(JUNE 06, 2021) Last surviving Allied soldier involved in the liberation of Auschwitz dies at 98: Red Army soldier David Dushman flattened the fence around the concentration camp with his tank in 1945.
The Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria said on Sunday that Dushman had died at a Munich hospital on Saturday.
As a young Red Army soldier, Dushman flattened the forbidding fence around the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland with his tank on January 27, 1945.
After the war, he helped train the Soviet Union's women's national fencing team and survived the attack on the Munich Olympics.
Later in life, Dushman visited schools to tell students about the war and the horrors of the Holocaust.
'Every witness to history who passes on is a loss, but saying farewell to David Dushman is particularly painful,' said Charlotte Knobloch, a former head of Germany's Central Council of Jews.
Dushman was right on the front lines when the National Socialists' machinery of murder was destroyed.'
Along with other heroes of Auschwitz, Dushman has saved many lives, she said.

(JUNE 09, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS - It’s with a heavy heart; we share the news that WWII Paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division and TGGF Ambassador Richard “Dick” Klein has died. He was 98.
When America entered World War II after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Klein chose to enlist and served in the elite 101st Airborne Division. He was part of the attack by paratroopers who landed in Normandy, France, the night before the main seaborne assault on the beaches began.
On a return battlefield program with The Greatest Generations Foundation, Klein described his participation in the D-Day invasion:
“I didn’t have time to feel nervous or apprehensive,” Klein said. “When you’re jumping, you have no time to think. The training helped prepare you.”
Like many paratroopers in the battle, he discovered that he hadn’t been dropped at the planned location.
“I jumped last from our plane, which had 22 or 23 people, in it,” Klein said.
“The plane was going about 200 mph and about 300 feet above the ground. When I landed, there was a church by me. I knew that wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”
But like many other paratroopers, Klein joined with other Americans on the ground and went on the offensive.
Klein found another American soldier and then located others. They held a bridge, keeping enemy reinforcements from being able to get to the beach.
Klein also fought in Operation Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne, where he was wounded in the leg by a German sniper shortly after killing Klein's best friend.
Klein’s wound was severe, and he spent considerable time in European and American hospitals. During his service from 1942 to 1945, he earned a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, France’s Legion of Honor, and numerous campaign ribbons.
After the war, Klein and his wife June met at a 1945 Ohio State-Michigan football game. The best man at their wedding was the late Jim Campbell, longtime general manager and president of the Detroit Tigers.

(JUNE 11, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS – It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II ambulance driver Mr. Thomas Grasser has died. He was 96.
Grasser was an 18-year-old kid who had just graduated from his Wisconsin high school in June 1943 when he was drafted into the Army. Trained as a medic and ambulance driver, he hit Omaha Beach in Normandy 14 days after the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion.
Grasser was born September 6, 1924, in Kenosha, WI. Following graduation, Grasser served in the US Army under Gen Patton’s Third Army where he experienced the Battle of the Bulge, Massacre at Malmady, and liberated the holocaust camps of Dachau & Buchenwald. He received the Bronze Star & French Legion of Honor Medal for his exemplary service. His additional military service after WWII included the Navy & National Guard.
After the war, Grasser came to New Mexico and married the “love of his life”, Maria Montoya. They raised an amazing family of four children, Linda, Pamela, Tom, and Valerie. Grasser was a devoted Catholic and attributed his safe passage during WWII to his faith and Guardian Angels.
Grasser would give anyone he met a blessed Guardian Angel medal to let people know that they were watched over by Guardian Angels and loved by God. There are thousands of people from all over the world who have received these medals from Thomas. Grasser lived each day with gratitude and never hesitated to share it with everyone he met.

(JUNE 11, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS --- An incredible, sparkling bright light has left us and is now shining in another dimension. "Rosie" Kay Catherine Morrison passed away peacefully in her sleep at the age of 97 years last night.
Even though we were expecting this, it doesn't make it any easier to take.
Kay embodied the "We can do it" spirit throughout her life, and I don't say lightly that she will be genuinely missed.
She lit up a room, and people were drawn to this wonderful, funny, witty, and charming lady. When she visited with you, she took an interest in you and remembered everything you told her. I would listen in awe of her recollections of Old Berkeley (long ago businesses, people) with fellow Home Front worker Bob Hinds. Such a memory she had!
Catherine Stavros Morrison was born in Chico, CA., on November 22, 1923. After her mother passed away while Kay was young, she lived with her aunt and uncle while her dad was a Merchant Mariner. Kay and her husband Ray married when she was a junior in high school.
Kay's older brother was in the Army, serving in the African campaign chasing Rommel and her husband was eager to join the service. Still, the military classified him as "4F"- unable to serve due to health reasons. After her graduation in 1941, they moved to the Bay Area to search for work in the war effort, finding an apartment on Haight and Fillmore in San Francisco. Ray could find a job right away in Kaiser Shipyard #2 as a Shipwright (carpenter).
Kay was discouraged from working because of a sign in the window of the Union hall that read "No Women or Blacks Wanted." By 1943 Kay was determined to work in the shipyard, so she returned to the Union hall to apply for a job, which she got this time, becoming a Welder. She requested just two things; to work in Kaiser Shipyard #2 and work the graveyard shift so she could be with her husband. Kay had no idea what a welder was but would soon learn by attending welding school for two weeks.
Kay and her husband commuted to work together via the ferry from the Ferry Building in San Francisco to Richmond. After three months on the job, she took the Government's Navy Welding test, where she passed with flying colors and became a certified Journeyman Welder. A fellow male co-worker told her, "you must be perfect because it took me three tries before I passed it!" Her wages went from $0.90 an hour to $1.38 an hour (approx. $20.00 an hour in 2021 dollars).
When you became a Journeyman Welder, you have excelled in flat, vertical, and overhead welding. She worked the graveyard shift, from 11 pm to 7 am, six days a week. One time she was fortunate enough to be asked to attend the launching of a ship she had worked on. Being a part of that experience made her feel proud and patriotic.
Kay welded from 1943 to August 1945, when the war ended. Although Kay understood that the men returning from war had first right to jobs back at home so was understandably disappointed that she could not continue in her found profession. Ray went on to work at Moore's Shipyard and Bethlehem Steel.
In the years following the war, they would have two children, and Ray would eventually go into the laundry business while Kay worked for Bank of America for over 30 years, retiring in 1984 as a bank branch manager. Kay and Ray were married for 64 years until his passing in 2004.
Together they have six grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren that she was so immensely proud of, and how lucky for them to have had this wonderful, inspiring woman as their matriarch. Her passing will be deeply felt by them forever.
Kay looked fondly on her days as a Rosie and felt privileged to have been allowed to promote women and share her stories with visitors at the Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Park. Story was submitted by friend, Tammy Brumley.

(JUNE 12, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS -- World War II veteran Henry 'Corky' Caldwell dies peacefully aged 101 after becoming a pacifist due to the horrors of war - even holding his own ANZAC Day commemoration when the pandemic saw services canceled.
A legendary Australian war veteran has died suddenly at the age of 101 - with his family paying tribute to a 'kind-hearted' man dedicated to remembering his fellow Anzacs.
Henry 'Corky' Caldwell, an army mechanic during World War II in the Middle East, suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage at his daughter Glenda Chappel's home on Friday.
His eldest daughter Suzanne Lofts said her father had not missed an Anzac Day parade in 76 years - including during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when he famously organized his ceremony.
Ms. Lofts said though her father was a firm pacifist.
'He loved celebrating ANZAC Day; to him, it was the most important day of the year,' Ms. Lofts said.
Mr. Caldwell was driven through his hometown of Grafton in a WWII jeep and laid a wreath at the cenotaph as part of his Covid-safe ceremony in 2020.
'His thoughts on war never had a war live a nice life with your neighbors,' Ms. Lofts said.
'Last year, I heard him say that when he was an engineer in the second world war, he used to have to clean bits and pieces of people out of the tanks before they returned them to the field.
'That was a shock to hear him say that; he'd never spoken about it before.'
Mr. Caldwell enlisted in the military in 1941 at the age of 21.
His wartime job included repairing ambulances, tanks, and jeeps at various fronts in the Middle East Theatre during World War II, including in Egypt.
As a keen amateur photographer, he smuggled a pocket camera in his belongings - taking photos of pyramids, desert tribes, and ancient tombs along the way.
Ms. Lofts said that although her father was 101, his death was a huge shock.
'He was sitting up enjoying his ice cream after dinner, watching the football with my sister, and he dropped his ice cream, and that was it,' his daughter Suzanne Lofts said.
'I'm pretty devastated because his health was so good, and it was unexpected. He'd just been given a clean bill of health, heart, lungs, everything.
'I think he was aiming to go on to at least 105 because that's when his pacemaker battery needed to be changed.'
His wife Gloria died in 2020, aged 95, after a battle with dementia.
Ms. Lofts said her father 'was a bit of a devil' and once threw her out of a boat while fishing over water for 'safety.
'I used to go out fishing with him in the boat, and my fondest memory is when he threw me out of the boat because he said it was dangerous to be in the boat when it came up the ramp,' she said.
'He said, "get out," I said, "no," he said, "get out" again, I said "no" again, so he chucked me out.'
'I thought it was funny that it was dangerous to bring a boat up on the ramp with me in it, but it was safer in the water where sharks could get me.'
'But he was a very kind man; he'd drop anything to come and help us.'
His loved ones said Mr. Caldwell was also straight-talking, honest, and also committed to volunteering.
In 1956 he was asked to run the Olympic torch through Grafton.
He received an Order of Australia for community service and a Queen's Medal for service to the fire brigade.
'He was proud of his volunteering achievements; he volunteered for 50 years, for the town fire brigade and the rural fire service,' she said.
He was also a life member of the Grafton Show Society and the local kennel club.

(JUNE 14, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEART -- Retired Army Lt. Col. Sam Lombardo, an Italian immigrant who came to America at the age of 10 and served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, died Friday at the age of 101.
A colorful and deeply patriotic presence in Fort Walton Beach for years, participating regularly in events honoring veterans while dressed in his World War II uniform, Lombardo had been under hospice care in Pensacola in the days prior to his passing, according to longtime friend and local restaurateur Tom Rice.
“You couldn’t keep up with the 100 years of stories,” Rice said Saturday in remembering Lombardo. And like all good conversationalists, Rice added, Lombardo “seemed to be able to find some common ground with everybody.”
“He was so proud to wear his World War II uniform,” Rice said, going on to note that Lombardo was always willing to share his wartime experience with younger generations.
“He was one of these guys who thought we’d all live forever,” Rice continued. “He was pushing for 102.” Lombardo’s passing came just one month before he would have turned 102.
But Lombardo, an avid golfer and fan of the game, also was humorously philosophical about death, according to Rice. “He’d say, ‘Where I’m going, there are no greens fees,’ ” Rice said with a laugh.
Some of the fabric of Lombardo’s life will live on in the National Infantry Museum & Soldier Center at Fort Benning, Ga. On display there is an American flag crafted in the days after World War II’s Battle of the Bulge by Lombardo and his men as they advanced across the German countryside from late 1944 into early 1945.
In the days after the battle, a last-ditch effort by Adolf Hitler to split the Allied forces arrayed against him that produced heavy American casualties, Lombardo noticed that he hadn’t seen any American flags. Then serving as the executive officer of an infantry company, he asked his company commander for a flag. The request was sent up but denied by headquarters.
“The denial made me so furious that I thought to myself, ‘If they won’t give us one, we’ll make one,’ ” Lombardo recounts in his World War II memoir, “O’er the Land of the Free.”
Moving across Germany, Lombardo and his men noticed white cloth surrender flags hanging from many windows. One of those pieces of cloth happened to measure 3 feet by 5 feet, the perfect size for a flag. Inside the abandoned home in which that cloth hung, Lombardo and his men found pillows made of red fabric that would become stripes on their flag, and the blue curtains that would become the flag’s field under pieces of white cloth cut into the shape of stars with the company medic’s scissors.
Lombardo and his men worked for weeks on the flag, using sewing machines found and borrowed in the towns through which they were moving.
“It was a nice project for us,” Lombardo said in a 2018 interview with the Northwest Florida Daily News. “I think it helped everybody, reminding them of America and what we had over here.”
The flag was finished three weeks before World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. Soon after, the soldiers who fashioned the homemade flag would go their separate ways as they were assigned new roles in the Allied occupation of Germany. Lombardo wound up in Nuremberg, preparing the Palace of Justice for the war crimes trials of various Nazis.
But before they split up, the members of Lombardo’s company called a special formation and presented him with the flag. Some years later, he offered the flag to the Smithsonian Institution, where a kindly curator there dissuaded him from making the donation, explaining the flag would be displayed for just a short time before being relegated to storage. Today, the flag is displayed prominently at the Fort Benning museum.
Lombardo arrived in America in 1929 with his mother and two sisters, coming through Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty three years after his father had come to the United States.
The family settled in Altoona, Pa., and 10 years after his arrival, Lombardo volunteered for the Pennsylvania National Guard. He attended Officer Candidate School, became a lieutenant in 1942 and was sent to Europe as part of Company I of the 394th Infantry Regiment in 1944.
Lombardo returned to the United States via New York by ship in 1945, seeing the Statue of Liberty for the second time.
“We came up and saw the Statue of Liberty which was a great sight,” Lombardo told the Veterans History Project, a Library of Congress initiative to collect firsthand stories from U.S. wartime veterans. “That was my second time seeing that beauty. Whatever little bit I contributed to the Army, I was just happy that I helped save the greatest democracy in the world. ... It meant more to see it the second time because I realized what I had helped protect. ... I’d earned my freedom.”

(JUNE 22, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS – It is with a heavy heart, we announce the passing of DDAY Paratrooper Paul Martinez, who was 16 at the onset of World War II — legally too young to join the U.S. Army.
Paul Martinez was born in San Antonio on March 13, 1926, to Jose Martinez and Rosalie Zepeda. When Paul was five, his father left the family, so his mother worked in restaurants and took in laundry to keep food on the table.
At nine, Paul shined shoes and sold newspapers to help his family get by. He remembers watching the movie Sergeant York when it was interrupted with the announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He had also found out that the Army paid twenty-one dollars a month—a lot of money.
Paul enlisted in the Army on August 15, 1942, having lied about his true age—16 at the time. He and a friend, Joe Varela, passed the physical exam, headed to Fort Sam Houston, and spent a week waiting for a train with his fellow Texans.
On June 6, Martinez was one of the youngest men to land by parachute in Normandy with the famed 2/506. On D-Day +4, they fought their way into Carentan and took it from the Germans. That same afternoon, the Germans regrouped and drove them back out. During the battle, Paul, in concentrated machine-gun fire, took a bullet fragment near his eye. He was red-tagged and sent back to England, where they removed a piece of lead from his eye.
Paratrooper Martinez rejoined his unit on their return to England after they had spent a month in France. They made their second combat drop into Holland during the afternoon of September 18, 1944. Operation Market Garden was primarily a British operation, joined by two U.S. paratrooper divisions—the 82nd and 101st. The battle lasted until late November for his unit, when they were relieved and sent to France.
Staff Sergeant Martinez, a member of the greatest generation, was pinned with many medals and ribbons for his honorable and courageous service in World War II. They include the Purple Heart, Bronze Star Medal with Oakleaf Cluster, Combat Infantry Badge, European Campaign Medal, Good Conduct Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Army of Occupation Medal, Nation Defense Medal, French Croix de Guerre, Belgium Croix de Guerre, World War II Orange Lanyard for Holland Campaign and two Presidential Unit Citations, but he is most proud of earning his Paratrooper Wings.
Paul Martinez, was honorably discharged from the Army on December 10, 1945.

(JUNE 24, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS – It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of Joseph T. Capone, proud member of Company E, 415th Regiment, 104th Infantry Division. He was 98.
Joseph Capone, of Wilkins, who also worked as a professional magician and was among the founders of the Pittsburgh Rockets Drum and Bugle Corps. The son of Italian immigrants, including a father who fought in the first World War, Mr. Capone grew up in Homewood during the Depression. At the end of Prohibition, Mr. Capone’s father bought a bar in a building along Homewood Avenue, where the family also lived and raised racing pigeons on the rooftop.
As a young man, Mr. Capone helped out at the bar and served as a drummer for a band that often played in the bar’s beer garden.
“Even from an early age, he loved big band music,” his son said. “He must have almost 1,000 78s of big band music.”
After graduating from Westinghouse High School in 1940, Mr. Capone enlisted in the Army, where he served on the Western Front, from January 1943 through December 1945, as an infantryman in Company E, 415th Regiment, 104th Infantry Division, also called the Timberwolf Division.
The division is perhaps best known for 195 consecutive days of combat — from its landing in northern France in September 1944 through Belgium, Holland and finally Germany — and for being the first American division to fight under Allied commanders.
Pfc. Capone’s description of the preparations and emotions leading up to Operation Grenade — the Allied invasion of Germany that began with the February 1945 crossing of the Roer River — is riveting.
“Men of all faiths had opportunity for final devotions, and again that nervous, uneasy restless tension gripped them as they wrote a last letter home,” Mr. Capone wrote in his self-published memoir about the campaign.
“I, like the others, consumed many cigarettes and, nervously, tried my best to keep at ease. However, the ‘battle of nerves’ that results from ‘sweating it out’ always seems the worst. Some men tried sleeping, some played poker, some wrote letters, or some, as I did, merely talked. ... Finally, word came down from [command post] to fall in for the march to Merken. One last check of equipment, another cigarette, and out we poured into the pitch black night that enveloped Lucherberg.”
A few hours later, he and a comrade scrambled to notify officers of quickly deteriorating conditions down river, alternately advancing and ducking into the frigid water — all the while dodging gunfire and munitions — until they became trapped along a river bank.
“We laid in the water with just our heads exposed trying to figure things out ... it was about 0430 hours and, being soaked from head to foot, cold, miserable, and frightened, we didn’t know quite what to do,” Mr. Capone wrote.
“So, we prayed. Prayers do help, and we prayed hard. However, about 15 minutes later a shell hit the water just a few feet behind us and the effect was terrific because the next thing I knew, it was 1030 hours and overhead our planes were raining havoc. I tried to get my bearings and account for that time lost between 0445 and 1030 hours. When I tried to move my limbs, I found I couldn’t do so. I was paralyzed from head to foot. The other fellows with me were in just as bad, if not worse, shape. My conclusion was that the concussion through the water was of such force that it blacked me out and after laying in the water for about six hours I was paralyzed from exposure.”
In what would be the first of three hospitalizations during the war, Mr. Capone spent 11 days recovering before returning to the front.
A month later, his regiment liberated the Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camp in central Germany.
“We were the first ones to uncover it, I guess,” Mr. Capone said in a May 2012 interview for the Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative. “I’ll never forget that site or that smell. ... Unbelievable. You know the pictures you’ve seen? That happened.”
At the camp, thousands of prisoners were forced to dig an underground factory where V2 rockets were built. Nazis evacuated most of the camp’s inhabitants in notorious death marches in the days before American troops found those who remained, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
A medical detachment was brought in to help rescue sick and injured prisoners, Mr. Capone said, while mass graves were dug for the many dead.
He was wounded twice more and served in several major campaigns, eventually being recognized with a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, a Purple Heart with two clusters, a Combat Infantryman Badge and several other honors.
After the war, Mr. Capone married Rosemarie Morelli, also a Homewood native.
“My mother was good friends with his sister Virginia, and she wrote to him during the war,” their son said. “They kept in touch and married in August of 1951.”
Through the GI Bill, Mr. Capone attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned an education degree. But finding a job was harder than he imagined.
“There was shrapnel in his legs, and I think he was injured three different times — each one compounded the problems he had with his legs,” Thom Capone said of his father. “When he came home, he walked with braces on both legs and a cane. That was why he couldn’t get hired at Pittsburgh Public Schools. They told him it was because he was ‘crippled.’ ”
Mr. Capone successfully sued the district for discrimination and worked at Westinghouse from 1952 until his retirement in 1986. He was inducted into the school’s Wall of Fame in 2009.
“He loved teaching,” his son said. “He still would run into former students who loved him.”
By the mid-1960s, Mr. Capone no longer needed the leg devices, thanks to physical therapy — including magic tricks that improved his dexterity and muscle tone.
After retirement, Mr. Capone spent many years perfecting and expanding his repertoire for his show, “The Magic of Joseph.”
“He started performing professionally at senior citizen centers and shows,” his son said. “He really got into it.”
In 1947, Mr. Capone joined 11 other men from the Homewood American Legion Post 351 to organize the senior drum and bugle corps that was to become the Pittsburgh Rockets. He couldn’t perform due to his physical limitations, but Mr. Capone served for 27 years as the organization’s business manager. He was inducted into the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame in 1980.
He was also an avid — and nationally ranked — duckpin bowler and a 30-year member of the Elks Lodge 577, where he served as leader for a term.
In his later years, Mr. Capone often wore a World War II ballcap and attended veterans-related events, including the Veterans Breakfast Club, where he was especially active.

Minnesota WWII veteran dies at 101 on Independence Day
Walter Straka was the state's last living Bataan Death March survivor.
Of the 64 men from the tank company that left Brainerd who went with the 194th to the Philippines, three were killed in action and 29 died as POWs. Thirty-two survived captivity.
 In 1941, Straka’s unit, the 194th Tank Battalion, was ordered to the Philippines in September, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Stationed near Clark Field on the island of Luzon, they represented the first tank unit in the Far East before World War II. Isolated and without supplies, they fought on until ordered to surrender with the fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942.
"I should have been dead a thousand times," Straka said in a November 2015 interview with the Dispatch. "That 91 days, I was in range of getting killed every minute."
Born Oct. 24, 1919, Walter Straka was 10 years old when Black Tuesday hit and the Great Depression descended on the world. Much like the rest of America, the Strakas of Brainerd struggled to put food on the table and heat their home — though, Walt noted his was a humble, if stable childhood. A far cry from the destitution suffered by millions of others.
“When I got back, I had so many things wrong with me I just got on my knees and prayed to God, I said, ‘Please give me 10 years,’” Straka said. “Then I went to work and fought it off, raised a family of seven. It was a chore, believe me, but I did it. I worked my butt off, but it kept me alive. It kept me going.”
Physical health issues lingered for Straka years after the end of the war, but the dark hells of the mind have continued to haunt him to the present day. He didn’t dwell on what happened. He settled down. He married his wife Cleta, who shared with him 64 years and seven children — of which, he noted, all were put through college without them paying a nickel. He worked hard until he retired in 1974. He remained active, so uncommonly spry he could be spotted shoveling his own sidewalk well into his 90s.
But Walt Straka wasn’t the Walt Straka that left Brainerd in 1941. He said he couldn’t find the frame of mind to pursue a career in law as he had hoped, so he settled as a used car salesman with a construction outfit on the side. But, then, sometimes the weight of his experiences in Luzon were debilitating, he said, rendering him unable to work altogether.

It is with a heavy heart, we learn the news that Henry Parham, last of a Black unit that fought on D-Day, dies at 99.
Before 2009, the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, Henry Parham got little recognition for his role as a African-American soldier in a segregated Army during one of the most important — and bloodiest — battles of World War II.
When writers and historians figured out that the Wilkinsburg man was likely the last surviving African American combat veteran of D-Day, as his wife, Ethel Parham, puts it, “All hell broke loose.”
“We were just plain, simple people; we weren't looking for awards and all that stuff. Then all of a sudden, people got interested when they heard his story,” said Mrs. Parham, his very sprightly wife of 47 years.
“Every Tom, Dick and Harry called here and wanted an interview, interview, interview. Before that, nobody really bothered. But after the 65th anniversary, people’s eyes were really opened.”
A veteran of the 320th Anti-Aircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only all-Black unit to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944,
His loss marks the end of an era.
The son of a sharecropper in Emporia, Greensville County, Va., Mr. Parham was raised primarily by an aunt while his mother worked out of the home and his father spent his days in the fields, growing everything from corn and cotton to peanuts and soybeans.
Mr. Parham’s education was typical of that era in the Jim Crow South, his wife said.
“In Virginia in 1921, if you were Black, you went to a one-room schoolhouse, where the teacher taught all ages, all day long,” Mrs. Parham said. “The highest education they had in Emporia, Va., was 7th grade for Black folks.”
At 17, Mr. Parham moved to Richmond, Va., where he found work as a porter for National Trailways bus lines.
He was drafted into a segregated U.S. Army at 21 and trained at Camp Tyson, Tenn., with the 320th, before shipping out to England in 1943 for additional training in anticipation of the Allied invasion of Northern France.
D-Day was his first combat experience.
Mr. Parham’s unit landed at Omaha Beach — by far the deadliest landing spot on D-Day among the five beaches used for the invasion — at 2 p.m., as part of the third wave.
His unit was spared the massive casualties that was encountered by the first wave of infantry, Mr. Parham said in an August 2012 interview for the Veterans Breakfast Club.
Mr. Parham shared vivid memories of seeing comrades drown and Nazi air bombardments above him as he and his unit waded ashore, while landmines and other obstacles planted by the Germans forced the soldiers out of their boats and into the surf.
“We landed in water up to our necks,” Mr. Parham said, recalling a shorter man in his unit who had to be carried onto the beach because the water was over his head and he couldn’t swim.
“Once we got there, we were walking over dead Germans and Americans on the beach, it was so heavily mined. While we were walking from the boat to the beach, bullets were falling all around us.”
His unit dug foxholes on the beach during the day and used the cover of darkness to launch helium-filled barrage balloons over the combat area, forcing German bombers to fly at higher, less effective altitudes.
From the balloons hung steel cables, fitted with small packs of explosive charges, which could — and did, even on that first night of June 6 — destroy the wings and propellers of aircraft that became ensnared in the cables.
“We only flew them at night, between dusk and dawn,” he said in the VBC interview at the Gettysburg Room in the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland.
Mr. Parham’s unit spent the next 68 days on Omaha Beach, where they deployed improvised winches to raise and lower the balloon defense system, ensuring that reinforcements and supplies made it through, while preventing German strafing attacks on the beach.
After Normandy, Mr. Parham’s unit moved on to Sherburne, France, where it provided defense for Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army.
He returned to the U.S. in November 1944 — 11 months after landing in England. His unit resumed training, this time for fighting in the South Pacific.
“We were supposed to be in Okinawa, but the boat we were on broke down, and we missed the convoy,”
“We missed that battle, and before we could see battle again, V-J Day happened,” he said. “I wasn’t exactly disappointed about that, though.”
When he returned to Virginia, Mr. Parham wasn’t surprised to find that African Americans were still treated as second-class citizens, despite serving their country and even dying for it.
After the war, Mr. Parham got his job as a porter back after the war and came to Pittsburgh in 1949, where he spent 34 years as a heavy equipment operator at the Buncher Co. before his retirement at age 65.
He met fellow southerner Ethel Perry in Pittsburgh in the 1960s while she was working in a restaurant and studying to become a certified nursing assistant.
“I was a waitress, and he ate his breakfast and his dinner at the restaurant where I was working,” Mrs. Parham recalled, her soft Louisiana drawl still detectable.
The couple married in October 1973 and made their home in East Liberty for 27 years before moving to Wilkinsburg 20 years ago.
Mrs. Parham began volunteering at the former Veterans Affairs Hospital on Highland Drive in Lincoln-Lemington more than 40 years ago and convinced her husband to join her when he retired.
“We were a husband and wife team at the VA on Highland Drive, then after it closed, we continued to volunteer at the Oakland VA,” she said.
“I’ve been volunteering longer than him, but who’s counting? The only thing that's important is that you bring joy to these patients’ bedside. You talk, you make them laugh and forget their troubles.”
Mr. Parham was a 67-year member of the American Legion Post 577 in Squirrel Hill and also volunteered for many years with the Saint Mary Magdalene Parish in Point Breeze.

It is with great sadness; we share the news that Frank Wada, a Nisei veteran who fought in the World War II ‘lost battalion rescue,’ dies at 99.
For most of his 99 years, World War II veteran Frank Wada Sr. didn’t talk about his service in the U.S. Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
But late in life, he could be talked into a rare media interview or photograph so that his regiment’s history wouldn’t die after he and his fellow soldiers were gone. Wada died peacefully on June 14 at his home in the San Diego County community of Spring Valley. Family members said they believed Wada was the regiment’s last local survivor.
Wada served in E Company of the 442nd and an all-volunteer regiment made up entirely of Nisei, the American-born descendants of Japanese immigrants. Most of its recruits came from internment camps, where 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the U.S. West Coast were forced to move after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
The 442nd would become the most decorated unit, for its size and length of service, in the history of the U.S. military. Roughly 18,000 men served, ultimately earning more than 4,000 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor, and an unprecedented seven Presidential Unit Citations, according to the Go for Broke National Education Center. “Go for Broke” was the regiment’s motto, representing the soldiers’ fearlessness in the battle to prove their patriotism to their native land.
Wada’s son, Greg Wada, said his father was quiet and reserved but proud of his service. He had “Go for Broke” on his car’s license plate, and the family jokes they’ll affix a “Go for Broke” sticker to his casket before it’s lowered into the ground at Miramar National Cemetery next week on what would have been his 100th birthday.
“It wasn’t until I was in high school that I found out what happened to my dad in the war,” Greg Wada said. “He never talked about it, and he never displayed any of his medals. But he was proud of what he did, and he always said: ‘You’ve got to do the right thing, and the right thing was to serve.’”
Frank Mitoshi Wada was born July 23, 1921, in Redlands to Tamakichi and Akiyo Wada. According to a profile on Wada published in May on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website, he faced frequent anti-Japanese discrimination when he was growing up in San Bernardino County. In his senior year of high school in 1938, a fellow student asked him which side he would fight for if the U.S. went to war. When Wada’s mother heard about that confrontation, she made her son promise that if he were ever to fight, it would be for America.
After high school, Wada moved to San Diego, where he worked on his sister Mary’s farm in Chula Vista. The morning after the Pearl Harbor attack, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but, like another nisei, was turned away as an “enemy alien.” Three months later, his family was ordered into a prison camp. In mid-1942, they ended up at the camp in Poston, Ariz., where he would meet his future wife, Jean Ito of San Jose.
In 1942, the Army called up the Japanese American men serving in the National Guard in Hawaii to form the first nisei unit, the 100th Infantry Battalion. Their discipline and success in training were so impressive that orders went out in 1943 to form a second unit, the 442nd, from Hawaiian nisei and volunteers from the mainland internment camps. Wada was one of the first Poston internees to apply. His decision didn’t sit well with many people at the camp.
But “when they came for volunteers,” Greg Wada said, “my dad went to his sister Mary and asked what he should do. She said, ‘If you don’t volunteer, we may never get out of here.’ So he did.”
Before leaving for training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, he married Jean at the camp. Their marriage endured happily for 69 years until she died in 2012. After a year of training, the 442nd soldiers shipped out to Europe, where Wada’s company served on the frontlines in the Rome-Arno, Po Valley, Rhineland, and Ardennes campaigns. The casualty rate was high. Within a month, Wada rose three ranks from scout to platoon sergeant, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans profile.
The 442nd’s greatest test — and one that nearly cost Wada his life — came in October 1944, when the combat unit and the 100th Infantry Battalion fought to liberate Bruyères, France, and rescue a small Texas battalion surrounded by German troops. The bravery of the nisei soldiers, who hurled themselves at the dug-in German forces and fought hand-to-hand at close range, led the “lost battalion rescue” to become known as one of the greatest ground battles of World War II.
During the final days of the battle, Wada was seriously injured by shrapnel injuries to his lower body and spent more than a month in the hospital. Among the many combat decorations he received was a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and a combat medal with four oak leaf clusters. In 2011, he and all 442nd and 100th veterans received the Congressional Gold Medal. And in 2015, he received France’s highest military award, the Legion of Honor.
After the war, Wada and his wife, Jean, returned to San Diego, where he designed and built a home on a 350-acre family farm in the Encanto area of San Diego. Together they raised five children. Wada worked for the U.S. Postal Service, went to college, and then worked for many years in the public works division at the former Naval Training Center San Diego. He started there as a lawnmower repairman and worked his way up to the position of contract specialist before retiring in 1977.
Wada is survived by his daughters, Dorothy Saito and Janet Kobayashi, and his son, Greg, brothers Henry and Robert, nine grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.
On behalf of TGGF and its members, you will be remembered and revered always for you were part of something truly extraordinary. You stood in the path of one of the most significant forces of evil this world has ever seen. This world owes you all a debt of gratitude. RIP Frank Wada.

It is with a heavy heart, we learn the passing of legendry World War II veteran, Mr. Howard Chamberlain. He was 99.
Howard Chamberlain is among Kiwi soldiers finding pockets of resistance, Germans and their Italian allies, and as he terms it, “taking appropriate action.”
He says it was nasty, bitter fighting with their enemy, Fascist “fanatics”.”
“We were trying to clean out groups that hadn't completely been wiped out. They started causing trouble when you’d gone past.
“There were both Germans and Italians, it was hard to tell one from the other at times. Some of them were changing their uniform and some had no uniform.”
Chamberlain and his mates dash to a house for cover.
He’s unsure where it was. All he knows is that it was one of two villages. High command never gave information of their whereabouts, and they could only pick the information up from street signs not blown up or blasted to bits.
“There was a window facing the road with quite a ledge. What it was used for I don't know. Myself and two others got under that.
“These Germans came walking down the street. They got mowed down.”
Other Germans were nearby, they concentrated machine gun and rifle fire on Chamberlain and about five other Kiwis sheltering inside the house.
“They sprayed the whole inside of the house. The others along the walls never had a hope, they were mown down. We were under the ledge. Most of us got wounded. We were all wounded some worse than others.”
Severely wounded in the right arm having been shot through the joint in his elbow, fellow New Zealand soldiers dashed inside to help.
One of them was Chamberlain’s mate from Waimate, Les Shefford, a farm labourer and second cousin with whom he had gone to school.
The memory brings tears to his eyes.
”Les, he died last year,” Chamberlain says. “He dragged me out.”
As Shefford pulled Chamberlain away from the carnage inside the house, a blast from a German bazooka exploded nearby.
“No-one survived 10 yards either side of it.”
Chamberlain was wounded again. This time in the face.
“I was almost completely blinded by the bazooka.”
Les continued to drag him away. Reaching a safe position Chamberlain was desperately dry. They had little water. They had received rations of either cigarettes or one bottle of beer. Les still had his bottle of beer. He gave it to Chamberlain.
“I was bleeding fairly badly.”
Having been taken to a dressing station, Chamberlain was flown out in a small spotter plane, a trip which took three days.
“Others were getting carted out too.”
Reaching a hospital doctors wanted to amputate his right arm.
“I managed to talk them down. I said ‘leave it there.’ They said ‘it will be no good for you’.”
He got his way.
“I can use it up to a point. I can write my name with it. I can’t write a letter or anything. People just let me sign an initial.”
But he lost the sight in his left eye and after returning to New Zealand had to travel up to Burwood in Christchurch for months to receive treatment.
“They worked on that eye and saved it. They repaired it, but there’s no sight in it.”
Before the war Chamberlain worked in various jobs around Waimate, as a grocer, traveller and builder, until conscripted aged 18.
While training at Burnham, to his surprise, he and other soldiers were used to bolster a labour shortage on farms travelling out in trucks each day. Others worked on back country farms like Mt White station near Arthur’s Pass. He even went deer culling.
There was a lot of talk of going overseas but nothing came of it. That changed.
“Very suddenly the division was suffering a bad patch, and they were in need of reinforcements.”
He was off to war. His troop ship took a zigzag course to Freemantle.
“They were a bit scared of subs at the time,” he says, then on to Egypt and Maadi camp near Cairo for more training with marching and mock battles.
“We had two to three mock battles, the last one turned out to be our departure from there. We gradually got news of boats of all sorts congregating outside Alex [Alexandria].”
He embarked for Italy on an old coal ship, part of a large convoy of hundreds of vessels commandeered for the purpose.
“We were on the deck for two days and nights, huddled in one spot. We didn’t go anywhere and the only rations we had were what we carried on board.”
He stuck with a group of Waimate men, including Les. They were the only two to come home.
On reaching Italy, they found the Italians had surrendered to the Allies who were driving the Germans up the peninsula.
“They had strung Musso [Mussolini] up.”
German aircraft flew overhead, prompting the New Zealanders to blaze away with their guns.
“You couldn’t control some of the chaps. It’s not as difficult to shoot them down as you think. There were plenty of them shot down. All wanted a piece of the plane shot down. I joined in of course, but I never did souvenir hunting.”
Chamberlain says it was “dicey” with many Italians showing divided loyalties, one minute to the Germans, the next to the Allies.
“A terrible lot ... changed sides. A lot surrendered and wanted to help, but they weren’t trustworthy.”
Italians carted supplies to the New Zealanders on mules over rough country, and soon the Kiwis found some Italians helped themselves. The ration sacks, full on departure, were arriving half empty.
“The platoon commander, he told the ‘Itie’ in charge of the ration train as we called it, if the sacks didn’t arrive full, they’d be filled up with Italian soldiers, shot on the spot.”
That problem was sorted. Chamberlain and his fellow New Zealanders went into action.
“We’d break into a German camp at night, shoot everything in sight and get out. The main thing was to get out. That went on for quite a while.
“We were getting up country at that stage, but everything was pretty well under control. We struck sticky spots that didn’t go well for us. We lost quite a few, small payback for breaking into their camps. We got used to it happening at night.”
The Germans then attacked in daylight using Italian soldiers at the front as shields. The Italians having surrendered, and theoretically on the Allies’ side, refused to shoot. The New Zealanders were in a dilemma. They fired.
“We were told not to say anything about it. It was a very difficult situation to be in. There were times when what I did wouldn’t earn me a medal.
“We were told we were not allowed to shoot civilians. That we adhered to.
“There were a lot of times when you didn’t know whether you should shoot in that direction or not.
“We were getting shot up. The camp was in groups rather than any other formation.”
The New Zealanders camped near a river. Each morning civilians came with buckets to take water, one of them an old woman.
“We let them do that.”
But they found themselves coming under constant attack.
“It took a week till we could pin it down. She [the old woman] was signaling the German troops where to open fire, where we were at our weakest point.
“We got instruction that day as soon as she appeared that morning to shoot her.”
The woman was shot. The visits to the river for water ended.
“We found similar cases before and after that too, it was the only way to stop it. The Germans used to send messages, if we killed, they’d kill more.’’
Back from the war, Chamberlain married Una, and farmed just outside Waimate. They had four sons. Una died a few years ago.
“The one thing that kept me going: I married. She was a great gal.’’
A bad right arm and blind in one eye did not stop Chamberlain becoming a champion road cyclist.
In 1946, trained by the legendary Phil O’Shea, he won the Timaru-Christchurch classic and competed in Australia. He coached one of his sons, Bruce to win the same race in 1990.
Chamberlain remains a stalwart of the Waimate Caledonian Society and helped organise the local games until four years ago.
The war has left the 99-year-old scarred.
Remembering his time in Italy is like walking through hell.
He has never attended an Anzac Day service. It unlocks too much pain.
He says his youngest son Ken goes in his place.
And whenever he mentions Les’ name, the Waimate mate who saved his life, the tears flow.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that Mr. Gail Farrell, WWII tail gunner has died at 96.
As a boy in Depression-era Kansas, Gail F. Farrell had the itch to fly.
His service as a B-17 tail gunner in the closing months of World War II led to a lifelong association with the U.S. Air Force, and his receipt last month of France’s highest military decoration, the Legion of Honor.
Gail Farrell grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, one of five children reared by a single mother.
He joined the Army Air Forces as an aviation cadet while still in high school. Within a few weeks after graduating, in 1943, he was off to boot camp in, of all places, Miami Beach, Florida — a place he said in a 2017 interview with the War History Online blog was hot and “stunk like hell” from sulfur in dried-up canals.
From there, Farrell headed to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for introductory flight training.
“All of us aviation cadets were hoping to be pilots,” he told War History Online. “While we were there, I remember doing some flying in a little one-wing aircraft.”
But the Army Air Forces needed Farrell as a gunner, not a pilot. A year of training took him from Tennessee to Colorado to Nevada, back to Florida and to Mississippi.
In February 1945, he joined a unit in Georgia and headed across the Atlantic to Kimbolton, an airfield in England, for duty with the 379th Bombardment Group.
In the last two months of the European war, Farrell flew 21 missions over targets in France and Germany, including Berlin, Schweinfurt and the Ruhr Valley.
“He (saw) some of the most intense fighting of the last few months of the war,” Col. Michael Manion, then commander of the 55th Wing, said during a February 2018 tribute to Farrell at Offutt Air Force Base.
After Germany surrendered in May 1945, he was sent back to the United States to retrain for duty on the big new B-29 bombers in the planned invasion of Japan.
But the Japanese surrendered after B-29s dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead of continued combat, Farrell earned a military discharge.
He returned to Kansas and married his sweetheart, Connie. They raised three sons, Forest, Kevin and Terrence.
He used his GI bill to earn a degree in journalism. He was working at a weekly newspaper when he was recalled to duty in the Air Force during the Korean War and commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Farrell served two years in Texas before being discharged again. After a brief stint with the U.S. Border Patrol, he returned to the Air Force as a civilian public affairs officer. In 1960, he took a civilian job at Offutt as associate editor of Combat Crew, a safety magazine published by the Strategic Air Command.
That was the job he said he loved best. He supervised production of 200 editions before his retirement in 1982.
In a farewell article, Farrell’s Combat Crew colleagues described him as an “institution,” and said they would miss his wit and expertise.
Years later, in 2018, he was honored again at Offutt, this time by the 55th Wing. Through the efforts of Mark Jensen, an Omahan who has befriended many veterans of the era, Farrell was presented with medals he had earned during World War II — the World War II Victory Medal and the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal in addition to the Air Medal.
More than 100 airmen applauded Farrell and stood in line to greet him.
“It’s a recognition of my career — and for all the men who didn’t come back,” Farrell told The World-Herald after the ceremony. “There’ll never be another war like that.”

It is with a heavy heart; we share the news on the passing of TGGF Ambassador and Three war Veteran, Mr. Kenneth (Scooter) Barclay. He was 97.
He was born May 2, 1924, in Spokane, Washington, to Kenneth Campbell Barclay and Alice Caroline (Kunsch) Barclay. Mr. Kenneth Barclay was preceded in death by his parents, his beloved wife Jacqueline Marie Barclay, his brother Scott Barclay, and Kenneth Barclay Wyatt.
“Scooter,” as he was known, grew up in Spokane, Washington, and graduated in 1941 from Hill Military Academy in Portland, Oregon. He attended Washington State University in 1941-42 and returned after World War II, graduating in January 1949.
Scooter was active in the ROTC, Sigma Nu fraternity was president of the Young Republicans Club, and was a national championship ROTC rifle team member.
During WWII, Scooter served with the 27th Infantry Division, 165th Regiment (the famed Fighting 69th) in combat in the Pacific Theater at Makin, Saipan, and ending the war as an acting platoon leader on Okinawa.
Scooter rejoined the Army in September 1949 and served in Germany, Korea, Viet Nam, Okinawa, and Thailand. He served over ten years in US Army Special Forces including Company A, 77th Special Forces Group 1956-58; Headquarters, 5th Special Forces Group, Ft. Bragg, 1962-66, during which time he served as J3 Briefing Officer in JUWTF Atlantic (the first Joint Unconventional Warfare Taskforce ever formed in the US Army) preparing for deployment to Cuba; TDY 1967-68 to Defense Language Institute, Monterrey, CA to study Thai; Commander Co A (battalion size), 1st Special Forces Group, Okinawa, 1967-69; Special Warfare School, Ft. Bragg, 1969-70; and in 1971 commanded 46th Special Forces Augment Detachment in Thailand, principal trainer of the Royal Thai Army Division deployed to Viet Nam.
Scooter is the recipient of the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, and the usual service ribbons for military and overseas service. Scooter was awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge, Master Parachute Badge, Halo Parachute Badge, Ranger Tab, Jungle Warfare Patch, and was a Thai linguist. After 30 years’ service, he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1973.
After retirement, Scooter attended and graduated from Central Texas College and entered real estate in 1973. He was very active in the Fort Hood Area Board of REALTORS and serving several times as a director and president in 2014. He was a member of many military associations; the American Legion Post 223, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 9192, Veterans Corps 69th Regiment, Chapter 77, Special Forces Association, and in recent years, with The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation, traveling the world speaking about his wartime experiences.
He had four great loves, his family, his country, the military, and the Fort Hood Board of Realtors in his life. Scooter is survived by his son Kenneth C. Barclay II and his wife Denise; his grandsons Trent Barclay and wife Melody, Trace Barclay and great-granddaughter, Kinsley, all of Hamilton, Texas, Trever Barclay and wife Tami and great-grandson Kade Barclay and great-granddaughter Emma Barclay of Killeen, Texas; his daughter Melinda and husband Steve Wyatt and Ryan Wyatt and wife Kelly, and great-grandsons, Anson, Valin and Davin Wyatt, and grandson Kenneth Wyatt (deceased) all of Knoxville, Tennessee.
On behalf of TGGF and its members, we are all thankful for your devotion and service to our grateful nation. We are indebted to you, Scooter.
Your memories will continue for generations to come.

With great sadness, we announce the passing of DDAY (Normandy) Paratrooper, Mr. Thomas Lucas, a Markesan, Wisconsin native. He was 98.
Thomas Joseph “Tom” Lucas was born on Nov. 8, 1922, in Markesan, Wis., the only child of Thomas and Elizabeth (Evans) Lucas.
Tom grew up in West Allis and moved to Madison his junior year of high school. He was proud of his service as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army, where he was a pathfinder for the D-Day invasion and in the Battle of the Bulge. He served as a sergeant in World War II and as a lieutenant in the Korean War, where he was stationed in Japan, and that sparked his respect and friendship with many Japanese citizens. Tom received many decorations during his time of service, including three Purple Hearts and one Bronze Star.
Thomas was united in marriage to Patricia Whittlinger on Oct. 30, 1946, in Madison. He worked for the State of Wisconsin as a Director of Emergency Welfare. They had three daughters and lived in Monona, Wis.
Tom loved to fish in Lake Superior and Canada. He enjoyed making his fishing lures and rods that he gifted to friends and family. He loved all animals, primarily the many canine companions he had over the years. He acquired his pilot’s license and loved to fly for work and pleasure. He enjoyed flying his daughters to Rockford for ice cream.
Tom was proud of his Croatian heritage. He was a member of the Milwaukee Croatian Tamburitzans for many years. Tom was also a member of the Madison Rotary. He was a sponsor of Japanese students at UW-Madison, where he made lifelong friends. He learned to speak Japanese fluently and traveled to Japan five times to visit his friends.
You are an example of honor, courage, and dedication to the people of the free world. We salute you, and may we all bear witness to your commitment and heroism.

Legendary Normandy Paratrooper Lawrence Rudmann Sr, dies at 98.
They poured out of the sky like tens of thousands of black raindrops. Those paratroopers who made up the first wave of Allied forces hitting the cold, dark beaches of Normandy, France, instinctively committing acts of soundless heroism that gave the world hope that the Nazi forces would not overpower.
One of those jumpers was a young 20-year-old from Ironton, whose days just three years earlier were filled only with classes at St. Joseph High and ball games during the week and Mass at St. Lawrence on Sundays.
A year before the invasion, Lawrence Rudmann had signed up with the Army, shipping down to Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training. Along the way, he decided to volunteer with the 82nd Airborne Division and train at parachute school.
That switch put $50 more in his paycheck a month, money that he thought would come in handy for a married man with a young wife and baby girl.
“That fall, they sent me to Ireland,” Rudmann said. “It was three months there and then three months in England. We were preparing for the invasion of D-Day.”
Rudmann knew the Allies were gearing up to invade Europe, but how massive the operation he had no idea.
On June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops hit 50-miles of the French coastline to meet the Nazis. There were 5,000 ships, and 13,000 aircraft supporting the invasion as more than 100,000 soldiers began the march through France.
It was two that Tuesday morning when Rudmann jumped out of a C-47 twin-engine cargo plane, crammed in the hold with 30 other soldiers. For the next hour, 12,000 men pulled their parachutes and jumped and jumped and jumped.
“I was somewhat scared,” he said. “I landed in a tree and had to wiggle myself down. I had my bayonet with me and cut my lines off me.”
Down on the ground, he met up with his buddy, George Hickey from New York, and joined the march through France. Their first stop was the tiny village of Sainte-Mere-Eglise in northwestern France, located on the main route the Nazis would take to battle back the Allies as they took over the Normandy beaches.
Liberating the village, the troops were met with jubilant French citizens who popped open cider kegs to share with them. Then for the next four days, the Allies and Germans exchanged fire.
“In the middle of the night, we got captured,” Rudmann said.
His buddy was mortally wounded, and Rudmann was taken, prisoner.
“It wasn’t good,” he said. “There were nine of us. They marched us halfway across Europe.”
When they got to Paris, the prisoners were packed into boxcars for part of the way.
“But mostly we walked,” he said.
From June to September, they marched, always at night, to hide from the strafing by American aircraft.
The first POW camp Rudmann saw was Stalag 7A at Moosburg, Germany.
“There was barbed wire, dogs, and hardly any food,” Rudmann said. “We slept on the ground. I thought I would never get home.”
Days were a jumble of stick-to-your stomach fear and mind-numbing boredom.
“You stood around and walked around and looked at the fence,” he said.
And always Rudmann’s thoughts were on his wife, Margie, and their 2-year-old daughter, Rita.
In December, the POWs were taken by rail to a village near Munich, where the picture-postcard landscape belied the ordeal of slave labor at a farm facing the men. There they worked sun up to sun down, finding rest in a cold, dank stable at night.
“Sometimes the snows were two feet deep,” he said.
“My shoes wore out, and they gave me a pair of wooden shoes to wear. Some days you didn’t have anything to eat. Some days they gave you potatoes.”
Rudmann said conditions in the camp were brutal and recalled being headbutted by one of the guards and forced to eat a grass soup with maggots in it.
Rudmann stayed there through winter until spring when finally that day he thought would never come did arrive. The defeat of the Nazis had come. It was liberation, freedom, and home.
He received two bronze stars, returned to civilian life, and made a career working at Allied Chemicals at South Point and Haverhill.
In 2020, Rudmann, a regular at the Ironton McDonald’s restaurant, was surprised by his friends for his birthday when they threw a surprise party for him and Korean War veteran Bill Kerns.
The two became friends at the restaurant and, after Kerns found out that German soldiers had taken Rudman’s silver jump wings and hat as prizes in the camp, he ordered him new wings and a ball cap with his unit logo on it.
Rudman was a member of the congregation at St. Lawrence O’Toole Church. He and his wife Margie, who died in 1986, had five children.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II veteran Mr. Edward E. (Pap) Hildreth, Sr. He was 101.
Edward E. (Pap) Hildreth, Sr. was born April 20, 1920, in Akron, Ohio, a son of the late Denny Earl Hildreth and Ethel A. Flanigan Hildreth.
Pap worked for several gas and oil companies in OH, PA, KY, and WV, including Lumberport-Shinnston Gas Co., and retired from Interstate Engineers of Fairmont.
Pap was a combat veteran of the United States Army, having served in World War II in the Pacific Theater for four years. He was a member of the VFW in Clarksburg and enjoyed farming, working with, and trading ponies and horses.
Survivors include his son: Edward “Bud”( Elizabeth “Libby”) Hildreth, Jr. of Oakdale Community; a grandson: Brian (Lisa) Haught of Oakdale; and several nieces and nephews.
You are an example of honor, courage, and dedication to the people of America. We salute you, and may we all bear witness to your commitment and heroism. RIP Pap.

(JULY 31, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS – One of the six original "Rosie the Riveters" died last week after spending her life making sure Americans would never forget the trailblazing women who helped boost the country's military arsenal during World War II.
Phyllis Gould, one of the millions of women who worked in defense plants in World War II and who later relentlessly fought for recognition of those “Rosie the Riveters,” has died. She was 99.
During World War II, the U.S. created a recruitment campaign for women to fill defense jobs to replace men who were serving in the armed forces. An iconic poster from the campaign showed Rosie the Riveter, a woman in a polka-dotted bandana flexing a muscular arm as she rolls up her sleeve.
Some 6 million women joined the workforce. Gould, a welder, was one of the first six women hired at a shipyard in Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area for the war effort.
After the war, she became an interior decorator, married, had five children and moved around before settling in Fairfax.
Women defense workers received little notice or appreciation after the end of the war but Gould fought tenaciously to honor them. She helped push for creation of the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, established in 2000.
You are an example of honor, courage, and dedication to the people of America. We salute you and may we all bear witness to your commitment and heroism.

(AUGUST 02, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS -- Japanese prisoner of war veteran Len Gibson who survived Burma Railway dies aged 101
Len slaved on the infamous Burma-Siam “Death“ Railway and the Mergui Road, built in Burma by POWs and Asian labor which the Japanese army used as a means of retreat in 1945 as British and American forces advanced.
He suffered nearly 30 separate bouts of malaria, dysentery, typhus, beriberi, tropical ulcers, and abscesses.
A scant “diet” of poor rice, tea, and a “stew” which was little more than flavored water, plus beatings and intense labor in stifling heat, caused Len to drop to six stones in weight.
After recovering in hospital upon his return to Sunderland, Len forged a new path as a teacher before meeting his future wife Ruby, who was a nurse. The pair spent 70 happy years together.
Len was born in Sunderland on January 2, 1920. In early 1939 he was taking night classes at Sunderland Technical College and working during the day at the town’s Binns factory.
Len volunteered for a TA artillery regiment and after the outbreak of hostilities, Len, accompanied by his banjo and his regiment, set sail landing at Bombay in India.
They set off again on the slow and ageing ship Empress of India. Built in 1912, she had difficulty in keeping up with the convoy.
Eight miles from Singapore, she was sunk by Japanese aircraft.
“I had never been in the deep end of Sunderland swimming baths,” said Len. “But a piece of cork around my chest kept me afloat.”
He was later picked up – minus banjo- by a boat and taken to Singapore – where he and his comrades and their truck-towed gun joined in the fighting to repel the Japanese invasion.
Len added: “Word came that we were capitulating. It was to be an unconditional surrender. We could not believe it.”
Len and his comrades were herded into metal cattle trucks in the punishing heat for a six-day journey into Thailand and their first labor camp.
The journey saw the group divide into three and they took two-hour turns to stand, sit and lie down.
Their first task was to clear jungle ground for the rail track in conditions Len described in his memoirs as like “being in an oven”.
“There were often beatings when the guards weren’t satisfied with progress,” he said. “It was terrible to have to witness a comrade being beaten.”
After 40 of their comrades died in a cholera outbreak, the prisoners had to bury them.
After the Japanese surrender, the POWs were flown to Rangoon in Burma and taken to a dining room. When they eventually returned home, he said no one could possibly describe the feeling of seeing their families after more than four years.
Lying in his own bed at last, Len remembered: “I gazed at the ceiling. How had I survived? Why had I been spared?
“Every day for more than three years I had seen men die, because of inhumanity, starved of food and denied basic medicines.”
On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Len Gibson for his devotion and service to our freedom. Thank You.

(AUGUST 04, 2021) FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS – It is with a heavy heart, we share the news that the legendary World War II veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor - Chief Stuart Hedley, has gone with the lord. He was 99.
Chief Stuart Hedley, was a crew member on the battleship West Virginia, and early Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, as Hedley was about to disembark the ship for a morning picnic with a girlfriend, he was told to head to his battle station "on the double." The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of Japanese fighter planes swarmed the skies above eight enormous battleships.
Hedley, a 20-year-old seaman apprentice, narrowly escaped death several times as torpedoes and bombs hit the ship. One explosion tore through the gun turret where he was positioned, killing a dozen of his shipmates. Escaping to shore meant swimming around and under flaming oil, sucking in breaths of scorching air. Taken by ambulance to a dispensary, he dodged shattering glass and flying shrapnel during the second wave of Japanese strafing.
“I grew up in a hurry that day,” he said in a previous interview with The Greatest Generations Foundation. “We all did.”
More than 100 of his shipmates aboard the battleship West Virginia died at Pearl Harbor during the December 07, 1941, attack by the Japanese that shoved the United States into the war.
After Pearl Harbor, Hedley was stationed on the cruiser San Francisco and the destroyer Massey and saw action in more than a dozen battles in the South Pacific, including Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He often credited surviving the war to his Christian faith.
Trained as an electrician, Hedley spent 20 years in the Navy, retiring in 1960. He worked another 20 years in the La Mesa-Spring Valley school district. He and his wife Wanda raised five children in Clairemont.
Born October 29, 1921, in West Palm Beach, Florida, and raised near Buffalo, New York., Hedley was fascinated as a child by the military and warfare. He drew pictures of airplanes dropping bombs when he was a child.
He tried to join the Navy out of high school, but at 4 feet 11 inches tall was too short. Recruiters sent him to the Civilian Conservation Corps instead. A couple of years later, he had reached 5 foot 2 and was allowed in. He went aboard West Virginia on his 19th birthday.
In the mid-1970s, Hedley went back to Pearl Harbor for the first time as a tourist and had flashbacks from the war. He’d seen bodies blown into the air when the battleship Arizona exploded. He’d found one of his friends cut in half by a sheet of flying glass.
Like many World War II veterans, he hadn’t talked much about his experiences with relatives or friends, not even his wife. But he began opening up and joined the San Diego chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.
Now defunct, but once 30,000-members strong, the association had a two-sentence motto — “Remember Pearl Harbor, Keep America Alert” — and Hedley took both to heart.
Over the last fifteen years, Hedley has spent his time serving as Ambassador in numerous battlefields return programs with The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation – including our annual Trans-Atlantic Crossing onboard the Queen Mary 2 with other members of the Greatest Generation.
In addition to his World War II-related interests, Hedley was active with Shadow Mountain Community Church and community organizations feeding the homeless. His decades of service prompted a local non-profit, the Enlisted Leadership Foundation, to create the Chief Stuart Hedley Legacy Award, given annually to three chief petty officers for their leadership, mentorship, and volunteerism.
Survivors include three daughters, Barbara, Patty, and Nancy, and a son, Ray. He was predeceased by Wanda, his wife of 64 years, and another daughter, Pam.