itself,” President George W. Bush said at a 2001 ceremony dedicating the memorial. “This is the place they left behind.”

Amateur historian Ken Parker and his wife, Linda, have turned the town’s old pharmacy into a coffee shop and tribute center to the Bedford Boys. Green’s Drug Store was where Bedford Boys had hung out as high schoolers and their wives and girlfriends exchanged gossip and news during the war.

Saturday, May 25, 2019 The center is now filled with war-era uniforms, pictures and other items, including the teletype machine that Parker says printed out the notices when the boys were killed.

On a recent Monday, Bedford resident Maryellen Cunningham came in to take a look around. She said seeing the old teletype gave her chills.

“I can’t even imagine the operator that was getting one telegram after another after another,” she said.

The Parkers — who recently moved to Bedford from Oklahoma — said they get similar visits all the time from Bedford residents, who often want to place a warrelated family heirloom on display at the new tribute center.

Nance, the last surviving Bedford Boy, died in 2009. Only a few of the fallen soldiers’ siblings are still alive. But the Parkers said younger generations have held on to many of the boys’ letters and other keepsakes, handing them down through generations almost like sacred relics.

The couple said one of the Bedford Boys’ nephews recently found a stash of unopened letters his grandmother had sent to her son before she knew he had been killed on D-Day. “They just bottled this up for so long,” Linda Parker said. “They can finally open that box and let the stuff out.”

Cottrell, who recently dropped in at Green’s Drug Store, said her mother used to open up an old trunk with her brother’s belongings on Sunday afternoons and read his letters. Cottrell said her mother blamed herself for letting Jack enlist and talked about him often to keep his memory alive.

“There’s so many people that have passed away, you know, that this would have meant so much to,” she said of the drugstore. “My mom would have loved coming here.”

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Serving America

Saturday, May 25, 2019

MURPHY FROM PAGE 9

That’s the night it first dawned on you that war is a bloody mess. You used to think people got killed with neat little bullet holes. They don’t, though, do they? They usually get smashed up and there have been over 45,000 smashed up already in Korea. And they claim this is just the start of the war.

And there are probably a few guys in Korea like Jack McBride. You remember Jack, don’t you Murph? You never liked him too well — a kind of a wise guy.

But when the chips were down he always came through, didn’t he? You’ve always wondered what made Jack do what he did the night the shell hit your gun. He was up in the director tub and lost both legs at the knees. But somehow he crawled out of the tub, dragged himself across the deck in front of you, crawled down the ladder into chief’s quarters, and backed into a corner where he died.

And when they carried you down to the

Dylan

chief’s quarters, the first thing you saw in the dim light was Jack. And you felt a little sick to your stomach, didn’t you?

Wonder how many guys in Korea are going to feel the same way — if they haven’t already.

And when they set your stretcher down on the table you didn’t feel very funny, did you? the doc cut your pants away and you could see the bones sticking through the flesh. You turned away and saw Sig Hanna on the table next to you. Yeah, Murph, it was Hanna, that little redheaded coxswain. He was half propped up against a stanchion and you could see his guts oozing through holes in his shirt.

Remember how he leaned over a little an said to you: How ya doing, Gunner, isn’t this a helluva a way to make a living?”

And in 20 minutes he was dead.

And Korea is full off guys — just good old American guys that can still crack a smile 20nminuts before they die.

And you’re worried about the price of eggs. Quit worrying. Forget it. You never had it so good.

Doug Heath Head Honcho

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The World War II mural that is part of the five mural salute to veterans in downtown Manteca at Yosemite Avenue and Main Street. Posing with the mural are the artist and some of the volunteers that made the mural possible.

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