Life Lessons Found in the Memories of War

“Our Great War: Memoirs of World War II from the Wake Robin community, Shelburne, Vermont”

A local review of book by Vermont paper at:
http://www.7dvt.com/2009talking-bout-their-generation

Excerpts:

“Before long, we school children were doing our part by giving our pennies to the Red Cross and collecting and folding tin foil wrappings from cigarettes, chocolate, and food products to be recycled for the war effort.  Sometimes, instead of buying ice cream or candy, we saved our nickels to buy a 25-cent stamp at school to put in a booklet.  When the booklet was finally filled, we proudly exchanged it for a much prized $5 War Savings Certificate.  In school assemblies we often sang “There’ll Always Be an England.” I don’t remember anyone complain about the rationing during the war years.

At the beginning of fourth grade, Farina Schwartzman joined our class. Her family had made their way to Quebec from Romania.  Farina was unlike anyone I had ever met and we quickly became friends.  Her grandmother, an invalid, could not be left alone. On days that both of Farina’s parents had to be at work, either she or her older sister would stay home from school to be with their grandmother.  No other child I knew did this.  Another refugee in our class, Ishobel Chisolm from Britain, had been sent with her siblings to spend the war years with cousins in Quebec.  By sixth grade I was earning ten cents to accompany another refugee, Susan, to and from kindergarden.  She had been sent to Canada with her younger brother and their nanny.”

Not a Nurse
Elizabeth Middleton Brown

I wasn’t a nurse, but anyone seeing us in our smart grey uniforms could guess we were with some special service during World War II.  I was serving as an Occupational Therapist with the American Red Cross and stationed at Staten Island Area Hospital in New York, New York.  It wasn’t long before I discovered that the uniform covered not only my ignorance but also my fears about what I had gotten into.  Where were the nurses?  Inside the office, I learned.  Yes, we were expected to do all that was necessary short of actual nursing. 

Wounded soldiers came regularly to be treated.  They were all bed patients.  I was assigned to an Amputee Ward.  Suddenly occupational therapy became real to me.  Never mind looking for an occasion to play gin rummy; what does this guy want?  He wants a urinal.  My job at this moment is to find a nurse.  Sometimes we saw a movie, when again my training my desert me.  I might pull a cart alongside a patient’s bed and we’d go together to see “It happened One Night.”

On New Year’s Eve I went all out, demanding extra sodas from the canteen, more hats blowers and whistles.  I ran about the corridors whooping it up in a hula skirt, yes, it relieved boredom, the men sang, they laughed, finally telling Army jokes that dispersed the shadows creeping along the gray cement block walls that they had come home to. 

The Fighting First
David Ackerman
U.S. Army

When we replacement troops arrived in the 18th Regiment, our commander informed us that “few of us would make it back home!”  At that point I began to regard myself as a fatalist, a belief that was strengthened by subsequent battle experience.  The city of Aachen, a cultural and historic landmark, was also an armament and coal producing center and a key point on the Siegfried Line opposing the Maginot Line of the French.  Aachen, considered by the Germans as a symbol of heroic resistance (as had been Stalingrad for the Russians), was taken by American forces after fierce fighting involving the First Division in the late October, 1944.  I arrived as a replacement in Company 1 shortly thereafter.  In Aachen, we performed mainly guard duty among the captured bunkers of the Siegfried Line, which were in the hands of the Allied Forces. 

From the point on, however, I led the life of a real foot soldier, riding in trucks and tanks when available but mostly walking everywhere the battlefront took us.  The 1st Division moved into the Hurtgen Forest, a treacherous, muddy, and snow-laden woods.  Fighting was heavy and the German artillery and mortar deadly.  This was my first sighting of dead German soldiers.  The 18th Infantry Regiment was engaged in house-to-house fighting n Heistern.  When we were not marching, our lives were spent mainly in foxholes in the forest.  I recall being served a hot turkey dinner in a foxhole on Thanksgiving Day, 1944.
For a copy of the book, write to:

Wake Robin Resident’s Association
Attn: Our Great War
200 Wake Robin Drive
Shelburne, VT 05482

ISBN: 978—1-886064-34-8