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VOL.27, NO.5
Memories still sear after 70 years
Under the sea Pennsylvania-born Kaufman spent much of the war submerged under the ocean on a Navy submarine. After graduating from high school in 1936, he went on to the Naval Academy, graduating about a year and a half before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Because he was not supposed to get married less than two years after graduation, he wed his wife surreptitiously on Valentine’s Day in 1942, and was aboard a ship sailing
MAY 2015
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY BARBARA RUBEN
By Barbara Ruben May 8, 1945 dawned warm and drizzly in Washington, D.C. Unlike the day when cheering conga lines snaked past the White House three months later as victory was declared over Japan, the May day that become known as Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) retained a muted, business-asusual air in the nation’s capital. One bright spot was the re-lighting of the Capitol dome, which had been darkened after the bombing of Pearl Harbor more than three years earlier. Author Peter Hart described it in his book Washington at War this way: “A loveliness appeared on the night sky. The dome of the Capitol gleamed in a bath of light, and the light flowed upward over the gown of the goddess,” the Armed Freedom statue that stands on top of the dome. More than 4,000 miles away in Austria, Army nurse Bernadine “Brownie” Plasters was helping liberate the Mauthausen concentration camp. Robert Kaufman was in the Pacific, and in September would be aboard the USS Missouri witnessing the signing of the Japanese surrender. The Beacon interviewed these two Washington-area residents and several others about their remembrances of the war and its end. Seventy years later, they are all in their 90s. But each can instantaneously remember dates of shipping out and battles, even meals eaten on the battlefield. “I have retained details that go way, way back,” said Robert J. Berens, 93, of Springfield, Va., whose recent self-published book The Second Time Around devotes seven chapters to his war experiences. “Some people said you must have referred to notes. I said, ‘No I didn’t. I remember things so vividly.’”
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L E I S U R E & T R AV E L
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ARTS & STYLE
Robert Kaufman spent much of World War II on a submarine in the Pacific, and witnessed the signing of the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. On the eve of the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, Kaufman and other World War II veterans recalled their service in interviews with the Beacon.
for British waters two days later. Kaufman’s first foray into submarine school ended in disaster when he tried to do a simulation of escaping from a submarine in distress at the ocean floor. He was put in a pressure chamber, but his ears wouldn’t clear properly halfway through, and he was sent home — but not for long. Kaufman, who today is 95 and lives in the Vinson Hall Retirement Community for retired military in Arlington, Va., was called in for surgery on his nose that would allow him to work on a submarine. He was sent out on an old sub from the 1910s to Pearl Harbor and on into the Western Pacific. “Now things started to get interesting,” he quipped.
How interesting? As Kaufman puts it, one day they were “heavily worked over” by artillery from Japanese ships. They submerged, resurfacing at twilight to hear something loose on deck. “I can remember this so vividly,” he said, recalling that there was an unexploded 500 pound anti-submarine bomb — a depth charge — sitting on the deck. Fellow sailors gently rolled it onto a rubber boat, and they got away as fast as they could. “Had the seas been rougher and we had a bit more rolling, it would have exploded and I wouldn’t be here,” Kaufman said. By war’s end he had reluctantly taken on the role of flag lieutenant, a job he calls See VETERANS, page 54
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